Come, My Beloved

  Dr. Barton agreed, David supposed, for in a moment his father replied, “Good—we aren’t waiting, but there will be a cup of hot coffee for you.” He hung up.

  “Did you say anything about the price of this place?” he inquired.

  “No,” David said, “I didn’t think that was proper. You may not like the idea at all, or Dr. Barton may not.”

  “Dessard,” MacArd murmured, “Dessard? I have heard it somewhere.”

  They sipped their coffee in silence. Whatever MacArd was thinking he did not tell his son, and David sat relaxed, his mind roving over the day. He felt rested and weary together, weary in body and rested in spirit from the day of sunshine and air and widespread views. He had not been in the country since they left India, and this was different country indeed. He had a comforting sense of richness and plenty, of confidence and security. It was good to be American, he was glad to be born what he was. And then he thought of Olivia and her lovely troubled face. She had such a pretty mouth, though too small, and magnificent hair. Very likely such hair would come far below her waist if she allowed it to hang. His mother’s hair had been long like that, dark, too, but not coal black as Olivia’s was. They were not alike, except that both of them had an intrepid air, a natural daring. Olivia had no laughter, and laughter had been his mother’s golden gift. Olivia had not once laughed while he was there, though it was not to be expected perhaps, when they had talked of so somber a matter as selling the house she loved.

  “Dr. Barton, sir,” Enderby said.

  The handsome grey-haired minister came in, smiling and cordial. David sprang to his feet, but MacArd did not rise as they shook hands.

  “Good of you to come on a moment’s notice, Barton.”

  “I always come if I can when you send for me, Mr. MacArd.”

  Enderby poured fresh coffee and MacArd turned his head.

  “Leave us now, Enderby. Nobody need stay. David can let Dr. Barton out.”

  “Yes, sir, good night sir.”

  “Good night,” David said because his father did not answer, and the door closed.

  “Well, dear boy,” Dr. Barton said cheerfully to David, “you are quite sunburned.”

  David smiled agreeably and looked at his father and MacArd began to talk.

  “David has found an interesting place—”

  David watched Dr. Barton’s neatly bearded face. It was impossible to tell whether he was displeased. The light blue eyes did not flicker, the ministerial calm did not change.

  “Splendid—splendid,” Dr. Barton murmured now and then.

  He was pleased, David decided, perhaps because if the School opened earlier, so much earlier would his place be set in it. Then he despised himself for his readiness to suspect a man perhaps innocent and when his father finished he said somewhat impatiently,

  “Father, shall I write Miss Dessard that we will come next week?”

  “If you wish,” MacArd said, surprised. “I was going to have Barton write to the mother.”

  “On the contrary,” the minister said gracefully, “it will make it more informal if we allow the young people to be in charge.”

  David changed the subject abruptly. “There are the most awful tenements on the way. One expects them in India but not here.”

  “Not at all,” MacArd said. “That is where men like Parkhurst make such a mistake.”

  Dr. Barton did not speak. Parkhurst, the minister of a fashionable uptown Presbyterian church, had chosen to ruin himself by attempting to clean up New York. Other ministers observing his predicament had prudently refused to endorse his accusations.

  MacArd went on, “It is impractical idealism to think that we can do away with the weaknesses in human nature which produce misery. Nothing is further from my purpose. I intend to bring to the MacArd School of Theology the finest and strongest young men we can find and fit them to go out and preach and practice a virile gospel that will attract men like themselves. I purpose to offer an opportunity to all alike, but I know perfectly well, whether this be done in our own country or in India or anywhere in the world, that only a few will respond.”

  “Many will be called, but few chosen,” Dr. Barton murmured.

  “Exactly,” MacArd said, “but those are the few who count. They are the men who change the world.”

  David lifted his bead sharply, but his father’s eyes were not upon him.

  A week later MacArd stood on the terrace of the Dessard house overlooking the river. He was pleased with his son’s imagination. The place was beautiful, the house was sound. He liked having a great mansion at the heart of his memorial to Leila. New buildings could be grouped about it, but the center would be here in these lofty rooms.

