"Yes," he said, with a composure he did not feel, "the book is apparently not quite straight—a kind of joke, in fact."
Electra rose. She looked very thoughtful and also, Madam Fulton thought, with a quaking at her guilty heart, rather terrible. She was pinched at the nostrils and white about the lips.
"What I must do first," she was saying, as if to herself, "is to notify the club we cannot possibly have our inquiry afternoon."
"Notify them!" repeated Madam Fulton, in a spasm of fearful admiration. "Are you going to tell all those women?"
Electra included her in that absent glance. Now that there were things to arrange, dates to cancel, topics to consider, she was on her own ground. She spoke with dignity:—
"I shall most certainly tell nobody. A thing like that had better die as soon as possible. I cannot"—she turned upon her grandmother, a look of passionate interrogation on her face—"I cannot understand you."
Madam Fulton answered humbly, yet with some eagerness, as if Electra might readily be excused from so stiff a task,
"You never would, Electra, not if you lived a hundred years."
Electra was the accuser now, age and kinship quite forgotten.
"Why did you do a thing like that?"
"For fun," said the old lady faintly.
"For fun!" The tree of sin grew and flowered as she thought upon it. "You offered to buy this house with that money, unclean money from the sales of that fraudulent book!"
Madam Fulton turned to Billy Stark with a childlike gesture of real surprise.
"Is it unclean money, Billy?" she asked. "Do you call it that?"
"We mustn't go too far," Billy temporized, with a warning look at Electra.
She was on the way to the door. There she paused.
"I do not fully understand it yet," she was saying. "It is monstrous. I dare say I never shall understand it." Then they heard her rustling up the stairs.
Madam Fulton and her old friend looked at each other. When a door closed overhead, Billy's face relaxed and Madam Fulton put a hand over her lips.
"Billy," said she weakly, "am I so bad?"
"You're a dear, Florrie. Don't you worry."
"But, Billy, is she right?"
"Oh, yes, my dear, she's right."
"I'm a shocking person, then!"
"Yes, you're truly shocking. But you're a dear, Florrie, you're a dear."
And now it was night again and Rose hurried away to the tryst. She made no doubt that she should find him there.
"Playmate!" she called.
"Here," answered the voice. "There's your chair. There's your throne."
She plunged into the thick of the confidence intended for him.
"He has come."
"I know it. Peter told me."
"It's all as bad as I thought. Playmate, I'm afraid I shall have to go away."
"Can't you stand up to it?"
"I don't know. It's pretty bad."
"I guess it will have to come to your telling me about it."
"Yes. You see, the worst of it is, he wants to make me love somebody I can't love."
"Peter?"
"No, no, not Peter. Not nice, like Peter."
"Could you love Peter?"
"Why should you ask me that? Peter belongs to Electra."
"Not so very much. Could you love him if he asked you to?"
"Oh, that's not fair, playmate!"
"Yes, it is, when the night's as dark as this and it's only you and me. Could you love Peter?"
"Why do you want to know?"
"I want to know everything about you. Could you love Peter?"
For some reason, she felt constrained to use one of her small obstinacies.
"I couldn't love any man when another woman stood between us."
"That's a good girl. Did you love your husband?"
"My husband!" She choked upon the word. "Tom Fulton! Did you know him?"
"Oh, yes, I knew him."
"Was it likely I loved him?"
He was considering, it seemed.
"Yes," he said then, "it's very likely. Tom was a handsome devil."
"But he was—a devil."
"A woman wouldn't know that, not at first."
"No. I didn't, at first."
"Who is this other man?"
"A prince."
"So you would be a princess."
"No, I should not be a princess." Her voice had a curious sound.
"What has your father to do with it?"
"Everything. The prince can advance him in certain ways. My father plays for high stakes."
"Are you sure you don't want to be a princess?" The voice seemed to coax her. "Even if you do want it very much," it seemed to say, "why not relinquish it and stay here under the tree?"
"No," she said, "I don't want to be a princess, even if I could be. And I don't want anything my father can offer me, or buy for me, or steal for me."
"Then, playmate, when he comes back, you'll have to stand up to him or—cut."
At that moment he saw before him the imagined picture of her face with the tears upon it.
"It isn't easy," she was saying. "If you knew my father, you would see. You can't withstand him, he looks so kind. You can't refuse him, because he seems to want nothing but your good. You can't say you won't have a splendid time with him, because you simply have it."
"Are you sure he is so bad?"
"I am sure," she answered gravely. "He is very bad. And it is not because he wills to be bad. It is because he wills to have power, and as if he were better fitted to have power than almost anybody—except that he is not good. Why, do you know what power he has? He wears a ring, the seal of the Brotherhood. Whatever order is stamped with that seal is carried out, even if it is thousands of miles away. When Ivan Gorof died"—she stopped, shuddering.
"What was that?"
"I can't tell you. It is too dreadful. He withstood my father. And when he was found, they picked up in the chamber a bit of red wax on a shred of paper—there was nothing else—but I know and we all know it was a part of the seal that held the warrant they read to him—the assassins—before he died."
"Did your father sentence him to death?"
"Who else? Sometimes I get thinking about it at night, and then it seems to me as if all the people in the world had been delivered into his hand. That is because I know I have grown to be afraid of him."
"Was he always cruel to you?"
"Oh, never! never in the world! When I was little, I traveled about with him, and I had the best time a child ever had. I was fêted, and carried on shoulders, and made much of because I was his daughter. Then I grew up and it all—changed." Her voice fell. She remembered the snare of the fowler, but that she could not tell him.
"Is he unkind to you now?"
"Never! it is unbroken kindness,—a benevolence, shall I call it? But it terrifies me. For under it all is that unbending will. And I keep hardening myself against it, and yet I know the time will come when he will have his way, because he is stronger than I."
"You must not let him be stronger than you. The birch bends, but it can resist."
"You don't know! If he were outwardly cruel, I could defy him. But he is like the sun that nourishes and then burns. He seems to have such life in himself, such great inborn power, no one can resist it. You almost feel as if you were going against natural laws when you go against him; and you know you'll be beaten because the laws are inevitable."
"That wasn't what you said of him that first night down in the shack."
"No! I scoffed at him then a little. He was so far away! Now I have been near him again and I tremble."
"But as you picture him, he's all good, all benevolence. You could convince a man like that."
"Never! He hasn't any soul. He is this great natural force that radiates power."
