Part 1 (1/2)
The Street Called Straight.
by Basil King.
I
As a matter of fact, Davenant was under no illusions concerning the quality of the welcome his hostess was according him, though he found a certain pleasure in being once more in her company. It was not a keen pleasure, but neither was it an embarra.s.sing one; it was exactly what he supposed it would be in case they ever met again--a blending on his part of curiosity, admiration, and reminiscent suffering out of which time and experience had taken the sting. He retained the memory of a minute of intense astonishment once upon a time, followed by some weeks, some months perhaps, of angry humiliation; but the years between twenty-four and thirty-three are long and varied, generating in healthy natures plenty of saving common sense. Work, travel, and a widened knowledge of men and manners had so ripened Davenant's mind that he was able to see his proposal now as Miss Guion must have seen it then, as something so incongruous and absurd as not only to need no consideration, but to call for no reply. Nevertheless, it was the refusal on her part of a reply, of the mere laconic No which was all that, in his heart of hearts, he had ever expected, that rankled in him longest; but even that mortification had pa.s.sed, as far as he knew, into the limbo of extinct regrets. For her present superb air of having no recollection of his blunder he had nothing but commendation. It was as becoming to the spirited grace of its wearer as a royal mantle to a queen. Carrying it as she did, with an easy, preoccupied affability that enabled her to look round him and over him and through him, to greet him and converse with him, without seeming positively to take in the fact of his existence, he was permitted to suppose the incident of their previous acquaintance, once so vital to himself, to have been forgotten. If this were so, it would be nothing very strange, since a woman of twenty-seven, who has had much social experience, may be permitted to lose sight of the more negligible of the conquests she has made as a girl of eighteen. She had asked him to dinner, and placed him honorably at her right; but words could not have made it plainer than it was that he was but an accident to the occasion.
He was there, in short, because he was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Temple.
After a two years' absence from New England he had arrived in Waverton that day, ”Oh, bother! bring him along,” had been the formula in which Miss Guion had conveyed his invitation, the dinner being but an informal, neighborly affair. Two or three wedding gifts having arrived from various quarters of the world, it was natural that Miss Guion should want to show them confidentially to her dear friend and distant relative, Drusilla Fane. Mrs. Fane had every right to this privileged inspection, since she had not only timed her yearly visit to her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Temple, so that it should synchronize with the wedding, but had introduced Olivia to Colonel Ashley, in the first place. Indeed, there had been a rumor at Southsea, right up to the time of Miss Guion's visit to the pretty little house on the Marine Parade, that the colonel's calls and attentions there had been not unconnected with Mrs. Fane herself; but rumor in British naval and military stations is notoriously overactive, especially in matters of the heart. Certain it is, however, that when the fas.h.i.+onable London papers announced that a marriage had been arranged, and would shortly take place, between Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, of the Suss.e.x Rangers, and of Heneage Place, Belvoir, Leicesters.h.i.+re, and Olivia Margaret, only child of Henry Guion, Esquire, of Tory Hill, Waverton, near Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts, U.S.A., no one offered warmer congratulations than the lady in whose house the interesting pair had met. There were people who ascribed this att.i.tude to the fact that, being const.i.tutionally ”game,” she refused to betray her disappointment. She had been ”awfully game,” they said, when poor Gerald Fane, also of the Suss.e.x Rangers, was cut off with enteric at Peshawur. But the general opinion was to the effect that, not wanting Rupert Ashley (for some obscure, feminine reason) for herself, she had magnanimously bestowed him elsewhere. Around tea-tables, and at church parade, it was said ”Americans do that,” with some comment on the methods of the transfer.
On every ground, then, Drusilla was ent.i.tled to this first look at the presents, some of which had come from Ashley's brother officers, who were consequently brother officers of the late Captain Fane; so that when she telephoned saying she was afraid that they, her parents and herself, couldn't come to dinner that evening, because a former ward of her father's--Olivia must remember Peter Davenant!--was arriving to stay with them for a week or two, Miss Guion had answered, ”Oh, bother! bring him along,” and the matter was arranged. It was doubtful, however, that she knew him in advance to be the Peter Davenant who nine years earlier had had the presumption to fall in love with her; it was still more doubtful, after she had actually shaken hands with him and called him by name, whether she paid him the tribute of any kind of recollection. The fact that she had seated him at her right, in the place that would naturally be accorded to Rodney Temple, the scholarly director of the Department of Ceramics in the Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts, made it look as if she considered Davenant a total stranger. In the few conventionally gracious words she addressed to him, her manner was that of the hostess who receives a good many people in the course of a year toward the chance guest she had never seen before and expects never to see again.
”Twice round the world since you were last in Boston? How interesting!”
Then, as if she had said enough for courtesy, she continued across the lights and flowers to Mrs. Fane: ”Drusilla, did you know Colonel Ashley had declined that post at Gibraltar? I'm so glad. I should hate the Gib.”
