"Oh, yes! they recognize the instinct. They're ready to stamp on it. I wasn't ready. I'm glad to have met that instinct. It's a healthy old devil of an instinct. I respect it."
Peter was staring as if he did not know him.
"What was it, Osmond?" he asked again.
Osmond shook his head and laughed.
"I'll wash my hands," he said. "I feel as if there were dirt on them and the touch of clothes that are not mine." He stopped on his way to the bench where there was a basin and towel for hasty use. "Pete," he said, "you don't want to scrap a little, do you?"
He did not look like the same man. Light was in his face, overlying the flush of simple passions. He looked almost joyous. It was Peter who was distraught, older with a puzzled sadness.
"Don't!" he said. "Don't think of such devilment. There's no good in it. Why, we get over that when we are under twenty—except in an emergency."
"Ah, but this is an emergency," said Osmond, coming out of his washing with clean hands and a dripping face. "It was an emergency for me, if it wasn't for him."
MacLeod kept his thoughtful way on to Electra's gate. There he turned in with no lack of decision, and walked up to her door. She had seen him, and came forward from the shaded sitting-room. It was as if she had been expecting him. Whether she had acknowledged it to herself or not, it was true that Electra had never felt so strong a desire for the right companionship as at that moment. As soon as she saw him and he had put out his hand to her, she felt quieted and blessed. He was, as he had been from the first, the completion of her mood. As he looked at her, MacLeod, little as he knew her face, noted the change in it. She seemed greatly excited and yet haggard, as if this disturbance were nothing to what had preceded it. And her bright eyes fed upon him with a personal appeal to which he was well used: that of the lower vitality involuntarily demanding the support of his own magnetic treasury.
"You are tired," he said, as she drew her hand away and they sat down.
"No," returned Electra. "I am not tired."
"Tell me what has done it!"
The tender disregard of her denial broke down reserve. She looked at him eloquently. It seemed to her that he had a right to know. She answered faintly,—
"I have been through such scenes."
"Scenes? With whom?"
"Your daughter has told me"—She hesitated for a moment, and then, still confident that his worship of the truth must be as exalted as her own, ended with unstinted candor, "She says she was not my brother's wife."
Electra was looking at him, and it appeared to her now as if, in a bewildering way, his gaze absorbed hers. It was very strange, how he seemed to draw the intelligence of the eye into his and hold it unresisting. She hardly knew how he looked, whether surprised or sympathetic, or whether he was moved at all. But she was conscious of being gripped by some communion in which she acquiesced. After a moment he leaned forward and took her hand.
"Will you promise me something?" he asked.
"Anything!" The quickness of the answer was as eloquent as its force.
"Promise me that this thing—this subject—shall never come between you and me."
"Gladly."
"We won't talk of it."
"No."
"We won't ask each other how it seems to us."
"No."
"There!" He released her hand, and seemed also to free her, in some subtle way. He was smiling at her, and she felt a keen gladness, like a child who is told he has been good.
"Then we can be friends," he said, with a spontaneous relief, it seemed to her, like her own. "The best of friends."
"Yes. The best of friends."
Electra felt rich. Her heart swelled, as now she reflected that here was one who understood her. She had that warm consciousness common to all MacLeod's partisans, that his world and hers were alike. Each was mysteriously prevented by other people from enjoying the full freedom of that world, because each had been, until now, uncompanioned. But they had met at last. The path was plain. All sorts of gates were opening to them.
"Was that all?" MacLeod was asking her. "Were there other scenes?"
Immediately she wished to tell him everything. Yet this was difficult. She hesitated.
"I am"—she flushed redly—"I am not engaged to Peter. He doesn't care about me."
"My dear lady! He would say you do not care for him."
Then Electra saw her good fortune. She was enchanted with the freedom which had fallen upon her in time for her to accept a more desirable bondage. She lifted her head and looked at him in a proud happiness.
"No," she said, "I do not care for him. I never did. I see it now. I am free."
"Are you glad to be free?"
MacLeod had a way of asking women persuasive questions. Though they were interrogative, they had the force of suggestion, of the clinching protest he might make in answer, when confession came. And they only noted, long after, that he never did answer. Electra did not know that form of communion, and it struck her as something holy. She looked him in the eyes, with a clear and beautiful gaze.
"Yes," she said, "I am very glad. Now I am free to devote myself to the most wonderful things, to worship them if I like."
There was passionate sincerity in her tone. It would have made a smaller thing of her vow if she could have said she was free to worship him.
"I am going to tell you something. You must not repeat it."
"I never will."
"I am going back to France."
"You have been summoned!"
He smiled at her and shook his head slightly, as if the manner of it were the only thing he could deny. She followed with another question, rather faintly, for his news left her shivering.
"To France, you said?"
"That is all I can say," he assured her. "It will be France first."
"You will be in danger!" She did not put that as a question. It was an assertion out of her solemn acceptance of his task. But that he did not seem to hear.
"When are you coming to France?" he asked her.
Electra had now no more doubt of the unspoken pact between them than if it had been sealed by all the most blessed vows. It would have cheapened it rather if he had delegated her to the classified courts of sympathy. Instead, it left them a universe to breathe in. It pointed to undiscovered cities beyond the marge of time. It made her his in a way transcending mutual promises. This same full belief rose passionately to assert itself, and perhaps to soothe that small sharp ache in her heart, the kind that rises in woman when man, though he takes the cup, yet offers none in turn.
"Immediately," she answered, without question. "Or, when you tell me to come."
"Will you write to me there?" He scribbled a street and number on a blank card and gave it to her. "I shall not get word from you for a month, at least. Perhaps not until the late autumn. But I shall get it. And if I don't answer, you will know I shall answer by coming—when I can."
Even that seemed enough. It was evident that until he came she would be upholding something for him, keeping the faith. It was beautiful in a still, noble way, one that left her indescribably uplifted. Her eyes were wet when he looked at her. Seen thus, Electra was a fine creature, her severity of outline softened into womanly charm. It seemed unnecessary to claim from him any high assurance of what he had for her to do, yet she did say, for the pleasure of saying it,—
"You are going to let me help you?"
"What else is there for either of us to do," he said quickly, "but to help everybody?"
The blood rushed swiftly to her face and showed her in a glow. She leaned toward him in a timid and what seemed to her, for a moment, an ignoble confidence, because it touched such sordid things.
