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Rose MacLeod

by Alice Brown · English · Gutenberg #32115 · 560,548 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Rose MacLeod

Author: Alice Brown


        
Release date: April 24, 2010 [eBook #32115]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32115

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROSE MACLEOD ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









                              ROSE MACLEOD

                             BY ALICE BROWN

                           WITH A FRONTISPIECE
                         By W. W. CHURCHILL, Jr.


NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT 1907 AND 1908 BY ALICE BROWN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published April 1908_




[Illustration: Rose MacLeod]




ROSE MACLEOD




I


Madam Fulton and her granddaughter Electra were sitting at the
breakfast-table. It was a warm yet inspiriting day in early spring, and,
if the feel and look of it were not enough, the garden under the
dining-room windows told the season's hour like a floral clock. The
earliest blossoms had been pushed onward by the mounting spirit of the
year, and now the firstlings of May were budding. The great Georgian
house, set in the heart of this processional bloom, showed the mellow
tints of time. It had an abundant acreage, diversified, at first hand,
not only by this terraced garden in the rear, but by another gone to
wild abandon on the west, and an orchard stretching away into level
fields and, beyond them, groves of pine.

These dining-room windows, three of them, side by side, and now
unshaded, gave large outlook on a beautiful and busy world where the
terrace mounted in green, to be painted later with red peony balls, and
where the eye, still traveling, rested in satisfaction on the fringe of
locusts at the top.

Inside the house the sense of beauty could be fully fed. Here was a
sweet consistency, the sacred past in untouched being, that time when
furniture was made in England, and china was the product of long voyages
and solemn hoarding in corner cabinets with diamond panes. Life here was
reflected dimly from polished surfaces and serenely accentuated by
quaint carvings and spindle legs. Here was "atmosphere"--the theatre of
simple and austere content.

Madam Fulton outwardly fitted her background as a shepherdess fits a
fan. She was a sprite of an old lady, slender and round, and finished in
every movement, with the precision of those who have "learned the steps"
in dancing of another period. It was her joy that she had kept her
figure, her commonplace that, having it, she knew what to do with it.
She had a piquant profile, dark eyes, and curls whiter than white,
sifted over with the lustre of a living silver. According to her custom,
she wore light gray, and there was lace about her wrists and throat.

"Coffee, Electra?" she suddenly proposed, in a contralto voice that
still had warmth in it. She put the question impatiently, as if her
hidden self and that of the girl opposite had been too long communing,
in spite of them, and she had to break the tacit bondage of that
intercourse by one more obvious. The girl looked up from the letter in
her hand.

"No, thank you, grandmother," she said. Her voice, even in its lowest
notes, had a clear, full resonance. Then she laid the letter down. "I
beg your pardon," she added. "I thought you were opening your mail."

"No! no!" Madam Fulton cried, in a new impatience. "Go on. Read your
letter. Don't mind me."

But the girl was pushing it aside. She looked across the table with her
direct glance, and Madam Fulton thought unwillingly how handsome she
was. Electra was young, and she lacked but one thing: a girl's uncertain
grace. She had all the freshness of youth with the poise of ripest
womanhood. She sat straight and well, and seemed to manage her position
at table as if it were a horse. Her profile was slightly aquiline and
her complexion faultless in its fairness and its testimony to wholesome
living. Her lips were rather thin, but the line of white teeth behind
them showed exquisitely. She had a great deal of fine brown hair wound
about her head in braids, in an imperial fashion. Perhaps the only fault
in her face was that her eyes were of a light and not sympathetic blue.

"Shall I open your mail, grandmother?" she asked with extreme deference.

Madam Fulton's hand was lying on a disordered pile of letters, twenty
deep, beside her plate. She pressed the hand a little closer.

"No, thank you," she said. "I will attend to them myself."

Electra laid down her napkin, and pushed her plate to one side, to give
space for her own papers. She lifted one sheet, and holding it in her
fine hands, began rather elegantly,--

"Grandmother, I have here a most interesting letter from Mrs. Furnivall
Williams. She speaks of your book in the highest praise."

"Oh!" said the old lady, with a shade of satire, "does she? That's very
good-natured of Fanny Williams."

"Let me read you what she says." Electra bent a frowning brow upon the
page. "Ah, this is it. 'It was to be expected that your grandmother
would write what we all wanted to read. But her "Recollections" are more
than welcome. They are satisfying. They are illuminative.'"

"Fanny Williams is a fool!"

Electra, not glancing up, yet managed to look deeply pained.

"She goes on to say, 'What a power your dear grandmother has been! I
never realized it until now.'"

"That's a nasty thing for Fanny Williams to write. You tell her so."

"Then she asks whether you would be willing to meet the Delta Club for
an afternoon of it."

"Of what?"

"Your book, grandmother,--your 'Recollections.'"

"Electra, you drive me to drink. I have written the book. I've printed
it. I've done with it. What does Fanny Williams want me to do now?
Prance?"

Electra was looking at her grandmother at last and in a patient
hopefulness, like one awaiting a better mood.

"Grandmother dear," she protested, "it almost seems as if you owe it to
the world, having said so much, to say a little more."

"What, for instance, Electra? What?"

Electra considered, one hand smoothing out the page.

"People want to know things about it. The newspapers do. How can you
think for a moment of the discussion there has been, and not expect
questions?"

The old lady smiled to herself.

"Well," she said, "they won't find out."

"But why, grandmother, why?"

"I can't tell you why, Electra; but they won't, and there's an end of
it." She rose from her chair, and Electra, gathering her mail, followed
punctiliously. As they were leaving the room, her grandmother turned
upon her. "Did you hear from Peter?" she asked.

"Yes. From New York. He will be here to-morrow." Electra's clear,
well-considered look was very unlike that of a girl whose lover had come
home, after a five years' absence, for the avowed purpose of marriage.

Madam Fulton regarded her for a moment with a softened glance. It seemed
wistfully to include other dreams, other hopes than the girl's own, a
little dancing circle of shadowy memories outside the actual, as might
well happen when one has lived many years and seen the growth and
passing of such ties.

"Well, Electra," she said then, "I suppose you'll marry him. You'll be
famous by brevet. That's what you'll like."

Electra laughed a little, in a tolerant way.

"You are always thinking I want to become a celebrity, grandmother," she
said. "That's very funny of you."

"Think!" emphasized the old lady. "I know it. I know your kind. They're
thick as spatter now. Everybody wants to do something, or say he's done
it. You want to 'express' yourselves. That's what you say--'express'
yourselves. I never saw such a race."

She went grumbling into the library to answer her letters, or at least
look them through, and paused there for a moment, her hand on the table.
She knew approximately what was in the letters. They were all
undoubtedly about her book, the "Recollections" of her life, some of
them questioning her view of the public events therein narrated, but
others palpitating with an eager interest. She had written that history
as a woman of letters in a small way, and a woman who had known the
local celebrities, and she had done it so vividly, with such incredible
originality, that the book was not only having a rapid sale, but it
piqued the curiosity of gossip-lovers and even local historians. No
names were mentioned; but when she wrote, "A poet said to me in
Cambridge one day," everybody knew what poet was meant. When she
obscurely alluded to the letters preceding some smooth running of the
underground railway, historians of the war itched to see the letters,
and invited her to produce them. The book was three months old now, and
the wonder no less. The letters had been coming, and the old lady had
not been answering them. At first she read them with glee, as a later
chapter of her life story; but now they tired her a little, because she
anticipated their appeal.

A bird was singing outside. She cocked her head a little and listened,
not wholly in pleasure, but with a critical curiosity as well. She was
always watching for the diminution of sound, the veiling of sight
because she was old, and now she wondered whether the round golden notes
were what they had been fifty years ago. She stood a moment
thoughtfully, her hand now on the letters,--those tedious intruders upon
her leisure. Then, with an air of guilty escape, though there was no one
to see and judge, she left them lying there and stole softly out on the
veranda, where she sank into her friendly wicker chair, and looking upon
the world, smilingly felt it to be good. The sky was very bright, yet
not too bright for pleasure; clouds not meant for rain were blotting it
in feathery spaces. There was a sweet air stirring, and the birds,
though they were busy, said something about it from time to time in a
satisfactory way. Madam Fulton felt the rhythm and surge of it all, and
acquiesced in her own inactive part in it. Sometimes of late she hardly
knew how much of life was memory and how much the present brilliant call
of things. It was life, the thing she did not understand. Presently she
closed her eyes and sank, she thought, into a deeper reverie. These
excursions of hers were less like sleep, she always told herself, than a
kind of musing dream. At last she was learning what other old people had
meant when they explained, with a shamefaced air of knowing youth could
never understand, "I just lost myself." To lose one's battered and yet
still insistent self was now to be at peace.

When the forenoon was an hour or more along, she opened her eyes, aware
of some one looking at her. There he was, an old gentleman of a pleasant
aspect, heavy, with a thickness of curling white hair, blue eyes, and
that rosiness which is as the bloom upon the flower of good living. His
clothes were of the right cut, and he wore them with the ease of a man
who has always had the best to eat, to wear, to look at; for whom life
has been a well-organized scheme to turn out comfort. The old lady
stared at him with unwinking eyes, and the old gentleman smiled at her.

"Billy!" she cried at last, and gave him both her hands. "Billy Stark!"

They shook hands warmly and still looked each other in the eye. They had
not met for years, and neither liked to think what was in the other's
mind. But Madam Fulton, after they had sat down, challenged it.

"I'm an old woman, Billy." She wrinkled up her eyes in a delightful way
she had. "Don't you think that's funny?"

Billy with difficulty crossed one leg over the other, helping it with a
plump hand.

"You're precisely what you always were."

His round, comfortable voice at once put her where she liked to be, in
the field of an unconsidered intercourse with man. Electra, she knew,
was too much with her, but she had forgotten how invigorating these
brisk yet kindly breezes were, from the other planets. "That's what I
came over to see about," Billy was saying, with a rakish eye. "I needn't
have taken the trouble. You're as little changed as that syringa bush."

Her brilliant face softened into something wistful.

"The bush will come into bloom in a few weeks, Billy," she reminded him.
"I shan't ever bloom again."

"Boo to a goose!" said Billy. "You're in bloom now."

The wistfulness was gone. She adjusted her glasses on her nose and eyed
him sharply.

"I think too much about old age," she said. "I regard mine as a kind of
mildew, and every day and forty times a day I peer at myself to see if
the mildew's growing thicker. But you don't seem to have any mildew,
Billy. You're just a different kind of person from what you were fifty
years ago. You haven't gone bad at all."

Billy set his correct feet together on the floor, rose, and, with his
hand on his heart, made her a bow.

"I don't care for it much myself," he said.

"Growing old? It's the devil, Billy. Don't talk about it. Why aren't you
in England?"

"I'm junior partner now."

"I know it."

"I'm a great publisher, Florrie."

She nodded.

"Your men run over to arrange with us in London. There was no occasion
for my coming here. But I simply wanted to. I got a little
curious--homesick, maybe. So I came. Got in last night. I read your book
before I sailed."

She looked at him quizzically and almost, it might be said, with a droll
uneasiness.

"You brought it out in England," she offered, in rather a small voice.
"Naturally you'd read it."

"Not because we brought it out. Because it was yours," he corrected her.
"My word, Florrie, what a life you've had of it."

The pink crept into her cheeks. Her eyes menaced him.

"Are you trying to pump me, Billy Stark?" she inquired.

"Not for a moment. But you're guilty, Florrie. What is it?"

She considered, her gaze bent on her lap.

"Well, the fact is, Billy," she temporized, "I've got in pretty deep
with that book. I wrote it as a sort of a--well, I wrote it, you know,
and I thought I might get a few hundred dollars out of it, same as I
have out of those novels I used to write to keep lace on my petticoats.
Well! the public has made a fool of itself over the book. Every day I
get piles of letters asking what I meant by this and that, and won't I
give my documentary evidence for saying this or that great gun did so
and so at such a time."

"Well, why don't you?"

"Give my evidence? Why, I can't!" She was half whimpering, with a laugh
on her old face. "I haven't got it."

"You mean you haven't the actual letters now. Those extraordinary ones
of the abolitionist group, for example,--can't you produce them?"

"Why no, Billy, of course I can't. I"--she held his glance with a
mixture of deprecation and a gay delight--"I made them up."

William Stark, the publisher, looked at her with round blue eyes growing
rounder and a deeper red surging into his sea-tanned face. He seemed on
the point of bursting into an explosion, whether of horror or mirth
Madam Fulton could not tell. She continued to gaze at him in the same
mingling of deprecating and amused inquiry. In spite of her years she
looked like a little animal which, having done wrong, seeks out means of
propitiation, and as yet knows nothing better than the lifted eyebrow of
inquiry.

"Well," she said again defiantly, "I made them up."

"In God's name, Florrie, what for?"

"I wanted to."

"To pad out your book?"

"To make a nice book, the kind of one I wanted. I'll tell you what,
Billy,"--she bowled caution into the farthest distance,--"I'm going to
make a clean breast of it. Now you won't peach?"

He shook his head.

"Go on," he bade her.

She lifted her head, sat straighter in her chair, and spoke with
firmness:--

"Now, Billy, if I'm going to talk to you at all, you must know precisely
where I stand. Maybe you do, but I don't believe it. You see, all these
years I've been writing what I called novels, and they've paid me a
little, and I've got up a sort of local fame. I'm as poor--well, I can't
tell you how poor. Only I live here in the summer with Electra in her
house--"

"It's the old Fulton house."

"Yes, but it came to her through her father. Remember, I was a second
wife. I had no children. My husband gave me the Cambridge place and left
this to his son."

"What became of the Cambridge house?"

"Sold, years ago. Eaten up. Seems as if I'd done nothing, all these
years, but eat. It makes me sick to think of it. Well, here was I,
credit low, my little knack at writing all but gone--why, Billy, styles
have changed since my day. Folks would hoot at my novels now. They don't
read them. They just remember I wrote them when they want a celebrity at
a tea. I'm a back number. Don't you know it?"

He nodded, gravely pondering. The one thing about him never to be
affected by his whimsical humor was the integrity of a business verdict.
Madam Fulton now was warming to the value of her own position. She began
to see how picturesque it was.

"Well, then up rises one of your precious publishers and says to me,
'Mrs. Fulton, you have known all the celebrated people. Why not write
your recollections?' 'Why not?' says I. Well, I went home and sat down
and wrote. And when I looked back at my life, I found it dull. So I gave
myself a free hand. I described the miserable thing as it ought to have
been, not as it was."

William Stark was leaning forward, looking her in the face, his hands on
his knees, as if to steady him through an amazing crisis.

"Florrie," he began, "do you mean to say you made up most of the letters
in that book?"

"Most of them? Every one! I hadn't any letters from celebrities. Days
when I might have had, I didn't care a button about the eggs they were
cackling over, and I didn't know they were going to be celebrities,
then, did I?"

"Do you mean the recollections of Brook Farm, taken down from the lips
of the old poet as he had it from a member of the fraternity there--"

"Faked, dear boy, faked, every one of them." She was gathering
cheerfulness by the way.

"The story of Hawthorne and the first edition--"

"Hypothetical. Grouse in the gun-room."

"Do you mean that the story of the old slave who came to your mother's
door in Waltham, and the three abolitionists on their way to the
meeting--"

"Now what's the use, Billy Stark?" cried the old lady. "I told you it
was a fake from beginning to end. So it is. So is every page of it. If
I'd written my recollections as they were, the book would have been a
pamphlet of twenty odd pages. It would have said I married a learned
professor because I thought if I got into Cambridge society I should see
life, and life was what I wanted. It would have gone on to say I found
it death and nothing else, and when my husband died I spent all the
money I could get trying to see life and I never saw it then. Who'd have
printed that? Pretty recollections, I should say!"

Mr. Stark was still musing, his eyes interrogating her.

"It's really incredible, Florrie," he said at last. "Poor dear! you
needed the money."

"That wasn't it."

"Then what was?"

"I don't know." But immediately her face folded up into its smiling
creases and she said, "I wanted some fun."

William Stark fell back in his chair and began to laugh, round upon
wheezy round. When his glasses had fallen off and his cheeks were wet
and his face flamed painfully, Madam Fulton spoke, without a gleam.

"You're a nice man, Billy Stark."

"You wanted your little joke!" he repeated, subsiding and trumpeting
into his handkerchief. "Well, you've had it, Florrie; you've had it."

"I don't know that I have," she returned. "I had to enjoy it alone, and
that kind of palled on me. When the first notices came, I used to lie
awake from three o'clock on, to laugh. I used to go to the window when
Electra was in the room, and make up faces, to let off steam and keep
her from knowing. Then the letters kept coming, and clubs and things
kept hounding me, and Electra was always at me. There she is now, with
my grog. See me take it and pour it into the syringa."




II


Electra was crossing the veranda with her springing step, bearing a
glass of beaten egg and milk on a little tray. Madam Fulton signed to
her to place the tray on a table, evidently ready for such
ministrations, and then presented her friend. Electra greeted him with a
smile of bright acceptance. She knew his standing, and his air of
worldly ease quite satisfied her.

"May I bring you--?" she began, with a pretty grace.

"I should like a glass of water," said Billy, "if you will be so good."

When she had gone, Madam Fulton spoke in impressive haste:--

"How long can you stay, Billy? All day? All night?"

"I've got to run back to New York for a bit, but I shall be in America
all summer, one place or another. I'll stay to luncheon, if you'll let
me."

"We must avoid Electra! If she comes back and settles on us, I shall
simply take you to walk. We can go over to Bessie Grant's. You remember
her. She married the doctor."

"I remember."

Electra had returned with a glass and pitcher, and ice clinking
pleasantly. She took occasion to explain to Madam Fulton, with some
civil hesitation,--

"I have a committee meeting, grandmother. I had planned to go in town."

The old lady responded briskly.

"Go, my dear, go. Mr. Stark will stay to luncheon. We'll look out for
each other."

When Electra had rustled away, after the pleasantest of farewell
recognitions between her and the guest, Madam Fulton heaved a sigh.

"Billy," said she, "that's a dreadful girl."

"She's a very handsome girl. What's the matter with her?"

"She's so equipped. First, she's well born. Her grandmother was a Grace
and her mother was a Vanderdecken. See her teeth. See her hair, and her
profile. Dreadful!"

"They're very beautiful, in a correct way. She's as well made as a grand
piano."

"That's it, Billy. And she has done nothing but polish herself, and now
you can see your face in her. Fancy, Billy, what these modern creatures
do. They go to gymnasium. They can take a five-barred gate, I believe,
in their knickerbockers and what they call sneakers. They understand all
about foods and what's good for them and what's good for the aged, and
if you're over seventy they buy condensed foods in cans and make you
take it twice a day."

"You haven't tasted your grog."

"I shan't. Want it?"

He accepted the glass, and sniffed at it critically.

"That's good," he commented. "That's very good. There's a familiar
creature in that." He tasted, and then drank with gusto.

"Well," said the old lady disparagingly, "you wouldn't have said so if
it had been one of the foods. I have them before I go to bed."

He spoke persuasively: "Florrie, let's talk a little more about the
book."

"There's nothing more to say. I've told you the whole story, and I know
you won't tell anybody else."

"Don't you think you'd better make a clean breast of it to Gilbert and
Wall?"

"What for?"

"Well, I don't know exactly: only it seems to me publishers and authors
are in a more or less confidential relation. Being a publisher myself, I
naturally feel rather strongly about it."

"I don't see it in the least," said the old lady decisively. "All this
talk about the paternal relation is mere poppycock. They print me a
book. If it takes a start, they back it. They're as glad as I am. But as
to telling them my glorious little joke, why, I can't and I won't."

"But, dear woman, they're printing away with full confidence in having
got a valuable book out of you."

"So they have. It's selling, isn't it?"

"Madly. Specialists want it for honest data. The general reader has got
an idea from the reviews that there's personal gossip in it, more or
less racy. So it goes."

"Well, let it go," said the old lady recklessly. "I shan't stop it."

"No, but I can't help thinking Gilbert and Wall ought to be in the
secret."

"Do you imagine they'd stop printing?"

"I don't imagine anything. I believe, to speak temperately, they'd drop
dead. I only say it's a fearful and wonderful situation, and they ought
to know it. You see, dear woman, you've not only played a joke on the
public; you've played a joke on them."

"Well, for goodness' sake, why not? What's a publisher, anyway? Has he
got to be treated like a Hindu god? Billy Stark, I wish you'd stayed in
London where you belong."

Again Billy felt himself wheezing, and gave up to it as before. She
watched him unwinkingly, and by and by she chuckled a little and then
joined him, in an ecstasy.

"Florrie," said he, "you're simply a glorious portent, and you've no
more moral sense than the cat."

"No, Billy, no!" She was answering in a happy acquiescence. "I never had
any. I've always wanted some fun, and I want it to this day." Her old
face changed surprisingly under a shade of gravity. "And see where it's
led me." It was natural to conclude that her verdict embraced wider
evidence than that of the erring book. Billy, quite serious in his turn,
looked at her in candid invitation. She answered him earnestly and
humbly: "Billy, I always took the wrong road. I took it in the beginning
and I never got out of it."

"There's a frightful number of wrong turnings," Billy offered, in rather
inadequate sympathy, "and a great deficiency of guideposts."

