On the way back to the house, Peter kept looking solicitously at Rose,
breaking now and then into quick regrets.
"What have I done?" he asked her, in his impetuous stammer. "Shouldn't I
have written to your father? Rose, what have I done?"
She seemed not to hear him. Her face had a strained expression, the old
look he remembered from the days of Tom's illness and her not quite
natural grief. Then she had never given way to the irrepressible warmth
of sorrow, like a loving wife. She had seemed to harden herself, and
that he accounted for by his knowledge of Tom's hideous past. The woman
had known him, Peter reflected, from illuminating intercourse, and his
death meant chiefly the turning of a blotted page. But now! over her
bloom of youth was the same shadowing veil. She was not so much a woman
moved by strong emotion as made desperate through hidden causes. Still
he besought her to forgive him, finally to look at him. Then she
wakened.
"It's all right, Peter," she said absently. "It had to be."
But still he saw no reason for her blight and pain. It was not merely
incredible, it was impossible that any one should shrink because Markham
MacLeod was coming. At the door she did look at him. He was shocked at
the drooping sadness of her face. Yet she was smiling.
"Don't bother, Peter," she said. "You've done nothing wrong, nothing
whatever."
Then she went up the stairs, and Peter, after watching the last glimmer
of her dress, strode away into the orchard and threw himself on the
grass. Thoughts not formulated, emotions one yeast of unrest went
surging through him, until he felt himself a riot of forces he could not
control. It was youth that moved him, his own ungoverned youth, but it
seemed to him life, and that all life was like it. Peter thought he had
experienced enormously because he had lived in Paris and painted
pictures. Yet he had never governed his course of being. It had been
done for him. The greatest impression it had made on him thus far was of
the extreme richness of things. There was so much of everything! He was
young. There was a great deal of time, and if he did not paint his
pictures this year, he could do it next. There were infinite
possibilities. He had ease and talent and power. He had, even so far,
won laurels enough to be a little careless of them. Since he had by the
happy pains of art got so much out of life, he made no doubt that by
superlative efforts, which he meant to make in that divine future where
the sun was always shining, he should set all the rivers afire. There
was money enough, too. He had never lacked it, thanks to old Osmond's
thrift, Osmond who did not need it himself in the ordinary ways of man.
He found such pure fun in the pleasures money bought that there was a
separate luxury in giving it up, turning it in to the sum of things, and
living straitly that labor might take some ease.
And here he lay on the grass, youth seething within him and pointing
like a drunken guide, a vine-crowned reveler, to a myriad paths, all
wonderful. His mind wandered to Rose and settled there in a delighted
acquiescence. He had never before given himself wholly up to her spell,
but now, whether the summer day beguiled him, or whether her mysterious
trouble moved him, he thought of her until they seemed to be alone
together on the earth,--and that was happiness. Beauty! that was what
she meant to him, he told himself when thought was at last uppermost,
and not mere passionate feeling. She was delight and harmony, and
allegiance to her was like worship of the world.
When he got out of his dream and went in to dinner with the noon sun
upon his burning face, she was on the veranda with grannie, a little
pale still, but sweet and responsive in the quiet ways she had for every
day. Peter, looking at her, felt the sun go out of his blood, and the
mad worship of that hour in the orchard seemed like a past bacchanal
rout and triumph when the worshipers go home to feed the flocks. His
will, recalled, took him by swift revulsion to Electra, but it could not
make the journey welcome. She seemed to be far away on some barren plain
at the top of climbing. Rose, too, was far away, but the mountain where
she lived was full of springs and blossomy slopes, and at the top the
muses and the graces danced and laughed. There were flying feet always,
the gleam of draperies, the fall of melody,--always pleasures and the
hint of pleasures higher still,--and echoes from old joys tasted by gods
and nymphs in the childhood of the world. The way there, too, was hard,
but what would the path matter to such blisses of the mind and soul? In
his daze he became aware that grannie was looking at him kindly.
"I guess you've been asleep," said she.
"He's been dreaming, too," said Rose, in her intimate kindliness, always
the same to him as if he were a boy with whom she had a tender and
confident relation.
Peter rubbed his eyes.
"I got lost," he said ruefully. "I went up on the mountain and got
lost."
"I guess you dreamed it," said grannie. "Come, let's have our dinner;"
and they went in together, both the young things helping her.
Peter reflected that Rose had not even heard what he said. She did not
care what the mountain was, or whether he was lost. But at the table,
while grannie talked about gardening and the things Osmond meant to do
another year, and Rose glanced up with involuntary question in her eyes
whenever Osmond's name was mentioned, he seemed to have the vision of
the mountain again before him and to hear the laughter and the sound of
dancing feet. The picture, little by little, faded and would not be
recalled, and by afternoon it had quite gone. Sobered, his feet on the
earth again, he went away in the early evening, to see Electra.
