Osmond was sitting in his playhouse under the tree. He did not expect Rose to come, but he had things to think about, and in the playhouse he never felt alone. He was studying his own life as it had been and as it was. The past looked to him all submission and a still endurance. He marveled that a man could live so long and not look man's lot in the face. A thousand passions had been born in him at once, and they seemed almost equally good to him because they were all so strong. He sat there drunk with the lust of power and reviewing his desires as, one by one, they came and smiled upon him.
First he desired a woman, the one woman, Rose, not now romantically through the mist of dreams, but as the wild man wants his mate. Was that love? he asked himself, in this dispassionate scrutiny, and decided that, as men chose to name it, it was love. They crowned it with garlands, they sang about it and drank to it, but that was only to make it sweeter.
He remembered again the passion of protection he had felt for her, the desire to slay whatever crossed her path. That was hate, he knew, and it seemed to him good. All these things were the forces that made up life, and life was a battle.
And then, as he did intermittently after every wave of thought, he remembered that Peter was in love with Rose, he recalled the gay certainty of the boy when he had said he could make her happy, and he saw her in Peter's arms. And this was jealousy.
At once he rose to his feet and listened. A step was coming nearer, heavy and halting, pausing for frequent rests. The familiar sound of it and the appeal of a presence not yet known made him knit his brows and peer forward through the dark. When the step ceased again, for an interval, he cried out, "Grannie!"
"Why, dear, you there?" called grannie.
He ran to her and put his arm about her, and so they came onward to the chair which had been a throne for Rose. When she had sunken into it, he began to scold her gently. She had not been so far from home for many a day. She had chosen night and a rough path. Why did she do it?
"I had to see you, dear," said grannie. "Maybe I didn't consider how hard it would be, but when I started out, I wasn't thinking much about my aches and pains. I had to see you. So I just dressed me and came."
"But, grannie, it's the middle of the night!"
"Yes, child, I suppose it is. Night or day, it's all one. Osmond, her father's going to take her away from here."
"Rose!"
"Yes, dear, she's going. Do you think it's best to let her go with him?"
"No! It's outrageous and impossible."
"I thought you'd say so. Well, Osmond, she meant to go away to-morrow morning without seeing you. But she sent you her love. It seemed to me that.... So I thought you'd better have it to-night."
She heard him breathing heavily, but he did not speak. Once he walked away from her and back again.
"What has made her want to go?"
"She doesn't want it. But he has worked upon her. He's told her she is bad; some dreadful things I guess he said. I don't believe in that man, Osmond. I never did, first minute I laid eyes on him."
"No, grannie, he's not to be believed."
"I thought maybe you'd better have the night-time to think it over in. You may want to do something."
"Grannie, what can I do?"
"I don't know, son. But you're the head of the house."
Again he strode away on his impatient march, and grannie waited and prayed a little, and thought how her knees ached and how she hoped God would help him. He was back again.
"You know how it is with me?" he said roughly.
"Yes, child."
"It's a big proposition."
"It's the biggest there is, son. I've just been telling her so."
"Rose? What has Rose said?"
"Not much. Only I had the feeling, when I was with her, that she loved you and didn't hardly know about your loving her. So I came down here."
"You did right to come."
Grannie drew a long breath. The thing was out of her hands, now, she knew. What his hands would do with it did not yet appear. She rose.
"Well, son," she said, "I'll go back. Come with me to the wall. Then I'll manage it alone."
He did go with her, helping her in a tender silence, and at the door she kissed him good-night.
"What time is breakfast, grannie?"
"Eight o'clock."
The next morning when they had assembled in the dining-room, grannie, standing with a hand on the back of her chair, waited. Her face had a flush of expectation. Her eyes sought the window.
"There!" she said, "he's coming. Peter, I've moved your place. Osmond will sit opposite me."
"Osmond!" Peter almost shouted it.
"Yes," said grannie, in what seemed pride. "I thought Osmond would be here."
Osmond came in, a workman in his blouse, fresh from cold water and the night's stern counseling. Rose, hearing his step, could not, for a minute, look at him, because he had once forbidden it. The commonplace room, with the morning light in it, swam before her. After he had spoken to grannie, he walked up to her and offered his hand. Then their eyes met. Hers were full of tears, and through their blur, even, his face looked stern and beautiful.
"I wanted to see you," Osmond said; and she answered, feeling his kindness as from some dim distance,—
"To say good-by?"
"No, not to say good-by."
Then they sat down, and there was no constraint, but a good deal of talking; and, strangely, it was Osmond who led it. He did not touch upon things of wider interest than his own garden ground, where he was at home. He had pleasant chronicles of the work to give grannie, and MacLeod took a genial interest. Only Peter sat, wide-eyed at the turn things were taking, and Rose grew paler and left her plate untouched. She did not know whether it was joy that moved her, or grief at parting with him. Only the morning seemed like no other morning. When they rose from the table, Osmond turned at once to MacLeod.
"May I see you for a minute or two?" he asked. "We'll go into the west room, grannie."
While Peter started forward, as if to help or hinder as the case might be when he understood it, Osmond had led the way, still with the air of being master of the house, and Rose stood with downcast eyes, as if miserably conscious that the interview would concern her. Inside the west room, cool in the morning, and with a restful bareness about it, a retreat where people went to sleep or read, Osmond turned at once to the man whom, at that moment, he delighted in as a worthy foe. Osmond had never known before the keen, salt taste of victory. All his triumphs up to this time had been as slow as the growth of a tree that recovers itself after lopped branches. Now he felt the anticipation of combat.
"We needn't sit down," he said rapidly, yet with self-possession. He looked taller, even, MacLeod thought with wonder. His dark eyes were full of fire. "I love your daughter," said Osmond, in a full, steady voice. He chose the words the poets had taught him to use simply, and also, perhaps, the novels he had been reading since he had known Rose.
"My dear fellow!" cried MacLeod expansively. And then, remembering the peculiar circumstances of the case, "I'm sorry, devilish sorry for you."
Osmond smiled. He felt capable, if there were no other way of doing it, of wresting the lady's fate from evil chances with his hands. Yet he liked MacLeod to resist. It made the fight more splendid.
"She must not go back with you," he said. "You are not to insist on it. Don't insist. That will save us all trouble."
MacLeod had gathered himself together. He put his hand in his pocket and meditatively brought out his pipe, fingering the case with an absent and lingering interest, as if he felt the call to a lost rite.
"My dear fellow," he said again, "this is too bad. I'm sorry."
"Rose will remain here," said Osmond briefly. "My grandmother will take the kindest care of her."