"You see, Billy, the first thing I did was to give up Charlie Grant and
marry Mark Fulton. I was only a country girl. Charlie was a country boy.
I thought Mark must be a remarkable person because he was a professor in
Cambridge. I thought Charlie was going to be a poor little country
doctor, because he was studying medicine with another country doctor,
and he couldn't go to college to save his skin. There were eight
children, you know, younger than he. He had to work on the farm. Well,
Billy, I made a mistake."

Stark marveled at the crude simplicity of all this. He forgot, for the
moment, that she was an old woman, and that for a long time she had been
conning over the past like a secret record, full of blemishes, perhaps,
but not now to be remedied.

"You did like Charlie," he ventured. "I knew that."

"I liked him very much. And I've never quite escaped from his line of
life, if that's what they call it. Since Electra was alone and I came
here to stay with her, I've been thrown with his widow. Bessie's an old
woman, too, you know, like me. But she's a different kind."

"She was a pretty girl. Rather sedate, I remember, for a girl."

"Billy, she's a miracle. She lives alone, all but old Mary to do the
work. She's stiffened from rheumatism so that she sits in her chair
nearly all day, and stumps round a little, in agony, with two canes. But
she's had her life."

"How has she had it, Florrie? In having Grant?"

"Because all her choices were good choices. She took him when he was
poor, and she helped him work. They had one son. He married a singer, a
woman--well, like me. Maybe it was in the blood to want a woman like me.
Then this boy and the singer had two sons--one of them clever. Peter
Grant, you know. I suppose he's a genius, if there are such. The other
has--a deformity."

"I know," he nodded. "You wrote me."

"I didn't write you all. He wasn't born with it. He was a splendid boy,
but when he had the accident the mother turned against him. She couldn't
help it. I see how it was, Billy. The pride of life, that's what it
is--the pride of life."

"Is he dwarfed?"

"Heavens! he was meant for a giant, rather. He has great strength.
Somehow he impresses you. But it's the grandmother that built him up,
body and brain. Now he's a man grown, and she's made him. Don't you see,
Billy? she's struck home every time."

"Is she religious?"

"Yes, she is. She prays." Her voice fell, with the word. She looked at
him searchingly, as if he might understand better than she did the
potency of that communion.

"She's a Churchwoman, I suppose."

"No, no. She only believes things--and prays. She told me one day
Osmond--he's the deformed one--he couldn't have lived if she hadn't
prayed."

"That he would be better?"

"No, she was quite explicit about that. Only that they would be taught
how to deal with it--his trouble. To do it, she said, as God wished they
should. Billy, it's marvelous."

"Well, dear child," said Billy, "you can pray, too."

Her old face grew pinched in its denial.

"No," she answered sadly, "no. It wouldn't rise above the ceiling. What
I mean is, Billy, that all our lives we're opening gates into different
roads. Bessie Grant opened the right gate. She's got into a level field
and she's at home there. But I shouldn't be. I only go and climb up and
look over the bars. And I go stumbling along, hit or miss, and I never
get anywhere."

He was perplexed. He frowned a little.

"Where do you want to get, Florrie?" he asked at length.

She smiled into his face engagingly.

"I don't know, Billy. Only where things don't bore me; where they are
worth while."

"But they always get to bore us--" he paused and she took him up.

"You mean I'm bored because I am an old woman. I should say so, too, but
then I look at that other woman and I know it isn't so. No, Billy, I
took the wrong road."

Billy looked at her a long time searchingly.

"Well," he said at last, "what can we do about it? I mean, besides
writing fake memoirs and then going ag'in our best friends when they beg
us to own up?"

She put the question by, as if it could not possibly be considered, and
yet as if it made another merry chapter to her jest. Billy had gathered
his consolatory forces for another leap.

"Florrie," said he, "come back to London with me."

"My dear child!"

"You marry me, Florrie. I asked you fifty odd years ago. I could give
you a good sober sort of establishment, a salon of a sort. I know
everybody in arts and letters. Come on, Florrie."

Fire was in the old lady's eye. She rose and made him a pretty courtesy.

"Billy," said she, "you're splendid. I won't hold you to it, but it will
please me to my dying day to think I've had another offer. No, Billy,
no. You wouldn't like it. But you're splendid."

Billy, too, had risen. They took hands and stood like boy and girl
looking into each other's eyes. There was a little suffusion, a tear
perhaps, the memory of other times when coin did not have to be counted
so carefully, when they could open the windows without inevitable dread
of the night, its dark and chill. The old lady broke the moment.

"Come over and see Bessie Grant. What do you say?"

"Delighted. Get your hat."

But she appeared with a gay parasol, one of Electra's, appropriated from
the stand with the guilty consideration that the owner would hardly be
back before three o'clock. The old lady liked warm colors. She loved the
bright earth in all its phases, and of these a parasol was one. They
went down the broad walk and out into the road shaded by summer green,
that quivering roof-work of drooping branches and many leaves.

"Billy," said she, "I'm glad you've come."

"So am I, Florrie; so am I."

It was not far to the old Grant house, rich in the amplitude of its
size, and of the grounds, where all conceivable trees that make for
profit and delight were colonized according to a wise judgment. The
house was large, of a light yellow with white trimmings and green
blinds, and the green of the shrubbery relieved it and endowed it with
an austere dignity. There was a curving driveway to the door, and
following it, they came to the wide veranda, where an old lady sat by
herself, dozing and reflecting as Madam Fulton had done that morning.
The two canes by her chair told the story of a sad inaction. She was of
heroic stature and breadth. Her small, beautifully poised head had thick
white hair rolled back and wound about in a soft coil. Her face, pink
with a persistent bloom, soft with a contour never to break or grow old,
was simply a mother's face. It had the mother look,--the sweet serious
eyes, the low brow, for beauty not for thought, the tranquil mouth. She
was dressed in a fine cambric simply made, with little white ruffles
about her neck and above her motherly hands. Madam Fulton saw her
debating as they came, frowning a little, wondering evidently about the
stranger. She called to her.

"Who is this, Bessie Grant?"

The other woman laid a hand upon her canes, and then, as if this were an
instinctive movement, yet not to be undertaken hurriedly, smiled and sat
still, awaiting them. When they were at the steps, she spoke in an
exceedingly pleasant voice. It deepened the effect of her great
gentleness.

"I'm sure I don't know. Come right up and tell me."

They mounted the steps together, and Stark put out his hand. Mrs. Grant
studied him for a moment. Light broke over her sweet old face.

"It's Billy Stark," she said.

"Of course it is," triumphed the other old lady. "Billy Stark come back
from foreign parts as good as new. Now let's sit down and talk it over."

They drew their chairs together, and, smiles and glances mingling, went
back over the course of the years, first with a leap to the keen, bright
time when they were in school together. The type of that page was
clear-cut and vivid. There were years they skipped then, and finally
they came to the present, and Billy said,--

"You have two grandsons?"

"Yes. One lives with me. The other is coming home to-morrow. He's the
painter."

"Engaged to Electra," added Madam Fulton. "Did you know that? They are
to be married this summer. Then I suppose he'll go back to Paris and
she'll go with him."

Mrs. Grant was looking at her with a grave attention.

"We hope not," she said, "Osmond and I. Osmond hopes Peter will settle
here and do some work. He thinks it will be best for him."

"There's no difficulty about his getting it," said Billy. "I saw his
portrait of Mrs. Rhys. That was amazing."

The grandmother nodded, in a quiet pleasure.

"They said so," she returned.

"It will do everything for him."

"It has done everything. Osmond says he has only to sit down now and
paint. But he thinks it will be best for him to do it here--at least for
a time."

"How in the world can Osmond tell before he sees him?" objected Madam
Fulton. "You haven't set eyes on Peter for five years. He may be
Parisian to the backbone. You wouldn't want to tie him by the leg over
here."

"So Osmond says. But he hopes he won't want to go back."

"I can tell him one thing," said the other old lady; "he'd better make
up his mind to some big centre, Paris or New York, or he won't get
Electra. Electra knows what she wants, and it isn't seclusion. She is
going to be the wife of a celebrated painter, and she'll insist on the
perquisites. I know Electra."

Mrs. Grant smiled in deprecation; but Stark had a habit of intuitive
leaps, and he judged that she also knew Electra. His mind wandered a
little, as his eyes ran over the nearer features of the place. It hardly
suggested wealth: only comfort and beauty, the grace that comes of long
devotion, the loving eye, the practiced hand. Somebody's heart had been
put into it. This was the labor that was not hired. He had a strong
curiosity to see Osmond, and yet he could not ask for him because Madam
Fulton had once written him some queer tale of the man's sleeping in the
woods, in a house of his own building, and living the wild life his body
needed. One thing he learned now: Osmond's name was never out of his
grandmother's mouth. She quoted his decisions as if they stood for
ultimate wisdom. His ways were good and lovely to her.

The forenoon hour went by, and finally Madam Fulton remembered.

"Bless me!" she said. "It's luncheon time. Come, Billy."

The road was brighter now under the mounting sun. Madam Fulton was a
little tired, and they walked silently. Presently, at her own gate, she
suggested, not grudgingly, but as if the charm of goodness was,
unhappily, assured,--

"I suppose she's lovely!"

"Great! She's one of those creatures that have good mother-stuff in
them. It doesn't matter much what they mother. It's there. It's a kind
of force. It helps--I don't know exactly how."

"Now can't you see what I mean? That woman has had big things. She had
one of the great loves. She built it up, piece by piece, with Charlie.
He kept a devotion for her that wasn't to be compared with the tempest
he felt about me. I'm sure of that."

Stark looked at her as they walked, his eyes perplexedly denying the
evidence of his ears.

"Do you know, Florrie," he said, "it's incredible to hear you talk so."

"Why?"

"You have a zest for life, a curiosity about it. Why, it's simply
tremendous."

"No, Billy, no. It's not tremendous. It's only that I am quite convinced
I haven't got my money's worth. Late as it is, I want it yet. I'll have
it--if it's only playing jokes on publishers!"

They ate together in the shaded room, and Madam Fulton, looking out
through the windows at the terrace, realized, with an almost humble
gratitude, that the world itself and the simple joys of it were quite
different tasted in comradeship. She forgot Electra and the irritated
sense that her well-equipped granddaughter was wooing her to the ideals
of a higher life.

"Billy," she said again, "I'm uncommon glad you came."

Billy's heart warmed with responsive satisfaction He had expected a more
or less colorless meeting with his old love, a philosophic reference
here and there to vanished youth, a twilight atmosphere of waning days;
but here she was, living as hard as ever. And he had brightened her; he
had given her pleasure. The complacency of it reacted upon him, and he
sought about in his clever mind for another drop to fill the beaker. By
the time they had finished their coffee, he knew.

"Florrie," said he, "what if you should put on your hat and take the
train with me?"

"My stars, Billy! Run away?"

"Come up to town. We'd scare up some kind of a theatre this evening, and
in the morning you could see Gilbert and Wall."

"And 'fess? Not by a great sight! But I'd like to go, Billy. Leave out
Gilbert and Wall, make it you and me, and I'm your man."

"Come along."

"Worry Electra to death!" she proffered brightly. "I'll do it, Billy.
Here's the key of my little flat, right here on the writing-desk. I
never stayed there alone, but there's no reason why I shouldn't. You can
come round in the morning, to see if I've had a fit, and if I haven't
we'll go to breakfast. But we must take the three o'clock. She'll be
back by four."

She got her bonnet and her handbag, and when Electra did come back at
four, her grandmother had flown, leaving a note behind.




III


The next morning Electra, dressed in white and rather pale at the lips,
walked about the garden with a pretense of trimming a shrub here and
there and steadying a flower. But she was waiting for her lover. She had
expected him before. The ten o'clock would bring him, and he would come
straight to her without stopping to see his grandmother and Osmond. But
time went by, and she was nervously alert to the fact that he might not
have come. Even Electra, who talked of poise and strove for it almost in
her sleep, felt a little shaken at the deferred prospect of seeing him.
It was after those five years, and his letters, voluminous as they were,
had not told all. Especially had they omitted to say of late whether he
meant to return to France when he should be able to take her with him.
To see a lover after such a lapse was an experience not unconnected with
a possibility of surprise in herself as well as in him. She had hardly,
even at the first, explicitly stated that she loved him. She had only
recognized his privilege of loving her. But now she had put on a white
dress, to meet him, and the garden was, in a sense, a protection to her.
The diversity of its flowery paths seemed like a shade out of the glare
of a defined relation. At last there was a step and he was coming. She
forced herself to look at him and judge him as he came. He had scarcely
changed, except, perhaps from his hurrying gait and forward bend, that
he was more eager. There was the tall figure, the loose tie floating
back, the low collar and straight black hair--the face with its aquiline
curve and the wide sweet mouth, the eager dark eyes--he looked exactly
like the man who had painted the great portrait of the year. Then he was
close to her, and both her hands were in his. He lifted them quickly to
his lips, one and then the other.

"Electra!" he said. It was the same voice, the slight eager hesitancy in
it like the beginning of a stammer.

Electra, to her surprise, said an inconsequent thing. It betrayed how
she was moved.

"Grandmother is away. She has gone to town."

"We will go into the summer-house," said the eager voice. "That is where
I always think of you. You remember, don't you?"

He had kept her hand, and, like two children, they went along the broad
walk and into the summer-house, where there was a green flicker of light
from the vines. There was one chair, a rustic one, and Peter drew it
forward for her. When she had seated herself, he sat down on the bench
of the arbor close by, and, lifting her hand, kissed it again.

"Do you remember the knock-kneed poem I wrote you, Electra?" he asked
her. "I called it 'My Imperial Lady.' I thought of it the minute I saw
you standing there. My imperial lady!"

The current was too fast for her. She could not manage large, impetuous
things like flaming words that hurtled at her and seemed to ask a like
exchange--something strong and steady in her to meet them in mid-air and
keep them from too swift an impact. His praise had always been like the
warriors' shields clanging over poor Tarpeia,--precious, but too
crushing. They disconcerted her. If she could not manage to escape after
the first blow, she guessed how they might bruise.

"When did you come?" she asked.

Peter did not answer. He was still looking at her with those wonderful
eyes that always seemed to her too compelling for happy intercourse.

"Electra," he said, and stopped. She had to answer him. There must be
some heavy thing to break to her, which he felt unequal to the task of
telling unless she helped him. "Electra," he said again, "I didn't come
alone. Some one came with me. I wrote you about Tom."

Electra drew her hand away, and sat up straight and chilled. There had
been few moments of her grown-up life, it seemed to her, unspoiled by
Tom, her recreant brother. In the tumultuous steeple chase of his
existence he had brought her nothing but mortification. In his death, he
was at least marring this first moment of her lover's advent.

"You wrote me everything," she said. The tone should have discouraged
him. "You were with him at the last. He knew you. I gather he didn't
send any messages to us, or you would have given them."

"He did, Electra."

"He sent a message?"

"I simply couldn't write it, because I knew I should be home so soon. It
was about his wife. He begged you to be kind to her."

"His wife! Tom was not married."

"He was married, Electra, to a very beautiful girl. I have brought her
home with me."

Electra was upon her feet. Her face had lost its cold sweet pallor. The
scarlet of hot blood was upon it, a swift response to what seemed
outrage at his hands.

"I have never--" she gasped. "It is not true."

Peter, too, had risen. He was looking at her rather wistfully. His
imperial lady had, in that instant, lost her untouched calm. She was
breathing ire.

"Ah, don't say that," he pleaded. "You never saw her."

"I can't help it. I feel it. She is an adventuress."

"Electra!"

"What did he say to you? What did Tom say?"

"He pointed to her as she stood by the window, her back to us--it was
the day before he died--and said, 'Tell them to be good to her.'"

"You see! You don't even know whether he meant it as a message to me or
some of his associates. He didn't say she was his wife?"

"No."

He answered calmly and rather gravely, but the green world outside the
arbor looked unsteady to him. Electra was one of the fixed ideas of his
life; her nobility, her reserve, her strength had seemed to set her far
above him. Now she sounded like the devil's advocate. She was gazing at
him keenly.

"Her story made a great impression on you," she threw out incidentally.

The effort was apparent, but Peter accepted it.

"Yes," he answered simply. "She makes a great impression on everybody.
She will on you."

"What evidence have you brought me? Did you see them married?"

"No," said Peter, with the same unmoved courtesy.

"You see! Have you even found any record of their marriage?"

"No."

"You have the girl's word. She has come over here with you. What for?"

Peter lifted a hand to his forehead. He answered gently as a man
sometimes does, of set purpose, to avoid falling into a passion.

"It was the natural thing, Electra. She has no home, poor child!--nor
money, except what Tom left in his purse. He'd been losing pretty
heavily just before. I say, it seemed the natural thing to come to you.
Half this place was his. His wife belongs here." The last argument
sounded to him unpardonably crude, as to an imperial lady, but he
ventured it. Then he looked at her. With his artist's premonition, he
looked to see her brows drawn, her teeth perhaps set angrily upon a
quivering lip. But Electra was again pale. Her face was marble to him,
to everything.

"I shall fight it," she said inexorably, "to the last penny."

He gazed at her now as if she were a stranger. It was incredible that
this was the woman whose hand he had kissed but the moment before. He
ventured one more defense.

"Electra, you have not seen her."

"I shall not see her. Where is she--in New York?"

"Here."

"Here!"

"At grandmother's. I left her there. I thought when we had had our
little talk you would come over with me and see her, and invite her
home."

"Invite her here?"

"I thought so."

"Peter," said Electra, with a quiet certainty, "you must be out of your
mind."

There they stood in the arbor, their lovers' arbor, gazing at each other
like strangers. Peter recovered first, not to an understanding of the
situation, but to the need of breaking its tension.

"I fancied," he said, "you would be eager to know her."

"Is she a grisette?"

His mind ached under the strain of taking her in. He felt dumbly her
contrast to the facile, sympathetic natures he had been thrown with in
his life abroad. When he had left her, Electra was, as she would have
said, unformed; she had not crystallized into the clearness and the
hardness of the integrity she worshiped. To him, when in thought he
contrasted her with those other types who made for joy and not always
for moral beauty, she was immeasurably exalted. In any given crisis
where other women did well, he would not have questioned that Electra
must have done better. Her austerity was a part of her virgin charm. But
as he looked at her now, in her clear outlines, her incisive speech, the
side of him that thrilled to beauty trembled with something like
distaste or fear. She was like her own New England in its bleakness,
without its summer warmth. He longed for atmosphere.

But she had asked her question again: "Is she a grisette?"

He found himself answering:--

"She is the daughter of Markham MacLeod."

"Not the author? Not the chief?"

"Yes," said Peter, with some quiet pride in the assurance, "chief of the
Brotherhood, the great Markham MacLeod."

Electra pondered.

"If that is true," she said, "I must call on her."

"True? I tell you it is true. Electra, what are you saying?"

But Electra was looking at him with those clear eyes where dwelt neither
guile nor tolerance of the guile of others.

"Did she tell you so," she inquired, "or do you know it for a fact?"

He had himself well in hand now, because it had sprung into his wise
artist brain that he must not break the beauty of their interview. It
was fractured, but if they turned the hurt side away from the light,
possibly no one would know, and the outer crystalline sheen of the thing
would be deceptively the same.

"I know Markham MacLeod," he said. "I have seen them together. She calls
him father."

A wave of interest swept over her face.

"Do you mean you really know him, Peter?"

"Assuredly."

"As the leader of the Brotherhood?"

"Yes, the founder."

"He is proscribed in Russia and watched in France. Is that true?"

"All true."

"He gave up writing for this--to go about organizing and speaking?
That's true, isn't it?"

"Quite true."

"How much do you know about the Brotherhood, Peter?"

"I belong to it."

He straightened as he spoke. An impulse of pride passed over him, and
she read the betrayal in his kindling eyes and their widened pupils.

"Is there work for you?" she asked, "for men who don't speak and
proselytize?"

"I do speak, Electra."

"You do?"

"I have spoken a little. I can't do it yet in the way he wants. What he
wants is money."

"We have sent him money," she agreed. "The Delta Club gave a series of
plays last winter and voted him the proceeds. The first was for labor in
America. The second for free Russia."

"Yes, it pours in on him. It's his enormous magnetism."

"It's his cause."

She seemed to have reached something now that warmed her into life, and
he took advantage of that kindling.

"Rose is his daughter," he reminded her. "She is very beautiful, very
sad. She is worthy of such a father."

"Rose? Is that her actual name?"

"Yes. They are Americans, though since her childhood she has lived in
France."

"What did she do before Tom--got acquainted with her? Live there in
Paris with her father?"

"She sang. She has a moving voice. She always hoped she was going to
sing better, but there never was money enough to give her the right
training. Then she began going about with her father. She spoke, too."

"In public? For the Brotherhood?"

"Yes. She has great magnetism. But she stopped doing that."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I have heard her father ask her to do it, but she
refused. She is beautiful, Electra."

Electra was looking at him thoughtfully.

"Did she persuade you to join the Brotherhood?" she asked.

"No," said Peter, unmoved, "the chief himself persuaded me. I went to a
great meeting one Sunday night. I heard him. That was the end of me. I
knew where I belonged."

