"Tell me more about it."
"You have thought about it, too. We can't be so much alike, you and I, and not have thought the same things."
"Are we alike?"
It was a wistful voice. She laughed, a little sorry laugh.
"Well," she said, "at least we are in our playhouse together."
"Ah!" He seemed to speak in spite of prudence. "That's not because we are alike. It is because we are different." But he went on at once, as if to keep her from interrogating that, or even perhaps remembering it. "I have forbidden myself to think of some things. When they came upon me, I went out and dug them into the ground."
She was filled that night with an imperative sense of life. It made her forget even him and his claim to be heard. The great resolve in her to be for once understood was like a crowning wave drenching the farthest shore.
"I have never had enough of life," she avowed passionately. "I have always had the appearance of it, the promise that the next minute the cup would be given me. But the cup was never there. Or if it was, there was muddy water in it. The lights have never been bright enough, the music has never gone on long enough. Why!" She seemed frightened. "Is that like my father? Do I get that from him?"
"It is because you are young," said Osmond. "And because you are beautiful and the world ought to be yours—to put your foot on it."
The passion of his voice recalled her.
"No," she answered humbly. "Not to put my foot on anything. No! no! no! Playmate," she added, "you are the dearest thing in all the world."
The voice laughed out harshly. The man was lying prone at full length where she could not see him, his hands upon the earth he loved, his fostering, yet unheeding mother that had saved his life for her own service. At that moment, it seemed to him, his eye turned inward upon himself, as if there were foolish irony in that friendly comment. He looked to himself rather one of the earth forces, supremely strong, waiting for some power to guide it.
"Elemental things are no good until they are harnessed and made to work," he heard himself saying, as in a trance; and then it was apparent she had not noticed, for she went on,—
"To be able to speak to any one as I speak to you! Playmate, it seems to me men might as well kill a child as kill women's innocent faith in love."
"But men love, too," he heard himself answering her.
"If I thought that! But when anything so beautiful turns into something base, and the creature we worshiped laughs and says it is always so, he kills something in us. And he can't bring it to life again. Neither he nor any other man can make it live. It is a dream, and the thought of it hurts us too much for us even to dream it over again.—What is that?"
Out of his web of pain he could only answer,—
"What, playmate?"
"Something sweet in the air."
That recalled him to his dear garden and the homely sanities that awaited him. He sat up and brushed the wet hair from his forehead.
"It is the lily field," he said. "A wind has risen. The flowers have been coming out to-day, and you get their scent." He laughed a little, tenderly, as at a child. "You said you never had enough of anything. You would have enough of them if you were there."
"Why should I?"
"The fragrance is so strong. You can make yourself drunk with it."
"Come, playmate! Take me there. Let us walk through them in the dark and smell them."
"No!"
"Why not?"
"It isn't good for you." He spoke seriously. "I know all about the preservatives of life, the medicines that keep us sane. I know we mustn't go and smell strong lilies at ten o'clock at night. We must go home and say our prayers and brush our hair and go to bed."
"Do you say your prayers?"
"Not exactly."
"But almost?"
"Well, since I have known you, I say something or other to the heathen gods at night about making you safe and sleepy."
"The heathen gods?"
"Well, not precisely. Grannie's unknown God, I guess it is. Unknown to me!"
"Why do you say we must brush our hair?"
He laughed a little, yet soberly.
"I read it in a novel, the other day. There were two young women talking together while they brushed their hair. Then I thought of yours and how it must hang down your back like a golden fleece."
"That's in Shakespeare."
"It's in me, too. A golden mane, then."
"Do you like novels?" Suddenly she had back her absorbing curiosity over him.
"Not much. I haven't read many."
"Why?"
"It's best not. They make me discontented. Seed catalogues are better."
"But you are reading them now!"
"That's because you have come."
"What's that to do with it?"
"For the manners and customs. I want to know how young women behave."
"You know how Electra behaves."
"Electra behaves like a Puritan's god. If an early colonist had hewn him a deity out of stone, it would be like Electra."
"Poor Electra!"
"Yes. You're far happier, all fire and frost."
"But why do you read novels to find out about me? Why don't you observe me?"
"Because I don't see you in the light."
"But you will."
"Never!"
"Never, playmate? You hurt my feelings. What if we should meet face to face in the lily field at twelve o'clock to-morrow?"
He answered sternly, and she believed him.
"I should never speak to you again. You must keep faith with me, or we shall both be sorry."
"Why, of course!" Rose said it gently, as if she wondered at him. "Of course I shall keep faith with you."
She heard him rising from his place.
"Now," he said, "you must go home."
"Why must I? The little side door is never locked."
"No, but you have been through a good deal. We must take care of you."
"I feel as if I had all the strength in the world. I could waste it and waste it, and then have enough to waste again."
"It isn't altogether strength. It's fire—the fire of youth. Bank it up and let it smoulder, or it will burn you up."
"How are you so wise, playmate? You are as wise as dear grannie."
He stretched up his hands in the darkness. The face he lifted to the shrouded heavens only the unseen citizens of the night could see, the beneficent powers that nurse and foster.
"It has been my study," he said, in a tone of awe, as if he had not before thought how strange it is never to squander. "All these years I have done nothing but think of my body, how to build up here, how to husband there. So much exercise, so much sleep, so much turning away from what burns up and tears. Well, I have done it. I have made myself into something as solid as the ground, as enduring as the rocks."
"Has it been—easy?" she ventured. "Have you liked to do it?"
"No, I have not liked to do it." Afterwards, in her own room, she thought of that question and understood the answer better. "I have never lavished anything," he said. "As soon as I saw what grannie was about, trying to give me a body to live in, I began to help her. We have done it. Sometimes I think she did it sitting there in her chair and praying to her God. I haven't done any spending. It has been all saving. But when the time comes, I shall spend it all at once."
She felt very far away from him.
"How, playmate?" she asked timidly.
He roused himself. "Never mind," he said. "That's not for us to think about to-night. Now run home, child, and go to bed."
"But we haven't decided about me. What must I do?"
He was silent for a moment and then he said,—
"A long time ago, grannie told me what to do. She said, 'Do the thing you think God wishes you to do.'"
"But I don't know anything about God."
"Nor I, playmate. But I think very often about what grannie said."
"Have you tried to do it?"
"I have kept it in my mind."
It was her turn to brood in silence. Then she said to him,—
"It doesn't seem to mean anything to you,—that thing—I told you."
"Everything you tell me means more than anything else in the world."
"But about Tom Fulton. I was not married to him. I lied about it. It isn't possible that I seem—the same—to you."