"I have some money. I will give that—and anything I have. You must teach me. I have everything to learn."
He seemed to promise that, as he seemed to promise other things, partly by his answering smile, partly by the inexplicable current of persuasion pouring from him. He rose.
"Now," he said, "I must go. It is nearly noon."
"You won't stay to luncheon?"
"Won't the others be here?"
"My grandmother and Mr. Stark."
She was hardly urging him, because it seemed to her, too, a doubtful pleasure, if it must be shared.
"Not to-day, then. But I shall see you again."
"Before you go."
Her face called upon him like a messenger beseeching news.
"Many, many times," he told her smilingly. "Many times, even if they have to be within a few days. Now, good-by."
She watched him down the walk, and as if he knew that, he turned, as the shrubbery was closing about him, and waved his hat to her. That seemed another bit of prescience,—to know she was to be there. Electra was very happy. She sat down again in a swoon of the reason and a mad hurry of what cried to her as the higher part of her nature, unrecognized until now, and thought of her exalted fortune.
MacLeod found Rose ready to question him. She was at the gate, to have her word immediately. He noted the signs of apprehension in her face, and, taking her hand, swung it as they walked.
"Has anything happened?" she asked irrepressibly.
"I've been down to—what do they call it?—the plantation."
"What did you talk about?"
"Oh, crops!"
"You don't know anything about crops!"
MacLeod laughed.
"Well, the other man did. I can always listen."
"Have you been there all the time?"
"No. I went in to see Electra."
Rose stopped short in the path between the banks of flowers. It was a still day, and the summer hush of the plot—a velvet stillness where the garden held its breath—made the time momentous to her. Unconsciously she gripped her father's hand.
"She has told you!" she breathed. Her eyes sought his face. MacLeod was looking at her smilingly, fondly even. She shuddered.
"You are a goose, Rose," he said lightly. He released his fingers from the clasp of hers and gave her hand a little shake before he dropped it. "But I can't help it. If you will go on tipping over your saucer of cream, why, you must do it, that's all."
They walked on, and at the steps she paused again, though she heard Peter's voice within.
"You're terribly angry with me, aren't you?" she said, in a low tone, seeming to make it half communion with herself.
"Angry, my girl! Don't say a thing like that."
"You look exactly as you did the night Ivan Gorof defied you—and the next day he died."
MacLeod laughed again, so humorously that Peter, coming forward from the library, his own face serious with unwelcome care, smiled involuntarily and returned to his every-day mood of belief that, on the whole, things go well.
"I didn't kill him," MacLeod was saying, as he mounted the steps.
Rose shivered a little.
"No," she insisted. "But he died."
MacLeod was beguilingly entertaining at dinner that day, and in the afternoon he and Peter went to drive. At supper, too, he was in his best mood, and that evening Rose, worn out by the strain of his persistent dominance, escaped to her own room. There she sat and counseled her tense nerves. She was afraid. Then when she heard the closing of grannie's door, she slipped downstairs to her tryst. The night was dark, and there was a grumble of thunder from the west. In her excitement she took swift steps, as if all her senses were more keenly awake than they had been in the light, and kept the path unerringly. She had no doubt that he was there, but he called to her before she could ask. His voice vibrated to the excitement in her own heart.
"Good child, to come!"
She found her chair and sank into it.
"I had to come." At once she felt light-hearted. There seemed to be no bounds to his protection of her. "I have told Electra."
"I knew you would."
"She has told Peter. They know it now,—all but grannie,—dear grannie."
"She can wait. She won't flicker. She won't vary. Nothing can shake grannie's old heart."
"What did he say to you to-day?"
Osmond laughed. It was a low note of pleasure.
"Platitudes," he rejoined.
"And what did you say to him?"
"Platitudes again. He said his kind, I said mine. I learned a few truths."
"About his business?—that's what it is. I can say it when I'm not in the same room with him—business."
"About me. I learned what other fellows know when they are boys."
"Did he teach you?"
"He? No. Yes. Through my hatred of him."
"Ah, then you hated him! Was it because I taught you to?"
"Partly. Partly because he is an insolent animal. He is kind because he is well-fed. Yet I think it was chiefly because he has ill-used you."
"Yes," she owned sadly. "I betrayed him to you."
But Osmond had escaped from recollection of the day into a mood half meditative, half excited fancy.
"I have been thinking back, since he left me," he said, "ever so many years. I see I haven't had any life at all."
"Ah!" It was a quick breath of something sweeter than pity. It could not hurt.
"I have been turning away from things all my life, because they were not for me. But now I think—what if I didn't turn away? What if I met them face to face?"
"What, playmate? You puzzle me."
"Grannie indulged Peter. Even in his eating, she couldn't refuse him anything."
"But she loved you best!"
"No doubt of it. But he was well. He could have anything, even hunks of cake. Grannie hates to deny pleasures to any living thing. 'I guess it won't hurt you!' I've heard her say it to him over and over. But to me—"
"To you?"
"Why, to me she never varied. 'Son,' she'd say, 'that isn't the way to do. We can't risk it.' So I turned aside and ate good crusty bread and drank milk. I didn't want cake. I didn't want Peter's coffee. But I wonder how it would seem to have ridden them all bareback, all vices, all indulgences, and conquered them after I'd known them—not turned aside and gone the other way."
In that mood she hardly knew him. The clean, sweet, childlike quality had gone; it had fled before this breath of the passion of life. She felt vaguely how wrong he was. He was idealizing the world as he did not know it and the conquest of the world as it appeared in her father, the master of all its arts.
"Playmate," she said, though she was doubtful of her own wisdom.
"Yes, playmate."
"There isn't anything desirable in evil knowledge. I've heard him say—you know—"
"Tom Fulton?"
"Yes. I've heard him say he wanted to know everything about life—bad and good. He was black with knowledge. I might have learned it from him. I thank God he spared me that. I wish you would be grateful for your clean life. I wish you'd see there's no magic in the things my father knows, for instance. It's better to make a lily grow."
"Ah, but I've discovered things in myself that are exactly like the things in other men—and other men are used to them. So when an ugly beast puts up its head, the man gives it a crack and knocks it silly. Then it lies down a spell, and the man goes about his business. He gets used to its growling and clawing away at intervals. He's only to knock it down. But I don't fully know yet what is in that pit of mine. I discovered something to-day."
"What?"
"The lust for fight."
She shuddered.
