Electra, in her excitement, found herself unable to stay upstairs at her
accustomed tasks. She had to know what grandmother thought of this
ill-bred woman. But speeding down, she saw grandmother in the garden
path with Billy Stark. There they walked intimately arm-in-arm, and
grandmother talked. There was something eager in the pose of her head.
Evidently what she had heard quite pleased her, if only because it was
some new thing. And there was Peter at the door. Instantly the light
sprang renewed into Electra's eyes. Peter would do still better than
grandmother to confirm her triumph, though at the moment even she
charged herself to be lofty in her judgments and temperate in expressing
them. Peter did not look at all like one who had himself heard unlovely
news. His face glowed. There were points of light in his dark eyes. Rose
had left them there, and Electra, with the sick certainty of the
jealous, knew it. They went silently into the library, Peter holding, as
well as he might, the lax hand hanging at her side. In the morning light
of the room they faced each other, and she asked her question, the one
that, unbidden, came leaping to her lips.
"Did you meet her?"
He knew whom she meant, for his thought, too, was full of her.
"Yes," he said, and then swept even Rose aside as deflecting him from
his purpose. "Electra, I have decided to go back to France."
Immediately she thought she saw why. Rose was going and he had to
follow.
"What did she tell you?" she cried sharply. The pang that came
astonished her, it was so savage. Even in the haste of the moment, she
had time for a passing surprise that she could be so moved by Peter. He
was looking at her with innocent perplexity.
"Rose?" he said. "Nothing. I told her I was coming here and she--" He
paused, for he was on the point of adding, "She sent me." Peter could
see how ill-judged that would be.
Electra, her proud glance on him, was considering, balancing
probabilities. With his artist's eye he saw how handsome she was, how
like, in the outer woman, to his imperial lady. Such spirit in her could
only, it seemed, be spent for noble ends.
"Has she told you?" asked Electra, and there was something, he saw,
beyond what he suspected. Her voice rang out against her will: "No, she
hasn't. She means, for some reason, not to tell you. But she has had to
tell me."
Peter was staring at her.
"Has something happened to her?" he asked quickly. "I must know."
That mysterious rage she was so unwilling to recognize got possession of
her again.
"It means a great deal to you," she breathed.
"Of course it does," said Peter honestly. "Don't keep me dangling,
Electra."
Electra's mouth seemed to harden before his eyes. She looked like some
noble and beautiful image of justice or a kindred virtue.
"She thinks I shall not tell you," she declared. "But I shall. It is no
more right for you to be deceived than it was right for me. I shall tell
you."
"Don't tell me anything she wouldn't wish," said Peter earnestly. He
began to see the need of holding down the flaming spirit in her, lest it
consume too much. "If there is anything she wants me to know, she will
tell me."
"My instinct was right," said Electra, now with equal steadiness. "She
was not his wife. Tom never married her."
Peter was tired of that issue. His controlled manner showed it.
"I know what you think about that, Electra," he said. "You see we don't
agree. We mustn't talk about it."
Electra answered him with a gracious certainty.
"That was what she told me, Peter. She told grandmother, too. For some
reason she has abandoned her deception. She has a reason for ending it.
That was what she said. Tom never married her."
Peter's face was blazing, the indignant blood in it, the light darting
from his eyes. He straightened. His hands clenched. His voice was thick
with anger.
"Tom never married her?"
"That was what she told us."
"The damned scoundrel!"
Electra had been regarding him in serene certainty of her own position
and her ability to hold it. But human nature flashed out in her, the
loyalty of blood.
"Are you speaking of my brother?" she demanded.
"I am speaking of your precious brother. And I might have known it."
Ire, gathering in him, suffused his face anew. "I might have known Tom
Fulton would do the dastardly trick in any given situation. Of course he
never married her."
"You don't seem to think of her," she reminded him, under her breath.
"Not think of her! What else am I thinking of? Poor child! poor child!"
Electra was always having to feel alone in the world. Art left her
desolate when other people sang and painted and she could only praise.
Love and the fierce loyalty she coveted were always failing her and
lavishing themselves elsewhere. She had one momentary impulse to speak
for herself.
"Do you wonder now," she said, "that I wouldn't accept her."
"Not accept her, when she had been hurt? Good God, Electra! how
monstrous it is. You, a delicate woman, fully believed he had wronged
another woman as lovely as yourself, and yet the only impression it made
on you was that you could not accept her."
Electra resisted the impulse to turn away or put her hands to her face;
the tears were coming. She held herself rigid for a moment, choking down
the shuddering of her nerves, lest her lips quiver and betray her.
"I suppose,"--the words were almost inaudible, yet he heard them,--"I
suppose that is because you have lived so long in France."
"What, Electra?" He spoke absently, his mind with Rose.