Electra, her mind hidden from him as completely as if a veil had fallen
between them, was, he could see, considering him. As for her, he hardly
dared dwell upon her as she ruthlessly seemed. She was again like the
bright American air, too determinate, too sharp. She almost hurt the
eyes. He wondered vaguely over several things he was unwilling to ask
her, since he could not bear to bring their difference to a finished
issue: why she cherished a boundless belief in the father and only
reprobation for the daughter, when she had seen neither the one nor the
other; why she had this vivid enthusiasm for the charity that embraces
the world and none for a friendless child at her door. Their interview
seemed to have dropped flat in inconceivable collapse; what was to have
been the beginning of their dual life was only the encounter of a
hand-to-hand discussion. He tried to summon back the vividness to his
fagged emotions, and gave it up. Then he ventured to think of his
imperial lady, and found a satirical note beating into his mind. He took
refuge in the practical.

"I have not seen Osmond yet."

"Wasn't he there to meet you?"

"No. Grannie said I should have to go down to the plantation, to find
him. Does he keep up his old ways, Electra?"

"Yes. Sleeping practically out of doors summer and winter, or in the
shack, as he calls it,--that log hut he put up years ago. Haven't you
known about him? Hasn't he written?"

"Oh, he writes, but not about himself. Osmond wouldn't do that. Somehow
grandmother never wrote any details about him either. I fancied he
didn't want her to. So I never asked. She only said he was 'well.' You
know Osmond always says that himself."

"I believe he is well," said Electra absently. She was thinking of the
alien presence at the other house. "He looks it--strong, tanned. Osmond
is very impressive somehow. It's fortunate he wasn't a little man."

Peter made one of the quick gestures he had learned since he had been
away from her. They told the tale of give and take with a more mobile
people. He could not ask her to ignore Osmond's deformity, yet he could
not bear to hear her speak of it. Osmond was, he thought, a colossal
figure, to be accepted, whatever his state, like the roughened rock that
builds the wall. He rose, terminating, without his conscious will, an
interview that was to have lasted, if she had gone to the other house
with him and he had returned again with her, the day long.

"I must see Osmond," he hesitated.

Electra, too, had risen.

"Yes," she said conformably, though the table, she knew, would be laid
for them both in what had promised to be their lovers' seclusion.

"I will come back. This afternoon, Electra?"

That morning, the afternoon had been his and hers only. She had expected
to listen to the recital of his triumphs in Paris, and to scan eagerly
the map of his prospects which was to show her way also. And she too
opened her lips and spoke without preconsidered intent.

"This afternoon I shall be busy. I have to go in town."

"You won't--" he hesitated again. "Electra, you won't call at the house
on the way, and see her, at least?"

"Your Rose?" She smiled at him brilliantly. "Not to-day, Peter."

Then, bruised, bewildered, he went back over the path he had come,
leaving his imperial lady to go in and order the luncheon table prepared
for one.

"Madam Fulton will not be home," she said to the maid, with a proud
unconsciousness; and for the moment it sounded as if Madam Fulton had
been the expected guest.




IV


When Peter went up the steps of his grandmother's house, he found Mrs.
Grant still on the veranda, and Rose beside her. The girl looked at him
eagerly, as if she besought him for whatever message he had, and he
answered the glance with one warmed by implied sympathy. Until he saw
her, he had not realized that anger made any part in the emotion roused
in him by his imperial lady. Now he remembered how this gracious young
creature seemed to him, so innocent, so sad. He felt a rising in his
throat, as he thought of subjecting her to unfriendly judgment. Rose, in
spite of the serious cast of her face and the repose of her figure, wore
an ineffable air of youth. She had splendid shoulders and a yielding
waist, and her fine hands lay like a separate beauty in the lap of her
black dress. She had the profile of a coin touched with finer human
graces, a fullness of the upper lip, a slight waving of the soft
chestnut hair over the low forehead, and lashes too dark for harmony
with the gray eyes. There were defects in her flawlessness. Her mouth
was large, in spite of its pout, and on her nose were a few beguiling
freckles. At that moment, in her wayward beauty, lighted by the kindled
eye of expectation, she seemed to Peter to be made up of every
creature's best. His grandmother smiled at him out of her warm
placidity, and though Rose still drew his eyes to her, he was aware that
she did not mean to question him.

"Electra has to go in town," he volunteered. "She won't be back. Perhaps
not to-night."

"You must stay here with us, my dear," said Mrs. Grant. "Peter, have her
trunks moved into the west chamber."

Still the girl's eyes seemed to interrogate him, and Peter sat down in a
chair and twined his long fingers in and out. He felt the drop in
temperature ready to chill the voyager who, after the lonely splendor of
the sea, returns to the earth as civil life has made it.

"We must remember she hadn't heard of you," he assured Rose
blunderingly, out of his depression.

"No. He had not written." She made the statement rather as that of a
fact they shared together, and he nodded. "I am afraid it is unwelcome
to her, the idea of me."

"She doesn't know you," he assured her, in the same bungling apology. He
expected her to betray some wound to her pride, but she only looked
humble and a little crushed.

Grannie had apparently not heard, and she said now, with her lovely
gentleness,--

"Don't you want to go upstairs, my dear, and be by yourself a little
while? You have been traveling so far. We have noon dinner, you know.
That will seem funny to you. Mary is getting it, but Peter will show you
a room."

Peter found her bag in the wide hall, darkened from the sun, and went
with her up the stairs. At the head she paused and beckoned him to the
window-seat over the front door.

"Set it down there," she said rapidly, touching the bag with a finger.
"Tell me--how did she receive it?"

"What?"

"You know. The news of me."

"She was surprised."

"Naturally. But what else? She was shocked!"

"It was a shock, of course. In its suddenness, you know. You'd expect
that."

She sank down in the window-seat and clasped her hands upon her knees,
looking at them thoughtfully. Her brows were drawn together.

"Yes," she said, "yes. It was a shock. I see that. Well!" She looked up
at him in a challenging directness before which he winced, conscious of
the little he had to meet it with. "When am I to see her?"

"I am not sure when she is to be back."

"Ah! She won't come to me. Very well. I shall go to her." She laid her
hand upon the bag, and rose, as if the interview were ended. Peter
carried the bag in at the open door of her room, and after he had set it
down, looked vaguely about him, as if arrangements might be bettered in
the still, sweet place. She was smiling at him with an irradiating
warmth.

"You're sorry, aren't you?" she said, from a comprehension that seemed a
proffer of vague sympathy. "It makes you feel inhospitable. You needn't.
You're a dear. Your grandmother is lovely--lovely."

Her praise seemed to Peter such a precious fruitage that the only thing,
in delicacy, was to turn away and take it with him to enjoy. But she was
calling him.

"Peter!"

He found her flushed and eagerly expectant, it seemed to him, as if his
news had been uplifting to her. She looked at him, at the room, and
rapidly from the window where the treetops trembled, all in one
comprehensive sweep.

"Peter," she said, with conviction, "it's simply lovely here."

"It's a nice old place," responded Peter. He loved it from long use, but
he was aware of its comfortable plainness.

"I never saw anything so dear. Those square worn tiles down by the front
door, the fireplace, the curtains,--look, Peter, it's dotted muslin."
She touched a moving fold, and Peter laughed outright.

"I like it," he said, "but there's nothing particular about it. If you
want style, why, you'll have to look back at what you've left. When it
comes to that, what's the matter with a château?"

"Yes, yes." She put the château aside with one of her light movements of
the hands. "But here I feel as if I'd come home to something. You see
it's so safe here, Peter. It's so darling, too, so intimate. I can't
tell what I mean. If Electra would only like me--O Peter, I could be
almost happy, as happy as the day is long!" As she said the old phrase,
it seemed to her to fit into the scene. She looked not merely as if
happiness awaited her, but as if she could almost put her eager finger
on it. And there was Electra, not so many rods away, drawbridge up and
portcullis down, inquiring, "Is she a grisette?" Afterwards it seemed to
Peter as if his sympathy for the distressed lady went to his head a
little, for he lifted her hand and kissed it. But he did not speak, save
to himself, going down the stairs:--

"It's a damned shame!"

When he went out on the veranda, grannie made a smiling comment:--

"What a pretty child! Tom Fulton did well. He was a bad boy, wasn't he,
Peter?"

"Yes, grannie," said Peter, from the veranda rail where he sat picking
rose leaves, "Tom was about the limit."

"Well! well! poor girl. Maybe it's as well he went while she knew only
the best of him."

Peter was not sure she did know only the best, but he inquired,--

"Shall I have time to run down and see Osmond before dinner?"

"You'd better. He was here waiting when the carriage came. When he saw
her, he slipped away."

"Rose?"

"Rose? Is that her name? Now isn't that pretty! Maybe you'll find him
before you get to the plantation. I shouldn't wonder if he'd think it
over and come back."

Peter did meet him in the lane lined with locusts on each side, walking
doggedly back to the house. Some things the younger brother had
forgotten about him, the beauty of the dark face that looked as if it
had been cut out of rock, the extraordinary signs of strength, in spite
of that which might have appealed to pity. Osmond had grown rugged with
every year. His long arms, ending in the brown, supple hands, looked as
if they were compact of sinewy potencies. And on his shoulders, heavier
than Christian's burden, was that pack he must carry to the end of life.
He saw his brother coming, and stopped, and Peter, as if to save him the
sense of being looked at from afar, even by his own kin, ran to meet
him. They did not take hands, but the older brother gave him a slap on
the shoulder.

"Well, boy!" said he.

There were tears in Peter's eyes.

"Look-a-here," he cried, "I'm sniveling. Coming up to the house?"

"No. I've been there once this morning. You come back with me."

They turned about, and walked on through the lane. It led to the
plantation; this was the nursery, here were the forcing beds, and all
the beneficent growing things that had saved Osmond's life while he
tended them, and also earned his bread for him, and Peter's bread and
paints.

"Well, boy," said Osmond, "you've brought a girl with you. That was why
I cut. Who is she?"

"Tom Fulton's wife--his widow."

Osmond knew Electra very well. Some phases of her were apparent to him
in his secluded life that her lover, under the charm of an epistolary
devotion, had never seen.

"Does Electra know it?" he asked.

"I told her." Peter's tone added further, "Shut up, now!" and Osmond
tacitly agreed.

"Coming down to dinner?" he asked safely.

"No, I must be back. I feel responsible for her--Rose. I brought her
over. In fact, I rather urged her coming. Grannie has asked her to stay
with us until Electra is--at home."

"Is her name Rose?"

"Yes--one of those creamy yellow ones. You must see her. She's a dear.
She's a beauty, too."

"Oh, I've seen her,--one ear and a section of cheek and some yellow
hair. Then I ran."

"For heaven's sake, man! what for?"

"She's one of those invincible Parisians. I've read about them."

Peter burst out laughing. Osmond's tone betrayed a terrified admiration.

"Do you eat down here with the men?" Peter was asking.

"Sometimes. I go up and eat with grannie once a day while she's alone. I
shan't now."

"Why not?"

"You'll be here to keep her company, you and your Parisian. I've got to
go on being a wild man, Pete. I shan't save my soul alive if I don't do
that."

Peter put out a hand and laid it, for an instant, on his brother's arm.

"I don't know anything about your soul, old man," he said, with a moving
roughness. "But if you like this kind of a life, you're going to have
it, that's all. Who cooks the dinner?"

"Pierre. He came just after you went to France. There's a _pot-au-feu_
to-day. I smelled it when I went by the kitchen. It's a good life,
Pete,--if you don't want to play the game." His eyes grew wistful,
something like the eyes of the dog that longs for man.

"If you don't play the game, I don't know who does."

"Well!" Osmond smiled a little, whimsically. "Maybe I do; but I play
with counters."

Peter was not especially ready, save with a brush in his hand. He wanted
to say something to the effect that Osmond was playing the biggest of
all games, with the visible universe against him; but he hardly knew how
to put it. It seemed, though, as if he might some time paint it into a
picture. But Osmond was recognizing the danger of soft implication, and
bluffly turned the talk.

"Well, Pete, you've done it, haven't you?"

There was no possibility of affecting to misunderstand. Peter knew what
he had gone to Paris for, five years ago, and why Osmond had been
sending him the steady proceeds of the garden farm. He was to prove
himself, take his talent in his hand and mould it and turn it about with
a constant will, and shape a cup to hold the drink that makes the gods
jealous and men delirious with adulation. Peter was to live at his ease
in Paris, sparing nothing that would keep him well and strong of heart,
so that he could paint the best portraits in the world. Peter knew he
had begun to paint the best portraits in the world, because he had done
many good ones and one actual marvel, and suddenly, as it sometimes is
in art after we have been patient and discouraged, the whole task seemed
to him a light and easy one. In his extraordinary youth he had the
freshness of his brain, his quick eye and obedient hand, and he felt,
lightly and gayly, that he was rich,--but rich in a world where there
was plenty more of whatever he might lose.

"I guess so," he said, returning to the speech of his youth. "And I can
do it twice, old man. I can do it a hundred times."

Osmond stopped and laid a hand on a boulder at the termination of their
way, where the lane opened into plowed fields. He looked off through the
distance as if he saw the courts of the world and all the roads that run
to fame. His eyes were burning. The hand trembled upon the rock.

"By George!" he said, "it's amazing."

"What is, Osmond?"

"It's amazing that the world can hold so much for one man. You wouldn't
think there would be water enough in all the rivers for one man to drink
so deep. What does Electra say?"

"About the painting? Nothing yet."

"Didn't you speak of it? Why, you're covered with laurel, boy, like
Jack-in-the-Green. She couldn't help seeing it."

Peter, brought back to that luckless interview with the imperial lady,
felt shamefaced in his knowledge of it.

"We didn't get to that," he said. "We were talking about Rose. Who do
you think she is, Osmond?"

"Tom's widow. So you said."

"Yes, but what more? She's the daughter of Markham MacLeod."

He was watching Osmond narrowly, to weigh the effect of the name. But
Osmond's face kept its impressive interest.

"You know who he is," Peter suggested.

"Yes, oh, yes! But that doesn't mean anything to me. Nothing does until
I see the man. He works with too big a brush. He is an agitator. He may
be Christ or Anti-Christ, but he's an agitator. That's all I know. I
can't give a snap judgment of a man that gets whole governments into a
huff and knows how to lead a rabble a million strong. So he's her
father?"

Peter, unreasonably irritated, pitched upon one word for a cause of war.

"Rabble? What do you mean by that? Labor?"

Osmond smiled broadly and showed his white teeth.

"I'm labor myself," he said. "You know that, boy."

"Then what do you want to talk so for? Rabble!"

"I only meant it in relation to numbers," said Osmond, again
irritatingly, in his indifference to all interests outside his dear
boy's home-coming. "I'll make it a rabble of kings, if you say so.
Folks, Peter, that's what I mean, folks. He deals with them in the mass.
That makes me nervous. I can't like it."

"He believes in the equality of man," Peter announced, as he was
conscious, rather swellingly. "The downfall of kings, the freedom of the
individual."

"There's the _pot-au-feu_ smoking inside that shack," said Osmond,
indicating a shanty across the field. "Come and have dinner with labor."

But Peter turned. He shook his head.

"I can't, Osmond," he said. "I've brought this girl into the house, and
I've got to see her through. Won't you come up to-night?"

"Not till your Parisian has gone over to Electra's. You come down here.
Come down about dusk and we'll have another go."

As Peter hurried back, conscious of being a little late, he could have
beaten his head against the locust trees for the stupidity of his
home-coming. He had the shattered moment with Electra to remember, and
now he had turned the other great meeting of the day into a fractious
colloquy. Unformed yet vivid in his mind, for the last year, had been
strong, determining anticipations of what would happen when he at last
came home. He had known certainly what would happen when he saw Electra.
She would still be the loveliest and best, and his would be the
privilege of telling her so. And to Osmond, who had dug in the ground
that Peter might work under the eye of men, he would return as one who
has an account to give, and say, in effect, "You did it." But,
laughably, neither of these things had happened. He forgot that he had
in him the beginnings of a great painter in remembering that he had
shown the obtuseness of an ass.

He did not see Electra that night. After the noon dinner he left Rose
and grannie intimately together,--the girl, with a gentle deprecation,
as if she brought gifts not in themselves worth much, talking about
Paris, the air young Peter had been breathing,--and betook himself again
to Electra's house. It was all open to the day, but no one answered his
knock. He went in and wandered from parlor to library, the dignified
rooms that had once seemed to him so typical of her estate as compared
to his own: for in those days he had been only a young man of genius
with scarcely enough money to live and study on, save as his brother
earned it for him. He sauntered in and out for an hour--it seemed as if
even the two servants had gone--and then played snatches at the piano,
to waken drowsy ears. But the house kept its quiet, and in the late
afternoon he wandered home again. That evening he returned, and then
there was some one to answer his knock. The maid told him Miss Electra
had gone out; but though he waited in a fevered and almost an angry
impatience, she did not return. Knowing her austere and literal truth,
he could not believe that the denial was the conventional expedient, and
in a wave of regret over the day, he longed for her inexpressibly. It
seemed to him that no distance would be too great to bring him to her.
He felt in events, and in himself also, the rushing of some force to
separate them, and swung back, after his blame of her, into the
necessity of a more passionate partisanship. When he went home, still
without seeing her, he found his grandmother's house deserted. But the
minute his foot sounded, there was a soft rush down the stairs. Rose
stood beside him in the hall.

"Did you see her?" she asked breathlessly.

He strove to make his laugh an evidence of the reasonableness of what he
had to answer.

"No. She was obliged to be away."

"Isn't she at home now?" asked the girl insistently. "She is there, and
you refuse to hurt me. She won't see me!"

"She is not there," said Peter, in relief at some small truth to tell.
"I haven't seen her since morning."

The girl stood there in the faint radiance of the hall lamp, her eyes
downcast, thinking. She had dressed for dinner, though there was only
high tea in the old-fashioned house, and delighted grannie beyond words.
The old lady said it was as good as a play to her, who never went out,
to see a lovely dress trailing about the rooms. Peter, looking at the
girl, felt his heart admonish him that here was beauty demanding large
return of kindly treatment from the world. Not only must justice be done
her, but it must be done lavishly. This was for all their sakes. Electra
could not be allowed to lose anything so precious, nor could he lose it
either, his small share of tribute. She was speaking, still with that
air of pondering:--

"I must do it myself. I mustn't let you risk anything." Then she turned
her full glance on him, and frankly smiled. "Good-night," she said,
giving him her hand. "Don't speak of me to her. Don't think of me. I
must do it all myself."




V


Next morning it was a different Rose he saw, quite cosy and cheerful at
the breakfast-table, with no sign of tragedy on her brow. The day was
fair, and the mood of the world seemed to him, for no reason, to have
lightened. It was not credible that Electra, of all gracious beings,
should sulk outside the general harmony. After breakfast, when Rose had,
with a sweet air of service, given grannie her arm to the veranda chair,
she returned to Peter, waiting, perhaps for a word with her, in the
hall. His hat swung from his hand, and seeing that, she spoke in a low,
quick tone.

"You are going over there. Don't do it."

"I must. I want to see her."

"I know. But not yet. Let me see her first. If you talk about me, it
will make trouble between you,--not real trouble, perhaps, but something
unfortunate, something wrong. I am going myself, now." She pointed out
her hat and gloves where she had them ready, and without waiting for him
to speak, began pinning on the hat. While she drew on the gloves she
looked at him again with her charming smile. "Don't you see," she said,
"we can get along better alone--two women? Which house is it?"

He followed her out and down the steps.

"I'll go part of the way with you."

She waved a gay farewell to grannie, busy already at her knitting, and
they went down the path. But at the gate she paused.

"Now," she said, "which way? Which house?"

"The next one."

"I see. Among the trees. Now don't come. Whatever happens, don't come.
If I am not here to dinner,--if I am never here. You simply must not
appear in this. Good-by." She gave her parasol a little reassuring
fling, as if it were a weapon that proved her amply armed, and took her
swift way along the shaded road.

Peter stood for a moment watching her. She went straight on, and the
resolution of her gait bore sufficient witness to her purpose. He turned
about then and went rather disconsolately the other way, which would
bring him out at the path to Osmond's plantation.

Rose, going up the garden path, came upon Electra herself, again dressed
in white and among the flower-beds. Whether she hoped her lover would
come, and was awaiting him, her face did not tell; but she met Rose with
the same calm expectancy. There was ample time for her to walk away, to
avoid the interview; but Electra was not the woman to do that. False
things, paltering things, were as abhorrent to her in her own conduct as
in that of another. So she stood there, her hands at her sides in what
she would have called perfect poise, as Rose, very graceful yet flushed
and apparently conscious of her task, came on. A pace or two away, she
stopped and regarded the other woman with a charming and deprecatory
grace.

"Do guess who I am!" she said, in a delightful appeal. "Peter Grant told
you."

"Won't you come in?" returned Electra, with composure. "Mr. Grant did
speak of you."

Rose felt unreasonably chilled. However little she expected, this was
less, in the just civility that was yet a repudiation. They went into
the library, where the sun was bright on rows of books, and Electra
indicated a seat.

"Mr. Grant told me a very interesting thing about you," she volunteered,
with the same air of establishing a desirable atmosphere.

