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THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT

A NOVEL

BY

BASIL KING

AUTHOR OF
THE INNER SHRINE, THE WILD OLIVE, ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
ORSON LOWELL

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers

1911, 1912.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED MAY, 1912

"_By the Street Called Straight we come to the House called
Beautiful_"

--New England Saying




THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT





I


As a matter of fact, Davenant was under no illusions concerning the
quality of the welcome his hostess was according him, though he found a
certain pleasure in being once more in her company. It was not a keen
pleasure, but neither was it an embarrassing one; it was exactly what he
supposed it would be in case they ever met again--a blending on his part
of curiosity, admiration, and reminiscent suffering out of which time
and experience had taken the sting. He retained the memory of a minute
of intense astonishment once upon a time, followed by some weeks, some
months perhaps, of angry humiliation; but the years between twenty-four
and thirty-three are long and varied, generating in healthy natures
plenty of saving common sense. Work, travel, and a widened knowledge of
men and manners had so ripened Davenant's mind that he was able to see
his proposal now as Miss Guion must have seen it then, as something so
incongruous and absurd as not only to need no consideration, but to call
for no reply. Nevertheless, it was the refusal on her part of a reply,
of the mere laconic No which was all that, in his heart of hearts, he
had ever expected, that rankled in him longest; but even that
mortification had passed, as far as he knew, into the limbo of extinct
regrets. For her present superb air of having no recollection of his
blunder he had nothing but commendation. It was as becoming to the
spirited grace of its wearer as a royal mantle to a queen. Carrying it
as she did, with an easy, preoccupied affability that enabled her to
look round him and over him and through him, to greet him and converse
with him, without seeming positively to take in the fact of his
existence, he was permitted to suppose the incident of their previous
acquaintance, once so vital to himself, to have been forgotten. If this
were so, it would be nothing very strange, since a woman of
twenty-seven, who has had much social experience, may be permitted to
lose sight of the more negligible of the conquests she has made as a
girl of eighteen. She had asked him to dinner, and placed him honorably
at her right; but words could not have made it plainer than it was that
he was but an accident to the occasion.

He was there, in short, because he was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Temple.
After a two years' absence from New England he had arrived in Waverton
that day, "Oh, bother! bring him along," had been the formula in which
Miss Guion had conveyed his invitation, the dinner being but an
informal, neighborly affair. Two or three wedding gifts having arrived
from various quarters of the world, it was natural that Miss Guion
should want to show them confidentially to her dear friend and distant
relative, Drusilla Fane. Mrs. Fane had every right to this privileged
inspection, since she had not only timed her yearly visit to her
parents, Mr. and Mrs. Temple, so that it should synchronize with the
wedding, but had introduced Olivia to Colonel Ashley, in the first
place. Indeed, there had been a rumor at Southsea, right up to the time
of Miss Guion's visit to the pretty little house on the Marine Parade,
that the colonel's calls and attentions there had been not unconnected
with Mrs. Fane herself; but rumor in British naval and military stations
is notoriously overactive, especially in matters of the heart. Certain
it is, however, that when the fashionable London papers announced that a
marriage had been arranged, and would shortly take place, between
Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, of the Sussex Rangers, and of Heneage
Place, Belvoir, Leicestershire, and Olivia Margaret, only child of Henry
Guion, Esquire, of Tory Hill, Waverton, near Boston, Massachusetts,
U.S.A., no one offered warmer congratulations than the lady in whose
house the interesting pair had met. There were people who ascribed this
attitude to the fact that, being constitutionally "game," she refused to
betray her disappointment. She had been "awfully game," they said, when
poor Gerald Fane, also of the Sussex Rangers, was cut off with enteric
at Peshawur. But the general opinion was to the effect that, not wanting
Rupert Ashley (for some obscure, feminine reason) for herself, she had
magnanimously bestowed him elsewhere. Around tea-tables, and at church
parade, it was said "Americans do that," with some comment on the
methods of the transfer.