"These things have ceased to mean anything to you. It is not a moral
question. You see the woman is pretty and you--"
"No, no! She is beautiful, but that's not it. I can't theorize about it,
Electra, only the whole thing seems to me monstrous. That he should
wrong her! That he should be able to make her care about him in the
first place--a fellow like him--just because he was handsome as the
devil and had the tongue of angels--but that he should wrong her, that
she should come over here expecting kindness--" It was Peter who put a
hand before his eyes, not because there were tears there, but as if to
shut her out from a knowledge of his too candid self. But in an instant
he was looking at her again, not in anger, but sorrowfully.
"Isn't it strange?" she exclaimed, almost to herself.
"What, Electra?"
"Strange to think what power a woman has--a woman of that stamp."
"Don't, Electra. You mustn't classify her. You can't."
She was considering it with a real curiosity.
"You don't blame her at all," she said. "You know Tom did wrong. You
don't think she did."
"Electra," he said gently, "we can't go back to that. It's over and done
with. Besides, it is between those two. It isn't our business."
"You could blame Tom!" She clung to that. He saw she would not release
her hold.
"Electra!" He put out his hands and took her unwilling ones. Then he
gazed at her sweetly and seriously; and when Peter was in gentle
earnest, he did look very good. "Electra, can't you see what she is?"
His appealingness had for the instant soothed that angry devil in her.
She wrenched her hands free, with the one hoarse cry instinct with
mental pain,--
"You are in love with her!"
Peter stepped back a pace. His face paled. He could not answer. Electra
felt the rush of an emotion stronger than herself. It swept her on, her
poise forgotten, her rules of life snapping all about her.
"I have always known it, from the first day you spoke of her. She has
bewitched you. Perhaps this is what she really came for--to separate us.
Well, she has done it."
Something seemed demanded of him, and he could only answer in her own
words,--
"Has she done it?"
Her heat had cooled. Her soberer self had the upper hand again, and she
spoke now like the gracious lady called to some dignified dismissal.
"I find," she said, "I must have intended to say this for days. We must
give up--what we meant to do."
"You must give me up, Electra?"
"I give you up."
"I came to-day,"--Peter's voice sounded very honest in his endeavor to
show how well he had meant,--"I came to ask you to go back to France. We
would live on a little. We would serve the Brotherhood--the chief says
you have joined already--" Electra bowed her head slightly, still in a
designed remoteness.
"I shall go to France," she said, "later. But I shall never marry you.
That is over. As you said of something else, it is over and done with."
She glanced toward the door, but he kept his place. Peter was conscious
that of all the things he ought to feel, he could not summon one. It did
not seem exactly the woman he had loved who was dismissing him. This was
a handsome and unfriendly stranger, and in the bottom of his heart
surged a sweet new feeling that was like hope and pain.
"Let us not talk any more," she was saying, with that air of extreme
courtesy which still invited him to go.
Peter walked slowly to the door.
"I am wondering"--he hesitated. "Why do you say that, Electra? Why do
you tell me I am in love with her?"
He looked as shy as a girl. It struck her full in the mind that even in
this interview she had no part. She had refused a lover, and he was
going away with his thoughts stirred by another woman.
"I said so," she repeated clearly, "because it is true. You are in love
with her. Good-by."
Peter turned to her with one of his quick movements and held out his
hand. She did not take it.
"Won't you shake hands, Electra?" he asked. "I should think we might be
friends." Honest sorrow moved his voice. Now, at least, he was thinking
of her only.
Electra meant to show no resentment, no pain. But she had to be true.
"I can't," she said, in a low tone. "Good-by."
And Peter, seeing the aversion in her face, not for him, perhaps, but
for the moment, got himself hastily out of the room and into the summer
road. And there, before he had walked three paces, Peter began to sing.
He sang softly, not at all because melody was unfitted to the day, but
as if what inspired it were too intimate a thing to be revealed. He
looked above him, straight ahead, and on every side.
The world was beautiful to him at this moment, and he had a desire to
drink it up, to be as young and as rich as Apollo. He did feel very
rich, not only in his youth, but in the unnamed possibilities trembling
before him; and Peter denied himself no pleasure because it was
inappropriate to the moment. It would have seemed to him a refusal of
the good gifts of life and an affronting of the God who created plenty
if, because he had lost Electra, he renounced the delight of a happiness
he really felt. By and by he would remember Electra, how dignified she
was, how irreproachable, in the moments when her virtues did not get the
bit between their teeth and dash away with her; but now, under this
abounding summer sun, with the leaves trembling, she withdrew into a
gray seclusion like an almost forgotten task--one that had resolved
itself into a beneficent fulfillment quite unlike what it had promised.
Noble as it was, he had been excused from it, and he felt blissfully
free. Something else that swam before him like the gleam of a vision did
not look like another task. It was more like a quest for a hero's
arming. It fitted his dreams, it went hand in hand with the visions he
had had years ago about his painting, when that was all possibility, not
work. This was the worshipful righting of an innocent lady.