"But I can't allow it, you know," said the father, still with tolerance. "Rose is due in Paris. We're both due there. It's very good of you, very hospitable and all that,—but you mustn't carry this Lochinvar business too far. It's too rapid a world, you know. I'm too busy, my dear fellow. That's the truth."
Osmond stood gazing at him reflectively, not in doubt or hesitation, but because he liked the look of so big an animal, and considering that it would be charming to see the creature yield. Osmond had not sharpened his weapons or even decided what they were. He only knew MacLeod must bend, and that there was in himself a big, even an invincible force to make him.
"Rose is not going," he said quietly.
Then MacLeod laughed. The morning was hurrying by and this vaporing was a hindrance to be shuffled off. "You say you love my daughter?" he remarked, with a veiled meaning in the tone. "What then? You don't propose to marry her?" The tone said further, "You don't tell me you propose to marry anybody?"
"I only said I loved her," returned Osmond simply. "I thought it would be well for you to know that. It seemed fairer."
MacLeod smiled again, as if he were smiling down on something. Osmond opened the door, knowing where he should find her. She was there at the end of the hall, sitting in one of the high-backed chairs, her hands in her lap, her head bent sweetly as she listened. She was pale, and there was terror in her face. As Osmond read that, his own passion quieted, and he spoke with perfect gentleness:—
"Rose, will you come here?"
She obeyed at once, and they three were in the room together and Osmond had closed the door. He put out his hand to her, and without hesitation she gave him hers.
"Rose," he said, "I have been telling your father you will not go back with him."
Her eyes dilated. Her lips parted eagerly.
"I have said I would," she began; but he forestalled her.
"I have forbidden it, Rose. I have told him I forbid it."
His touch on her hand seemed to be leading her, drawing her into his own breast. They looked at each other, and both forgot the other presence in the room. The color came back slowly to her cheeks, and Osmond's eyes filled with tears.
"Answer, dear," he said, with the same gentleness. "Let me hear you answer."
"Very well," she returned, like a gentle child. "Shall I go now, Osmond?"
He led her to the door, opened it, and closed it after her. Then he glanced at his adversary. MacLeod had sunk into a chair and was sitting astride it, his chin bowed upon its back. He looked terror-stricken. One hand held a little box, and he was tendering it to Osmond.
"Open it," he gasped. "Crush one in your handkerchief. Let me smell it."
Osmond ignorantly but deftly did it, and held the handkerchief to MacLeod's face. MacLeod breathed at it greedily. He lifted his left hand as if it were half useless to him. "Rub it," he said savagely. "Wring it off. Such pain! my God, such pain!"
In a moment more the attack was over, and he looked like an old man, inexplicably ravaged. Osmond's question sprang impetuously.
"Is it—excitement?"
MacLeod smiled a little and moistened his lips.
"You think you did it?" he suggested. "No. You didn't do it. It comes—of itself—like a thief in the night, like the very devil. Nobody's to know it. Understand that."
"Then you need her with you!" Osmond broke out, in a fresh understanding.
"Need her? need Rose? Get that out of your mind. The world is full of women. She'll go back with me, but not because I need her."
He walked past Osmond and out through the empty hall, and slowly, but still erect, to the driveway and the road. Osmond stood watching him. He saw him straighten more and more, and assume his wonted carriage though without its buoyancy. Osmond followed for a little distance, but when MacLeod turned to look at him and then went on again, he stepped over the wall and crossed the lot to his own plantation. MacLeod, he knew, was going to Electra's for a last word, and for himself, he had struck his one sharp, quick blow for Rose. She should have an interval alone, to make her abiding decision calmly, and when the moment came for MacLeod's going, Osmond would be there again, to hearten her.
But MacLeod, when Osmond had really turned aside, halted more and more. At last he was sick with fear of that enemy inside his breast. There was no moment now, he knew, when he might not expect it, tearing away at the delicate harmonies within the gates of life. What would happen when the pain grew fiercer still? The enemy would let in that other he refused to think upon, though even that was more tolerable than having this evil creature claw at him when men could see him cringe. And as life itself is death when it is once sapped of power, he threw up his head and strode on faster. One step with the old vigor and abandon—and there it was again.
Later that same morning, Peter was hurrying along the road, for the carriage was due and MacLeod had not returned. Peter was not more than reasonably sorry to lose his chief, because he meant to follow soon. He had the excited sense of being ready for flight, of great freedom before him and strength in his wings, and of leaving Osmond and grannie with regret, yet happily, for something untried and as wonderful as youth. He ran along the road, hat in hand, in love with the morning breeze, and Electra met him. She looked wan, he saw, and with an incredulous pang, he questioned whether she could be moved by their separation. But he was glad of a definite and hurried question to ask.
"Where is MacLeod?"
A look like hope flashed into her face. She stopped and turned half about, as if for instant flight back to the house.
"Was he coming to me?" she asked breathlessly.
"We thought he might be there."
"Did he say he was coming?" Her eagerness looked like hunger for a desired good, slipping, by some chance, away from her.
"No! no! he may have gone to the plantation. I'll run down there and find him."
He hurried on, and Electra, watching his light, easy lopes, wished she, too, were a man and running to find Markham MacLeod.
At the pasture-bars, in a bed of roadside fern, Peter found him. MacLeod lay majestically, stretched at length, upon his side, as if some one had disposed him in the attitude of sleep. Peter knew. Yet he stooped and touched one of the beautifully shaped hands with his finger. He stood there a long time, it seemed to him, looking not at the figure at his feet, but off into the morning sky, and MacLeod was not in his mind: only Osmond and what Osmond had said about the lust for fight. Osmond seemed to fill the world. He had wished to kill the man, but God instead had killed him. Yet the other thing might have been. Peter wondered that he had not realized what his brother was to him, and again that he had too often foregone Osmond's companionship, this summer of their reunion, for lesser loyalties. He comprehended him, at the moment, with an exaggerated passion that was pain: a gigantic figure, all sacrifice, all patient truthfulness, and, in its own bounded life, as much to be loved and protected as a woman, and yet untrained and ready for a savage deed. And all the time Electra was advancing rapidly toward him on the road, aimlessly, but, as she afterwards believed, drawn by some premonition of what she was to find. Her approach broke Peter's fearful vision. She was like a figure walking into his dream, and he hurried toward her, remembering what she must not see. He motioned to her harshly with his hand.
"Go back!" he called.
But Electra came inevitably on. Then Peter placed himself before her.
"Something has happened," he said quietly, while she looked him in the face. "Go home."