"Power!" echoed Osmond. "No wonder he's drunk on it. I could go down on my knees and worship it."
"Not such as his!"
"Such as anybody's, so long as it is power."
For the first time she began to comprehend his mortal hunger.
"Don't you go over to him, too," she said jealously. "Peter is under his foot. So is Electra. If you go over, I shall be alone."
"I shall never go anywhere to leave you alone." Then, after a moment, he continued, "So you are not sure whether the prince loves you?"
"He would call it that. It is not that to me."
"Of course he loves you!"
"Don't be too sure, playmate. I know the world. You know your garden."
"Then why does he want you?"
"It's a game. My father wants to buy him. He may want to buy my father. Then maybe he wants the prestige of owning the woman with the most beautiful hair in Europe."
"Is that your hair, playmate?"
"He says so."
"Well, a man might do worse than gamble for a thing like that."
"You amaze me." But he would not continue that, and presently she asked him, "What have you been thinking about lately?"
"About you."
"When?"
"All day long while I was at work, and every night when I sat here and you didn't come."
"Was it a happy thing to do?"
"Very happy."
"Even when I didn't come?"
"Even when you didn't come."
"Then it's just as nice to think about me as to talk to me?"
"Almost!" He said it quite cheerfully, and through her pique she had to laugh.
"What do you think, playmate?"
"I make a world and I put you in it. Then I put myself in, too."
When he spoke like this, simply and even with a gay indifference, she wondered whether the world was a pageant to him, which it cost him no pains to relinquish, and whether, too, though he had great kindliness and understanding, deep emotions were forbidden him. At least, since he was impersonal and remote, she could ask him anything.
"What is your world? Is it like this?"
"It isn't my world. It's yours and mine. We go about in it, having a bully time, and nobody looks at us or asks us questions."
"Don't they see us?"
"Oh, yes, I dare say. Only they don't stare after us and say, 'Why do they do thus and so?' They don't even speak of your beautiful hair. I talk about that myself, all the time, and you like to have me. But we should both think it mighty queer if anybody else did."
"Do we speak to the other people?"
"Sometimes. If we want to. If you see a diamond or a sapphire, or I see a new patent weeder, then we say, 'We want to buy that.' But we don't have much time for other folks. We travel a lot. You tell me about pictures and Alps and thrones and principalities, because I don't know much except about grafting trees and sowing seed at the best time. But always we come home here to the plantation because I find that's where I feel most at peace. And you are at peace here, too. I am delighted when I find that out."
"Be delighted now, then. I am at peace here, more than anywhere else."
"And when we are here, we live in our house. At first, I built a large one up there on the hill, and I had you bring over pictures for it from abroad, and I planted trees, and it was very grand. But I wasn't contented there, and you weren't, because of it. You saw at once that my shell had got to fit me, and the plain house did. So I kicked over the big house, and we lived in the old one."
"With grannie?"
"Yes, only I didn't think very much about her. She was always there, I suppose, like the sun through the windows, very kind and warm, and glad we were contented; but it was our house. That's what makes the charm of everything—that it's yours and mine. I couldn't sleep in the house though. It had to be outdoors."
"Did I have my hammock swung in the upper veranda?"
He laughed out delightedly.
"How did you know? Yes, I slept down here or under the fir by the house, but you were afraid of caterpillars and you had to be up there."
"I'm not afraid of anything else," she explained humbly. "Not of bears or anything in the deep woods. But caterpillars crawl so!"
"However, it didn't make any difference where you were, because while we were asleep it was just as it is while we are awake—there is a fine thread that goes from me to you. There might be processions of people between us, chariots and horses and marching armies, but they couldn't break the thread."
"And what do we do all day?"
"Talk. Think. I think to you and you think back to me."
"But we must work. If we don't, you'll get tired of me." She spoke out of sad knowledge.
"Why, playmate!"
The reproach in his voice recalled her, and she was ashamed to find her belief less warm than his.
"Well," he conceded, "maybe we work. I go on grafting and sowing seeds and sending things to market, and you sit on a stone and sing."
"Shall I sing to you now?"
"No, playmate. It makes me sad."
"I could sing happy songs."
"That wouldn't make any difference. When you sing, it wakens something in me, some discontent, some longing bigger than I am, and that's not pleasure. It is pain."
"Are you afraid of pain?"
He waited a long time. Then he asked her,—
"Have you ever known pain?"
"Yes. I thought my mind was going."
"But not pain of your body?"
"Oh, no, not that."
"The pain of the body is something to be afraid of. If we have it once, we cringe when we see it coming. But your singing—can I tell you what it wakens in me? No, for I don't know. Pain, the premonition of pain. Something I must escape."
"Yet I was to sit by and sing to you while you were at work."
"Yes, but that would be when we were quite content." It was the first wistful hint that things were lacking to him. He could not be contented; yet, against reason, his manner told a different, braver story.
"You said," she began, "if armies came between us, they could not break the little thread. Suppose I go away?"
"That wouldn't break it. Don't you suppose my thought can run to London or Rome? It isn't worth much if it can't."
"Suppose I"—she stopped, appalled at herself for the thought, but jealously anxious to be told.
"Suppose you marry the prince? That would be dreadful, because you don't love him. But it wouldn't break the thread. It would muffle it, I guess. We couldn't think back and forth on it. But it would be there."
Immediately it seemed to her that she had something even more precious than she had guessed, something not to be imperiled.
"I must not do anything to muffle it," she said. "Either with the prince—or any one."
"The only thing I'm afraid of," he went on, "is that you won't stand up to your father. Why, you must, playmate, if you feel like that about him."
She answered bitterly.
"I am afraid, I suppose."
Osmond spoke out sharply in the tone of a man who dismisses dreams.
"Don't be afraid. Stand up and fight."
Her pathetic voice recalled him.
"But think! You said you were afraid of pain. You ought to know what fear is."
He answered slowly, and in what seemed almost exaltation,—
"I am afraid of pain; but when the time comes I shan't wait for it. I shall go out to meet it."
"What do you mean?"
He seemed another creature, all steel and fire, not an impersonal thing speaking out of the dark.
"Don't you know we all want something big, something bigger than we are to fight and conquer? Before we leave this earth, we want to make our mark on it, that shall not be washed away."
"Are you ambitious?"
"I don't know. I do know I mean to live—when I am free."
Alarm was quickening in her. He seemed to be withdrawing into dark halls where she could not see to follow. He was building the house of his heart, yet there were apparently other edifices, fortresses or dungeons, it might be, where he walked alone.
