After supper, which had been, grannie thought, a brilliant occasion,
MacLeod took his hat and said to Peter, with an air of proposing the
simplest possible thing,--
"I am going over to pay my respects to your neighbor."
Peter stared frankly.
"She was so kind as to invite me to luncheon, you know," MacLeod
explained from the doorway. "I want to call at once."
"I'll go with you," said Peter.
"No, no! It's a first occasion. She'll want to catechise me, and you've
heard all the answers. I rather depend on her putting straight
questions."
It was not the custom to wonder at MacLeod. Whatever he did bore the
stamp of privilege. He was "the chief." So he walked away through the
summer dusk, and Peter and Rose, on the veranda, talked Paris while
grannie listened, in a pleasant daze, not always sure, through age's
necromancy, whether all the movement and action of their tone and
subject belonged to the reality they knew, or to her own dream of a land
she never saw.
Electra, the lights turned low, was sitting at the piano, nursing her
discontent. She could hear the murmur of Madam Fulton's voice from the
next room, broken by pauses when the old lady waited for Billy Stark to
laugh. It all made Electra feel very much alone. Perhaps she had gone to
the piano in a tacit emulation of the mastery Rose had shown, to see if,
by a happy miracle, she also could bring to birth some of those magical
things she never knew she felt until she heard others expressing them.
But when she struck a chord, it was no richer and no more responsive
than she remembered it in her old practicing days. Then she tried
singing a little:--
"'Drink to me only with thine eyes.'"
And all the time she was recalling the liquid flow of another voice, its
restrained fervor and dying falls. A thing so beautiful as this song, so
simple, had its root, she began dimly to feel, not in happy love but in
despair, and as it often happened with her, she seemed to be timidly
reaching out chilled fingers toward emotions she feared because they
were so unrestrained, and yet which had to be reckoned with because the
famous people made them of such account; they were like the earth where
all creative power has life.
Electra had given carefully apportioned time to music. She knew
something of harmony, in a painstaking way; but at this moment she felt
more than ever outside the house of song. She was always having these
experiences, always finding herself face to face with artists of various
sorts, men and women who, without effort, as it seemed, could coax trees
out of the ground and make them blossom before your eyes. And sometimes
she had this breathless feeling that the incredible might happen and
she, too, might do some of these amazing things. Often, it seemed to
her, she was very near it. The turning of a key in the lock, a wind
driving through vapor, and she might be on the stage of the world, no
longer wondering but making others wonder. These were real hungers. She
wanted great acknowledged supremacies, and her own neat ways of action
had to end ingloriously.
And at the moment MacLeod came up the steps, without hesitation she went
to meet him. Any one that night might have been a messenger from the
richer world she coveted. She saw him there smiling at her in the dim
hall light, and the old feeling came back that she had known him before
and waited for him a long time. They had touched hands and he had gone
with her to the sitting-room before she realized that such silent
meetings were not the ordinary ones.
"Did Peter come with you?" she asked unnecessarily.
"No. He wanted to."
"I am glad to see you!"
MacLeod spared no time.
"You have been very kind," he said, "to my little girl."
Rose, as any sort of little girl, implied an incredible diminishing; but
the phrase served in the interest of conversational ease. Electra's eyes
were on him, absorbed and earnest. There was nothing she believed in so
much, at that moment, as the clarity of MacLeod's mind and heart. It
seemed belittling him even to withdraw into the coverts of ordinary
talk, and, if she wanted his testimony, to surprise it out of him by
stale devices. She was worshiping the truth very hard, and there was no
effort in putting her question crudely:--
"Mr. MacLeod, was your daughter married to my brother?"
He met her gaze with the assurance she had expected. It seemed noble to
her. At last, Electra reflected with a throb of pride, she was on the
heights in worthy company.
"Yes," he said, not hesitating, "she was his wife."
Electra drew a long breath.
"Then," she answered, "I shall know what to do."
He bent toward her an embracing look. It promised her a great deal:
comprehension, sympathy, almost a kind of love.
"What shall you do?" he asked.
Electra choked a little. Her throat hurt her, not at the loss of what
she was going to relinquish, but at the greatness of sacrifice with
somebody by to take cognizance of the act. He would not, like Madam
Fulton, call her a fool. He might even see where the action placed her,
on ground he also had a right to, from other deeds as noble.
"I supposed I had inherited my brother's property," she said, in a low
and penetrating voice. "I shall make it over to her."
MacLeod put out his hand, and she laid hers within it. When he spoke, it
was with a moved restraint.
"That is a good deal to do."
"It is incumbent on me--ethically." At that instant she had a throb of
high triumph in remembering that he, at least, would not gird at her
choice of terms.
"It is what you would do," he said warmly. "It is exactly what you would
do."
"I cannot do otherwise."
They seemed to be engaged in antiphonal praises of abstract right. It
gave Electra a solemn satisfaction. She could hardly leave the subject.
"I wish to do everything in my power," she announced. "I cannot ask her
to live here, because I may not be here long myself."
"You will marry Peter and go away!"
Electra felt her face growing warm in the dusk, and an unreasonable
vexation possessed her against any one who should have mapped out her
purposes and given him the chart. He might know her. He was evidently
destined to, she intemperately thought, better than any one else, but
she could herself induct him into the paths of intimacy. There was no
pleasure in feeling that he was bound to prejudge her through cognizance
of this other tie she had for the moment forgotten.
"Did Peter tell you that?" she asked.
"I'm afraid I guessed it."
His frankness put her back on their pleasant ground of intimacy; it even
brought them nearer.
"Why did you guess it?"
Here was foolish talk, she following upon the heels of his venture, as
if there were something in the very dust of his progress too precious to
be lost. But MacLeod, who cared nothing about inanities once their
purpose was served, whirled her away from further challenge and reply.
"You must come to Paris," he said; "with or without Peter, you must
come."