  He turned to Olivia Dessard. “I will buy the house,” he said abruptly. “If your mother cares to sell some of her larger pieces of furniture, I will include those. My lawyers will visit her here or in the city, as you please. By the way, the name, Dessard—it seems to be familiar to me and yet I cannot place it. What was your father’s business?”

  Olivia looked into the deep-set grey eyes under the thick grizzled red eyebrows. “He owned land in the West, Mr. MacArd, much land, and he raised beef. But he was ruined because the railroad on which he depended for shipping his steers increased its rates until he could no longer ship.”

  MacArd remembered suddenly. A small railroad, ending in Chicago, served at its farthest reach an area in Wyoming on the eastern side of the Rockies. It was only one of the small railroads which he had absorbed into his own great central system and he had done it by lowering freight rates until competition ceased. He had then bought the small railroad cheaply. Dessard was not directly connected with him, but that was how he had heard the name. A Dessard had been one of several owners who had brought suit against his main company and they had lost. He wondered if this girl standing here so trim in her white shirtwaist and black skirt, knew that story. If she did, she gave no sign of it and he did not make a test of her memory. A fate brought him here to Dessard’s house, God’s leading, if one wanted to call it that, something more at least than coincidence. He resolved to be generous to Dessard’s widow and daughter, not because of obligations, for he had won the suit honestly in the courts, but merely because he liked to be generous when he could.

  “I believe your mother suggested tea,” he said abruptly.

  “Yes, please, in the drawing room,” Olivia said.

  She led the way and he found Mrs. Dessard and Barton already seated and waiting for him. The girl, he noticed, left them at once, and a few seconds later he saw David walking with her away from the terrace. They were off together, then. He pondered for a moment the possible meaning in this and then decided against its distraction. He had come here to make a bargain.

  “With your permission, Madam,” he said to Mrs. Dessard, “I will make an appointment for my lawyers to call up yours.”

  “Very well, Mr. MacArd.” Her slightly withered cheeks were very pink but she gave him a cup of tea with a hand that did not tremble.

  He had accepted Mrs. Dessard’s invitation to drink a cup of tea in the drawing room, but he could not forget that while he and Barton sat with her over the fragile china she had set out on the tea table, David was wandering away somewhere with the girl. He listened to Mrs. Dessard’s random talk and to Barton’s ceremonious answers and waited.

  “Will you show me the path to the river?” David asked. He was confused by his own pleasure in being alone with Olivia again.

  “It is easy to find,” she said carelessly, but she led the way while he followed.

  She was used to the path, he could see, and she guided him down, sure of foot, touching his hand now and then when he offered it to support her over a rock. She was handsomer than he remembered, but still not beautiful, he decided, so much as unusual in her looks. The severity of her white shirtwaist and the black of her skirt and the short waist-length jacket suited her black hair and olive skin. He longed inexplicably to know her better, and it was
easy to talk with her for she was frank and not at all shy. He had known many girls casually, girls whom he had met at birthday parties when they were children and later at dances and Christmas cotillions and college proms, pretty fluffy merry girls of whom he was wary because he was the son of his father. His mother had laughed at him often for his wariness, pretending distress lest he never present her with the delightful daughter-in-law she pretended she wanted. She made David’s wife into a figure at once imaginary and real, and had done so since he was out of knickerbockers. Perhaps had she been less mocking he would have found earlier someone who could attract him.

  He was not quite sure that Olivia did attract him so much as interest him. She was a grave sort of girl, unchanging, or so he imagined, who if she gave her word, would stand by it, whether or not it made her happy to do so. But today she almost smiled at him a few times and once when he made a joke she gave a quick laugh, broken off as though it surprised her. They sat down on a log and he talked about India and Darya, and she listened with so remote a look upon her face that he did not know whether she was interested.

  “Curiously enough, it was India that gave my father the inspiration for all these plans,” he said.

