Basil King

“ To this Ashley lent himself with entire good-will, taking Guion's timid claim for recognition as part of the new heaven and the new earth under process of construction. In this greatly improved universe Olivia, too, acquired in her lover's eyes a charm, a dignity, a softened grace beyond anything he had dreamed of. If she seemed older, graver, sadder perhaps, the change was natural to one who had passed through trials so sordid and so searching. A month of marriage, a month of England, would restore all her youth and freshness. ”

“ He retained the memory of a minute of intense astonishment once upon a time, followed by some weeks, some months perhaps, of angry humiliation; but the years between twenty-four and thirty-three are long and varied, generating in healthy natures plenty of saving common sense. Work, travel, and a widened knowledge of men and manners had so ripened Davenant's mind that he was able to see his proposal now as Miss Guion must have seen it then, as something so incongruous and absurd as not only to need no consideration, but to call for no reply. ”

“ If now and then he was appalled at what he, a shy fellow with no antecedents to recommend him and no persuasive powers, had undertaken, he thought of Olivia Guion. The thing he was attempting became trivial when compared with the possible benefits to her.
That reflections too, enabled him to come victoriously out of three long hours of inward wrestling—three long hours spent on the jetty which thrust itself into the sea just outside his hotel at Havre. He supposed he had already fought the battle with himself and won it. Its renewal on the part of powers within his soul took him by surprise. ”

“ It was a great deal to say. Once he had said it there could be no reconsideration. Reconsideration would be worse than not saying it at all, on the principle that not to stand by one's guns might be a greater cowardice than not to mount them. Fear, destruction, and the pit might come upon him; the service, the country, Heneage, home, honors, ambitions, promotions, high posts of command, all might be swept into the abyss, and yet one imperative duty would survive the wreck, the duty to be Rupert Ashley at his finest. ”

“ 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 was ashamed, too, to perceive that they concerned themselves chiefly, not with his love for Olivia Guion, but with his enmity to Rupert Ashley. It was the first time in his life that he was ever possessed by the fury to kill a man. He wouldn't have been satisfied to be rid of Ashley; he wanted to leap on him, to strike him, to choke him, to beat him to death. ”

“ Ashley smiled at her—a smile that was not wholly forced, because of the thoughts with which she inspired him. Her poise, her courage, the something in her that would have been pride if it had not been nearer to meekness and which he had scarcely called meekness before he felt it to be fortitude, gave him confidence in the future. "She's stunning—by Jove!" It seemed to him that he saw her for the first time. For the first time since he had known her he was less the ambitious military officer seeking a wife who would grace a high position than he was a man in love with a woman. ”

“ And unless Ashley assumed 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. ”

“ The next second she had slipped between the portières into the hail. He heard her pause there.
It was inevitable that Guion's words should return to him: "Half in love with him—as it is."
"That's rot," he assured himself. He had only to call up the image of Davenant's hulking figure and heavy ways to see what rot it was. He himself was not vain of his appearance; he had too much to his credit to be obliged to descend to that; but he knew he was a distinguished man, and that he looked it. The woman who could choose between him and Davenant would practically have no choice at all. ”

“ With little perkings of the head and much rolling of the eyes the Marquise watched the warm color rise in Olivia's cheek and surge slowly upward to the temples. Madame de Melcourt made signs of trying to look anywhere and everywhere, up to the ceiling and down at the floor, rather than be a witness of so much embarrassment. She emphasized her discretion, too, by making a great show of seeing nothing in particular, toying with her rings and bracelets till Olivia had sufficiently recovered to be again commanded to send for Davenant. ”

“ In this direction, however, his aptitudes were no more spontaneous than they were for the life of cultivated taste. Henry Guion's need struck him, therefore, as an opportunity. If he took other views of it besides, if it made to him an appeal totally different from the altruistic, he was able to conceal the fact—from himself, at any rate—in the depths of a soul where much that was vital to the man was always held in subliminal darkness. It disturbed him, then, to have Drusilla Fane rifle this sanctuary with irreverent persistency, dragging to light what he had kept scrupulously hidden away. ”

“ 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 chastisement from which he should suffer all the stings of shame. ”

“ Drusilla allowed the explanation to pass till she had thanked him ecstatically for what he had done.
"Really, Peter, men are fine! The minute I heard Cousin Henry's wretched story I knew the worst couldn't come to the worst, with you here. I only wish you could realize what it means to have a big, strong man like you to lean on."
Davenant looked pleased; he was in the mood to be pleased with anything. He had had so little of women's appreciation in his life that Drusilla's enthusiasm was not only agreeable but new. He noticed, too, that in speaking Drusilla herself was at her best. ”