But now she was gazing past him, and the figure in the bracken caught her sight. With a low cry, the inarticulate sound that throws suffering woman back to her kinship with the mother brute, she ran past him and stooped over MacLeod; Peter, dull with feeling, thought she tried to raise his head, and failing that, she took the hand and nursed it on her bosom. Peter judged apathetically that he had never really known Electra; she looked now like a woman numb with grief over a dead child. Then he waked himself out of his maze.
"Don't!" he heard himself calling. "People will come."
"Who will come?" she returned sharply, as if she challenged them all to show why this should not be her dead. Then she wakened. "Go!" she cried. "Get help. It can't be true."
"I will call the men. We can get him home among us."
He ran over the wall and on to the field where men were hoeing. When they had dropped their work and followed him, they found Electra sitting there by the roadside, as if she were the one mourner over the dead, and she did not rise until they stooped to lift him, and arranged how he should be carried. Then she said to Peter, again as if it were her right,—
"Have him taken to my house."
Peter stared at her, but he remembered Rose.
"That will be better," he said; and added, "but who will tell her?"
"His daughter?" said Electra, in her clear tone. "I will tell her. But there is a great deal to do before that. She can wait."
So they walked along the road like a strange funeral procession, Electra in front, as if she had a right to lead. She turned in at her own gate, and they followed, and she walked on up the steps and into the library, where they laid him down. Madam Fulton and Billy Stark had gone for a drive, and the house, in its morning order, looked as if it had been prepared for the solemnity of this entrance. Now Electra's methodical capacity came into play. She sent one man for the doctor and another to the kitchen for hot water and for brandy. But when they were hurriedly dispersed, she turned to Peter and said, with a heart-breaking quiet,—
"And yet, he is dead!"
She sat down upon the floor beside the couch and laid her head on the dead man's heart. Peter knew it was to listen for a flutter there, but with his sensitive apprehension of all emotion, he felt also that she was glad to put her head upon MacLeod's breast. He was conscious of being useless in his inactivity, but he could only stand and stare down at them, the dead man and the mourning woman. Presently Electra got up and stood, dry-eyed, and looked at him.
"He was coming to me," she said, in awe at the loneliness of the event. "I couldn't sleep last night. I wish I had known a little more. Instead of thinking about him, I could have met him. I could have been with him."
Peter shuddered.
"I am glad you were not with him."
Electra was not listening. She had placed her hand on the hair of the fallen man, tenderly and yet with reverence.
"He is splendid, Peter, isn't he?" she said, as if she wondered at life and its fleeting forms. "He looks like a god, sleeping." Some echo of her words came back to her, and she felt a momentary pleasure at their sound. Then, very shortly it seemed, men came, the doctor and others who had authority, and Electra was turned out of the room.
"Go upstairs," Peter besought her.
But she stepped out, bare-headed, into the air.
"No," she answered, "I am going to tell his daughter."
"No!" Suddenly Peter remembered how little she was fitted to be a kindly messenger. "No, Electra. I will go."
Electra looked at him in a calm surprise.
"He would wish it," she said. "He would wish me to do everything." And she was gone.
Peter went back into the room, where there were quick voices and peremptory demands. Markham MacLeod was being interrogated in a way that had never befallen him before. His body was being asked to bear witness of the fashion by which it had come to its dumb estate, wherein it could not compel others, but was most ruthlessly at their will.
Rose, at grannie's knee, in a mute gratitude that now she was to stay here, because it had been wonderfully decreed, saw Electra coming up the walk. She ran to meet her light-heartedly; in her flooding delight it seemed to her as if even Electra might acquiesce in her reprieve.
At the foot of the steps they met, Rose all pleadingness, as if again she begged Electra to love her. But Electra delivered her news straightway. She felt like nothing but the messenger of MacLeod.
"He is dead," she said, with the utmost quietude.
Rose stared at her.
"Who is dead?" she managed to ask.
"Markham MacLeod."
Rose leaned forward and gazed still in her face. She was well convinced that this look was real: a look of hopeless grief, though the words were so fantastic.
"Electra," she said gently, and even put out a hand and touched her on the arm. "Electra! What is it?"
"I have told you," said Electra, "he is dead. We found him in the ferns, Peter and I. He is at my house. We thought you ought to know it."
"Come!" said Rose. She seized her hand, and Electra pulled it away again, quietly, and yet as if it had no business in that hasty grasp. "Let me go home with you."
"If you wish," said Electra. "I suppose you have a right to be there. They may want you." And in silence they hurried down the path together and out into the road. At Electra's own gate, she turned to Rose.
"It is strange, isn't it?" she said.
"What, Electra?"
"That he could die."
"Electra, he has not died. No one has died." Rose spoke gently, knowing that in some way the other woman had been shocked and her reason shaken. "Come into the house and we'll find Peter."
But at the moment Peter and the doctor appeared together in the doorway, and the doctor turned to give orders to a servant in the hall. Peter saw them and came quickly down to them. It was apparent to Rose that something had happened.
"Tell her, Peter," said Electra, in some impatience. "She won't believe me. Tell her he is dead."
Peter and Rose stood looking at each other, she questioning and he in sad assent. Then there crept upon her face a look that was the companion to Electra's. The color faded, her eyes widened.
"My father?" she breathed, and Peter nodded.
"Yes," said Electra, as if she were astonished at them both and their dull wits, "Markham MacLeod is dead."
That evening grannie was in her own room, and Peter and Rose, below, talked intermittently of that strange morning.
"It is incredible, Peter, isn't it," she began, "for him to die like this?"
He nodded.
"I expected violence," he said. "We all expected it."
"Isn't it strange, too, that I can't feel grief! I'm neither glad nor sorry. I feel very still."
"The whole world will feel grief," said Peter loyally.
"Yes, but to me—Peter, it is just as if he were not a man, not something I had loved, but a thing that was great to look at and had no soul. It was like a tree falling, or a huge rock undermined. Don't you see? As if it were the natural thing, and there was no other way possible."
She began to feel the inexorability of great revenges, and to see that when a soul has for a long time denied us answer in our needs, we refuse to believe that it can speak. MacLeod had grown to be a beautiful spectacle of the universe, full of natural health and power. Now that he had fallen, there was nothing left. She had no vestige to remember of those responses in the dim reaches of being when one calls and another answers: homely loyalties, sweet kindnesses, even overlaid by later pain. He had lived what he called the natural life, and its breath had failed him and he was no more. Some time, she knew, in this dull brooding, she might try to whip herself up into an expected grief; but now, in the bare honesty of the moment, she accepted the event as it was.
"Osmond has been great," said Peter.
She started back to life.
"What has he done?"
"Everything. He's been Electra's right-hand man. I'll run down to see him a minute presently."
