Chapter 15

"It's not very abstruse, however. Just think. It isn't as if Cousin Henry had fallen ill, or had died, or had gone to pieces in any of the ordinary ways. Except for his own discomfort, he might just as well have been tried and sentenced and sent to prison. He's been as good as there. Every one knows it's only a special providence that he didn't go. But if he's escaped that by the skin of his teeth, he hasn't escaped a lot of other things. He hasn't escaped being without a penny in the world. He hasn't escaped having his house sold over his head and being turned out into the streets. He hasn't escaped reaching a perfectly impotent old age, with not a soul on this earth to turn to but Olivia."

"What about me?"

"Would _you_ take him?"

"I shouldn't _take_ him exactly. If he was my father-in-law"--he made a little grimace--"I suppose I could pension him off somewhere, or board him out, like an old horse. One couldn't have him round."

"H'm! I dare say that would do--but I doubt it. If you'd ever been a daughter you might feel that you couldn't dispose of a poor, old, broken-down father quite so easily. After all, he's not a horse. You might more or less forsake him when all was going well, and yet want to stick to him through thick and thin if he came a cropper. Look at me! I go off and leave my poor old dad for a year and more at a time--because he's a saint; but if he wasn't--especially if he'd got into any such scrape as Cousin Henry's--which isn't thinkable--but if he did--I'd never leave him again. That's my temperament. It's every girl's temperament. It's Olivia's. But all that is neither here nor there. If she married you, her whole life would be given up to trying to make you blend with a set of circumstances you couldn't possibly blend with. It would be worse than singing one tune to an orchestra playing another. She'd go mad with the attempt."

"Possibly; except for one factor which you've overlooked."

"Oh, love! Yes, yes. I thought you'd say that." Drusilla tossed her hands impatiently. "Love will do a lot, but it won't do everything. You can't count on it to work miracles in a sophisticated company like the Sussex Rangers. They've passed the age of faith for that sort of thing."

"I don't see," he said, speaking very slowly, "that the Rangers need be altogether taken into consideration."

She looked at him fixedly. "Do you mean that you'd--send in your papers?"

"Only in the sense that if my wife wasn't happy in the Service we could get out of it."

"Then you're really so much in love that you'd be willing to throw up everything on account of it?" There was some incredulity in her tone, to which, however, he offered no objection.

"Willing or unwilling isn't to the point. Surely you see that as far as public opinion goes I'm dished either way. The more I think of it the plainer it becomes. If I marry Olivia I let myself in for connection with a low-down scandal; if I don't, then they'll say I left her in the lurch. As for the effect on any possible promotion there might be in store for me, it would be six of one and half a dozen of the other. If I married her, and there was something good to be had, and old Bannockburn, let us say, was at the Horse Guards, then Lady Ban wouldn't have Olivia; and if I didn't marry her, and there was the same situation with old Englemere in command, then he wouldn't have me. There it is in a nutshell--simply nothing to choose."

They proceeded to stroll aimlessly up and down the lawn.

"I can quite see how it looks from your point of view--" she began.

"No, you can't," he interrupted, sharply, "because you leave out the fact that I am--I don't mind saying it--that is, to you--you've been such a good pal to me!--I shall never forget it!--but I _am_--head over heels--desperately--in love."

Having already heard this confession in what now seemed the far-off days in Southsea, she could hear it again with no more than a sense of oppression about the heart.

"Yes," she smiled, bravely. "I know you are. And between two ills you choose the one that has some compensation attached to it."

"Between two ills," he corrected, "I'm choosing the only course open to a man of honor. Isn't that it?"

There was a wistful inflection on the query. It put forth at one and the same time a request for corroboration and a challenge to a contrary opinion. If there could be no contrary opinion, he would have been glad of some sign of approval or applause. He wanted to be modest; and yet it was a stimulus to doing precisely the right thing to get a little praise for it, especially from a woman like Drusilla.

In this for once she disappointed him. "Of course you are," she assented, even too promptly.

