The Wild Olive Part 34

Lifting his eyes in a sharp look, he saw her head lilted back with her own special air of deliberate temerity.

"Oh, very well, then," he said, quietly, resuming his scribbling again.

After this warning he felt justified in taking her at her word.

With that as a beginning she knew she had gained her first great point. In answer to his questions she told the story over again, displaying, as he remembered afterward--but long afterward--a surprising familiarity with its details. She made suggestions which he noted as marked by some ac.u.men, and laid stress on the value of the aid they might expect privately from Philip Wayne. The beauty and eagerness in her face fired the almost atrophied enthusiasm in his own heart, while he could not but see that this entirely altruistic interest had brought them in half an hour nearer together than they had ever been before. It was what they had never had till now--a bond in common. In spite of the persistency of his efforts and his a.s.sertions, he had never hitherto got nearer her than a statue on a pedestal gets to its neighbor in a similar situation but now at last they were down on the same earth together. This was more than reason enough for his taking up the cause of Norrie Ford, consecrating to it all his resources, mental and material, and winning it.

In the course of an hour or two their understanding was complete, but he did not refer again to the conditions of their tacit compact. It was she who felt that sufficient had not been said--that the sincerity with which she subscribed to it had not been duly emphasized. She was at the door on the point of going away when she braced herself to look at him and say:

"You can't realize what all this means to me. If we succeed--that is, if you succeed--I hardly dare to tell you of the extent to which I shall be grateful."

He felt already some of the hero's magnanimity as to claiming his reward.

"You needn't think about that," he smiled. "I sha'n't. If by making Evie happy I can serve you, I shall not ask for grat.i.tude."

She looked down at her m.u.f.f and smoothed its fur, then glanced up swiftly.

"No; but I shall want to give it."

With that she was gone--lighter of heart than a few hours ago it had seemed to her possible ever to be again. Her joy was the joy of the captain who feels that he has saved his s.h.i.+p, though his own wound is fatal.

Part IV

Conquest

XX

Among the three or four qualities Conquest most approved of in himself, not the least was a certain capacity for the patient acquisition of the world's more enviable properties. He had the gift of knowing what he wanted, recognizing it when he saw it, and waiting for it till it came within his reach. From his youth upward he had been a connoisseur of quality rather than a lover of abundance, while he owned to a talent for seeing the value of things which other people overlooked, and throwing them into relief when the objects became his. As far back as the time when the modest paternal heritage had been divided between his brothers and sisters and himself, he had been astute enough to leave the bulk of it to them, contenting himself with one or two bits of ancestral furniture and a few old books, which were now known by all to have been the only things worth having. Throughout his life he had followed this principle of acquiring un.o.btrusively but getting exactly what he wanted. It was so that he bought his first horse, so that he bought his first motor, so that he purchased the land where he afterward built his house--in a distant, desolate stretch of Fifth Avenue which his acquaintances told him would be hopelessly out of reach, but where, not many years after, most of them were too late to join him.

In building his house, too, he took his time, allowing his friends to make their experiments around him, while he studied the great art of "how not to do it." One of his neighbors erected a Flemish chateau, another a Florentine palazzo, and a third a Francois Premier _hotel_; but his plot of ground remained an unkempt tangle of mullein and blue succory. In the end he put up a sober, handsome development on a style which the humbler pa.s.sers-by often called, with approval, "good, plain American," but whose point of departure was Georgian. He had the instinct for that which springs out of the soil. For this reason he did not shrink from an Early Victorian note--the first note of the modern, prosperous New York--in decoration; and the same taste impelled him toward the American in art.

While Neighbor Smith displayed his Gainsboroughs, and Neighbor Jones his Rousseaus or Daubignys, Conquest quietly picked up a thing here and there--always under excellent advice--which no picture-dealer had been able to dispose of, because it came from some studio in Twenty-third Street. Hung on his walls, it produced that much-sought-for effect of "having been always there." He was not a Chauvinist, nor had he any sympathy with the intolerantly patriotic. He was merely a lover of the indigenous.