"You would always seem the same to me," he answered,—and she found herself smiling at the beauty of his voice. "How could you be different? These things are just things that happen to you. Should I like you less if you were caught in the rain, or got your pretty dress muddy?"
"How do you know it is a pretty dress?" she asked irrepressibly.
"Because it's your dress. Run home, now, and brush your hair."
She went at once, and, in spite of her doubts, light-heartedly. He made her feel, as the night did, that here in this present life, as in the outer universe, are great spaces still unexplored. Everything had possibilities. Sprinkle new pollen on a flower and its fruit would take on other forms. Stretch out a hand and you might be led into unguessed delights, even after you were dulled with pain. Sleeping in the air, even, were forces to nourish and revive, dormant only because we do not call upon them. She smiled into the night, and her heart called believingly.
Madam Fulton sat on the veranda, in the shade of the vines. It was rather early in the morning, and Electra was about her methodical tasks. Billy Stark sat reading the paper, but nevertheless not failing, from time to time, to look up and give his old friend a smile. Madam Fulton could not answer it. She felt estranged in a world where she had failed to learn the values.
"Billy," she said at length, "do you think she is right?"
"Who?"
"Electra. She says the money I got out of that pesky book is tainted money. Is it?"
Billy folded his paper and hung it over the veranda rail. His face began to pucker into a smile, but, gazing at Madam Fulton, it became apparent to him that she was really troubled. She even looked as if she had not slept. Her faint pinkness was overlaid by a jaded ivory. Her eyes interrogated him with a forlorn pleading. All his chivalry rose in arms.
"Hang the book, Florrie!" he said. "Forget it. You've had your fling with it. You wanted fun and you got it. Stop thinking about it."
"But," she persisted, "is it really true? Have I done a shocking thing, and is it monstrous to use the money?"
"You've been exceedingly naughty," said Billy. He eyed her with anxiety. "You ought to have your hands slapped, of course. Electra's done it, so far as I can see. So now let's get over crying and go out and jump rope."
"It isn't so much the book nor the money nor Electra. It's because I can't help wondering whether I'm a moral idiot. Do you think I am, Billy?"
"I think you're the gamest old girl that ever was, if you want to know. Let me have the horse put into the phaeton, Florrie, and we'll go out and jog awhile."
But she was musing. Suddenly he saw how old she looked.
"It's always been so, Billy. I never was able to see things as other people saw them. These rules they make such a pother about never seemed so vital to me. It's all a part of life, seems to me. Go ahead and live, that's what we're in for. Growing things just grow, don't they? They don't stop and take photographs of themselves on the twenty-third day of every month. Now, do they?"
"Florrie," said her old friend, still watching her, "I'll tell you what you do. You just run away with me and come to London. We've got fifteen good years before us yet, if we take 'em soberly."
She seemed to be considering. Her face lighted.
"I could almost do it," she owned. "Electra's having me here helps out a lot, but I could almost do it-on my polluted gains."
Billy Stark looked into the distance. In his earlier years he had loved to ride and take his fences well, even when they loomed too high. He could not remember many great challenges in life; but what he had recognized, he had not refused. Everything he had met like an honest gentleman.
"Florrie," he said, "I shan't want to leave you here in Electra's clutches. You come—and marry me."
She laughed a little. It was sadly done, but the pink came back into her cheeks.
"As true as I am a living sinner, Billy," she said, "I'd do it, if I were half sure how we were coming out."
"Coming out?"
"Yes. If I thought I should be pretty vigorous up to the end, and then die in my chair, like a lady. Yes, I'd do it, and thank ye, too. But a million things might happen to me. I might be palsied and helpless on your hands, head nodding, deaf as a post—damn, Billy! I could swear."
"I might give out myself," he said generously. "You might be the one to tote the burden."
The old lady laughed again.
"The amount of it is, Billy, we're afraid. Own up. Now aren't we?"
Billy thought it over.
"I'm not so sure of that," he said contentiously, "I'm not prepared to say I'm afraid. Nor you either, Florrie. Come on, old girl. Chance it."
"I'll think it over," said Madam Fulton. The brightness had come back to her eye. So much was gained, at any rate, Billy told himself. "There's that handsome girl coming, Tom's widow.—Electra!"
Electra's scales were beginning, with a serious emphasis.
"I love to see them together," Madam Fulton said. "She makes Electra mad as hops."
Rose was coming very fast. She had the walk of women well trained, for the stage perhaps, the spring and rhythm of art superadded to nature's willingness. She wore no hat, and the sun made her bright hair brighter and brought out the tragic meaning in her face. She had been thinking in the night, and this morning forbade herself to falter. All through her fluctuating moods there had been a division of joy and dread. The perplexing questions of her past lay heavily upon her; but when she thought of Osmond, she was light as air. He made everything easy, his simplicity, his implied truth. She felt a great loyalty to what seemed good to him. Her conscious life throughout the night and morning became a reaching out of hands to him in the passionate asseveration that she would be true.
Electra came, in answer to Madam Fulton's call. She, too, was grave, but with a hint of expectation on her face. She had been looking for MacLeod. Since their meeting, she had done nothing but wait for him again. Rose was running up the steps. She glanced from one to another of them with a recognizing swiftness, and when Billy Stark rose and placed a chair for her, she thanked him with a word, and took her place behind it, her hands upon it, so that she faced them all. There was a momentary hush. Madam Fulton put up her eyeglasses and gazed at her curiously, as if she were a species of tableau arranged for notice. Billy Stark felt uneasily as if this were one of the occasions for him to take himself away. Rose spoke rapidly, in her beautifully modulated voice, but without emotion.
"I want to tell you something. I was not his wife."
Electra was the one to show dramatic feeling. She threw her hands up slightly.
"I knew it." Her lips formed the words. Her triumphant glance went from one to another, saying, "I told you so."
Rose stood there with perfect self-possession, very white now and with the chilled look that accompanies difficult resolution. She glanced at Madam Fulton, and the old lady met her gaze eagerly with an unbelieving query.
"For heaven's sake!" she ejaculated, "Electra, why don't you speak?"
"I lived with Tom Fulton as his wife," said Rose, in the same moving voice. She might have been engaged in the rehearsal of a difficult part. No one looking at her could have said whether she duly weighed what she was announcing. "I called myself his wife because I thought I had a right to. Other people would have called me a disgraced woman."
Billy Stark now, without waiting to find the step, walked off the edge of the veranda and was presently to be seen, if any one had had eyes for him, lighting a cigar in the peaceful garden. Madam Fulton had spoken on the heels of these last words. She brightened into the most cordial animation.
