"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.