The Street Called Straight Part 2

"That's interesting--very," Guion said. "How did you make the discovery?"

"By being bored to death."

"Bored?--with all your money?"

"The money isn't much; but, even if it were, it couldn't go on buying me a good time."

"That, of course, depends on what your idea of a good time may be; doesn't it, Rodney?"

"It depends somewhat," Rodney replied, "on the purchasing power of money. There are things not to be had for cash."

"I'm afraid my conception of a good time," Davenant smiled, "might be more feasible without the cash than with it. After all, money would be a doubtful blessing to a bee if it took away the task of going out to gather honey."

"A bee," Guion observed, "isn't the product of a high and complex civilization--"

"Neither am I," Davenant declared, with a big laugh. "I spring from the primitive stratum of people born to work, who expect to work, and who, when they don't work, have no particular object in living on."

"And so you've come back to Boston to work?"

"To work--or something."

"You leave yourself, I see, the lat.i.tude of--something."

"Only because it's better than nothing. It's been nothing for so long now that I'm willing to make it anything."

"Make what--anything?"

"My excuse for remaining on earth. If I'm to go on doing that, I've got to have something more to justify it than the mere ability to pay my hotel bill."

"You're luckier than you know to be able to do that much," Guion said, with one of his abrupt, nervous changes of position. "But you've been uncommonly lucky, anyhow, haven't you? Made some money out of that mine business, didn't you? Or was it in sugar?"

Davenant laughed. "A little," he admitted. "But, to any one like you, sir, it would seem a trifle."

"To any one like me! Listen." He leaned forward, with feverish eyes, and spoke slowly, tapping on the table-cloth as he did so. "For half a million dollars I'd sell my soul."

Davenant resisted the impulse to glance at Temple, who spoke promptly, while Guion swallowed thirstily a gla.s.s of cognac.

"That's a good deal for a soul, Henry. It's a large amount of the sure and tangible for a very uncertain quant.i.ty of the impalpable and problematical."

Davenant laughed at this more boisterously than the degree of humor warranted. He began definitely to feel that sense of discomfort which in the last half-hour he had been only afraid of. It was not the commonplace fact that Guion might be short of money that he dreaded; it was the possibility of getting a glimpse of another man's inner secret self. He had been in this position more than once before--when men wanted to tell him things he didn't want to know--when, whipped by conscience or crazed by misfortune or hysterical from drink, they tried to rend with their own hands the veil that only the lost or the desperate suffer to be torn. He had noted before that it was generally men like Guion of a high strung temperament, perhaps with a feminine streak in it, who reached this pa.s.s, and because of his own reserve--his rather cowardly reserve, he called it--he was always impelled to run away from them. As there was no possibility of running away now, he could only dodge, by pretending to misunderstand, what he feared Guion was trying to say.

"So everything you undertook you pulled off successfully?" his host questioned, abruptly.

"Not everything; some things. I lost money--often; but on the whole I made it."

"Good! With me it was always the other way."

The pause that followed was an uneasy one, otherwise Temple would not have seized on the first topic that came to hand to fill it up.

"You'll miss Olivia when she's gone, Henry."

"Y-yes; if she goes."

The implied doubt startled Davenant, but Temple continued to smoke pensively. "I've thought," he said, after a puff or two at his cigar, "I've thought you seemed to be antic.i.p.ating something in the way of a--hitch."

Guion held his cigar with some deliberation over an ash-tray, knocking off the ash with his little finger as though it were a task demanding precision.

"You'll know all about it to-morrow, perhaps--or in a few days at latest. It can't be kept quiet much longer. I got the impression at dinner that you'd heard something already."

"Nothing but gossip, Henry."

Guion smiled, but with a wince. "I've noticed," he said, "that there's a certain kind of gossip that rarely gets about unless there's some cause for it--on the principle of no smoke without fire. If you've heard anything, it's probably true."

"I was afraid it might be. But in that case I wonder you allowed Olivia to go ahead."