"This is the most extraordinary story I ever heard in my life," she commented, with relish. "Sit down, my dear, and tell us all about it."
"There is nothing more to tell," said Rose. Her eyes traveled to Electra's face, and stayed there, though the unfriendly triumph of it shook her resolution. "I had to say this because I must say, too, that I do not want money and I will not take it. I do not want to be known as Tom Fulton's wife. I was not his wife."
"You wanted it a week ago," said Electra involuntarily. She had made up her mind not to speak, not to be severe, not to be anything that would destroy the picture Markham MacLeod must have of her in his own mind; but the words escaped her.
"That was before—" Rose stopped. She had almost said it was before her father came, but it was borne floodingly in upon her that this was not alone the reason. It was before she had felt this great allegiance to Osmond Grant.
"Your father confirms you," said Electra, yielding to her overpowering curiosity. "He says you were my brother's wife."
"My father"—Rose held her head higher—"I have nothing to do with that," she concluded. "It is the truth that I was never married."
Electra turned away and went into the house. They heard her step in the neighboring room. She had paused there by the piano, considering, in her desire to be mistress of herself, whether she should not go on with her music as if nothing had happened. But the thought of Rose and her mastery of the keys forbade that, as display, and she turned away and went upstairs, with great dignity, though there was no one by to consider the fashion of it. There she sat down by the window, to watch for Markham MacLeod. Madam Fulton had been regarding Rose with an exceedingly friendly smile. The girl looked tired, though her muscles had relaxed with Electra's going.
"Come here, my dear, and sit down," said the old lady, indicating a chair. Rose shook her head. Then, as she found herself trembling, she did sit down, and Madam Fulton laid a hand upon her knee. "You are a very interesting child," she said, with an approving emphasis. "Now what in the world made you fall in love with Tom Fulton? Did he seem very nice to you?"
"I can't talk about him," said Rose. It seemed to her as if now his shadow might be lifted from her. "It is over. He is dead."
"Of course he's dead. It was the best thing he could do. Well, well, my dear! What made you come over here and play this little comedy for us?"
The girl's eyes had filled with tears.
"I can't tell you," she answered. It was easy to defend her cause to Osmond; not to this eager creature who wanted to read her like a curious book. But Madam Fulton was almost whispering. She looked as if she had something of the utmost importance to communicate.
"I ask you, my dear, because I am thoroughly bad myself, and it's beyond me to understand why it's so important whether we are bad or good. And I thought maybe if you could tell me—did you know you were bad before you came and Electra found you out?"
Rose was looking kindly into the vivid face.
"No," she said, "I didn't think I was bad."
"That's it!" cried the old lady, in high triumph. "We don't any of us know it till they find us out. My dear, it's the most awful system—now, isn't it? You go on as innocent as you please, and suddenly they tell you you're a criminal. It's as if you made up your mouth to whistle, walking along the road, and somebody pounces on you and tells you whistling's against the law and claps you into jail."
Rose was smiling at her now, forgetful, for the moment, of her own coil, Madam Fulton seemed to her so pathetically young and innocent of everything save untamed desires.
"What under heavens does it mean?" Madam Fulton was insisting, with the greatest irritation.
"I must go now," said Rose. "I had to tell you."
Madam Fulton kept the detaining hand upon her knee.
"But where are you going?" she insisted. "Back to France?"
"No, I shall stay in America. I shall sing."
"Do you think anybody'll want to hear you?"
"They'll love to hear me!"
Madam Fulton eyed her smilingly.
"You're a brazen hussy," she said. "But of all things, why did you come here with your little comedy in your hand, if you didn't mean to play it out?"
"I did mean to play it," said Rose, laying her head back against the high rail of the chair. She closed her eyes, for again she felt the tears coming. "But I—got sick of it."
Madam Fulton nodded confirmingly.
"That's precisely it," she agreed. "We do get sick of it. We get sick of conduct, good or bad. They don't, the good ones. They go on clambering, one step after another, up that pyramid, and peering over the edge to see us playing in the sand, and occasionally, if they can get a brick, they heave it at us."
"Who are the good ones?" Rose asked languidly. "Electra?"
"Electra? She's neither hot nor cold. But she's of the kind that made the system in the first place."
"Grannie is good," said Rose absently.
"Bessie Grant? Yes, she's God's anointed, if there is a God. My dear, I love to talk with you, almost as much as with Billy Stark. You come and stay with me next winter."
Rose smiled.
"There's Electra," she reminded her.
"Bless you, Electra and I don't live together! I only visit her here half the year, to save my pocketbook. That's another proof of my general unworthiness. I flout her and mad her all the time. She wouldn't do that to me, but she'd drive me to drink trying not to. No, I've got a little apartment in town, like a hollow tree, and I crawl into it in the winter. You come, too, and I'll introduce you to all the people I know, and you can make 'em listen while you sing."
Rose was looking at her in a moved warmth and wonder.
"How kind you are!" she breathed.
"No! no! Only when you said you were a liar, and worse, I suddenly felt the most extraordinary interest in you. I feel as if you might speak my language. I don't know that I want to do anything bad, but I don't want to be kept so nervous trying to decide whether things are bad or not. You come, my dear—unless I marry Billy Stark. I may do that. I must, if it will plague Electra."
Rose gave her a quick glance, at once withdrawn, and while she allowed the last possibility to sink into the depths of her mind, Madam Fulton was interrogating her again.
"You don't think it is possible," she was urging, with the insistence of one who sees incredible good fortune, "you don't suppose you haven't any moral sense?"
She seemed to hang upon the answer. Rose, in spite of herself and the unhappy moment, laughed.
"I hoped I had," she rejoined, "but I don't believe I ever thought much about it."
Madam Fulton nodded quite gayly.
"That's it!" she cried. "Don't you see you haven't? When they have it, they're always thinking about it. It's like a cinder in the eye. My dear, you're just as bad as I am, and I thank my stars I've met you."
But all this touch and go was a strange, poor sequel to the task of that confession. It had all turned out very small beer indeed, except so far as Electra was concerned. Electra, Rose was convinced, in a moment of sadly mirthful fancy, was upstairs setting her judgments in order and decorously glad to have been proven right.
"I'll go now," she said, rising. She felt very tired with it all. "I've told you."
"But come again, my dear," the old lady insisted. "Be sure you come again. You are so understanding, I shall miss you sadly. Come every day."
Rose went down the garden path and noted, with some irony, that Billy Stark, still smoking, turned away into the grape arbor. It looked like the shyness of decorum. She could hardly know that Billy felt unable to bear any more revelations from womenfolk. And now she said to herself, "I shall have to tell grannie and I shall have to tell Peter."