"I wasn't prepared for it. Another time I should be. It was an ugly devil—but I loved it."
She was silent, and after a moment he asked her, in his old anxious, friendly tone, "Have I hurt you?"
"No. But somehow it seems as if you'd gone away."
"I know. I'm still communing with that brute in me—the fighting brute. I must be honest with you. I can't help thinking he'd give me a special kind of pleasure."
"Would he?" She asked it wistfully. He had opened the windows of their house to strange discords from without. "What kind of pleasure?"
He was glad to tell. The magnitude and newness of his emotion that day made it something to be flaunted while the disturbed currents of his blood kept their fervor. Later he might put it to the test of equable judgment. Now it was all a glory of hot action.
"Playmate," he said, "I wanted to kill him."
"My father? Oh, why, why?"
"Maybe for your sake. Yes! there was an instant when I said I would kill him and free you from him." She could not answer. He heard the rustle of her dress and added quickly, "Now, don't go. Of all nights, to-night is the night I can't spare you."
"I thought it was the one when you didn't need me."
"I need you to listen. I'm a blaring, trumpeting egotist to-night. Please understand me! Stop being a woman a minute, and see how it would seem to be a man—not like me, but free to live and sin and refuse to sin."
"You are free," she said, in her low, pained voice. "You have refused all the ignoble things."
"Ah, but I didn't even parley with them. I wish I could feel I'd whacked them and broken their skulls instead of going the other way."
"Playmate," she cried, "you are all wrong. You must not parley with them. You must refuse to look at them."
"Refuse to look at the worm that eats the root? No. Find him and stamp on him. The worst of it is, I begin to be rather terrified. I see that life is a bigger thing than I thought."
"Not to grannie. To her it's big and simple."
"Because she knows the way. Well, what if there are many ways,—not like hers, not the true way,—but ways we ought to look at before we can say we know life at all? Think of it, playmate. You are a woman, younger than I, delicate as a rose; yet you know more about life than I. You know how to meet men and women. There aren't surprises you can't master."
She sat wondering what it was that had moved him, and whether it was not simply the power of MacLeod's personality, equally compelling to love or hate. But Osmond was going on in that fierce monologue.
"I feel as if I had been waked up. Once I had my riding dream. Now I have a million dreams. Did I tell you my riding dream? Some nights—chiefly when there's a moon—I wake and lie there and fancy I am on a horse. There's the smell of the horse and the leather, the creak of the saddle, and we are riding like the devil or the wind, always over plains that stretch out into more miles, however far I ride. I am bent over the saddle, peering forward. That's what I had when my blood moved too fast for me. Now I shall dream of fight. Playmate, what is it?"
"It isn't anything. I didn't speak."
"Yes, but there was that quick little breath. I keep hurting you somehow. Do you suppose I want any of it except for you? I want to ride to you. I want to fight because I could fight for you."
"Ah," she said sadly, "you think so now for a minute. But you had forgotten me."
"Yes, I had," he owned. "That's being a man, too. We have to forget you or we couldn't ride and we couldn't fight. But it's all for you."
There was the thunder again.
"I must go back," she said.
"Yes, it's going to rain. You must go. One minute. It won't come yet. Does he know you have told Electra?"
"My father? Yes."
"What did he say?"
"He—accepted it." For some reason, she dared not tell him how that acceptance troubled her. Osmond himself seemed like an unknown force as ready to bring confusion as calm.
But he knew.
"You are afraid of him," he said. "Dear child, don't be afraid. Sit down hard and say 'no' and 'no,' whatever he demands. You are here with us. Grannie is an angel of light. She'll send for shining cohorts and they'll camp round about you. There's Peter—your Peter. And I'll die for you."
"No! no!" The assurance of his tone was terrifying to her. She saw him dying in unnecessary sacrifice. "Nobody must die for me. We must all live and be good children and do what grannie would want us to."
"Then the first thing is to run home and go to bed. The storm is coming. Good-night, dear playmate. I'll follow on behind and see you don't get lost."
"One minute!" She paused, not knowing how to say it. "Can't you take it back?" she adventured. "What you said about my father?"
He laughed, with an undertone of wild emotion.
"Not even for you! I did want to kill him. If I got my hands on him, I should want it again. But it was for you."
"Good-night."
She was going, and he called after her,—
"Remember!"
"What shall I remember?"
She halted hopefully, and the old kind voice was near her:—
"Remember I would die for you."
Peter was early at Osmond's door. He did not find him working, though the other men had been many hours afield, but standing still gazing off into the distance. Osmond was pale. He looked as if he had not slept, and the lines about his mouth hinted at decisions.
"I want to speak to you," said Peter abruptly.
"Yes. I want to speak to you, too." The answer was gravely and almost unwillingly given. "Come out under the tree."
They took their way silently to the apple tree, but there neither could, after old custom in a talk, throw himself on the ground to luxuriate and, in moments of doubt, chew a blade of grass. Peter walked back and forth, a short tether. Osmond, fixed in some unexplained reserve, awaited him. Peter spoke first, nervously.
"Electra has given me up."
"Well, it was bound to come."
"Why was it?"
"It was a dream, Pete. You dreamed it when you were a boy. It was the best you had then."
"Well, there's something else. That's not a dream. But I don't know that I can talk of it yet. What was it you wanted to say to me?"
At intervals all night Osmond had been wondering how to broach it.
"You know, boy," he began at last, "it isn't good for you any more to have me send you money."
Peter stared.
"But it's our money," he said.
Osmond too stared, but not at him. He was wondering whether Peter could possibly fail to see that the money, all these years, had not come by favor, that it had been earned by Osmond's own arduous grappling with the earth, that struggle out of which the man had gained strength and the earth had yielded her fruits.
"You see, boy," he hesitated, "there isn't anything but the place, and that's grannie's."
"Yes, but the place earns something."
"Not without a good deal put into it."
"Ah!" Peter drew a breath of pure surprise. "You're tired of overseeing, old boy. I don't wonder. Of course you must let up."
Again Osmond waited, not so much to commune with himself as from sheer disinclination to face the awkwardness of speech. It was impossible to say, "I am not tired of serving you, but you must not be served. You must carry your pack."
"You see," he began again, "the place must stand intact while grannie lives. After that, we don't know. But now—Pete, you must paint your pictures."
"Of course!" But the response was wavering. Peter smiled radiantly. "Come, old chap," he said, "you're not going to make rules for me, because it's better for the white man to bear his burden."