"Yes," said Rose rather eagerly. She leaned forward a little, her hands
clasped on her parasol top. "Yes. I forbade him to say any more. I
wanted to tell you myself."

Electra's brows quivered perceptibly at the hint of familiar
consultation with Peter, but she answered with a responsive grace,--

"He told me the interesting fact. It is very interesting indeed. We have
all followed your father's career with such attention. There is nothing
like it."

"My father!" There was unconsidered wonder in her gaze.

Electra smiled agreeingly.

"He means just as much to us over here as he does to you in France--or
England. Hasn't he been there speaking within the month?"

"He is in England now," said Rose still wonderingly, still seeking to
finish that phase and escape to her own requirements.

"Mr. Grant said you speak, at times."

"I am sorry he said that," Rose declared, recovering herself to an
unshaded candor. "I shall never do it again."

Electra was smiling very winningly.

"Not over here?" she suggested. "Not before one or two clubs, all women,
you know, all thoughtful, all earnest?"

Rose answered coldly,--

"I am not in sympathy with the ideas my father talks about."

"Not with the Brotherhood!"

"Not as my father talks about it." She grew restive. Under Electra's
impenetrable courtesy she was committing herself to declarations that
had been, heretofore, sealed in her secret thought. "I want to talk to
you," she said desperately, with the winning pathos of a child denied,
"not about my father,--about other things."

"This is always the way," said Electra pleasantly, with her immutable
determination behind the words. "He is your father, and your familiarity
makes you indifferent to him. There are a million things I should like
to know about Markham MacLeod,--what he eats and wears, almost. Couldn't
you tell me what induced him--what sudden, vital thing, I mean--to stop
his essay-writing and found the Brotherhood?"

Rose answered coldly, and as if from irresistible impulse,--

"My father's books never paid."

Electra gazed at her, with wide-eyed reproach.

"You don't give that as a reason!"

Rose had recovered herself and remembered again the things she meant to
leave untouched.

"No," she said, "I don't give it as a reason. I only give it."

Electra was looking at her, rebuffed and puzzled; then a ray shot
through her fog.

"Ah," she said, "wouldn't it be one of the inconceivable things if we
who have followed his work and studied him at a distance knew him better
than you who have had the privilege of knowing him at first hand?"

In spite of herself, Rose answered dryly,--

"It would be strange."

But Electra had not heard. There was the sound of wheels on the drive,
and she looked out, to see Madam Fulton alighting.

"Excuse me, one moment," she said. "My grandmother has come home from
town."

When Rose was alone in the room, she put her hand to her throat to
soothe its aching. There were tears in her eyes. She seemed to have
attempted an impossible task. But presently Electra was entering again,
half supporting by the arm a fragile-looking old lady who walked
inflexibly, as if she resented that aid. Madam Fulton was always
scrupulous in the appointments of her person; but this morning, with the
slightly fagged look about her eyes and her careful bonnet a trifle
awry, she disclosed the fact that she had dressed in haste for a train.
But she seemed very much alive, with the alert responsiveness of those
to whom interesting things have happened.

"I want my grandmother to be as surprised as I am," Electra was saying,
with her air of social ease. "Grandmother, who do you think this is? The
daughter of Markham MacLeod!" She announced it as if it were great news
from a quarter unexplored and wonderful. Rose was on her feet, her
pathetic eyes fixed upon the old lady's face. Madam Fulton was regarding
her with a frank interest it consoled her to see. It was not, at least,
so disproportioned.

"Dear me!" said the old lady. "Well, your father is a remarkable man.
Electra here has all his theories by heart."

"I wish I had," breathed Electra with a fervency calculated perhaps to
distract the talk from other issues.

"How long have you been in America?" asked the old lady civilly, though
not sitting down. She had to realize that she was tired, that it would
be the part of prudence to escape to her own room.

"I have just come," said Rose, in a low, eloquent voice, its tones
vibrating with her sense of the unfriendliness that had awaited her.

"And where are you staying? How did you drift down here?"

"At Mrs. Grant's--for the present." What might have been indignation
warmed the words.

"Grandmother, you must be tired," said Electra affectionately. "Let me
go to your room with you, and see you settled."

"Nonsense!" said the old lady briskly. "Nonsense! I'm going, but I don't
need any help. Good-by, Miss MacLeod. I shall want to see you again when
I have a head on my shoulders."

She had gone, and still Electra made no sign of bidding her guest sit
down again. Instead, she turned to Rose with an engaging courtesy.

"You will excuse me, won't you? I ought to go to grandmother. She is far
from strong."

Rose answered quickly,--

"Forgive me! I will go. But"--she had reached the door, and paused there
entreatingly--"when may I see you again?"

"Grandmother's coming will keep me rather busy," said Electra, in her
brilliant manner. "But I shall take great pleasure in returning your
visit. Good-by."

Rose, walking fast, was out upon the road again, blind to everything
save anger, against herself, against the world. She had come to America
upon an impulse, a daring one, sure that here were friendliness and
safety such as she had never known. She had found a hostile camp, and
every fibre in her thrilled in savage misery. Half way along the
distance home Peter came eagerly forward to her from the roadside where
he had been kicking his heels and fuming. The visit to Osmond had not
been made. At the plantation gate he had turned back, unable to curb his
desire to know what had gone on between these two. At once he read the
signs of her distress, the angry red in her cheeks, the dilated eye.
Even her nostrils seemed to breathe defiance or hurt pride. She spoke
with unconsidered bitterness.

"I ought never to have come."

"What was it? Tell me."

"It was nothing. I was received as an ordinary caller. That was all."

"Who received you?"

"She. Electra."

"What then?"

"I was presented to her grandmother as my father's daughter, not as her
brother's--wife." She was breathless upon the word. All the color went
out of her face. She looked faint and wan.

"But it couldn't be," he was repeating. "Didn't you speak of Tom at
all?"

"No."

"Didn't she?"

"No."

He essayed a bald and unreasonable comfort.

"There, you see! You didn't mention him, and Electra hardly brings
herself to do it to any one. He never ceased being a trial to her. You
must let me say that."

"Ah, that wasn't it! Every time I might have spoken, a hand, a clever,
skillful hand and cold as ice pushed me away. I can never speak of it.
She won't let me."

He was with her, every impulse of his eager heart; but a tardy
conscience pulled him up, bidding him remember that other loyalty.

"Give her time," he pleaded. "It's a shock to her. Perhaps it ought not
to be; but it is. Everything about Tom has always been a shock."

She, as well as he, remembered now that they spoke of Electra, whose
high-bred virtues he had extolled to her in those still evenings on
their voyage, when her courage failed her and he had opened to her the
book of Electra's truth and justice.

"Do you think," she said wistfully, "I might stay at your grandmother's
a few days more?"

"You are to stay forever. Grannie dotes upon you."

"No! no! But I shall have to think. I shall have to make my plans."

Again Peter felt yesterday's brand of anger against his imperial lady,
or, he told himself immediately, the unfortunate circumstances of this
misunderstanding. "You run on," he said. "Grannie's where you left her.
If you don't feel like talking you can skip in at that little gate and
the side door up to your room. I'm going back to see Electra."

"You mustn't talk about me!"

"No!" He smiled at her in a specious reassurance, and went striding on
over the path by which she had come.

Electra, in the fulfillment of her intention, had gone scrupulously to
her grandmother's door, to ask if she needed anything, and then, when
she had been denied, returned to the library, where she stood when Peter
appeared on the threshold, as if she had been expecting him. He did not
allow his good impulse to cool, but hurried forward to her with an
abounding interest and a certainty of finding it fulfilled. As at first,
when he had come to her in the garden the day before, he uttered her
name eloquently, and broke out upon the heels of it,--

"I didn't see you all yesterday, after that first minute."

Electra looked at him seriously, and his heart sank. Peter had been
thinking straight thoughts and swearing by crude values in these five
years when he had lived with men and women who said what they meant,
things often foolish and outrageous, but usually honest, and his mind
had got a trick of asserting itself. None of the judgments it had been
called upon to make seemed to matter vitally; but this one
disconcertingly did, and to his horror he found himself wondering if
Electra could possibly mean to be so hateful. Electra meant nothing of
the kind. She had a pure desire toward the truth, and she assumed that
Peter's desire tallied with her own. She felt very strongly on the point
in question, and she saw no reason why he should not offer the greatest
hospitality toward her convictions.

"Peter," she said at once, "you must not talk to me about that woman."

"So she said," Peter was on the point of irresistibly retorting, but he
contented himself with the weak make-shift that at least gains time,--

"What woman?"

"Markham MacLeod's daughter."

"Tom's wife? Tom's widow?"

Electra looked at him in definite reproof.

"You must not do that, Peter," she warned him. "You must not speak of
her in that way."

"For God's sake, why not, Electra?"

"That is not her title. You must not give it to her."

He stared at her for a number of seconds, while she met his gaze
inflexibly. Then his face broke up, as if a hand had struck it. Light
and color came into it, and his mouth trembled.

"Electra," he said, "what do you want me to understand?"

"You do understand it, Peter," she said quietly. "I can hardly think you
will force me to state it explicitly."

"You can't mean it! no, you can't. You mustn't imply things, Electra.
You imply she was not married to him."

Still Electra was looking at him with that high demeanor which, he felt
with exasperation, seemed to make great demands upon him of a sort that
implied assumptions he must despise.

"This is very difficult for me," she was saying, and Peter at once
possessed himself of one passive hand.

"Of course it is difficult," he cried warmly. "I told her so. I told her
everything connected with Tom always was difficult. She knows that as
well as we do."

"Have you talked him over with her?" The tone was neutral, yet it
chilled him.

"Good Lord, yes! We've done nothing but talk him over from an outside
point of view. When she was deciding whether to come here, whether to
write you or just present herself as she has--of course Tom's name came
into it. She was Tom's wife, wasn't she? Tom's widow?"

"No! no!" said Electra, in a low and vehement denial. "She was not."
Peter blazed so that he seemed to tower like a long thin guidepost
showing the way to anger. "I said the same thing yesterday."

"That was before you saw her. It means more now, infinitely more."

"I hope it does."

"Think what you're saying, Electra," he said violently, so that she
lifted her hand slightly, as if to reprove him. "You refuse to receive
her--"

"I have received her,--as her father's daughter. I may even do so
again."

"But not as your sister?"

"That would be impossible. You must see it is impossible, feeling as I
do."

"But how, how? You imply things that dizzy me, and then, when it comes
to the pinch, I can't get a sane word out of you." That seemed to him,
as to her, an astonishing form of address to an imperial lady, and he
added at once, "Forgive me!" But he continued irrepressibly, "Electra,
you can't mean you doubt her integrity."

She had her counter question:--

"Did you see them married?"

"No, no, heavens, no! Why, I didn't come on Tom in Paris until his
illness. Tom never had any use for me. You know that. Meantime he'd been
there a couple of years, into the mire and out again, and he'd had time
to be married to Rose, and she'd had time to leave him."

"Ah, she left him! Why?"

"Why did you leave him, Electra, before he went over there? Why did you
give up living in town, and simply retreat down here? You couldn't stand
it. Nobody could. Tom was a bad egg, Electra. I don't need to tell you
that."

"It is certainly painful for me to hear it."

"But why, why, Electra? I can't stultify myself to prove this poor girl
an adventuress. I can't canonize Tom Fulton, not even if you ask me."

"There are things we need not recur to. My brother is dead," said
Electra, with dignity.

"Yes. That's precisely why I am asking you to provide for his widow."

"Suppose, then, this were true. Suppose she is what you say,--don't you
feel she forfeited anything by leaving him?"

"Ah, but she went back, poor girl! She went back to him when he was
pretty well spent with sickness and sheer fright. Tom didn't die like a
hero, Electra. Get that out of your mind."

She put up both hands in an unconsidered protest.

"Oh, what is the use!" she cried; and his heart smote him.

"None at all," he answered. "But I mean to show you that this girl
didn't walk back to any dead easy job when she undertook Tom."

"Why did she do it?"

"Why? From humanity, justice, honor, I suppose, the things that
influence women when they stick to their bad bargains."

"Where had she been meantime?"

"With her father, in lodgings. That was where I met her."

"Was she known by my brother's name?"

"No," he hesitated, "not then. I knew her as Miss MacLeod."

"Ah!"

"I can see why," Peter declared, with an eager emphasis. "I never
thought of it before, but can't you see? I should think a woman could,
at least. The whole situation was probably so distasteful to her that
she threw off even his name."

"And assumed it after his death!"

"No! no! She was called Madame Fulton at his apartment. I distinctly
remember that."

They had been immovably facing each other, but now Electra turned away
and walked back to the library table, where she stood resting one hand
and waiting, pale and tired, yet unchanged. This seemed to her one of
the times that try men's souls, but wherein a New England conscience
must abide by its traditions.

"How long does she propose remaining?" she asked, out of her desire to
put some limit to the distasteful situation, though she had forbidden
herself to enter it with even that human interest.

"Why, as long as we ask her to stay,--you, or, if she is not to expect
anything from you, I. She has nothing of her own, poor girl."

"Has her father repudiated her? That ought to tell something."

Peter was silent for a moment. Then he said in an engaging honesty,
bound as it was to hurt his own cause,--

"I don't know. I don't understand their relation altogether. Rose gives
no opinions, but I fancy she is not in sympathy with him."

"Yes, I fancied so."

"But we mustn't fancy so. We mustn't get up an atmosphere and look
through it till we see distorted facts."

"Those are what I want, Peter, facts. If Miss MacLeod--"

"Do you mean you won't even give her your brother's name?"

"Even, Peter! What could be more decisive?"

"Do you expect me to introduce her as Miss MacLeod? Do you expect me to
call her so?"

"I fancied you called her Rose."

"I did. I do. I began it in those unspeakable days when Tom went out of
his head with fright and fever and we held him down in bed. Electra!"

She was listening.

"Was that grandmother calling?" she asked, though grandmother never yet
had summoned her for companionship or service. But Electra felt her high
decorum failing her. She was tired with the impact of emotion, and it
was a part of her creed never to confess to weakness. She had snatched
at the slight subterfuge as if it were a sustaining draught. "I am
afraid I must go."

"Electra!" He placed himself before her with outstretched hands. Very
simple emotions were talking in him. They told him that this was the
second day of his return, that he was her lover, and he had not kissed
her. And they told him also, to his sheer fright and bewilderment, that
he did not want to kiss her. All he could ineffectually do was to
reiterate, "We can't go on like this. Nothing in the world is worth it."
Yet while he said it, he knew there was one thing at least infinitely
worth while: to right the wrongs of a beautiful and misjudged lady. Only
it was necessary, apparently, for the present, to keep the lady out of
the question.

Electra was listening.

"It is grandmother," she said recklessly. "I must go."

There was a rustle up the staircase, and he was alone in the library, to
take himself home as he might.




VI


After a week Electra had made no sign toward acceptance of the unbidden
guest. She received Peter sweetly and kindly whenever he went to see
her, but he felt they were very far apart. Something had been destroyed;
the bubble of pleasure was broken and, as it seemed, for good and all.
He strove to find his way back into their lost dream and take her with
him; but there was no visible path. Rose spared him questions. She
stayed gratefully on, and grannie was delighted with her. Rose had such
a way of fitting into circumstance that it seemed an entirely natural
thing to have her there, and Peter forgot to wonder even at the pleasure
of it. Twice she came in from a walk pale and inexplicably excited, and
he knew she had been besieging the scornful lady in the other house. But
she kept her counsel. She had never seen Osmond since her coming, though
she knew he and Peter had long talks together at the plantation.

One night, a cold, unseasonable one, Osmond was alone in the shack, his
room unlighted save by the flaring wood. The cabin had a couch, two
chairs, and a big table, this covered with books. There were books on
the wall, and the loft above, where he slept when he was not in his
neighboring tent, made a balcony, taking half the room. He was in his
long chair stretched among the shadows, his face lighted intermittently
from the fire. He was thinking deeply, his black brows drawn together,
his nervous hands gripped on the elbows of the chair. There was a slight
tap at the door. He did not heed it, being used to mice among the logs
and birds twittering overhead. Then the door opened, and a lady came in.
Osmond half rose from his chair, and leaning forward, looked at her. He
knew her, and yet strangely he had no belief that she was real. It was
Rose, a long cloak about her, the hood slipped back from her rich hair.
Her face was flushed by the buffeting of the wind, and its moist
sweetness tingled with health. It was apparent to him at once that, as
he was looking at her in the firelight, she also had fixed his face in
the gloom. She was smiling at him, and her eyes were kind. Then she
spoke.

"I came to see you, Mr. Osmond Grant."

Osmond was now upon his feet. He drew a chair into the circle of light.

"Let me take your cloak," he said. It seemed to him that no such
exciting thing had ever happened.

"No, no. It isn't wet." She tossed it on the bench by the door, and
having put both hands to her hair with the reassuring touch that is
pretty in women, she turned to him, a radiant creature smiling out of
her black drapery. "But I'll sit down," she said.

The next moment, he hardly knew how it was, they were there by the fire,
and he had accepted her. She was beautiful and wonderful, a thing to be
worshiped, and he lost not a minute in telling himself he worshiped her,
and that he was going to do it while he was man and she was woman, or
after his clay had lost its spirit. Osmond had very little time to think
of his soul, because he worked all day in the open and slept hard at
night; but it always seemed to him reasonable that he had one. Now it
throbbed up, invincible, and he looked at the lady and wondered again at
her. The lady was smiling at him.

"I wanted to meet you," she said, in her soft, persuasive voice. "You
don't come to the house any more."

He answered her simply and calmly, with no token of his inward turmoil.

"I haven't been there for some days."

"Is it because I am there?"

"Grannie hasn't needed me."

"Is it because I am there?"

Then he smiled at her, with a gleam of white teeth and lighted eyes.

"I've been a little afraid of you," he owned.

"Well, you're not now?"

"No, I'm not now."

"That's what I came here for." She settled more snugly into the chair,
and folded her hands on her knee. He looked at them curiously, their
slender whiteness, and noted, with interest, that she had no wedding
ring. She continued, "I got breathless in the house. Grandmother was
tired and went to bed. Peter has gone to see his cruel lady."

"Why do you call her cruel?"

"She won't hold out her hand to me."

That simple and audacious candor overwhelmed him. He had never known
anything so facile yet direct. It made life incredibly picturesque and
full of color. He laughed from light-heartedness, and it came into his
head that, in her company, it would be easy to believe "as many as six
impossible things before breakfast." But she was continuing:--

"Don't you find her cruel?"

"Electra? We haven't exchanged a dozen words in a year."

"Why not?"

"I'm not a notability. It's not remarkable to raise seeds for sale."

"But isn't she cruel?"

He thought a moment, and then answered gravely,--

"She is very opinionated. But she has high ideals. She would be
unyielding. Has she been unyielding to you?"

"Hasn't Peter told you?"

"Not a word."

"I came here expecting her to accept me as her brother's wife. She won't
do it."

"Won't do it? Does she say so?"

"She says nothing. But she ignores me." Her cheek took on a deeper
flush. She did not look at him, and he followed her gaze into the coals.

"You are too proud to give her proofs?" he hesitated.

She stirred uneasily in her chair.

"Proud!" she said bitterly. "If I had been proud, I should never have
come here at all. But I am here, and she must recognize me." Some
dauntless lines had come into the delicate face and made it older. "It
is absurd," she continued, "worse. Here am I living in your house--"

"No! no!" he corrected her. "Not that it matters. It would be yours just
the same. But it's grannie's house."

"Taking her hospitality,--oh, it's a shame! a shame!"

"Peter must make it right with Electra," he ventured.

"Peter! He has tried. He has tried too much. Things are not right
between them any more. I know that."

Osmond, almost with no conscious will, went back to what he had been
thinking when she came in.

"Peter belongs to your Brotherhood--"

"Don't say mine. It is my father's." She spoke with an unguarded warmth.

"But you belong to it, too."

"I used to. I used to do everything my father told me to--but not
now--not now!" She looked like a beautiful rebel, the color deepened in
her cheeks, her eyes darkening.

Osmond could not question her, but he went back to his own puzzle.

"The trouble is--about Peter--his painting has taken a back seat. He
talks about the Brotherhood--little else."

She nodded, looking at the fire.

"I know. I know."

"I've no objection to his believing in the brotherhood of man; but can't
the brotherhood of man be preserved if we paint our pictures, and mind
our own business generally?"

"Not while my father leads the procession. He will have no other gods
before him."

"Tell me about your father."

She turned on him a face suddenly irradiated by fun. An unexpected
dimple came to light, and Osmond's pulse responded to it.

"Electra," she said, "found time to propose that I should give a little
talk on my father. Last night I lay awake rehearsing it. Do you want to
hear it? Markham MacLeod is the chief of spoilers. He preaches the
brotherhood of man, and he gets large perquisites. He deals with
enormous issues. Kingdoms and principalities are under his foot because
the masses are his servitors. Money is always flowing through his hands.
He does not divert it, but it has, with the cheerful consent of his
followers, to take him from place to place, to shed his influence, to
pay his hotel bills--and he must live well, mind you. For he has to
speak. He has to lead. He is a vessel of the Lord." She had talked on
unhesitatingly, straight into the fire. Now, when she paused, Osmond
commented involuntarily,--

"How well you speak." Then as quickly, "Does your father know you think
these things?"