Rose waited until the dark had really fallen and evening sounds had
begun. Then she stole out of the house and, a black cloak about her,
this time, went across the fields to the oak tree. At a little distance
from it she paused, her heart too imperious to let her speak and find
out whether he was there. But when she was about to venture it, a voice
came from under the tree.
"Don't stay there, playmate. Come into the house."
Then she went on.
"Where are you?" she asked. There was an eloquent quiver in her voice.
"Never mind. I'm in the house. Stop where you are. There's a little
throne. I made it for you."
She had her hand on the back of a rough chair. At once she seated
herself.
"I never heard of a throne in a playhouse," she said, with that new
merriment he made for her.
"You never saw a playhouse just like this. That's a beautiful throne. It
fits together like a chair. It's here in the playhouse by night, but
before daylight I draw it up into the tree and hide it."
"What if somebody finds it?"
"They'll think it's a chair."
"What if they break it?"
"That's easy. We'll make another. There's nothing so easy as to make a
throne for a playhouse, if you know the way. Well, playmate, how have
you been, all this long time?"
When she came across the field she had meant to tell him how sad she
was, how perplexed, how incapable of meeting the ills confronting her.
But immediately it became unnecessary, and she only laughed and said,--
"It hasn't been a long time at all."
"Hasn't it? Oh, I thought it had!"
"Have you been here every night?"
"Every night."
"But it rained."
"I know it, outside. It doesn't rain in a playhouse."
"Did you truly come?"
"Of course. What did I tell you? I said 'every night.'"
"Did you have an umbrella?"
"An umbrella in a playhouse? You make me laugh."
"You must have got wet through."
"Not always. Sometimes I climbed up in the branches--in the roof, I
mean. You're eclipsed to-night, aren't you?"
"What do you mean?"
"That dark cloak. The other night you were a white goddess sitting there
in the moonlight. You were terribly beautiful then. It's almost a shame
to be so beautiful. This is better. I rather like the cloak. You're
nothing but a voice to-night, coming out of the dark."
Immediately she had a curious jealousy of the white dress that made her
beautiful to him when he did not really know her face.
"You have never seen me," she said involuntarily.
"Oh yes, I have. In the shack, that night. Then the day you came. I saw
you driving by."
"Where were you?"
"In the yard looking at some grafted trees. Peter was late from the
train. I got impatient, so I went round fussing over the trees, to keep
myself busy. Then you came up the drive, and I saw you and retreated in
good order."
"You needn't have hated me so. You hadn't really seen me."
"I saw enough. I saw your cheek and one ear and the color of your hair.
Take care, playmate, you mustn't do that."
"What?"
"You mustn't say I hated you. You know it wasn't hate."
Some daring prompted her to ask, "What was it, then?" but she folded her
hands and crossed her feet in great contentment and was still.
"Tell me things," she heard him saying.
"What things? About the house up there? About grannie? About Peter?"
"No, no. I know all about grannie and Peter. Tell me things I never
could know unless we were here in the playhouse, in the dark."
Her mind went off, at that, to the wonder of it. She was here in strange
circumstances, and of all the occurrences of her life, it seemed the
most natural. Immediately she had the warmest curiosity, the desire that
he should talk inordinately and tell her all the things he had done
to-day, yesterday, all the days.
"You tell," she said. "Begin at the beginning, and tell me about your
life."
"Why, playmate!" His voice had even a sorrowful reproach. "There's
nothing in it. Nothing at all. I have only dug in the ground and made
things grow."
"What people have you known?"
"Grannie."
"She isn't people."
"She's my people. She's all there is, except Peter, and he hasn't been
here."
Something like jealousy possessed her. She was stung by her own
ignorance.
"But there are lots of years when we didn't meet," she said.
"Lots of them. But I don't care anything about them. I told you so the
other night."
"Don't you care about mine?"
"Not a bit."
She was lightheaded with the joy of it. There were things she need not
tell him.
"Not the years before we met?" Then because she was a woman, she had to
spoil the cup. "Nor the years after I go away?"
"No, not the years when you've gone away. You can't take this night with
you, nor the other night."
He had hurt her.
"That's enough, then--a memory."
Osmond laughed a little. It was a tender sound, as if he might scold
her, but not meaning it.
"You mustn't be naughty," he said. "There's nothing naughtier in a
playhouse than saying what isn't true. You know if you go away you'll
come back again. You can't help it. It may be a long time first. You
were twenty-five years in coming this time. But you'll have to come. You
know that, don't you?"
"Yes," she said gravely, "I know that." Then the memory of her wandering
life and the sore straits of it voiced itself in one cry, "I don't want
to go. I want to stay."
"Stay, dear playmate," said the other voice. "There never will be a
night when I'm not here. Is the playhouse key in your hand, all tight
and warm? I wear mine round my neck. We shan't lose them."
Immediately she felt that she must tell him her new trouble.
"My father is coming here," she said, in a low tone.
"Ah!" he answered quickly. "You won't like that."
"How do you know?"
"From what you said the other night. You don't like him."
"Is it dreadful to you, if I don't like my father?"