The Street Called Straight Part 6

In doing so he was consciously taking a farewell. He had been born in this house; in it he had spent his boyhood; to it he had come back as a young married man. He had lived in it till his wife and he had set up their more ambitious establishment in Boston, an extravagance from which, perhaps, all the subsequent misfortunes could be dated. He had known at the time that his father, had he lived, would have condemned the step; but he himself was a believer in fortunate chances. Besides, it was preposterous for a young couple of fashion to continue living in a rambling old house that belonged to neither town nor country, at a time when the whole trend of life was cityward. They had discussed the move, with its large increase of expenditure, from every point of view, and found it one from which, in their social position, there was no escape. It was a matter about which they had hardly any choice.

So, too, a few years later, with the taking of the cottage at Newport.

It was forced on them. When all their friends were doing something of the sort it seemed absurd to hesitate because of a mere matter of means--especially when by hook or by crook the means could be procured.

Similar reasoning had attended their various residences abroad--in London, Paris, Rome. Country-houses in England or villas on the Riviera became matters of necessity, according to the demands of Olivia's entry into the world of fashion or Mrs. Guion's health.

It was not till the death of the latter, some seven years ago, that Guion, obliged to pause, was able to take cognizance of the degree to which he had imperiled himself in the years of effort to maintain their way of life. It could not be said that at the time he regretted what he had done, but he allowed it to frighten him into some ineffectual economies. He exchanged the cottage at Newport for one at Lenox, and, giving up the house in Boston, withdrew to Tory Hill. Ceasing himself to go into society, he sent his daughter abroad for a large portion of her time, either in the care of Madame de Melcourt or, in London, under the wing of some of the American ladies prominent in English life.

Having taken these steps, with no small pride in his capacity for sacrifice, Guion set himself seriously to reconstruct his own fortune and to repair the inroads he had made on those in his trust. It was a matter in which he had but few misgivings as to his capacity. The making of money, he often said, was an easy thing, as could be proved by the intellectual grade of the men who made it. One had only to look about one to see that they were men in whom the average of ability was by no means high, men who achieved their successes largely by a kind of rule of thumb. They got the knack of investment--and they invested. He preferred the word investment to another which might have challenged comment. They bought in a low market and sold in a high one--and the trick was done. Some instinct--a _flair_, he called it--was required in order to recognize, more or less at sight, those properties which would quickly and surely appreciate in value; and he believed he possessed it.

Given the control of a few thousands as a point of departure, and the financial ebb and flow, a man must be a born fool, he said, not to be able to make a reasonable fortune with reasonable speed.

Within the office of Guion, Maxwell & Guion circ.u.mstances favored the accession to power of the younger partner, who had hitherto played an acquiescent rather than an active part. Mr. Maxwell was old and ailing, though neither so ailing nor so old as to be blind to the need of new blood, new money, and new influence in the fine old firm. His weakness was that he hated beginning all over again with new men; so that when Smith and Jones were proposed as possible partners he easily admitted whatever objections Guion raised to them, and the matter was postponed.

It was postponed again. It slipped into a chronic condition of postponement; and Mr. Maxwell died.

The situation calling then for adroitness on Guion's part, the fact that he was able to meet it to the satisfaction of all the parties concerned, increased his confidence in his own astuteness. True, it required some manipulation, some throwing of dust into people's eyes, some making of explanations to one person that could not be reconciled with those made to another; but here again the circ.u.mstances helped him. His clients were for the most part widows and old maids, many of them resident abroad, for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion had so long stood, in the matter of income, for the embodiment of paternal care that they were ready to believe anything and say anything and sign anything they were told to.

With the legal authorities to whom he owed account he had the advantage of the house's high repute, making it possible to cover with formalities anything that might, strictly speaking, have called for investigation.

Whatever had to be considered shifty he excused to himself on the ground of its being temporary; while it was clearly, in his opinion, to the ultimate advantage of the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs and the Compton heirs and all the other heirs for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion were _in loco parentis_, that he should have a free hand.

The sequel astonished rather than disillusioned him. It wrought in him disappointment with the human race, especially as represented by the Stock Exchange, without diminishing his confidence in his own judgment.

Through all his wild efforts not to sink he was upborne by the knowledge that it was not his calculations that were wrong, but the workings of a system more obscure than that of chance and more capricious than the weather. He grew to consider it the fault of the blind forces that make up the social, financial, and commercial worlds, and not his own, when he was reduced to a frantic flinging of good money after bad as offering the sole chance of working out his redemption.

And, now that it was all over, he was glad his wife had not lived to see the end. That, at least, had been spared him. 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 a.s.sumption 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. He had not been ruled by her--the term would have been grotesque--he had only made it his pleasure to carry out her wishes.

That her wishes led him on to spending money not his own was due to the fact, ever to be regretted, that his father had not bequeathed him money so much as the means of earning it. She could not be held responsible for that, while she was the type of woman to whom it was something like an outrage not to offer the things befitting to her station. There was no reproach in the look he lifted on her now--nothing but a kind of dogged, perverse thankfulness that she should have had the way of life she craved, without ever knowing the price he was about to pay for it.

