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.