"No," she answered. "I have not had occasion to tell him. Not yet! But
about Peter." She faced round at him. "Peter is hypnotized by my father,
as they all are in the beginning. He won't paint any more portraits
while the spell lasts."

"Then he won't get Electra."

"He won't get her anyway,--not if he champions me. That's my
impression."

"But what does your father want him to do?"

"Nothing, that I know. It isn't that he chokes people off from other
channels. It's just that his yoke is heavy, for one thing, and that they
can't do too much for him. Peter has taken him literally. He will sell
all he has and give to the poor, and live on a crust. He'll think the
chief, too, is doing it; but he'll be mistaken. The chief never denied
himself so much as an oyster in his life."

They sat staring at each other, in the surprise of such full speech.
Osmond had a sense of communion he had never known. Peter and he had
talked freely of many things in the last week, but here was a strange
yet a familiar being to whom the wells of life were at once unlocked.
The girl's face broke up into laughter.

"Isn't it funny?" she interjected, "our talking like this?"

"Yes. Why are we doing it?" He waited, with a curious excitement, for
her answer. But she had gone, darting at a tangent on what, he was to
find, were her graceful escapes when it was simpler to go that way.

"It's very mysterious here," she said, glancing about the cabin, "very
dark and strange."

"Shall I throw on more wood?"

"If you like. I am not cold."

But he did not do it.

"You don't speak like a Frenchwoman," he ventured.

"I am not. You know that. I am an American."

"Yes; but you have lived in France."

"Always, since I was twelve. But I have known plenty of
English,--Americans, too. Shall I speak to you in French?"

He deprecated it, with hands outspread.

"No, no. I read it, by myself. I couldn't understand it, spoken."

She was smiling at him radiantly, and with the innocent purpose, even
he, in his ecstasy, felt, of making herself more beautiful and more
kind.

"Now," she was saying, "since we have met, you'll come to the house? You
won't let me stand in the way?"

His tongue was dry in his mouth. He felt the beauty of her, the pang of
seeing anything so sweet and having only the memory of it. Great
instincts surged up in him with longings that were only pain. They
seemed to embrace all things, the primal founts of life, the loyalties,
devotions, hopes, and tragedies. At last he understood, not with his
pulses only, but his soul. And all the time he had not answered her. She
was still looking at him, smiling kindly now, and, he believed, not
cognizant of the terror in his heart, not advertising her beauty as at
first he had supposed. She seemed a friend home from long absence. He
was speaking, and his voice, in his effort, sounded to him reassuringly
gentle.

"We'll see."

"You will come?"

"We'll see."

"Good-night." She wrapped her cloak about her and was gone.

He followed her to the door only, and heard her feet upon the spongy
turf. With his impulse to follow farther walked the sane certainty that
he ought not to let her find her way alone, even along that friendly
road. But he could not do it. The rain had ceased, and there was a moist
wind blowing in little temperate gusts, as if it ran over the land and
gave it something, and then took brooding interval for another breath.
He looked up to heaven, and in the nebulous cloud reaches found a star.
So seemed the creature who had dawned in his dark room and lighted it:
inaccessible, unchangingly bright, and, if one rashly approached her,
armed with a destroying fire.

He went out and sat down upon the bench at his door, turning to lean his
forehead against the rough casing. What had happened to him? He did not
even own it was the thing that happens to all, the unassuageable
longing, the reaching hand for a mate. He had felt safe in his garden
ground, where no blossoms opened but innocent velvet ones, temperately,
to ripen and then die. But now the portals of the world were wide. He
saw beauty, and it roused him to a rage of worship. As the night went
on, he grew calmer. Sweet beliefs, a holier certainty stole into that
ecstasy of meeting. She seemed again, as she had in one moment of her
stay, a dear friend happily returned. The sense of her familiarity was
as convincing as if he had known her all his life. It was not
recognition alone: it was reunion.




VII


Osmond tried to cease thinking of the beautiful lady until his mind
should be more at ease, and to consider Peter, who was acting like a
changeling. It seemed possible that he might have to meet his boy
bravely, even sharply, with denial and admonition. Peter, he knew, had
deliberately put his wonderful gift in his pocket, and under some
glamour of new desire was forgetting pictures and playing at the love of
man. Playing at it? Osmond did not know; but everything seemed play to
him in the divergences of a man who had a gift and stinted using it. If
Osmond had had any gift at all, he knew how different it would have made
his life. A tragedy of the flesh would have been slighter to a man who
felt the surge of fancy in the brain. He had nothing, at the outset, but
a faltering will and a deep distaste for any task within his reach. He
remembered well the day when he first found Peter had that aptitude for
painting, and realized, with the clarity of great revealings, what it
meant to them both. All through his boyhood Peter had been drawing, with
a facile hand, caricatures, fleeting hints of homely life, but always
likenesses. One day he came home from the post-office in a gust of
rapture. A series of random sketches had been accepted by a journal.
From that time the steps had led always upward, and Osmond climbed them
with him. But the day itself--Osmond remembered the June fervor of it
when, after a word or two to the boy, surprising to Peter in its
coldness, he went away alone and threw himself under an apple tree, his
face in the grass, to realize what had come. His own life up to this
time had seemed to him so poor that the hint of riches dazzled him. He
saw the golden gleam, not of money, but of the wealth of being. Peter
had the gift, but they would both foster it. Peter should sleep softly
and live well. He should have every luxurious aid, and to that end
Osmond would learn to wring out money from the ground. That was his only
possibility, since he must have an outdoor life. Then he began his
market-gardening. Grandmother was with him always. She even sold a piece
of land for present money to put into men and tools, and the boy began.
At first there were only vegetables to be carried to the market; then
the scheme broadened into plants and seeds. He was working passionately,
and so on honor, and his works were wanted. To his grandmother even he
made no real confidence, but she still walked with him like a spirit of
the earth itself. He knew, as he grew older, how she had drained herself
for him, how she had tended him and lived the hardiest life with him
because he needed it. There were six months of several years when she
took him to the deep woods, and they camped, and she did tasks his heart
bled to think of, as he grew up, and looked at her work-worn hands; but
those things which bound them indissolubly were never spoken of between
them. His infirmity was never mentioned save once when, a boy, and then
delicate, he came in from the knoll where he had been watching the
woodsmen felling trees. His face was terrible to her, but she went on
getting their dinner and did not speak.

"Grannie," he said at last, "what am I going to do?"

She paused over her fire, and turned her face to him, flushed with heat
and warm with mother love.

"Sonny," she said, "we will do the will of God."

"Did He do this to me?" the boy asked inflexibly.

She looked at the mountain beyond the lake, whence, she knew, her
strength came hourly.

"The world is His," she said. "He does everything. We can't find out
why. We must help Him. We must ask Him to help us do His will."

Then they sat down to dinner, and the boy, strengthening his own savage
will, forced himself to eat.

He did not think so much about the ways of God as shrewdly, when he grew
older, of toughening muscles and hardening flesh. Peter's talents,
Peter's triumphs, became a kind of possession with him. Osmond had
perhaps his first taste of happiness when Peter went abroad, and Osmond
knew who had sent him and who, if the market-garden throve, had sworn to
keep him there. The allowance he provided Peter thereafter gave him as
much pleasure in the making as it did the boy in the using of it. Peter
was like one running an easy race, not climbing the difficult steps that
lead to greatness. It looked, at times, as if it were the richness of
his gift that made his work seem play,--not Osmond's fostering. But now,
coming home to more triumphs, Peter seemed to have forgotten the goal.

He found Osmond one morning resting under the apple tree, his chosen
shade. Peter strode up to the spot moodily, angrily even, his
picturesque youth well set off by the ease of his clothes. Osmond
watched him coming and approved of him without condition, because he saw
in him so many kinds of mastery. Peter gave him a nod, and threw himself
and his hat on the grass, at wide interval. He quoted some Latin to the
effect that Osmond was enjoying the ease of his dignified state.

"I've been up and at it since light," said Osmond, smiling at him. "You
don't know when sun-up is."

Peter rolled over and studied the grass.

"Are you coming up to see Rose?" he asked presently.

Osmond could not tell him Rose had been to see him.

"I might," he said, remembering her requisition.

"Come soon. Maybe you could put an oar in. She needs help, poor girl!"

"Help to Electra's favor?"

Peter nodded into the grass.

"You could do it better than I. You can do everything better. You
mustn't forget, Pete, that you're the Fortunate Youth."

There was something wistful in his tone. It stirred in Peter old
loyalties, old responses, and he immediately wondered what Osmond wanted
of him that was not expressed. Osmond had made no emotional demands upon
him, as to his profession, but Peter always had a sense that his brother
was sitting by, watching the boiling of the pot. This was a cheerful
companionship when the pot was active; not now, as it cooled. He threw
out a commonplace at random, from his uneasy consciousness.

"Art isn't the biggest thing, old boy."

"What is?"

Now Peter rolled over again, and regarded him with glowing eyes. To
Osmond, who was beginning to know his temperament better than he had
known it in all the years of the lad's journey upon an upward track,
that glance told of remembered phrases and a dominating personality that
had made the phrases stick.

"It's to give one man who works with his hands fresher air to breathe,
fewer hours' work, a better bed."

"You're an artist, Pete. Don't forget that."

"I don't. But it isn't the biggest thing."

"If you should paint a picture for that workingman to look at while he
says his prayers? what then?"

"You don't understand, Osmond," said the boy. "Labor! Labor is the
question of the day."

Osmond looked over at a field of seedlings where five men with bent
backs were weeding and where he himself had been bending until now. He
smiled a little.

"I understand work, boy," he said gently. "Only I can't make hot
distinctions. The workingman is as sacred to me as you are, and you are
as sacred as the workingman."

Peter was making little nosegays of grass and weeds, and laying them in
methodical rows.

"I can't paint, Osmond," he said abruptly. "These things are just
crowding me."

"What things?"

"Capital. Labor."

Osmond was silent a long time because he had too many things to say, all
of them impossible. He felt hot tears in his eyes from a passion of
revolt against the lad's wastefulness. He felt the shame of such
squandering. To him, all the steps in the existence by which his own
being had been preserved meant thrift and penury. He had conserved every
energy. He had lived wholesomely, not only for months, but unremittingly
for years. His only indulgences had been the brave temperate ones of air
and sleep; and with their aid he had built up in himself the strength of
the earth. And here was a creature whose clay was shot through with all
the tingling fires of life, whose hand carried witchery, whose brain and
eye were spiritual satellites, and he talked about painting by and by.

"What a hold that man has on you!" he breathed involuntarily.

Peter swept his little green nosegays into confusion and sat up. His
eyes were brilliant.

"Not the man," he said. "It's not the man. It's the facts behind him."

Osmond's thought flew back to one night, and a girl's reckless picture
of her father. It seemed now like a dream, yet it swayed him.

"What can you do for him?" he asked, forcing himself to a healthy
ruthlessness. "What have you done?"

"For Markham MacLeod? Nothing. What could I do for him? He has done
everything for me."

"What, Pete?"

"Opened my eyes. Made me realize the brotherhood of man. Why, see here,
Osmond!"

Osmond watched him, fascinated by the heat of him. He seemed possessed
by a passion which could never, one would say, have been inspired save
by what was noble.

"You know what kind of a fellow I've been: all right enough, but I like
pleasures, big and little. Well, when I began to listen to MacLeod, I
moved into a garret the poorest student would have grumbled at. I turned
in my money to the Brotherhood. The money I got for the portrait--maybe
I shouldn't have asked such a whacking big price if I hadn't wanted that
money--I turned that in to the Brotherhood. Would a fellow like me sleep
hard and eat crusts for anything but a big thing? Now I ask you?"

Osmond sat looking at him, and thinking, thinking. This, he understood
perfectly, was youth in the divinity of its throes over life, life
wherever it was bubbling and glowing. Always it was the fount of life,
and where the drops glittered, there the eyes of youth had to follow,
and the heart of youth had to go. The exact retort was rising to his
lips: "That was my money, the money you gave away. I earned it for you.
I dug it out of the ground." But the retort stayed there. He offered
only what seemed a blundering remonstrance: "I can't help feeling, Pete,
that it's your business to paint pictures. If you can paint 'em and give
the money to your Brotherhood, that's something. Only paint 'em."

"But you know, I've found out I can speak."

There it was again, the heart of youth on its new track, chasing the
glow, whatever it might be, the marsh-lamp or star. Osmond shook his
head.

"I don't know, Pete," he owned. "I don't know. I'm out of the world. I
read a lot, but that's not the same thing as having it out with men. But
I feel a distinct conviction that it's every man's business to mind his
own business."

"You wouldn't have us speak? You wouldn't have him, Markham MacLeod?"

The boy's impetuousness made denial seem like warfare. Osmond put it
aside with his hand.

"Don't," he said. "You make me feel like Capital. I'm Labor, lad. I
always have been."

"Isn't it anything to move a thousand men like one? To say a word and
bring on a strike of ten thousand? The big chieftains never did so much
as that. Alexander wasn't in it. Napoleon wasn't. It's colossal."

"I don't know whether it seems to me very clever to bring on a strike,"
said Osmond. "It would seem to me a great triumph to make ten thousand
men feel justly. Resistance isn't the greatest thing to me. I should
want to know whether it was noble to resist."

"Ah, but it is noble! Resistance--for themselves, their children, their
children's children."

Osmond was looking away at the horizon, a whimsical smile coming about
the corners of his mouth.

"Yes, Pete," he said. "But you paint your pictures."

"Now you own I'm right! Isn't it anything to move ten thousand men to
throw down their tools and go on strike?"

"Well, by thunder!" Osmond had awakened. "Now you put it that way, I
don't know whether it is or not. That phrase undid you. Lay down their
tools? Show me the man that makes me take up my tools in reverence and
sobriety, because good work is good religion. That's what I'd like."

"But it means something,--starvation, maybe, death. You don't recognize
it, do you? You won't recognize the war that's on--oh, it is
on!--between Capital and Labor, between the high places and the low.
It's war, and it's got to be fought out."

"I do recognize it, lad." He spoke gently, thinking of his own lot, and
the hard way through which he had come to his almost fevered
championship of whatever was maimed or hurt. "Only, Pete, do you know
what your opposing forces need? They need grannie."

"To say it's the will of God?"

"To be wheeled out in her chair, and sit at the head of your armies and
say, 'Love God. Love one another.' If they love God, they'll listen to
Him. If they love one another your strikes will end to-morrow, and your
rich man will break bread with your poor one, and your poor one will
lose hatred for the rich. You need grandmother."

They sat smiling over it. Peter had amazingly cooled. He rose to his
feet.

"Well," he said, "I'll paint some pictures. Of course I'll paint my
pictures--sometime. There's the Brotherhood again. Don't I want to turn
in shekels? Don't I want to have it known that such weight as my name
carries is going in there?"

It was Osmond's turn to rage. He, too, rose, and they confronted each
other. Osmond spoke. His voice trembled, it seemed with emotion that was
not anger but a fervor for great things.

"I cannot get it through my head. You can do the thing, and it's I that
value it. You can paint pictures and you'd prostitute the thing for
money,--for reputation. If I had it, if I had that gift"--he paused, and
shook his head as if he shook a mane. Peter was looking at him
curiously. This was passion such as he had never seen in any man.

"What would you do, old chap?" he asked.

Osmond was ashamed of his display, but he had to answer.

"I would guard it," he said, "as a man would guard--a woman."

They stood silent, their eyes not meeting now, hardly knowing how to get
away from each other. As if she had been evolved by his mention of
precious womanhood, Electra, in her phaeton, drove swiftly by. They took
off their hats, glad of the break in the moment's tension; but she did
not turn that way.

"Could she be going to see her?" Peter asked in haste.

"To see her?"

"Rose. She mustn't go now. Rose has gone to the orchard with her book."

He started straightway across the field, and met Electra, returning. As
he was standing in the roadway, hat off, smiling most confidently at
her, Electra had no resource but to draw up. Before she fairly knew how
it had come about, he was beside her, and they were in a proximity for
the most intimate converse. Electra felt irritably as if she could not
escape.




VIII


Peter made up his mind to display, at last, all the guile he had; he
would say nothing about Rose. If Electra had attempted to call on her,
she might impart the fact to him or not, as she determined. But Electra
did not wait to be asked. She turned to him with a serious air,
inquiring,--

"When is Miss MacLeod likely to be back?"

"Rose?" Peter countered obstinately. "At dinnertime, surely."

"I shall try to find her then."

Peter felt such an access of gratitude that, as he looked down at the
charmingly gloved hands, holding the reins in the right way, he thought
of conveying his emotion by placing his own hand over them. But their
masterful ease had a message of its own. It seemed almost as if they
might resist. He cast about for something to please her.

"Electra," he began, "I'm going to pitch into work with Osmond."

Electra looked at him over a chin superbly lifted. This was evidently
surprise, but whether disdainful of him or not he could not tell. At any
rate, he felt whimsically miserable under it.

"Osmond works on the farm," she said merely.

Peter inferred some belittling of Osmond, and immediately he was at one
with him and market-gardening.

"I belong to the Brotherhood," he said stiffly. "I don't propose to live
like a bondholder while other fellows are hoeing. I'm going to work."

Still Electra said nothing. She had meant to stop at her own gate and
let Peter leave her, if he would, but she had driven by, and now they
were in a pretty reach of pines, with the needles under the horse's
feet. The reins lay loosely, and Electra, who seldom did anything
without a painstaking consciousness, even forgot her driving, and let
her hands relax into an unlawful ease. They might almost tremble, she
was afraid, she felt so undone with some emotion,--disappointment,
anger? She did not know. But she kept her eyes fixed on a spot directly
ahead, and in spite of herself thought turbulently. She could not help
feeling that Peter would be surprised if he knew how he seemed to her
after this return, almost a stranger, and one who awoke in her no desire
for further acquaintance. He was not ministering to her pride in any
way. He was not in the least a person whom she could flaunt at
gatherings of the intellectually worshipful, with any chance of his
doing her credit. She herself had tried to talk art with him, and Peter
grew dumb. She could not guess it was because she did not speak his
language, which had become almost a sign language, touched here and
there with idiom and the rest understood,--a jargon of technicalities,
mostly, it seemed, humorous, he appeared to mean them so lightly. Before
he went abroad, she, who had read exhaustively in art, used to impart
fact and theory to him in a serious fashion, and Peter had humbly
accepted them. But now, when she opened her lips about his darling work
which was so intimate a part of him that it was almost like play, he had
a queer horror of what she was saying, as if she were beginning a
persistent solo on a barbarous instrument; he could think of nothing but
putting his hands over his ears and running off. But instead he had only
been silent. She could not understand Peter's having read so few books
and being in possession of such a meagre treasury of formulated opinion.
The truth was that he had so many pleasant things to think about that
books were only the dullard's task. His thoughts were not very
consecutive or toward any particular end; they were merely a pageant of
dancing figures, sometimes fantastic, sometimes dramatically grave, but
always absorbing. This Electra could not know. Now it was running
through her mind that Peter, though he had won the great prizes of art,
was mysteriously dull and not what she considered a distinguished figure
at all. His air, his clothes even--she found herself shrinking a little,
at the moment, from the slovenly figure he made, his long legs drawn up
in the carriage so that he could clasp his hands about his knees, while
he went brightly on. For now Peter had found something to talk about.
His topic shone before him as he handled it. This was almost like
painting a picture with a real brush on real canvas, it grew so fast.

"We might found a community," he was urging as warmly, she thought, as
if he meant it. "Osmond can dig. I can. I wonder if you could milk the
cow!"

"I have certainly never tried to milk a cow," said Electra, in a tone
that bit.

But Peter wasn't listening. He was simply pleasing his own creative
self.

"You shouldn't," he offered generously. "You should

    'Sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam,
    And live on ripe strawberries, sugar, and cream.'"

Electra pulled the horse up, and though this was the narrowest bit of
road for a mile, turned, with a masterly hand.

"How under the sun do you do that?" Peter was asking pleasantly. She
interrogated him with a glance, and saw him hunched together in more
general abandon. The happier Peter was in his own thoughts and the
warmer the sun shone on him, the looser his joints became. To Electra he
looked like a vagabond, but she was conscious that if for a moment he
would act the part of a great painter, she would bid him sit up, try to
get him into a proper cravat, and marry him to-morrow. Careless Peter
was quite oblivious to the effect he was creating. He had forgotten
Electra, save as some one possessed of two ears to listen.

"Turn," he pursued. "How can you turn? I never could. I remember I took
you to drive once, ages ago, and I had to keep on in a thunder-shower,
round the five-mile curve, because I didn't dare to let you know I
couldn't cramp the wheel."

Electra remembered the day. Peter was timidly worshipful of her then,
and she had found that quite appropriate in him. She remembered the
lightning, and how satisfied she had been to go round the five-mile
curve, if only to show that she was not timid in a storm. Then it seemed
as if Peter had been unable to forego the delight of having her with
him; but now it appeared that he could absently sit there hugging his
knees and guying the occasion.

"I believe I can cramp the wheel," he was saying sunnily, out of an
absolute content in his limitations. "Only I never can remember which
rein does it. Can you turn either way, Electra, right or left, one just
as well as the other?"