"And yet you're advising me," he said, returning to the charge, "to make a bolt for it--and leave Olivia to shift for herself."

"If I remember rightly, the question you raised was not about you, but about her. It wasn't as to whether you should marry her, but as to whether she should marry you. I'm not disputing your point of view; I'm only defending Olivia's. I can see three good reasons why you should keep your word to her--"

"Indeed? And what are they?"

She told them off on her fingers. "First, as you can't do anything else. Second--"

"Your first reason," he interrupted, hastily, as though he feared she suspected him of not being convinced of it, "covers the whole ground. We don't need the rest."

"Still," she insisted, "we might as well have them. Second, it's the more prudent of two rather disadvantageous courses. Third--to quote your own words--you're head over heels in love with her. It's easy to see that now, and now another of these reasons is uppermost in your mind; but it's also easy to see that none of them makes a conclusive appeal to Olivia Guion. That's the point."

"The point is that I'm in love with her, and--if it's not claiming too much--she with me. We've nothing else to consider."

"You haven't. She has. She has all the things I've just hinted at--and ever so many more; besides which," she added, taking a detached, casual tone, "I suppose she has to make up her mind one way or another as to what she's going to do about Peter Davenant."

The crow's-foot wrinkles about his eyes deepened to a frown of inquiry. "About Peter--who?"

Drusilla still affected a casual tone. "Oh? Hasn't she told you about _him?_"

"Not a word. Who is he?"

She nodded in the direction of the house. "He's up-stairs with Cousin Henry."

"The big fellow who was here just now? That--lumpkin?"

"Yes," she said, dryly, "that--lumpkin. It was he who gave Cousin Henry the money to meet his liabilities."

"So he's the Fairy Prince? He certainly doesn't look it."

"No; he doesn't look it; but he's as much of a problem to Olivia as if he did."

"Why? What has he to do with her?"

"Nothing, except that I suppose she must feel very grateful."

They reached the edge of the lawn where a hedge of dahlias separated them from the neighboring garden.

"When you say that," he asked, "do you mean anything in particular?"

"I suppose I mean everything in particular. The situation is one in which all the details count."

"And the bearing of this special detail--"

"Oh, don't try to make me explain that. In the first place, I don't know; and in the second, I shouldn't tell you if I did. I'm merely giving you the facts. I think you're entitled to know _them_."

"So I should have said. Are there many more? I've had a lot since I landed. I thought I must have heard pretty well all there was--"

"Probably you had, except just that. I imagine Olivia found it difficult to speak of, and so I'm doing it for her."

"Why should she find it difficult to speak of? It's a mere matter of business, I suppose."

"If it's business to give Cousin Henry what would be nearly a hundred thousand pounds in English money, with no prospect that any one can see of his ever getting it back--that is, not unless old Madame de Melcourt--"

"Oh, I say! Then he's one of your beastly millionaires, by Jove!--grind the noses off the poor, and that sort of thing, to play Haroun-al-Raschid with the cash."

"Not in the least. He never ground the nose off any one; and as for being a millionaire, father says that what he's done for Cousin Henry will pretty well clean him out."

"All the same, he's probably done it with a jolly sharp eye to the main chance."

"Oh, I dare say his motives weren't altogether altruistic. Only it's a little difficult to see where the main chance comes in."

"Then what the deuce is he up to?"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you that. I repeat that I'm only giving you the facts. You must interpret them for yourself."

He looked thoughtful. Drusilla plucked a scarlet dahlia and fastened it in her dress, after which they strolled back slowly to the middle of the lawn. Here Ashley said:

"Has all this got anything to do with Olivia? I wish you wouldn't make mysteries."

"I'm not making mysteries. I'm telling you what's happened just as it occurred. He advanced the money to Cousin Henry, and that's all I know about it. If I draw any inferences--"

"Well?"

"I'm just as likely to be wrong as right."

"Then you _have_ drawn inferences?"

"Who wouldn't? I should think you'd be drawing them yourself."