In much the same way he had sought for--and waited for--a wife. He had been rashly put down as "not a marrying man," when he was only taking his time. He had seen plainly of excellent possibilities--fine women, handsome women, clever women, good women--any of whom presumably he could have had for the asking; but none was, in his own phraseology, "just the right thing." He wanted something unusual, and yet not exotic--something obvious, which no one else had observed--something cultivated, and yet native--something as exquisite as any hothouse orchid, but with the keen, fresh scent of the American woods and waters on its bloom. It was not a thing to be picked up every day, and so he kept on the lookout for it, and waited. Even when he found it, he was not certain, on the spur of the moment, that it would prove exactly what he had in mind. So he waited longer. He watched the effect of time and experience upon it, until he was quite sure. He knew the risk he was running that some one else might s.n.a.t.c.h it up; but his principle had always been to let everything, no matter how coveted, go, rather than buy in haste.

Lest such an att.i.tude toward Miriam Strange should seem cold-blooded, it should be said in his defence that he considered the aggregate of his sentiments to be--love. She was to be more than "something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse," more than the living, responsive soul among his chattels. There was that in her which appealed to his desire, and to something more deeply seated in him still. After satisfying ear, eye, and intelligence, there was in her nature a whole undiscovered region, undivined, undefined, wakening the imagination, and stirring the speculative faculties, like the subconscious elements in personality. In her wild, non-Aryan glances he saw the flame of eyes that flashed on him out of a past unknown to history; in the liquid cadences of her voice he heard the echo of the speech that had sounded in the land before Plymouth was a stockade or Manhattan was a farm; in her presence he found a claim that antedated everything sprung of Hudson, Cabot, or Columbus. The slender thread that attached her to the ages of nomadic mystery made her for him the indigenous spirit, reborn in a woman of the world.

Knowing himself too old to be dominated by a pa.s.sion, and too experienced to be snared by wiles, he estimated his feelings as being those of love, as he understood the word. He conceded the fact that love, like every other desire, must work to win, and proceeded to set about his task according to his usual methods of persistent, un.o.btrusive siege. It was long before Miriam became aware of what he was doing, and her surprise as she drew back was not quite so great as his to see her do it. He was so accustomed to success--after taking the trouble to insure it--that he was astonished, and a little angry, to find his usual tactics fail. He did not believe that she was beyond his grasp; he perceived only that he had taken the wrong way to get her. That there was a right way there could be no question; and he knew that by patient, unremitting search he should find it.

He had, therefore, several sources of satisfaction in espousing the cause of Norrie Ford. The amplitude of his legal knowledge would be to him as gay feathers to the c.o.c.k; while the contemplation of the prize added to his self-approval in never doubting that it could be won.

It was early March when Ford sailed away, leaving his affairs in Conquest's charge, at the latter's own request. He in his turn placed them in the hands of Kilcup and Warren, who made a specialty of that branch of the law. The reward was immediate, in that frequent talks with Miriam became a matter of course.

His trained mind was prompt to seize the fact that these interviews took place on a basis different from that of their meetings in the past. Where he had been seeking to gain an end he was now on probation. He had been told--or practically told--that what he had been asking would be granted, as soon as certain conditions were fulfilled. It became to him, therefore, a matter of honor, in some degree one of professional etiquette, to fulfil the conditions before referring to the reward. Instead of a suitor pressing his suit, he became the man of business recounting the points scored, or still to be scored, in a common enterprise. In keeping her informed of each new step that Kilcup and Warren were taking, he maintained an att.i.tude of distant respect, of which she could have nothing to complain.

Expecting an equal reserve on her part, it was with some surprise that he saw her a.s.sume the initiative in cordiality. He called it cordiality, because he dared not make it a stronger word. Her manner went back to the spontaneous friendliness that had marked their intercourse before she began to see what he was aiming at, while into it she threw an infusion of something that had not hitherto been there. When he came with the information that a fresh bit of evidence had been discovered, or a new light thrown on an old one, she listened with interest--just the right kind of interest--and made pretexts to detain him, sometimes with Wayne as a third, sometimes without, for the pleasure of his own company. Now and then, as spring came on, they would all three, at her suggestion, cross the street, and stroll in the park together. Leaving Wayne on some convenient seat, they would prolong their own walk, talking with the unguarded confidence of mutual trust. It was she who furnished the topics--books, music, politics, people, anything that chanced to be uppermost. When he decided to purchase an automobile a whole new world of consultation was opened up. They visited establishments together, and drove with Wayne into the country to test machines. Returning Conquest would dine informally, in morning dress, with them; or else, from time to time he would invite them to a restaurant. By-and-by he took to organizing little dinners at his own house, ostensibly to cheer up Wayne, but really to see Miriam at his table.