Opportunity was easy, for Peter was at that moment coming whistling along the road on the way to Electra's. When she saw him, her purpose failed. He looked so boyish, so free and happy-hearted. How could she give him a sordid secret to keep, in place of their admiring comradeship?
"Where is my father?" she asked him, when they met and Peter had pulled off his hat and salaamed before her.
"Gone down to the plantation to see Osmond."
She took fright.
"To see Osmond! How does my father know anything about him? How does he dare—"
"Osmond sent for him," said Peter, turning to walk with her. He was tossing up his stick and catching it, in love of the day. "It's the first human being Osmond has expressed an interest in. But I don't wonder. Everybody wants to see the chief."
"Why should he have sent?" she repeated to herself.
"I'll tell you something," continued Peter. "The chief will tell you when you see him. He has been summoned."
"My father?"
"Yes. He is needed."
"Where?"
"He won't tell me. But it's urgent. It means canceling his engagements here. Of course there's but one supposition."
"Russia?"
He nodded.
"I wish I could go with him," he said impetuously.
She looked at him, and his face was glowing. She had seen that look so many times on other faces, that wistful longing for the unnamed beautiful. It was what Markham MacLeod was always calling out in faces. They might be young, they might be the faces of those who had suffered long experience, but always it was those who were hungry, either with the hunger of youth or the delay of hope, the cruelty of time. He seemed to be the great necromancer, the great promiser. Could such promises come to naught?
"To leave here?" she suggested. "To leave—" she hesitated.
"I shouldn't leave Electra," said Peter simply. "When I met you, I was going to ask her to go with me."
She stopped and held out her hand to him.
"Go," she said. "Go to her and ask her. I wish you luck, Peter—dear Peter!"
He did not look altogether a happy lover, as he stood holding her hand. He gazed at her, she thought, sadly, as if he dreamed of things that could not be. What was it in youth that made everything into twilight, even with the drum and fife calling to wars and victories? She was impatient with it, with deceiving life itself that promised and then lied. She took her hand away.
"Good-by, Peter," she said, sadly now in her turn, because it occurred to her that after Peter should have seen Electra, he would never again be her own good comrade. He would know. She left him standing there looking after her, and then, when he found she would not loiter, he went on his way. But Peter did not toss his stick up now. He walked slowly, and thought of what he meant to do.
They seemed to be walking with him, one on each side, Rose and Electra. It was chiefly the thought of Electra, as it had moulded him from year to year while he had been absent from her; but it was the delicate presence of the other woman, so wonderful by nature and so equipped with all the arts of life that the pleasure of her was almost pain. They seemed to keep a hand upon him, one through his fealty to her and the other by compelling and many-sided beauty.
Electra, in her excitement, found herself unable to stay upstairs at her accustomed tasks. She had to know what grandmother thought of this ill-bred woman. But speeding down, she saw grandmother in the garden path with Billy Stark. There they walked intimately arm-in-arm, and grandmother talked. There was something eager in the pose of her head. Evidently what she had heard quite pleased her, if only because it was some new thing. And there was Peter at the door. Instantly the light sprang renewed into Electra's eyes. Peter would do still better than grandmother to confirm her triumph, though at the moment even she charged herself to be lofty in her judgments and temperate in expressing them. Peter did not look at all like one who had himself heard unlovely news. His face glowed. There were points of light in his dark eyes. Rose had left them there, and Electra, with the sick certainty of the jealous, knew it. They went silently into the library, Peter holding, as well as he might, the lax hand hanging at her side. In the morning light of the room they faced each other, and she asked her question, the one that, unbidden, came leaping to her lips.
"Did you meet her?"
He knew whom she meant, for his thought, too, was full of her.
"Yes," he said, and then swept even Rose aside as deflecting him from his purpose. "Electra, I have decided to go back to France."
Immediately she thought she saw why. Rose was going and he had to follow.
"What did she tell you?" she cried sharply. The pang that came astonished her, it was so savage. Even in the haste of the moment, she had time for a passing surprise that she could be so moved by Peter. He was looking at her with innocent perplexity.
"Rose?" he said. "Nothing. I told her I was coming here and she—" He paused, for he was on the point of adding, "She sent me." Peter could see how ill-judged that would be.
Electra, her proud glance on him, was considering, balancing probabilities. With his artist's eye he saw how handsome she was, how like, in the outer woman, to his imperial lady. Such spirit in her could only, it seemed, be spent for noble ends.
"Has she told you?" asked Electra, and there was something, he saw, beyond what he suspected. Her voice rang out against her will: "No, she hasn't. She means, for some reason, not to tell you. But she has had to tell me."
Peter was staring at her.
"Has something happened to her?" he asked quickly. "I must know."
That mysterious rage she was so unwilling to recognize got possession of her again.
"It means a great deal to you," she breathed.
"Of course it does," said Peter honestly. "Don't keep me dangling, Electra."
Electra's mouth seemed to harden before his eyes. She looked like some noble and beautiful image of justice or a kindred virtue.
"She thinks I shall not tell you," she declared. "But I shall. It is no more right for you to be deceived than it was right for me. I shall tell you."
"Don't tell me anything she wouldn't wish," said Peter earnestly. He began to see the need of holding down the flaming spirit in her, lest it consume too much. "If there is anything she wants me to know, she will tell me."
"My instinct was right," said Electra, now with equal steadiness. "She was not his wife. Tom never married her."
Peter was tired of that issue. His controlled manner showed it.
"I know what you think about that, Electra," he said. "You see we don't agree. We mustn't talk about it."
Electra answered him with a gracious certainty.
"That was what she told me, Peter. She told grandmother, too. For some reason she has abandoned her deception. She has a reason for ending it. That was what she said. Tom never married her."
Peter's face was blazing, the indignant blood in it, the light darting from his eyes. He straightened. His hands clenched. His voice was thick with anger.
"Tom never married her?"
"That was what she told us."
"The damned scoundrel!"
Electra had been regarding him in serene certainty of her own position and her ability to hold it. But human nature flashed out in her, the loyalty of blood.
"Are you speaking of my brother?" she demanded.
"I am speaking of your precious brother. And I might have known it." Ire, gathering in him, suffused his face anew. "I might have known Tom Fulton would do the dastardly trick in any given situation. Of course he never married her."
"You don't seem to think of her," she reminded him, under her breath.
"Not think of her! What else am I thinking of? Poor child! poor child!"
Electra was always having to feel alone in the world. Art left her desolate when other people sang and painted and she could only praise. Love and the fierce loyalty she coveted were always failing her and lavishing themselves elsewhere. She had one momentary impulse to speak for herself.