She was there in view when he got home, as if she had waited for him,
under a tree, trembled about by the summer green, her white dress
flickered upon by leaves. She was pale; her mouth looked piteous to him,
and his heart beat hard in championship. She half rose from her chair,
and let her unread book fall to the grass beside her.
There were two things Rose wanted very much to know: whether Electra had
shocked him out of his trust in her, and why her father stayed so long
in that visit to Osmond at the plantation. The last question was the
great one, and she asked it first.
"What can my father be saying to him?"
"Osmond? I don't know. Equal rights, labor, capital, God knows. Rose,
don't sit there. Please get up!"
She obeyed, wondering, brushed out her skirt and put her hair straight,
and then glanced at him.
"What for?" she asked. "What do you want me to do?"
Peter looked to her about eighteen, perhaps, nothing but youth and gleam
and gay good luck. She felt a thousand years older herself, yet she
loved Peter dearly. She would do anything for him. This she told herself
in the moment of smoothing down her hair. His face brimmed over with
fun, with something else, too. The seriousness that dwells housemate to
comedy was behind.
"I couldn't say it with you lying there and looking at me," said Peter.
"Nobody ever made a proposal to a lady in a steamer chair unless he was
in another and the deck was level."
"Peter," she said gravely, "don't make fun."
Peter shook back the lock of hair he encouraged to tumble into his eyes.
It was his small affectation. It kept him at one with his artistic
brotherhood.
"I am rejected," he said, and do what he might, he announced it
exultingly, and not in the least with the dignity he would have admired
in the lady who had refused him. But at that moment Peter had had enough
of dignity and the outer form of things. He wanted to be himself, light
or sad, bad or good, and speak the truth as the moment revealed it to
him. "But I am rejected," he continued, when she looked at him in a
quick reproof, "turned down, jilted, smashed into a cocked hat. And I
came just as quick as I could. Rose--"
"Don't!" she warned him. "Don't say that, Peter."
"Just as quick as I could get here without running--I couldn't run,
there were so many pretty things to look at--to tell you, to beg of
you"--Peter's voice broke. He was behaving badly to conceal how much he
was moved. "I came to offer it to you," he said seriously, in a low
tone. "Not what was given back to me, but something else, so much better
you couldn't speak of 'em in the same day. When I think of what might
be, it's all light and color--and the leaves of the wood moving. It's a
great big dream, Rose, and you fit into it. You fit into the dream." He
was intoxicated with youth and life. She was not sure whether it was
with her.
"I hope you haven't quarreled," she said soberly. She wished she might
recall him. "But if you have and are patient--"
Peter could not let her go on. He put out his quick, clever hands in an
eager gesture, as if he pushed something away.
"Ah," he said, "I don't want to be patient! I want to be rash. I don't
want anything back. I want something new and beautiful. I want to tell
you a million things in a minute--chiefly how much I love you."
His voice had deepened. It swept her on apace, in spite of herself,
because it was like Osmond's. For a moment she felt the kinship between
them, the same swift blood, the picturesque betrayals. There was
something at the heart of each that was dear to her, and Peter, for the
moment, speaking in the sunshine with her eyes upon him, was also the
voice out of the dark. But she had nevertheless to recall him.
"Have you really given each other up?" she asked.
"Yes," said Peter, in the same glad acquiescence. "And what do you think
she told me, the last thing of all?"
She shook her head.
"She told me I loved you. And I do, Rose. Oh, I do! I do!"
"But that mustn't part you. Think what it is to me--to know my coming
here has done it."
"Oh, you had to come!" said Peter light-heartedly. "It was preordained.
It's destiny. I was a fool not to see it the first minute. She had to
tell me."
Rose, in spite of herself, smiled a little. But her thoughts settled
gravely back upon her own hard task.
"Did she tell you"--She hesitated, and then asked her question with a
simple directness. "Did she tell you how much mistaken you are in me?"
"Please don't," said Peter. His face flushed. He looked his misery.
"You see she is the only one who was not mistaken in me. Those of you
who believed in me--well, I must tell all of you. Even grannie, dear
grannie! I am afraid--" She stopped because she meant to show no
emotion; but it seemed to her that grannie, in her guarded life, must
view her harshly. "I was wrong, Peter, ever to let you mix yourself in
this miserable coil. If I could lie, well and good. Let me do it and
take the consequences. But I should have known better than to bring you
into it."
Peter stood thoughtfully regarding her in a very impersonal way, as if
he debated how she could be moved.
"I wonder," he said at last, "how it is possible to tell you how lovely
you are to everybody, how perfectly splendid, you know, quite different
from anybody else! And when you add to that that you've been wronged
and--and insulted--oh you've simply no conception how it makes a fellow
feel! Why, I adore you, that's all. I just adore you."
He stretched out his hand like a bluff comrade and she put hers into it
as frankly.
"You're a dear boy, Peter," she said, and her eyes were wet.