In all this there was nothing remarkable, as between old friends, except the contrast with her bearing toward him during the past year. He had expected that when Norrie Ford went finally free she would fulfil her contract, and fulfil it well; but he had not expected this instalment of graciousness in advance. It set him to pondering, to looking in the mirror, to refining on that careful dressing which he had already made an art. After all, a man in the fifties was young as long as he looked young, and according as one took the point of view.

Except when Ford's affairs came directly under discussion he occupied, seemingly, a secondary place in their thoughts. Miriam rarely spoke of him at all, and if Conquest brought up his name more frequently it was because his professional interest in the numerous "nice points" of the case was becoming keen. He talked them over with her, partly because of his pleasure in the intelligence with which she grasped them, and partly because their intimacy deepened in proportion as the hope strengthened that Ford's innocence would be proved.

It was June before Miriam heard from South America. Two or three letters to Evie had already come, guardedly written, telling little more than the incidents of Ford's voyage and arrival. It was to Miriam he wrote what he actually had at heart.

"The great moment has come and gone," she read to Conquest. "I have seen Mr. Jarrott, and made a clean breast of everything. It was harder than I expected, though I expected it would be pretty hard. I think I felt sorrier for him than for myself, which is saying a good deal. He not only takes it to heart, but feels it as a cut to his pride. I can see that that thought is uppermost. What he feels is not so much the fact that _I_ deceived him as that I deceived _him_. I can understand it, too. In a country where there is such a lot of this sort of thing, he has never been touched by it before. It has been a kind of boast that his men were always the genuine article. If one of them is called Smith, it is because he _is_ a Smith, and not a Vere de Vere in hiding. But that isn't all. He took me into his family--into his very heart. He showed that, when I told him. He tried not to, but he couldn't help it. I tell you it hurt--_me_. I won't try to write about it. I'll tell you everything face to face, when I get up to the mark, if I ever do. Apparently my letters hadn't prepared him for the thing at all. He thought it was to be something to do with Evie, though he might have known I wouldn't have chucked up everything for that.

The worst of it is, he's no good at seeing things all round. He can't take my point of view a bit. It is impossible to explain the fix I was put in, because he can see nothing but the one fact that I pulled the wool over his eyes--_his_ eyes, that had never suffered sacrilege before. I sympathize with him in that, and yet I think he might try to see that there's something to be said on my side. He doesn't, and he never will--which only hurts me the more.

"As for Evie, he wouldn't let me mention her name. I didn't insist, because it was too painful--I mean, too painful to see how he took it. He said, in about ten words, that Evie had not been any more engaged than if she had given her word to a man of air, and that there was no reason why she should be spoken of. We left it there. I couldn't deny that, and it was no use saying any more. The only reply to him must be given by Evie herself. He is writing to her, and so am I. I wish you would help her to see that she must consider herself quite free, and that she isn't to undertake what she may not have the strength to carry out. I realize more and more that I was asking her to do the impossible."

It was an hour or two after reading this, when Conquest had gone away, that Evie herself--as dainty as spring, in flowered muslin and a Leghorn hat crowned with a wreath of roses--came fluttering in.

"I've had the queerest letter from Uncle Jarrott," she began, breathlessly. "The poor old dear--well, something must be the matter with him. I can't for the life of me imagine what Herbert can have told him, but he doesn't understand a bit."

Miriam locked her own letter in her desk, saying as she did so:

"How does he show it?--that he doesn't understand."

"Why, he simply talks wild--that's how he shows it. He says I am not to consider myself engaged to Herbert--that I was never engaged to him at all. I wonder what he calls it, if it isn't engaged, when I have a ring--and everything."

"It is rather mystifying." Miriam tried to smile. "I suppose he means that having given your word to Herbert Strange, you're not to consider yourself bound to Norrie Ford, unless you want to."

"Pff! I don't care anything about that. I never liked the name of Herbert--or Strange, either. I told you that before. All the same, I wish Uncle Jarrott would have a little sense."

"Suppose--I mean, just suppose, dear--he felt it his duty to forbid your engagement altogether. What would you do then?"

"It wouldn't be very nice of him, I must say. He was as pleased as Punch over it when I was down there. If he's so capricious, I don't see how he can blame me."

"Blame you, for what, dear?"

"For staying engaged--if it's all right."

"But if he thought it wasn't all right?"

"You do, don't you?"

Evie, who had been prancing about the room, turned sharply on Miriam, who was still at her desk.