The next night Rose went early to her own room, and when she heard Peter
and MacLeod on the veranda, their voices continuing in a steady
interchange, she took her cloak, locked the chamber door behind her, and
ran downstairs and out by the long window to the garden, the orchard,
and the field. The night was dark and hot, and over in the south played
fitful lightnings. In spite of the heat, she wrapped her cloak about her
for an invisible shield: for now that MacLeod had come, she felt
strangely insecure, as if eyes were everywhere. It was apparent to her
that these meetings might be few, and as if this even might be the last;
so it must not be interrupted. When she was once in the field, the hush
of the night, the heat, and her own uneasy thoughts bewildered her. She
stopped in doubt. His voice assured her.
"This way, playmate."
"I am coming," she found herself answering, not once but twice, and
then, as she reached the seat he had ready for her, it came upon her
overwhelmingly that such gladness was of the scope and tumult to bear
two creatures to each other's arms, to mingle there, face to face and
breast to breast.
But the quick thought neither threw her back in shame upon herself nor
forward to his side. The night and the things of life together were too
great to admit of fine timidities or crude betrayals. It was not of so
much avail to consider what was done as whether the deed was true. She
sat down, in deep relief at finding herself near him.
"Playmate," she said, "things are very bad indeed."
"Are they, my dear playmate?"
Her breath came in a sob, his voice sounded so kind, so altogether
merciful of her, whatever she might do.
"Dreadful things are happening," she said.
"The prince?"
"Not the prince, this time. Worse things."
"Tell me, child."
She had ceased to be altogether his playmate. Deeper needs had called
out keener sympathies, and she found some comfort even in his altered
tone. She waited for a time, listening to the summer sounds, and vainly
wishing she had been a more fortunate woman, and that these sad steps
need not be retraced in retrospect before life could go on again.
"You will have to listen to a long story," she said at last. "And how am
I to tell you! Ask me questions."
"How far shall I go back?"
"To the beginning--to the beginning of my growing up. Before I met Tom
Fulton."
"When you meant to sing?"
"I did sing. But you mustn't think that was what I wanted. I never
wanted anything but love."
"Go on." To him, who, in his solitude, had never expected to find close
companionship, it was inconceivable that they should be there speaking
the unconsidered truth. She, too, who, in the world, had tasted the
likeness of happy intercourse, only to despair of it, had found a goal.
Here now was the real to which all the old promises had been leading.
"You must understand me," she said, in a low voice. "I'm going to tell
you the plain truth. How awful if you didn't understand!"
"I shall understand. Go on."
"I don't know how it is with other girls, but always I dreamed of love,
always after my first childhood. I thought of kings and queens, knights
and ladies. They walked in pairs and loved each other."
"What did you mean by love?"
"Each would die for the other. That was my understanding of it. I knew
the time would come some day when a beautiful young man would say to me,
'I would die for you,' and I should say to him, 'And I would die for
you.' It was a kind of dream. Maybe it would not have been, except that
I was never much of a child when I was a child. I had ecstatic times
with my father, but I was lonesome. The lover was to change that, when
he came."
"When did he come?"
"He came several times, but either he was too rough and he frightened
me, or too common and he repelled me, or--"
"And Tom Fulton came!"
"Yes, walking just the right way, neither too fast nor too slow, and all
chivalry and honor. Oh, my heart! my heart!" She was sobbing to herself.
There was a long pause.
"So you married him," Osmond reminded her.
"Osmond!" At last she had said his name. She knew it with her mind, but
how did her heart have it so ready? To him it seemed natural that she
should use it, until he thought of it next day. She continued in that
hurried voice that pleaded so, "I must make you see how I had thought of
those things always."
"What things, dear child?"
"Loving and being loved. It was like your plants, coming to flower.
There was to be one person who would give me a perfect devotion. There
would be music and dancing and bright weather, day after day, year after
year. That was coming to flower, like your plants."
"A rose in bloom!" he murmured.
"It was a kind of possession with me. I can't tell you what hold it took
on me. There were years when I tried not to have a wrong thought or do
an ugly act, so that I could be beautiful to him when he came."
"Behold, the bridegroom cometh!" mused the voice, in involuntary
comment, as if it responded to the man's own wondering mood.
"He came. He made himself irresistible to me. He knew my father first."
"Were they friends?"
"My father has no friends--not as you would understand it. He touches
people at one little point. They think they have everything; but it is
nothing. Still, they understood each other. My father sold me to him."
There was silence from the darkness under the tree; only she heard him
breathe.
