Part 13 (1/2)
”I've nothing against him--except that I've never liked him.”
”What do you know about him? When did you ever see him?”
”I _haven't_ seen him for years--not since Drusilla used to bring him to dances, when we were young girls. She didn't like it particularly, but she had to do it because he was her father's ward and had gone to live with them. He was uncouth--aggressive. Wasn't he a foundling, or a street Arab, or something like that? He certainly seemed so. He wasn't a bit--civilized. And once he--he said something--he almost insulted me.
You wouldn't take his money now, papa?”
There was no answer. He breathed gently. She spoke more forcibly.
”Papa, you wouldn't let a stranger pay your debts?”
He continued to breathe gently, his eyes closed, the long black lashes curling on his cheek.
”Papa, darling,” she cried, ”I'll help you. I'll take everything on myself. I'll find a way--somehow. Only, _don't_ do this.”
He stirred, and murmured sleepily.
”You attend to your wedding, dear. That'll be quite enough for you to look after.”
”But I can't have a wedding if Mr. Davenant has to pay for it. Don't you see? I can't be married at all.”
When he made no response to this shot, she understood finally that he meant to let the subject drop.
VII
It was in the nature of a relief to Olivia Guion when, on the following day, her father was too ill to go to his office. A cold, caused by the exposure of two nights previous, and accompanied by a rising temperature, kept him confined to his room, though not to bed. The occurrence, by maintaining the situation where it was, rendered it impossible to take any irretrievable step that day. This was so much gain.
She had slept little; she had pa.s.sed most of the night in active and, as it seemed to her, lucid thinking. Among the points clearest to her was the degree to which she herself was involved in the present business. In a measure, the transfer of a large sum of money from Peter Davenant to her father would be an incident more vital to her than to any one else, since she more than any one else must inherit its moral effects. While she was at a loss to see what the man could claim from them in return for his generosity, she was convinced that his exactions would be not unconnected with herself. If, on the other hand, he demanded nothing, then the lifelong obligation in the way of grat.i.tude that must thus be imposed on her would be the most intolerable thing of all. Better any privation than the incurring of such a debt--a debt that would cover everything she was or could become. Its magnitude would fill her horizon; she must live henceforth in the world it made, her very personality would turn into a thing of confused origin, sprung, it was true, from Henry and Carlotta Guion in the first place, but taking a second lease of life from the man whose beneficence started her afresh.
She would date back to him, as barbarous women date to their marriage or Mohammedans to the Flight. It was a relation she could not have endured toward a man even if she loved him; still less was it sufferable with one whom she had always regarded with an indefinable disdain, when she had not ignored him. The very possibility that he might purchase a hold on her inspired a frantic feeling, like that of the ermine at pollution.
Throughout the morning she was obliged to conceal from her father this intense opposition--or, at least to refrain from speaking of it. When she made the attempt he grew so feverish that the doctor advised the postponement of distressing topics till he should be better able to discuss them. She could only make him as comfortable as might be, pondering while she covered him up in the chaise-longue, putting his books and his cigars within easy reach, how she could best convert him to her point of view. It was inconceivable to her that he would persist in the scheme when he realized how it would affect her.
She had gone down to the small oval sitting-room commanding the driveway, thinking it probable that Drusilla Fane might come to see her.
Watching for her approach, she threw open the French window set in the rounded end of the room and leading out to the Corinthian-columned portico that adorned what had once been the garden side of the house.
There was no garden now, only a stretch of elm-shaded lawn, with a few dahlias and zinnias making gorgeous cl.u.s.ters against the already gorgeous autumn-tinted shrubbery. On the wall of a neighboring brick house, Virginia creeper and ampelopsis added fuel to the fire of surrounding color, while a maple in the middle distance blazed with all the hues that might have flamed in Moses's burning bush. It was one of those days of the American autumn when the air is shot with gold, when there is gold in the light, gold on the foliage, gold on the gra.s.s, gold on all surfaces, gold in all shadows, and a gold sheen in the sky itself. Red gold like a rich lacquer overlay the trunks of the occasional pines, and pale-yellow gold, beaten and thin, s.h.i.+mmered along the pendulous garlands of the American elms, where they caught the sun.
It was a windless morning and a silent one; the sound of a hammer or of a motorist's horn, coming up from the slope of splendid woodland that was really the town, accentuated rather than disturbed the immediate stillness.
To Olivia Guion this quiet ecstasy of nature was uplifting. Its rich, rejoicing quality restored as by a tonic her habitual confidence in her ability to carry the strongholds of life with a high and graceful hand.
Difficulties that had been paramount, overpowering, fell all at once into perspective, becoming heights to be scaled rather than barriers defying pa.s.sage. For the first time in the twenty-four hours since the previous morning's revelations, she thought of her lover as bringing comfort rather than as creating complications.
Up to this minute he had seemed to withdraw from her, to elude her. As a matter of fact, though she spoke of him rarely and always with a purposely prosaic touch, he was so romantic a figure in her dreams that the approach of the sordid and the ugly had dispelled his image. It was quite true, as she had said to Drusilla Fane, that from one point of view she didn't know him very well. She might have said that she didn't know him at all on any of those planes where rents and the price of beef are factors. He had come into her life with much the same sort of appeal as the wandering knight of the days of chivalry made to the damsel in the family fortress. Up to his appearing she had thought herself too sophisticated and too old to be caught by this kind of fancy, especially as it was not the first time she had been exposed to it. In the person of Rupert Ashley, however, it presented itself with the requisite limitations and accompaniments. He was neither so young nor so rich nor of such high rank as to bring a disproportionate element into their romance, while at the same time he had all the endowments of looks, birth, and legendary courage that the heroine craves in the hero. When he was not actually under her eyes, her imagination embodied him most easily in the _svelte_ elegance of the King Arthur beside Maximilian's tomb at Innspruck.
Their acquaintance had been brief, but illuminating--one of those friends.h.i.+ps that can afford to transcend the knowledge of mere outward personal facts to leap to the things of the heart and the spirit. It was one of the commonplaces of their intimate speech together that they ”seemed to have known each other always”; but now that it was necessary for her to possess some practical measure of his character, she saw, with a sinking of the heart, that they had never pa.s.sed beyond the stage of the poetic and pictorial.
Speculating as to what he would say when he received her letter telling of her father's misfortunes, she was obliged to confess that she ”had not the remotest idea.” Matters of this sort belonged to a world on which they had deliberately turned their backs. That is to say, she had turned her back on it deliberately, though by training knowing its importance, fearing that to him it would seem mundane, inappropriate, American. This course had been well enough during the period of a high-bred courts.h.i.+p, almost too fastidiously disdainful of the commonplace; but now that the Fairy Princess had become a beggar-maid, while Prince Charming was Prince Charming still, it was natural that the former should recognize its insufficiency. She had recognized it fully yesterday; but this morning, in the optimistic brightness of the golden atmosphere, romance came suddenly to life again and confidence grew strong. Drusilla had said that she, Olivia, knew him well enough to be sure that he would want to do--everything right. They would do everything right--together. They would save her father whom she loved so tenderly, from making rash mistakes, and--who knew?--find a way, perhaps, to rescue him in his troubles and shelter his old age.