The Street Called Straight Part 34

"I don't see what it's got to do with me--" Davenant began to protest.

"It's got everything to do with you," Ashley broke in. "Since you've created the situation you can't s.h.i.+rk its responsibilities."

"Tell him, Mr. Davenant, tell him," Olivia repeated. "Would you, or would you not?"

He looked helplessly from one to the other. "Well, then--I wouldn't," he said, simply.

"There you are!" Ashley cried, triumphantly, moving away from the wall and turning toward Olivia.

She was plainly disappointed. Davenant could so easily have said, "I would." Nevertheless, she answered quietly, picking up the paper-knife that lay on the table and turning it this way and that as though studying the tints of the mother-of-pearl in the dying light:

"It doesn't matter to me, Rupert, what other people would do or would not do. If you persist in this attempt--this mad attempt--I shall not marry you."

He strode to the table, looking down at her averted face and bent head.

"Then we're at a deadlock."

She gave him a quick glance. "No; it isn't a deadlock, because--because there's still a way out."

He leaned above her, supporting himself with his hand on the table. "And it's a way I shall never take so long as you can't say--what you admitted a little while ago that you couldn't say--"

"I can't say it," she murmured, her face still further averted; "but all the same it's cruel of you to make it a condition."

He bent lower till his lips almost touched her hair. "It's cruel of you," he whispered, "to put me in the position where I must."

The room and the hall behind it were now so dim that Davenant had no difficulty in slipping between the portieres and getting away.

XVII

"He's going to squeeze me out."

This was Davenant's reflection as he walked back, along the Embankment, to Rodney Temple's house. He made it bitterly, in the light of clarified views, as to the ethics of giving and taking benefits. Up to within the last few days the subject had seemed to him a relatively simple one. If you had money, and wished to give it away, you gave it. If you needed it, and were so lucky as to have it offered you, you took it. That was all. That such natural proceedings should create complicated relations and searchings of heart never entered his mind.

He could see that they might, however, now that the knowledge was forced upon him. Enlightenment came by the easy process of putting himself in Ashley's place. "I wouldn't take my wife as a kind of free gift from another fellow--I'll be hanged if I would! I'd marry her on my own or not at all."

And unless Ashley a.s.sumed the responsibilities of his future wife's position, he couldn't marry her "on his own." That much was clear. It was also the most proper thing in the world. It was a right--a privilege. He looked upon it chiefly as a privilege. Ashley would sell his estate, and, having paid him, Davenant, the money he had advanced, would send him about his business. There would be nothing left for him but to disappear. The minute there was no need for him there would be no place for him. He had been no more than the man who holds a horse till the owner comes and rides away.

Worse than that reflection was the fear that his intervention had been uncalled for in the first place. The belief that it was imperative had been his sole excuse for forcing himself on people who fought against his aid and professed themselves able to get along without it. But the event seemed to show that if he had let things alone, Rupert Ashley would have come and taken the burden on himself. As he was apparently able to shoulder it, it would have been better to let him do it. In that case he, Peter Davenant, would not have found himself in a position from which he could not withdraw, while it was a humiliation to be dislodged from it.

But, on the other hand, he would have missed his most wonderful experience. There was that side to it, too. He would not have had these moments face to face with Olivia Guion which were to be as food for his sustenance all the rest of his life. During these days of discussion, of argument, of conflict between his will and hers, he had the entirely conscious sense that he was laying up the treasure on which his heart would live as long as it continued to beat. The fact that she found intercourse with him more or less distasteful became a secondary matter.

To be in her presence was the thing essential, whatever the grounds on which he was admitted there. In this way he could store up her looks, her words, her gestures, against the time when the memory of them would be all he should have. As for her proposals of friends.h.i.+p made to him that day--her suggestions of visits to be paid to Ashley and herself, with introductions to a greater world--he swept them aside. He quite understood that she was offering him the two mites that make a farthing out of the penury of her resources, and, while he was touched by the attempt to pay him, he didn't want them.

He had said, and said again, that he didn't want anything at all.

Neither did he. It would have been enough for him to go on as he was going now--to fetch and carry, to meet lawyers and pacify creditors, to protect her father because he _was_ her father, and get a glimpse of her or a word from her when he came on his errands to Tory Hill. There were a.n.a.logies between his devotion and the adoration of a mortal for a G.o.ddess beyond the stars. Like Hippolytus, he would have been content that his Artemis should never step down from her shrine so long as he was permitted to lay his gifts on her altar.

At least, he had felt so till to-day. He had begun the adventure in the strength of the desire born of his visit to the scene of his father's work at Hankow to do a little good. True, it was an impulse of which he was more than half ashamed. Its mere formulation in words rendered it b.u.mptious and presumptuous. Beyond the confession made to Rodney Temple on the night of his arrival no force could have induced him to avow it.