  “How strange!” she said. “My grandfather Dessard was once in India. He went there to study Hinduism when he was young. I remember he said that India changed everybody who set foot upon her soil.”

  David laughed. “It didn’t change my father—it merely inspired him to want to change India.”

  At this moment he heard his father’s voice and looking up he saw that tall and grizzled figure standing at the top of the cliff shouting for him.

  “David! I am ready to leave!”

  “Coming!” he shouted upward. He turned to Olivia. “I must go, as you see. But may I come back alone? Then I shall stay as long as you will let me.”

  “Do come back,” Olivia said. Her eyes were fixed upon his face, eyes black, intense, veiled with doubt and question. He smiled, but her look did not change.

  IV

  HE DID NOT SEE her again for many weeks, partly because of a strange cowardice when he remembered the last look she had given him, partly because he did not want to be present or near while his father took possession of the house.

  For MacArd moved with his usual resolution and speed once his attorneys had settled upon a price and he had paid it. He summoned architects to plan three new buildings and design necessary changes in the mansion. For the present the upstairs was to be made into an apartment for the president of the seminary, Barton he supposed, since it was obvious that he wanted the job, and Barton would be obedient to his wishes. He ordered the architects to please the minister and his wife, he ordered Barton himself to call together a suitable number of men to form a Board of Trustees of whom he himself would be chairman, and he directed that the seminary open in the autumn of the next year, with suitable installation services and an imposing catalogue. He designated men from his own offices to carry out his plans, distrusting Barton’s practical ability.

  “You put your time in on getting the best men you can find for the faculty,” he ordered. “I don’t know anything about that. Pay them whatever is needed to take them away from their present jobs.”

  “Historical Theology,” Dr. Barton murmured. “Hebrew and Greek, Systematic Theology, Classical Languages, Church History, Exegetical—”

  “Yes, yes,” MacArd broke in, “that’s all your business. What I want is a certain kind of man, you understand, a sound pioneer type.”

  “We shall have to approach the colleges and universities for their best graduates,” Dr. Barton said solemnly.

  “Of course, of course,” MacArd agreed, his eyes restless with impatience. “I am simply telling you what I want. If there is any difficulty about money we can arrange scholarships, though I don’t see why we can’t get other men in the church to contribute scholarships as their part in it.”

  “Or chairs of theology, for that matter,” Dr. Barton said, anxious to be practical.

  MacArd nodded and drummed his fingers on his desk. The interview was taking place in his office, and he was anxious to be done with it, though determined to carry through his plans without delay.

  He had an overwhelming anxiety which he could not explain to so simple-minded a man as Barton, who had nothing to do with business. The production of gold this year was evidently going to be the lowest in the history of the country. His figures had arrived from Washington only this morning and they showed an incredible lag in the production of the precious metal. At this hour of the country’s magnificent growth, when everything else was expanding with glorious speed, wheat pouring out of the new lands in the west, oil wells spouting fountains of eternal wealth, manufacturing soaring, the total number of miles of his railroads more than three times what they were a quarter of a century ago, even the population rising to a new height, only gold was short, its increase far behind the demand. Gold simply could not be mined at sufficient speed to meet the need for basic money. He had long toyed with the idea of a process whereby gold could be extracted from low grade ore. Only by such a miracle could prosperity be saved and he saw the miracle like a mirage upon a desert, the glory of a new era, an era when the mountebank, William Jennings Bryan, would be defeated, when all the wild socialistic ideas of Populists and Greenbacks and the Silver Party would be deflated by plentiful gold, when the angry farmers ready to join the ranks of the long-haired Bryan would be appeased. A sound government based on gold would be the foundation for such an expansion in business as the country had never yet seen.

  “Now, Barton,” MacArd said firmly, “I shall have to ask you to get about your business so that I can get about mine. I have to make the money for you, you know.”

  “Be assured that I take the task as a sacred duty,” the minister replied.

  His back was not turned before MacArd was roaring into his office telephone, banging a great outspread hand palm down upon his desk. “Get the lawyers here, and tell them to come now!”

