Clark's Field Part 9

"I couldn't say off hand," the banker replied cautiously. "But enough to keep you from want, if you don't spend too much making jewelry." He added facetiously,--"You don't feel cramped for money, do you?"

"No-o," the girl admitted dubiously. "But you can't always tell what you may want."

"If you don't want much more than you do at present, you're safe," Mr.

Crane stated guardedly. "That is, if nothing goes wrong--a panic, and that sort of thing."

After a pause he said,--

"But you should have some one look after your property, invest it for you--a woman can't do that very well."

"The bank does it, don't it?"

"I mean after you are of age and have control of your own property."

"Oh," the girl murmured vaguely, running her hand through the ripples of river water. "That's a good ways off!... I suppose I shall be married by that time, and _he_ will look after it for me."

She said this in a thoroughly matter-of-fact voice, but the banker almost jumped from his seat at the words.

"You aren't thinking of getting married yet!" he exclaimed hastily.

"I suppose I shall some day," she replied.

"Of course you'll marry sometime," he said with relief; and ran on glibly,--"That is the natural thing. Every girl should get married early. But you must take good care, my dear girl, not to make a mistake.

You might be very unhappy, you know. He might not treat you right." And with a sense of climax he exclaimed,--"He might lose all your money--ruin you!"

"Yes, he might," Adelle agreed with composure. "They do that sometimes."

She looked at him from her open gray eyes undisturbed by the prospect, as if, womanlike, she was aware of this unpleasant fate in danger of which she must always be. Mr. Ashly Crane knew that this was the point when his love-making should begin, but suddenly he felt that Adelle Clark was a very difficult person to make love to.

"Perhaps you've been thinking of the man?" he opened clumsily.

She shook her head thoughtfully.

"No, I haven't."

"But you could love some one?"

"I suppose so," she answered in such a matter-of-fact tone that for the moment he was baffled. The present situation, he decided, was unfavorable for love-making, and searched desperately within for his next words.

"I wonder what they look like," Adelle mused aloud.

"Who look like--husbands?"

"No, Edward's children--the other heirs," she explained.

"Perhaps there aren't any," he snapped.

And under his breath Mr. Ashly Crane consigned Edward S. Clark and all his offspring to perdition.

XIX

Mr. Crane was a persistent person. Otherwise he would hardly have arrived where he had in the Washington Trust Company. Having failed to broach the great subject in the afternoon, he immediately made another opportunity for himself by hustling Adelle, ahead of the others, into his own cab for the return drive to the city, and then jumping in after her and giving the driver the order to leave. It was very ill-bred and he knew it, but he was determined not to bother about Miss Comstock any longer. His vacation was very nearly at an end, and this would be his last chance for another year if the ward was to remain in Europe as was her present determination. He consoled himself with the thought that the others had Adelle's car at their disposal, and gave the order to take a roundabout road back to London. The driver needed but the suggestion to plunge them into a maze of forgotten country roads where there were no lights and no impeding traffic....

There are in general three ways in which to make love to a woman, young or old: the deliberate, the impulsive, and the inevitable. Of the third there is no occasion to speak here, as neither Ashly Crane nor Adelle understood it. Of the remaining two the deliberate method of cautious, persistent siege was more to the taste and the temperament of the banker, but he was strictly limited in time. The Kaiser Nonsuch, on which his pa.s.sage was reserved, sailed in three days from Southampton, and he must win within that brief period or put the matter over for a whole year. And he judged that Adelle, under her present environment with such an expert manager as Miss Catherine Comstock, would not be left hanging on the bough within his reach for long. A year's delay would almost surely be fatal, and it was uncertain whether he could get away before the next summer from his important responsibilities at the Washington Trust Company. So haste must be the word.

That he should reason thus about a delicate matter of sentiment betrays not merely the man's coa.r.s.e grain, but the inferiority of the commercial experience in making an accomplished lover. He had been trained in the "new school" of rapid finance to complete large transactions on the moment, never letting small uncertainties or delays interfere with his purposes. It was really not essential to the working of the financial system--even for the salvation of the Washington Trust Company--that Mr.

Ashly Crane should turn up at his desk on the morning of the twenty-sixth instanter. It might just as well have been the thirty-first or even the middle of the next month--or, if he should have the good luck to gain the heart and hand of the heiress, never at all! But Mr.

Ashly Crane was neither of the temperament nor of the age to play the sentimental game thus desperately. He was altogether too much an American to let his love-making interfere with his business schedule.

(Besides, there was not another swift steamer sailing for New York for three weeks.)

So he sighed, and when the cab shot into the umbrageous dimness of old trees he took the girl's hand in his. She made no attempt to withdraw her hand. Probably Adelle was more frightened by this first experience in the eternal situation than the man was, and that is saying a good deal. She took refuge in her usual defense against life and its many perplexities, which was silence, permitting the banker to press her captive hand for several moments while the cab tossed on the uneven road and Crane was summoning his nerve for the next step. Her heart beat a little faster, and she wondered what was going to happen.