He hoped Rose would send some word of appreciative thanks. Old Osmond, he knew, would like it. But she got up and gave him her hand, in her grave affectionate way, and said good-night. She remembered how Osmond and her father had met in contest, and she knew Osmond would not seek her until Markham MacLeod was wholly gone.
Peter met his brother midway in the field, and waited for him.
"I'll go with you," he said.
"No," said Osmond, "I'm not going now. Come back to the shack."
"You're a regular night-owl," said Peter, as they turned. "When I don't find you after dark, I know you're in the woods, prowling. What makes you?"
"It's a good place to think things out,—and swear over 'em."
"What things, old man? You know I wouldn't tell. Nothing would tempt me to."
Osmond laughed a little.
"If you care so much as that, I'll tell you," he said, with a sudden harshness for himself in retrospect. "I go into the woods to think about life, my life, my difference from other fellows."
They sat down on the bench at the door, and a whippoorwill, calling, made the distance lonely. Peter had no answer for the truth he had evoked. It was too harsh. Only a woman could have met it, and that with kisses, not with words.
"Do you know," he said abruptly, "what all this makes me want?—this horrible excitement?"
"No, boy."
"It makes me want to paint. I want to paint everything I see: Markham MacLeod lying there in that bed of fern, Rose with all the life washed out of her, and you now, your face coming out of the dark. Everything's been unreal to me since it happened—except paint—and you."
"Poor old chap!" said Osmond. But he fled on from that concurrent sympathy to a dearer plea. "Paint, Pete," he urged. "Let all the rest go. Let MacLeod die. But you paint."
Peter was looking at him now, fascinated. The pale face out of the dark was all one glowing life. Peter wondered at him, his strength, his beauty. Again he felt as he had that morning, as if he had never known his brother, and as if it would pay for any pains to comprehend that pathetic and yet adventurous soul. Peter was more than half woman, with his quick perception of what went on in other minds. He understood, at that moment, that the great adventure of all is life itself: not, as it seemed to him, to paint, to love, but to taste all things with this richness that was beginning to be Osmond's, this hunger for the forbidden, even, so it was hunger. Osmond had begun to recognize his own nature, and for the first time his brother began to recognize him.
"Osmond," he said, in a wistful eagerness, very beguiling, "whatever you did, I should believe in it."
Osmond looked at him with that faint sweet smile upon his face, and his eyes offered hints of ineffable meanings.
"Would you, boy?" he asked.
Peter went on. It was almost like a woman's confession of her love.
"Osmond, you say you think about your life when you are alone. What do you think?"
"I think it is full of passions as an egg is of meat. They have been growing while I ignored them. I saw them marching before me and round and round me. They thought they were my masters."
"What then?"
Osmond remembered how the morning seemed when he met Rose in the sunlight, and touched her hand.
"Then," he said gravely, "I was their master. That's all."
"Oh," said Peter exultingly, "you'd be the master in the end. You're great!"
"Pete," said Osmond suddenly, "is this death coming?"
"Is what death?"
"It's too queer for life."
"To sit here talking like this?"
"No, not that exactly, but the sense of things to come. It seems as if life wasn't going to be the same again, and nothing was quite big enough to come after things as they've been lately,—but death, and that's only big enough because it's unknown."
"What will come?" asked Peter. He felt at once like a little boy, half afraid, and afraid of his fear, yet with his brother to uphold him.
"We won't go to bed to-night, will we? We'll sit here, even if we hold our tongues. I can't go to bed."
They did sit there for an hour or so. Peter spoke.
"What are you thinking, old man?"
"Of Rose."
It was not strange to Peter to hear him speak of her familiarly. He returned,—
"I've been thinking of her, too."
The deed was over. The great emotional wave that mounted, in Europe and America, at the death of Markham MacLeod, threw its spray upon this quiet shore. Letters came from his disciples and his lovers, and Rose, wondering as she read them, answered in a patient duty. If a great man is one who moves things, then her father had been great. He was bigger to her now than when she feared him. Though there were mutterings afar of what must come now Markham MacLeod was dead, this country spot took on its old tranquillity. Peter sat in the garden and painted. He seemed to think of nothing else. Rose was too busy to sit, and he began a portrait of grannie; then his only communication with the world seemed to be his flashing glance at her and at his canvas. Osmond, in the plantation, bent his back and worked with the men, and no one knew what he thought. To Peter he was gravely kind, and Rose, with a growing emotion that seemed to her likely to become terror in the end, realized that he had not sought her.
One morning while Peter was in the garden smoking, before he called grannie to her chair again, and Rose was at the library table answering letters, Madam Fulton appeared at the door.
"Where's Bessie Grant?" she asked.
Rose was at once on her feet and came forward to give her a chair, relieve her of her parasol, and stand beside her in a deferential waiting that, for some reason, never displeased this pulsating age with its memory ever upon the habitudes of youth.
"Where's Bessie Grant?"
"She will be in presently. Peter is painting her."
The old lady lay back in the chair and gazed at her absently, as if she merely included her in a general picture of life. Madam Fulton had changed. Her eyes were wistful, and she looked very frail.
"Billy Stark sails on Saturday," she volunteered, as if it were the one thing in her mind.
Grannie came in at the moment, and laid a kindly hand on her old friend's shoulder. Rose went back to her chair, and left them to their talk, while she put up her papers before quitting the room. Madam Fulton looked at grannie now.
"You've had your morning coffee, haven't you?" asked grannie, because she could think of nothing else to offer.
"Yes, I've had coffee, and I've had cereals. Electra is looking after me with that kind of an air, you know, as if I were a rockbound duty. My soul! If it wasn't for Billy Stark, I should die."
"Poor Electra!" said grannie softly.
"Now what do you want to call her that for? Why is she 'poor Electra' because she chooses to go round like a high priestess strapping me down on altars and pouring libations of cereals and cream? I could stand it if her heart was in it, but it's miles away. And Billy Stark is going."
Grannie only patted her hand.
"Well, well!" said she. "It's been nice to have him here."
"It's been heaven. It's the only heaven I shall ever know."
"We get a little mite of it here every once and a while," said grannie. "Don't you think so?"
"No, except when Billy Stark comes,—and he won't come again. Electra's going, too."
"Abroad?"
"Yes. She's going abroad. At once, it seems. Rose MacLeod!"
Rose looked up from her papers.
"What was it about your father that put the devil into people?"
Rose answered with an unsmiling candor.
"I don't know, Madam Fulton."
"But you know what I mean?"
"He had great personal power."
"You are not in mourning for him?" She had been considering the girl's dress and its fluttering ribbons.
Rose returned with dignity,—
"I am not in mourning."