Osmond, too, tried to smile, and failed in it.
"I don't know but I am," he said, with a wry face. "Pete, I want you to go in and conquer—earn your fame, earn your bread. I don't want you to depend on anybody, even on me."
Peter was wrinkling his brows. He was delightfully good-tempered, and money meant very little to him save as a useful medium of which there was sure to be enough. He had never regarded it as a means of moral discipline.
"That's very awkward," he said, "because—Osmond, I want to marry."
"To marry! You said she had given you up!"
"Oh, Electra!" That issue had withdrawn into a dim past. "Osmond, I have spoken to Rose."
"Rose!" Now again Osmond felt the blood beating in his ears. Was it the impulse of fight, he asked himself, or another, as savage? But this time he did not mean to be overborne. Peter was speaking simply and boyishly, with a great sincerity.
"I see now there never was anybody but Rose, from the minute we met. I told her yesterday."
"So you are—engaged." Osmond brought out the commonplace word with a cold emphasis.
Peter looked at him, surprised.
"No. She's not to be had for the asking. I had to tell her. But I've got to earn her. If you knew her as I do, you'd see that."
Osmond's brain was in a maze of longing to hear what she had said, and with it a fierce desire to escape that knowledge. Also he was overborne by a passionate recoil from his own suggestion of cutting off his brother's income. At least he might have some share in their happiness. He could work here like a gnome underground, delving for the gold to deck their bridal. And underneath was that new pain at the heart: that earth pang so sickening that it might well threaten to stop the heart's beating altogether.
"There never was anything like her," said Peter, out of his new dream. "She needs happiness, sheer happiness, after what she has been through. That settles it about living abroad." He looked up brightly. "We must be in Paris."
"You think she would wish it?"
"We should be near her father, near headquarters. For of course we should be working for the Brotherhood."
Osmond turned abruptly.
"I must get to hoeing," he said.
Peter followed him. Something in the air struck him with a new timidity.
"You know," he qualified, when they were well into the field, "she hasn't accepted me."
"No."
"I'm not the man for her, in many ways. Who is? But by the powers! I bet I could make her happy."
He took off his hat to strike at a butterfly, not to destroy it but to prove his good-will, and Osmond, without glancing at him, knew exactly how he looked, and thought bitterly that to Peter Rose was only one of a hundred beautiful things that made the earth a treasury. And to Osmond there was but one, and that was Rose.
Peter took the path homeward, and Osmond kept on across the field. At the farthest bound, he stepped over the stone wall into the bordering tangle on the other side, and crossed that field also and went on into the pasture, to the pines. This land was his, and the deep woods, stretching forth in a glimmering twilight, had been in many moods his best resort. He did not enter far, but sat down in a little covert where in spring there were delicate flowers. There he faced himself.
Everything brought its penalty, even life. This he knew at last. He could not feed on what he called his kinship with Rose and escape the suffering from a bond unfulfilled. Instead of halting outside the garden of being, smelling its fragrance and thankful for a breath, he was inside with other men who owned the garden and felt free to eat the fruit. He had never really been outside the garden at all. He had merely been turning away from the blossoming trees, denying himself the certainty of what the fruit might be, working carefully about the roots and learning the unseeing patience of the earthworm. And the one flower had bloomed in the garden at last, so sweet he could not ignore it, so white it lighted the air like a lamp that was stronger than the sun. He had bade himself never to forget that he was not like other men; but he was exactly like other men, for he loved a woman.
As he sat there, overcome by this conviction of the tyranny of the universe, one thought pierced him like the light of stars. He could have made her happy. A sweet exultancy told him that her nature turned to him as irrevocably as the needle to the north. He could sway and dominate her. He could comfort her with the unconsidered tenderness that, when he thought of her, came with his breath. As by a revelation he understood what she had meant when she told him how love had been her waiting dream. In a passion of sympathy he saw her trailing through sad undergrowths in pursuit of that luring light—now stumbling in the bog of earthy desires other hands had led her to, now pricked by thorns of disappointment, but never for a moment sullied through that wretched progress; and when the marsh was past, washing her garments and her feet in the water of life—that unquenchable spring of belief in the mystery. That was what it was, the divine mystery, the force that led through all appearance to the real, through all false glitter to the light. It was a heavenly vision, the possibility as she saw it: the rounded life, the two bound in a mutual worship, carrying their full cup carefully to the altar where they would make their vows. He saw how lesser desires could be wiped out by one pure passion, how no price is too great to pay for the soul's treasure, not so much the possession of it, but the guarding it for all the uses of the world.
While he lay there, the scent of the pines in his nostrils, it seemed to him that he was living through the progress of his completed life with her. There was not only the overwhelming passion of it, but the intimate communion of quiet days. She would turn to him for counsel and for sustenance, as he would turn to her. This would be the interchange of needs and kindnesses. There would be funny little queernesses of the day to keep them laughing; and they would be kind, not forgetful in their castle of content, but kind, the stronger that they had multiplied their strength by union.
And then settled upon him again his wonder at the inexorability of things, that a man could not escape the general laws because he willed to live outside them. He was bound round by necessity. Merely because he would not take a mate, he was not exempt from crying out for her. And as the day went on and the vividness of his first high vision faded, his mind went back to Peter and the incredible truth that Peter also knew he could make her happy. The cloud of jealousy darkened again, and he met earth pangs and strangled them. But as he slew them, more were born, and lying there in the fern he hated his brother and his brother's body, born to regnancy. MacLeod, too, appeared before his inward vision, wholesome, well-equipped, riding the earth as Apollo drives the horses of the sun. Him, too, he hated, and for Rose's sake longed again to put him away with his own hands out of the air she breathed. Spent by his passions, he lingered there in the coolness of the unheeding woods while the afternoon gloomed into night.
Madam Fulton sat on the veranda, thinking sadly. She found herself puzzled by one thing most of all. Several times a day she had asked Billy Stark, "Do you really believe there's anything in that notion about money's being tainted?"
"Don't fret yourself," he counseled her, in his kind voice; but she would sit wrinkling her brows and putting the question again to herself, if not to him.
"The trouble is, Billy," she had said, this morning, "I get so puzzled. It's like trying to learn a new language when you're old. My eyes are too blurred to see the accents. My ears are dulled. There's that girl that comes looking like an angel and says she's a sinner. I thought she might be a comfort; but no, if you please. She just looks Electra in the face and says, 'I'm as good as the best, only I prefer to do things in my own way.' I wish Electra hadn't made me so frightfully self-conscious."
