The Wild Olive Part 6

"I should like it well enough if he did--that is, if his wife did. You see," she tried to explain, "she's very sweet and gentle, and all that, but she's devoted to the proprieties of life, and I seem to represent to her--its improprieties. I know it's a trial to her to keep me, and so, in a way, it's a trial to me to stay."

"Why do you stay, then?"

"For one reason, because I can't help myself. I have to do what the law tells me."

"I see. The law again!"

"Yes; the law again. But I've other reasons besides that."

"Such as--?"

"Well, I'm very fond of their little girl, for one thing. She's the greatest darling in the world, and the only creature, except my dog, that loves me."

"What's her name?"

The question drove her to painting with closer attention to her work. Ford followed something of the progress of her thought by watching the just perceptible contraction of her brows into a little frown, and the setting of her lips into a curve of determination. They were handsome lips, mobile and sensitive--lips that might easily have been disdainful had not the inner spirit softened them with a tremor--or it might have been a light--of gentleness.

"It isn't worth while to tell you that," she said, after long reflection.

"It will be safer for you in the end not to know any of our names at all."

"Still--if I escape--I should like to know them."

"If you escape, you may be able to find out."

"Oh, well," he said, with a.s.sumed indifference, "since you don't want to tell me--"

Going on with her painting, she allowed the subject to drop; but to him the opportunity for conversation was too rare a thing to neglect. Not only was his youthful impulse toward social self-expression normally strong, but his pleasure in talking to a lady--a girl--was undeniable. Sometimes in his moments of solitary meditation he said to himself that she was "not his type of girl"; but the fact that he had been deprived of feminine society for nearly three years made him ready to fall in love with any one. If he did not precisely fall in love with this girl, it was only because the situation precluded sentiment; and yet it was pleasant to sit and watch her paint, and even torment her with his questions.

"So the little girl is one reason for your staying here. What's another?"

She betrayed her own taste for social communion by the readiness with which she answered him--

"I don't know that I ought to tell you that; and yet I might as well. It's just this: they're not very well off--so I can help. Naturally I like that."

"You can help by footing the bills. That's all very fine if you enjoy it, but everybody wouldn't."

"They would if they were in my position," she insisted. "When you can help in any way it gives you a sense of being of use to some one. I'd rather that people needed me, even if they didn't want me, than that they shouldn't need me at all."

"They need your money," he declared, with a young man's outspokenness.

"That's what."

"But that's something, isn't it? When you've no place in the world you're glad enough to get one, even if you have to buy it. My guardian and his wife mayn't care much to have me, but it's some satisfaction to know that they'd get along much worse if I weren't here."

"So should I," he laughed. "What I'm to do when I'm turned adrift without you, Heaven only knows. It's curious--the effect imprisonment has on you.

It takes away your self-reliance. It gives you a helpless feeling, like a baby. You want to be free--and yet you're almost afraid of the open air."

He was so much at home with her now that, sitting carelessly astride of his chair, with his arms folded on the back, he felt a fraternal element in their mutual relation. She bent more closely over her work, and spoke without looking up.

"Oh, you'll get along all right. You're that sort."

"That's easy to say."

"You may find it easy to do." Her next words, uttered while she continued to flick color into her sketch, caused him to jump with astonishment. "I'd go to the Argentine."

"Why not say the moon?"

"For one reason, because the moon is inaccessible."

"So is the Argentine--for me."

"Oh no, it isn't. Other people have reached it."

"Yes: but they weren't in my fix."

"Some of them were probably in worse."

There was a pause, during which she seemed absorbed in her work, while Ford sat meditatively whistling under his breath.

"What put the Argentine into your head?" he asked, at last.

"Because I happen to know a good deal about it. Everybody says it's the country of new opportunities. I know people who've lived there. The little girl I was speaking of just now--whom I'm so fond of--was born there. Her father is dead since then, and her mother is married again."

He continued to meditate, emitting the same tuneless, abstracted sound, just above his breath.

"I know the name of an American firm out there," she went on. "It's Stephens and Jarrott. It's a very good firm to work for. I've often heard that. And Mr. Jarrott has helped ever so many--stranded people."

"I should be just his sort, then."