Electra could not answer in that vein.

"Don't!" she said involuntarily.

In some moods Peter had a habit of not waiting for answers.

"It's beyond me how they do those things," he was saying, "drive, ride,
swim. Shouldn't you like to be a fish? I should be mighty proud."

"Shall I leave you here?" asked Electra, drawing up at his gate.

Peter came out of his childish muse. He saw Rose in the garden, and knew
it was better that Electra should find her alone.

"Yes, let me out," he said. "I'll run back and see if Osmond is where I
left him."

Electra also had seen Rose, lying in the long chair under the grape
arbor, and left her carriage at the gate. Rose was in white. A book lay
in her lap, unopened. The idle hands had clasped, and her eyes were
closed. Electra, coming upon her, felt a pang, an inexplicable one, at
her loveliness. It seemed half lassitude, not alone to challenge pity,
but a renewed and poignant interest when she should awake. At Electra's
step her eyes came open slowly, as if there were nothing in that garden
ground to move her. Then with a rush of color to the face, her eyes grew
large. Life, surprised life, poured in on her, and she had gained her
feet with a spring. Before Electra could insist upon her own decorous
distance, Rose, with a charming gesture and an insistent cordiality, had
her by both hands.

"How good of you," she was saying. "How good of you!"

"Not at all," returned Electra, with a stiff dignity she hated, as not
in the least the armor she had meant to wear. "I came to see if you
would drive over to the house." This she had not meant to ask, but it
seemed easier to deal with problematic characters in the course of
motion than face to face and standing. Rose was eagerly ready.

"My hat is here," she cried, "and my parasol. I thought I might walk up
the road a bit,--but it was so hot. How good of you!"

As they went down the path together, Rose in her slender grace and eager
motions the significant note in the garden, Electra felt the irritation
of having, for any reason, committed herself to even a short intimacy
with her. But presently they were together in the carriage, and Electra
spoke.

"My grandmother is at home this morning. We have a guest for a few days,
Mr. William Stark, of London. I thought you might be interested in
meeting them both."

"I shall be delighted," returned Rose, still in that warmly impulsive
tone.

Electra had a strong distaste for unconsidered things. They seemed to
her to show lack of poise. Now she was conscious of the inconsistency of
proposing that Rose should meet anybody, even Billy Stark. But in the
moment of conceiving it she had remembered that Mr. Stark was a man of
the world; he would know an adventuress when he saw one. Afterwards she
would ask him frankly how his judgment had been affected by the siren's
song.

At the house she led the way into the vine-shaded sitting-room where
Madam Fulton and Stark had been engaged for an hour in a battle
delightful to them both. Madam Fulton sat beautifully upright in a
straight-backed chair, and her old friend, with her permission, lay upon
a bamboo couch, where he held his eyeglass by its ribbon in one
outstretched hand and gesticulated with it, while he urged torrentially
upon her the rights of a publisher to the confidence of his author. Now
he came to his feet and stood punctiliously.

"Ah!" said Madam Fulton. She had remembered a little lack in her
reception of Rose when, hot and tired from her journey, she had found
her in the house. "So here is our young lady again. I have been
wondering why we haven't seen you, my dear."

While Rose, in her grateful sweetness, was bowing over her hand, Electra
had said to the gentleman, with the air of its being quite the usual
thing to say,--

"You know all about Markham MacLeod, Mr. Stark. This is the daughter of
Markham MacLeod."

Somehow, save to Rose, it seemed an adequate presentation, and that
instant Stark was bowing before her.

"I can't say Mr. MacLeod," Electra added, with the elaborate grace that
fitted what seemed to her that skillful preface. "He is quite too great
for that, isn't he, Mr. Stark?"

Billy had no extravagant opinion of Markham MacLeod. He had rather the
natural dubiousness of the inquiring mind toward a man whom the world
delighted to honor and who had, according to dispassionate standards,
done nothing, as yet, save telling others what to do.

"We don't say Mr. Browning often," he concurred, "certainly not Mr.
Shakespeare. But, my dear young lady, I don't forgive your father."

He seated himself, for Electra was now decorously smiling in a chair
that became her. It had a high carved top like Madam Fulton's, and in
these the older woman and the younger looked like the finest-fibred
beings bred out of endurance and strong virtues. Rose was in a low chair
near Madam Fulton's knee. She was leaning forward now, listening in her
receptive way, and Billy Stark looked at her anew and wondered at her
beauty and her grace. But he recalled himself with a sigh, and
remembered it was the old commonplace--youth--and it was not for him.

"You don't forgive my father?" she repeated, with a slightly foreign
accent that came sometimes upon her tongue, no one knew why, whether to
enhance her charm or in unconsciousness. "Why?"

Billy Stark had thrown one of his short legs over the other, and held it
with his well-kept hand.

"He is a renegade," he said. "He began to write, and stopped writing.
You can't expect a publisher to condone that."

Madam Fulton was having a strange pang of liking and envy as she looked
at the girl, one such as she never felt over Electra. Rose for her, too,
had youth, beautiful and pathetic also. As the girl only smiled without
answering, she said kindly,--

"Your father got very much interested in people, didn't he, my dear? the
working classes?"

"Labor," said Electra, as if it were a war-cry.

Madam Fulton glanced at her involuntarily, with a satirical thought.
Electra had a maternal attitude toward her servants, shown, her
grandmother thought, chiefly by interfering in their private lives. She
worked tirelessly at clubs to raise money for labor, and she listened to
the most arid talks on the situation of the day. But did Electra love
her fellowman? Madam Fulton did not know. She had seen no sign of it.
But Rose was returning one of her vague answers that always seemed
significant, and, to any partial ear, quite adequate.

"My father founded what he calls the Brotherhood. He speaks for it. He
works for it. But you know that already."

Stark nodded.

"I know," he said. "It is tremendous. He says to this man 'Come,' and he
cometh, and so on. I should think it would make him lie awake o'
nights."

"No," said Rose, smiling brilliantly in a way she had when the smile had
no honest mirth in it, "my father never lies awake. Responsibility is
the last thing he fears."

Now Electra was smiling upon her so persuasively that Rose bent toward
the look as if it were a species of sunshine.

"We want you to do something for us," Electra said.

"Oh, I'll do it," Rose was responding eagerly. "Gladly."

"We want you to give us a talk on your father."

Rose, painfully thrown back upon herself, looked her discomfort.

"Do you mean"--she began. "That was what you asked me before."

"For the Club."

"They want me to give a talk on my book," said Madam Fulton, looking at
Stark with a direct mirth. Then, still with a meaning for him, she
added, to Rose, "You do it, my dear. So will I, if they drive me to it.
We'll surprise them."

"That would be very sweet of you, grandmother," said Electra, innocent
of hidden meanings. "Then we might count on two afternoons."

"What do you want to know about my father?" asked Rose, and Electra
answered with a contrasting enthusiasm,--

"His habit of thought, something about his daily life as seen by those
nearest him, anything to interpret a great man to us."

"I can't do it." Rose had answered with a touch of harshness strangely
contrasted with her facile ways. "I really can't."

Now she saw why she had been summoned, and her gratitude sobered into
dull distaste. She felt cold.

"That sort of thing is very difficult," said Stark, in a general desire
to quell the emotional tide. "I often think a person next us has to be
inarticulate about us. He doesn't know really what he thinks of us till
we are gone. You know a big Frenchman says it is like being inside the
works of a clock. You can't tell the time there. You have to go
outside."

Rose was upon her feet, a lovely figure, wistful and mysteriously sad.

"I must go back," she said. "Thank you for letting me come." She had
turned away when Madam Fulton called to her.

"Miss MacLeod!" Rose stood, arrested. Madam Fulton continued, "Why not
stay to luncheon with us?"

The girl did not answer. Apparently she could not. Tears were swimming
in her eyes. She looked at Electra in what might be reproach or a
despair at the futility of the fight she had to make. She returned to
Madam Fulton and stood before her.

"You didn't know," she said, in a low tone. "No one has told you!"

"Sit down," said the old lady kindly. "What is it?"

Rose stood before her, proudly now, her back turned upon Electra, as if
she repudiated one source of justice and appealed to another court.

"You called me Miss MacLeod," she said, in her full-throated voice. "I
was your grandson's wife."

"Tom's wife!" cried the old lady, in a sharp staccato. "Tom's wife! For
heaven's sake!"

Rose turned from her to Stark with an eloquent insistence. Electra,
outside the circle of the drama, stood ignored. But Madam Fulton called
to her,--

"Electra, do you hear?"

"I have heard it," answered Electra, with composure.

"You have heard it? Why didn't you tell me?"

But Electra made no reply. Madam Fulton gave way to her excitement. It
seemed to put new blood into her veins.

"Sit down here," she said imperiously, pushing forward a chair. Rose
sank upon it in a dignified obedience. "Now tell me,--how long were you
married?"

"Two years."

"Did Tom"--there were many things the old lady, knowing Tom, wished to
ask. But Tom was in his grave, and she contented herself with remarking,
"I certainly am petrified."

Stark gave a little smiling nod at them, and began making his way to the
door. It seemed to him emphatically that this was a family conclave.

"Billy," called the old lady, "did you ever hear of such a thing in your
life? Tom had a wife two years before he died, and not a word. Did you
ever dream of such a thing? Electra, I could trounce you for not telling
me." Then, as no one spoke, she asked sharply, "Does Peter know?"

"Yes, Madam Fulton," Rose returned. "He brought me here. Not quite that.
He assured me I might come."

"Come! of course you had to come. You belong here. Why aren't you
staying with us? Electra, haven't you seen to it?"

Electra was immovable, and the other girl turned to her a mute glance.
To Billy Stark it said many things. Reproach was in it, and a
challenging, almost a hard appeal. Rose looked like a gentle thing that
has been forced to fight. But she spoke to Madam Fulton.

"I must go," she said, with her exquisite deference. "I mustn't tire
you."

"Tire me! I'm never tired. Well, you must come again. You must come to
stay. Electra will see to that."

But Electra only walked to the library door with the departing guest,
and presently Billy Stark caught the white shimmer of a gown, as Rose
went down the path. Electra was looking eagerly from him to her
grandmother.

"Well, Mr. Stark," she said, as if she hurried him, "what do you think
of her?"

Stark indicated a chair, with a courteous motion, and then allowed
himself to be seated.

"She is a remarkably beautiful young woman," he returned, in his
impartial way of shedding optimism. Electra made an impatient gesture.

"I know--I know. It's easy enough to be handsome."

"Oh, is it?" commented Madam Fulton.

"But what do you think of her?"

"What do you mean, Electra?" asked her grandmother testily. She was
prepared to hear that Electra thought the stranger lacking in poise.

A deep red had risen to Electra's cheeks. Her hands flew together in a
nervous clasp. She had momentarily lost what poise she herself
possessed.

"Can't you see," she urged, "that girl is an adventuress?"

Grandmother was leaning forward, enchanted at the prospect. She seemed
to have before her an absorbing work of fiction, "concluded in our
next."

"Now what makes you think so?" she inquired cosily. "Wouldn't that be
grand! Stay here, Billy. If there's any scandal about Queen Elizabeth,
you must share it."

Electra was speaking with a high impatience.

"Of course she is an adventuress. You must see it, both of you."

"Is that all the evidence you have?" asked the old lady dryly.

Electra blenched a little. She liked to have irrefutable fact on her
side, and allow other people the generalities. Yet her certainty
remained untouched.

"Does Peter say she is Tom's wife?" inquired Madam Fulton, in some scorn
at herself for putting elementary questions.

"Yes. Peter says she was Tom's wife."

"There, you see!" But at Electra's look, the old lady cried out to
Stark, in irrepressible annoyance, "No, she doesn't see! It doesn't mean
a thing to her."

"It will be quite easy," said Stark soothingly, "to assure yourself,
Miss Electra. She will no doubt tell you where she was married. That can
be confirmed at once."

"She must present her proofs," said Electra. "I shall not ask for them."

"What do you hate the poor girl for?" asked Madam Fulton. "Is it the
money? Are you afraid you've got to share with her?"

Billy Stark had been nearing the door, and now he was out of the room.

"Have you told Peter how you feel about it?" asked the old lady keenly.

Electra seemed to herself to be unjustly upon her own defense when she
had meant to place the stranger there.

"He knows it, grandmother." She spoke as impatiently as decorum would
allow.

The old lady watched her for a moment steadily. Then she inquired,--

"Do you know what's the matter with you, Electra?"

"With me, grandmother?"

"You're jealous, child. You're jealous of Peter, because the girl's so
pretty."

Electra stood still, the color surging over her face. She felt out of
doors for all the world to jeer at, and without the blameless habit of
her life. Nothing, Electra told herself, even at that moment, had the
value of the truth. If she believed herself to be jealous, she must not
shirk it, degrading as it was. But she would not believe it.

"You must excuse me, grandmother," she said, with dignity. "I can't
discuss such things, even with you."

Madam Fulton spoke quite eagerly.

"But, bless you, child, I like you the better for it. It makes you
human. Your decorum is the only thing I've ever had to complain of. If I
could find a weakness in you now and then, we should agree like two peas
in a pod."

Electra stood taller and straighter.

"At least," she said, "the young woman is here, and we have got to do
our best about it."

"The young woman! Don't talk as if she were a kitchen wench. What's the
use, Electra! What's the sense in being so irreproachable? Come off your
stilts while we're alone together."

"But, grandmother," said Electra, with an accession of firmness, and
leaving irrelevant strictures to be considered in the silence of her
room, "I shall neither acknowledge her nor shall I invite her here."

"You won't acknowledge her?"

"Not until she brings me proof."

"You won't ask for it?"

"I shan't ask for it. It is for her to act, not for me."

"And you won't have her here? Then, by George, Electra, I will!"

Electra raised her eyebrows by the slightest possible space. It was
involuntary, but the old lady saw it.

"You're quite right," she said ironically, "the house isn't mine."

"The house is yours to do exactly as you please with it," said Electra,
with an instant justice instinct even with a dutiful warmth. "Any guest
you invite is welcome. Only, grandmother, I must beg of you not to
invite this particular person."

"Person! Electra, you make me mad. Be human; come, unbend a little. Take
the poker out of your training. Do the decent thing, and ask her here,
and then find out about her, and if she's a baggage, turn her out, neck
and crop."

"I must refuse, grandmother," said Electra. "Now aren't you getting
tired? I will bring your food."

Madam Fulton spoke with deliberate unction:--

"Perdition take my food!"




IX


Rose came down out of her chamber after supper on a warm still evening.
She had stayed in retirement nearly all day. Grandmother had been
suffering discomfort from the heat and was better alone. Peter had gone
to town, and he had not come back. The girl stopped in the doorway of
the silent house and looked out into the night. It was all moonlight,
all mysterious shadows and enchanting stillnesses. The glamour of the
hour lay over it like a veil, and her heart responded to the calling
from mysterious distances, voices that were those of life itself
springing within her and echoing back from that delusive world. She
stood there smiling a little, trying to keep the wholesome bitterness of
her mood, because she thought she knew what a deceiving jade fortune is,
and yet with her young heart pathetically craving life and the fullness
of it. Rose thought she had quite fathomed the worth of things. She knew
the bravest shows are made by the trickiest design, and she had sworn,
in desperate defense of herself, to "take the world but as the
world,"--a gaming-ground for base passions and self-love. But to-night
all the instincts of youth in her were innocently vocal. Here was the
beautiful earth, again fecund and full of gifts. She could not help
believing in it. She gathered her skirts about her, and stepped out into
the dew, and with no avowed purpose, but, straight as inevitable intent
could lead her, crossed the orchard and went down across the field to
Osmond. She had selected that way, in her unconscious mind, when
grandmother had that morning sent her into the attic to look at some
precious heirlooms in disuse. Looking out of the attic window she had
noted his little shack and fields of growing things, and some impatience
then had said to her, That would be the way to get to him. Before the
last wall, she came out on a low rise where there was a spreading tree.
It was an oak tree, and though there seemed to be no wind that night,
the leaves rustled thinly.

"Where are you going?" It was Osmond's voice out of the shadow near the
wall.

Rose answered at once,--

"I was going down to see you."

"I thought you would come."

He was sitting there, his back against the wall, and at once she sank
down opposite him on a stone that made her a prim little seat. The
shadow lay upon her in flecks, but the outline of her white dress was
visible to him.

"Did you call me?" she asked. There was no trace of her unrest of the
moments before, either in her manner or in her own happy consciousness.
She felt instead a delicious ease and security that needed no explaining
even to herself.

Osmond answered as if he were deliberating.

"I don't know whether I called you. I hope I didn't. I was thinking
about you, of course."

"Why do you hope you didn't?"

"Because I haven't any right to."

"Doesn't my coming prove you had a right to? You see you did call me,
and I came."

After a moment he answered irrelevantly,--

"I'm a cowardly sort of chap. When I feel like calling you, I choke it
down. I don't want to get the habit of you."

"Why not?"

"One reason--it will be so difficult when you go away."

A sense of freedom and happiness possessed her. Words rose tumultuously
to her lips, to be choked there. She wanted to say unreasonably, "I
shall never go away. How could you think it?" But instead she asked,
with a happy indirection, "Where am I going?"

He, too, answered lightly,--

"How should I know? Back into your cloud, I guess--dear goddess." The
last words were very low, and to himself, but she heard them. Instantly
and against all reason, she, who had never meant to be happy again,
laughed ecstatically.

"Think," she said, "a month ago I didn't know you were in the world."

"Oh, yes, you did. Peter told you he had a kind of a brother, that
worked on the farm. But I didn't know you were in the world."

"Of course," she deliberated softly, "I knew Peter had a brother. But I
didn't know it was you."

The moonlit air was as beguiling to him as it was to her. Everything was
different and everything was possible. He put his hand to his head and
tried to recall old prudences. In vain. The still, bright world told
him, with a voice so quiet that it was like a hand upon his heart, that
it was the only world. The daylight one of doubts and dull expediency
had been arranged by man. This was the home of the spirit. For a moment
he felt himself drowning in that sea of life. Then, perhaps lifted by
his striving will, he seemed to come out again to the free air that had
touched him at her coming. Again he was at peace and incredibly exalted.
He tried to bring lightness into their talk.

"I suppose," said he, "you are one of the charmers."

"What do you mean by charmers?"

"Don't ask me what I mean, when you know. If you do that, we shall
forget our language."

"What do you mean by our language?"

"Yours and mine. Don't you hear it going on, question and answer,
question and answer, all the time our tongues are talking? Those are the
things we never can speak out loud."

"Yes, I hear them. But I couldn't tell what I hear."

"Of course you couldn't. Only when we really speak with our lips, we
must tell each other the truth. If we don't, we shall jar things. Then
the other voices will stop."

When she spoke her words had a note of pain, mysteriously
disproportioned, he thought, to the warning he had given.

"I don't think I have told you what wasn't true," she faltered. Life had
gone out of her.

The tenderest comforting seemed to him too harsh for such pathetic
sorrow. But he clung to his lighter, safer mood.

"We've simply got to tell each other the truth. When we don't, it's like
the clanging of ten thousand bells. Of course that drowns the other
voices. So when I ask you if you are one of the charmers, you mustn't
ask what I mean. You must answer."

She began to laugh. His heart rejoiced at it.

"Yes," she owned gleefully. "Yes, I am."

"That's a good lady. You're very beautiful, too, aren't you?"

"Yes," she corroborated. "Oh, I'd swear to anything!"

"If it's true," he corrected her. "What are your accomplishments, missy?
Do you play the piano?"

For his life, Osmond could not have told why he addressed her as he did,
or how he got the words. Some strange self seemed to have sprung up in
him, a self that had a language he had not learned from books nor used
to woman. The new self grew rapidly. He felt it wax within him. It was
loquacious, too. It seemed to have more to say than there would be time
for in a million years; but he gave it head.

"I play a little," said Rose. She was meeting him joyously. "I sing,
too."

"Yes, you sing. I guessed that. Let me hear you."

At once she folded her hands on her knees and sang like a child in
heaven, with the art that is simplicity. She sang "Nous n'irons plus au
bois," and Osmond felt his heart choking with the melancholy of it. His
own voice trembled when he said,--

"You must not sing that often. It's too sad."

"Are we never to be sad?" She asked it in a quick tone full of eager
confidence, as if whatever he told her was bound to come to pass.

"Not when we are together."

Premonition chilled him there. Why should they ever be together again?
Why was it not possible that this was his one night, the first and the
last? So if it was to be the last, he would taste every minute of it,
and make it his to keep.

"Well," he said consideringly, "so you are a charmer. You can charm a
bird off a bush. That would be one of the first tricks."

She answered, in what he saw was real delight,--

"I can try. Want me to?"

"No, no. You can't tell what will become of the bird--in the end."

His voice sounded to her ineffably sad. Eager words rose again to her
lips, and again she held them back, even against the glamour of that
light and air.

"You broke your promise to me," she adventured presently.

"What promise?"

"You said you would come to the house."

"I said I might." He spoke with an embracing tenderness, as if to a
child. She fancied he was smiling at her through the dusk. "Besides," he
continued, "I shan't come to see you there, anyway; I have decided
that."

"Why not?"

"This is better."

"This?"