That was the man's attempt to encircle her waist with his free arm. In this maneuver Adelle did not a.s.sist him: instead, she pushed herself back against the cushion so firmly that it made it a difficult engineering feat to obtain possession of her figure. By this time his face was close to hers, and he was stammering incoherently such words as--"Adelle" ... "Dearest" ... "Love" ... etc. But we will spare the reader Mr. Ashly Crane's crude imitation of ardor. All love-making, even the most sincere and eloquent, is verbally disappointingly alike and rather tame. The human animal, ingenious as he is in many ways, is nevertheless almost as limited as the ape when it comes to the articulation of the deeper emotions. That is why delicacy and the habit of _nuances_ give the experienced wooer such an immense advantage, even with a raw girl like Adelle, over the mere clumsy male. Love, like the drama, being so rigidly limited in technique, is no field for the bungler! And Mr. Ashly Crane was far from being an artist in anything.

By this time Adelle had become aware that she was being made love to. It filled her with a variety of emotions not clearly defined. First of all, there was something of the woman's natural complacency in her first capture, more vivid than when the other girls had dubbed Mr. Crane her "beau." This was a _bona fide_ ill.u.s.tration of what all the girls talked about most of the time and the novels were full of from cover to cover--love-making! And next was a feeling akin to repugnance. Mr. Crane was not aged--barely forty-two--and he was good-looking enough and quite the man. But to Adelle he had always been, if not exactly a parent, at least an older brother or uncle,--in some category of relationship other than that of young love. That he should thus hastily be professing ardent sentiments towards her seemed a trifle improper. Beneath these superficial feelings there were, of course, some deeper ones;--for instance, a slight sense of humor in his clumsy management and a feeling of gratification that at last the unknown had arrived. And a something else not wholly unpleasant in her own small person....

Crane was mumbling something about his loneliness and her unprotected condition. Adelle was not aware that she was to be pitied because of lack of protection, but she liked to be the object of sympathy.

Gradually she relaxed, and permitted him to insert his arm between her and the cushion, which he seemed so ridiculously anxious to do. At once he drew her slight form towards him. He was saying,--

"Dearest! Can you--will you--"

And she demanded point-blank,--

"What?"

"Love me!" the man breathed very close to her.

"I don't know," she replied, struggling to regain her refuge in the corner from which his embrace had dragged her.

And just here Ashly Crane committed an irretrievable blunder, due to those imperfections of nature and technique which have been described before. As the cab lurched, throwing the girl nearer him, he grasped her very firmly and kissed her. The Kaiser Nonsuch sailed on the Thursday, and it was now Monday....

As his mustached lips sought her small mouth and met the cold, hard little lips, he knew that he had taken a fearful risk. Adelle did not scream. She did not struggle very much. She took the kiss pa.s.sively, as if she had some curiosity to know what a man's kiss was like. After he had given it with sufficient ardor and was ready to relax his pa.s.sionate embrace, she drew back calmly into her corner and looked at him very coolly out of her gray eyes. After the flurry of the struggle, with her brown hair slightly awry, her hat tipped back, and her lips still half open as they had been forced by his kiss, she was almost pretty. But those gray eyes looked at him as no girl ought to look after her lover's first kiss, and let us hope as few girls do look. Mr. Ashly Crane read there that he had lost his chance with the heiress. There was just enough of spirit even in his common clay to divine this. If only he had not been so hasty!--not tried to "put the thing through" before sailing, and do it in the manner of the "whirl-wind campaign"....

For a moment or two there was silence within the cab while the car rocked on in its mad race for London. They were well within the outskirts of the city now, and the banker knew that there would not be time to work up to another crisis. He must defer the recovery until the morrow, if he could summon courage to go on with it at all. But the girl still stared at him out of her wide-open eyes, as if she were saying in her small head--"So that's what a man's kiss is like." He muttered uncomfortably a lot of nonsense about forgetting himself, and her forgiving him,--ignorant that in such a grave matter forgiveness is always out of the question: either it is not needed, or it cannot possibly be given. Adelle said nothing, merely looked at him until he was driven to turn his head away and gaze out of the swiftly moving cab at the lighted streets to escape the wonder and the surprise and the contempt in those gray eyes. As they turned into Piccadilly, he remarked brusquely,--"I shall come to-morrow morning--and get your answer!" That was to "save his face," as we say, for her answer was written in those eyes. Again he took her little ungloved hand and tried to bear it to his lips. But this time Adelle gently, firmly extracted it from his grasp and placed it behind her back with its mate, safely out of reach, still looking at him gravely.

Crane helped her out of the cab, and turned to pay the driver, who was beaming with expectation of an extra fee for his partic.i.p.ation in this adventure. When he had settled the fare, Adelle had disappeared within the hotel. Judging that it might be unwise to follow her, Mr. Ashly Crane walked off to his hotel, scowling along the way, very little pleased with himself. He was really more mortified at discovering how poor an artist in the business he was than by his ill success itself.

"Nothing but a meek, pale-faced, little school-girl, too!" he was saying to himself. And aloud,--"Oh, d.a.m.n the women."

XX