On every ground, then, Drusilla was entitled to this first look at the
presents, some of which had come from Ashley's brother officers, who
were consequently brother officers of the late Captain Fane; so that
when she telephoned saying she was afraid that they, her parents and
herself, couldn't come to dinner that evening, because a former ward of
her father's--Olivia must remember Peter Davenant!--was arriving to stay
with them for a week or two, Miss Guion had answered, "Oh, bother! bring
him along," and the matter was arranged. It was doubtful, however, that
she knew him in advance to be the Peter Davenant who nine years earlier
had had the presumption to fall in love with her; it was still more
doubtful, after she had actually shaken hands with him and called him by
name, whether she paid him the tribute of any kind of recollection. The
fact that she had seated him at her right, in the place that would
naturally be accorded to Rodney Temple, the scholarly director of the
Department of Ceramics in the Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts, made it look
as if she considered Davenant a total stranger. In the few
conventionally gracious words she addressed to him, her manner was that
of the hostess who receives a good many people in the course of a year
toward the chance guest she had never seen before and expects never to
see again.

"Twice round the world since you were last in Boston? How interesting!"
Then, as if she had said enough for courtesy, she continued across the
lights and flowers to Mrs. Fane: "Drusilla, did you know Colonel Ashley
had declined that post at Gibraltar? I'm so glad. I should hate the
Gib."

"The Gib wouldn't hate you," Mrs. Fane assured her. "You'd have a
heavenly time there. Rupert Ashley is deep in the graces of old
Bannockburn, who's in command. He's not a bad old sort, old Ban isn't,
though he's a bit of a martinet. Lady Ban is awful--a bounder in
petticoats. She looks like that."

Drusilla pulled down the corners of a large, mobile mouth, so as to
simulate Lady Bannockburn's expression, in a way that drew a laugh from
every one at the table but the host. Henry Guion remained serious, not
from natural gravity, but from inattention. He was obviously not in a
mood for joking, nor apparently for eating, since he had scarcely tasted
his soup and was now only playing with the fish. As this corroborated
what Mrs. Temple had more than once asserted to her husband during the
past few weeks, that "Henry Guion had something on his mind," she
endeavored to exchange a glance with him, but he was too frankly
enjoying the exercise of his daughter's mimetic gift to be otherwise
observant.

"And what does Colonel Ashley look like, Drucie?" he asked, glancing
slyly at Miss Guion.

"Like that," Mrs. Fane said, instantly. Straightening the corners of
her mouth and squaring her shoulders, she fixed her eyes into a stare of
severity, and stroked horizontally an imaginary mustache, keeping the
play up till her lips quivered.

"It is like him," Miss Guion laughed.

"Is he as stiff as all that?" the professor inquired.

"Not stiff," Miss Guion explained, "only dignified."

"Dignified!" Drusilla cried. "I should think so. He's just like Olivia
herself. It's perfectly absurd that those two should marry. Apart,
they're a pair of splendid specimens; united, they'll be too much of a
good thing. They're both so well supplied with the same set of virtues
that when they look at each other it'll be like seeing their own faces
in a convex mirror. It'll be simply awful."

Her voice had the luscious English intonation, in spite of its being
pitched a little too high. In speaking she displayed the superior,
initiated manner apt to belong to women who bring the flavor of England
into colonial and Indian garrison towns--a manner Drusilla had acquired
notably well, considering that not ten years previous her life had been
bounded by American college class-days. Something of this latter fact
persisted, notwithstanding her English articulation and style of doing
her hair. Her marriage had been the accident of a winter spent with her
mother in Bermuda, at a time when the Sussex Rangers were stationed
there. Her engagement to Captain Gerald Fane--son of the Very Reverend
the Dean of Silchester--was the result of a series of dances given
chiefly in the Hamilton hotels. Marriage brought the girl born and bred
in a New England college town into a kind of life for which she had had
no preparation; but she adapted herself as readily as she would have
done had she married a Russian prince or a Spanish grandee. In the
effort she made there was a mingling of the matter-of-fact and the _tour
de force_. Regimental life is not unlike that of a large family; it has
the same sort of claims, intimacies, and quarrels, the same sort of
jealousies within, combined with solidarity against the outsider.
Perceiving this quickly, Drusilla proceeded to disarm criticism by being
impeccable in dress and negatively amiable in conduct. "With my
temperament," she said to herself, "I can afford to wait." Following her
husband to Barbados, the Cape, and India, she had just succeeded in
passing all the tests of the troop-ship and the married quarters when he
died. For a while her parents hoped she would make her widowed home in
Boston; but her heart had been given irrevocably to the British army--to
its distinguished correctness, to its sober glories, its world-wide
roving, and its picturesque personal associations. Though she had seen
little of England, except for occasional visits on leave, she had become
English in tastes and at heart. For a year after Gerald's death she
lived with his family at Silchester, in preference to going to her own.
After that she settled in the small house at Southsea, where from time
to time she had her girlhood's companion, Olivia Guion, as a guest.