"Do you wonder now," she said, "that I wouldn't accept her."
"Not accept her, when she had been hurt? Good God, Electra! how monstrous it is. You, a delicate woman, fully believed he had wronged another woman as lovely as yourself, and yet the only impression it made on you was that you could not accept her."
Electra resisted the impulse to turn away or put her hands to her face; the tears were coming. She held herself rigid for a moment, choking down the shuddering of her nerves, lest her lips quiver and betray her.
"I suppose,"—the words were almost inaudible, yet he heard them,—"I suppose that is because you have lived so long in France."
"What, Electra?" He spoke absently, his mind with Rose.
"These things have ceased to mean anything to you. It is not a moral question. You see the woman is pretty and you—"
"No, no! She is beautiful, but that's not it. I can't theorize about it, Electra, only the whole thing seems to me monstrous. That he should wrong her! That he should be able to make her care about him in the first place—a fellow like him—just because he was handsome as the devil and had the tongue of angels—but that he should wrong her, that she should come over here expecting kindness—" It was Peter who put a hand before his eyes, not because there were tears there, but as if to shut her out from a knowledge of his too candid self. But in an instant he was looking at her again, not in anger, but sorrowfully.
"Isn't it strange?" she exclaimed, almost to herself.
"What, Electra?"
"Strange to think what power a woman has—a woman of that stamp."
"Don't, Electra. You mustn't classify her. You can't."
She was considering it with a real curiosity.
"You don't blame her at all," she said. "You know Tom did wrong. You don't think she did."
"Electra," he said gently, "we can't go back to that. It's over and done with. Besides, it is between those two. It isn't our business."
"You could blame Tom!" She clung to that. He saw she would not release her hold.
"Electra!" He put out his hands and took her unwilling ones. Then he gazed at her sweetly and seriously; and when Peter was in gentle earnest, he did look very good. "Electra, can't you see what she is?"
His appealingness had for the instant soothed that angry devil in her. She wrenched her hands free, with the one hoarse cry instinct with mental pain,—
"You are in love with her!"
Peter stepped back a pace. His face paled. He could not answer. Electra felt the rush of an emotion stronger than herself. It swept her on, her poise forgotten, her rules of life snapping all about her.
"I have always known it, from the first day you spoke of her. She has bewitched you. Perhaps this is what she really came for—to separate us. Well, she has done it."
Something seemed demanded of him, and he could only answer in her own words,—
"Has she done it?"
Her heat had cooled. Her soberer self had the upper hand again, and she spoke now like the gracious lady called to some dignified dismissal.
"I find," she said, "I must have intended to say this for days. We must give up—what we meant to do."
"You must give me up, Electra?"
"I give you up."
"I came to-day,"—Peter's voice sounded very honest in his endeavor to show how well he had meant,—"I came to ask you to go back to France. We would live on a little. We would serve the Brotherhood—the chief says you have joined already—" Electra bowed her head slightly, still in a designed remoteness.
"I shall go to France," she said, "later. But I shall never marry you. That is over. As you said of something else, it is over and done with."
She glanced toward the door, but he kept his place. Peter was conscious that of all the things he ought to feel, he could not summon one. It did not seem exactly the woman he had loved who was dismissing him. This was a handsome and unfriendly stranger, and in the bottom of his heart surged a sweet new feeling that was like hope and pain.
"Let us not talk any more," she was saying, with that air of extreme courtesy which still invited him to go.
Peter walked slowly to the door.
"I am wondering"—he hesitated. "Why do you say that, Electra? Why do you tell me I am in love with her?"
He looked as shy as a girl. It struck her full in the mind that even in this interview she had no part. She had refused a lover, and he was going away with his thoughts stirred by another woman.
"I said so," she repeated clearly, "because it is true. You are in love with her. Good-by."
Peter turned to her with one of his quick movements and held out his hand. She did not take it.
"Won't you shake hands, Electra?" he asked. "I should think we might be friends." Honest sorrow moved his voice. Now, at least, he was thinking of her only.
Electra meant to show no resentment, no pain. But she had to be true.
"I can't," she said, in a low tone. "Good-by."
And Peter, seeing the aversion in her face, not for him, perhaps, but for the moment, got himself hastily out of the room and into the summer road. And there, before he had walked three paces, Peter began to sing. He sang softly, not at all because melody was unfitted to the day, but as if what inspired it were too intimate a thing to be revealed. He looked above him, straight ahead, and on every side.
The world was beautiful to him at this moment, and he had a desire to drink it up, to be as young and as rich as Apollo. He did feel very rich, not only in his youth, but in the unnamed possibilities trembling before him; and Peter denied himself no pleasure because it was inappropriate to the moment. It would have seemed to him a refusal of the good gifts of life and an affronting of the God who created plenty if, because he had lost Electra, he renounced the delight of a happiness he really felt. By and by he would remember Electra, how dignified she was, how irreproachable, in the moments when her virtues did not get the bit between their teeth and dash away with her; but now, under this abounding summer sun, with the leaves trembling, she withdrew into a gray seclusion like an almost forgotten task—one that had resolved itself into a beneficent fulfillment quite unlike what it had promised. Noble as it was, he had been excused from it, and he felt blissfully free. Something else that swam before him like the gleam of a vision did not look like another task. It was more like a quest for a hero's arming. It fitted his dreams, it went hand in hand with the visions he had had years ago about his painting, when that was all possibility, not work. This was the worshipful righting of an innocent lady.
She was there in view when he got home, as if she had waited for him, under a tree, trembled about by the summer green, her white dress flickered upon by leaves. She was pale; her mouth looked piteous to him, and his heart beat hard in championship. She half rose from her chair, and let her unread book fall to the grass beside her.
There were two things Rose wanted very much to know: whether Electra had shocked him out of his trust in her, and why her father stayed so long in that visit to Osmond at the plantation. The last question was the great one, and she asked it first.
"What can my father be saying to him?"
"Osmond? I don't know. Equal rights, labor, capital, God knows. Rose, don't sit there. Please get up!"
She obeyed, wondering, brushed out her skirt and put her hair straight, and then glanced at him.
"What for?" she asked. "What do you want me to do?"
Peter looked to her about eighteen, perhaps, nothing but youth and gleam and gay good luck. She felt a thousand years older herself, yet she loved Peter dearly. She would do anything for him. This she told herself in the moment of smoothing down her hair. His face brimmed over with fun, with something else, too. The seriousness that dwells housemate to comedy was behind.
"I couldn't say it with you lying there and looking at me," said Peter. "Nobody ever made a proposal to a lady in a steamer chair unless he was in another and the deck was level."