"This tree."

It seemed quite just and natural that she should meet him there. Why
should she disclaim it?

"But you won't go to the house to see your grandmother?"

"Oh, I see grannie. She wakes before day. We have a little talk every
morning while you're asleep. The last time"--he stopped.

"Well!" she urged him.

"The last time I passed your door I heard your step inside. When I went
out at the front door, I heard you on the stairs." It had apparently
enormous significance to him. "The next morning I came earlier," said
Osmond, in a low tone, "but I dropped a handful of rose leaves at your
sill."

"I saw them--scattered rose leaves."

"For you to step on."

There was a moment's silence.

"But I didn't," she said. "I didn't step on them."

"What did you do?"

"I gathered them up very carefully in my handkerchief and left them in
my bureau drawer."

"Now, why"--he spoke curiously--"why did you do that?"

"I hate to throw away flowers. They are precious to me."

There was silence again, and then he said reprovingly,--

"No, you mustn't do that."

"Do what?"

"You mustn't get up earlier to catch me scattering my rose leaves. That
wouldn't be fair."

"That was what I was thinking." She mused a moment. "No, I suppose it
wouldn't be fair."

"You see we shall have to play fair every minute. That's the way to be
good playmates."

"That's what we are, isn't it--playmates?"

"It's about the size of it." Then he asked her gravely, across the
distance between them, "Don't you hear a nightingale?"

She was taken in.

"But there aren't any nightingales in New England!"

"I almost think I hear one. You see if you don't."

She caught the pace then, and listened. Presently she spoke as gravely
as he had done.

"I am sure I hear one--over there in the rose garden."

"I knew you would." He breathed quickly, in a gay relief. "Yes, in the
rose garden, 'her breast against a thorn.' Well, playmate, it's a
wonderful night. I smell the roses, too, don't you?"

"Yes, and lilies. The nightingale sings very loud."

"Let us talk, playmate. Where have you been since I saw you last?"

"Since that other night I came down here?"

"Since that other year, so long ago. We mustn't forget there are other
years, though we can't quite recall them. If there hadn't been, we
shouldn't be hearing the nightingale to-night and talking without words.
You see it's a good while since I saw you. How old are you?"

"Twenty-five."

"Twenty-five! A quarter of a century. That's a long time. Well, what
have you been doing all that twenty-five years?"

She seemed to shrink into herself, as if a hand had struck her.

"Don't!" she breathed. "Don't ask me to remember."

"Why, no! not if it troubles you."

"Troubles me! it kills me. Can't we begin now?"

"We will begin now. There, playmate, don't shiver. I feel you're doing
it through the moonlight. Don't let your chin tremble either. It did,
that night down in the shack."

"When I was talking about Electra?"

"I guess so. Anyway it trembled a lot, and I made up my mind it mustn't
any more. Cheer up, playmate. Be a man."

"I wish I were a man." She spoke bitterly. The beauty of the night
seemed to break about her, and this castle of whim that had looked, a
moment ago, more solid than certainty, was crumbling.

"Now you're doing what I told you not to," he warned her gravely. "You
have stopped telling the truth. You don't wish you were a man. Think how
happy you were a minute ago, only because you are a beautiful woman and
you heard the nightingale."

She was struggling back into the clear medium that had been between them
the moment before.

"I only meant"--she spoke painstakingly, hunting for words and
pathetically anxious to have them right--"I only meant--I have been
unhappy. No man would have been as unhappy as I have been."

Osmond smiled a little to himself, in grave communing. The uphill road
of his life presented itself to him as a thorny way so hard that, if he
had foreseen it from the beginning, he would have said it was
impossible. But at the same instant he remembered where it had led him:
he had come out into clear air, he was resting in this garden of
delight. And she, too, was resting. He knew that with a perfect
certainty.

"We have begun over," he warned her. "We don't have to remember. See the
moon driving along the sky. We are going with her, fast. Look at her,
playmate."

She looked up into the sky where the moon seemed to be racing past more
stable clouds. It was as if their spiritual gaze met there, to be welded
into a mutual compact. This was the ecstasy of silence. Presently a
sound broke it, a whistle loud and clear from the other field. Osmond
was at once upon his feet.

"Come," he said, "we must go. There's Peter."

"But why must we go?" She was struggling out of her trance of quietude,
almost offended at his haste.

"Come with me. We will meet him in the field. It is too--too splendid,
here. This is our castle under the tree. Don't you know it is? We can't
ask anybody in--not even Peter."

"Not even Peter!" She tried to say it gayly, but a quick sadness fell
upon her as she rose and went with him along the path. The moon had gone
into a cloud, and a breath sprang up. The night was cooler. That other
still langour of too great emotion seemed like something generated by
their souls, and dissipated when they had to come out of the world of
their own creating. All her daily fears rose up before her in
anticipation. She was again alien here in her own land, and Electra was
unkind to her. But there was a strange confidence and strength in
knowing this silent figure was at her side.

"Courage, playmate," he said, as if he knew her thought. "We shall think
this night over, shan't we?"

"Yes. When"--her voice failed her.

"Every night," he said, with an unchanged assurance that amazed her like
the night itself. "I shall be there every night. If you don't come--why,
never mind. If you come"--his voice stopped, as if something choked it.
Then he went on heartily, "The house will be there under the tree, the
playhouse. Nobody will see it by day, you know. Nobody'll run up against
it by night. But you've got the key. There are only two, you know. You
have one. I have the other. And here's Peter."

The whistle had come nearer, clear and pure now like the pipe of Pan.
Peter stopped short.

"Rose!" he cried. "Osmond! What is it?"

Some accident seemed to him inevitable. Nothing else could have brought
about this meeting. Osmond answered, stopping as he did so, when Peter
turned to join him.

"I'll go back, now you've come, Peter. We were taking our walks abroad.
So we met. Good-night! good-night!"

It seemed a separate and a different farewell to each of them, and he
walked away. Peter stood staring after him, but Rose involuntarily
glanced up to heaven to see if the moon, out of her cloud now, would
give again the radiant assurance of that other moment. She longed
passionately for an instant's meeting even so with the man who had gone.
Then an exalted calm possessed her. She and Peter were walking rather
fast along the path; he had been talking and she was conscious that she
had not heard. Now a name arrested her.

"Had you met him before?" he was asking,--"Osmond?"

Her old habit of elusive courtesy came back to her. She laughed a
little.

"We haven't really met now, have we?" she responded pleasantly.

"He said he was afraid of you." Peter put it bluntly, out of his
curiosity and something else that was not altogether satisfaction. He
was not jealous of Osmond. He could not be, more than of a splendid
tree; but there was a something in the air he did not understand. He
felt himself pushing angrily against it, as if it were a tangible
obstruction. "He was afraid of you," he continued blunderingly, "because
you are a Parisian."

Rose laughed again, with that beguiling gentleness.

"But he spoke first, I believe," she explained carelessly. "I was
walking along and he asked me where I was going."

"What were you talking about?" Peter's voice amazed him, as it did her.
It was rough, remonstrating, he realized immediately, like the mood that
engendered it. He was shocked at himself and glad she did not answer.
Instead, she gave him her hand that he might help her over the low wall.

"See," she said, "your grandmother has a light in her room. She is lying
in bed reading good books."

"Does she read them to you?"

"A little word sometimes when I go in to say good-night."

"Grannie's a saint."

"Yes, and better. She's a beautiful grannie."

When they stepped into the hall, Peter, under the stress of his
inexplicable feeling, turned to look at her. Instantly the eyes of the
man and of the artist agreed in an amazed affirmation. The artist in
Peter got the better, and gave him authority.

"Wait a minute," he bade her. "Stand there."

She obeyed him, and looked inquiringly yet languidly. The angry man in
him told him at once that she could obey because she was indifferent to
his reasons for commanding her. Out of that indifference she stood and
looked at him, kind, friendly, yet as far from him as the remoter stars.
He stared at her and thought of brush and canvas. Never had he seen a
woman so alive. Her eyes, her wayward hair, her very flesh seemed
touched with flame. Her lips had softened into a full curve, strange
contrast to their former patient sweetness. The pupils of her eyes,
distended, gave her face a tragic power. As he gazed, that wild bright
beauty seemed to fade. Her eyes lost their reminiscent look and inquired
of him sanely. The lips tightened a little. Her languor gave place to a
steady poise. Now she shook her head with a pretty motion, as if she
cast off memories.

"Do I look nice to-night?" she said kindly, as if she spoke to an
admiring boy. "Do you want to paint me?"

Peter turned aside with an exclamation under his breath. He had never,
again he told himself, seen a woman so alive, so radiating beauty as if
it bloomed and faded while he looked at her. She was beginning to mount
the stairs.

"Good-night," she called back to him, with her perfect kindliness.
"Good-night, Peter."




X


Madam Fulton and Billy Stark sat in the library, wrangling.

"I say she'll come," said Madam Fulton.

"I say she won't," replied Billy with a hearty zest. "No woman of
self-respect would."

"Maybe she hasn't self-respect."

"Oh, you go 'way, Florrie. Of course she has, any girl as pretty as
that."

Madam Fulton looked at him smilingly. There were few left, nowadays, to
call her Florrie.

"You see Electra never in the world would have invited her," she
continued. "I simply did it, and she had to confirm it or appear like a
brute. Electra won't do that. She's willing to appear like a long and
symmetrical icicle, but not a brute."

That was it. She had boldly asked Rose to luncheon, and then told
Electra she had done it. Now it was fifteen minutes to the time, and the
hostess had not appeared. Madam Fulton looked up from her work. There
was a laughing cherub in each eye. Her work, let it be said, was no work
at all, only a shuttle plying in and out mysteriously, and lyingly doing
the deed known as tatting. She usually tied knots and had to begin over;
still, as she said, she liked the motion.

"There was a reporter here yesterday," she remarked, watching the effect
on Billy.

"The mischief there was! What for?"

"To see me. To ask about the book."

"You didn't talk to him?"

"Oh, yes, I did!"

"What did he ask you?"

"Everything, nearly. He wanted to see the Abolitionist letters I had
quoted."

"What did you say?"

"I refused. I told him they were sacred."

"Did he suspect them? Was that his idea?"

"Oh, dear, no! he wanted to reproduce some of the signatures. Then he
asked me about my novels."

"What about them?"

"How I used to write them--if the characters were taken from life. I
said every time."

"Florrie, what a pirate you are!"

"Then his eyes sharpened up like knives, and he wanted to know about the
originals. 'Dead,' I said, 'years and years ago.'"

"You didn't use to be a freebooter, Florrie. You were just a bright
girl."

"Of course I didn't. I was walking Spanish then. I was on my promotion.
I always had faith life would do something for me if I'd speak pretty
and hold out my tier. I held my tier a great many years and nothing
dropped into it. I'm an awful example, Billy, of what a woman can become
when she's had no fun. This may seem to you insanity. It isn't. It's the
abnormal and monstrous fruit of a plant that wasn't allowed to mature at
the right time. I am a mammoth squash."

"What did you tell him about your novels?"

"I told him they weren't written. They wrote themselves. My characters
simply got away from me and did things I never dreamed of. I said they
were more alive to me than people of flesh and blood."

"Do you suppose he put in all that?"

"I know he did."

"Have you seen the paper?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I haven't dared to look."

Billy Stark glanced at the floor as if he wanted to get down and roll.
Then he lay back in his chair and went gasping off. Madam Fulton watched
him seriously, that unquenchable spark still in her eyes.

"I don't know what you can do next," said Billy, getting out his
pocket-handkerchief, "unless you become engaged to me."

Madam Fulton laid down her tatting, to look at him in a gentle musing.

"It would plague Electra," she owned.

"Come on, Florrie, come on! Get up early to-morrow morning, and we'll
post off and be married."

"No," said Madam Fulton absently, still considering, "I don't want to be
married. Harsh measures never did attract me. But I'd like very well to
be engaged. Tell you what, Billy, we could be engaged for the summer,
and when you go back to England we'll call it off."

Billy rose, and possessed himself of one of her hands. He kissed it
ceremoniously, and returned it to its tatting.

"You do me infinite honor," he announced, with more gravity than she
liked.

"Don't get too serious, Billy," she said quickly. "It'll remind us of
being young, and mercy knows that isn't what we want."

"May I inform your granddaughter?" asked the gentleman gravely.

"No, no, I'll do it. That's half the fun."

At that moment Electra came in. She was dressed in white, as usual, but
her ordinary dignified simplicity seemed overlaid, to the old lady's
satirical gaze, with an added smoothness of glossy surfaces. Her dress
fell in simple folds. She seemed to have clothed herself to meet a moral
emergency. Her face was pale in its determination. She was like a New
England maiden led to sacrifice and bound, at all hazards, to do her
conscience credit. Madam Fulton, seeing her, hardened her heart. There
were few pirouettes she would not have essayed at that moment to plague
her granddaughter.

"Electra, my dear," she said, in a silken voice, "we have something to
tell you, Mr. Stark and I. We have become engaged."

Electra looked from one to the other, not even incredulity in her gaze,
all a reproachful horror. Yet Electra did not for a moment admit the
possibility of a joke on such a subject. She saw her grandmother, as she
often did, peering down paths that led to madness, and even, as in this
case, taking one.

"Please do not mention it," grandmother was saying smoothly. "The
engagement is not to be announced--not yet."

Electra could not look at Billy Stark, even in reproof. The situation
was too intolerable. And at that moment, flushed from her walk, eager,
deprecating as she had to be in this unfriendly spot, Rose came in. She
went straight to Madam Fulton, as if she were the recognized head of the
house.

"It was so good of you," she said. "I am so glad to come." Then she
turned to Electra and Billy Stark with her quick, beautiful smile and
her inclusive greeting. This was not the same woman who had run away to
trysts under the tree, or even the woman Peter had seen when she
returned, glowing, lovely, as if from a bath of pleasure. She was the
Parisian, as Osmond had perhaps imagined her in his jesting fancy,
regnant, subtle, even a little hard. Electra felt for a moment as if it
were wise to be afraid of her. But they sat down, and she essayed the
safe remark,--

"I believe luncheon is late."

"What have you been doing with yourself, my dear?" Madam Fulton asked
Rose, who was looking from one to another with an accessible brightness,
as if she only wanted a chance to respond to everything beautifully. She
bent a little, deferentially, toward Madam Fulton.

"Reading aloud this morning," she said, "to grannie."

"You call her grannie, do you?"

"I begged to. I adore her."

"Does she like it?"

"Oh, yes, she likes it," Rose returned, with her lovely smile. "Don't
you think she likes it?"

"I know she does. That's what I can't understand. Every time I hear
Electra say 'grandmother' it's like a nail in my coffin."

"Grandmother!" exclaimed Electra, in an instant and quite honest
deprecation.

"That's it, my dear," nodded the old lady. "That's precisely it. Nail me
down."

Then luncheon was announced, and they went out, Rose with that instant
deference toward Madam Fulton which suggested a hundred services while
she delicately refrained from doing one.

"I know you," said the old lady dryly, after they had sat down. "I know
quite well what you are."

"What, please?" asked Rose, bending on her that warm look which was yet
never too flattering, and still promised an incense of personal regard
not to be spoiled by deeds.

"I know exactly what you are," said the old lady, with her incisive
kindliness. "You're a charmer."

Instantly Rose flushed all over her face, a flooding red. With the word
she remembered the other voice out of the moonlit night, telling her the
same thing. Now it was almost an accusation. Then it was a caressing
loveliness of the night, as if an unseen hand had crowned her with a
chaplet, dripping fragrance. In that instant, with a throb of haste and
longing, she was away from the circle of these alien souls, back in the
night where voice had answered voice. It was immediately as if she were
hearing his call to her. "I will come to-night, to-night," she heard her
heart repeating. "Did you wait for me last night, dear playmate, alone
in the dark and stillness? And the night before? Did you think I was
never coming? I will come to-night."

Meantime Billy Stark, seeing the blush and knowing it meant discomfort,
was pottering on in his kindly optimism, throwing himself into the
breach, and dribbling words like rain. He talked of Paris and
continental life in general. Rose had been everywhere. She spoke of
traveling with her father on his missions from court to court. When
MacLeod's name recurred upon her lips, Electra, who presided, still and
pale, roused momentarily into some show of interest. But Rose would not
be led along that road. For some reason she refused to speak freely of
her father. At a question, her lovely lips would fix themselves in a
straight line. Back in the library again, she seated herself
persistently by Madam Fulton, like a dog who has at last discovered the
person friendliest to him.

"Run away, Billy, if you like," said the old lady indulgently. "You want
your cigar on the veranda. I know you."

Billy was going, in humorous deprecation, when there was a running step
along the veranda, and Peter came in with a bound. And what a Peter! He
looked like a runner--not a spent one, either--with the news of victory.
It was in his face, his flushed cheeks and flaming eyes, but chiefly in
the air he brought with him--all tension and immoderate joy. Electra
held her hands tight together and looked at him. Rose got half out of
her chair. In those days when she thought continually of her own
affairs, it seemed to her that nothing could be so important unless it
had to do with her. Billy Stark by the door waited, and it was Madam
Fulton who spoke, irritated at the vague excitement.

"For heaven's sake, Peter, what's the matter?"

He addressed himself at once to Rose.

"I have heard from him. I have had a letter."

"From him!" She was out of her chair and facing him. For the moment,
with that hidden communion with Osmond hot in her heart and sharp in her
ears, she had almost cried, "Osmond!" But he went on,--

"I have heard from your father."

Instantly the blood was out of her face. Billy Stark wondered at the
aging grayness, and reflected curiously that youth is not only a
question of flesh and blood but of the merry soul. Peter could not
contain his pleasure. He cried out irrepressibly, like the herald beside
himself with news,--

"He is coming here!"

"Here!" Rose made one step to lay her hand upon a little cabinet, and
stood supporting herself. Electra, who caught the movement, looked at
her curiously. Her own enormous interest in Peter's news seemed to merge
itself in watchful comment on the other girl.

"Here!" Peter was answering. "To America! He writes me the most stirring
letter. I didn't think I knew him so well. He has so many friends here,
he says, friends he never saw. He wants to meet them. The best of it is,
he's coming here--to us."

"Here!" repeated Rose again. She seemed to be sinking into herself, but
the tense hand upon the cabinet kept her firm.

Peter looked at her with eyes of innocent delight.

"Here, to us. I told him if he ever came over, we should grab him before
anybody got a hand on him. I've told grannie. She's delighted."

"You told him that!" Her voice held a reproach so piercing that they
were all staring at her in wonder. She looked like a woman suffering
some anguish too fierce, for the moment, to be stilled. "You've been
writing him!"

"Of course," said Peter. "Why, of course, I wrote him. I sent him word
when we first got here, to tell him you were well."

"How could you! Oh, how could you!"

At her tone, the inexplicable reproach of it, he lost his gay assurance.
Peter forgot the others. There was nobody in the room, to his eager
consciousness, but Rose and his erring self; for somehow, most
innocently, he had offended her. He took a step toward her, his boyish
face all melted into contrition. There might have been tears in his
eyes, they were so soft.

"Sit down," he implored her. "Rose! What have I done?"

It was like a sorry child asking pardon. Electra gave him a quick look,
and then went on watching. At the tone Rose also was recalled. She shook
herself a little, as if she threw off dreams. Her hand upon the cabinet
relaxed. Her face softened, the pose of her body yielded, She seemed
almost, by some power of the will, to bring new color into her cheeks.
Peter had drawn forward her chair, and she took it smilingly.

"I'm not accustomed to long-lost fathers appearing unannounced," she
said whimsically. "Dear me! What if he brings me a Paris gown!"

But Peter was standing before her, still with an air of deep solicitude.

"It was a shock, wasn't it?" he kept repeating. "What a duffer I am!"

"It was a shock," said Electra, with an incisive confirmation. "Mayn't I
get you something? A glass of wine?"

Rose looked at her quite pleasantly before Peter had time to begin his
persuasive recommendation that she should spare herself.

"Let me take you home," he was urging.

It was as if Rose had been drawing draughts from some deep reservoir,
and now she had enough to carry her on to victory.

"No, no, Peter," she denied him. "I won't go home. Thank you,
Electra,"--a delicate frown wrinkled Electra's brows. The girl had never
used her familiar name before--"thank you, I won't have any wine. Well,
my father is coming. Let's hope he won't turn the country upside down,
and keep the trains from running. Get in your supplies, all of you. He
may instigate a strike, and if the larder isn't full, you'll starve."

"Stop the trains?" repeated Electra, who was not imaginative. "Why
should he stop the trains?"

"Ah, Miss Fulton, you don't know my father," Rose answered gayly. She
had seen that tiny frown punctuating her first familiarity, and took
warning by it. "Don't you know how, in great gardens, you can take a key
and turn on the fountains? Well, my father can turn on strikes in the
same manner. He has the key in his pocket."

Electra warmed, in spite of herself.

"I should like"--she hesitated.