"When you are free?" she insisted.
"When Pete has got his gait and I needn't back him. When grannie is dead—dear grannie! Then I shall do my one free act."
She was so shaken that it seemed as if the night itself terrified her, not he alone.
"Not"—she paused, and then whispered it. "Do you mean—to kill yourself?"
He laughed.
"Not on your life! I am going to get all that's coming to me. But I am going to get it in my own particular way."
"I cannot understand you."
"Of course you can't. But remember all of you have something to bring to life. You give as well as take. You have your beauty and your voice. Peter has his brush. Grannie has her mothering gift. That's better than being a queen. There's power in it. Your prince has his inheritance. I have had to look about and choose my gift. I chose it long ago."
"Is it something that makes you happy?"
"It made me wild when I discovered it, because I saw it was mine. Nothing had ever been mine before. As it comes nearer and nearer, it looks pretty grim to me. But it's mine, still. When men used to go out to fight, they must have said a good many times, 'This is a nasty situation, but it's my quarrel.' And this is mine."
She felt her loneliness. At once it seemed that she had not yet known the real man. Their play at friendship, sympathy,—what was it?—had been only play. Like all men, he could bring the woman a flower, a crown even, "a rosy wreath," but the roses must wither while he chose his sword. She could not speak.
"What is it, playmate?" he asked presently. It was the old kindly voice.
"I must go back. I'm cold."
"Cold! It's warm to-night."
"Good-night."
He followed her.
"I did it. I chilled you somehow. Forgive me."
She could not speak, and he was at her side.
"I know. There are things that can't be talked about. They sound like twaddle. These things I've told you—they're well enough to think about. They can't be said. You're disappointed in me!"
But it was not that he had told her too much; he had told her too little. He had put her away from him.
"Good-night," she said again. "It's all right, playmate, truly."
His anxious voice came after her.
"It's not all right. I've muddled it."
Electra felt very much alone in a world of wrongdoers. To her mind moral trespassing was a definite state of action fully recognized by the persons concerned in it. She made no doubt that everybody was as well able to classify obliquity as she was to do it for them. She had stated times for sitting down and debating upon her own past deeds, though she seldom found any flagrant fault in them. There was now and then an inability to reach her highest standard; but she saw no crude derelictions such as other people fell into. It was almost impossible for her to think about grandmother at all, the old lady seemed to her so naughty and so mad. Billy Stark, too, though he was a man of the world, admirably equipped, was guilty of extreme bad taste or he could never have asked Madam Fulton to marry him. Why was he calling her Florrie and giving her foolish nosegays every morning? Rose and Peter, when it came to them, seemed pledged to keeping up some wild fiction beneficial to Rose; only Markham MacLeod was entirely right, and so powerful, too, that his return must shake all the warring atoms into a harmonious conformity with Electra and the moral law.
Moreover, she had the entire programme of the club meeting to reconstruct. Nothing, she inexorably knew, would tempt her to allow for a moment any further consideration of her grandmother's pernicious book. Yet the club was to meet with her, the honorable secretary, and it had no topic to whet its teeth upon. In her dilemma, she put on her hat and walked over to inquire of Rose when her father was to return. MacLeod's bubbling kindliness seemed to her so generous that she made no doubt he would talk to them for an hour, or even allow her to give him a reception.
Rose was in the garden, as usual, in the long chair, and Peter was painting. Ostensibly he was painting her, but the mood escaped him and he was blurring in a background. Electra remembered, as she went up the path, that still nothing had been said to her about Peter's painting. He might have been any sort of young 'prentice for all she heard about his work; and here it was beginning incidentally, like an idle task, with no reference to her. She had thought painting was something to be carried on gravely, when one had reached Peter's eminence. There ought to be talk of theories and emotions inspired by pictures in the inception, not merely this prosaic business of sitting down to work and characterizing beauties with a flippant jargon of words misused. "Very nice," "stunning"—that was what she had heard Peter say even of sunsets that ought to have moved him to the skies. He had a delicate-fingered way of touching everything, as if the creative process were a little one, of small simplicities: not as if art were long.
When she appeared that morning, behind the hollyhocks, Rose was about to spring up, and Peter did stand, expectant, with his charming smile. Electra at once made proper disclaimers, and insisted that the sitter's pose should not be broken and that it would be an immense entertainment to see the work go on. Peter brought a chair out of the arbor, and she sat down, erect and handsome, while Rose sank back into her unconstrained reclining. Rose wore the simplest dress, and her slender arms were bare. There were about her the signs of tasks abandoned, even of pleasures dropped and not remembered—the book half closed upon her finger, the rose and fan. Her great hat with its long feather lay beside her on the ground, and Electra, justly appraising its picturesqueness and value, thought, with brief distaste, that it looked as if it might belong to an actress. She asked her question at once and Rose answered. No, her father would not be here in time for the important meeting. She had no doubt he would indeed have said more than a few words, since the entertainment had fallen through. Here Electra interrupted her delicately and challenged the use of that term for so serious an issue. It could hardly be called an entertainment; they had simply been unable to consider the topic fixed upon, and it was necessary to find a substitute.
"Let me do something," said Rose, with her appealing grace. "I'll sing for them."
That accounted for her again, Electra thought, the unconsidered ease, perhaps the boldness. She belonged to public life; yet as such she might well be taken into account.
"What do you sing?" she asked.
Rose forgot all about her picture and sat up, looking quite in earnest. Peter held his brush reproachfully poised.
"I tell you what I can do," she said, after a moment's thinking. "I can give a little talk on contemporary music—what they are doing in France, in Germany. I can give some personal data about living musicians—things they wouldn't mind. And I really sing very well. Peter, boy, tell the lady I sing well."
"She sings adorably," said Peter. "She has a nightingale in her throat:—
"'Two larks and a thrush,All the birds in the bush.'
"'Two larks and a thrush,All the birds in the bush.'
"You never heard anything more sympathetic. I never did."
The "Peter, boy," had spoiled it. Electra grew colder. She wished she were able to be as easy as she liked; but she never could be, with other people perpetually doing and saying things in such bad taste.
"The club is composed of ladies who know the best music," she heard herself saying, and realized that it sounded like a child's copy-book.