Better any imputation of craft than the suspicion of wanting to confer benefits on his fellow-men. It was a satisfaction to him to be able to say, even in his own inner consciousness, that the desperate state of Guion's affairs forced his hand and compelled him to a quixotic course which he would not otherwise have taken.

The first glimpse of Ashley brought this verbal shelter to the dust. So long as the accepted lover had been but an abstract conception Davenant had been able to think of him with toleration. But in presence of the actual man the feeling of antagonism was instinctive, animal, instantaneous. Though he pumped up his phrases of welcome to a heartiness he did not feel, he was already saying to himself that his brief day of romance was done. "He's going to squeeze me out." With this alert and capable soldier on the spot, there would be no need for a clumsy interloper any longer. They could do without him, and would be glad to see him go.

The upshot of it all was that he must retire. It was not only the part of tact, but a gentleman could do no less. Ashley had all the rights and powers. The effort to withstand him would be worse than ineffectual, it would be graceless. In Miss Guion's eyes it would be a blunder even more unpardonable than that for which her punishment had been in some ways the ruling factor in his life. He was sure she would not so punish him again, but her disdain would not be needed. Merely to be _de trop_ in her sight, merely to be troublesome, would be a chastis.e.m.e.nt from which he should suffer all the stings of shame. If he was to go on serving her with the disinterestedness of which, to himself at any rate, he had made a boast, if he was to keep the kindly feeling she had perhaps begun to entertain for him, he must resign his provisional authority into Ashley's hands and efface himself.

To do that would be easy. He had only to advance by a few weeks his departure for Stoughton, Michigan, where he meant to return in any case.

It was the familiar field of those opportunities in copper which he hoped to profit by again. Once he was on that ground, Olivia Guion and her concerns would be as much a part of a magic past as the woods and mountains of a holiday are to a man nailed down at an office desk. With a very little explanation to Ashley he could turn his back on the whole business and give himself up to his own affairs.

He made an effort to recapture his zest in the old game, but after the pa.s.sionate interest he had put into the past week the fun was out of it.

Stoughton, Michigan, presented itself as a ramshackled, filthy wooden town of bar-rooms, eating-rooms, pool-rooms, and unspeakable hotels. The joys and excitements he had known over such deals as the buying and selling of the Catapult, the Peppermint, and the Etna mines were as flat now as the lees of yesternight's feast. "I'm not in love with her," he kept saying, doggedly, to himself; and yet the thought of leaving Olivia Guion and her interests to this intrusive stranger, merely because he was supposed to have a prior claim, was sickening. It was more sickening still that the Englishman should not only be disposed to take up all the responsibilities Davenant would be laying down, but seemed competent to do it.

On the embankment he met Rodney Temple, taking the air after his day in the Gallery of Fine Arts. He walked slowly, with a stoop, his hands behind him. Now and then he paused to enjoy the last tints of pink and purple and dusky saffron mirrored in the reaches of the river or to watch the swing of some college crew and the swan-like movement of their long, frail sh.e.l.l.

"h.e.l.lo! Where are you off to? Home?"

Davenant had not yet raised this question with himself, but now that it was before him he saw it was worth considering. Home, for the present, meant Drusilla and Mrs. Temple, with their intuitions and speculations, their hints and sympathies. He scarcely knew which he dreaded most, the old lady's inquisitive tenderness or Drusilla's unsparing perspicacity.

"Not home just yet, sir," he had the wit to say. "In fact, I'm walking in to Boston, and may not be home to dinner. Perhaps you'll tell Mrs.

Temple so when you go in. Then I sha'n't have to 'phone her."

Temple let that pa.s.s. "Been up to look at the great man?"

Peter nodded. "Just come from there."

"And what do you make of him?"

"Oh, he's a decent sort."

"Not going to back out, eh?"

"Not at all; just the other way: he wants to step in and take everything off--off our hands."

"You don't say so. Then he's what you say--a decent sort."

"He's more than that," Davenant heard himself saying, to his own surprise. "He's a fine specimen of his type, and the type itself--"

"Is superb," the old man concluded. "That's about what I supposed he'd be. You could hardly imagine Olivia Guion picking out any other kind--especially as it's a kind that's as thick as blackberries in their army."

Davenant corroborated this by a brief account of what Ashley proposed to do. Light gleamed in the old man's eyes and a smile broke the s.h.a.ggy crevice between his beard and mustache as he listened.

"Splendid! Splendid!" he commented, now at one point and now at another of the information Peter was imparting. "Sell his estate and pay up?

That's downright sporting, isn't it?"

"Oh, he's sporting enough."

"And what a grand thing for you to get your money back. I thought you would some day--if Vic de Melcourt ever came to hear of what you'd done; but I didn't expect it so soon."