"What makes you hate her so?"
Tears came slowly into Electra's eyes. They surprised her as much as
they did him. She was not used to crying, and she held them from
falling, with a proud restraint. Electra felt very lonely at that moment
in a world which would not understand. She was upholding truth and
justice, and she was accused of mean personal motives. She had proposed
a picturesque sacrifice for the sake of abstract right, and she could
not be unconscious that the act ought to look rather beautiful. Yet
Peter saw no beauty in it, and grandmother had called her a fool. Peter,
seeing the tears, was enormously embarrassed by them. He could only kiss
her hand in great humility. He, on his part, put justice cheerfully
aside.
"How could I?" he murmured, with the contrition of the male who has
learned that tears are to be stanched without delay. "How could I?" But
Electra, on her feet, had drawn her hand away from him. She felt only
haste, haste to conclude her abnegation, perhaps even to forestall any
question of the house by getting the matter out of her hands before
MacLeod came back and she had to reckon with his testimony.
"I am not crying," she said proudly. "I must go and talk to grandmother.
Promise me this. Don't tell her"--she hesitated.
"Rose?"
"Don't tell her I have spoken of this."
She had gone, and Peter helplessly watched her walking up the path. Then
he took his own way home. "My stars!" he muttered from time to time. His
chief desire at the moment was to escape from anything so strenuous as
Electra's moral life. It made a general and warm-hearted obliquity the
only possible condition of conduct in a pretty world. Peter looked round
at it admiringly then, as the shadow of Electra's earnestness withdrew
into the distance. It was such a darling world, there were such dear
shadows and beguiling lights and all things adorable to paint. He cast
off the mood that teased him, and walking faster, began to whistle. It
seemed to him that there were so many agreeable deeds to do, and so much
time to do them in, that he must simply bestir himself to use half the
richness of things. But when he got into the garden, the honeysuckle
smelled so sweet that he sat down at its foot and breathed it until he
went to sleep.
Electra walked into the library, where Madam Fulton sat at her tatting
and Billy Stark read aloud to her from an idle book. Electra felt that
she could not possibly delay. All her affairs must be settled at once
and the ends knit up.
"I beg your pardon," she said. "Grandmother, may I speak to you a
moment?"
Madam Fulton laid down her work.
"Is it the same old story?" she inquired.
"Yes, grandmother. I don't feel that I can wait."
"Electra," said the old lady kindly, "I can't listen to you. It's all
fudge and nonsense. If we talk about it any more, we shall be insane
together. Don't go, Billy."
"I should like to put it before Mr. Stark," said Electra, with her clear
gaze upon him, as if she summoned him to some exalted testimony.
Billy stirred uneasily in his chair. He had confided to Florrie the
night before that Electra's hypothetical cases made him as nervous as
the devil. Madam Fulton cast him a comical look. It had begun to occur
to her that a ball, once rolling, is difficult to stop.
"Go ahead, then," she agreed. "I wash my hands of it. Billy, keep a
tight grip on yourself. You'll die a-laughing."
Then Electra stated her case; but Billy did not laugh. Like Peter, he
looked at her frowningly, and owned he did not understand. Electra
stated it again, and this time he repeated the proposition after her.
Madam Fulton sat in a composed aloofness and made no comment.
"But, my dear young lady," said Billy Stark, "you quite misunderstand.
An extract from a letter has no legal value compared with a document
signed and sealed in proper form."
"I know," said Electra, "not legal, but--" She was aware that Madam
Fulton's eye was upon her and she dared not finish. "It was at least my
grandfather's expressed wish," she concluded firmly. "I shall carry it
out."
"But--" Billy sought about for a simile, "my dear child,"--Electra, in
the weakness of her lofty reasoning, seemed to him pathetically to be
protected,--"don't you see you're putting yourself through all kinds of
discomfort for nothing, simply nothing? You've gone and got a big
sword--you call it justice--to cut a thread. Why, it's not even that.
There's nothing, absolutely nothing there. It's very admirable of
you"--Electra's waiting attitude quickened at this--"but it's
fantastic."
She spoke decisively.
"It is the thing to do."
Now Madam Fulton entered the field. She looked from one to the other, at
Electra with commiseration, at Billy in a community of regret over that
young intellect so dethroned.
"Now you see what I told you," she warned them. "Here we are, all crazy
together. We've let you say it, and we've addled our own brains
listening to it for a minute. I'll tell you what, Electra!" She had
discovered. "If you're so anxious to get rid of the place, I'll tell you
what I'll do. I'll buy it."
"Buy it, grandmother? what belongs to you already?"
"Don't say that again. It gives me a ringing in my ears. That's what
I'll do. You're going to marry Peter Grant and go abroad. I'll take the
place off your hands. I've always wanted it. I've made a shocking sum
out of my book, shocking. I can well afford it. There's an offer for
you!"