"I had to let fate take charge of that. When a man gets himself so entangled in a coil of barbed wire that he trips whichever way he turns, his only resource is to stand still. That's my case." He poured himself out another gla.s.s of cognac, and tasted it before continuing. "Olivia goes over to England, and gets herself engaged to a man I never heard of. Good! She fixes her wedding-day without consulting me and irrespective of my affairs. Good again! She's old enough to do it, and quite competent. Meanwhile I lose control of the machine, so to speak. I see myself racing on to something, and can't stop. I can only lie back and watch, to see what happens. I've got to leave that to fate, or G.o.d, or whatever it is that directs our affairs when we can no longer manage them ourselves." He took another sip of cognac, and pulled for a minute nervously at his cigar. "I thought at first that Olivia might be married and get, off before anything happened. Now, it looks to me as if there was going to be a smash. Rupert Ashley arrives in three or four days'

time, and then--"

"You don't think he'd want to back out, do you?"

"I haven't the remotest idea. From Olivia's description he seems like a decent sort; and yet--"

Davenant got to, his feet. "Shouldn't you like me to go back to the ladies? You want to talk to the professor--"

"No, no," Guion said, easily, pus.h.i.+ng Davenant into his seat again.

"There's no reason why you shouldn't hear anything I have to say. The whole town will know it soon. You can't conceal a burning house; and Tory Hill is on fire. I may be spending my last night under its roof."

"They'll not rush things like that," Temple said, tying to speak rea.s.suringly.

"They haven't rushed things as it is. I've come to the end of a very long tether. I only want you to know that by this time to-morrow night I may have taken Kipling's Strange Ride with Morrowby Jukes to the Land of the Living Dead. If I do, I sha'n't come back--accept bail, or that sort of thing. I can't imagine anything more ghastly than for a man to be hanging around among his old friends, waiting for a--for a"--he balked at the word--"for a trial," he said at last, "that can have only one ending. No! I'm ready to ride away when they call for me--but they won't find me pining for freedom."

"Can't anything be done?"

"Not for me, Rodney. If Rupert Ashley will only look after Olivia, I shan't mind what happens next. Men have been broken on the wheel before now. I think I can go through it as well as another. But if Ashley should fail us--and of course that's possible--well, you see why I feel as I do about her falling out with the old Marquise. Aunt Vic has always made much of her--and she's very well off--"

"Is there nothing to be expected in that quarter for yourself?"

Guion shook his head. "I couldn't ask her--not at the worst. In the natural course of things Olivia and I would be her heirs--that is, if she didn't do something else with her money--but she's still in the early seventies, and may easily go on for a long time yet. Any help there is very far in the future, so that--"

"Ashley, I take it, is a man of some means?"

"Of comfortable means--no more. He has an entailed property in the Midlands and his pay. As he has a mother and two sisters to pension off, Olivia begged to have no settlements made upon herself. He wanted to do it, after the English fas.h.i.+on, but I think she showed good feeling in declining it. Naturally, I approved of her doing it, knowing how many chances there were that I mightn't be able to--to play up--myself."

After this conversation Davenant could not but marvel at the ease with which their host pa.s.sed the cigars again and urged him personally to have another gla.s.s of Chartreuse. "Then suppose we join the ladies," he added, when further hospitality was declined.

Guion took the time to fleck a few specks of cigar-ash from his s.h.i.+rt-bosom and waistcoat, thus allowing Rodney Temple to pa.s.s out first. When alone with Davenant he laid his hand upon the younger man's arm, detaining him.

"It was hardly fair to ask you to dinner," he said, still forcing an unsteady smile, "and let you in for this. I thought at first of putting you off; but in the end I decided to let you come. To me it's been a sort of dress-rehearsal--a foretaste of what it'll be in public. The truth is, I'm a little jumpy. The role's so new to me that it means something to get an idea of how to play it on nerve. I recall you as a little chap," he added, in another tone, "when Tom Davenant and his wife first took you. Got you out of an orphanage, didn't they, or something like that? If I remember rightly, your name was Hall or Hale--"