The Street Called Straight. Basil King
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Murphy, whose position of honorable service at Lawyer Benn's enabled her to profit by the hints dropped at that eminent man's table, had announced, in the servant's dining-room of Tory Hill itself, that Henry Guion was "going to be put in jail." He had stolen Mrs. Clay's money, and Mrs. Rodman's money, "and a lot of other payple's money, too," Miss Murphy was able to affirm—clients for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion had long acted as trustees—and was now to be tried and sentenced, Lawyer Benn himself being put in charge of the affair by the parties wronged. Drusilla described the sinking of her own heart as these bits of information were given her, though she had not failed to reprimand Collins for the repetition of foolish gossip. This, it seemed, had put Collins on her mettle in defense of her own order, and she had replied that, if it came to that, m'm, the contents of the waste-paper baskets at Tory Hill, though slightly damaged, had borne ample testimony to the truth of the tale as Miss Maggie Murphy told it. If Mrs. Fane required documentary evidence, Collins herself was in a position to supply it, through the kindness of her colleagues in Henry Guion's employ.
Davenant listened in silence. "So the thing is out?" was his only comment.
"It's out—and all over the place," Drusilla answered, tearfully. "We're the only people who haven't known it—but it's always that way with those who are most concerned."
"And over three hundred guests invited to Olivia's wedding next Thursday fortnight! And the British Military Attaché coming from Washington! And Lord Woolwich from Ottawa! What's to happen I don't know."
Mrs. Temple raised her hands and let them drop heavily.
"Oh, Peter, can't you do anything?"
"What can he do, child? If Henry's been making away with all that money it would take a fortune to—"
"Oh, men can do things—in business," Drusilla asserted. "I know they can. Banks lend them money, don't they, Peter? Banks are always lending money to tide people over. I've often heard of it. Oh, Peter, do something. I'm so glad you're here. It seems like a providence."
"Colonel Ashley will be here next week, too," Mrs. Temple groaned, as though the fact brought comfort.
"Oh, mother dear, don't speak of him!" Drusilla put up her two hands, palms outward, before her averted face, as though to banish the suggestion. "If you'd ever known him you'd see how impossible—how impossible—this kind of situation is for a man like him. Poor, poor Olivia! It's impossible for her, too, I know; but then we Americans—well, we're more used to things. But one thing is certain, anyhow," she continued, rising in her place on the stairs and stretching out her hand oratorically: "If this happens I shall never go back to Southsea—never, never!—no, nor to Silchester. With my temperament I couldn't face it. My career will be over. There'll be nothing left for me, mother dear, but to stay at home with father and you."
Mrs. Temple rose, sighing heavily. "Well, I suppose we must go to bed, though I must say it seems harder to do that than almost anything. None of us'll sleep."
"Oh, Peter, won't you do something?"
Drusilla's hands were clasped beneath an imploring face, slightly tilted to one side. Her black hair had begun to tumble to her shoulders.
"I'll—I'll think it over," was all he could find to answer.
"Oh, thank you, Peter! I must say it seems like a providence—your being here. With my temperament I always feel that there's nothing like a big strong man to lean on."
The ladies retired, leaving him to put out the light. For a long time he stood, as he had entered, just inside the front door leaning on his stick and wearing his hat and overcoat. He was musing rather than thinking, musing on the odd way in which he seemed almost to have been waited for. Then, irrelevantly perhaps, there shot across his memory the phrases used by Rodney Temple less than an hour ago:
"Some call it conscience. Some call it God. Some call it neither. But," he added, slowly, "some do call it God."
IV
losing the door behind his departing guests, Guion stood for a minute, with his hand still on the knob, pressing his forehead against the woodwork. He listened to the sound of the carriage-wheels die away and to the crunching tread of the two men down the avenue.
"The last Guion has received the last guest at Tory Hill," he said to himself. "That's all over—all over and done with. Now!"
It was the hour to which he had been looking forward, first as an impossibility, then as a danger, and at last as an expectation, ever since the day, now some years ago, when he began to fear that he might not be able to restore all the money he had "borrowed" from the properties in his trust. Having descried it from a long way off, he knew that with reasonable luck it could not overtake him soon. There were many chances, indeed, that it might never overtake him at all. Times might change; business might improve; he might come in for the money he expected from his old Aunt de Melcourt; he might die. If none of these things happened, there were still ways and means by which he might make money in big strokes and "square himself" without any one ever being the wiser. He had known of cases, or, at least, he had suspected them, in which men in precisely his position had averted by daring play the deadliest peril and gone down into honored graves. Fortune had generally favored him hitherto, and probably would favor him again.
So after the first dreadful days of seeing his "mistakes," and, in his recoil, calling himself by opprobrious names, he began to get used to his situation and boldly to meet its requirements. That he would prove equal to them he had scarcely any doubt. It was, in fact, next to inconceivable that a man of his antecedents and advantages should be unable to cope with conditions that, after all, were not wholly exceptional in the sordid history of business.
He admitted that the affair was sordid, while finding an excuse for his own connection with it in the involuntary defilement that comes from touching pitch. It was impossible, he said, for a man of business not to touch pitch, and he was not a man of business of his own accord. The state of life had been forced on him. He was a trustee of other people's property by inheritance, just as a man becomes a tsar. As a career it was one of the last he would have chosen. Had he received from his father an ample personal fortune instead of a mere lucrative practice he would have been a country gentleman, in the English style, with, of course, a house in town. Born with a princely aptitude for spending his own money, he felt it hard that he should have been compelled to make it his life's work to husband that of others. The fact that he had always, to some extent been a square man in a round hole seemed to entitle him to a large share of moral allowance, especially in his judgment on himself. He emphasized the last consideration, since it enabled him, in his moments of solitude, to look himself more straightly in the face. It helped him to buttress up his sense of honor, and so his sense of energy, to be able to say, "I am still a gentleman."
He came in time to express it otherwise, and to say, "I must still play the gentleman." He came to define also what he meant by the word still. The future presented itself as a succession of stages, in which this could not happen till that had happened, nor the final disaster arrive till all the intervening phases of the situation had been passed. He had passed them. Of late he had seen that the flames of hell would get hold upon him at that exact instant when, the last defense having been broken down and the last shift resorted to, he should turn the key on all outside hope, and be alone with himself and the knowledge that he could do no more. Till then he could ward them off, and he had been fighting them to the latest second. But on coming home from his office in Boston that afternoon he had told himself that the game was up. Nothing as far as he could see would give him the respite of another four and twenty hours. The minutes between him and the final preparations could be counted with the finger on the clock.
In the matter of preparation the most important detail would be to tell Olivia. Hoping against hope that this would