Markham Macleod's great advantage, after that of his wonderful physique,
was his humility. A carping humorist, who saw him dispassionately, the
more so that women were devoted to "the chief," said that humility was
his long suit. There was his splendid body, instinct with a magnetic
charm. He was born, charlatans told him, to be a healer. But he
deprecated his own gifts. With a robust humor he disclaimed whatever he
had done, and listened to other voices, in specious courtesy. Now, face
to face with Electra, he had convinced her in five seconds that it was
an illuminating thing to come to America and find her there. This was
more than the pliancy of the man of the world. It seemed to her the
spontaneous tribute of a sincere and lofty mind. As for her, she was
abounding in a tremulous satisfaction.
"You have not been in America for a long time," she was saying.
"Not for years. I have been too busy to come."
"You are needed over there."
She glowed the more, and he looked upon her kindly as a handsome young
woman whose enthusiasm became her.
He smiled and shook his head.
"I don't know whether they wanted me so much. I needed them."
"Your brothers, you mean. The units that make your brotherhood."
She was quoting from his last reported speech, and her spirits rose as
she felt how glad she was to have been ready. It seemed to her that
there were so many things she had to say at once that they would come
tumultuously. MacLeod, when his position was assured, was quite willing
to let the disciple talk. It was only over ground not yet tilled that
his eloquence fell like rain. And Electra, leaning toward him in a
brilliant, even a timid expectation, was saying,--
"Tell me about Russia. What do you foresee?"
A reporter had asked him the same question a few hours before, and the
answer would be in the evening paper. He smiled at her, and spread out
his hands in a disclaiming gesture.
"You know what I foresee. You know what you foresee yourself. It is the
same thing."
"Yes," said Electra, "it is the same thing."
But there were times when MacLeod wanted to escape from posturing, even
though it brought him adulation.
"I haven't apologized for breaking in on you like this," he said, with
his engaging smile. "They told me at Grant's that I should probably find
him over here, in the garden. The next house they said. This is the next
house?"
"Oh, yes," returned Electra. "He has not been here, but I will send for
him. He shall come to luncheon. You must stay."
"Shall I?" He was all good-nature, all readiness and adaptability.
Electra excused herself to give the maid an order, and while she stood
in the hall, talking to the woman, temptation came upon her. Yet it was
not temptation, she told herself. This was the obvious thing to do.
"Tell Mr. Grant I wish him particularly to come to luncheon," she said,
"and to bring"--she hesitated at the name and shirked it, "and to bring
the young lady,--the lady who is staying there."
Then she returned to MacLeod. But she was not altogether at ease.
Electra was accustomed to examine her motives, and she had the
disquieting certainty that, this time, though they would do for the
literal eye, they had not been entirely pure. Still, was it her fault if
Rose, confronted by the newcomer, proved unprepared and showed what was
fragile in her testimony? But she was not to be thrown off the scent of
public affairs.
"Talk about Russia," she entreated. She had never felt so spontaneously
at ease with any one.
MacLeod was used to making that impression, and he smiled on her the
more kindly, seeing how the old charm worked.
"I'd rather talk about America," he said, "about this place of yours.
It's a bully place."
Electra was devoted to academic language, and to her certainty that all
great souls expressed themselves in it. She winced a little but
recovered herself when he asked with a new conversational seriousness,
"and how is my friend Grant?"
"Well." She found some difficulty in answering more fully, because it
somehow became apparent to her that he had not really placed her. Peter
was his only clue in the town. It hardly looked as if he expected to
find a daughter here.
"Is he painting?" MacLeod went on.
Electra frowned a little. Peter was doing nothing but idling, she
suspected, up to yesterday, and then, driving past, she had caught a
glimpse of him in the garden before a canvas and of Rose lying before
him in her long chair. That had given her a keener, a more bitter
curiosity than she was prepared for in herself. She had shrunk back a
little from it, timid before the suspicion that she might like Peter
more tempestuously and unreasonably than was consonant with
self-mastery. But while these thoughts ran through her head she gazed at
MacLeod with her clear eyes and answered,--
"I fancy he looks upon this as his vacation. He must have worked very
hard in Paris."