But smile at it all she might, something had wrought upon her. She looked older and more frail, a pathetic figure now, leaning forward in a ruminating dream, and reminding Billy Stark, in a hundred unconsidered ways, of the shortness of the time before she should be gone. His heart ached. He had truly loved her in his youth, and afterwards, in other fashions, for many years.
As she sat there in her daze of past and present, she was aware that a tall white figure stood before her in the sun. She recalled herself with a start from those never-to-be-explored bounds, and came awake, humorously frightened at the thought that here, judging from the height and whiteness, was an angel come to make remarks upon tainted money. But it was only Electra.
"The next thing to it," said Madam Fulton, with her broad-awake smile.
"What did you say, grandmother?" asked Electra.
"Nothing, my dear. What were you going to say? Sit down. You dazzle me in that sun."
Electra sat down and considered how she should speak, having triumphant news to tell. Then, in the midst of her reflection, the news got the better of her. She began with an eloquent throb in her voice.
"Grandmother, I am going abroad."
"So Peter has spoken, has he? When is it to be?"
"I am not going with Peter. That is all over."
"Well, you're a silly girl. You never'll get such a nice boy again. Peter could make a woman laugh from morning till night, if she'd have the sense to please him."
"I am going for a year. At least, I say a year. I put no limit to it in my own mind. Do you want to go with me, grandmother?"
"No, I'm sure I don't. If I go with anybody, it will be Billy Stark."
"Then I must go alone," A high determination ruled her voice.
"Alone! Mercy, Electra! you're a young woman. Don't you know you are?"
"I am glad I am young," said Electra. Her eyes were shining. "I shall have the more years to devote to it."
"You don't mean to say you propose crossing alone? Did you want to drag me out of my coffin to see you landed there respectably?"
"I am quite willing to go alone," said Electra, still with her air of beatific certainties. "I shall be the more unhampered. You must stay here all you want to, grandmother. Keep the house open. Act exactly as if it were yours."
A remembrance of the time when she had thought the place not altogether her own tempered the warmth of that permission. Some severity crept into her demeanor, and Madam Fulton, recognizing its birth, received it humbly as no more than she had earned.
"When are you going, Electra?" she asked.
"In about a month. Grandmother!" Electra, in her worship of the conduct of life, hardly knew how to express strong emotions without offense to her finer instincts. "I don't forget, grandmother," she hesitated, "that I ought to be with you."
"Why ought you?"
"Because—grandmother, haven't I a duty to you?"
"A duty!" the old lady muttered. "The devil fly away with it!"
"I beg your pardon, grandmother?"
"I beg yours, my dear. Never swear before a lady! No, no. You haven't any duty towards me."
"But there are other calls." Electra struggled to find words that should not tell too much. She ended lamely, "There are calls I cannot disregard." There rose dimly before her mind some of the injunctions that bid men leave father and mother for the larger vision.
"There's Billy Stark," said the old lady, with a quickened interest. "Fancy! he's been away all day."
Electra rose and went in again. She was not sensitive now to the ironies of daily life, but it did occur to her that her grandmother was more excited at seeing Billy Stark home after a day in town than by her own great conclusion. Electra had thought solemnly about the magnitude of the decision she was making when she gave up the care of grandmother to follow that larger call, but again she found herself outside the line of recognized triumphs. She had announced her victory and nobody knew it.
Billy Stark had brought his old friend a present: a box of the old-fashioned peppermints she liked. She took off the string with a youthful eagerness.
"My dear," said she, "what do you think has happened now?"
"I know what has happened to me," said Billy. He threw himself into a chair with an explosive sigh, half heat and half regret. "I've had business letters. I've got to be off."
"Off!" She regarded him in a frank dismay. "Billy, you break my heart!"
"I break my own heart," said Billy gallantly. "I've taken my passage. Say the word, dear girl, and I'll take it for two."
She looked at him in silent trouble. Tears had dimmed her eyes.
"Well, Billy," she said at last, "this is the pleasantest summer I shall ever have."
"Say the word," he admonished her again. "We've got more summers before us."
She smiled at him, and winked away the tears.
"Then come back and spend them here. Electra's going, too,—like a stowaway. You won't let her cross with you, and see at least that she doesn't hold services on board?"
"God forbid!" said Billy. "I'm afraid of her."
"I don't blame you. Billy, I suppose we ought to be saying solemn things to each other, if you're really going."
"Clip ahead, old lady. What do you want to say?"
"I'd like to clear up my accounts a little. I want to get my books in order. I don't intend to die in a fog. Billy, how much of it was real?"
"How much of what, Florrie?"
"Of life. Of the things we thought and felt. Is there such a thing as love, Billy?"
He got up under the necessity of thought and stood, hands in his pockets and legs apart, looking over the garden beds. He might have been gazing out to sea for the Islands of the Blest.
"Florrie," he said at length, "I guess there is."
"Did you love me, Billy? No compliments. We're beyond them."
"Yes," said Billy, after another pause. "I think I did. You were a great deal to me at that time. And when I found it was no use, other people were a great deal to me, one after another. Several of 'em. I looked upon it then as a species of game. But they didn't last, Florrie. You did. You always give me a kind of a queer feeling; you're all mixed up in my mind with pink and blue and hats with rosebuds on 'em and college songs."
It was not much like a grand passion, but it was something, the honest confession of a boy.
"I thought it was a game, too," she said musingly. "Do you suppose it was, Billy? Or were we wrong?"
Billy whirled about and faced her.
"Dead wrong! No, Florrie, it never was meant for a game. It's earnest. The ones that take it so are the ones that inherit the earth. No, not that—but they go in for all they're worth and they've something left to show for it. They don't put their money into tinsel and see it fade."
"Well, what else? Did Charlie Grant love me?"
"Yes. No doubt of it."
"But he loved Bessie afterwards."
"Yes. She lived the thing through with him. She built up something, I fancy. He probably remembered you as I did, all pink ribbons and fluff; but she helped him rear his house of life."
"And my husband didn't love me and I didn't love my husband," the old lady mused. "Well, Billy, it's almost the end of the play. I wish I understood it better. And I've written a naughty book, and I'm going to be comfortable on the money from it. And you wish I hadn't, don't you?"