"Well, Electra is. She hasn't put on black, but it's all over her. She's perfectly shameless. I asked her this morning why she was hurrying her sailing, and she said it was because he would wish it. There were things to do for him."
"That he would wish it?"
"Your father. Don't you see? She's got an idea that she's his earthly vicegerent, and there's some majestic poppycock about the Brotherhood. I can't understand it, and I don't want to. All I know is, she's mad. Bessie Grant, when I told the Lord I wanted things to happen, I didn't mean this kind, and He knew it perfectly well."
Rose had risen and stood in grave attention.
"Oh, she mustn't do that," she said earnestly. "I must tell her."
"Well, go and tell her, then," said the old lady, turning back to Mrs. Grant. "If you can make her listen, you'll do more than I can. I ought to chaperon her, though you might as well chaperon the Lion of Lucerne. Bessie!" And then as Rose left the room, she bent forward, and leaned her head on grannie's breast. "Bessie," she repeated, "it's a miserable world."
To grannie all ages were as one. The old and the young were alike defenseless, when they were in trouble, and she put her arms about the frail creature and held her warmly.
"Hush, dear!" she said, and forgot this was not one of her own children. "Mother's sorry." Then they both smiled a little, but grannie went on: "You must come right here, you know. Electra will be gone, and Billy, and you don't want to carry on the house alone. You come here, dear, and stay with me."
"Could I?" Madam Fulton lifted her tear-wet face. "If I could stay here a little while, maybe I might pull myself together. I don't know how to do it, Bessie. I don't know how to live. I never did."
Rose had run over to the other house in an unreasoning haste. Electra was in the library, putting her desk in order. Her firm white hands were busy, assorting and arranging. She turned her head as Rose came in, and, without rising, spoke to her collectedly and bade her be seated. She was older, Rose thought; she looked even like a different woman, not merely one whom middle age had overtaken. Purpose sat on her brow, and her eyes looked straight at you, as if she bade you tell your business and be gone. The one effect upon Rose was to make her sorry, infinitely sorry for her. Electra had broken the globe of her hopes upon a rock, and she was not even going to walk on and leave the shards forgotten there. Rose spoke at once, to use her courage while she felt it hot.
"Madam Fulton tells me you are going abroad."
"Yes. I sail next week."
"Is it with any purpose? Electra, did my father make you love him?"
Electra faced her. Color flowed into her cheeks. Her eyes glowed beyond any promise they had ever given.
"I am glad you ask me that," she said, and her full tone was strangely unlike the even consonance of the old Electra's voice. At last she forgot how she did things or why. Life was sweeping her along. "He never made me love him. It was ordained. It was like nothing else on earth."
Rose felt cold with the sad knowledge of it.
"Yes," she said, "he had great power over people."
A smile stole upon Electra's lips.
"We had planned it all," she said. "I was to go to Paris. I was to work with him. Now that he is gone, I must carry on the work for both of us."
Rose regarded her with a wistful compassion, not knowing how much she might help her, and yet wishing to offer all she had.
"Electra," she said, "what do you mean by carrying on the work?"
"His work, the Brotherhood."
"But, dear child, you would have to submit yourself for years and years to all sorts of tests before you would be trusted. I don't even know whether it won't fall apart, now he has gone. It may do that and reorganize in a different form. And how would you find it? You think of it as a definite body with headquarters anybody can reach. Why, Electra, you might stay a dozen years in Paris and not put your finger on it."
Still Electra turned to her that look of rapt allegiance. She heard apparently, yet the words made no impression on her fixed resolve. Now she spoke, and rather sweetly. All the tones of her voice, all her looks, had a reminiscent value, as if they were echoes from her lost relation with him.
"He told me where to write," she said, as if she were satisfied with that. "I shall go there."
"I know, the address for his letters. But he was never there. Now that he is gone, the place will be for other uses. Everything connected with the Brotherhood keeps fluctuating, changing. There would be no safety otherwise."
Electra was looking at her in that removed, patient way that made another woman of her. It was almost like a mother who has cares to think of and can spare no time from them for alien presences.
"I must go," she said again. "He would wish it."
Rose now had her moment of delay. Her mind went back over that weary road, to the past the present had so illumined for her. It tired her to think the trouble ever attendant on her father's life was to go on, ripple after ripple, now that he had sunken into the mystery of things. Once over the horror of his death, there had been a throb of thankfulness that at least an end had been made to his great power of bringing pain. And now here was another life to be thrown into the void after him, another woman to love a dream. She awoke from that momentary musing, to hear Electra saying,—
"You will excuse me, if I go on working? I sail so soon, and I must leave everything in order."
"Electra," said Rose. Then she called her name again, as if appealing to the softest of her moods. "How can I tell you! Electra, you mustn't love my father."
Again that swift smile came to Electra's face. The face itself was all a burning truth. The old crude precision in her seemed suddenly to have flowered into this warm candor that spoke and liked to hear itself disclosing, regardless of its auditor.
"You cannot"—she looked at Rose with happy inspiration, as if she had been the first to make the saying—"you can't kill love with reason."
Again Rose deliberated. When she spoke it was with an air of sad decisiveness.
"Electra," she said wistfully, "did he ask you to marry him?"
"I never thought of it," said Electra at once, in the simplest unreserve. "It would have seemed too small, to limit it and bound it."
"Yes. That is what he would have said, too small. You were a quick pupil."
Electra glowed.
"I know what he would have said, if he had had time. He did not need to tell me."
Rose sat wondering what argument would move her.
"Electra," she ventured, "have you had any curiosity about my father's relations to other people?"
"He had no time to tell me," said Electra, with a proud dignity.
"No, he would not have told you. He never confused his relations. Did you know he was adored by women?"
Electra's face flamed. She made no answer. If she could have set forth adequately what was in her tumultuous thoughts, she would have told Rose that nothing seemed so entirely her own as her part in Markham MacLeod's life. She had no curiosity over his past, no doubt of what her future would have been with him, accepting what he chose to give her, and finding it enough.
Rose pursued her into the cloister of her thought.
"Do you know, Electra," she was urging, "do you know how women devoted themselves to him?"
"They must have devoted themselves to him. I am one of them. I am proud to be."
"Ah, but, Electra, to take so much and give nothing!"
"How do you dare to say he gave nothing?"
"I know. I was slow in learning. I learned it first through your brother. No, don't put me off with a gesture. I must speak of him. It was he who showed me the cruelty of my father's attitude toward women. He laughed over it, but he showed me."
"He was never cruel." Electra seemed to be dreaming away in a sad reminiscence of his kindness.
"But to promise so much, Electra, and give nothing! He implied to every one, I have no doubt, that she was his great helper, that he would have married her if he had not been set aside by his work. That was like him. He was a sponge drinking up devotion."
