"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?"