Rose was still sitting upright, Peter patiently looking at her, evidently wishing she would return to her pose, and yet quite as evidently enriching his attention with this new aspect of her. She had turned into a vivid and yet humble creature, intent on offering something and having it accepted. The thought that she had something Electra wanted seemed for the moment the next best thing to knowing that Electra tendered her kinship and recognition.
"Please like me," her look begged for her. "Please tolerate me, at least, and take what I have to give."
The end of it was that Electra did accept it, and that Peter's painting was quite forgotten while Rose ran eagerly over the ground she could cover. One moment of malice she did have. While Electra was hesitating, she looked up at her with a curious little smile.
"You can introduce me," she said, "as you always have, as 'the daughter of Markham MacLeod.' That will give your afternoon an added flavor."
Electra answered seriously, "Thank you," and resolved to do it. Madam Fulton, she thought, would have the decency not to break the situation by her intemperate "Mrs. Tom's." Electra had no experience of contrition in her grandmother, but she could but feel that any woman who had done what that old lady had might be trusted to observe the decencies for at least a week thereafter.
"That was my public name," Rose added hastily, as if she had invalidated her claim. "I sang for eight months or more as Rose MacLeod."
It was a new triumph for her, Electra realized when the day was over. The ladies came down from the city and, in perfect weather, sat about on the veranda and in the two front rooms, while Rose, at the piano, sang to them and then gave them a charming talk. Electra, who could do no creative work, could not take her eyes from the young creature, all eager brilliancy and dressed in a perfect Paris gown. The dress, Electra knew, was no finer than she herself could amply afford to buy in her own country. Only it was worn with a grace, the air of a woman born to be looked at, and used to fervid tributes. The other women, too, were worshipers of notability, and Rose knew she had raised a wave of admiration. To her, unused to the American woman's passion for new things, it was a real tribute, something she could count upon to-morrow after the epoch of to-day; and the afternoon left her exhilarated and warm in momentary triumph. The women crowded about her with intemperate comment and question. They wanted to know as much about her father as they did about her. They were all eager to show their conversance with the Brotherhood, its aims and potencies, and they were more than ready to besiege her father and to entertain her. Some of them even wanted to make dates for the coming autumn, and Rose found herself the recipient of a score of visiting cards, all pointing to new alliances. She slipped away before the afternoon was over, to spare Electra the pains of thanking her, and going home, found Markham MacLeod at the gate. Immediately her hopes died. She had forgotten the issues she had to reckon with in him. From these no ladies' club could save her.
He was affection itself in greeting her.
"I have just come," he explained. "Peter is in town and Mrs. Grant is taking her afternoon rest. Let us walk a little way."
"I haven't my hat," she demurred.
He looked at her sufficient parasol and took her hand, turning her toward the road again.
"Come. We'll walk along to that grove. It is shady there. I want to see you before we meet the others."
She yielded, and presently they stepped in at the bars to the field where the grove invited. Under the trees she furled her parasol, and sat down on a stone. She looked involuntarily toward the plantation, below them to the west. There were the little clumps of nursery trees, the green patches of seedlings, and, dotted through the working area, men with backs bent over the rows. She wondered if Osmond were there, and the thought gave her, if not courage, at least the defiance that answers for it. MacLeod threw himself on the ground, and her eyes came back to him. He looked so strong, so much a part of all living things, that he seemed to her invincible. He spoke quite seriously, as if there were matters between them to be gravely settled.
"I have been wondering about the bearing of these people toward you. What explanation did you make when you came?"
"I made no explanation."
"What attitude did you take?"
"Peter introduced me to her. He went in advance, to tell her I was coming."
"Electra?"
"Yes, Tom's sister."
"What did Peter tell her?"
"He told her I was her brother's wife."
"Ah! and she accepted you?"
"No, she has never accepted me."
"What!"
He glanced sharply up at her, and she met the look coldly. Her cheeks were burning, but there was nothing willingly responsive in her face. She repeated it: "Peter told her Tom had married me. I have reason to think she told him she did not believe it."
"Has Peter said that to you?"
"No, but I think so."
"Did she send for you, to go to see her?"
"No, I went without it."
"Now, how did she receive you?" His voice betrayed an amiable curiosity. He might have been interested merely in the vagaries of human nature, and particularly because Electra, as a handsome, willful creature, had paces to be noted. Rose laughed a little, in a way that jarred on him. He liked mirth to sound like mirth.
"She was civil to me. But she has never once given me Tom's name, nor has she allowed me to introduce myself by it."
"The old lady used it."
"That was because I followed an impulse one day and told her. She followed an impulse and used it. She is a naughty old lady."
"Ah!" He considered for a moment. "If she did believe you, is it your impression she would expect you to—inherit?"
"I wouldn't have it." Her face quivered all over. "I never thought of that for a moment. Can't you see why I came? I was beside myself in Paris. There were you, hurrying back from the East and bringing—him."
"The prince?"
"You had written me he would come with you. When he saw me again, you said, he would not take 'no.' Peter was going home. Kind Peter! He said, 'Why don't you come with me?' He said Electra was beautiful, quite the most beautiful person in the world. I thought she would receive me. I could tell another woman—and so kind!—everything, and I could settle down for a little among simple people and get rested before—" She stopped, and he knew what she had meant to say: "Before you and your prince began pursuing me again."
But he did not answer that. It was a part of his large kindliness never to perpetuate harsh conclusions, even by accepting them.
"I shall go to see your Electra at once," he said.
She raised a forbidding hand.
"Do nothing of the kind. I insist on that."
But he was again reflecting.
"That puzzles me," he said at last; "that she should receive you at all if she does not believe you. Why?"
She looked at him steadfastly for a moment, a satirical smile coming on her face. These emotions he was awakening in her made her an older woman.
"I really believe you don't know," she said at length.
"Certainly I don't know."
"Why, it's you!" He stared at her. It was, she saw, an honest wonder. "She adores you. They all do, all her ladies. They meet and talk over things, and you are the biggest thing of all. I am the daughter of Markham MacLeod. That is what she calls me."
"I see." He mused again. "I must go over there to-night."
"No! no! no!" It was an ascending scale of entreaty, but he did not regard it. He got up and offered her his hand.
"Come," he said. "Peter will be back. By the way," he added, as she followed him laggingly, "does Peter know why you came to America?"
"Peter thought it the most natural thing in the world to wish to be with Tom's relations."
"You haven't told him about the prince?"
"I have been entirely loyal to you—with Peter. Don't be afraid. He, too, adores you."