"Peter," she said gravely, "don't make fun."
Peter shook back the lock of hair he encouraged to tumble into his eyes. It was his small affectation. It kept him at one with his artistic brotherhood.
"I am rejected," he said, and do what he might, he announced it exultingly, and not in the least with the dignity he would have admired in the lady who had refused him. But at that moment Peter had had enough of dignity and the outer form of things. He wanted to be himself, light or sad, bad or good, and speak the truth as the moment revealed it to him. "But I am rejected," he continued, when she looked at him in a quick reproof, "turned down, jilted, smashed into a cocked hat. And I came just as quick as I could. Rose—"
"Don't!" she warned him. "Don't say that, Peter."
"Just as quick as I could get here without running—I couldn't run, there were so many pretty things to look at—to tell you, to beg of you"—Peter's voice broke. He was behaving badly to conceal how much he was moved. "I came to offer it to you," he said seriously, in a low tone. "Not what was given back to me, but something else, so much better you couldn't speak of 'em in the same day. When I think of what might be, it's all light and color—and the leaves of the wood moving. It's a great big dream, Rose, and you fit into it. You fit into the dream." He was intoxicated with youth and life. She was not sure whether it was with her.
"I hope you haven't quarreled," she said soberly. She wished she might recall him. "But if you have and are patient—"
Peter could not let her go on. He put out his quick, clever hands in an eager gesture, as if he pushed something away.
"Ah," he said, "I don't want to be patient! I want to be rash. I don't want anything back. I want something new and beautiful. I want to tell you a million things in a minute—chiefly how much I love you."
His voice had deepened. It swept her on apace, in spite of herself, because it was like Osmond's. For a moment she felt the kinship between them, the same swift blood, the picturesque betrayals. There was something at the heart of each that was dear to her, and Peter, for the moment, speaking in the sunshine with her eyes upon him, was also the voice out of the dark. But she had nevertheless to recall him.
"Have you really given each other up?" she asked.
"Yes," said Peter, in the same glad acquiescence. "And what do you think she told me, the last thing of all?"
She shook her head.
"She told me I loved you. And I do, Rose. Oh, I do! I do!"
"But that mustn't part you. Think what it is to me—to know my coming here has done it."
"Oh, you had to come!" said Peter light-heartedly. "It was preordained. It's destiny. I was a fool not to see it the first minute. She had to tell me."
Rose, in spite of herself, smiled a little. But her thoughts settled gravely back upon her own hard task.
"Did she tell you"—She hesitated, and then asked her question with a simple directness. "Did she tell you how much mistaken you are in me?"
"Please don't," said Peter. His face flushed. He looked his misery.
"You see she is the only one who was not mistaken in me. Those of you who believed in me—well, I must tell all of you. Even grannie, dear grannie! I am afraid—" She stopped because she meant to show no emotion; but it seemed to her that grannie, in her guarded life, must view her harshly. "I was wrong, Peter, ever to let you mix yourself in this miserable coil. If I could lie, well and good. Let me do it and take the consequences. But I should have known better than to bring you into it."
Peter stood thoughtfully regarding her in a very impersonal way, as if he debated how she could be moved.
"I wonder," he said at last, "how it is possible to tell you how lovely you are to everybody, how perfectly splendid, you know, quite different from anybody else! And when you add to that that you've been wronged and—and insulted—oh you've simply no conception how it makes a fellow feel! Why, I adore you, that's all. I just adore you."
He stretched out his hand like a bluff comrade and she put hers into it as frankly.
"You're a dear boy, Peter," she said, and her eyes were wet.
He spoke perversely, when she had taken her hand away:—
"That's all very well, you know, but I'm not a boy—not all the time. I love you awfully, Rose, in the real way, the bang-up old style, Tristan and all that, you know. I'm going to keep on and you'll have to listen."
"Shall I, Peter?" She was still smiling wistfully. Love, sweet, clean, young love looked very beautiful to her. She wished she could see it crowning some head, not hers, some girl quite worthy of him. "Well, not to-day."
"No, maybe not to-day," Peter agreed obstinately, "but other days, all the days. I can't give up the most beautiful thing there is, and you're that. You're simply the most beautiful there is."
"There's grannie coming out on the veranda." Then she added bitterly, "I wonder if she will think I am the most beautiful thing there is!"
MacLeod was not used to being summoned, except by high officials, and then if the meeting would not advantage his cause, he was likely to take a journey in another direction. But when Osmond's man invited him to go down to the shack that morning, he had agreed with a ready emphasis, and now walked along, smiling over the general kindliness of things. The change of air after his sea voyage was doing him good, and he had been able to command anew the sense of physical prosperity which had once been his habitual possession. That forbade him morbid premonitions and withdrawals relative to the bodily life. It hardly seemed possible, this robust guardian declared, that anything should happen to him, save after a very long period, when inevitable decay would set in. But in a harmonious mood and prospect retreated so far that it might almost as well not threaten at all. He had no doubt that when change fell upon the aged, it was as beneficent in its approach as the oncoming of sleep. But of these things he need not think, except as they might be brought to his mind by the disasters of other people. Acquiesce in the course of nature, said his philosophy, and refuse to anticipate trouble as trouble. It could always be curbed or stamped out when it came. That abounding certainty was a part of his power.
He found his way without difficulty. The neat rows of growing things led him in from the road, and directing his steps toward the shack, where he had understood Osmond lived, he saw a figure advancing to meet him, a man in a blue blouse, like a workman, beating his hands together as he came, to dust the soil from them. When they were at a convenient interval, the man looked at MacLeod with a measuring gaze, and MacLeod returned the challenge with what was, perhaps, too frank encouragement. He put out his hand, but Osmond shook his head. He opened his two palms, displaying them.
"I didn't expect you for a few minutes yet," he said, "or I should have washed. I'm just out of the dirt. Come on down to the house. We won't go in. There are some seats outside."
MacLeod knew at once, through the keen sense that served him in his fellowship with men, that the excuse was a true one, yet that Osmond was glad he had it to offer. He evidently had no desire to shake hands. That seemed reasonable enough. The man was quite unlike other men in his unstudied speech, the clear, healthy, and yet childlike look of his eyes. It was as if, working in the earth, he had become a part of it. When they were in the shade of the great oak tree by the house, each in his rough chair, MacLeod stretched out his legs, with much enjoyment, and offered his host a cigar.
"No, thank you," said Osmond. He felt briefly, and was ashamed of himself for entertaining it, a childish regret that he did not smoke. Every easy habit gave the man of the world an advantage the more. "Light up," he said grimly, as MacLeod, after a questioning look which seemed also a commiserating one, was about to return the case to his pocket. "I like to see it—and smell it—rather."