They wandered on a few yards, when he stopped again. "Look here," he said, with a sort of appealing roughness, "you're quite straight with me, aren't you?"

The rich, surging color came swiftly into her face, as wine seen through something dark and transparent. Her black eyes shone like jet. She would have looked tragic had it not been for her fixed, steady smile.

"Have I ever been anything else with you?"

"No. You've been straight as a die. I'll say that for you. You've been a good pal--a devilish good pal! But over here--in America--everything seems to go by enigmas--and puzzles--and surprises--"

"I'll explain what I can to you," she said, with a heightened color, "but it won't be so very easy. There are lots of people who, feeling as I do--toward Olivia--and--and toward you--would want to beat about the bush. But when all these things began to happen--and you were already on the way--I turned everything over in my mind and decided to speak exactly as I think."

"Good!"

"But it isn't so very easy," she repeated, pretending to rearrange the dahlia in her laces, so as to find a pretext for not looking him in the eyes. "It isn't so very easy; and if--later on--in after years perhaps--when everything is long over--it ever strikes you that I didn't play fair--it'll be because I played _so_ fair that I laid myself open to that imputation. One can, you know. I only ask you to remember it. That's all."

Ashley was bewildered. He could follow little more than half of what she said. "More mysteries," he was sighing to himself as she spoke. "And such a color! That's her strong point. Pity it only comes by fits and flashes. But, good Lord, what a country! Always something queer and new."

"Good-by," she said, offering her hand before he had time to emerge from his meditations. "We shall see you to-morrow evening. And, by the way, we dine at half-past seven. We're country people here, and primitive. No; don't come to the gate. Olivia must be wondering where you are."

He looked after her as she tripped over the lawn toward the roadway, still holding her long-handled, beribboned, eighteenth-century sunshade with the daintiness of a Watteau shepherdess holding a crook.

"She's a good 'un," he said to himself. "Straight as a die, she is--and true as steel."

None the less he was glad when she left him.

XVI

Ashley wanted to be alone. He needed solitude in order to face the stupendous bit of information Mrs. Fane had given him. Everything else he had heard during the past twenty-four hours he had felt himself more or less competent to meet. True, his meeting it would be at a sacrifice and the probable loss of some of the best things he had hoped and worked for; but he should have the satisfaction that comes to every man of honor when he has done a brave thing well. There would be something, too, in giving the lie to people who accused him of having no thought but for his own advancement. He had been sensitive to that charge, because of the strain of truth in it, and yet had seen no means of counteracting it. Very well; he should counteract it now.

Since there was no way out of the situation he had found in America--that is, no way consistent with self-respect--it was characteristic of him, both as diplomatist and master of tactics, to review what was still in his favor. He called himself to witness that he had wasted no time in repining. He had risen to the circumstances as fast as nature would permit, and adapted himself right on the spur of the moment to an entirely new outlook on the future. Moreover, he had been able to detach Olivia herself from the degrading facts surrounding her, seeing her, as he had seen her from the first, holy and stainless, untouched by conditions through which few women could pass without some personal deterioration. In his admiration and loyalty he had not wavered for a second. On the contrary, he was sure that he should love her the more intensely, in spite of, and perhaps because of, her misfortunes.

He felt free, therefore, to resent this new revelation so fantastically out of proportion to the harmony of life. It was the most staggering thing he had ever heard of. An act such as that with which Drusilla credited Davenant brought into daily existence a feature too prodigious to find room there. Or, rather, having found the room through sheer force of its own bulk, it dwarfed everything else into insignificance. It hid all objects and blocked all ways. You could get neither round it nor over it nor through it. You could not even turn back and ignore it. You could only stand and stare at it helplessly, giving it the full tribute of awe.

