XVII

“He’s going to squeeze me out.”

This was Davenant’s reflection as he walked back, along the Embankment, to Rodney Temple’s house.  He made it bitterly, in the light of clarified views, as to the ethics of giving and taking benefits.  Up to within the last few days the subject had seemed to him a relatively simple one.  If you had money, and wished to give it away, you gave it.  If you needed it, and were so lucky as to have it offered you, you took it.  That was all.  That such natural proceedings should create complicated relations and searchings of heart never entered his mind.

He could see that they might, however, now that the knowledge was forced upon him.  Enlightenment came by the easy process of putting himself in Ashley’s place.  “I wouldn’t take my wife as a kind of free gift from another fellow—­I’ll be hanged if I would!  I’d marry her on my own or not at all.”

And unless Ashley assumed the responsibilities of his future wife’s position, he couldn’t marry her “on his own.”  That much was clear.  It was also the most proper thing in the world.  It was a right—­a privilege.  He looked upon it chiefly as a privilege.  Ashley would sell his estate, and, having paid him, Davenant, the money he had advanced, would send him about his business.  There would be nothing left for him but to disappear.  The minute there was no need for him there would be no place for him.  He had been no more than the man who holds a horse till the owner comes and rides away.

Worse than that reflection was the fear that his intervention had been uncalled for in the first place.  The belief that it was imperative had been his sole excuse for forcing himself on people who fought against his aid and professed themselves able to get along without it.  But the event seemed to show that if he had let things alone, Rupert Ashley would have come and taken the burden on himself.  As he was apparently able to shoulder it, it would have been better to let him do it.  In that case he, Peter Davenant, would not have found himself in a position from which he could not withdraw, while it was a humiliation to be dislodged from it.

But, on the other hand, he would have missed his most wonderful experience.  There was that side to it, too.  He would not have had these moments face to face with Olivia Guion which were to be as food for his sustenance all the rest of his life.  During these days of discussion, of argument, of conflict between his will and hers, he had the entirely conscious sense that he was laying up the treasure on which his heart would live as long as it continued to beat.  The fact that she found intercourse with him more or less distasteful became a secondary matter.  To be in her presence was the thing essential, whatever the grounds on which he was admitted there.  In this way he could store up her looks, her words, her gestures, against the time when the memory of them