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.