He saw how frail she looked and answered mercifully,—
"I don't care much about the book, dear. Don't let's talk of that."
"You wish I hadn't written it!"
"I wish you hadn't been so infernally bored as to think of writing it."
"And I'll bet a dollar you wish you'd come back and found me reconciled to life and death, and reading daily texts out of little pious books, and knitting mufflers for sailors, instead of seething with all sorts of untimely devilishnesses. Don't you, Billy?"
What Billy thought he would not tell himself, and he said with an extreme honesty,—
"You're the greatest old girl there is, Florrie, or ever was, or ever will be."
"Ah, well!" she sighed, and laughed a little. "I can't help wishing there weren't so many good folks. It makes me uncommonly lonesome. For you're good, too, Billy, you sinner, you!"
He read the gleam in her eyes, the reckless courage, the unquenched love of life; after all, there was more youth in her still than there had ever been in him or in a hundred like him. He laughed, and said,—
"Oh, I do delight in you!"
It was the early twilight, and MacLeod was going to Electra to say good-by. But first he tapped at Rose's door. He had seen her from time to time through the day, and nothing of significance had passed between them. That unbroken level had been exciting to her. She knew he had things to say, and that he would not go leaving them unspoken; delay was only the withholding of bad news. Now she came to the door, a fan in her hand and the summer night reasonably accounting for the breathlessness she felt. Her pallor made a white spot in the dusk; she was like a ghost, with all the life drained out of her. MacLeod stepped inside and closed the door.
"Hot!" he breathed, taking a place by the window.
She could not quite compose herself, and stood near him, fanning him to give herself a pretext for movement. MacLeod looked up at her, smiling. He saw how pale she was.
"Why," he said, with his beguiling kindliness, "you mustn't look as if you were afraid of me."
She moved a little, to escape his eyes.
"No," she said, in a low tone, "I don't mean to be afraid. But I am."
"What of, Rose?"
She wanted to say, from her confused suspicions, that he was inevitably contemplating some course that would involve her freedom. But he had turned, and was looking at her in a smiling candor. There was evidently no more guile in him than in the impartial and cherishing sun.
"I wish life didn't present itself to you as a melodrama," he volunteered, with almost a brightness of reproach.
She shook her head. The tremulous expectancy of her face remained unchanged.
"I wish so, too," she answered.
"Well!" He spoke robustly, with a quick decision. "I'm going back. I shall sail next week."
She drew a quick breath. Ready as she was to disbelieve him, it was impossible to deny herself an unreasonable relief. She held herself rigid with anticipation, knowing what the next words would be, and how he would command or entreat her also to go. But they amazed her.
"Rose," said he, "this may be the last little talk we have together here. I want to speak to you about your mother."
"My mother!" Unconsciously she drew nearer him. Her mother was—what? A banished dream, not forgotten, but relegated to dim tapestried chambers because the air of the present seemed to blur out memory by excess of light. She had awakened from her girlhood's dreams; to them, chiefly, her mother had belonged. Now that past beneficence was a faded flower found in a casket, a scent of beauty touched by time.
"Sit down," said MacLeod, and she obeyed him. He stretched out his legs at ease, and put his head back, his eyes closed, in an easy contemplation. "We don't speak of her very often, do we, little girl?"
"No!" Her irrepressible comment was, "I thought you had forgotten her."
But he continued,—
"I was thinking the other day how much you lose in not having known her as she was when I met her first."
"I have the miniature."
"I know. But that's only a suggestion. It doesn't help me bring her to life for you. She had beauty—not so much as you have—and an extraordinary grace and charm. She had, too, that something we trace back to breeding."
He had always undervalued the virtues claimed by gentle birth, and she looked at him, amazed. He understood, and laughed a little. His best weapon against the aristocrat had been tolerance, at its mildest, or a gentle scorn. Where a mob threw eggs, he tossed a rounded epithet.
"I know," he said, "you think I laugh at breeding. Not in her. She had its rarest virtues. She was like an old portrait come to life. She couldn't think of her own advantage. She couldn't lie. Ah, well! well!"
He seemed to be musing over the sadness of things begun and ended all too soon, over a light quenched, a glory gone. Rose found herself passionately anxious to hear more. He had brought her a jewel, a part of her heritage; she might have seen it, but without knowing how bright it was. She was acquiescing, too, in the old spell of his kindness, but never, it seemed to her, so beguilingly administered: for he had come, like a herald accredited by an impeccable authority—the talisman of her mother's name. He was, she thought from his voice, gently amused, even smiling a little to himself.
"You see, Rose, your mother made a bad match. Her people, the few there were, repudiated her. I had no qualifications. I was a poor scribbler, too big, too robust, too everything to suit them. I breathed up all the air. I just went into their stained-glass seclusions and carried her off. They never forgave me."
"Her father died very soon?" She had never referred to the two old people as her grandparents. She found, in her emotional treasury, no right to them, even as a memory. This hesitating question, indeed, seemed a liberty, as it subtly brought them nearer.
"Yes. Your mother was prostrated by that. She had a strong sense of family feeling."
Immediately Rose pictured to herself the wonder of having such clinging tendrils, to aspire upward, and such filaments of root, to mingle with kindred roots in a tended ground. Until now it had seemed to her brave and desirable to walk alone without inherited ties, the cool wind breathing about her, unchecked by walls of old restraint. Now, whether he was gently guiding her thoughts toward his desired ends, or whether some actual hunger in her was impelling them to seek lost possibilities, she did not know; but she was sad. She wanted the spacious boughs of a tree of family life to sit under, to play there and rest. He was continuing,—
"Above all, your mother was a woman of great loyalties, not only to individuals but to her inherited pride. You know that threadbare phrase,noblesse oblige? I can laugh when most of them use it. I never laughed when I saw her cutting her conduct by it."
"I never knew—" She was about to say, in her glowing surprise, that she never knew he cared so much for her mother, or that he had been cherishing such memories.
"That's the reason, my dear," he was saying now, "why you must model yourself on her, and not on me. I don't know that you ever had the least desire to model yourself on me, but I feel very strongly about your knowing what kind of woman she was and letting her—well, letting her decide things for you."
"I wish"—All sorts of longings were choking her and crying for expression; but she could only finish, "I wish she had not died."