  Through the days of his father’s absorption in a business he did not explain nor David try to understand, the year moved on. There were no parties and no dances, for MacArd had decreed a full year of mourning, and David was left idle, and yet he was not discontented. He had finished college, he had not lived at home for eight years, and while he still missed his mother, there was a pleasant sense of growing freedom in the vast quiet house on Fifth Avenue. A letter from Darya had reached him in the late autumn, and he was moved to write back inviting the young Indian to come for a visit. He had broached the idea to his father today, who, absorbed and abstracted, was nevertheless willing.

  “I suppose you are lonely,” he said abruptly to David. The morning was grey with approaching November and the house looked somber. Even he could see that a young man alone for the day, and day after day, might find it grim, in spite of luxury and warmth.

  “I am not lonely,” David said, with his usual good humor. “But I would like to know Darya better.”

  “Well, have him come, by all means,” MacArd said, and then fell into his abstraction again. There was no use in trying to explain the labyrinth of his thoughts. He was going through a creative period during which he could have explained nothing to anybody. He watched the charts of the production of gold as they were prepared for him weekly. As yet very little had happened. The necessary machinery had to be designed and produced, and there had been delay and mistakes. It would be a matter of five years, he began to fear, before gold would become plentiful enough to make the currency of the country sound. Meanwhile the National Treasury was being robbed by anyone who could produce a silver dollar and get its equivalent in gold. The gold thus got did not go into banks but was hidden under mattresses and in chimney nooks and tied up in old stockings. Gold was actually disappearing from circulation, and if this went on long enough a new panic was inevitable. Nothing could stop it. The currency was being debased to a point where it would soon begin to affect the prestige of the
nation abroad.

  He got up from the breakfast table where he had been grinding out these gloomy thoughts. “Yes, yes,” he muttered. “Go ahead and invite the fellow. Tell him to stay the winter if he likes. You could take a trip somewhere, you two. I shan’t be able to get away for I don’t know how long.”

  “I wish I could help you,” David said, troubled by the greyness of his father’s face.

  “Nobody can help me,” MacArd said.

  “It isn’t money, is it, Father?” David asked.

  “Not my money,” MacArd retorted. “But the nation is going bankrupt unless this robbing of gold can be stopped. That long-haired fellow Bryan will be president one of these days if we aren’t careful.”

  David was the usual young college graduate. He did not understand business, finance or politics. If he made up his mind to go with his father he would have to understand them some day, but he was not sure now that he wanted to work with his father. He longed for another life, a different world, where mind and spirit were more important than making money and shaping politics. Why was his father so terrified of William Bryan? Perhaps he would make a good president. It was all in the muddle, the puzzle, the scintillating changefulness of life ahead, and he did not want to face it yet.

  “Give me a year, Father,” he said with his boyish smile. “A year, and then I shall settle down and try to understand these things, and be of some use to you.”

  “Take as long as you like,” MacArd grunted. Nothing would be solved in a year. He wiped his grizzled mustache with his napkin and left for his office.

  It would be a pity, Darya thought, folding David’s ardent letter, to leave Poona now just when the weather was at its best and coolest. A few months hence, in February or March, the dry heat would be suffocating and then it would be pleasant to take ship at Bombay and cross the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, saunter through Europe and England and reach America perhaps in June. He had never seen America, although he knew England well. His father was one of the Indians who admired England and who had brought up his children to be half English. Darya spoke English as well as he did his native Marathi, and he had finished at Cambridge with first honors. So that his children could be thoroughly at ease in England his father had built an English house within the compound here at Poona and had employed an English tutor, a Cambridge man, to live there with his sons. All during his youth Darya had been compelled during the week to eat lamb chops, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, boiled cabbage and potatoes and sweet puddings for dessert. This, his father declared, would fit him for life among the best Englishmen when he went to Cambridge. Only on Sundays were he and his younger brothers allowed to join the family in the big Indian house and eat the delicious spiced Indian foods.