”The Gib wouldn't hate you,” Mrs. Fane a.s.sured her. ”You'd have a heavenly time there. Rupert Ashley is deep in the graces of old Bannockburn, who's in command. He's not a bad old sort, old Ban isn't, though he's a bit of a martinet. Lady Ban is awful--a bounder in petticoats. She looks like that.”
Drusilla pulled down the corners of a large, mobile mouth, so as to simulate Lady Bannockburn's expression, in a way that drew a laugh from every one at the table but the host. Henry Guion remained serious, not from natural gravity, but from inattention. He was obviously not in a mood for joking, nor apparently for eating, since he had scarcely tasted his soup and was now only playing with the fish. As this corroborated what Mrs. Temple had more than once a.s.serted to her husband during the past few weeks, that ”Henry Guion had something on his mind,” she endeavored to exchange a glance with him, but he was too frankly enjoying the exercise of his daughter's mimetic gift to be otherwise observant.
”And what does Colonel Ashley look like, Drucie?” he asked, glancing slyly at Miss Guion.
”Like that,” Mrs. Fane said, instantly. Straightening the corners of her mouth and squaring her shoulders, she fixed her eyes into a stare of severity, and stroked horizontally an imaginary mustache, keeping the play up till her lips quivered.
”It is like him,” Miss Guion laughed.
”Is he as stiff as all that?” the professor inquired.
”Not stiff,” Miss Guion explained, ”only dignified.”
”Dignified!” Drusilla cried. ”I should think so. He's just like Olivia herself. It's perfectly absurd that those two should marry. Apart, they're a pair of splendid specimens; united, they'll be too much of a good thing. They're both so well supplied with the same set of virtues that when they look at each other it'll be like seeing their own faces in a convex mirror. It'll be simply awful.”
Her voice had the luscious English intonation, in spite of its being pitched a little too high. In speaking she displayed the superior, initiated manner apt to belong to women who bring the flavor of England into colonial and Indian garrison towns--a manner Drusilla had acquired notably well, considering that not ten years previous her life had been bounded by American college cla.s.s-days. Something of this latter fact persisted, notwithstanding her English articulation and style of doing her hair. Her marriage had been the accident of a winter spent with her mother in Bermuda, at a time when the Suss.e.x Rangers were stationed there. Her engagement to Captain Gerald Fane--son of the Very Reverend the Dean of Silchester--was the result of a series of dances given chiefly in the Hamilton hotels. Marriage brought the girl born and bred in a New England college town into a kind of life for which she had had no preparation; but she adapted herself as readily as she would have done had she married a Russian prince or a Spanish grandee. In the effort she made there was a mingling of the matter-of-fact and the _tour de force_. Regimental life is not unlike that of a large family; it has the same sort of claims, intimacies, and quarrels, the same sort of jealousies within, combined with solidarity against the outsider.
Perceiving this quickly, Drusilla proceeded to disarm criticism by being impeccable in dress and negatively amiable in conduct. ”With my temperament,” she said to herself, ”I can afford to wait.” Following her husband to Barbados, the Cape, and India, she had just succeeded in pa.s.sing all the tests of the troop-s.h.i.+p and the married quarters when he died. For a while her parents hoped she would make her widowed home in Boston; but her heart had been given irrevocably to the British army--to its distinguished correctness, to its sober glories, its world-wide roving, and its picturesque personal a.s.sociations. Though she had seen little of England, except for occasional visits on leave, she had become English in tastes and at heart. For a year after Gerald's death she lived with his family at Silchester, in preference to going to her own.
After that she settled in the small house at Southsea, where from time to time she had her girlhood's companion, Olivia Guion, as a guest.
”Perhaps that'll do us good,” Miss Guion ventured, in reply to Drusilla's observations at her expense. ”To see ourselves as others see us must be much like looking at one's face in a spoon.”
”That doesn't do us any good,” Rodney Temple corrected, ”because we always blame the spoon.”
”Don't you mind them, dear,” Mrs. Temple cooed. She was a little, apple-faced woman, with a figure suggestive of a tea-cozy, and a voice with a gurgle in it, like a dove's. A nervous, convulsive moment of her pursed-up little mouth made that organ an uncertain element in her physiognomy, s.h.i.+fting as it did from one side of her face to the other with the rapidity of an aurora borealis. ”Don't mind them, dear. A woman can never do more than reflect 'broken lights' of her husband, when she has a good one. Don't you love that expression?--'broken lights'? 'We are but broken lights of Thee!' Dear Tennyson! And no word yet from Madame de Melcourt.”
”I don't expect any now,” Olivia explained. ”If Aunt Vic had meant to write she would have done it long ago. I'm afraid I've offended her past forgiveness.”
She held her head slightly to one side, smiling with an air of mock penitence.
”Dear, dear!” Mrs. Temple murmured, sympathetically. ”Just because you wouldn't marry a Frenchman!”
”And a little because I'm _going_ to marry an Englishman. To Aunt Vic all Englishmen are grocers.”