"I was to blame, too," she cried. "But I did not see it then. I truly
did not see it. My father told me it was nobler and purer to go with my
lover so. Marriage, he said, had been profaned a million, million times.
Where was the sacrament, he asked, in a church that was all rotten? He
told me so, too--Tom Fulton. I went with him. I never married him." She
paused for the answering voice, but it delayed. The silence itself
constrained her to go on. "Do you know what Tom Fulton was?"
"He was a handsome beast."
"You never knew the half. But my father knew. He knew men. He knew Tom
Fulton. And he delivered me over to the snare of the fowler. I lived a
year with him. I left him. He had the accident, and I went back. He
died. I thanked God."
Osmond had not often, to his remembrance, formulated gratitude to any
great power, but he also said, "Thank God!" In a way he did not
understand, she seemed to him austere in her purity and her rebellion
against these bitter facts. There was no hesitation and no shame. She
had only wrong to remember, not willful sin. One thing he had to know.
He asked his question. "Was Fulton--kind to you?"
"At first. Not at the last."
"How was he--not kind?"
That, too, she was apparently thinking out.
"I can hardly tell you," she said at length. "He seemed to hate me."
"You!"
"I have seen the same thing twice, with other men and other women. You
see, it was a terrible blow to him--his vanity, his pride--to stop
loving me."
"I don't understand."
"You may not, ever. But he had had unworthy things in his life,
attachments, those that last a short time. When he cared for me, he
thought he cared tremendously. He believed it would last. But it didn't.
He had nothing left to give me."
"He had gambled it away!"
"I think it hurt his pride. He could only justify himself
unconsciously--it was all unconscious--by finding fault with me. By
proving I was not worthy to be loved. Do you see?"
"You are a strange woman to have guessed that. You must be very clever."
"No, oh, no! It was because I thought so hard about it. For a long time,
night after night, I thought of nothing else. When it died--what he
called love--I thought the world died, too."
"My dear good child!"
"When he was dead, what was I to do? I thought I should sing. But my
father was coming from the East with another suitor, the prince. The
prince had seen me here and there for a couple of years. I had always
been known as Madam Fulton. I called myself so at first, proudly,
honestly. Then other people called me so, and even when I had left him,
I let them do it. Peter stepped in then, honest Peter in his ignorance.
He wondered why I didn't come here to Tom's people. Electra was a kind
of goddess. I came. That is all." She paused.
Osmond spoke musingly.
"So you were not his wife! And Electra knew it."
"She did not know it."
"But she suspected it. She refused to own you."
"She suspected me because she knew Tom too well. I believe he had
shocked her and frightened her until his world was all evil to her.
There was another reason." This was a woman's reason, and she was
ashamed to have put her finger on it. Electra's proud possession of her
lover and her instant revolt at his new partisanship, what was it but
crude jealousy? Yet there were many things she could not even dimly
understand in Electra's striving and abortive life--the emulation that
reached so far and met the mists and vapors at the end. "But there was
one thing I did not want," Rose cried--"their money. I never thought of
it. I only thought how I might come here for a little and be at peace,
away from my father. Then when Electra hated me, I had to stay, I had to
fight it out. Why? I don't know. I had to. But now it's all different."
"How is it different?"
"Because she has accepted me."
"But you wanted her to accept you."
"Ah, yes, on my own word! I believe I had it in my mind to tell her the
next minute,--to throw myself on her mercy, the mercy of the goddess,
and beg her to see me as I was, all wrong, but innocent. It is innocent
to have meant no wrong. But when she met me like an enemy, I had to
fight."
"And now she has accepted you."
"Yes." The assent was bitter. "On my father's word."
"His word?"
"Yes. He stands by me. He confirms me. She asked him if I had been
married to her brother. 'Yes,' said my father."
"Why?"
"The money. Always that--money, position, a pressure here, a pull
there."
"Then"--his tone seemed to demand her actual meaning--"your case is won.
Electra owns you."
She was on her feet gripping the back of her chair with both hands. The
rough wood hurt her and she held it tighter.
"Range myself with him--my father? Sell myself in his company? No! When
I was fighting before, it was from bravado, pride, mean pride, the
necessity of the fight. But now, when he confirms me--no! no! no!"
"We must tell the truth," she heard Osmond murmuring to himself.
To her also it looked not only necessary but beautiful. There were many
things she wanted to say to him at that moment, and, as she suddenly
saw, they were all in condonation of herself. Yet the passionate justice
in her flamed higher as she remembered again that it was true that
others had marked out her way for her. When she walked in it, it had
been with an exalted sense that it was the one way to go.
