It was impossible to lie to Darya. He could detect the slightest deviation between thought and word. David said, “Not quite in my dreams, Darya, but hovering perhaps on the edge.” And then he told Darya of Olivia, and why he had not gone back to see her. “Yet I suppose,” he said, “that I have known all along that I would go back.”
“So,” Darya said, “why not now? Take me with you. I shall take advantage of your western customs and judge her for myself and see whether she is worthy of you.”
He ignored the memorial mansion pointedly, but David did not notice the omission. He would have liked to have laughed off Darya’s suggestion, but the young Indian was not easily put aside, as he had learned by now. Darya had an amiable persistence, an affectionate stubbornness, which would not be denied. And then it might be a good thing. He would see Olivia through other eyes, and he would know through his own whether her presence, hovering on the edge of his dreams, was something more than fancy.
“So be it,” he replied. He had infused his voice with gaiety to which Darya did not respond. Instead his face was grave while his eyes sparkled dangerously bright.
“What is your father’s idea in regard to my country?” he demanded suddenly.
Their eyes met and David drew upon his will not to turn his away first. He was astonished to see that Darya was angry.
“I shall ask my father to explain it to you,” he said, still gazing quietly into Darya’s eyes. “I fear I have been clumsy.”
Darya rose. “It is time to dress, in any event. Therefore I will wait.”
They parted for the time, and David waited until dinner was over and the coffee was served as usual in the library. Then he attacked his father with courage.
“Darya has asked to meet Miss Dessard, Father, and I have promised to introduce him. But first he wants to know about the memorial. I think if my father tells you, Darya, you will grasp it as he conceives it.”
MacArd put down his cup. “The memorial to my dear wife is to be a school of applied Christianity. That is, it will train young men to be Christian in the highest and most practical sense. They will go into all the world and preach the gospel. Take your own country, as an example. I felt there the lack of a dynamic, an energy, a purpose. Your people are slack, they are listless, they allow circumstances to overcome them. A real religion, a vital faith in the true God, will inspire them to better themselves.”
Darya listened to this, his eyes glittering again. “Is there more truth in your god than in ours?” he inquired with dangerous quiet.
MacArd faced him with massive power in his look. “Your temples are full of superstitious litter,” he said bluntly. “Your people are confused by the legends of ancient history. A clean wind, a sweeping change, will give you fresh strength. I believe that our own prosperity proves the validity of our religion. God has been with us.”
“I grant you the right to believe in your own religion,” Darya said in the same intense quiet. “I have sometimes even thought that I, too, would like to be a Christian if I could become one without giving up my own religion.”
“That,” MacArd said decisively, “would be impossible. When a man becomes a Christian, he must forsake all other gods, and believe only in the One.”
“Thus you exclude most of the world,” Darya said.
“Not at all,” MacArd retorted. “Any man can repent and accept the Christian faith.”
“You remind me of a certain American millionaire whose name I will not speak, because you know it well, Mr. MacArd. He says he does not believe in competition but in cooperation. Therefore he proceeds to absorb into his own business the livelihood of other men, especially those in smaller corporations than his own. They co-operate by becoming his property — a trust, I believe it is strangely called.”
MacArd was hurt. “I assure you I have no purpose except to benefit your people. I see my own country rich and prosperous, the people well-fed and happy. I see your country poor and the people wretched. I am compelled to deduce reasons for this difference.”
“Can it be because your people are free and mine are not?” Darya suggested, glints of light playing in his eyes.
“In spite of the benefits of Empire,” MacArd said, not comprehending, “your people continue in this poor state. Therefore they must be taught to help themselves. For this I say they need a new faith, an inspired and inspiring religion, which I did not find, young man, although I went into many temples.” These last words he spoke very sternly indeed and David was alarmed.
Darya rose, a guest too courteous to quarrel with his elder and his host. “I shall be interested to see the memorial,” he said. “And now will you excuse me, sir, if I say I have some letters to write? David has been giving me such a good time that I have not yet written to my brothers.”
He bowed to MacArd, smiled at David and walked gracefully from the room, shutting the door soundlessly after him.
David did not speak. MacArd poured himself another cup of coffee. “A well-educated young man but still a heathen,” he said drily.
David did not reply to this. Instead he said,
“I never heard you say the things you have just said, Father. I didn’t know you could.”
“Nor I,” his father replied. He drank the coffee and put down the cup and looked at his son with humorous eyes in which there was also something of apology. “I don’t know what got into me. I’m no theologian. But I guess that young Indian sitting so smug and rich, while I know the condition his country is in, just roused the American in me, and mixed up with that is my father’s old-fashioned religion. Maybe it was good, after all. I know it scared me enough to keep me out of a lot of tomfoolery when I was growing up. I never could be sure he wasn’t right about hellfire, and I didn’t dare take the chance. I guess I still don’t dare.”
He leaned forward on his elbows and his voice quieted. “Son, do you know what your mother really believed? There were so many things I never asked her. I always thought we’d have a lot of time together when we got old.”
A humble yearning crept over his big face, he was embarrassed and tried to smile and felt his lips too stiff for it, and he waited, his thick reddish eyebrows hanging far over his sad grey eyes.
“I never asked her, either, Father,” David replied. It was repulsive to see his father soft and actually quivering with inexplicable anxiety. Then, seeing his shadowed eyes, he felt sorry for him, growing old alone, and pity illumined his understanding. He had a momentary vision of what it might mean to a man to lose a woman like his mother while love was still alive between them. Out of his pity he spoke, “But I know that she believed in the things Dr. Barton talks about — in immortality, for instance.”
“You think so!” his father exclaimed. “Well, that relieves my mind. I’ve been worrying about things, putting so much money into the memorial when maybe she—”
David did not reply and they sat in silence, neither knowing what to say, for MacArd would not face the possibility that his son agreed with the Indian. When he did speak it was to say mildly, “I shall be glad if you will go up there and see how things are getting on. I am very much engaged now.”
“I wish I could be more useful to you, Father,” David said when he paused.
“No one can help me,” MacArd replied. “The country itself is on skids. Unless someone with common sense comes along we are headed for ruin. One of these days our creditors in Europe and even in Asia are going to get scared and insist on being paid in gold, and we haven’t enough gold in the national treasury to meet our debts, that is the plain truth of it. If the Silverites win the battle and we go into bimetallism, we’re done for. If only I could find some fellow, a chemist, who could work gold out of low grade ore—”