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?"