The Street Called Straight Part 9

He went on to speak rapidly, feverishly, with that half-hysterical impulse toward confession from the signs of which Davenant had shrunk on the previous evening. As Guion himself had forewarned, there was nothing new or unusual in the tale. The situations were entirely the conventional ones in the drama of this kind of unfaithfulness. The only element to make it appealing, an element forcibly present to Davenant's protective instincts, was the contrast between what Guion had been and what he was to-day.

"And so," Guion concluded, "I don't see how I could accept this money from you. Any honorable man--that is," he corrected, in some confusion, "any _sane_ man--would tell you as much."

"I've already considered what the sane man and the honorable man would tell me. I guess I can let them stick to their opinion so long as I have my own."

"And what _is_ your opinion? Do you mind telling me? You understand that what you're proposing is immoral, don't you?"

"Yes--in a way."

Guion frowned. He had hoped for some pretense at contradiction.

"I didn't know whether you'd thought of that."

"Oh yes, I've thought of it. That is, I see what you mean."

"It's compounding a felony and outwitting the ends of justice and--"

"I guess I'll do it just the same. It doesn't seem to be my special job to look after the ends of justice; and as for compounding a felony--well, it'll be something new."

Guion made a show of looking at him sharply. The effort, or the pretended effort, to see through Davenant's game disguised for the moment his sense of humiliation at this prompt acceptance of his own statement of the case.

"All the same," he observed, trying to take a detached, judicial tone, "your offer is so amazing that I presume you wouldn't make it unless you had some unusual reason."

"I don't know that I have. In fact, I know I haven't."

"Well, whatever its nature, I should like to know what it is."

"Is that necessary?"

"Doesn't it strike you that it would be--in order? If I were to let you do this for me you'd be rendering me an extraordinary service. We're both men of business, men of the world; and we know that something for nothing is not according to Hoyle."

Davenant looked at him pensively. "That is, you want to know what I should be pulling off for myself?"

"That's about it."

"I don't see why that should worry you. If you get the money--"

"If I get the money I put myself in your power."

"What of that? Isn't it just as well to be in my power as in the power of other people?"

Again Guion winced inwardly, but kept his self-control. He was not yet accustomed to doing without the formulas of respect from those whom he considered his inferiors.

"Possibly," he said, not caring to conceal a certain irritation; "but even so I should like to know in case I _were_ in your power what you'd expect of me."

"I can answer that question right away. I shouldn't expect anything at all."

"Then you leave me more in the dark than ever."

Davenant still eyed him pensively. "Do I understand you to be suspicious of my motives?"

"Suspicious might not be the right word. Suppose we said curious."

Davenant reflected. Perhaps it was his mastery of the situation that gave him unconsciously a rock-like air of nonchalance. When he spoke it was with a little smile, which Guion took to be one of condescension.

Condescension in the circ.u.mstances was synonymous with insolence.

"Well, sir, suppose I allowed you to remain curious? What then?"

They were the wrong words. It was the wrong manner. Guion looked up with a start. His next words were uttered in the blind instinct of the haughty-headed gentleman who thinks highly of himself to save the moment's dignity.

"In that case I think we must call the bargain off."

Davenant shot out of his seat. He, too, was not without a current of hot blood.

"All right, sir. It's for you to decide. Only, I'm sorry. Good-by!" He held out his hand, which Guion, who was now leaning forward, toying with the pens and pencils on the desk, affected not to see. A certain lack of ease that often came over Davenant at moments of leave-taking or greeting kept him on the spot. "I hoped," he stammered, "that I might have been of some use to you, and that Miss Guion--"

Guion looked up sharply. "Has _she_ got anything to do with it?"

"Nothing," Davenant said, quickly, "nothing whatever."

"I didn't see how she _could_ have--" Guion was going on, when Davenant interrupted.

"She has nothing to do with it whatever," he repeated. "I was only going to say that I hoped she might have got through her wedding without hearing anything about--all this--all this fuss."

In uttering the last words he had moved toward the door. His hand was on the k.n.o.b and he was about to make some repet.i.tion of his farewells when Guion spoke again. He was leaning once more over the desk, his fingers playing nervously with the pens and pencils. He made no further effort to keep up his role of keen-sighted man of business. His head was bent, so that Davenant could scarcely see his face, and when he spoke his words were m.u.f.fled and sullen.