"Yes, child. Now these people here, Rose,"—his voice had changed into a decisive affirmation,—"they are a good sort, very gentle, very well worth your meeting them with fairness. You haven't met them fairly. Now, have you?"
"What do you mean?" She was trembling, not so much under his words as from her own dreary shame. The shame had been with her all day, until she was tired with it, and the words seemed to be little separate floutings to make the burden heavier.
"Electra called you an adventuress. She had every right to."
"Yes. She had every right to." But Rose spoke with the unreasoning bitterness of youth that, finding itself in the wrong path, is sure the way, once entered, has no turning.
"She says you came here with a lie on your lips. Isn't that true?"
"But you told me"—She was seeking to get back her lost self, the one that still believed in its own integrity. "I didn't choose to lead the life she thinks I led. You told me it was the noblest thing to do."
"Ah!" He took the words out of her mouth. "I did. But did you make your stand magnificently and face the conventions you defied? No! you came here and told a lie. You chose the cheapest part you could, and played it."
His righteous anger was sweeping her away. Everything helped him, even her own sad sense of inexorable destiny and her poor desert.
"You have taken a very unfortunate step, child," he was saying. "You came here on a questionable errand. Now you have owned up to these people. They know what you are."
"Oh!" She threw out her hands at the horror of it. Until now she had not seen herself as she must be, even in Electra's eyes. His way of presenting things made them intolerably vivid.
"But they—they will not—" She quivered before him, and seemed to crouch and lessen.
"They won't tell? I don't feel sure of that. But do you want to trade on their not telling? Such things are always known."
"Well, I have done wrong. I must suffer for it."
"Who suffers? You—and I. The blow to me is incalculable. I don't understand it. Your mother's memory—that should have kept you straight. So far, child—why, you're a liar."
She was, she told herself, the tears streaming over her face. The happy certainties she had felt with Osmond withdrew into a vague distance. At last she understood; she had sinned, and she was not forgiven.
"Now!" said MacLeod. His voice had a ring she knew. "Now, we must consider what is to be done. One thing I have done already. I have taken passage for you. I will stand by you if you go back to France. I won't support you here. Nor shall they. Think what you did. A cheap adventuress could do no more, except persist in it." He was all breathing indignation.
"Do you mean"—Her voice broke. "Do you mean to take me back to him?"
"The prince? By no means. I mean to take you back to work, to be good and clean and honest. You must retrieve this step. You shall be independent of me, if you like. You shall sing. My dear daughter, you may not think I have shown you much affection,—but your honor is very dear to me." He looked nobly sincere, and yet she bent her brows upon him, and tried to read a deeper soul than he displayed.
"Father!" The word was wrung from her. She had not willingly called him by it for the two years past. "You have persuaded me before. How can I believe you?"
A melting change came over him. It was evident in his voice, his suffused look, his whole manner.
"My child," said he, "can't you believe I loved your mother?"
Immediately the tides of her filial being were with him. If she denied him, she must hurt something to which her very blood bade her be faithful. The house of life, the father, mother, and their child,—these were the sacred three, and it might be her high emprise to keep their union holy.
"Can you be ready to-morrow?" he asked, with that emphasis his followers knew. "You will stay in town with me until we sail."
"Yes."
"Will you be ready?"
"I will be ready."
He got up and bent to kiss her forehead. But she retreated.
"No," she breathed. "I'll do it, father, but don't be kind to me."
He gave her a little pat on the shoulder, and a reassuring, "Nonsense! I'm always kind. We'll have famous times yet, my dear."
She stood droopingly while his steps went down the stairs and out through the veranda and ceased upon the grass. Then she opened her door and crossed the hall to grannie's room and tapped.
"Come in," called the kind old voice. Grannie was in bed, a candle by her, a book in her hand. She looked, in her nightcap, like a beautiful old baby. "I had to crawl in here," she said apologetically. "I get so stiff sitting about. But I don't want to sleep. Draw up the rocking-chair."
Rose went up to the bedside, and dropped upon her knees, looking up so that the light could strike her face. It was a wretched face, but she tried to keep it calm lest it should plead for her.
"My father is going to take me away," she began. "I must pack to-night. But I want to tell you—"
"Take you away? where?" asked grannie.
"To France."
"Why, I don't like that!"
Rose continued,—
"I am not a good woman. My father has told me so. He has shown me. I believe it."
"I guess you're tired," said grannie. She laid a motherly hand on the girl's forehead. Then she smoothed her hair, and tucked a lock behind her ear. "I guess I wouldn't say such things."
"I was never married to Tom Fulton. I thought it was right not to be. But I came here and called myself his wife. I am an adventuress. My father says so."
The old lady sat looking at her with a puzzled glance.
"You blow out the candle," she said then. "It makes it kind of hot. Now I'll move over, and you climb up here and lie down a spell. I guess it'll rest you."
Rose put out the candle, and breathed her relief now that even that light was off her tortured face. Then she did stretch herself on the bed, and grannie put out a hand and held hers.
"'T won't hurt your skirt, will it?" she asked. "You've got such pretty clothes. I shouldn't want to have 'em tumbled."
Rose spoke again with her insistent haste,—
"I am an adventuress."
"There! there! don't say that. It's a miserable kind of a word. Did your father come here to take you back?"
"I don't know why he came—not entirely. But he tells me to go with him. I must go."
"Do you want to go, dear?"
She hesitated a moment, and they both listened to the sounds of the summer night.
"I want to be honest," Rose said at last. "It is too late—but I must do the best I can."
"It isn't ever too late," said grannie. "But I don't seem to want you to go. I'm fond of you, dear." Rose lifted the cherishing hand to her lips. "Peter is fond of you, too. He told me so to-day. It is all over between him and Electra. He told you that?"
"Dear Peter! But after this"—she was quivering with impatience to put that test—"you wouldn't be willing to have him like me—after this?"
Now grannie was silent, but only because she was thinking. The tightening clasp of her hand made that evident.
"My dear," she said at last, in her soft old voice, "you can't imagine how stupid I am. I never know how to say things right. But if it was a transgression—I suppose you'd say it was—"
Honesty rose up in the girl, and cried to be heard.
"I thought it was right," she protested sharply. "I did think it was right. About coming here I didn't think much, except that I was lonesome and afraid. Now I understand. I must pay my penalties. I must be honest. It is too late,—but it's all I can do."
"You see, about transgressions," said grannie, "why, they're not to be thought of, my dear, not for an instant after we are sorry. We've just taken the wrong road, that's all. We've got to clip it back into the right one. We can't sit down to cry."