"Yes, and he gave it back to the hungry and the thirsty and the cold."
"I don't know. I do know what he absorbed. One woman did translations for him. She worked like a dog, and he paid her with one of his looks. Another—she was a titled lady—kept his suite of rooms ready for him, and when he came, treated him like a prince. And they all had this sense of intimacy with him. Each thought she was the only one. Each felt she was divided from him by hard circumstance, but she should possess him in the end."
"In heaven?" asked Electra, eager for the slightest knowledge of him.
"No, not in heaven. My father always said his expectations stopped here. He never carried the game on there."
"The great souls"—Electra began, and stopped. Trouble was upon her brow. She knew there was a goodly reason for every act he did, yet human jealousy was in her. She had to seek out arguments. "The great souls are different," she halted. "They are many-sided. Look at Goethe—"
But Rose had heard that reason. She was tired of it.
"It's a pity they make it so hard for other people," she said wearily. "Because they are great, must they be greedy, too? But that was my father. He may have been a great man, but he was not the man you think him. If you saw him as he was,—he was a big, dominating animal, that's all."
Electra sat staring at her, condemning, Rose knew, not Markham MacLeod, but his daughter. The charm of his mastery was still upon her. Rose and Peter, more mobile than she, had escaped with the cutting of his cord of life. It was as if they had been under a crude natural magnetism, and now that the magician had gone into another room, they were free. But Electra had petrified in the attitude where he had left her. She had a pitying certainty that Rose had never known him. Something like indignation came now into her face. She spoke passionately:—
"Why do you want to take it away from me?"
Rose could not answer. Tears were in her eyes from pure pity at the loss and pain of it all.
"We knew each other so short a time," brooded Electra; and it was apparent that she believed the relation had been as much to MacLeod as to her. "Why can't you let me have the comfort of it?"
"If it didn't mean so much time, so much energy wasted! If you wouldn't devote your life to it,—you might, you know. It's quite like you, Electra. And that would be a pity; because he was never for a minute such a person as you think him,—never, Electra, never in the world."
Electra rounded upon her in a flash of indignation.
"Tell me what you think him."
Rose's mind ran back to that first night when, with the daring inspired in her by their meeting, she had given Osmond a portrait of her father. Now was the time to paint it again, but, for some reason, she could not. The man had not changed, but his aims obscured him. Behind them, he was nothing, but they were large enough to make his monument. Instead of answering directly, she found herself saying,—
"I have had such letters about him!"
"From the Brotherhood?"
"Yes. And they will keep on coming for a long time now, because it is everywhere, you know, in far, far-off places. And there's a tremendous loyalty in them, not only to him but to the Brotherhood."
"How can you read them and not be loyal, too!"
Rose considered why she could. Was it because the Brotherhood seemed, in her latest acquaintance with it, to have all the seeds of the old conditions that made a world of hate? If it had been the pure bond it promised to be, could even her father's sins have quenched the flame in her? Then she remembered one night when, in her father's absence, some one had spoken like a poet and created, in shining imagery, a new world. She had seen it, the new world, hanging like a crystal in the rejoicing sky.
"One night Ivan Gorof spoke," she began.
Electra's brows came together.
"He was the man that died."
"How did you know?"
"Peter told me."
"Yes. Well, there was a time when Ivan Gorof was like a flame. He was more moved than any one. He was a student,—and so enthusiastic, so believing,—I can't tell you! Afterwards he changed. That came suddenly. But this night he spoke about the Brotherhood as he wanted it to be. He said it could be a chain of hands round the earth, of people who wanted to do justice and show mercy. The old oppressors killed, he said. The Brotherhood must not kill. It can put to death,—but justly."
"What did he mean by justly?"
"Ah, that I don't know. I don't believe he knew, that night. He was like a man seeing a vision. But if such a thing could grow and grow, he said, that would be the kingdom of God. It would begin with the poor. Then some day a king would join it, and there would be rejoicing and wonder because some would think the king was mad and others would know it meant a great step upward. And they would all choose law, not liberty as the Brotherhood sees it. And then, he said, there would be a new heaven and a new earth, and it wouldn't be possible for oppressors to live, because everybody would love love and be afraid of hate. But it would all come through men who hated injustice more when they did it than when it was done to them."
"But that," said Electra, in no great interest, "is only Christianity."
"Is it? I don't know about that. I thought it was Ivan Gorof."
"What did he say?"
"My father?"
"The chief."
"It was reported to him, and I believe he said it was visionary. He probably smiled a little. He said there would be no peace without the sword. And afterwards Ivan told him to his face—I heard him—that it would come by the sword, but not the sword of war. It must be the sword kept hanging in the temple to be used for the god of the temple."
"Was the chief indignant?"
"He disapproved. Ivan was ignored, after that. He was quietly crowded out. My father," she could not resist saying,—"my father was very intolerant of new leadership."
"Naturally! He thought of the general good."
Rose sighed.
"Perhaps he did, Electra; I should like to think he did."
But she had told Electra nothing yet, she realized, to keep her from going forth with an ignorant intent. She tried once more, not to destroy the image of MacLeod, but to make it a just one. Yet if it were better to have the image broken, that, too, must be done.
"My father," she said, "took life like a great play."
"A game!" put in Electra quickly. She had heard him use the word, though as he said it, it seemed noble.
"Yes. He was always rearranging scenes on the big stage, ringing down the curtain and putting it up on another act. But what Ivan Gorof wanted—that silent spread of good—that he couldn't understand. He wanted war and himself a big figure in the midst."
"He was a leader!" cried Electra jealously, "the greatest of all."
Rose smiled wistfully.
"I haven't weakened your faith, have I?" she asked. "You don't doubt the wisdom of throwing yourself into this."
Electra rose suddenly from the desk, with an air of terminating the interview. Her voice rang like metal.
"If you talked to me until you were an old woman, you couldn't convince me. He was great—great! I should have followed him, if he had lived. I shall follow him all the faster now."
Rose, too, came to her feet.
"I almost think," she said, "I shall hear of your speaking for the cause."
A flush went over Electra's face. She looked wonderfully equipped for some high task, and also as if she recognized her own value and was glad she had that to give. Rose went back to Ivan Gorof and his great night.
"I keep remembering more and more of what he said," she mused. "He said the Brotherhood, as he saw it, would have its way because it was so beautiful. It would be like men in shining raiment regarded because they made a light, and people would see the light and want to walk by it."
"I must put that down," said Electra absorbedly. "I may at any time have to talk about him as I knew him."
"Ivan Gorof?"
"The chief. Was it Ivan Gorof who said that?"