They walked on in silence. At the house they found grannie, now in her afternoon muslin, cheerfully ready for a new guest, and Peter in extreme delight at seeing him.
Markham MacLeod, once in his own room, sat down and stretched his legs before him. As he ruminated, his face fell into lines. Nobody ever saw them,—even he,—because in public, and before his glass, he had a way of plumping himself into cheerfulness. His tortuous thoughts were for his inmost mind. Whatever he planned, no one knew he was planning; only his results came to him in the eye of the world.
After supper, which had been, grannie thought, a brilliant occasion, MacLeod took his hat and said to Peter, with an air of proposing the simplest possible thing,—
"I am going over to pay my respects to your neighbor."
Peter stared frankly.
"She was so kind as to invite me to luncheon, you know," MacLeod explained from the doorway. "I want to call at once."
"I'll go with you," said Peter.
"No, no! It's a first occasion. She'll want to catechise me, and you've heard all the answers. I rather depend on her putting straight questions."
It was not the custom to wonder at MacLeod. Whatever he did bore the stamp of privilege. He was "the chief." So he walked away through the summer dusk, and Peter and Rose, on the veranda, talked Paris while grannie listened, in a pleasant daze, not always sure, through age's necromancy, whether all the movement and action of their tone and subject belonged to the reality they knew, or to her own dream of a land she never saw.
Electra, the lights turned low, was sitting at the piano, nursing her discontent. She could hear the murmur of Madam Fulton's voice from the next room, broken by pauses when the old lady waited for Billy Stark to laugh. It all made Electra feel very much alone. Perhaps she had gone to the piano in a tacit emulation of the mastery Rose had shown, to see if, by a happy miracle, she also could bring to birth some of those magical things she never knew she felt until she heard others expressing them. But when she struck a chord, it was no richer and no more responsive than she remembered it in her old practicing days. Then she tried singing a little:—
"'Drink to me only with thine eyes.'"
"'Drink to me only with thine eyes.'"
And all the time she was recalling the liquid flow of another voice, its restrained fervor and dying falls. A thing so beautiful as this song, so simple, had its root, she began dimly to feel, not in happy love but in despair, and as it often happened with her, she seemed to be timidly reaching out chilled fingers toward emotions she feared because they were so unrestrained, and yet which had to be reckoned with because the famous people made them of such account; they were like the earth where all creative power has life.
Electra had given carefully apportioned time to music. She knew something of harmony, in a painstaking way; but at this moment she felt more than ever outside the house of song. She was always having these experiences, always finding herself face to face with artists of various sorts, men and women who, without effort, as it seemed, could coax trees out of the ground and make them blossom before your eyes. And sometimes she had this breathless feeling that the incredible might happen and she, too, might do some of these amazing things. Often, it seemed to her, she was very near it. The turning of a key in the lock, a wind driving through vapor, and she might be on the stage of the world, no longer wondering but making others wonder. These were real hungers. She wanted great acknowledged supremacies, and her own neat ways of action had to end ingloriously.
And at the moment MacLeod came up the steps, without hesitation she went to meet him. Any one that night might have been a messenger from the richer world she coveted. She saw him there smiling at her in the dim hall light, and the old feeling came back that she had known him before and waited for him a long time. They had touched hands and he had gone with her to the sitting-room before she realized that such silent meetings were not the ordinary ones.
"Did Peter come with you?" she asked unnecessarily.
"No. He wanted to."
"I am glad to see you!"
MacLeod spared no time.
"You have been very kind," he said, "to my little girl."
Rose, as any sort of little girl, implied an incredible diminishing; but the phrase served in the interest of conversational ease. Electra's eyes were on him, absorbed and earnest. There was nothing she believed in so much, at that moment, as the clarity of MacLeod's mind and heart. It seemed belittling him even to withdraw into the coverts of ordinary talk, and, if she wanted his testimony, to surprise it out of him by stale devices. She was worshiping the truth very hard, and there was no effort in putting her question crudely:—
"Mr. MacLeod, was your daughter married to my brother?"
He met her gaze with the assurance she had expected. It seemed noble to her. At last, Electra reflected with a throb of pride, she was on the heights in worthy company.
"Yes," he said, not hesitating, "she was his wife."
Electra drew a long breath.
"Then," she answered, "I shall know what to do."
He bent toward her an embracing look. It promised her a great deal: comprehension, sympathy, almost a kind of love.
"What shall you do?" he asked.
Electra choked a little. Her throat hurt her, not at the loss of what she was going to relinquish, but at the greatness of sacrifice with somebody by to take cognizance of the act. He would not, like Madam Fulton, call her a fool. He might even see where the action placed her, on ground he also had a right to, from other deeds as noble.
"I supposed I had inherited my brother's property," she said, in a low and penetrating voice. "I shall make it over to her."
MacLeod put out his hand, and she laid hers within it. When he spoke, it was with a moved restraint.
"That is a good deal to do."
"It is incumbent on me—ethically." At that instant she had a throb of high triumph in remembering that he, at least, would not gird at her choice of terms.
"It is what you would do," he said warmly. "It is exactly what you would do."
"I cannot do otherwise."
They seemed to be engaged in antiphonal praises of abstract right. It gave Electra a solemn satisfaction. She could hardly leave the subject. "I wish to do everything in my power," she announced. "I cannot ask her to live here, because I may not be here long myself."
"You will marry Peter and go away!"
Electra felt her face growing warm in the dusk, and an unreasonable vexation possessed her against any one who should have mapped out her purposes and given him the chart. He might know her. He was evidently destined to, she intemperately thought, better than any one else, but she could herself induct him into the paths of intimacy. There was no pleasure in feeling that he was bound to prejudge her through cognizance of this other tie she had for the moment forgotten.
"Did Peter tell you that?" she asked.
"I'm afraid I guessed it."
His frankness put her back on their pleasant ground of intimacy; it even brought them nearer.
"Why did you guess it?"
Here was foolish talk, she following upon the heels of his venture, as if there were something in the very dust of his progress too precious to be lost. But MacLeod, who cared nothing about inanities once their purpose was served, whirled her away from further challenge and reply.
"You must come to Paris," he said; "with or without Peter, you must come."
Her heart warmed and her voice trembled as she answered,—
"I should like it. I should like nothing better."
"You have been in Europe?"
"Oh, yes, for a year at a time. Three times in all."
"Lately?"
"No. The last time I was very young."
"You will see things with different eyes."