"Half a million would be too much. Four hundred and fifty thousand would cover everything."

"That would be all the same to me," Davenant said, in a matter-of-fact tone.

But he went back to the desk and took his seat again.

VI

Having watched through the window her father pa.s.s down the avenue on his way to town, Miss Guion reseated herself mechanically in her place at the breakfast-table in order to think. Not that her thought could be active or coherent as yet; but a certain absorption of the facts was possible by the simple process of sitting still and letting them sink in. As the minutes went by, it became with her a matter of sensation rather than of mental effort--of odd, dream-like sensation, in which all the protecting walls and clearly defined boundary-lines of life and conduct appeared to be melting away, leaving an immeasurable outlook on vacancy. To pa.s.s abruptly from the command of means, dignity, and consideration out into a state in which she could claim nothing at all was not unlike what she had often supposed it might be to go from the pomp and circ.u.mstance of earth as a disembodied spirit into s.p.a.ce. The a.n.a.logy was rendered the more exact by her sense, stunned and yet conscious, of the survival of her own personality amid what seemed a universal wreckage. This persistence of the ego in conditions so vast and vague and empty as to be almost no conditions at all was the one point on which she could concentrate her faculties.

It was, too, the one point on which she could form an articulated thought. She was Olivia Guion still! In this slipping of the world from beneath her feet she got a certain a.s.surance from the affirmation of her ident.i.ty. She was still that character, compounded of many elements, which recognized as its most active energies insistence of will and tenacity of pride. She could still call these resources to her aid to render her indestructible. Sitting slightly crouched, her hands clasped between her knees, her face drawn and momentarily older, her lips set, her eyes tracing absently the arabesques chased on the coffee-urn, she was inwardly urging her spirit to the buoyancy that cannot sink, to the vitality that rides on chaos. She was not actively or consciously doing this; in the strictest sense she was not doing it at all; it was doing itself, obscurely and spontaneously, by the operation of subliminal forces of which she knew almost nothing, and to which her personality bore no more than the relation of a mountain range to unrecordable volcanic fusions deep down in the earth.

When, after long withdrawal within herself, she changed her position, sighed, and glanced about her, she had a curious feeling of having traveled far, of looking back on the old familiar things from a long way off. The richly wrought silver, the cheerful Minton, the splendidly toned mahogany, the Goya etchings on the walls, things of no great value, but long ago acquired, treasured, loved, had suddenly become useless and irrelevant. She had not lost Tory Hill so much as pa.s.sed beyond it--out into a condition where nothing that preceded it could count, and in which, so far as she was concerned, existence would have to be a new creation, called afresh out of that which was without form and void.

She experienced the same sensation, if it _was_ a sensation, when, a half-hour later, she found herself roaming dreamily rather than restlessly about the house. She was not antic.i.p.ating her farewell of it; it had only ceased to be a background, to have a meaning; it was like the scenery, painted and set, after the play is done. She herself had been removed elsewhere, projected into a sphere where the signs and seasons were so different from anything she had ever known as to afford no indications--where day did not necessarily induce light, nor night darkness, nor past experience knowledge. In the confounding of the perceptive powers and the reeling of the judgment which the new circ.u.mstances produced, she clung to her capacity to survive and dominate like a staggered man to a stanchion.

In the mean time she was not positively suffering from either shock or sorrow. From her personal point of view the loss of money was not of itself an overpowering calamity. It might entail the disruption of lifelong habits, but she was young enough not to be afraid of that. In spite of a way of living that might be said to have given her the best of everything, she had always known that her father's income was a small one for his position in the world. As a family they had been in the habit of a.s.sociating on both sides of the Atlantic, with people whose revenues were twice and thrice and ten times their own. The obligation to keep the pace set by their equals had been recognized as a domestic hardship ever since she could remember, though it was a mitigating circ.u.mstance that in one way or another the money had always been found.

Guion, Maxwell & Guion was a well which, while often threatening to run dry, had never failed to respond to a sufficiently energetic pumping.

She had known the thought, however--fugitive, speculatory, not dwelt upon as a real possibility--that a day might come when it would do so no more.