"I believe in the Brotherhood of Man."
They stood so for a moment, and then he released her hand.
"That is all," he said.
Electra felt as if she had sworn allegiance not only to some unknown
majesty, but to him, and she was ineffably exalted. They two seemed to
be together in a world of wrong, pledged to right it, and taking the
highest delight in their joint ministrations.
"When do I"--she hesitated--"when do I pay in--money?"
"Twice a year," he answered cheerfully. "Peter will tell you those
things, if I am not here."
If he were not there! Her wings of pleasure drooped. It seemed as if he
were always to be there. And Peter! he looked like a small and callow
personage seen through the diminishing end of a glass, compared with
this great presence.
"I must go," he said, and Electra pulled herself out of her maze. "May I
tell my daughter you accept her?" He made it all very delicate and yet
prosaic, as if he quite understood Rose could hardly expect to be
received without difficulty, but as if Electra had made it magnificently
possible. Still she felt a little recoil.
"I can't talk about it," she faltered, "to her. I could to you. Let me
settle all the details, and my lawyer shall submit them to you. Would
that satisfy you?"
She spoke humbly, and Markham MacLeod, the chief of the Brotherhood,
bent over her hand and touched it with his lips. Then he was gone, and
Electra was left standing with that incredibly precious kiss upon her
hand. She was poor in imagination, but at the instant it flashed into
her mind that this was actually the touch of the coal red from the
altar.
Markham MacLeod, walking with long strides through the summer night,
drew in deep breaths, and delighted, for the moment, in the
voluptuousness of his own good health and the wonder that he had been
able to carry youth on into middle age. He had not been accustomed to
think about the past or what might come. It was enough to recognize the
harmonious interplay of his muscles and the daily stability of a body
which until now, and that briefly, had shown no sign of revolt. What
insurrection there was he meant to quell, and meantime to forget its
possibility, as a chief may, for the time, ignore rebellion. MacLeod was
plagued neither by unsatisfied desires nor by remorse. In his
philosophy, to live meant to feed upon the earth as it appeared to the
eye and to the other senses. He believed, without argument, that all the
hungers in him were good lusty henchmen demanding food. Now, in spite of
certain grim warnings he had had of late, he was filled with the old
buoyant feeling that his body was a well-to-do republic with his own
impartial self at the head of it. Justice should be done to all its
members that they might live in harmony. If discomforting forces
assailed the republic, they must be crushed. Some of these he might have
recognized as regrets, the sort of spectre that was ready to visit
Napoleon on a night after the campaign in Egypt. They were, he thought,
inseparable from great power and the necessities attending its
administration. But they were enemies of the republic, and he killed
them. So his voice was always hearty, his eye clear, and his cheek that
healthy red.
Peter he found in fits of laughter, and Rose mimicking certain
characters known to them in Paris. It was encouraging, he judged, to
find Rose out of her dumps. But she was only keeping Peter by her until
MacLeod should come and help detain him. Peter had said something in the
early evening about going down to find Osmond, who had of late, he
averred, been off at night on his deep wood prowls. "No," Rose wanted to
say,--and there would have been a choking triumph in her throat,--"he
has been in the playhouse waiting for me." And because she could not go
that night to the wide liberty of the fields, she would not have Peter
wandering off that way and hunting up her playmate, breaking spells and
spoiling wordless messages. MacLeod had not seen her so gay, not since
the days in Paris before she met Tom Fulton, when she had been one of a
changing wave of artist life, made up of students delirious with
possibilities and all bent toward the top notch of reputation. He joined
her and Peter now in precisely their own mood, his laugh and voice
reinforcing theirs. Rose warmed more and more. Not all her dreary
memories could keep her from delighting in him. He carried her along on
that high wave of splendid spirits, oblivious for the moment to all his
faults. Thus, she paused to remember again, it had been in her too-wise
childhood when, seeing her mother wan with tears, she had yet put her
little hand in his and gone off with him for an hour's pleasuring,
though he was the fount of grief as well as gayety. He compelled her,
the sheer physical health of him.
Peter rose finally, to give them a moment alone, and wandered off down
the garden, singing a light song and then whistling it farther and
farther into the dark. Something constricted the girl's throat. She
remembered, in the silence fallen between them, that she was alone with
the enemy of her peace, and felt again that old passionate regret that
he had not allowed her to keep the beauty of her belief in him. He had
swept away something she had thought to be indestructible. That, more
than any deed, was the wrong he had done--he had set his foot upon the
flower of hope. But MacLeod, his forehead bared to the night air, hummed
to himself the song Peter was singing, and then spoke with a commonplace
assurance:--
"She asked me the question."
"Electra?"
"Yes. She asked me plainly whether he married you."
"She asked you! How could she?"
"She did it without preamble. It was really rather magnificent."
"Did you answer without preamble?"
"I think so. At all events, it contented her. I said, 'yes,'--not much
more, if anything."
There was a long silence, and he felt her determination to remain
outside the issue, even to the extent of denying herself the further
news he brought. When that became apparent, he spoke again, rather
lightly:--
"She took my assurance without question. She said she should know what
to do."
"What will she do?"
"The simplest thing possible--make over Tom's money to you. She doesn't
consider, apparently, whether you are entitled to the whole of it, any
more than she had previously guessed that, if your claim were just, you
could have pushed it without her concurrence. She is a very intemperate
person."
Rose did not intend to comment on the situation, however warmly she
might express herself over Electra's personal standpoint.
"Electra did not strike me as intemperate," she said. "She seemed to me
very collected, very cold and resolute."
"Yes, but her reactions! they'd be something frightful. I can fancy that
pendulum swinging just as far the other way. They are terrifying, those
women."
"How are they terrifying?"
Governing the wild forces in herself at that minute, she felt as if all
women were terrifying when they are driven too far, and that all men
might well beware of them. MacLeod rose, and stretched himself upward in
a muscular abandon.
"Good-night, my dear," he said. "I'm going upstairs. I will see her
again to-morrow. You need give yourself no uneasiness about the outcome.
You needn't even concern yourself with the details. I shall arrange them
with her."
Rose was quickly upon her feet. She felt more his equal so than when he
towered above her at that height.
"If you see her," she threatened, "I will overturn everything."
"No, no, you wouldn't. Run upstairs now and go to bed. You are
overwrought. This whole thing has been a strain on you."
"Yes." She spoke rapidly and in a low tone, fearing grannie's window
above. "It has been a strain on me. But who brought it on? I did it
myself. I must meet it. But I will not have you meddling with it. I will
not."
"Not to-night, at least," said MacLeod, with unblemished kindliness.
"Don't do anything intemperate. But you won't. I know you too well."
After a good-night she could not answer he went in and up the stairs.
She could hear him humming to himself that gay little song. She stood
there quite still, as if she were in hiding from him and he might return
to find her. When the door closed above, she still stood there, her
nails clasped into her palms. And for the instant she was not thinking
of herself, but of Electra. It seemed to her that it would be necessary
to protect Electra from his charm. Then she heard Peter whistling back
again. She stepped down to the end of the veranda and stole across the
orchard into the field. The night was still, yet invisible forces seemed
to be whispering to one another. In the middle of the field she stopped,
tempted to call to Osmond, knowing he was there. But because it was
late, and because her thoughts were all a disordered and protesting
turmoil, she turned about and fled home.