Read Ebook: The Street Called Straight by King Basil Lowell Orson Illustrator

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Ebook has 2310 lines and 104559 words, and 47 pages

"Then you've been--hearing--things?"

Rodney Temple lowered his eyes in a way that confirmed Davenant--who knew his former guardian's tricks of manner--in his suppositions. He was so open in countenance that anything momentarily veiled on his part, either in speech or in address, could reasonably be attributed to stress of circumstances. The broad forehead, straight-forward eyes, and large mouth imperfectly hidden by a shaggy beard and mustache, were of the kind that lend themselves to lucidity and candor. Externally he was the scholar, as distinct from the professional man or the "divine." His figure--tall, large-boned, and loose-jointed--had the slight stoop traditionally associated with study, while the profile was thrust forward as though he were peering at something just out of sight. A courtly touch in his style was probably a matter of inheritance, as was also his capacity for looking suitably attired while obviously neglectful of appearances. His thick, lank, sandy hair, fading to white, and long, narrow, stringy beard of the same transitional hue were not well cared for; and yet they helped to give him a little of the air of a Titian or Velasquez nobleman. In answer to Guion now, he spoke without lifting his eyes from his plate.

"Have I been hearing things? N-no; only that the care of big estates is a matter of great responsibility--and anxiety."

"That's what I tell papa," Miss Guion said, warmly, catching the concluding words. "It's a great responsibility and anxiety. He ought to be free from it. I tell him my marriage is a providential hint to him to give up work."

"Perhaps I sha'n't get the chance. Work may give up--me."

"I wish it would, papa. Then everything would be settled."

"Some things would be settled. Others might be opened--for discussion."

If Rodney Temple had not lifted his eyes in another significant look toward Guion, Davenant would have let these sentences pass unheeded. As it was, his attention was directed to possible things, or impossible things, left unsaid. For a second or two he was aware of an odd suspicion, but he brushed it away as absurd, in view of the self-assurance with which Guion roused himself at last to enter into the conversation, which began immediately to turn on persons of whom Davenant had no knowledge.

The inability to follow closely gave him time to make a few superficial observations regarding his host. In spite of the fact that Guion had been a familiar figure to him ever since his boyhood, he now saw him at really close range for the first time in years.

What struck him most was the degree to which Guion conserved his quality of Adonis. Long ago renowned, in that section of American society that clings to the cities and seaboard between Maine and Maryland, as a fine specimen of manhood, he was perhaps handsomer now, with his noble, regular features, his well-trimmed, iron-gray beard, and his splendid head of iron-gray hair, than he had been in his youth. Reckoning roughly, Davenant judged him to be sixty. He had been a personage prominently in view in the group of cities formed by Boston, Cambridge, and Waverton, ever since Davenant could remember him. Nature having created Guion an ornament to his kind, fate had been equally beneficent in ordaining that he should have nothing to do, on leaving the university, but walk into the excellent legal practice his grandfather had founded, and his father had brought to a high degree of honor as well as to a reasonable pitch of prosperity. It was, from the younger Guion's point of view, an agreeable practice, concerned chiefly with the care of trust funds, in which a gentleman could engage without any rough-and-tumble loss of gentility. It required little or nothing in the way of pleadings in the courts or disputing in the market-place, and--especially during the lifetime of the elder partners--left him leisure for cultivating that graceful relationship to life for which he possessed aptitudes. It was a high form of gracefulness, making it a matter of course that he should figure on the Boards of Galleries of Fine Arts and Colleges of Music, and other institutions meant to minister to his country's good through the elevation of its taste.

"It's the sort of thing he was cut out for," Davenant commented to himself, as his eye traveled from the high-bred face, where refinement blended with authority, to the essentially gentlemanly figure, on which the delicately tied cravat sat with the elegance of an orchid, while the white waistcoat, of the latest and most youthful cut, was as neatly adjusted to the person as the calyx to a bud. The mere sight of so much ease and distinction made Davenant himself feel like a rustic in his Sunday clothes, though he seized the opportunity of being in such company to enlarge his perception of the fine points of bearing. It was an improving experience of a kind which he only occasionally got.

He had an equal sense of the educational value of the conversation, to which, as it skipped from country to country and from one important name to another, it was a privilege to be a listener. His own career--except for his two excursions round the world, conscientiously undertaken in pursuit of knowledge--had been so somberly financial that he was frankly, and somewhat na?vely, curious concerning the people who "did things" bearing little or no relation to business, and who permitted themselves sensations merely for the sake of having them. Olivia Guion's friends, and Drusilla Fane's--admirals, generals, colonels, ambassadors, and secretaries of embassy they apparently were, for the most part--had what seemed to him an unwonted freedom of dramatic action. Merely to hear them talked about gave him glimpses of a world varied and picturesque, from the human point of view, beyond his dreams. In the exchange of scraps of gossip and latest London anecdotes between Miss Guion and Drusilla Fane, on which Henry Guion commented, Davenant felt himself to be looking at a vivid but fitfully working cinematograph, of which the scenes were snatched at random from life as lived anywhere between Washington and Simla, or Inverness and Rome. The effect was both instructive and entertaining. It was also in its way enlightening, since it showed him the true standing in the world of this woman whom he had once, for a few wild minutes, hoped to make his wife.

The dinner was half over before he began clearly to detach Miss Guion from that environment which he would have called "the best Boston society." Placing her there, he would have said before this evening that he placed her as high as the reasonable human being could aspire to be set. For any one whose roots were in Waverton, "the best Boston society" would in general be taken as the state of blossoming. It came to him as a discovery, made there and then, that Olivia Guion had seized this elect state with one of her earliest tendrils, and, climbing on by way of New York and Washington, had chosen to do her actual flowering in a cosmopolitan air.