He seemed to be promising her something, in the fervor of his speech. Some one had said of him once that, in talking to women, he always said "you" as if it meant "you and I." It may not have been to women alone. Young men felt that in the reconstruction of the earth it would not be merely MacLeod who led the van, but MacLeod and each one of them.
"I should like," she dared, "to see the things you are doing. I should like to know—the Brotherhood."
"You shall know it. There are as many women in it as men. When the starving citizens marched up to Paris to ask King Louis for bread, the women's voices were loudest, I fancy. There is no distinction in our membership. Men and women serve alike."
"When could I join it?"
"Not too fast, dear lady." He was smiling at her. That warm tone of personal consideration soothed her through the dusk. "It involves hardship, the laying down of self. Are you ready for that?"
"I am ready," said Electra. Her heart beat high. At last life seemed large enough and rich enough to satisfy her.
"Your entire allegiance and a tenth of your income," he went on. "Do not pledge it unless you can keep the pledge."
"I promise. I pledge it, myself and all I have."
In her uplifted state, it seemed as if some spell had been laid upon her, and she sought to recall her lost composure. The occasion, she knew, was a very large one, and she must not, she earnestly thought, deprive it of dignity. He rose.
"Stand up," he said; and she also was upon her feet, with a swift compliance. "Give me your hand." She laid her hand in his. "Do you believe in the Brotherhood of Man?"
To say "yes" was not enough. She repeated the words,—
"I believe in the Brotherhood of Man."
They stood so for a moment, and then he released her hand.
"That is all," he said.
Electra felt as if she had sworn allegiance not only to some unknown majesty, but to him, and she was ineffably exalted. They two seemed to be together in a world of wrong, pledged to right it, and taking the highest delight in their joint ministrations.
"When do I"—she hesitated—"when do I pay in—money?"
"Twice a year," he answered cheerfully. "Peter will tell you those things, if I am not here."
If he were not there! Her wings of pleasure drooped. It seemed as if he were always to be there. And Peter! he looked like a small and callow personage seen through the diminishing end of a glass, compared with this great presence.
"I must go," he said, and Electra pulled herself out of her maze. "May I tell my daughter you accept her?" He made it all very delicate and yet prosaic, as if he quite understood Rose could hardly expect to be received without difficulty, but as if Electra had made it magnificently possible. Still she felt a little recoil.
"I can't talk about it," she faltered, "to her. I could to you. Let me settle all the details, and my lawyer shall submit them to you. Would that satisfy you?"
She spoke humbly, and Markham MacLeod, the chief of the Brotherhood, bent over her hand and touched it with his lips. Then he was gone, and Electra was left standing with that incredibly precious kiss upon her hand. She was poor in imagination, but at the instant it flashed into her mind that this was actually the touch of the coal red from the altar.
Markham MacLeod, walking with long strides through the summer night, drew in deep breaths, and delighted, for the moment, in the voluptuousness of his own good health and the wonder that he had been able to carry youth on into middle age. He had not been accustomed to think about the past or what might come. It was enough to recognize the harmonious interplay of his muscles and the daily stability of a body which until now, and that briefly, had shown no sign of revolt. What insurrection there was he meant to quell, and meantime to forget its possibility, as a chief may, for the time, ignore rebellion. MacLeod was plagued neither by unsatisfied desires nor by remorse. In his philosophy, to live meant to feed upon the earth as it appeared to the eye and to the other senses. He believed, without argument, that all the hungers in him were good lusty henchmen demanding food. Now, in spite of certain grim warnings he had had of late, he was filled with the old buoyant feeling that his body was a well-to-do republic with his own impartial self at the head of it. Justice should be done to all its members that they might live in harmony. If discomforting forces assailed the republic, they must be crushed. Some of these he might have recognized as regrets, the sort of spectre that was ready to visit Napoleon on a night after the campaign in Egypt. They were, he thought, inseparable from great power and the necessities attending its administration. But they were enemies of the republic, and he killed them. So his voice was always hearty, his eye clear, and his cheek that healthy red.
Peter he found in fits of laughter, and Rose mimicking certain characters known to them in Paris. It was encouraging, he judged, to find Rose out of her dumps. But she was only keeping Peter by her until MacLeod should come and help detain him. Peter had said something in the early evening about going down to find Osmond, who had of late, he averred, been off at night on his deep wood prowls. "No," Rose wanted to say,—and there would have been a choking triumph in her throat,—"he has been in the playhouse waiting for me." And because she could not go that night to the wide liberty of the fields, she would not have Peter wandering off that way and hunting up her playmate, breaking spells and spoiling wordless messages. MacLeod had not seen her so gay, not since the days in Paris before she met Tom Fulton, when she had been one of a changing wave of artist life, made up of students delirious with possibilities and all bent toward the top notch of reputation. He joined her and Peter now in precisely their own mood, his laugh and voice reinforcing theirs. Rose warmed more and more. Not all her dreary memories could keep her from delighting in him. He carried her along on that high wave of splendid spirits, oblivious for the moment to all his faults. Thus, she paused to remember again, it had been in her too-wise childhood when, seeing her mother wan with tears, she had yet put her little hand in his and gone off with him for an hour's pleasuring, though he was the fount of grief as well as gayety. He compelled her, the sheer physical health of him.
Peter rose finally, to give them a moment alone, and wandered off down the garden, singing a light song and then whistling it farther and farther into the dark. Something constricted the girl's throat. She remembered, in the silence fallen between them, that she was alone with the enemy of her peace, and felt again that old passionate regret that he had not allowed her to keep the beauty of her belief in him. He had swept away something she had thought to be indestructible. That, more than any deed, was the wrong he had done—he had set his foot upon the flower of hope. But MacLeod, his forehead bared to the night air, hummed to himself the song Peter was singing, and then spoke with a commonplace assurance:—
"She asked me the question."
"Electra?"
"Yes. She asked me plainly whether he married you."
"She asked you! How could she?"
"She did it without preamble. It was really rather magnificent."
"Did you answer without preamble?"
"I think so. At all events, it contented her. I said, 'yes,'—not much more, if anything."
There was a long silence, and he felt her determination to remain outside the issue, even to the extent of denying herself the further news he brought. When that became apparent, he spoke again, rather lightly:—
"She took my assurance without question. She said she should know what to do."
"What will she do?"
"The simplest thing possible—make over Tom's money to you. She doesn't consider, apparently, whether you are entitled to the whole of it, any more than she had previously guessed that, if your claim were just, you could have pushed it without her concurrence. She is a very intemperate person."