So MacLeod brought out his pipe and did light up.
"I smoke very little," he explained. "That's the way to skim the cream. It's the temperate man for flavors. Know that?"
Osmond, temperate in all ways from necessity, hardly knew how he should have felt about it if desires and delight had presented themselves to him as companions, not as foes. He pulled himself up, with an effort. MacLeod's effect on him was something for which he was not prepared. The man's physical fitness, his self-possession in the face of anything that might be required of him, made hot blood in Osmond. There was no ground for them to meet upon. Temperance of life in order to enjoy the more keenly? Then, to be honest, he would have to confess that for him temperance was his master, and that was a confidence he would not give. There could be no easy commonplaces. He spoke bluntly:—
"I wanted to see you."
"I wanted to see you, too," said MacLeod cordially. "Of course I know all about you. Peter talks about you by the yard."
Osmond's rebellious tongue formed the words, "I don't believe it." But he did not utter them.
"You've worked out a mighty interesting scheme down here," MacLeod continued, taking his pipe out of his mouth and looking about him.
"We have worked," said Osmond.
"It's like the older peasant life of Europe." MacLeod spoke rather at random, seeking about for some thoroughfare with his crusty host. "A sort of paternal government—"
"Not in the least," said Osmond. "My men are my neighbors. They work for me and I pay them."
"Without discontent?"
"I hope so. If I found a man doing half time and grumbling, I should kick him out."
"They don't combine?"
"We all combine. I get good work. They get good wages. It's a square deal."
"Profit-sharing?"
"No, not exactly."
"It strikes me as a sort of community," said MacLeod. "Everybody at work and everything in common."
"Now, why does it strike you that everything is in common? The place is mine."
"Ah, my dear fellow!" MacLeod forgot the simplicity of the moment and put on his platform voice. "Nothing is ours."
Osmond regarded him with a slow smile coming,—his perfect clothes, his white hand, his air of luxurious equipment.
"Isn't it?" he asked ironically. "Well, it looks mighty like it. But I haven't any data. I know what goes on inside my own fences. I don't know much more. What do you want of Peter?"
"To-day?"
"Any time. All the time. He has joined your league. What do you intend to do with him?"
MacLeod put his hands in his pockets and stretched his legs a little farther. He regarded the outer circle of hills, and then brought his gaze back over the pleasant rolling land between. Finally he looked at Osmond and smiled at him in what seemed a community of feeling.
"My dear fellow," he said, "I am not considering the individual."
"I am," said Osmond, with an offensive bluntness. "I am considering Peter. What are you going to do with him?"
"Your brother joined us of his own free will."
"Yes. But now you've got him, what do you want to do with him?"
"Isn't it of any use for me to tell you that when a man joins us, he has passed beyond personal recognition or privilege? Outside our circle, he is an individual; he counts. Inside—well, it is difficult to say what he is. We want him then to consider himself one of the drops that make a sea. The sea washes down things—even the cliffs. The drop of water is of no importance alone. With a million, million others, it moves. It crushes."
Osmond sat looking straight at him with eyes that burned. His hands, hanging at his side, were clenched. He recognized the might of the man, the crude physical power of him like an emanation, and he felt the despairing helplessness of trying to move a potency like that. Cliffs might be corroded by the sea; but a human force that respects no other cannot be easily invaded. He spoke without his own will, and heard himself speaking:—
"You haven't any soul!"
MacLeod was regarding him with as direct a gaze.
"What do you mean by that?" he asked, with a moderate interest. "Do you mean I haven't any mercy, any kindness? Is that what you mean?"
It was not what he meant. It was the indwelling spirit such as he saw in grannie, the mobile thing in Peter that, changing, blossoming in errant will here and there as the sun of life bade it, seemed in one form or another to proclaim itself undying. He shook his head.
"No," he said, "that's not what I mean."
A smile ran over MacLeod's face and moved it most delightfully.
"Well," said he, "if we're going to take inventories—have you a soul?"
Osmond shook his head again.
"I don't know," he answered.
"Well, then, what's the use of slanging me? If you're in the same box yourself—Come, who has one? has anybody?"
Osmond thought then of Rose, and of the fire of the spirit playing over her, that brightness he could neither classify nor define. Yet he must believe in it.
"Yes," he said. "I have seen it."
"You have? And you think I'm exempt. Why?"
Osmond was not getting anywhere. MacLeod and his own ineptitude of speech seemed to be forcing him into the solicitous fright of the mother, bent on shielding her child from the wolf.
"You are too powerful," he said, and realized that he was using the evidence Rose had given him, thought for thought.
"I hope so. I ought to be. I've got to overturn power."
"What's the use? You're a czar yourself. You're only another kind."
MacLeod looked at him thoughtfully, as if struck by the form of words.
"My dear fellow," he said, "is it possible you believe in the present state of things? Do you want one man to possess everything and the next man nothing?"
Osmond frowned his negation. MacLeod, unfairly it seemed to him, made him feel young and inadequate to the matter. He had the eyes to see what cause was just, yet he had not the equipment to maintain any cause at all.
"What is the use," he essayed, "for you and men like you to head revolts? It only means you are ruling instead of the rulers you overturn. It will all be done over again. The big man will rise to the top. The little man will go under. And in time you will have the same conditions repeated. It's because you are not teaching love. You are teaching envy and hate."
"How do you know I am?"
Osmond kept on as if he were speaking to himself, groping painfully for what he found.
"You are not preaching good work. You are preaching revolt against work—class hatred and discontent."
"Do you believe in non-resistance?"
"No."
"Do you believe in Midas, king of gold, swelled up with power, sitting smiling on the throne he has forced others to build for him, and saying, 'I am not as other men are'?"
"No. But I believe in work. You mustn't take it out of a man, that certainty that his own work is the greatest privilege he's got. Oh, you mustn't do that!"
There it was again, his hungry worship of achievement. It might even have seemed to him that oppression was not much to bear if, at the same time, a man had the glory of setting his hand to something and seeing it prosper. MacLeod, who knew something about his life, but nothing of its inward processes, began to feel that here was more than at first appeared, and answered rather temperately,—
"I don't believe you know much about the general conditions under which work is done. Work means to you Peter's painting a picture. Let it mean, for example, a great many Peters in a mine delving all day for some smug capitalist who wants to endow monuments to himself and get his children into society. What then?"
What then, indeed? Osmond could not answer; but a moment later he said again, tenaciously,—
"I don't want you to destroy the idea of good work."