MacLeod entered into that with fluency. Peter must have worked hard, he
owned, but that was in the days before they met. When they met, Peter's
talent was at its blossoming point. It was more than talent. It was
genius, it was so free, so strong, so unconsidered. He implied that
Peter had everything that belonged to a fortunate youth.
Electra's eyes glowed. Here was some one to justify her choice. The
newspapers had done it, but she had not yet heard Peter's praises from
the mouth of man.
"You have had an enormous influence over him," she ventured.
He deprecated that.
"He has an enormous affection for me, if you like," he owned, "but
influence! My dear young lady, I couldn't influence a nature like that.
I'm nowhere beside it. All I could hope for is that it would think some
of the things I think, feel some of the things I feel. Then we could get
on together."
Billy Stark, coming in at the door, thought that sounded like poppycock,
but Electra knew it was the wisdom of the chosen. She rose and indicated
Billy.
"You know Mr. Stark?"
The two men recurred humorously to their meeting in the garden, and
owned their willingness to continue the acquaintance. At the moment
there were steps and MacLeod turned to see Rose coming into the room.
Electra's heart beat thickly. She felt choked by it. And there was, she
could not help owning, a distinct drop of disappointment when MacLeod,
with an exclamation of delighted wonder, went forward and kissed Rose on
the cheek. Then he kept her hand while he gave the other one to Peter,
and regarded them both with expansive kindliness. Rose was the one who
had blenched under the ordeal. Yet she had herself immediately in hand.
She let her fingers stay in MacLeod's grasp. She looked at him, not
affectionately nor in pride, but with a sad steadfastness, as if he were
one of the monumental difficulties of life, not to be ignored. Peter was
ecstasy itself.
"How did you get here?" he was insisting. "How did you know I might be
over here? You hadn't met Electra."
Then the stranger dropped the hands he held and turned to her.
"I haven't met her yet," he said, with a humorous consideration that
stirred her heart. "Is this Electra?" He put out his hand, and she laid
hers in the waiting palm. She felt bound to something by the magnetic
grasp. The certainty was not weakened by any knowledge that other men
and women felt the same.
Madam Fulton came in then. She had removed the traces of past emotion,
but with the red still burning in her cheeks she looked very pretty.
MacLeod greeted her with an extreme deference, which presently slipped
into the ordinary courtesy of man to woman as he found she had no desire
to exact any special consideration. They went out to luncheon with that
air of accelerated life which contributes to the success of an occasion,
and then MacLeod talked. Rose sat silent, looking on with a sad
indifference, as at a scene she had witnessed many times before, to no
good end, and Madam Fulton listened rather satirically. But Electra and
Peter glowed and could hardly eat, and MacLeod addressed himself chiefly
to them. Now he did exactly what was expected of him. The brotherhood of
man was his theme, and it was no mere effusion of sympathetic
propaganda. His memory was his immense storehouse behind emotion, his
armory. He could mobilize facts and statistics until the ordinary mind
owned itself cowed by them. When they rose from the table, the
millennium was imminent, and it had been brought by the sword. At the
library door, Peter, beside Electra for an instant, irrepressibly seized
her hand, as it hung by her side, and gave it passionate pressure.
Instantly she looked at him, responsive. The sympathy they lacked in
their personal relation sprang to life under MacLeod's trumpeting.
Electra was in a glow, and Peter, with a surprised delight, felt all his
old allegiance to his imperial lady.
MacLeod would not sit down.
"I must catch my train," he said.
There was outcry at once from two quarters. He was not to return to the
city. He was to stay here, Peter declared. It was absurd, it was
unthinkable that he should do anything else. MacLeod took it with a
friendly smile and the air of deprecating such undeserved cordiality;
but he looked at Electra, who was frankly beseeching him from brilliant
eyes. It was settled finally that he should go back to his hotel for a
day or two, see some newspaper men and meet a few public engagements,
and then return for a little stay.
"Get your hat," he said to Rose, in affectionate suggestion, "and walk
with me to the station."