Rose did not intend to comment on the situation, however warmly she might express herself over Electra's personal standpoint.
"Electra did not strike me as intemperate," she said. "She seemed to me very collected, very cold and resolute."
"Yes, but her reactions! they'd be something frightful. I can fancy that pendulum swinging just as far the other way. They are terrifying, those women."
"How are they terrifying?"
Governing the wild forces in herself at that minute, she felt as if all women were terrifying when they are driven too far, and that all men might well beware of them. MacLeod rose, and stretched himself upward in a muscular abandon.
"Good-night, my dear," he said. "I'm going upstairs. I will see her again to-morrow. You need give yourself no uneasiness about the outcome. You needn't even concern yourself with the details. I shall arrange them with her."
Rose was quickly upon her feet. She felt more his equal so than when he towered above her at that height.
"If you see her," she threatened, "I will overturn everything."
"No, no, you wouldn't. Run upstairs now and go to bed. You are overwrought. This whole thing has been a strain on you."
"Yes." She spoke rapidly and in a low tone, fearing grannie's window above. "It has been a strain on me. But who brought it on? I did it myself. I must meet it. But I will not have you meddling with it. I will not."
"Not to-night, at least," said MacLeod, with unblemished kindliness. "Don't do anything intemperate. But you won't. I know you too well."
After a good-night she could not answer he went in and up the stairs. She could hear him humming to himself that gay little song. She stood there quite still, as if she were in hiding from him and he might return to find her. When the door closed above, she still stood there, her nails clasped into her palms. And for the instant she was not thinking of herself, but of Electra. It seemed to her that it would be necessary to protect Electra from his charm. Then she heard Peter whistling back again. She stepped down to the end of the veranda and stole across the orchard into the field. The night was still, yet invisible forces seemed to be whispering to one another. In the middle of the field she stopped, tempted to call to Osmond, knowing he was there. But because it was late, and because her thoughts were all a disordered and protesting turmoil, she turned about and fled home.
The next night Rose went early to her own room, and when she heard Peter and MacLeod on the veranda, their voices continuing in a steady interchange, she took her cloak, locked the chamber door behind her, and ran downstairs and out by the long window to the garden, the orchard, and the field. The night was dark and hot, and over in the south played fitful lightnings. In spite of the heat, she wrapped her cloak about her for an invisible shield: for now that MacLeod had come, she felt strangely insecure, as if eyes were everywhere. It was apparent to her that these meetings might be few, and as if this even might be the last; so it must not be interrupted. When she was once in the field, the hush of the night, the heat, and her own uneasy thoughts bewildered her. She stopped in doubt. His voice assured her.
"This way, playmate."
"I am coming," she found herself answering, not once but twice, and then, as she reached the seat he had ready for her, it came upon her overwhelmingly that such gladness was of the scope and tumult to bear two creatures to each other's arms, to mingle there, face to face and breast to breast.
But the quick thought neither threw her back in shame upon herself nor forward to his side. The night and the things of life together were too great to admit of fine timidities or crude betrayals. It was not of so much avail to consider what was done as whether the deed was true. She sat down, in deep relief at finding herself near him.
"Playmate," she said, "things are very bad indeed."
"Are they, my dear playmate?"
Her breath came in a sob, his voice sounded so kind, so altogether merciful of her, whatever she might do.
"Dreadful things are happening," she said.
"The prince?"
"Not the prince, this time. Worse things."
"Tell me, child."
She had ceased to be altogether his playmate. Deeper needs had called out keener sympathies, and she found some comfort even in his altered tone. She waited for a time, listening to the summer sounds, and vainly wishing she had been a more fortunate woman, and that these sad steps need not be retraced in retrospect before life could go on again.
"You will have to listen to a long story," she said at last. "And how am I to tell you! Ask me questions."
"How far shall I go back?"
"To the beginning—to the beginning of my growing up. Before I met Tom Fulton."
"When you meant to sing?"
"I did sing. But you mustn't think that was what I wanted. I never wanted anything but love."
"Go on." To him, who, in his solitude, had never expected to find close companionship, it was inconceivable that they should be there speaking the unconsidered truth. She, too, who, in the world, had tasted the likeness of happy intercourse, only to despair of it, had found a goal. Here now was the real to which all the old promises had been leading.
"You must understand me," she said, in a low voice. "I'm going to tell you the plain truth. How awful if you didn't understand!"
"I shall understand. Go on."
"I don't know how it is with other girls, but always I dreamed of love, always after my first childhood. I thought of kings and queens, knights and ladies. They walked in pairs and loved each other."
"What did you mean by love?"
"Each would die for the other. That was my understanding of it. I knew the time would come some day when a beautiful young man would say to me, 'I would die for you,' and I should say to him, 'And I would die for you.' It was a kind of dream. Maybe it would not have been, except that I was never much of a child when I was a child. I had ecstatic times with my father, but I was lonesome. The lover was to change that, when he came."
"When did he come?"
"He came several times, but either he was too rough and he frightened me, or too common and he repelled me, or—"
"And Tom Fulton came!"
"Yes, walking just the right way, neither too fast nor too slow, and all chivalry and honor. Oh, my heart! my heart!" She was sobbing to herself.
There was a long pause.
"So you married him," Osmond reminded her.
"Osmond!" At last she had said his name. She knew it with her mind, but how did her heart have it so ready? To him it seemed natural that she should use it, until he thought of it next day. She continued in that hurried voice that pleaded so, "I must make you see how I had thought of those things always."
"What things, dear child?"
"Loving and being loved. It was like your plants, coming to flower. There was to be one person who would give me a perfect devotion. There would be music and dancing and bright weather, day after day, year after year. That was coming to flower, like your plants."
"A rose in bloom!" he murmured.
"It was a kind of possession with me. I can't tell you what hold it took on me. There were years when I tried not to have a wrong thought or do an ugly act, so that I could be beautiful to him when he came."
"Behold, the bridegroom cometh!" mused the voice, in involuntary comment, as if it responded to the man's own wondering mood.
"He came. He made himself irresistible to me. He knew my father first."
"Were they friends?"
"My father has no friends—not as you would understand it. He touches people at one little point. They think they have everything; but it is nothing. Still, they understood each other. My father sold me to him."
There was silence from the darkness under the tree; only she heard him breathe.