Immediately, Rose saw, the words had lost their lustre. They were of no value, save as they had the sanction of MacLeod. Electra moved a pace nearer the door. She was impatient, Rose believed, to have her gone.
"Good-by, Electra," she said lingeringly and sadly. "I can't persuade you, can I?"
"No, you can't persuade me."
"And you glory in it!"
"Yes. And I thank God I have something to glory in."
At last she had it, the purpose of her life, though it was only a memory. But after all, what might she not turn it into? For she was pressing on as rashly as if the army of her desires were not at the cliff's edge below which foamed the sea, and in the sea, perhaps, lay glorious disaster.
"I shall be in Paris within a month," Rose hesitated. "If I can do anything for you there,—I told you the Brotherhood was not easily found, but I could introduce you to the leaders."
"They will flock about you," said Electra, with a candid bitterness, "because you are his daughter."
"Not long. There are things to do,—money to make over to them, money that stood in his name. Everything was in his name. I don't know how much he had of his own, so I shall keep my mother's and give back the rest."
"That will be right," said Electra. She did not add "ethically." Outlines had grown too sharp for that.
Rose held out her hand, and Electra, after a perceptible hesitation, took it in her firm grasp. Having it, she seemed warmed, through the contact, to something more humble and more natural. Still holding it, she looked Rose in the face, as if she tried to read her deepest self.
"Tell me," she said, and stopped.
"Yes, Electra." The girl's voice was very soft. She felt as if she could tell Electra anything that would help her.
"Did he love you?" The words came with difficulty, whether from jealousy or pure interest Electra herself could not say.
Rose stood a moment, not so much considering her answer as grieved that she must give it.
"No, Electra," she said then. "My father loved nobody,—but himself."
Then, as Electra dropped her hand, she went away. But after three paces she returned, doubtful of her own judgment, but ready to venture it.
"Electra," she said, "the papers have begun already to report a woman's speeches to the Brotherhood. You saw that yesterday."
Electra bowed her head silently. She was white to the lips.
"That woman was Ivan Gorof's mistress. My father separated them, for a time, just as he is separating you now from all your past. Ivan Gorof accused him of it, and next day he died. But I know, as well as I know anything, that now she has gone back to Ivan Gorof's memory. She will preach the Brotherhood as he saw it. Don't you see, Electra, until a man rises that is strong enough, she will lead the Brotherhood herself?"
Electra struck her hands together in a passionate, unconsidered gesture. But she recalled herself immediately.
"Good-by," she said coldly, and, turning about, went in.
Rose, unquiet over her useless mission to Electra, sought out Peter where he sat in the sun, his mind swaying in its constant rhythm between his happy work and his charming dreams. He left the garden chair and came forward to her, struck by the pathos of her face, and a little irritated, too, because MacLeod's death was a sorrow past, and it seemed unfortunate, at least, that there should be so much melancholy in bright weather.
"Electra is going abroad, you know," she said.
Peter turned with her and they paced along the grass. Rose went on,—
"She was much impressed by my father."
"I know."
"She belongs to the Brotherhood now."
Peter nodded, his mind still with Osmond, but cheering a little in the consciousness of her graceful presence.
"Peter!" She stopped, and laid a finger on his sleeve. "Say something to her! She is going over there to work, to throw herself into that movement. She might as well jump into the Seine."
"Yes," said Peter musingly. "Yes, of course! I'll go see her. I'll go at once."
She assented eagerly. She seemed to hurry him away, and not knowing quite what he was to do when he got there, he found himself, obedient but unprepared, at the other house, before Electra. She was agreeably welcoming. Peter had ceased even to remind her of young love, chiefly because it was a part of her dignity to put the incomplete dream aside. When she was forced to remember, sometimes by a word of grandmother's, it gave her an irritated sense of having once been cheek to cheek with something unworthy of her. But this morning Peter meant nothing whatever. A larger bulk had blotted him out. He plunged, at once.
"I am going to Paris, too, Electra. We shall meet there."
She smiled at him with a fine remoteness.
"Perhaps," she said. Then a wave of her old distaste came over her, and she asked, with the indifference that veils forbidden feeling,—
"Are you going together?"
"Together?"
"Yes. Are you going with Rose MacLeod?"
Peter frowned.
"We have not mentioned it," he said. Their coming to America together had seemed most natural, but some intonation of her tone made the implication odious. Seeing his look, she said, not giving him time to answer,—
"You will help me with the Brotherhood. I must get in touch with it by every possible means."
The color came into his face. He looked half ashamed, half wondering.
"I can't account for it," he returned, "but—Electra, I shan't have time for those things any more."
"Not have time—for that!"
It was as if she accused him of lacking time to breathe.
"I can't help it," said Peter. "It's all true, Electra, as true as it was; but I've got to paint. That's my business."
"Don't you feel that you owe anything to Markham MacLeod?"
He looked at her with interest, noting the indignation that made a handsomer woman of her; but only for that reason, not because the indignation stirred him. Peter hardly knew how he felt about Markham MacLeod. He scarcely thought of him at all, save as Rose recalled him. As to the Brotherhood, now that this great persuasive force was gone, Peter could view it dispassionately, and it did not move him. It was like waves heard a long way off, the waves of a sea he once had sailed, but from which he had escaped to this upland meadow where the light was good. Only when Rose, possessed by the remembrance of Ivan Gorof's vision, had gone home and told him about it, had he felt the flare of that old enthusiasm to be in the surge of the general life,—but chiefly then because she had chanced to use the phrase "shining armor," and he saw a knight pricking through a glade, with sunlight dappling between leaves, and knew it would be good to paint. There was nothing to say to Electra, because, as Rose had told him, she could listen to nothing but the Brotherhood, and wakened only to MacLeod. It was not that she refused other challenges; but her face grew mystical and he knew her mind was afar from him. He got up to go.
"In Paris, then, Electra," he said awkwardly.
Her brows contracted. She remembered the other tryst that was to have been, and could not answer.
"You will let me know where you are. I shall find you," Peter said, as he went down the steps, "at once."
But as he walked away, he knew it would have to be some incredible chance to bring them together. There was no room for him.
Electra sat there, her feet together, her hands in her lap, like a carven image, and held herself still in her dream of fantasy. She hardly knew where she was in these days. This was not the world as she had known it. Bound beyond bound of possibility lay over its horizon. There had been her former world, full of disappointments, lacking in opportunities for picturesque morals, and Markham MacLeod had walked into it, and turned on a light under which the whole place glittered. He had caused things to be forever different. One such illumination made all things possible. She felt like an adventurer setting sail. There in the room where he had talked to her, she sat and thought of him and even felt him near. The great stories flashed out before her, as if she turned page after page. Dante—how many times did he see Beatrice? She must look that up. But once would be enough, once for souls to recognize each other and then be forever faithful. At a step in the hall she recalled herself. It seemed as if everybody interrupted her in her passionate musings. This was Madam Fulton, and Electra remembered she had something to say to her. Madam Fulton looked very tired and irked in some way, as if she found the daily burden hard to bear. Electra rose, and waited scrupulously for her to sit.