"We've got to take our punishment!"
"Yes, mercy, yes! I guess we have. But we've got to be happy, too. The punishments were given us in love. We've got to be thankful for 'em. Now, do you feel as if 't was right for you to go back with your father?"
"There are hard things there. I ran away from them. I must face them."
"Then you go, dear," said grannie. "But don't you forget for one minute that there's the love of God. Peter and I love you, too. And when all the things are done, you hurry right back here, and we shall be here—some of us, anyway—and your room'll be ready for you just the same."
Rose lay there with the ineffable sense upon her of that readjusted balance which we call forgiveness. Life, even the narrow piece of it she was touching, greatened with possibilities.
"Grannie," she said, "there's one thing more."
"What is it, dear?"
"I want to leave a message with you. I want you to tell Osmond something."
"Why, honey, do you know Osmond?"
"Yes, I know him." Then she rehearsed the bare details of their meetings, and finishing, said, quite simply, "I can't see him. I can't say good-by. If I spoke to him, how could I bear to go? But it's he who really sends me."
"What do you mean, dear?"
"I don't know how to tell you. Only, he is so true he makes me want to be true, too. He wants to do the hardest thing. This is the hardest thing for me. And I want to go and be honest, not stay and have you all make it easy for me to be honest. And I want to prove myself, to use my voice. I don't intend to be supported by my father. But when I have established myself, I shall come back."
She felt as if she were talking to Osmond himself, and as if his idea of great world spaces and inevitable meetings made it certain for them to part without loss.
Grannie was thinking. She gave a little sigh.
"What is it?" asked Rose.
"Osmond likes you very much, doesn't he?" asked the old lady.
"It isn't exactly liking. We understand each other. He is different from anybody."
"Yes."
"He understands me almost before I speak. It is comfortable to be with him."
"Yes. And the boy finds it comfortable to be with you."
"Oh, yes! It is because it is so exactly alike for us both. That is why we are so contented together."
"He will miss you when you are gone."
"Oh, but not as I shall miss him! He is so sure of things. He knows so well when the cord between us is holding. But I shall doubt. I shall want to hear his voice."
Grannie sighed again. She was a happy old woman in her certainties; but sometimes she felt tired, with the gentle lassitude of the old. She had been with Osmond through every step of his difficult way, and she had hoped some tragedies would be spared them both. Much as she believed in ultimate good fortune, she had to shrink from his desiring woman's love. Yet this was to be. A little jealous doubt of the girl crept into her troubled heart. Was she light of love, a lady of enchantments who could appear out of nowhere and make all these strange happenings seem commonplace until her fickle destiny should snatch her away again, leaving hurt and mourning hearts behind? Grannie was humbly conscious that there were many things outside her world, exotic flowers of life her upland pastures did not breed. That they were poison flowers she could not well believe; but when her dear boy tasted the essence of them, she had to pause and sternly think it over, whether it was well.
"My dear," she said, "you must be honest with him." The gentle voice had steel in it.
"Honest? With Osmond? How should I be anything else? What reason—why, grannie!"
"Osmond is not like other men."
"He is better. He is like a spirit."
"No. He is only a man that's had heavy loads to carry. You mustn't be cruel to him."
"Grannie, I never heard you speak like that. You have been so kind."
"I am kind now, but Osmond is my boy. Do you feel to him as you did to Tom Fulton?"
"Oh!" It was a cry of pain. "What has Tom Fulton to do with it, to do with me?" the girl asked, in that hurt surprise. "All I want is to forget him. He made himself beautiful to me because he lied to me. The things I loved he said he loved—and then he laughed at them. But Osmond—what has Osmond to do with Tom Fulton?"
"You have made Osmond love you," said grannie. "That's all."
The chamber was very still. Rose could hear the ticking of grannie's watch beside her on the stand. Presently she spoke in a wondering tone.
"Love me? Grannie, is it that?"
"What did you think it was?"
"I didn't think. I thought it was something greater."
"There is nothing greater, Rose. Is there anything more terrible?"
The girl turned her face over, and dropped it for a minute on the hollow of the old woman's arm. Then she spoke, and to grannie's amazement she laughed a little, too.
"Oh, I never dreamed I could be so happy!"
"Happy! But is he happy?"
"He must be, if he knows it. Do you think he knows it, grannie?"
"I'm afraid he does, my dear," said grannie sadly.
"Has he told you so?"
"Not a word."
"If he does, tell me, grannie. Betray him. I need to know everything he knows—everything."
It was a new Rose, one none of them in America had yet seen. There were tumultuous yearnings in her voice, innocent insistencies; she seemed to be clamoring for life, the boon that it was right and sweet for her to have.
"He doesn't speak of you," said grannie. "What could come of it, if he did?"
"What could come of it? Everything could come of it. I shall write him by every mail. Tell him that. I will write him all my life, every minute of it from morning till night. And I will come back, soon, soon,—as soon as I have earned money to be honest on. Tell him that, grannie."
But grannie sighed.
"I am afraid you are not very reasonable," she said. "And I shouldn't dare to give him such messages. How do I know what they would mean to him? Why, my dear, you may meet some young man to-morrow, any day. You may want to marry him. What do you think Osmond would feel, if you wrote and told him that?"
"Why," said Rose, in a pained surprise, "you haven't understood, after all. But he will understand. No, don't tell him anything, grannie, only that I'll write to him every mail and that I shall come home. He will believe me. Now I must go and pack."
But grannie held her anxiously.
"I'm afraid I've made you troubled," she said.
"No, you've made me rich. I don't care what happens to me now. I can face it all. Dear, dear grannie! I thank you for forgiving me." She kissed the two kind hands, and stood beside the bed for a minute. "He comes to you in the morning, doesn't he? Tell him all that then. Only tell him I couldn't bear to say good-by. But I shall come back, and there will be welcomes, not good-bys." She went softly out, and grannie heard the closing of the door.
Rose, in her own room, did not begin at once to pack. She was alive again with the most brilliant triumph and delight. Her father's influence had slipped from her, and she stood there shuddering in the delicious cold of a strong wind of life. If she was to go forth, to make herself whole with her own destiny, she was going, not as the puppet of his will, but exhilarated by marvels. There were still large things in the world, strong loyalties, pure faithfulness. She felt like a warrior girded with a sword.