"Oh no! What for?"
Before she could object further, Ashley had slipped out into the hall.
"I say! Come along in."
His att.i.tude as he stood with hands thrust into his jacket pockets and shoulders squared bespoke conscious superiority to the man whom he was addressing. Though Davenant was not in her line of vision she could divine his astonishment at this easy, English unceremoniousness, as well as his resentment to the tone of command. She heard him muttering an excuse which Ashley interrupted with his offhand "Oh, come in. Miss Guion would like to see you."
She felt it her duty to go forward and second this invitation. Davenant, who was standing at the foot of the staircase, murmured something about town and business.
"It"s too late for town and business at this hour," Ashley objected.
"Come in."
He withdrew toward the room where Olivia was standing between the portieres of the doorway. Davenant yielded, partly because of his ignorance of the small arts of graceful refusal, but more because of his curiosity concerning the man Olivia Guion was to marry. He had some interest, too, in observing one who was chosen where he himself had been rejected. It would afford an answer to the question, "What lack I yet?"
with which he was tormented at all times. That it could not be a flattering answer was plain to him from the careless, indefinable graces of Ashley"s style. It was a style that Davenant would have scorned to imitate, but which nevertheless he envied. In contrast with its unstudied ease he could feel his own social methods to be labored and apologetic. Where he was watchful to do the right thing, what Ashley said or did became the right thing because he said or did it. With the echo of soft English vowels and clear, crisp consonants in his ears, his own p.r.o.nunciations, too, were rough with the harshness transmitted from an ancestry to whom the melody of speech had been of no more practical concern than the music of the spheres.
Something of all this Olivia guessed. She guessed it with a feeling of being on his side--on the American side--which a month ago would have astonished her. She guessed, too, on Davenant"s part, that feeling of irritation which the calm a.s.sumptions of the Old World are likely to create when in contact with the aggressive unpretentiousness of the New, and if need were she was ready to stand by him. All she could say, however, for the moment was:
"Won"t you sit down? Perhaps I ought to ring for tea."
She made the latter remark from habit. It was what she was accustomed to think of when on an autumn day the sun went behind the distant rim of Brookline hills and dusk began to gather in the oval room, as it was gathering now. If she did not ring, it was because of her sense of the irony of offering hospitality in a house where not even a cup of tea was paid for.
She seated herself beside the round table in the chair she had occupied a half-hour earlier, facing inward to the room instead of outward to the portico. Ashley backed to the curving wall of the room, while Davenant scarcely advanced beyond the doorway. In his slow, careful approach the latter reminded her somewhat of a big St. Bernard dog responding to the summons of a leopard.
"Been up to see--?" Ashley nodded in the direction of what he took to be Guion"s room.
Davenant, too, nodded, but said nothing.
"How did you find papa to-day?"
"Pretty fair, Miss Guion; only, perhaps, a little more down on his luck than usual."
"The excitement kept him up at first. Now that that"s over--"
Ashley interrupted her, addressing himself to Davenant. "I understand that it"s to you we owe Mr. Guion"s relief from the most pressing part of his cares."
Davenant"s face clouded. It was the thing he was afraid of--Ashley"s intrusion into the little domain of helpfulness which for a few days he had made his own. He answered warily:
"My business with Mr. Guion, Colonel, has been private. I hope you won"t mind if we leave it so."
Ashley"s manner took on the diplomatic persuasiveness he used toward restive barbaric potentates.
"Not a bit, my dear fellow. Of course it"s private--only not as regards Miss Guion and me. You simply _must_ allow us to say how grateful we are for your help, even though it need be no more than temporary."
The word produced its effect. Davenant looked from Ashley to Olivia while he echoed it. "Temporary?"
Ashley nodded again. "You have no objection, I presume, to that?"
"If Mr. Guion is ever in a position to pay me back," Davenant said, slowly, in some bewilderment, "of course I"ll take it."
"Quite so; and I think I may say that with a little time--let us say a year--we shall be able to meet--"
"It"s a good bit of money," Davenant warned him.
"I know that; but if you"ll give us a little leeway--as I know you will--"
"He means," Olivia spoke up, "that he"ll sell his property--and whatever else he has--and pay you."
"I don"t want that," Davenant said, hastily.
"But I do. It"s a point of honor with me not to let another man shoulder--"
"And it"s a point of honor with me, Rupert--"
"To stand by me," he broke in, quickly.
"I can"t see it that way. What you propose is entirely against my judgment. It"s fantastic; it"s unreal. I want you to understand that if you attempted to carry it out I shouldn"t marry you. Whatever the consequences either to you or to me--_I shouldn"t marry you_."
"And if I didn"t attempt it? Would you marry me then?"
She looked up, then down, then at Davenant, then away from him. Finally she fixed her gaze on Ashley.
"Yes," she said at last. "If you"ll promise to let this wild project drop, I"ll marry you whenever you like. I"ll waive all the other difficulties--"
Davenant came forward, his hand outstretched. "I think I must say good-by now, Miss Guion--"
"No; wait," Ashley commanded. "This matter concerns you, by Jove!"
Olivia sprang to her feet. "No; it doesn"t, Rupert," she said, hastily.
"No; it doesn"t," Davenant repeated after her. "It"s not my affair. I decline to be brought into it. I think I must say good-by now, Miss Guion--"
"Listen, will you!" Ashley said, impatiently. "I"m not going to say anything either of you need be afraid of. I"m only asking you to do me the justice of trying to see things from my point of view. You may think it forced or artificial or anything you please; but unfortunately, as an officer and a gentleman, I"ve got to take it. The position you"d put me in would be this--of playing a game--and a jolly important game at that--in which the loser loses to me on purpose."
Ashley found much satisfaction in this way of putting it. Without exposing him to the necessity of giving details, it made clear his perception of what was going on. Moreover, it secured him _le beau role_, which for a few minutes he feared he might have compromised. In the look he caught, as it flashed between Olivia and Davenant, he saw the signs of that appreciation he found it so hard to do without--the appreciation of Rupert Ashley as the chivalrous Christian gentleman, at once punctilious and daring, who would count all things as loss in order to achieve the highest type of manhood. If in the back of his mind he had the conviction, hardly venturing to make itself a thought, "In the long run it pays," it was but little to his discredit, since he could scarcely have descended from a line of shrewd, far-sighted Anglo-Saxon forefathers without making some such computation.
"If we"re going to play a game," he continued, addressing Davenant, before the latter had time to speak, "for Heaven"s sake let us play it straight--like men. Let the winner win and the loser lose--"
"I"ve no objection to that, Colonel, when I _do_ play--but at present--"
"Look here," Ashley said, with a new inspiration; "I put it to you--I put it to you as a man--simply as a _man_--without any highfalutin principles whatever. Suppose I"d done what you"ve done--and given my bottom dollar--"
"But I haven"t."
"Well, no matter! Suppose I had done what you"ve done--and you were in my place--would you, as a man--simply as a _man_, mind you--be willing to go off with the lady whom I had freed from great anxiety--to say the least--and be happy forever after--and so forth--with nothing but a Thank-you-sir? Come now! Would you?"
It was evident that Davenant was shy of accepting this challenge. He colored and looked uneasy--all the more so because Olivia lifted her eyes to him appealingly, as though begging him to come to her support.
It was perhaps in the belief that he would do so that she said, earnestly, leaning forward a little:
"Tell him, Mr. Davenant, tell him."