"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.