Ashley gave it. He gave it while lighting mechanically a cigar which he did not smoke and standing motionless in the middle of the lawn, heedless of the glances--furtive, discreet, sympathetic, admiring--cast at him from the windows and balconies of the surrounding houses. His quick eye, trained to notice everything within its ken, saw them plainly enough. The houses were not so distant nor the foliage so dense but that kindly, neighborly interest could follow the whole drama taking place at Tory Hill. Ashley could guess with tolerable accuracy that the ladies whom he saw ostensibly reading or sewing on verandas had been invited to the wedding, and were consequently now in the position of spectators at a play. The mere detail of this American way of living, with unwalled properties merging into one another, and doors and windows flung wide to every passing glance, gave him an odd sense of conducting his affairs in the market-place or on the stage. If he did not object to it, it was because of the incitement to keep up to the level of his best which he always drew from the knowledge that other people's eyes were upon him.

He felt this stimulus when Olivia came out to the Corinthian portico, seating herself in a wicker chair, with an obvious invitation to him to join her. "Drusilla Fane has been telling me about your--your friend."

She knew he meant the last two words to be provocative. She knew it by slight signs of nervousness in his way of standing before her, one foot on the grass and the other on the first step of the portico. He betrayed himself, too, in an unsuccessful attempt to make his intonation casual, as well as by puffing at his cigar without noticing that it had gone out. An instant's reflection decided her to accept his challenge. As the subject had to be met, the sooner it came up the better.

She looked at him mildly. "What did she say about him?"

"Only that he was the man who put up the money."

"Yes; he was."

"Why didn't you tell me that this morning?"

"I suppose because there was so much else to say. We should have come round to it in time. I did tell you everything but his name."

"And the circumstances."

"How do you mean--the circumstances?"

"I got the impression from you this morning that it was some millionaire Johnny who'd come to your father's aid by advancing the sum in the ordinary way of business. I didn't understand that it was a comparatively poor chap who was cleaning himself out to come to yours."

In wording his phrase he purposely went beyond the warrant, in order to rouse her to denial, or perhaps to indignation. But she said only:

"Did Drusilla say it was to come to my aid?"

"She didn't say it--exactly. I gathered that it was what she thought."

She astonished him by saying, simply: "I think so, too."

"Extraordinary! Do you mean to say he dropped out of a clear sky?"

"I must answer that by both a yes and a no. He did drop out of a clear sky just lately; but I'd known him before."

"Ah!" His tone was that of a cross-examiner dragging the truth from an unwilling witness. He put his questions rapidly and sharply, as though at a Court-martial. "So you'd known him before! Did you know him _well?_"

"_I_ didn't think it was well; but apparently he did, because he asked me to marry him."

Ashley bounded. "Who? That--that cowboy!"

"Yes; if he _is_ a cowboy."

"And you took money from him?"

Her elbows rested on the arm of her chair; the tip of her chin on the back of her bent fingers. Without taking her eyes from his she inclined her head slowly in assent.

"That is," he hastened to say, in some compunction, "your father took it. We must keep the distinction--"

"No; I took it. Papa was all ready to decline it. He had made up his mind--"

"Do you mean that the decision to accept it rested with you?"

"Practically."

"You didn't--" He hesitated, stammered, and grew red. "You didn't--" he began again. "You'll have to excuse the question.... I simply _must_ know, by Jove!... You didn't _ask_ him for it?"

She rose with dignity. "If you'll come in I'll tell you about it. We can't talk out here."

He came up the portico steps to the level on which she was standing. "Tell me that first," he begged.

"You _didn't_ ask him for it? Did you?"

In the French window, as she was about to enter the room, she half turned round. "I don't think it would bear that construction; but it might. I'd rather you judged for yourself. I declined it at first--and then I said I'd take it. I don't know whether you'd call that asking. But please come in."

He followed her into the oval room, where they were screened from neighborly observation, while, with the French window open, they had the advantage of the air and the rich, westering sunshine. Birds hopped about in the trees, and now and then a gray squirrel darted across the grass.

"I should think," he said, nervously, before she had time to begin her explanation, "that a fellow who had done that for you would occupy your mind to the exclusion of everybody else."