In withdrawing his glance from hers he turned it about on the various objects in the room. Many of them had stood in their places since before he was born; others he had acquired at occasional sales of Guion property, so that, as the different branches of the family became extinct or disappeared, whatever could be called "ancestral" might have a place at Tory Hill; others he had collected abroad. All of them, in these moments of anguish--the five K'ang-hsi vases on the mantelpiece, brought home by some seafaring Guion of Colonial days, the armorial "Lowestoft" in the cabinets, the Copley portraits of remote connections on the walls, the bits of Chippendale and Hepplewhite that had belonged to the grandfather who built Tory Hill--all of them took on now a kind of personality, as with living look and utterance. He had loved them and been proud of them; and as he turned out the lights, leaving them to darkness, eyes could not have been more appealing nor lips more eloquent than they in their mute farewell.

Returning to the library, he busied himself with his main undertaking.

He was anxious that nothing should be left behind that could give Olivia additional pain, while whatever she might care to have, her mother's letters to himself or other family doc.u.ments, might be ready to her hand. It was the kind of detail to which he could easily give his attention. He worked methodically and phlegmatically, steeling himself to a grim suppression of regret. He was almost sorry to finish the task, since it forced his mind to come again face to face with facts. The clock struck two as he closed the last drawer and knew that that part of his preparation was completed.

In reading the old letters with their echoes of old incidents, old joys, old jokes, old days in Paris, Rome, or England, he had been so wafted back to another time that on pushing in the drawer, which closed with a certain click of finality, the realization of the present rolled back on his soul with a curious effect of amazement. For a few minutes it was as if he had never understood it, never thought of it, before. They were going to make him, Henry Guion, a prisoner, a criminal, a convict! They were going to clip his hair, and shave his beard, and dress him in a hideous garb, and shut him in a cell! They were going to give him degrading work to do and degrading rules to keep, and degrading a.s.sociates to live with, as far as such existence could be called living with any one at all. They were going to do this for year upon year, all the rest of his life, since he never could survive it. He was to have nothing any more to come in between him and his own thoughts--his thoughts of Olivia brought to disgrace, of the Clay heirs brought to want, of the Rodman heirs and the Compton heirs deprived of half their livelihood! He had called it that evening the Strange Ride with Morrowby Jukes to the Land of the Living Dead, but it was to be worse than that.

It was to be worse than Macbeth with his visions of remorse; it was to be worse than Vathek with the flame burning in his heart; it was to be worse than Judas--who at least could hang himself.

He got up and went to a mirror in the corner of the room. The mere sight of himself made the impossible seem more impossible. He was so fine a specimen--he could not but know it!--so much the free man, the honorable man, the man of the world! He tried to see himself with his hair clipped and his beard shaven and the white cravat and waistcoat replaced by the harlequin costume of the jailbird. He tried to see himself making his own bed, and scrubbing his own floor, and standing at his cell door with a tin pot in his hand, waiting for his skilly. It was so absurd, so out of the question, that he nearly laughed outright. He was in a dream--in a nightmare! He shook himself, he pinched himself, in order to wake up.

He was ready in sudden rage to curse the handsome, familiar room for the persistence of its reality, because the rows of books and the Baxter prints and the desks and chairs and electric lights refused to melt away like things in a troubled sleep.

It was then that for the first time he began to taste the real measure of his impotence. He was in the hand of the law. He was in the grip of the sternest avenging forces human society could set in motion against him; and, quibbles, shifts, and subterfuges swept aside, no one knew better than himself that his punishment would be just.

It was a strange feeling, the feeling of having put himself outside the scope of mercy. But there he was! There could never be a word spoken in his defense, nor in any one's heart a throb of sympathy toward him. He had forfeited everything. He could expect nothing from any man, and from his daughter least of all. The utmost he could ask for her was that she should marry, go away, and school herself as nearly as might be to renounce him. That she should do it utterly would not be possible; but something would be accomplished if pride or humiliation or resentment gave her the spirit to carry her head high and ignore his existence.

It was incredible to think that at that very instant she was sleeping quietly, without a suspicion of what was awaiting her. Everything was incredible--incredible and impossible. As he looked around the room, in which every book, every photograph, every pen and pencil, was a part of him, he found himself once more straining for a hope, catching at straws. He took a sheet of paper, and sitting down at his desk began again, for the ten thousandth time, to balance feverishly his meagre a.s.sets against his overwhelming liabilities. He added and subtracted and multiplied and divided with a sort of frenzy, as though by dint of sheer forcing the figures he could make them respond to his will.

Suddenly, with a gesture of mingled anger and hopelessness, he swept the scribbled sheets and all the writing paraphernalia with a crash to the floor, and, burying his face in his hands, gave utterance to a smothered groan. It was a cry, not of surrender, but of protest--of infinite, exasperated protest, of protest against fate and law and judgment and the eternal principles of right and wrong, and against himself most of all. With his head pressed down on the bare polished wood of his desk, he hurled himself mentally at an earth of adamant and a heaven of bra.s.s, hurled himself ferociously, repeatedly, with a kind of doggedness, as though he would either break them down or dash his own soul to pieces.

