Part 24 (1/2)

But on the Common after service, and at luncheon after that, and during the three or four weeks that ensued, he had much to do in reforming his opinions. There were several facts about Olivia Guion that disorientated his points of view and set him looking for new ones. Though he was not wholly successful in finding them, he managed, nevertheless, to justify himself for falling in love in violation of his principles. He admitted that he would have preferred to marry a compatriot of his own, and some one above the rank of a solicitor's daughter; but, since he had discovered the loveliest and n.o.blest creature in the world, it was idle to cavil because one land or one situation in life rather than another had produced her. As well complain of the rubies and pearls that deck the English crown because some were found in Tibetan mountains and others in Indian seas. There are treasures, he argued, so precious as to transcend all merely national limitations, making them petty and irrelevant. The one thing to the point was that in Olivia Guion he had won the human counterpart of himself, who could reflect his qualities and complete them.

He had been so proud that the blow on receiving Olivia's letter in New York was a cruel one. Though it told him nothing but that her father had lost all his money and that the invitations to the wedding had been withdrawn, this in itself was immeasurably distressing to a man with a taste for calling public attention to his movements and who liked to see what concerned him march with a certain pomp. His marriage being an event worthy to take place in sight of the world, he had not only found ways of making it a topic of interest before leaving England, but he had summoned to it such friends of distinction as he possessed on the American side of the water. Though he had not succeeded in getting the British Amba.s.sador, Benyon, the military attache at Was.h.i.+ngton, was to come with his wife, and Lord Woolwich, who was aide-de-camp at Ottawa, had promised to act as best man. His humiliation on speculating as to what they must have said when they received Olivia's card announcing that the marriage was not to take place on the 28th was such that he fell to wondering whether it wouldn't have been better to bluff the loss of money. They might have carried out their plans in spite of it. Indeed he felt the feasibility of this course the more strongly after he had actually seen Olivia and she had given him the outlines of her tale.

Watching his countenance closely, she saw that he blanched. Otherwise he betrayed no sign of flinching. His manner of sitting rigid and upright in his corner of the rustic seat was a perfectly natural way of listening to a story that affected him so closely. What distressed her chiefly was the incongruity between his personality and the sordid drama in which she was inviting him to take part. He was even more distinguished-looking than he appeared in the photographs she cherished or in the vision she had retained in her memory. Without being above the medium male height, he was admirably shaped by war, sport, and exercise.

His neat head, with its thick, crispy hair, in which there was already a streak of gray, was set on his shoulders at just the right poise for command. The high-bridged nose, inherited from the Umfravilles, was of the kind commonly considered to show ”race.” The eyes had the sharpness, and the thin-lipped mouth the inflexibility, that go with a capacity for quick decisions. While he was not so imposing in mufti as in his uniform, the trim traveling-suit of russet brown went well with the bronze tint of the complexion. It was so healthy a bronze, as a usual thing, that his present pallor was the more ashen from contrast.

Knowing from his telegram the hour at which to expect him, she had gone down the driveway to meet him when she saw him dismiss his taxicab at the gate. She chose to do this in order that their first encounter might take place out-of-doors. With the windows of the neighboring houses open and people sitting on verandas or pa.s.sing up and down the road, they could exchange no more than some conventional greeting. She would a.s.sume nothing on the ground of their past standing toward each other. He seemed to acquiesce in this, since he showed no impatience at being restricted to the formality of shaking hands.

Happily for both, commonplace words were given them--questions and answers as to his voyage, his landing, his hotel. He came to her relief, too, as they sauntered toward the house, by commenting on its dignity and Georgian air, as well as by turning once or twice to look at the view. Nearing the steps she swerved from the graveled driveway and began to cross the lawn.

”We won't go in just yet,” she explained. ”Papa is there. He felt he ought to dress and come downstairs to receive you. He's very far from well. I hope you'll do your best not to--to think of him too harshly.”

”I shouldn't think harshly of any one simply because he'd had business bad luck.”

”He _has_ had business bad luck--but that isn't all. We'll sit here.”

Taking one corner of a long garden-seat that stood in the shade of an elm, she signed to him to take the other. On the left they had the Corinthian-columned portico of the garden front of the house; in the distance, the multicolored slopes of the town. Olivia, at least, felt the stimulating effect of the, golden forenoon suns.h.i.+ne.

As for Ashley, in spite of his outward self-possession, he was too bewildered to feel anything at all. Having rushed on from New York by night, he was now getting his first daylight glimpse of America; and, though, owing to more urgent subjects for, thought, he was not consciously giving his attention to things outward, he had an oppressive sense of immensity and strangeness. The arch of the sky was so sweeping, the prospect before them so gorgeous, the sunlight so hard, and the distances so clear! For the first time in his life a new continent aroused in him an odd sense of antagonism. He had never had it in Africa or Asia or in the isles of the Southern Sea. There he had always gone with a sense of power, with the instinct of the conqueror; while here.... But Olivia was speaking, saying things too appalling for immediate comprehension.

Her voice was gentle and even; she spoke with a certain kind of ease.

She appeared to rehea.r.s.e something already learned by heart.

”So, you see, he didn't merely lose his own money; he lost theirs--the money of his clients--which was in his trust. I hadn't heard of it when I wrote you in New York, otherwise I should have told you. But now that you know it--”

He looked mystified. ”He's jolly lucky not to be in England,” he said, trying not to seem as stunned as he felt. ”There that sort of thing is a very serious--”

”Offence,” she hastened to say. ”Oh, so it is here. I must tell you quite plainly that if the money hadn't come papa would have had to go to--”

”But the money did come?”

She made a point of finis.h.i.+ng her sentence. ”If the money hadn't come papa would have had to go to prison. Yes, the money did come. A friend of--of papa's--and Drusilla's--advanced it. It's been paid over to the people who were going to law.”

”So that part of it is settled?”

”That part of it is settled to the extent that no action will be taken against papa.”

She continued to talk on gently, evenly, giving him the facts unsparingly. It was the only way. Her very statements, so it seemed to her, implied that as marriage between them was no longer possible their engagement was at an end.

She was not surprised that he scarcely noticed when, having said all she had to say, she ceased speaking. Taking it for granted that he was thinking out the most merciful way of putting his verdict into words, she, too, remained silent. She was not impatient, nor uneasy, nor alarmed. The fact that the business of telling him was no longer ahead of her, that she had got it over, brought so much relief that she felt able to await his pleasure.

She mistook, however, the nature of his thoughts. Once he had grasped the gist of her information, he paid little attention to its details.

The important thing was his own conduct. Amid circ.u.mstances overwhelmingly difficult he must act so that every one, friend or rival, relative, county magnate or brother officer, the man in his regiment or the member of his club, the critic in England or the onlooker in America, should say he had done precisely the right thing.

He used the words ”precisely the right thing” because they formed a ruling phrase in his career. For twenty-odd years they had been written on the tablets of his heart and worn as frontlets between his brows.

They had first been used in connection with him by a great dowager countess now deceased. She had said to his mother, apropos of some forgotten bit of courtliness on his part, ”You can always be sure that Rupert will do precisely the right thing.” Though he was but a lad at Eton at the time, he had been so proud of this opinion, expressed with all a dowager countess's authority, that from the moment it was repeated to him by his mother he made it a device. It had kept him out of more sc.r.a.pes than he could reckon up, and had even inspired the act that would make his name glorious as long as there were annals of the Victoria Cross.