"I cannot understand about the truth," she said. "I can't, even now."
"What about it?"
"Once it seemed as if there were different kinds. He told me so--my
father. He always said there was the higher truth, and that almost
nobody could understand. Then there were facts. What were facts? he
asked. Often worse than lies."
"I don't know," said Osmond. Whatever he might say, he was afraid of
hurting her. It seemed impossible to express himself without it. "Facts
are all I have had to do with."
She seemed like a bewildered creature flying about in a confined space.
"You wouldn't say what my father does," she concluded miserably. "You
wouldn't feel we have a right to the higher truth, if we feel great
desires, great hungers the world wouldn't understand?"
"I only know about facts," said Osmond again. "You see, I work in my
garden all day, nearly every day in the year. I know I must sow good
seed. I must nourish it. I know nature can't lie. I didn't suppose
things were so incomprehensible out in the world--or so hard."
"Haven't they been hard for you?"
"For me!" He caught his breath, and immediately she knew how the
question touched him. It was as monstrous as his fate. But he answered
immediately and with a gentleness without reproach,--
"Things are different for me in every way. But I should have thought you
would reign over them like a queen."
"A queen! I have been a slave all my life. I see it now. A slave to
other people's passions--Tom Fulton's cruelty, my father's greed."
"His greed for money? I don't always understand you when you speak of
him."
"For money, power, everything that makes up life. My father is one great
hunger. Give him the world and he would eat it up."
Images crowded upon her. It seemed to her that here in the silence, with
the spaces of the dark about her and that voice answering, her thought
was generated like the lightning.
"Do you see," she asked suddenly, "how I blame those two men, and not
myself? I am the sinner. The sinner ought to own his sin. I don't know
whether I have sinned or not. I believed in love, and because I believed
in it, those two men betrayed me. That was how I was taught not to
believe in anything."
"Don't you believe any more?"
"Oh, I don't know! I don't know!" It was a despairing cry. "There is
kindness, I know that. Peter is kind. Your grandmother is the kindest
person in the world. But that one thing I dreamed about--why, Osmond,
that one thing was the most beautiful thing God ever made."
"Tell me more about it."
"You have thought about it, too. We can't be so much alike, you and I,
and not have thought the same things."
"Are we alike?"
It was a wistful voice. She laughed, a little sorry laugh.
"Well," she said, "at least we are in our playhouse together."
"Ah!" He seemed to speak in spite of prudence. "That's not because we
are alike. It is because we are different." But he went on at once, as
if to keep her from interrogating that, or even perhaps remembering it.
"I have forbidden myself to think of some things. When they came upon
me, I went out and dug them into the ground."
She was filled that night with an imperative sense of life. It made her
forget even him and his claim to be heard. The great resolve in her to
be for once understood was like a crowning wave drenching the farthest
shore.
"I have never had enough of life," she avowed passionately. "I have
always had the appearance of it, the promise that the next minute the
cup would be given me. But the cup was never there. Or if it was, there
was muddy water in it. The lights have never been bright enough, the
music has never gone on long enough. Why!" She seemed frightened. "Is
that like my father? Do I get that from him?"
"It is because you are young," said Osmond. "And because you are
beautiful and the world ought to be yours--to put your foot on it."
The passion of his voice recalled her.
"No," she answered humbly. "Not to put my foot on anything. No! no! no!
Playmate," she added, "you are the dearest thing in all the world."
The voice laughed out harshly. The man was lying prone at full length
where she could not see him, his hands upon the earth he loved, his
fostering, yet unheeding mother that had saved his life for her own
service. At that moment, it seemed to him, his eye turned inward upon
himself, as if there were foolish irony in that friendly comment. He
looked to himself rather one of the earth forces, supremely strong,
waiting for some power to guide it.
"Elemental things are no good until they are harnessed and made to
work," he heard himself saying, as in a trance; and then it was apparent
she had not noticed, for she went on,--
"To be able to speak to any one as I speak to you! Playmate, it seems to
me men might as well kill a child as kill women's innocent faith in
love."
"But men love, too," he heard himself answering her.
"If I thought that! But when anything so beautiful turns into something
base, and the creature we worshiped laughs and says it is always so, he
kills something in us. And he can't bring it to life again. Neither he
nor any other man can make it live. It is a dream, and the thought of it
hurts us too much for us even to dream it over again.--What is that?"