"You'd like to see him do it? You may. Perhaps you will. We'll sit in a
circle and point our thumbs down and all the bloated capitalists shall
go in and be killed." She was talking, at random, out of a tension she
might not explain. Billy Stark, the coolest of them, saw that Madam
Fulton had some vague inkling of it. Billy, as usual, began talking, but
Rose had risen. Having proved her composure, she was going. She listened
to Billy with smiling interest, and then when he had finished,
humorously and inconsequently, nodded concurrence at him and said
good-by. She had a few pretty words for Madam Fulton, a gracious look
for Electra, and she was gone, Peter beside her. Billy Stark followed
and stayed on the veranda with his cigar. But Electra remained facing
her grandmother. She looked at her, not so much in triumph as with a
fixed determination. Suddenly Madam Fulton became aware of her glance
and answered it irritably.

"For mercy's sake, Electra, what is it?"

Then Electra spoke, turning away, as if the smouldering satisfaction of
her tone must not betray itself in her face.

"Do you realize what this means?"

"What what means?"

"She is terrified at his coming--Markham MacLeod's."

"Well, you don't know Markham MacLeod. Perhaps if you did, you'd be
terrified yourself."

"But his daughter, grandmother, a girl who calls herself his daughter!"

Madam Fulton stared.

"Don't you believe that either?" she inquired. "Don't you believe she is
his daughter?"

"Not for a moment." Electra had turned and was walking toward the door,
all her white draperies contributing to the purity of her aspect.

Madam Fulton continued, in the same inadequacy of amaze,--

"But Peter knows it. He knew them together."

"Peter knew her with Tom," said Electra conclusively. "One proof is
worth as much as the other."

At the door she turned, almost a beseeching look upon her face, as she
remembered another shock that had been dealt her.

"Grandmother!" she said.

"Well!"

"You spoke of Mr. Stark--"

The old lady's thought went traveling back. Then her face lighted.

"Oh," she said. "Yes, I know. I'm engaged to Billy."

"Grandmother--" Electra blushed a little, painfully--"You can't
mean--grandmother, are you going to marry him?"

Madam Fulton laid her head back upon the small silk pillow of her chair.
She never owned to it, but sometimes the dull hour after luncheon
brought with it a drowsiness she was ceasing to combat. She smiled at
Electra, who seemed very far away from her through the veil of that
approaching slumber and through the years that separated them.

"We shan't marry at once, Electra," she said, dropping off while the
girl looked at her. "Not at once. I expect to have a good many little
affairs before I settle down."




XI


On the way back to the house, Peter kept looking solicitously at Rose,
breaking now and then into quick regrets.

"What have I done?" he asked her, in his impetuous stammer. "Shouldn't I
have written to your father? Rose, what have I done?"

She seemed not to hear him. Her face had a strained expression, the old
look he remembered from the days of Tom's illness and her not quite
natural grief. Then she had never given way to the irrepressible warmth
of sorrow, like a loving wife. She had seemed to harden herself, and
that he accounted for by his knowledge of Tom's hideous past. The woman
had known him, Peter reflected, from illuminating intercourse, and his
death meant chiefly the turning of a blotted page. But now! over her
bloom of youth was the same shadowing veil. She was not so much a woman
moved by strong emotion as made desperate through hidden causes. Still
he besought her to forgive him, finally to look at him. Then she
wakened.

"It's all right, Peter," she said absently. "It had to be."

But still he saw no reason for her blight and pain. It was not merely
incredible, it was impossible that any one should shrink because Markham
MacLeod was coming. At the door she did look at him. He was shocked at
the drooping sadness of her face. Yet she was smiling.

"Don't bother, Peter," she said. "You've done nothing wrong, nothing
whatever."

Then she went up the stairs, and Peter, after watching the last glimmer
of her dress, strode away into the orchard and threw himself on the
grass. Thoughts not formulated, emotions one yeast of unrest went
surging through him, until he felt himself a riot of forces he could not
control. It was youth that moved him, his own ungoverned youth, but it
seemed to him life, and that all life was like it. Peter thought he had
experienced enormously because he had lived in Paris and painted
pictures. Yet he had never governed his course of being. It had been
done for him. The greatest impression it had made on him thus far was of
the extreme richness of things. There was so much of everything! He was
young. There was a great deal of time, and if he did not paint his
pictures this year, he could do it next. There were infinite
possibilities. He had ease and talent and power. He had, even so far,
won laurels enough to be a little careless of them. Since he had by the
happy pains of art got so much out of life, he made no doubt that by
superlative efforts, which he meant to make in that divine future where
the sun was always shining, he should set all the rivers afire. There
was money enough, too. He had never lacked it, thanks to old Osmond's
thrift, Osmond who did not need it himself in the ordinary ways of man.
He found such pure fun in the pleasures money bought that there was a
separate luxury in giving it up, turning it in to the sum of things, and
living straitly that labor might take some ease.

And here he lay on the grass, youth seething within him and pointing
like a drunken guide, a vine-crowned reveler, to a myriad paths, all
wonderful. His mind wandered to Rose and settled there in a delighted
acquiescence. He had never before given himself wholly up to her spell,
but now, whether the summer day beguiled him, or whether her mysterious
trouble moved him, he thought of her until they seemed to be alone
together on the earth,--and that was happiness. Beauty! that was what
she meant to him, he told himself when thought was at last uppermost,
and not mere passionate feeling. She was delight and harmony, and
allegiance to her was like worship of the world.

When he got out of his dream and went in to dinner with the noon sun
upon his burning face, she was on the veranda with grannie, a little
pale still, but sweet and responsive in the quiet ways she had for every
day. Peter, looking at her, felt the sun go out of his blood, and the
mad worship of that hour in the orchard seemed like a past bacchanal
rout and triumph when the worshipers go home to feed the flocks. His
will, recalled, took him by swift revulsion to Electra, but it could not
make the journey welcome. She seemed to be far away on some barren plain
at the top of climbing. Rose, too, was far away, but the mountain where
she lived was full of springs and blossomy slopes, and at the top the
muses and the graces danced and laughed. There were flying feet always,
the gleam of draperies, the fall of melody,--always pleasures and the
hint of pleasures higher still,--and echoes from old joys tasted by gods
and nymphs in the childhood of the world. The way there, too, was hard,
but what would the path matter to such blisses of the mind and soul? In
his daze he became aware that grannie was looking at him kindly.

"I guess you've been asleep," said she.

"He's been dreaming, too," said Rose, in her intimate kindliness, always
the same to him as if he were a boy with whom she had a tender and
confident relation.

Peter rubbed his eyes.

"I got lost," he said ruefully. "I went up on the mountain and got
lost."

"I guess you dreamed it," said grannie. "Come, let's have our dinner;"
and they went in together, both the young things helping her.

Peter reflected that Rose had not even heard what he said. She did not
care what the mountain was, or whether he was lost. But at the table,
while grannie talked about gardening and the things Osmond meant to do
another year, and Rose glanced up with involuntary question in her eyes
whenever Osmond's name was mentioned, he seemed to have the vision of
the mountain again before him and to hear the laughter and the sound of
dancing feet. The picture, little by little, faded and would not be
recalled, and by afternoon it had quite gone. Sobered, his feet on the
earth again, he went away in the early evening, to see Electra.

Rose waited until the dark had really fallen and evening sounds had
begun. Then she stole out of the house and, a black cloak about her,
this time, went across the fields to the oak tree. At a little distance
from it she paused, her heart too imperious to let her speak and find
out whether he was there. But when she was about to venture it, a voice
came from under the tree.

"Don't stay there, playmate. Come into the house."

Then she went on.

"Where are you?" she asked. There was an eloquent quiver in her voice.

"Never mind. I'm in the house. Stop where you are. There's a little
throne. I made it for you."

She had her hand on the back of a rough chair. At once she seated
herself.

"I never heard of a throne in a playhouse," she said, with that new
merriment he made for her.

"You never saw a playhouse just like this. That's a beautiful throne. It
fits together like a chair. It's here in the playhouse by night, but
before daylight I draw it up into the tree and hide it."

"What if somebody finds it?"

"They'll think it's a chair."

"What if they break it?"

"That's easy. We'll make another. There's nothing so easy as to make a
throne for a playhouse, if you know the way. Well, playmate, how have
you been, all this long time?"

When she came across the field she had meant to tell him how sad she
was, how perplexed, how incapable of meeting the ills confronting her.
But immediately it became unnecessary, and she only laughed and said,--

"It hasn't been a long time at all."

"Hasn't it? Oh, I thought it had!"

"Have you been here every night?"

"Every night."

"But it rained."

"I know it, outside. It doesn't rain in a playhouse."

"Did you truly come?"

"Of course. What did I tell you? I said 'every night.'"

"Did you have an umbrella?"

"An umbrella in a playhouse? You make me laugh."

"You must have got wet through."

"Not always. Sometimes I climbed up in the branches--in the roof, I
mean. You're eclipsed to-night, aren't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"That dark cloak. The other night you were a white goddess sitting there
in the moonlight. You were terribly beautiful then. It's almost a shame
to be so beautiful. This is better. I rather like the cloak. You're
nothing but a voice to-night, coming out of the dark."

Immediately she had a curious jealousy of the white dress that made her
beautiful to him when he did not really know her face.

"You have never seen me," she said involuntarily.

"Oh yes, I have. In the shack, that night. Then the day you came. I saw
you driving by."

"Where were you?"

"In the yard looking at some grafted trees. Peter was late from the
train. I got impatient, so I went round fussing over the trees, to keep
myself busy. Then you came up the drive, and I saw you and retreated in
good order."

"You needn't have hated me so. You hadn't really seen me."

"I saw enough. I saw your cheek and one ear and the color of your hair.
Take care, playmate, you mustn't do that."

"What?"

"You mustn't say I hated you. You know it wasn't hate."

Some daring prompted her to ask, "What was it, then?" but she folded her
hands and crossed her feet in great contentment and was still.

"Tell me things," she heard him saying.

"What things? About the house up there? About grannie? About Peter?"

"No, no. I know all about grannie and Peter. Tell me things I never
could know unless we were here in the playhouse, in the dark."

Her mind went off, at that, to the wonder of it. She was here in strange
circumstances, and of all the occurrences of her life, it seemed the
most natural. Immediately she had the warmest curiosity, the desire that
he should talk inordinately and tell her all the things he had done
to-day, yesterday, all the days.

"You tell," she said. "Begin at the beginning, and tell me about your
life."

"Why, playmate!" His voice had even a sorrowful reproach. "There's
nothing in it. Nothing at all. I have only dug in the ground and made
things grow."

"What people have you known?"

"Grannie."

"She isn't people."

"She's my people. She's all there is, except Peter, and he hasn't been
here."

Something like jealousy possessed her. She was stung by her own
ignorance.

"But there are lots of years when we didn't meet," she said.

"Lots of them. But I don't care anything about them. I told you so the
other night."

"Don't you care about mine?"

"Not a bit."

She was lightheaded with the joy of it. There were things she need not
tell him.

"Not the years before we met?" Then because she was a woman, she had to
spoil the cup. "Nor the years after I go away?"

"No, not the years when you've gone away. You can't take this night with
you, nor the other night."

He had hurt her.

"That's enough, then--a memory."

Osmond laughed a little. It was a tender sound, as if he might scold
her, but not meaning it.

"You mustn't be naughty," he said. "There's nothing naughtier in a
playhouse than saying what isn't true. You know if you go away you'll
come back again. You can't help it. It may be a long time first. You
were twenty-five years in coming this time. But you'll have to come. You
know that, don't you?"

"Yes," she said gravely, "I know that." Then the memory of her wandering
life and the sore straits of it voiced itself in one cry, "I don't want
to go. I want to stay."

"Stay, dear playmate," said the other voice. "There never will be a
night when I'm not here. Is the playhouse key in your hand, all tight
and warm? I wear mine round my neck. We shan't lose them."

Immediately she felt that she must tell him her new trouble.

"My father is coming here," she said, in a low tone.

"Ah!" he answered quickly. "You won't like that."

"How do you know?"

"From what you said the other night. You don't like him."

"Is it dreadful to you, if I don't like my father?"

She put it anxiously, with timidity, and he answered,--

"It's inevitable. He hasn't treated you well."

She was staring at him through the darkness, though she could see
nothing.

"You are a wizard," she said, "a wizard. Why do you say he has not
treated me well?"

"Because I see how you hate him. You would never hate without reason.
You are all gentleness. You know you are. You'd go on your knees to the
man that was your father, and beg him to be good enough so you could
love him. And if you couldn't--George! that settles him. Why, playmate,
you're not crying!"

She was crying softly to herself. But for a little unconsidered sniff he
need not have known it.

"I like to cry," she said, in a moment. "I like to cry--like this."

"It's awful," said the other voice, apparently to itself, "to make you
cry and not know how to stop you. Don't do it, playmate!"

She laughed then.

"I won't cry," she promised. "But if you knew how pleasant it is when it
only means somebody understands and likes you just as well--"

"Better," said the voice. "I always like you better. Whatever you do,
that's the effect it has. Now let's talk about your father. We can't
stop his coming?"

"No. Nobody ever stopped him yet in anything."

"Then what can we do to him after he gets here?"

"That's what I am trying to think. Sometimes I'm afraid I must run
away--before he comes."

"Yes, playmate, if you think so." There was something sharp in the tone:
a quick hurt, a premonition of pain, and it was soothing to her.

"But I've so little money." She said that to herself, and his answer
shocked her.

"There's money, if that's all. I'll bury it here under a stone, and you
shall find it."

"No! no! no! How could you! oh, how could you!"

The voice was hurt indeed now, and willing to be thought so.

"Why, playmate, is that so dreadful? Money's the least important thing
there is."

"It is important," said she broodingly. "It seems to me all my miseries,
my disgraces have come from that."

"You don't want to tell me about them? You don't think it would make
them better?"

"You said you didn't care. You said what we had lived through--what I
had--these twenty-five years, made no difference!"

"Not to me. But when it comes to you, why, maybe I could help you."

She thought a while and then answered definitely and coldly,--

"No, I can't do it. I should have to tell--too many things."

"Then we won't think of it," said the voice. "Only you must remember,
there's money and there's--Peter to take you off and hide you somewhere.
You can trust Peter." Again he seemed ready to break their
companionship, and she wondered miserably.

"You seem to think of nothing but my going away."

"I must think of it. Nothing is more likely."

"You don't seem to care!"

"Playmate!" Again the voice reproached her.

"Well!"

"There's but one thing I think of--really. To give you a little bit of
happiness while you are here. After that--well, you can make the picture
for yourself. I shall come to the playhouse every night--alone."

The one thing perhaps that had been the strongest in guiding her
romantic youth had been eternal faithfulness. Her heart beat at the word
"forever." Now her gratitude outran his calm.

"Will you do it?" she cried.

"Shall I promise?"

"No! no! I would not have you do it really--only want to do it. Do you
think you will remember--to want to come?"

He said the words after her, so slowly that they seemed to come from
lips set with some stern emotion.

"I shall remember. I shall want to come."

She rose.

"Good-night," she said. "Shake hands?"

"No," said the voice, "not that. In playhouses you can't shake hands.
Good-night--dear lady."

She turned away, and then, because she was silent the voice called after
her,--

"Playmate!"

"Yes."

"I shall follow you to the wall and watch you home. You're not afraid?"

"No, I'm not afraid."

"And you're almost happy?"

At the anxiety in his voice, she was unreasonably happy.

"Yes," she called back. "Good-night."

"Got the key safe?"

"All safe. Good-night."

"God bless you, playmate." That was what she thought she heard.




XII


Madam Fulton was at the library table, considering her morning mail, and
Billy Stark sat on the veranda just outside the window where she could
call to him and be cheerfully answered. Presently Electra came in, a
book, a pencil, and some slips of paper in her hand. There was intense
consideration on her brow. She had on, her grandmother thought with
discouragement, her clubwoman's face. Billy Stark, seeing her, got up
and with his cigar and his newspaper wandered away. He had some
compassion for Electra and her temperament, though not for that could he
abstain from the little observances due his engagement to Madam Fulton.
He had a way of bringing in a flower from the garden and presenting it
to the old lady with an exaggerated significance. Electra always winced,
but Madam Fulton was delighted. He called her "Florrie," prettily, and
"Florrie, dear." Again Electra shrank, and then he took the wrinkled
hand. One day Madam Fulton looked up at him with a droll mischief in her
eyes.

"I suppose it's an awful travesty, isn't it, Billy?"

"Not for me," said Billy loyally. "Can't I be in love with a woman at
the end of fifty years? I should smile."

"It's great fun," she owned. Then more than half in earnest, "Billy, do
you suppose I shall go to hell?"

This morning Electra had found something to puzzle her.

"I've been working on your book a little, grandmother," she began.

"What book? My soul and body!" The old lady saw the cover and laid down
her pen. "That's my 'Recollections.' What are you doing with that?"

"They are extremely interesting," said Electra absorbedly. She sat down
and laid her notes aside, to run over a doubtful page. "We are going to
have an inquiry meeting on it."

"We? Who?"

"The club. Everybody was deeply disappointed because you've refused to
say anything; but it occurred to us we might give an afternoon to
classifying data in it, naming people you just refer to, you know. I am
doing the Brook Farm section."

Madam Fulton sank back in her chair and looked despairingly from the
window for Billy Stark.

"I shall never," she said, "hear the last of that book!"

"Why should you wish to hear the last of it?" asked Electra. "It is a
very valuable book. It would be more so if you would only be frank about
it. But I can understand that. I told the club it was your extreme
delicacy. You simply couldn't mention names."

"No, I couldn't," murmured the old lady. "I couldn't."

"But here is something, grandmother. You must help me out here. Here
where you talk about the crazy philanthropist who had the colonization
scheme--not Liberia--no, that's farther on--Well, you say he came to
grandfather and asked him to give something to the fund." She was
regarding Madam Fulton with clear eyes of interrogation.

"No, no, I don't remember," said the old lady impatiently. "Well, go
on."

"You don't remember?"

"Yes, yes, of course I remember, in a way. But go on, Electra."

"Well, then the philanthropist asked him to be one of the five men who
would guarantee a certain sum at their death, and grandfather was
indignant and said, 'Charity begins at home.' Listen." She found her
page and read, "'I shall assuredly leave every inch of ground and every
cent I possess to my wife, and that, not because she is an advanced
woman but because she is not.'"

"Of course!" corroborated the old lady. "Precisely. There's a slap at
suffrage. That's what I mean it for, and you can tell 'em so."

Electra did not stop to register her pain at that. She held up one hand
to enjoin attention.

"But listen, grandmother. You don't see the bearing of it yet. That was
five years after grandfather made his will, leaving this place away from
you."

"Well, what of it?"

"Five years after, grandmother! And here, by his expressed intention, he
meant to leave it to you--not to his son, but you. Do you see what that
implies?"

"I don't know what it implies," said the old lady, "but I know I shall
fly all to pieces in about two minutes if you don't stop winding me up
and asking me questions."

Electra answered quite solemnly,--

"It means, grandmother, that legally I inherited this place. Ethically
it belongs to you. My grandfather meant to make another will. Here is
his expressed intention. He neglected doing it, as people are always
neglecting things that may be done at any time. It only remains for me
to make it over to you."

Madam Fulton lay back in her chair for a moment and stared. She seemed
incapable of measuring the irony she felt. But Electra went quietly
on,--

"There is simply nothing else for me to do, and I shall do it."

Madam Fulton gasped a little and then gave up speaking. Again she
glanced at the window and wished for Billy Stark. Electra was observing
her compassionately.

"It excites you, doesn't it?" she was saying. "I don't wonder."

Now the old lady found her tongue, but only to murmur,--

"I can't even laugh. It's too funny; it's too awfully funny."

"Let me get you a little wine." Electra had put her papers together and
now she rose.

Then Madam Fulton found her strength.

"Sit down, Electra," she said. "Why, child, you don't realize--I don't
know what you'd do if you did--you don't realize I put that in there by
the merest impulse."

"Of course," said Electra kindly. "I understand that. You never dreamed
of its having any bearing on things as they are now, they have gone on
in this way so long. But it would be shocking to me, shocking, to seem
to own this house when it is yours--ethically."

"Don't say ethically. I can't stand it. There, Electra! you're a good
girl. I know that. But you're conscience gone mad. You've read George
Eliot till you're not comfortable unless you're renouncing something.
Take things a little more lightly. You can if you give your mind to it.
Now this--this is nothing but a joke. You have my word for it."

"It isn't a joke," said Electra firmly, "when grandfather could write
that over his own signature and send it to a well-known person. How did
it come back into your hands, grandmother?"

But Madam Fulton looked at her, wondering what asylum Electra would put
her in, if she knew the truth. She essayed a miserable gayety.

"Very well, Electra," she smiled, "call it so, if you like, but we won't
say any more about it. I can't have houses made over to me. I may totter
into the grave to-morrow."

Electra's eyes went involuntarily to the garden where Billy Stark was
placidly walking up and down, smoking his cigar and stopping now and
then to inspect a flower. The old lady interpreted the look.

"I know, I know," she said wickedly; "but that's nothing to do with it.
Besides, if I marry Billy Stark, I shall go to London to live. What do I
want of houses? Let things be as they are, Electra. You keep the house
in your hands and let me visit you, just as I do now. It's all one."

Electra spoke with an unmoved firmness. Her face had the clarity of a
great and fixed resolve.

"The house is yours; not legally, I own, but--"

"Don't you say ethically again, Electra," said the old lady. "I told you
I couldn't bear it."

She sank b

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