"O G.o.d! O G.o.d!"

It was an involuntary moan, stifled in his fear of becoming hysterical, but its syllables arrested his attention. They were the syllables of primal articulation, of primal need, condensing the appeal and the aspiration of the world. He repeated them:

"O G.o.d! O G.o.d!"

He repeated them again. He raised his head, as if listening to a voice.

"O G.o.d! O G.o.d!"

He continued to sit thus, as if listening.

It was a strange, an astounding thought to him that he might pray.

Though the earth of adamant were unyielding, the heaven of bra.s.s might give way!

He dragged himself to his feet.

He believed in G.o.d--vaguely. That is, it had always been a matter of good form with him to go to church and to call for the offices of religion on occasions of death or marriage. He had a.s.sisted at the saying of prayers and a.s.sented to their contents. He had even joined in them himself, since a liturgical service was a principle in the church to which he "belonged." All this, however, had seemed remote from his personal affairs, his life-and-death struggles--till now. Now, all at once, queerly, it offered him something--he knew not what. It might be nothing better than any of the straws he had been clutching at. It might be no more than the effort he had just been making to compel two to balance ten.

He stood in the middle of the room under the cl.u.s.ter of electric lights and tried to recollect what he knew, what he had heard, of this Power that could still act when human strength had reached its limitations.

It was nothing very definite. It consisted chiefly of great phrases, imperfectly understood: "Father Almighty," "Saviour of the World,"

"Divine Compa.s.sion" and such like. He did not reason about them, or try to formulate what he actually believed. It was instinctively, almost unconsciously, that he began to speak; it was brokenly and with a kind of inward, spiritual hoa.r.s.eness. He scarcely knew what he was doing when he found himself saying, mentally:

"Save me!... I'm helpless!... I'm desperate!... Save me!... Work a miracle!... Father!... Christ! Christ! Save my daughter!... We have no one--but--but You!... Work a miracle! Work a miracle!... I'm a thief and a liar and a traitor--but save me! I might do something yet--something that might render me--worth salvation--but then--I might not.... Anyhow, save me!... O G.o.d! Father Almighty!... Almighty! That means that You can do anything!... Even now--You can do--anything!... Save us!... Save us all!... Christ! Christ! Christ!"

He knew neither when nor how he ceased, any more than when or how he began. His most clearly defined impression was that of his spirit coming back from a long way off to take perception of the fact that he was still standing under the cl.u.s.ter of electric lights and the clock was striking three. He was breathless, exhausted. His most urgent physic need was that of air. He strode to the window-door leading out to the terraced lawn, and, throwing it open, pa.s.sed out into the darkness.

There was no mist at this height above the Charles. The night was still, and the moon westering. The light had a glimmering, metallic essence, as from a cosmic mirror in the firmament. Long shadows of trees and shrubbery lay across the gra.s.s. Clear in the moonlit foreground stood an elm, the pride of Tory Hill--springing as a single shaft for twice the measure of a man--springing and spreading there into four giant branches, each of which sprang and spread higher into eight--so springing and spreading, springing and spreading still--rounded, symmetrical, superb--till the long outermost shoots fell pendulous, like spray from a fountain of verdure. The silence held the suggestion of mighty spiritual things astir. At least the heaven was not of bra.s.s, if the earth continued to be of adamant. On the contrary, the sky was high, soft, dim, star-bestrewn, ineffable. It was s.p.a.cious; it was free; it was the home of glorious things; it was the medium of the eternal.

He was not rea.s.sured; he was not even comforted; what relief he got came only from a feeling--a fancy, perhaps--that the weight had been eased, that he was freed for a minute from the crushing pressure of the inevitable. It would return again and break him down, but for the moment it was lifted, giving him room and power to breathe. He did breathe--long deep draughts of the cool night air that brought refreshment and something like strength to struggle on.

He came back into the room. His pens and papers were scattered on the floor, and ink from the overturned inkstand was running out on the Oriental rug. It was the kind of detail that before this evening would have shocked him; but nothing mattered now. He was too indifferent to lift his hand and put the inkstand back into its place. Instead, he threw himself on a couch, turning his face to the still open window and drinking in with thirsty gasps the blessed, revivifying air.

V

Guion awoke in a chill, gray light, to find himself covered with a rug, and his daughter, wrapped in a white dressing-gown, bending above him.

Over her shoulder peered the scared face of a maid. His first sensation was that he was cold, his first act to pull the rug more closely about him. His struggle back to waking consciousness was the more confused because of the familiar surroundings of the library.

"Oh, papa, what's the matter?"

He threw the coverlet from him and dragged himself to a sitting posture.

"What time is it?" he asked, rubbing his eyes. "I must have dropped off to sleep. Is dinner ready?"

"It's half-past six in the morning, papa dear. Katie found you here when she came in to dust the room. The window was wide open and all these things strewn about the floor. She put the rug on you and came to wake me. What is it? What's happened? Let me send for the doctor."

With his elbow on his knee, he rested his forehead on his hand. The incidents of the night came back to him. Olivia seated herself on the couch beside him, an arm across his shoulder.

"I'm cold," was all he said.