The Street Called Straight Part 15

The question took him unawares. "I--I don't remember."

"I do. I should think you would. The trial was in all the papers. It was the Gray estate. He was Mrs. Gray's trustee. He ruined the whole Gray family."

"Possibly." He did his best to speak airily. "In the matter of estates there are all sorts of hitches that can happen. Some are worse than others, of course--"

"I've seen his wife, Ada Berrington, once or twice, when I've been in Paris. She lives there, waiting for him to come out of Singville. She avoids her old friends when she can--but I've seen her."

"I think I remember hearing about them," he said, for the sake of saying something; "but--"

"I should like to go and talk with my father. Would you mind waiting?"

She made as though she would pa.s.s him, but he managed to bar her way.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you, Miss Guion. If he's not well it'll only upset him. Why not let everything be just as it is? You won't regret it a year hence--believe me. In nine things out of ten you'd know better than I; but this is the tenth thing, in which I know better than you. Why not trust me--and let me have a free hand?"

"I'm afraid I must go to my father. If you'll be kind enough to wait, I'll come back and tell you what he says. Then we shall know. Will you please let me pa.s.s?"

He moved to one side. He thought again of the woman in the English law-court. It was like this that she walked from the dock--erect, unflinching, graceful, with eyes fixed straight before her, as though she saw something in the air.

He watched her cross the hall to the foot of the staircase. There she paused pensively. In a minute or two she came back to the sitting-room door.

"If it should be like--like Jack Berrington," she said, from the threshold, with a kind of concentrated quiet in her manner, "then--what you suggested--would be more out of the question than ever."

"I don't see that," he returned, adopting her own tone. "I should think it would be just the other way."

She shook her head.

"There are a lot of points of view that you haven't seen yet," he persisted. "I could put some of them before you if you'd give me time."

"It would be no use doing that. I should never believe anything but that we, my father and I, should bear the responsibilities of our own acts."

"You'll think differently," he began, "when you've looked at the thing all round; and then--"

But before he could complete his sentence she had gone.

Having seen her go up-stairs, he waited in some uncertainty. When fifteen or twenty minutes had gone by and she did not return, he decided to wait no longer. Picking up his hat and stick from the chair on which he had laid them, he went out by the French window, making his way to the gate across the lawn.

VIII

Finding the door of her father's room ajar, Miss Guion pushed it open and went in.

Wearing a richly quilted dressing-gown, with cuffs and rolled collar of lavender silk, he lay asleep in the chaise-longue, a tan-colored rug across his feet. On a table at his left stood a silver box containing cigars, a silver ash-tray, a silver match-box, and a small silver lamp burning with a tiny flame. Each piece was engraved with his initials and a coat-of-arms. On his right there was an adjustable reading-stand, holding an open copy of a recent English review. One hand, adorned with an elaborately emblazoned seal-ring, hung heavily toward the floor; a cigar that had gone out was still between the fingers. His head, resting on a cushion of violet brocade, had fallen slightly to one side.

She sat down beside him, to wait till he woke up. It was a large room, with white doors and wainscoting. Above the woodwork it was papered in pale yellow. On the walls there were water-colors, prints, photographs, and painted porcelain plaques. Over the bed, for decorative rather than devotional purposes, hung an old French ivory crucifix, while lower down was a silver holy-water stoup of Venetian make, that was oftenest used for matches. It had been the late Mrs. Guion's room, and expressed her taste. It contained too many ornaments, too many knickknacks, too many mirrors, too many wardrobes, too many easy-chairs, too much embossed silver on the dressing-table, too much old porcelain, wherever there was a place for it. Everything was costly, from the lace coverlet on the bed to the Persian rugs on the floor.

Olivia looked vaguely about the room, as on an apartment she had never before seen. She found herself speculating as to the amount these elaborate furnishings would fetch if sold. She recalled the fact, forgotten till now, that when the Berringtons' belongings, purchased with reckless extravagance, pa.s.sed under the hammer, they had gone for a song. She made the same forecast regarding the contents of Tory Hill.

Much money had been spent on them, but, with the exception perhaps of some of the old portraits, there was little of real intrinsic value. She made the reflection coldly, drearily, as bearing on things that had no connection with herself.

Her eyes traveled back to her father. With the muscles of the face relaxed in sleep, he looked old and jaded. The mustache, which had not been waxed or curled that day, sagged at the corners, the mouth sagging under it. Above the line of the beard the skin was mottled and puffy.

The lashes rested on his cheeks with the luxuriance of a girl's, and the splendid eyebrows had all their fullness; but the lids twitched and quivered like those of a child that has fallen asleep during a fit of weeping.

It was this twitching that softened her, that compelled her to judge him from the most merciful point of view. There was something piteous about him, something that silenced reproaches, that disarmed severity. She had come up-stairs staggered, incredulous--incredulous and yet convinced--outraged, terrified; but now the appeal of that f.a.gged face and those quivering lids was too strong for her. It wrought in her not so much sympathy as comprehension, an understanding of him such as she had never before arrived at. In his capacity of father she had loved him unrestrainedly, but admired him with reserves. It was impossible not to love a parent so handsome, so genial, so kind, so generally admired; it was equally impossible not to criticize, however gently, a man with such a love of luxury, of unwarranted princeliness, and of florid display.