His laugh, as he sprang to his feet, seemed to dismiss an impossible subject; and yet as he lay on his couch that evening in the lampless darkness the name of Stephens and Jarrott obtruded itself into his visions of this girl, who stood between him and peril because she "disliked the law," He wondered how far it was dislike, and how far jealous pain. In her eagerness to buy the domestic place she had not inherited she reminded him of something he had read--or heard--of the wild olive being grafted into the olive of the orchard. Well, that would come in the natural course of events. Some fine fellow, worthy to be her mate, would see to it. He was not without a pleasant belief that in happier circ.u.mstances he himself might have had the qualifications for the task. He wondered again what her name was. He ran through the catalogue of the names he himself would have chosen for a heroine--Gladys, Ethel, Mildred Millicent!--none of them seemed to suit her. He tried again. Margaret, Beatrice, Lucy, Joan! Joan possibly--or he said to himself, in the last inconsequential thoughts as he fell asleep, it might be--the Wild Olive.

V

As the days pa.s.sed, one much like another, and the retreat seemed more and more secure, it was natural that Ford's thoughts should dwell less on his own danger and more on the girl who filled his immediate horizon. The care with which she foresaw his wants, the ingenuity with which she met them, the dignity and simplicity with which she carried herself through incidents that to a less delicate tact must have been difficult, would have excited his admiration in any case, even if the namelessness which helped to make her an impersonal element in the episode had not stirred his imagination. He was obliged to remind himself often that she was "not his type of girl," in order to confine his heart within the limits which the situation imposed.

It worried him, therefore, it even hurt him, that in spite of all the openings he had given her, she had never offered him a sign of her belief in his innocence. For this reason he took the first occasion when she was seated at her easel, with the dog lying at her feet, to lay his case before her.

He told her of his overindulged boyhood, as the only child of a wealthy New York merchant. He outlined his profitless years at the university, where a too free use of money had hindered work. He narrated the disasters that had left him at the age of two-and-twenty to begin life for himself--his father's bankruptcy, followed by the death of both his parents within the year. He had been eager to start in at the foot of the ladder and work his way upward, when the proposal was made which proved fatal.

Old Chris Ford, his great-uncle, known throughout the Adirondack region as "the lumber king," had offered to take him, train him to the lumber business, and make him his heir. An eccentric, childless widower, commonly believed to have broken his wife's heart by sheer bitterness of tongue, old Chris Ford was hated, feared, and flattered by the relatives and time-servers who hoped ultimately to profit by his favor. Norrie Ford neither flattered nor feared his powerful kinsman, but he hated him with the best. His own instincts were city born and bred. He was conscious, too, of that apt.i.tude with which the typical New-Yorker is supposed to come into being--the capacity to make money. He would have preferred to make it on his own ground and in his own way; and had it not been for the counsels of those who wished him well, he would have replied to his great-uncle's offer with a courteous "No." Wiser heads than his pointed out the folly of such a course as that; and so, reluctantly, he entered on his apprenticeship.

In the two years that followed he could not see what purpose he served other than that of a mark for the old man's poisoned wit. He was taught nothing, and paid nothing, and given nothing to do. He slept under his great-uncle's roof and ate at his table, but the sharp tongue made the bed hard to lie on and the bread difficult to swallow down. Idleness reawakened the propensity to vicious habits which he thought he had outlived, while the rough society of the lumber camps, in which he sought to relieve the tedium of time, extended him the welcome which Falstaff and his comrades gave Prince Hal.

The revolt of his self-respect was on the eve of bringing this phase of his existence to an end when the low farce turned into tragedy. Old Chris Ford was found dead in his bed--shot in his sleep. On the premises there had been but three persons, one of whom must have committed the crime--Norrie Ford, and Jacob and Amalia Gramm. Jacob and Amalia Gramm had been the old man's servants for thirty years. Their faithfulness put them beyond suspicion. The possibility of their guilt, having been considered, was dismissed with few formalities. The conviction of Norrie Ford became easy after that--the more respectable people of the neighborhood being agreed that from the evidence presented no other deduction could be drawn.

The very fact that the old man, by his provocation of the lad, so thoroughly deserved his fate made the manner in which he met with it the clearer. Even Norrie Ford's friends, the hunters and the lumbermen, admitted as much as that, though they were determined that he should never suffer for so meritorious an act as long as they could give him a fighting chance for freedom.