He had none of the resentment the home-bred American business man habitually feels for this kind of eccentricity. Now that he had caught the idea, he could see at a glance, as his mind changed his metaphor, how admirably she was suited to the tapestried European setting. He was conscious even of something akin to pride in the triumphs she was capable of achieving on that richly decorated world-stage, much as though she were some compatriot prima-donna. He could see already how well, as the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, she would fill the part. It had been written for her. Its strong points and its subtleties were alike of the sort wherein she would shine.

"That's all very fine, but a man doesn't risk everything he holds dear in the world to go cheating at cards just for the fun of it. You may depend upon it he had a reason."

"Oh, he had a reason," Mrs. Fane agreed--"the reason of being hard up. The trouble lay in its not being good enough."

"I imagine it was good enough for him, poor devil."

"But not for any one else. He was drummed out. There wasn't a soul in the regiment to speak to him. We heard that he took another name and went abroad. Anyhow, he disappeared. It was all he could do. He was lucky to get off with that; wasn't he, Peter? wasn't he, father?"

"What he got off with," said Guion, "was a quality of tragic interest which never pertains to the people who stick to the Street called Straight."

"Oh, certainly," Mrs. Fane assented, dryly. "He did acquire that. But I'm surprised to hear you commend it; aren't you, father? aren't you, Peter?"

"I'm not commending it," Guion asserted; "I only feel its force. I've a great deal of sympathy with any poor beggar in his--downfall."

"Since when?"

The look with which Rodney Temple accompanied the question once more affected Davenant oddly. It probably made the same impression on Guion, since he replied with a calmness that seemed studied: "Since--lately. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, for no reason. It only strikes me as curious that your sympathy should take that turn."

"Precisely," Miss Guion chimed in. "It's not a bit like you, papa. You used to be harder on dishonorable things than any one."

"Well, I'm not now."

It was clear to Davenant by this time that in these words Guion was not so much making a statement as flinging a challenge. He made that evident by the way in which he sat upright, squared his shoulders, and rested a large, white fist clenched upon the table. His eyes, too, shone, glittered rather, with a light quite other than that which a host usually turns upon his guests. To Davenant, as to Mrs. Temple, it seemed as if he had "something on his mind"--something of which he had a persistent desire to talk covertly, in the way in which an undetected felon will risk discovery to talk about the crime.

No one else apparently at the table shared this impression. Rodney Temple, with eyes pensively downcast, toyed with the seeds of a pear, while Miss Guion and Mrs. Fane began speaking of some other incident of what to them was above everything else, "the Service." A minute or two later Olivia rose.

"Come, Cousin Cherry. Come, Drusilla," she said, with her easy, authoritative manner. Then, apparently with an attempt to make up for her neglect of Davenant, she said, as she held the door open for the ladies to pass: "Don't let them keep you here forever. We shall be terribly dull till you join us."

He was not too dense to comprehend that the words were conventional, as the smile she flung him was perfunctory. Nevertheless, the little attention pleased him.

The three men being left together, Davenant's conviction of inner excitement on the part of his host was deepened. It was as if, on the withdrawal of the ladies, Guion had less intention of concealing it. Not that at first he said anything directly or acted otherwise than as a man with guests to entertain. It was only that he threw into the task of offering liqueurs and passing cigars a something febrile that caused his two companions to watch him quietly. Once or twice Davenant caught Temple's eye; but with a common impulse each hastily looked elsewhere.

"So, Mr. Davenant, you've come back to us. Got here only this afternoon, didn't you? I wonder why you came. Having got out of a dull place like Waverton, why should you return to it?"

Looking the more debonair because of the flush in his face and the gleam in his eye, Guion seated himself in the place his daughter had left vacant between his two guests. Both his movements and his manner of speech were marked by a quick jerkiness, which, however, was not without a certain masculine grace.

"I don't know that I've any better reason," Davenant laughed, snipping off the end of his cigar, "than that which leads the ox to his stall--because he knows the way."

"Good!" Guion laughed, rather loudly. Then, stopping abruptly, he continued, "I fancy you know your way pretty well in any direction you want to go, don't you?"

"I can find it--if I know where I'm going. I came back to Boston chiefly because that was just what I didn't know."

"He means," Rodney Temple explained, "that he'd got out of his beat; and so, like a wise man, he returns to his starting-point."

"I'd got out of something more than my beat; I'd got out of my element. I found that the life of elegant leisure on which I'd embarked wasn't what I'd been cut out for."

"That's interesting--very," Guion said. "How did you make the discovery?"

"Bored?--with all your money?"

"The money isn't much; but, even if it were, it couldn't go on buying me a good time."

"That, of course, depends on what your idea of a good time may be; doesn't it, Rodney?"

"It depends somewhat," Rodney replied, "on the purchasing power of money. There are things not to be had for cash."

"I'm afraid my conception of a good time," Davenant smiled, "might be more feasible without the cash than with it. After all, money would be a doubtful blessing to a bee if it took away the task of going out to gather honey."

"A bee," Guion observed, "isn't the product of a high and complex civilization--"

"Neither am I," Davenant declared, with a big laugh. "I spring from the primitive stratum of people born to work, who expect to work, and who, when they don't work, have no particular object in living on."

"And so you've come back to Boston to work?"

"To work--or something."

"You leave yourself, I see, the latitude of--something."

"Only because it's better than nothing. It's been nothing for so long now that I'm willing to make it anything."

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