"Perhaps that'll do us good," Miss Guion ventured, in reply to
Drusilla's observations at her expense. "To see ourselves as others see
us must be much like looking at one's face in a spoon."

"That doesn't do us any good," Rodney Temple corrected, "because we
always blame the spoon."

"Don't you mind them, dear," Mrs. Temple cooed. She was a little,
apple-faced woman, with a figure suggestive of a tea-cozy, and a voice
with a gurgle in it, like a dove's. A nervous, convulsive moment of her
pursed-up little mouth made that organ an uncertain element in her
physiognomy, shifting as it did from one side of her face to the other
with the rapidity of an aurora borealis. "Don't mind them, dear. A woman
can never do more than reflect 'broken lights' of her husband, when she
has a good one. Don't you love that expression?--'broken lights'? 'We
are but broken lights of Thee!' Dear Tennyson! And no word yet from
Madame de Melcourt."

"I don't expect any now," Olivia explained. "If Aunt Vic had meant to
write she would have done it long ago. I'm afraid I've offended her past
forgiveness."

She held her head slightly to one side, smiling with an air of mock
penitence.

"Dear, dear!" Mrs. Temple murmured, sympathetically. "Just because you
wouldn't marry a Frenchman!"

"And a little because I'm _going_ to marry an Englishman. To Aunt Vic
all Englishmen are grocers."

"Horrid old thing!" Drusilla said, indignantly.

"It's because she doesn't know them, of course," Olivia went on. "It's
one of the things I never can understand--how people can generalize
about a whole nation because they happen to dislike one or two
individuals. As a matter of fact, Aunt Vic has become so absorbed in her
little circle of old French royalist noblesse that she can't see
anything to admire outside the rue de l'Universite and chateau life in
Normandy. She does admit that there's an element of homespun virtue in
the old families of Boston and Waverton; but that's only because she
belongs to them herself."

"The capacity of the American woman for being domesticated in an alien
environment," observed Rodney Temple, "is only equaled by the dog's."

"We're nomadic, father," Drusilla asserted, "and migratory. We've always
been so. It's because we're Saxons and Angles and Celts and Normans,
and--"

"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we," Mrs. Temple quoted, gently.

"They've always been fidgeting about the world, from one country to
another," Drusilla continued, "and we've inherited the taste. If we
hadn't, our ancestors would never have crossed the Atlantic, in the
first place. And now that we've got here, and can't go any farther in
this direction, we're on the jump to get back again. That's all there is
to it. It's just in the blood. Isn't it, Peter? Isn't it, Cousin Henry?"

Drusilla had a way of appealing to whatever men were present, as though
her statements lacked something till they had received masculine
corroboration.

"All the same, I wish you could have managed the thing without giving
offence to Aunt Vic."

The words were Henry Guion's first since sitting down to table.

"I couldn't help it, papa. I didn't _give_ Aunt Vic offence; she took
it."

"She's always been so fond of you--"

"I'm fond of _her_. She's an old darling. And yet I couldn't let her
marry me off to a Frenchman, in the French way, when I'd made up my mind
to--to do something else. Could I, Cousin Cherry?"

Mrs. Temple plumed herself, pleased at being appealed to. "I don't see
how you could, dear. But I suppose your dear aunt--great-aunt, that
is--has become so foreign that she's forgotten our simple ways. So long
as you follow your heart, dear--"

"I've done that, Cousin Cherry."

