Part 16 (2/2)

”But I couldn't be married in that way, papa dear. I couldn't be married at all to--to one man--when another man had a claim on me.”

”Had a claim on you? How do you mean?”

”He'll have that--if he pays for everything--pays for everything for years and years back. Don't you see?”

”A claim on you for what, pray?”

”That's what I don't know. But whatever it is, I shall feel that I'm in his debt.”

”Nonsense, dear. I call that morbid. It _is_ morbid.”

”But don't you think it's what he's working for? I can't see anything else that--that could tempt him; and the minute we make a bargain with him we agree to his terms.”

There was a long silence before he said, wearily:

”If we call the deal off we must do it with our eyes open to the consequences. Ashley would almost certainly throw you over--”

”No; because that possibility couldn't arise.”

”And you'll have to be prepared for the disgrace--”

”I shall not look on it as disgrace so much as--paying. It will be paying for what we've had--if not in one sort of coin, then in another.

But whatever it is, we shall be paying the debt ourselves; we sha'n't be foisting it off on some one else.”

”Why do you say we?”

”Well, won't it be we? I shall have my part in it, sha'n't I? You wouldn't shut me out from that? I've had my share of the--of the wrong, so I ought to take my share in the reparation. My whole point is that we should be acting together.”

”They can't put _you_ in Singville.”

”No; but they can't keep me from sitting outside the walls. I shall want to do that, papa, if you're within. I'm not going to separate myself from you--or from anything you're responsible for. I couldn't if I wanted to; but as it happens I shouldn't try. I should get a kind of satisfaction out of it, shouldn't you?--the satisfaction of knowing that every day we suffered, and every night we slept through or wept through, and every bit of humiliation and dishonor, was so much contributed to the great work of--paying up. Isn't that the way you'd take it?”

”That's all very fine now, dear, when you're--what shall I say?--a little bit _exaltee_; but how do you think you'll feel when they've--when they've”--he continued to speak with his eyes shut convulsively--”when they've arrested me and tried me and sentenced me and locked me up for ten or fifteen years?”

”I shall feel as if the bitterness of death were past. But I should feel worse than that--I should feel as if the bitterness of both death and h.e.l.l were still to come if we didn't make an effort to shoulder our own responsibilities.”

There was more in the same vein. He listened for the greater part of the time with his eyes closed. He was too unutterably tired to argue or to contest her point of view. Beyond suggesting that there were sides to the question she hadn't yet considered, he felt helpless. He was restrained, too, from setting them forth by a certain hesitation in demanding from her anything she did not concede of her own accord. That she would ultimately see for herself he had little doubt. In any case he was more or less indifferent from sheer spiritual exhaustion. He had ceased to direct, or try to direct, his own affairs or those of any one else. In his present condition he could only lie still and let come what might. Fate or G.o.d would arrange things either in the way of adjustment or of fatal ruin without interference on his part.

So as he lay and listened to his daughter he uttered some bit of reason or some feeble protest only now and then. When, occasionally, he looked at her, it was to see her--somewhat deliriously--white, slim, ethereal, inexorable, like the law of right. He was feverish; his head throbbed; whenever he opened his eyes the objects in the room seemed to whirl about, while she sat tense, low-voiced, gentle, a spirit of expiation.

Among the various ways in which he had thought she might take his dread announcement this one had never occurred to him; and yet, now that he saw it, he recognized it as just what he might have expected from the almost too rigid rect.i.tude and decidedly too uncompromising pride that made up her character. It was the way, too, he admitted, most worthy of a Guion. It was the way he would have chosen for himself if he had nothing to consider but his own tastes. He himself was as eager in his way to make satisfaction as she; he was only deterred by considerations of common sense. From the point of view of a man of business it was more than a little mad to refuse the money that would pay his creditors, hush up a scandal, and keep the course of daily life running in something like its accustomed channel, merely because for the rest of his days he must be placed in a humiliating moral situation. He wouldn't like that, of course; and yet everything else was so much worse for his clients, even more than for himself. This was something she did not see. In spite of the measure in which he had agreed with her heroic views of ”paying,” he returned to that thought after she had kissed him and gone away.

During the conversation with him Olivia had so completely forgotten Davenant that when she descended to the oval sitting-room she was scarcely surprised to find that he had left and that Drusilla Fane was waiting in his place.

”You see, Olivia,” Mrs. Fane reasoned, in her sympathetic, practical way, ”that if you're not going to have your wedding on the 28th, you've got to do something about it now.”

”What would you do?”

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