"Billy Stark comes back to-morrow," said Madam Fulton. She took a chair, and laid her head back wearily.
"When does he sail?"
"Next week. You go Wednesday. He goes Saturday."
Electra dared not remind her of that wild threat of marrying Billy Stark and sailing with him. Her grandmother looked a pathetically old woman, and such fantasy seemed to have withdrawn into its own place.
"Grandmother," she began delicately. She had a fear of disturbing something frail that might fall to pieces of its own weakness.
"Well."
"Shall you stay on here?"
Madam Fulton roused herself.
"No," she said. "I am going to Bessie Grant's. She'll help me pull myself together, and in the fall I shall move back to town."
Electra came awake to her pathetic look.
"You are not feeling well, grandmother," she said solicitously.
"Feeling well!" The old lady repeated it with a fractious emphasis. "I'm worn out."
"Is it anything particular, grandmother?"
"Billy Stark is going away, isn't he? Isn't that particular enough? He's the only human creature left, except Bessie Grant and that pretty girl."
"Rose MacLeod?"
"Yes; but she's too young. She tires me; you all tire me, all but Billy and Bessie Grant. No, you can close the house, or I will, after you're gone. I shan't be in it."
There was something inevitably foolish to Electra in the regret of an old woman at losing the company of an old man whom she had not married at the proper time. She found herself hoping, with some distaste, that grandmother would forget him as soon as possible, and settle down into the decencies of age. But Madam Fulton seemed to have gathered herself and summoned energy for action. She sat upright now, and composed her face into more cheerful lines. She looked at Electra, and a wicked smile flickered out.
"I believe," said Madam Fulton, "if I have the strength, the day he sails, I believe I'll marry Billy Stark and go along with him."
Electra looked her pain and then her purpose to ignore it.
"I have left everything in complete order, grandmother," she said. "It will be easy to close the house. I have made my will."
"Bless me!"
"I have given you half my property. The other half I leave to the Brotherhood."
"For heaven's sake, Electra! What do you want to act like that for?"
Electra was too enamored of that deed to keep it hidden.
"It is for a monument to Markham MacLeod," she said, from her abiding calm. "But it is to be used by the Brotherhood. He would wish that."
Madam Fulton was regarding her, not satirically now, but in an honest wonder.
"Electra," she said, "I glory in you."
"Grandmother!"
"I do. I can't help it. You've gone bad, just as I said you would. And you never were so human in your life. Brava! I'm proud of you."
But Electra lifted her head a little and did not answer. Grandmother, she knew, could hardly understand. It made her isolation the more sacred.
"You give me courage," the old lady was saying. "Why, you put some life into me! I don't know but I've got the strength to fly with Billy, after all."
Electra rose. She could not listen. But at the door she turned, a new thought burning in her.
"Grandmother," she said irrepressibly, "if you would make your will—"
"Bless you, I haven't sixpence," said the old lady gayly, "except the tainted money from the book."
"That's what I mean." Electra came back and stood beside her. She breathed an honest fervor. "That money, grandmother,—it is tainted, as you say,—if you would leave that to the Brotherhood—"
Madam Fulton was on her feet, with an amazing swiftness.
"My money!" she cried. Then a gleam of humor irradiated her face, and she ended affectionately, "My own tainted money? Why, I'm devoted to it. And I tell you this, Electra: if there's one scrap of it left when you inherit, if you give it to your brotherhoods, I'll haunt you. As I'm a living woman, you shan't have a chance. I'll make my will and Billy Stark shall help me, and I'll leave it to that pretty girl, and she shall buy ribbons with it. And—My heavens! but there's Billy Stark now."
He was coming up the walk, and she flew to meet him in an ingenuous happiness, half dramatic fervor to plague Electra, who, walking with dignity, went out the other way.
Madam Fulton was laughing, at Electra, at life itself.
"Billy," said she, "I'd rather see you than all the heavenly hosts."
Billy took off his hat and wiped his forehead.
"I found I'd got things pretty well in order," he explained. "I thought you wouldn't mind my coming sooner."
"Mind! I'm enchanted. Come along in and have cold drinks and things. Bless me, Billy! how it does set me up to see you."
She led the way into the dining-room, and when no one answered the bell, on into the kitchen for exploration in the icebox. She tiptoed about, her pretty skirt caught under one arm, her high heels clicking. The pink came into her cheeks. She had the spirit which is of no age. Then they sat down together at the dining-table in the shaded calm, and while Billy drank, she leaned her elbows on the table and, with the ice clinking in her glass, drank and made merry. She might have been sixteen and in a French café. Her spirits were seething, and she feared no morrow.
"I never can let you go in the world, Billy," she said, out of her gay candor.
He was instant with his gallant remedy.
"Come with me, then!"
"Sometimes"—she paused and watched him—"sometimes I almost think I will."
William Stark was a tired man that day. He had been telephoning and besieging men in their offices and talking business; he felt his age. It was one of the days when it seemed to him that sacred business even was less than nothing,—vanity,—and when he wondered, without interest, who would spend the money he might make. He was plainly fagged, and here was a gay creature of his own age, beguiled by the old perennial promises, whom life had not yet convinced of its own insolvency. He wondered at the youth of women, their appetite for pleasure, their inability to realize when the game is done. There was the curtain slowly descending between age and its entertainment, and Madam Fulton was clapping her unwearied hands as if things could go on forever. Grant her an encore, and she would demand another. As for him, he would fain go home to bed. But Billy was a man of his word. His loyal heart could not allow itself to recognize the waywardness of his sad mind. The one had done with life in all but its outer essences. The other, in human decency, must go on swearing the old vows to the last. His face took on a resolution that made him more the man, and sobered her. He put out his hand.
"Will you come, Florrie?" he asked.
"Yes, Billy," she answered. "I'll come."
"You honor me very much." He sat there holding the frail hand and wondering at himself, wondering at them both. If he had known he was to go back in this guise, he might not have had the courage to come. But it was well. It was a good thing, having missed many ventures, not to let this one pass. Madam Fulton was having one of her moments of a renewed grasp on life, a gay delight in it which was a matter of nerves and quite distinct from memory or hope. She was discoursing gleefully.