“ 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.
She was so sure of herself to-day, and so nearly sure of Ashley, that even the shock of seeing Peter Davenant coming up the driveway, between the clumps of shrubbery, brought her no dismay. She was quick in reading the situation. ”

“ He stood before her portrait in the drawing-room—the much-admired portrait by Carolus Duran—and told her so. She was so living as she looked down on him—a suggestion of refined irony about the lips and eyes giving personality to the delicate oval of the face—that he felt himself talking to her as they had been wont to talk together ever since their youth. In his way he had stood in awe of her. The assumption of prerogative—an endowment of manner or of temperament, he was never quite sure which—inherited by Olivia in turn, had been the dominating influence in their domestic life. ”

“ Far away, and dim in the morning haze, the roofed and steepled crest of Beacon Hill rose in successive ridges, to cast up from its highest point the gilded dome of the State House as culmination to the sky-line. Guion looked long and hard, first at the house, then at the prospect. He walked on only when he remembered that he must reserve his forces for the day's possibilities, that he must not drain himself of emotion in advance. If what he expected were to come to pass, the first essential to his playing the man at all would lie in his keeping cool. ”

“ Since those days a brilliant American society had sprung up on the English stem, like a mistletoe on an oak; but, while Henry and Charlotta Guion would gladly have struck their roots into that sturdy trunk, they lacked the money essential to parasitic growth. As for Victoria Guion, French life, especially the old royalist phase of it, which offers no crevices on its creaseless bark in which a foreign seed can germinate, absorbed her within its tough old blossom as a pitcher-plant sucks in a fly. ”

“ 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 clusters against the already gorgeous autumn-tinted shrubbery. ”

“ Knowing the probability that she disturbed some poignant bit of conversation, she proceeded to take command, stepping up to Olivia with a hasty kiss. "Hello, you dear thing!" Turning to Ashley, she surveyed him an instant before offering her hand. "So you've got here! How fit you look! What sort of trip did you have, and how did you leave your people? And, oh, by the way, this is Mr. Davenant."
Davenant, who had been paying his respects to Miss Guion, charged forward, with hand outstretched and hearty: "Happy to meet you, Colonel. Glad to welcome you to our country." ”

“ Miss Guion explained, "only dignified."
"Dignified!" Drusilla cried. "I should think so. He's just like Olivia herself. It's perfectly absurd that those two should marry. Apart, they're a pair of splendid specimens; united, they'll be too much of a good thing. They're both so well supplied with the same set of virtues that when they look at each other it'll be like seeing their own faces in a convex mirror. It'll be simply awful."
Her voice had the luscious English intonation, in spite of its being pitched a little too high. ”

“ Somewhere in the direction of Brookline a locomotive kept up a puffing like the beating of a pulse.
"I don't need that money," Davenant began again. "There's more where it came from. I shall be out after it—from to-morrow on."
Ashley's silence was less from rudeness than from self-restraint. All his nerves were taut with the need to visit his troubles on some one's head. A soldiering life had not accustomed him to indefinite repression of his irritable impulses, and now after two or three days of it he was at the limit of his powers. ”

“ The wind increased in violence; the spray was salt on his mustache, and clung to the nap of his clothing. The radiance that marked Trouville and Honfleur grew dim almost to extinction. Along the quay the cafés began to diminish the number of their lights. The cheerful groups broke up, strolling home to the mansard or to the fo'castle, with bursts of drunken or drowsy song. Davenant continued to sit crouched, huddled, bowed. He ceased to argue, or to follow the conflict between self-interest and duty, or to put up a fight of any kind. He was content to sit still and suffer. ”

“ It's no use for me to make bad worse by refusing a good offer. I must try to make the best of a bad business for every one's sake. I don't want to take Davenant's money. It's about as pleasant for me as swallowing a knife. But I'd swallow a knife if we could only hush the thing up long enough for you to be married—and for me to settle some other things. I shouldn't care what happened after that. They might take me and chuck me into any hole they pleased."
"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." ”

“ But the taxicab whizzed away, and the little lady tripped up the steps.
Olivia felt herself unable to move. The motor throbbed past her, and out the gate, but she still stood incapable of going farther. It seemed long before the pent-up emotions of the last month or two, controlled, repressed, unacknowledged, as they had been, found utterance in one loud cry: "Aunt Vic!"
Not till that minute had she guessed her need of a woman, a Guion, one of her very own, a mother, on whose breast to lay her head and weep her cares out. ”