The tone drew Davenant's eyes to her again, not in scrutiny, but for the
pleasure it gave him to see her delicate features suffused with a glow
of unexpected softness. It was unexpected, because her bearing had
always conveyed to him, even in the days when he was in love with her,
an impression of very refined, very subtle haughtiness. It seemed to
make her say, like Marie Antoinette to Madame Vigee-Lebrun: "They would
call me arrogant if I were not a queen." The assumption of privilege and
prerogative might be only the inborn consciousness of distinction, but
he fancied it might be more effective for being tempered. Not that it
was overdone. It was not done at all. If the inner impulse working
outward poised a neat, classic head too loftily, or shot from gray eyes,
limpid and lovely in themselves, a regard that was occasionally too
imperious, Olivia Guion was probably unaware of these effects. With
beauty by inheritance, refinement by association, and taste and "finish"
by instinct, it was possible for her to engage with life relatively free
from the cumbrous impedimenta of self-consciousness. It was because
Davenant was able to allow for this that his judgment on her pride of
manner, exquisite though it was, had never been more severe; none the
less, it threw a new light on his otherwise slight knowledge of her
character to note the faint blush, the touch of gentleness, with which
she hinted her love for her future husband. He had scarcely believed her
capable of this kind of condescension.

He called it condescension because he saw, or thought he saw, in her
approaching marriage, not so much the capture of her heart as the
fulfilment of her ambitions. He admitted that, in her case, there was a
degree to which the latter would imply the former, since she was the
sort of woman who would give her love in the direction in which her
nature found its fitting outlet. He judged something from what Drusilla
Fane had said, as they were driving toward Tory Hill that evening.

"Olivia simply _must_ marry a man who'll give her something to do
besides sitting round and looking handsome. With Rupert Ashley she'll
have the duties of a public, or semi-public, position. He'll keep her
busy, if it's only opening bazars and presenting prizes at Bisley. The
American men who've tried to marry her have wanted to be her servants,
when all the while she's been waiting for a master."

Davenant understood that, now that it was pointed out to him, though the
thought would not have come to him spontaneously. She was the strong
woman who would yield only to a stronger man. Colonel Ashley might not
be stronger than she in intellect or character, but he had done some
large things on a large field, and was counted an active force in a
country of forceful activities. There might be a question as to whether
he would prove to be her master, but he would certainly never think of
being her slave.

"What are _you_ going to do, Henry, when the gallant stranger carries
off Olivia, a fortnight hence?"

Though she asked the question with the good intention of drawing her
host into the conversation, Mrs. Temple made it a point to notice the
effort with which he rallied himself to meet her words.

"What am I going to do?" he repeated, absently. "Oh, my future will
depend very much on--Hobson's choice."

"That's true," Miss Guion agreed, hurriedly, as though to emphasize a
point. "It's all the choice I've left to him. I've arranged everything
for papa--beautifully. He's to take in a partner perhaps two partners.
You know," she continued in explanation to Mrs. Fane--"you know that poor
papa has been the whole of Guion, Maxwell & Guion since Mr. Maxwell
died. Well, then, he's to take in a partner or two, and gradually shift
his business into their hands. That wouldn't take more than a couple of
years at longest. Then he's going to retire, and come to live near me in
England. Rupert says there's a small place close to Heneage that would
just suit him. Papa has always liked the English hunting country, and
so--"

"And so everything will be for the best," Rodney Temple finished.
"There's nothing like a fresh young mind, like a young lady's, for
settling business affairs. It would have taken you or me a long time to
work that plan out, wouldn't it, Henry? We should be worried over the
effect on our trusteeships and the big estates we've had the care of--"

"What about the big estates?"

Davenant noticed the tone in which Guion brought out this question,
though it was an hour later before he understood its significance. It
was a sharp tone, the tone of a man who catches an irritating word or
two among remarks he has scarcely followed. Temple apparently had meant
to call it forth, since he answered, with the slightest possible air of
intention:

"Oh, nothing--except what I hear."

While Miss Guion and Mrs. Fane chatted of their own affairs Davenant
remarked the way in which Henry Guion paused, his knife and fork fixed
in the chicken wing on his plate, and gazed at his old friend. He bent
slightly forward, too, looking, with his superb head and bust slightly
French in style, very handsome and imposing.

"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 naively, 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.

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