And as it became apparent that father and daughter had had no time for
intimate talk, they were allowed to go away together, Peter following
them with impetuous stammering adjurations to MacLeod to rattle through
his business and come back. When they were out upon the highroad,
MacLeod turned to Rose.
"Well," he said, "you don't look very fit."
Rose had one of her frequent impulses to tell him the crude truth: to
say now, "I did until you came." But she answered indifferently,--
"I'm very well."
They walked along in silence for a moment, and she felt the return of
old aches, old miseries he always summoned for her. In the first moment
of seeing him, she always recurred to the other days when to be with him
was to be in heaven. Nobody ever had so blest a time as she in the
simple charm of his good-will. No matter what she was doing, for him to
call her, to hold out a finger, had been enough. She would forsake the
world and run, and she never remembered the world again until he loosed
the spell. It was broken now, she thought, effectively, but still at
these first moments her heart yearned back to the old playgrounds, the
old lure.
"What did she call you," he was asking--"Madam Fulton? Mrs. Tom?"
"Yes," said Rose, with a quiet bitterness, "Mrs. Tom."
"Have they accepted you?"
She raised her eyebrows and looked at him.
"You heard," she answered.
"Extraordinary people! Who is Electra? I couldn't call her anything.
Everybody was saying Electra."
"She is Madam Fulton's granddaughter. She and Peter are engaged."
"Ah! I'd forgotten that. I rather fancied it was you--with Peter."
She summoned the resolution to meet him bluntly.
"Don't do that, please. Don't assume anything of the sort about me."
He went on with unbroken good humor. She had never seen him angry, but
the possibility of it, some hidden force suspected in him, quelled her,
of late, when she considered the likelihood of rousing it.
"No, of course not," he said, with his habitual geniality. "Why aren't
you staying with them?"
She temporized, only from the general certainty that it was unsafe for
him to know too much.
"Peter asked me to stay there. His grandmother is very kind. I like
her."
"Ah! Have these people money?"
"What people?"
"Electra. Tom's family in general."
"I don't know."
"They must have. They have the air. Will they do anything for you?"
Her face contracted. The look of youth had fled and left her haggard.
"I have not accepted anything."
"Have they offered it?"
"No."
"There! you see! No doubt they will."
"Why did you come over here?" she cried irrepressibly.
But he ignored the question.
"The prince is much disturbed about you," he volunteered, throwing it
into the talk as if it were of no particular validity, but only
interesting as one chose to take it.
"Ah! that's why you came!"
"I saw him two weeks ago, in Milan. He was greatly troubled. I had to
own that you had left Paris without seeing me, without even telling me
your whereabouts."
"Then--" said Rose.
She knew what else had happened. The prince had urged, "Go over to
America. Influence her. Bring her back with you." But this she did not
say. The unbroken cordiality of his attitude always made his best
defense. If she had ever known harshness from him, she might brave it
again. But many forces between them were as yet unmeasured. She did not
dare.
"You must remember," he said, with the air of talking over reasonably
something to which he was not even persuading her, "the prince is
exceptionally placed. He could give you a certain position."
"I have a certain position now. Don't forget that, will you?" She seemed
to speak from an extremity of distaste.
"He offers a private marriage. He is not likely to set it aside; the
elder line is quite assured, so far as anything can be in this world.
Besides"--he looked at her winningly--"you believe in love. He loves
you."
"I did believe in it," she said haltingly, as if the words were
difficult. "I should find it hard now to tell what I believe."
"Well!" He took off his hat to invite the summer breeze. It stirred the
hair above his noble forehead, and Rose, in a sickness at old affection
dead, knew, without glancing at him, how he looked, and marveled that
any one so admirably made could seem to her so persistently ranged with
evil forces. Yet, she reflected, it was only because he arrogated power
to himself. He put his hands upon the wheels of life and jarred them.
"Well! I believe in it. Isn't that enough for you?"
"Not now, not now!" She had to answer, though it might provoke stern
issues. "Once it would have been. There is nothing you could have told
me that I would not have believed. But you delivered me over to the
snare of the fowler." Grandmother had read those words in her morning
chapter, and they had stayed in her ears as meaning precisely this
thing. He had known that it was a snare, and he had cast her into it.
