The Street Called Straight Part 10

It was a thought that went as quickly as it came, its only importance being that it never caused her a shudder. If it sometimes brought matter for reflection, it was in showing her to herself in a light in which, she was tolerably sure, she never appeared to anybody else--as the true child of the line of frugal forebears, of sea-scouring men and cheese-paring women, who, during nearly two hundred years of thrift, had put penny to penny to save the Guion competence. Standing in the cheerful "Colonial" hall which their stinting of themselves had made it possible to build, and which was still furnished chiefly with the objects--a settle, a pair of cupboards, a Copley portrait, a few chairs, some old decorative pottery--they had lived with, it afforded one more steadying element for her bewilderment to grasp at, to feel herself their daughter.

There was, indeed, in the very type of her beauty a hint of a carefully calculated, unwasteful adaptation of means to ends quite in the spirit of their sparing ways. It was a beauty achieved by nature apparently with the surest, and yet with the slightest, expenditure of energy--a beauty of poise, of line, of delicacy, of reserve--with nothing of the superfluous, and little even of color, beyond a gleam of chrysoprase in fine, gray eyes and a coppery, metallic l.u.s.ter in hair that otherwise would have pa.s.sed as chestnut brown. It was a beauty that came as much from repose in inaction as from grace in movement, but of which a noticeable trait was that it required no more to produce it in the way of effort than in that of artifice. Through the transparent whiteness of the skin the blue of each clearly articulated vein and the rose of each hurrying flush counted for its utmost in the general economy of values.

It was in keeping with this restraint that in all her ways, her manners, her dress, her speech, her pride, there should be a meticulous simplicity. It was not the simplicity of the hedge-row any more than of the hothouse; it was rather that of some cla.s.sic flower, lavender or crown-imperial, growing from an ancient stock in some dignified, long-tended garden. It was thus a simplicity closely allied to st.u.r.diness--the inner st.u.r.diness not inconsistent with an outward semblance of fragility--the tenacity of strength by which the lavender scents the summer and the crown-imperial adorns the spring, after the severest snows.

It was doubtless, this vitality, drawn from deep down in her native soil, that braced her now, to simply holding fast intuitively and almost blindly till the first force of the shock should have so spent itself that the normal working of the faculties might begin again. It was the something of which she had just spoken to her father--the something that might be pride but that was not wholly pride, which had never been taxed nor called on. She could not have defined it in a more positive degree; but even now, when all was confusion and disintegration, she was conscious of its being there, an untouched treasure of resources.

In what it supplied her with, however, there was no answer to the question that had been silently making itself urgent from the first word of her father's revelations: What was to happen with regard to her wedding? It took the practical form of dealing with the mere outward paraphernalia--the service, the bridesmaids, the guests, the feast.

Would it be reasonable, would it be decent, to carry out rich and elaborate plans in a ruined house? Further than that she dared not inquire, though she knew very well there was still a greater question to be met. When, during the course of the morning, Drusilla Fane came to see her, Olivia broached it timidly, though the conversation brought her little in the way of help.

Knowing all she knew through the gossip of servants, Drusilla felt the necessity of being on her guard. She accepted Olivia's information that her father had met with losses as so much news, and gave utterance to sentiments of sympathy and encouragement. Beyond that she could not go.

She was obliged to cast her condolences in the form of bald generalities, since she could make but a limited use of the name of Rupert Ashley as a source of comfort. More clearly than any one in their little group she could see what marriage with Olivia in her new conditions--the horrible, tragic conditions that would arise if Peter could do nothing--would mean for him. She weighed her words, therefore, with an exactness such as she had not displayed since her early days among the Suss.e.x Rangers, measuring the little more and the little less as in an apothecary's balances.

"You see," Olivia said, trying to sound her friend's ideas, "from one point of view I scarcely know him."

"You know him well enough to be in love with him." Drusilla felt that that committed her to nothing.

"That doesn't imply much--not necessarily, that is. You can be in love with people and scarcely know them at all. And it often happens that if you knew them better you wouldn't be in love with them."