"Well, now!" MacLeod spoke impatiently. He realized that here was not a man whom his torrent of bloody facts would move, but who demanded also a more persuasive rhetoric. "Well, now, you acknowledge the world is upside down. Shall we leave it so?"
Osmond shook his head dumbly.
"Shall we say the great scheme counteracts its own abuses, and we won't interfere? When an empire gets sufficiently corrupt, it tumbles apart of its own rottenness? Or when we see just cause, shall we go to war?"
"Grannie has the whole secret of it in her hand." This he said involuntarily, for he had no idea of talking to MacLeod about grannie. But the subject had passed beyond their predilections of what was best to say. "Science won't do it—war won't do it. Religion will."
"Ah! You are an enthusiast."
"No. But there is something beyond force and beyond reason."
"Religion, you mean."
"You can call it that. It is what has made that old woman up there at the house live every day of her life as if she were the multi-millionaire of the universe—without a thought of herself, without a doubt that there is an inexhaustible reservoir, and that everybody can dip into it and bring up the water of life. Sometimes when she told me that—how rich we all are, if we only knew it—I used to see the multitudes of hands dipping in for their drop—old wrinkled hands, children's hands."
He was musing now, and yet admitting the other man to his confidence. It was proof of MacLeod's charm that even Osmond, who kept his true self to himself, and who started by hating a girl's oppressor, had nevertheless fallen into a maze of self-betrayal. MacLeod spoke softly, as if he recognized the spell and would not break it:—
"Yet, the Founder of her religion said, 'I came not to send peace, but a sword.'"
"How do you know who the Founder of her religion is? I don't know it myself. I don't know but she dug it out of the ground, or breathed it out of the air. She has her sword, too, grannie has. You never saw her licking a boy for torturing a rat. I have."
"What shall we do?"
Osmond roused himself a little from his muse.
"I read something the other day in a book—about the town of Abdera. I suppose you know it."
MacLeod shook his head.
"In the town of Abdera they suddenly began to love one another, that's all. They went round chanting, 'O Cupid, prince of God and men!'"
"Is that going to obviate all the difficulties?"
Osmond looked at him with dog's eyes, the eyes that seek and wonder out of their confusion of incomplete knowledge.
"Every man would refuse to rest," he said, "while any other man was hungry. They would all be humble, the rich as well as the poor. Now, one's as cocky as the other. I don't know that the cockiness of the ignorant is any more picturesque than the cockiness of the privileged."
MacLeod was smiling a little. These, he saw, were pretty dreams, but hardly of the texture to demand destruction. They would fall to pieces, in good time, of their own flimsiness.
"Do you believe in kings?" he asked idly.
Osmond glowed.
"I know it's a mighty pity not to," he said. "Some people have got to be fostered chiefly because they have gifts. If you don't draw a little circle round them, you lose the gifts maybe, and you certainly lose the fun of adoring them. I'd like to be a soldier of Alexander—if I couldn't be Alexander himself. But you'll never get anywhere smashing round and yelling that one man's better than another because he works with his hands. No! the man that brings peace will bring it another way."
MacLeod regarded him for a moment curiously.
"But why," he said at length, "why won't you trust me to bring it precisely that way?"
Osmond smiled faintly.
"No," he said, "you couldn't."
"But why? You say I am extremely powerful. You rather accuse me of it. I am too powerful, in fact. Wasn't that what you said?"
"Yes."
"Well, why not trust me to administer your great awakening?"
Osmond kept his ironic smile of unbelief.
"You are not the man," he said. "You would not believe in it. You wouldn't live it. You are very powerful. But your mastery wouldn't serve you. That's where you can't pretend."
"Now where have you got your idea of me?" MacLeod was looking at him sharply. "You never saw me before to-day. Yet your idea was already formed before I came down here. Who's been talking to you?"
Osmond had entrenched himself at last in his customary reserve.
"You are a public character," he said indifferently.
"Has Peter been talking about me?"
"Yes. He speaks of you."
"But not in this fashion. Peter believes in me, over head and ears."
"Yes. He believes in you. I wish he didn't."
"Ah!" MacLeod drew a deep breath. "My daughter! Do you know my daughter?"
The question was too quick, and Osmond quivered under the assault of it. He felt the blood in his face. His heart choked him. And MacLeod's eyes were upon him.
"Do you know her?" MacLeod was asking sharply.
"Yes," Osmond heard himself answering, in a moved voice. "I have seen her."
MacLeod spoke with what seemed to the other man an insulting emphasis. Yet Osmond had not time to calm himself by the reminder that he was not used to hearing Rose spoken of at all as mortal woman. In his dreams she was something more than that.
"My daughter," MacLeod was saying, "has an intemperate habit of speech. If she has talked me over with you, she has inevitably made your opinions. For Rose is a very beautiful woman. I needn't tell you that."
Then something strange happened to Osmond. He experienced a sensation which he had accepted as a form of words, and had only idly believed in. He saw red. A rush and surge were in his ears. And as if it were a signal, known once but ignored through years of tranquil living, he as instantly obeyed. He was on his feet, his fists clenched, and MacLeod, also risen, was regarding him with concern and even, Osmond thought in fury, with compassion. The red deepened into black and Osmond felt the suffocation and nausea of a weakness MacLeod instantly formulated for him.
"My dear fellow," he was saying, "sit down here. You're faint."
But Osmond would neither sit nor accept the cup of water MacLeod had brought him from the pail left on the bench for the workmen. He stood, keeping his grip on himself and battling back to life. Presently he was conscious that Peter was there, calling him affectionately. Now again he felt the blood in his face, the wetness of the hair above his forehead, and he knew he was not the man he had been. MacLeod was speaking, in evident solicitude.
"Your brother has had an ill turn. He's all right now, aren't you, Grant?"
Osmond looked at him, smiling grimly. MacLeod seemed to him his foe not only for the sake of Rose, but because the man, great insolent child of good fortune as he was, represented the other side of the joy of fight. Osmond almost loved him, because it was through him that he had been inducted into a knowledge of that unknown glory. MacLeod picked up his pipe from the bench, tapped it empty, and pocketed it. He gave them a pleasant inclusive nod of fellowship.
"I'll trot along," said he. "See you at dinner, Peter."
"What was it, Osmond? What was it?" Peter was asking, in a worried voice.
Osmond suddenly looked tired. He passed his hand over his forehead, and put back his matted hair.
"Pete," he said, "I suppose it was a hundred things. But all it really was, was the rage for fight, plain fight. But whatever it was, I've got something out of it."
"What?"
"I know how men—other men—feel."
"Other men don't want to tackle one another, as a general thing, like bulldogs."