Guessing that he hoped for a disclaimer on her part, she was sorry to be unable to make it.

"Not to their exclusion--but perhaps--a little to their subordination."

He pretended to laugh. "What a pretty distinction!"

"You see, I haven't been able to help it. He's loomed up so tremendously above everything--"

"And every one."

"Yes," she admitted, with apologetic frankness, "and every one--that is, in the past few days--that it's as if I couldn't see anything but him."

"Oh, I'm not jealous," he exclaimed, pacing up and down the length of the room.

"Of course not," she agreed, seating herself in one of the straight-backed chairs. Her clasped hands rested on the small round table in the center of the room, while she looked out across the lawn to the dahlias and zinnias on its farther edge.

Ashley, who had flung his panama on a sofa, continued to pace up and down the room, his head bent and his fingers clasped tightly under his jacket behind his back. He moved jerkily, like a man preserving outward self-control in spite of extreme nervous tension.

He listened almost without interruption while she gave him a precise account of Davenant's intervention in her father's troubles. She spared no detail of her own opposition and eventual capitulation. She spoke simply and easily, as though repeating something learned by heart, just as she had narrated the story of Guion's defaulting in the morning. Apart from the fact that she toyed with a paper-knife lying on the table, she sat rigidly still, her eyes never wandering from the line of autumn flowers on the far side of the lawn.

"So you see," she concluded, in her quiet voice, "I came to understand that it was a choice between taking it from him and taking it from the poor women papa had ruined; and I thought that as he was young--and strong--and a man--he'd be better able to bear it. That was the reason."

He came to a standstill on the other side of the table, where he could see her in profile.

"You're extraordinary, by Jove!" he muttered. "You're not a bit like what you look. You look so fragile and tender; and yet you could have let that old man--"

"I could only have done it if it was right. Nothing that's right is very hard, you know."

"And what about the suffering?"

She half smiled, faintly shrugging her shoulders. "Don't you think we make more of suffering than there's any need for? Suffering is nothing much--except, I suppose, the suffering that comes from want. That's tragic. But physical pain--and the things we call trials--are nothing so terrible if you know the right way to bear them."

The abstract question didn't interest him. He resumed his restless pacing.

"So," he began again, in his tone of conducting a court-martial--"so you refused the money in the first place, because you thought the fellow was trying to get you into his power. Have you had any reason to change your opinion since?"

"None, except that he makes no effort to do it."

He stopped again beside the table. "And do you suppose he would? When you've prepared your ambush cleverly enough you don't have to go out and drag your victim into it. You've only to lie still and he'll walk in of his own accord."

"Of course I see that."

"Well, what then?"

She threw him a glance over her shoulder. To do so it was necessary for her to turn her head both sidewise and upward, so that he got the exquisite lines of the neck and profile, the mysterious gray-green tint of the eyes, and the coppery gleam of her hair. The appeal to his senses and to something beyond his senses made him gasp. It made him tremble. "My God, what a wife for _me_!" he was saying to himself. "She's got the pluck of a Jeanne d'Arc and the nerve of a Christian martyr."

"Well, then," she said, in answer to his words--"then I don't have to walk into the ambush--unless I want to."

"Does that mean that there are conceivable conditions in which you might want to?"

She turned completely round in her chair. Both hands, with fingers interlaced, rested on the table as she looked up at him.

"I shall have to let you find your own reply to that."

"But you know he's in love with you."

"I know he was in love with me once. I've no absolute reason to think that he is so still."

"But supposing he was? Would it make any difference to you?"

"Would it make any difference to _you?_"

"It would make the difference--"

He stopped in confusion. While he was not clear as to what he was going to say, he was startled by the possibilities before him. The one thing plain was that her question, simple as it seemed, gave an entirely new turn to the conversation. It called on him to take the lead, and put him, neatly and skilfully, in the one place of all others which--had he descried it in advance--he would have been eager to avoid. Would it make any difference to him? What difference _could_ it make? What difference _must_ it make?