The Wild Olive Part 30

"Oh!"

"Do you mind if we speak quite frankly? I should like to. I've been bluffing that point ever since you and I met again. It's been torture to have to do it--d.a.m.ned, humiliating torture; but it's been difficult to do anything else. You see, I couldn't even speak of it without seeming to--to insult you--that is, unless you took me in just the right way."

His look, his att.i.tude, the tones of his voice, the something woe-begone and yet boyish in his expression, recalled irresistibly the days in the cabin, when he often wore just this air. She had observed before that when they were alone together the years seemed to fall from his manner, while he became the immature, inexperienced young fugitive again. She had scarcely expected, however, that this lapse into youth would occur to-night. She herself felt ages old--as though all the ends of the world had come upon her.

"You may say anything you like. There's nothing you could possibly tell me that I shouldn't understand."

"Well, then, when I made that promise, I meant to keep it, and to keep it in a special way. I thought--of course we were both very young--but I thought that, after what had happened--"

"Wait a minute. I want to tell you something before you go on." She rallied her spirit's forces for a desperate step, gathering all her life's possible happiness into one extravagant handful, and flinging it away, in order to save her pride before this man, who was about to tell her that he had never been able to love her. "What I am going to say may strike you as irrelevant; but if it is, you can ignore it. I expect to be married--in a little while--it's practically a settled thing--to Charles Conquest, whom I think you know. Now, will you go on, please?"

He stared at her in utter blankness.

"Good G.o.d!"

He got up and took a few restless turns up and down the room, his head bent, his hands behind his back. He reseated himself when his confused impressions grew clearer.

"So that it doesn't matter what I thought about--that promise?"

"Not in the least." She had saved herself. "The one thing important to me is that you should have made it."

"And that you can hold me to it," he added, tersely.

"I presume I can do that?"

"You can, unless--unless I find myself in a position to take the promise back."

"I can hardly see how that position could come about," she said, with an air of wondering.

"I can. You see," he went on in an explanatory tone, "it was an unusual sort of promise--a promise made, so to speak, for value received--for unusual value received. It wasn't one that a common occasion would have called forth. It was offered because you had given me--life."

He rested his arm now on a table that stood between them and, leaning toward her, looked her steadily in the eyes.

"I haven't the faintest idea what you're going to say," she remarked, rather blankly.

"No, but you'll see. You gave me life. I hold that life in a certain sense at your pleasure. It is at your disposal. It must remain at your disposal--- until I give it back."

She sat upright in her chair, leaning in her turn on the table, and drawing nearer to him.

"I can't imagine what you mean," she said, under her breath and looking a little frightened.

"You'll see presently. But don't be alarmed. It's going to be all right.

As long as I hold the life you gave me," he continued to explain, "I must do your bidding. I'm not a free man; I'm--don't be offended--I'm your creature. I don't say I was a free man before this came up. I haven't been a free man ever since I've been Herbert Strange. I've been the slave of a sort of make-believe. I've made believe, and I've felt I was justified.

Perhaps I was. I'm not quite sure. But I haven't liked it; and now I begin to feel that I can't stand it any longer. You follow me, don't you?"

She nodded, still leaning toward him across the table, and not taking her eyes from his. He remembered afterward though he paid no heed to it at the time, how those eyes grew wide with awe and flashed with strange, lambent brightness.

"I told you a few days ago," he pursued, "that there were _times_ when it was h.e.l.l. That was putting it mildly--too mildly. There's been no time when it wasn't h.e.l.l--in here." He tapped his forehead. "I've struggled, and fought, and pushed, and swaggered, and bluffed, and had ups and downs, and taken heart, and swaggered and bluffed again, and lied all through--and I've made Herbert Strange a respectable man of business on the high road to success. But when I come near you it all goes to pieces--like one of those curiously conserved dead bodies when they're brought to the air. There's nothing to them. There's nothing to me--so long as I'm Herbert Strange."

"But you _are_ Herbert Strange. You can't help yourself--now."

"Herbert Strange goes back into the nothingness out of which he was born the minute I become Norrie Ford again."

"But you can't do that!"

She drew herself up hastily, with a gasp.

"It's exactly what I mean to do." He spoke very slowly "I'm going to be a free man, and my own master, even if it leads me where--where they meant to put me when you s.n.a.t.c.hed me away. I'm going back to my fellow-men, to the body corporate--"

She rose in agitation, and drew back from him toward the chimney-piece.

"So that if--if anything happens," she said, "I shall have driven you to it. That's how you get your revenge."

"Not at all. I'm not coming to this decision suddenly, or in a spirit of revenge, in any way." He followed her, standing near her, on the hearth-rug. "I can truthfully say," he went on in his slow, explanatory fas.h.i.+on, "that there's been no time, since the minute I made my first dash for liberty, when I haven't known, in the bottom of my heart, what a good thing it would have been if I hadn't done it. I've come to see--I've _had_ to--- that the death-chair would have been better, with self-respect, than freedom to go and come, with the necessity to gag every one, every minute of the day, and every day in the year, and all the time, with lies. If that seems far-fetched to you--"

"No, it doesn't."

"Well, if it did you'd see it wasn't, if you were in my place for a month.

I didn't mind it so much at first. I stood it by day and just suffered by night--till the Jarrotts began to be so kind to me, and I came to New York--and--and--and Evie!"

"I'm sorry I've spoken to you as I have," she said, hastily. "If I'd known you felt like that--"

"You were quite right. I always understood that. But I can't go on with it. If Evie marries me now, it shall be knowing who I am."

"You don't mean that you could possibly tell her?"

"I'm going to tell every one."

She stifled a little cry. "Then it will be my doing!"

"It will be your doing--up to a point. But it will be something for you to be proud of, not to regret. You've only brought my mistake so clearly before me that even I can't stand it--when I've stood so much. You ask me to turn my back on Evie and sneak away. You've got the right to command, and there's nothing for me but to obey you. But I can't help seeing the sort of life that would be left to me after I'd carried out your orders.

It wouldn't only be the loss of Evie--I may lose her in any case--it would be the loss of everything within myself that's enabled me hitherto merely to hold up my head--and bluff."

"I might withdraw what I've just asked you to do. Perhaps we could find some other way."

He laughed with grim lightness.

"You're weakening. That's not like you. And it wouldn't do any good now.

Even if we did patch up some other scheme, there would still remain what you talked about a minute ago--the loyalty that every human being owes to every other."

"But I thought you didn't recognize that?"

"I said I didn't. But in here"--he tapped his fingers over the heart--"I did, and I do. You've brought me to see it."

"That's very n.o.ble, but you saw it for yourself--"

"Through a gla.s.s--darkly; now I can look at the thing in clear daylight, and see what I have to do."

She dropped into her chair again, looking up at him. He stood with his back to the fire, holding his head high, his bearing marked by a dogged, perhaps forced, serenity.