She was indulgent to his tastes in the degree to which a new and enlightened generation can be tolerant of the errors of that preceding it, but she could not ignore the fact that the value he set on things--in morals, society, or art--depended on their power to strike the eye. She had smiled at that, as at something which, after all, was harmless. She had smiled, too, when he offered to himself--and to her also, it had to be admitted--the best of whatever could be had, since, presumably, he could afford it; though, as far as she was concerned, she would have been happier with simpler standards and a less ambitious mode of life. In following the path her parents had marked out for her, and to some extent beaten in advance, she had acquiesced in their plans rather than developed wishes of her own. Having grown tired of her annual round of American and English country-houses, with interludes for Paris, Biarritz, or Cannes, she had gone on chiefly because, as far as she could see, there was nothing else to do.

Looking at him now, it came over her for the first time that she must be a disappointment to him. He had never given her reason to suspect it, and yet it must be so. First among the aims for which he had been striving, and to attain to which he had hazarded so much, there must have been the hope that she should make a brilliant match. That, and that alone, would have given them as a family the sure international position he had coveted, and which plenty of other Americans were successful in securing.

It was only of late years, with the growth of her own independent social judgment, that she could look back over the past and see the Guions as in the van of that movement of the New World back upon the Old of which the force was forever augmenting. As Drusilla Fane was fond of saying, it was a manifestation of the nomadic, or perhaps the predatory, spirit characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. It was part of that impulse to expand, annex, appropriate, which had urged the Angles to descend on the sh.o.r.es of Kent and the Normans to cross from Dives to Hastings.

Later, it had driven their descendants over the Atlantic, as individuals, as households, or as "churches"; and now, from their rich, comfortable, commonplace homes in New England, Illinois, or California, it bade later descendants still lift up their eyes and see how much there was to be desired in the lands their ancestors had left behind--fair parks, stately manors, picturesque chateaux, sonorous t.i.tles, and varied, dignified ways of living.

To a people with the habit of compa.s.sing sea and land to get whatever was good to have the voyage back was nothing, especially in the days of easy money and steam. The Guions had been among the first to make it.

They had been among the first Americans to descend on the sh.o.r.es of Europe with the intention--more or less obscure, more or less acknowledged, as the case might be--of acquiring and enjoying the treasures of tradition by a.s.sociation or alliance or any other means that might present themselves. Richard Guion, grandfather of Henry Guion, found the way to cut a dash in the Paris of the early Second Empire and to marry his daughter, Victoria Guion, to the Marquis de Melcourt. From the simple American point of view of that day and date it was a dazzling match, long talked of by the nave press of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

By the more ambitious members of the Guion house it was considered as the beginning of a glorious epoch; but, looking back now, Olivia could see how meager the results had been. 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 st.u.r.dy 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. Henceforth the utmost she could do for her kith and kin was to force open the trap from time to time, so that Olivia, if she liked, could be swallowed, too. In that task the old lady was not only industrious but generous, offering to subscribe handsomely toward the _dot_, as well as giving it to be understood that the bride-elect would figure in the end as her residuary legatee. Owing to this prospect Olivia had been compelled to decline a comte and a vicomte of crusading ancestry, procured at some pains by Madame de Melcourt; but when she also refused the eminently eligible Duc de Berteuil, whose terms in the way of dowry were reasonable, while he offered her a splendidly historic name and background, the Marquise not unnaturally lost her temper and declared that she washed her hands of her grandniece once for all.

Not till this minute had Olivia ever considered that this reluctance on her part to be "well established" must have been something like a grief to her father, for he had never betrayed a sign of it. On the contrary, he had seemed to approve her decisions, and had even agreed with her in preferring the mistletoe to the pitcher-plant. He welcomed her back to Tory Hill, where her residences were longer, now that she ceased to be much with Madame de Melcourt, and yet was always ready with money and his consent when she had invitations from her friends abroad. On her engagement to Rupert Ashley he expressed complete satisfaction, and said in so many words that it was a more appropriate match for her than any French alliance, however distinguished. His tenderness in this respect came over her now as peculiarly touching, unsealing the fount of filial pity at a moment when other motives might have made for indignation and revolt.

He opened his eyes without giving any other sign of waking.

"Hallo! What are you looking at me for?"

The tone was not impatient, but she heard in it an implication of fear.

"Papa, are your troubles anything like Jack Berrington's?"

He gazed at her without moving a muscle or changing a shade. She only fancied that in the long look with which he regarded her there was a receding, sinking, dying light, as though the soul within him was withdrawing.

"What makes you ask that?"

The intonation was expressionless, and yet, it seemed to her, a little wary.

"I ask chiefly because--well, because I think they are."

He looked at her for a minute more, perhaps for longer.

"Well, then--you're right."

Again she had the sensation, familiar to her since yesterday, of the world reeling to pieces around her while her own personality survived.

When she spoke, her voice sounded as if it came out of the wildness of a surging wreck.

"Then that's what you meant in saying yesterday that when everything was settled you still wouldn't be able to pay all you owed."

"That's what I meant--exactly."