She turned her moved face upon him. "We mustn't talk about these things.
Nobody knows where it will end. And you mustn't talk to me about the
prince."
"If it doesn't mean anything to you, wouldn't it move you if I told you
it meant something to me?"
"What?"
"It would mean a great deal if you formed an alliance there."
She answered bitterly.
"You are humorous. Alliance! An alliance is for princes. There are other
words for these things you propose. I try not to think what they are. I
dare say I don't know all of them. But there are words."
"It would make me solid with the prince. He would get several
concessions from his brother. They would be slight, but they would mean
a great deal to the Brotherhood."
"I see. You would pull a wire or two in Germany. In Russia, too,
perhaps? You think you would disarm suspicion, if the prince stood by
you. Maybe you'd get into Russia, even. Is that it? It would be dramatic
to get into Russia after you'd been warned."
She was following his mind along, as she often did, creeping with
doubtful steps where he had taken wing. "But still!" She looked at him,
smiling rather wistfully. "Still, you wouldn't throw me to the wolves
for that, would you?"
He met her look with one as candid, and little as she believed in the
accompanying smile, she felt her heart warmed by it. Now he was gazing
about him at the summer prospect.
"I am delighted to find you here," he volunteered. "It's a change. It
will do you good--do us both good."
"Are you quite well?" She hesitated slightly in asking that, but he
turned upon her as if the words had given him a shock of terror or
dismay. In her surprise she even fancied he paled a little.
"What makes you ask that?" he cried. "What do you mean by it?"
"Why, I don't know! You look well, but not quite yourself,
perhaps,--somehow different."
MacLeod took off his hat and wiped his forehead beaded with a moisture
come on it, he knew, at that moment.
"I should like to ask," he said peevishly, "what in the devil you mean.
Have you--heard anything?"
"No," said Rose, entirely amazed. "What is there to hear?"
They had reached the station, and she led him to the bench under a tree
where lovers and their lasses assembled at dusk to see the train come
in. She sat down, dispirited and still wondering, and he stood before
her, all strength, now, and candor, as if he had thrown off his dubious
mood and resolved to be himself.
"About the prince," he was saying. "I want you to think of him. He would
give you experiences such as I never could. You'd live on velvet. You'd
have art, music, a thousand things. He likes your voice. He'd insist on
fostering that. You would meet men of rank, men of note--"
She interrupted him.
"Men of rank! I've no doubt of it. How about their wives?"
He shook his head. A look of what seemed noble pain was on his face,
impatience at the shallowness of things.
"Rose," he said, "you know how little I respect society as it is. Take
out of it what good you can, the play of emotion, the charm, the
inspiration. Don't undervalue the structure, my dear. Live, in spite of
it."
She looked at him wearily and thought how handsome he was, and that
these were platitudes. Then his train came, and he left her with a
benedictory grace, standing on the step hat in hand, majestic in his
courtesy. But as she watched him, suddenly, an instant before the train
was starting she saw him yield and sway. He leaned upon the rail with
both hands and then, as if by a quick decision, stepped to the platform
again. She hurried to him, and found him with an unfamiliar look on his
face. It might have been dread anticipation; it was surely pain.
"What is it?" she asked him. "Tell me."
He did not answer, but involuntarily he stretched out his hand to her.
"Rub it," he said. "Hold it tight. Infernal! oh, infernal!"
As she rubbed the hand he suddenly recovered his old manner. The color
came back to his face, and he breathed in a deep relief.
"That's over," he said, almost recklessly, she thought. "Queer how quick
it goes!"
"What is it?" She was trembling. It seemed to her that they had each
passed through some mysterious crisis.
"Is there another train to town?" he was asking an official, who had
kept a curious eye on him. There would be in three minutes, an
accommodation crawling after the express he had lost.
"Good-by again," he called to Rose, with a weaker transcript of his
usual manner. "I'm to be down in a few days, you know. Good-by."
This time he walked into the car, and she saw him take his seat and lie
back against the window-casing. But he recovered himself and smiled,
when his eyes met hers. If anything was the matter, she was evidently
not to know.