"And you know him well enough to be sure that he'll want to do everything right."

"Oh yes; I'm quite sure of that. I'm only uncertain that--everything right--would satisfy me."

Drusilla reflected. "I see what you mean. And, of course, you want to do--everything right--yourself."

Olivia glanced up obliquely under her lashes.

"I see what _you_ mean, too."

"You mustn't see too much." Drusilla spoke hastily. She waited in some anxiety to see just what significance Olivia had taken from her words; but when the latter spoke it was to pa.s.s on to another point.

"You see, he didn't want to marry an American, in the first place."

"Well, no one forced him into that. That's one thing he did with his eyes open, at any rate."

"His doing it was a sort of--concession."

Drusilla looked at her with big, indignant eyes.

"Concession to what, for pity's sake?"

"Concession to his own heart, I suppose." Olivia smiled, faintly. "You see, all other things being equal, he would have preferred to marry one of his own countrywomen."

"It's six of one and half a dozen of the other. If he'd married one of his own countrywomen, the other things wouldn't have been equal. So there you are."

"But the other things aren't equal now. Don't you see? They're changed."

"_You're_ not changed." Drusilla felt these words to be dangerous. It was a relief to her that Olivia should contradict them promptly.

"Oh yes, I am. I'm changed--in value. With papa's troubles there's a depreciation in everything we are."

Drusilla repeated these words to her father and mother at table when she went home to luncheon. "If she feels like that now," she commented, "what _will_ she say when she knows all?--if she ever has to know it."

"But she hasn't changed," Mrs. Temple argued.

"It doesn't make any difference in _her_."

Drusilla shook her head. "Yes, it does, mother dear. You don't know anything about it."

"I know enough about it," Mrs. Temple declared, with some asperity, "to see that she will be the same Olivia Guion after her father has gone to prison as she was in the days of her happiness. If there's any change, it will be to make her a better and n.o.bler character. She's just the type to be--to be perfected through suffering."

"Y-y-es," Drusilla admitted, her head inclined to one side. "That might be quite true in one way; but it wouldn't help Rupert Ashley to keep his place in the Suss.e.x Rangers."

"Do you mean to say they'd make him give it up?"

"They wouldn't make him, mother dear. He'd only have to."

"Well, I never did! If that's the British army--"

"The British army is a very complicated inst.i.tution. It fills a lot of different functions, and it's a lot of different things. It's one thing from the point of view of the regiment, and another from that of the War Office. It's one thing on the official side, and another on the military, and another on the social. You can't decide anything about it in an abstract, offhand way. Rupert Ashley might be a capital officer, and every one might say he'd done the honorable thing in standing by Olivia; and yet he'd find it impossible to go on as colonel of the Rangers when his father-in-law was in penal servitude. There it is in a nutsh.e.l.l. You can't argue about it, because that's the way it is."

Rodney Temple said nothing; but he probably had these words in his mind when he, too, early in the afternoon, made his way to Tory Hill. Olivia spoke to him of her father's losses, though her allusions to Colonel Ashley were necessarily more veiled than they had been with Mrs. Fane.

"The future may be quite different from what I expected. I can't tell yet for sure. I must see how things--work out."

"That's a very good way, my dear," the old man commended. "It's a large part of knowledge to know how to leave well enough alone. Nine times out of ten life works out better by itself than we can make it."

"I know I've got to feel my way," she said, meaning to agree with him.

"I don't see why."

She raised her eyebrows in some surprise. "You don't see--?"

"No, I don't. Why should you feel your way? You're not blind."

"I feel my way because I don't see it."

"Oh yes, you do--all you need to see."

"But I don't see any. I a.s.sure you it's all confusion."

"Not a bit, my dear. It's as plain as a pikestaff--for the next step."

"I don't know what you mean by the next step."

"I suppose the next step would be--well, let us say what you've got to do to-day. That's about as much ground as any one can cover with a stride. You see that, don't you? You've got to eat your dinner, and go to bed. That's all you've got to settle for the moment."

Her lips relaxed in a pale smile. "I'm afraid I must look a little farther ahead than that."