"I was to blame, too," she cried. "But I did not see it then. I truly did not see it. My father told me it was nobler and purer to go with my lover so. Marriage, he said, had been profaned a million, million times. Where was the sacrament, he asked, in a church that was all rotten? He told me so, too—Tom Fulton. I went with him. I never married him." She paused for the answering voice, but it delayed. The silence itself constrained her to go on. "Do you know what Tom Fulton was?"
"He was a handsome beast."
"You never knew the half. But my father knew. He knew men. He knew Tom Fulton. And he delivered me over to the snare of the fowler. I lived a year with him. I left him. He had the accident, and I went back. He died. I thanked God."
Osmond had not often, to his remembrance, formulated gratitude to any great power, but he also said, "Thank God!" In a way he did not understand, she seemed to him austere in her purity and her rebellion against these bitter facts. There was no hesitation and no shame. She had only wrong to remember, not willful sin. One thing he had to know. He asked his question. "Was Fulton—kind to you?"
"At first. Not at the last."
"How was he—not kind?"
That, too, she was apparently thinking out.
"I can hardly tell you," she said at length. "He seemed to hate me."
"You!"
"I have seen the same thing twice, with other men and other women. You see, it was a terrible blow to him—his vanity, his pride—to stop loving me."
"I don't understand."
"You may not, ever. But he had had unworthy things in his life, attachments, those that last a short time. When he cared for me, he thought he cared tremendously. He believed it would last. But it didn't. He had nothing left to give me."
"He had gambled it away!"
"I think it hurt his pride. He could only justify himself unconsciously—it was all unconscious—by finding fault with me. By proving I was not worthy to be loved. Do you see?"
"You are a strange woman to have guessed that. You must be very clever."
"No, oh, no! It was because I thought so hard about it. For a long time, night after night, I thought of nothing else. When it died—what he called love—I thought the world died, too."
"My dear good child!"
"When he was dead, what was I to do? I thought I should sing. But my father was coming from the East with another suitor, the prince. The prince had seen me here and there for a couple of years. I had always been known as Madam Fulton. I called myself so at first, proudly, honestly. Then other people called me so, and even when I had left him, I let them do it. Peter stepped in then, honest Peter in his ignorance. He wondered why I didn't come here to Tom's people. Electra was a kind of goddess. I came. That is all." She paused.
Osmond spoke musingly.
"So you were not his wife! And Electra knew it."
"She did not know it."
"But she suspected it. She refused to own you."
"She suspected me because she knew Tom too well. I believe he had shocked her and frightened her until his world was all evil to her. There was another reason." This was a woman's reason, and she was ashamed to have put her finger on it. Electra's proud possession of her lover and her instant revolt at his new partisanship, what was it but crude jealousy? Yet there were many things she could not even dimly understand in Electra's striving and abortive life—the emulation that reached so far and met the mists and vapors at the end. "But there was one thing I did not want," Rose cried—"their money. I never thought of it. I only thought how I might come here for a little and be at peace, away from my father. Then when Electra hated me, I had to stay, I had to fight it out. Why? I don't know. I had to. But now it's all different."
"How is it different?"
"Because she has accepted me."
"But you wanted her to accept you."
"Ah, yes, on my own word! I believe I had it in my mind to tell her the next minute,—to throw myself on her mercy, the mercy of the goddess, and beg her to see me as I was, all wrong, but innocent. It is innocent to have meant no wrong. But when she met me like an enemy, I had to fight."
"And now she has accepted you."
"Yes." The assent was bitter. "On my father's word."
"His word?"
"Yes. He stands by me. He confirms me. She asked him if I had been married to her brother. 'Yes,' said my father."
"Why?"
"The money. Always that—money, position, a pressure here, a pull there."
"Then"—his tone seemed to demand her actual meaning—"your case is won. Electra owns you."
She was on her feet gripping the back of her chair with both hands. The rough wood hurt her and she held it tighter.
"Range myself with him—my father? Sell myself in his company? No! When I was fighting before, it was from bravado, pride, mean pride, the necessity of the fight. But now, when he confirms me—no! no! no!"
"We must tell the truth," she heard Osmond murmuring to himself.
To her also it looked not only necessary but beautiful. There were many things she wanted to say to him at that moment, and, as she suddenly saw, they were all in condonation of herself. Yet the passionate justice in her flamed higher as she remembered again that it was true that others had marked out her way for her. When she walked in it, it had been with an exalted sense that it was the one way to go.
"I cannot understand about the truth," she said. "I can't, even now."
"What about it?"
"Once it seemed as if there were different kinds. He told me so—my father. He always said there was the higher truth, and that almost nobody could understand. Then there were facts. What were facts? he asked. Often worse than lies."
"I don't know," said Osmond. Whatever he might say, he was afraid of hurting her. It seemed impossible to express himself without it. "Facts are all I have had to do with."
She seemed like a bewildered creature flying about in a confined space.
"You wouldn't say what my father does," she concluded miserably. "You wouldn't feel we have a right to the higher truth, if we feel great desires, great hungers the world wouldn't understand?"
"I only know about facts," said Osmond again. "You see, I work in my garden all day, nearly every day in the year. I know I must sow good seed. I must nourish it. I know nature can't lie. I didn't suppose things were so incomprehensible out in the world—or so hard."
"Haven't they been hard for you?"
"For me!" He caught his breath, and immediately she knew how the question touched him. It was as monstrous as his fate. But he answered immediately and with a gentleness without reproach,—
"Things are different for me in every way. But I should have thought you would reign over them like a queen."
"A queen! I have been a slave all my life. I see it now. A slave to other people's passions—Tom Fulton's cruelty, my father's greed."
"His greed for money? I don't always understand you when you speak of him."
"For money, power, everything that makes up life. My father is one great hunger. Give him the world and he would eat it up."
Images crowded upon her. It seemed to her that here in the silence, with the spaces of the dark about her and that voice answering, her thought was generated like the lightning.
"Do you see," she asked suddenly, "how I blame those two men, and not myself? I am the sinner. The sinner ought to own his sin. I don't know whether I have sinned or not. I believed in love, and because I believed in it, those two men betrayed me. That was how I was taught not to believe in anything."
"Don't you believe any more?"
"Oh, I don't know! I don't know!" It was a despairing cry. "There is kindness, I know that. Peter is kind. Your grandmother is the kindest person in the world. But that one thing I dreamed about—why, Osmond, that one thing was the most beautiful thing God ever made."