Electra shook her head.
"I couldn't," she said gently. "How could I sell you what is yours
already? The letter--"
"The letter!" repeated the old lady, as if it were an imprecation. She
looked at Billy. He returned the glance with a despairing immobility.
She reflected that the case must be worse even than she had thought,
since Billy had not smiled. Electra must be madder than she had
imagined, and her own culpability was the greater for weaving such a
coil. "Shall I tell her, Billy?" she asked faintly.
He nodded.
"I should," he said commiseratingly, and got up to leave the room. It
seemed to Billy this summer that he was constantly trying to escape
situations with a delicacy which was more than half cowardice, only to
be dragged back into the arena. The mandate he had expected promptly
came.
"Don't go, Billy," cried the old lady. "Sit down." Madam Fulton
continued, in a hesitating humility Electra had never seen in her,
"Electra, I don't believe you'll quite understand when I tell you
there's something queer about the letter. You see there never was any
letter. I--made it up."
The boot was on the other foot. All the values of the scene had shifted.
Now it was Electra who doubted the general sanity. Electra was smiling
at her.
"No, grandmother," she was saying, with a pretty air of chiding, "you
mustn't talk that way. You think that convinces me. It's very dear of
you, very dear and generous. But I know why you do it."
"Bless my sinful soul!" ejaculated the old lady. "Oh--you tell her,
Billy."
Billy shook his head. He was not going to be dragged as far as that. He
was sorry for her, but she had had her whistle and she must pay for it.
The old lady was beginning again in a weak voice,--
"You see, Electra, that book isn't what you think. It isn't what anybody
thinks. I--I made it up."
Electra was about to speak, but her grandmother forestalled her.
"Don't you go and offer me wine. You get it into your head once and for
all that I'm telling you a fact and that you've got to believe it. I
made up my book of recollections. They're not true, not one of them. As
I remember, there isn't one. The letters I wrote myself."
Electra was staring at her in a neutrality which was not even wonder.
Finally she spoke; her awed voice trembled.
"The Brook Farm letters!"
Perhaps it was this reverent hesitation which restored Madam Fulton to
something of her wonted state.
"For heaven's sake, Electra," she fulminated, "what is there so sacred
about Brook Farm? If anybody is going to make up letters from anywhere,
why shouldn't it be from there?"
Electra was looking at Billy Stark as if she bade him save her from
these shocks or tell her the whole world was rocking. But Billy twirled
his eyeglass, and watched it twirling. Finally he had to meet her eye.
"Yes," he said, with a composure he did not feel, "the book is
apparently not quite straight--a kind of joke, in fact."
Electra rose. She looked very thoughtful and also, Madam Fulton thought,
with a quaking at her guilty heart, rather terrible. She was pinched at
the nostrils and white about the lips.
"What I must do first," she was saying, as if to herself, "is to notify
the club we cannot possibly have our inquiry afternoon."
"Notify them!" repeated Madam Fulton, in a spasm of fearful admiration.
"Are you going to tell all those women?"
Electra included her in that absent glance. Now that there were things
to arrange, dates to cancel, topics to consider, she was on her own
ground. She spoke with dignity:--
"I shall most certainly tell nobody. A thing like that had better die as
soon as possible. I cannot"--she turned upon her grandmother, a look of
passionate interrogation on her face--"I cannot understand you."
Madam Fulton answered humbly, yet with some eagerness, as if Electra
might readily be excused from so stiff a task,
"You never would, Electra, not if you lived a hundred years."
Electra was the accuser now, age and kinship quite forgotten.
"Why did you do a thing like that?"
"For fun," said the old lady faintly.
"For fun!" The tree of sin grew and flowered as she thought upon it.
"You offered to buy this house with that money, unclean money from the
sales of that fraudulent book!"
Madam Fulton turned to Billy Stark with a childlike gesture of real
surprise.
"Is it unclean money, Billy?" she asked. "Do you call it that?"
"We mustn't go too far," Billy temporized, with a warning look at
Electra.
She was on the way to the door. There she paused.
"I do not fully understand it yet," she was saying. "It is monstrous. I
dare say I never shall understand it." Then they heard her rustling up
the stairs.
Madam Fulton and her old friend looked at each other. When a door closed
overhead, Billy's face relaxed and Madam Fulton put a hand over her
lips.
"Billy," said she weakly, "am I so bad?"
"You're a dear, Florrie. Don't you worry."
"But, Billy, is she right?"
"Oh, yes, my dear, she's right."
"I'm a shocking person, then!"
"Yes, you're truly shocking. But you're a dear, Florrie, you're a dear."