MacLeod kept his thoughtful way on to Electra's gate. There he turned in
with no lack of decision, and walked up to her door. She had seen him,
and came forward from the shaded sitting-room. It was as if she had been
expecting him. Whether she had acknowledged it to herself or not, it was
true that Electra had never felt so strong a desire for the right
companionship as at that moment. As soon as she saw him and he had put
out his hand to her, she felt quieted and blessed. He was, as he had
been from the first, the completion of her mood. As he looked at her,
MacLeod, little as he knew her face, noted the change in it. She seemed
greatly excited and yet haggard, as if this disturbance were nothing to
what had preceded it. And her bright eyes fed upon him with a personal
appeal to which he was well used: that of the lower vitality
involuntarily demanding the support of his own magnetic treasury.
"You are tired," he said, as she drew her hand away and they sat down.
"No," returned Electra. "I am not tired."
"Tell me what has done it!"
The tender disregard of her denial broke down reserve. She looked at him
eloquently. It seemed to her that he had a right to know. She answered
faintly,--
"I have been through such scenes."
"Scenes? With whom?"
"Your daughter has told me"--She hesitated for a moment, and then, still
confident that his worship of the truth must be as exalted as her own,
ended with unstinted candor, "She says she was not my brother's wife."
Electra was looking at him, and it appeared to her now as if, in a
bewildering way, his gaze absorbed hers. It was very strange, how he
seemed to draw the intelligence of the eye into his and hold it
unresisting. She hardly knew how he looked, whether surprised or
sympathetic, or whether he was moved at all. But she was conscious of
being gripped by some communion in which she acquiesced. After a moment
he leaned forward and took her hand.
"Will you promise me something?" he asked.
"Anything!" The quickness of the answer was as eloquent as its force.
"Promise me that this thing--this subject--shall never come between you
and me."
"Gladly."
"We won't talk of it."
"No."
"We won't ask each other how it seems to us."
"No."
"There!" He released her hand, and seemed also to free her, in some
subtle way. He was smiling at her, and she felt a keen gladness, like a
child who is told he has been good.
"Then we can be friends," he said, with a spontaneous relief, it seemed
to her, like her own. "The best of friends."
"Yes. The best of friends."
Electra felt rich. Her heart swelled, as now she reflected that here was
one who understood her. She had that warm consciousness common to all
MacLeod's partisans, that his world and hers were alike. Each was
mysteriously prevented by other people from enjoying the full freedom of
that world, because each had been, until now, uncompanioned. But they
had met at last. The path was plain. All sorts of gates were opening to
them.
"Was that all?" MacLeod was asking her. "Were there other scenes?"
Immediately she wished to tell him everything. Yet this was difficult.
She hesitated.
"I am"--she flushed redly--"I am not engaged to Peter. He doesn't care
about me."
"My dear lady! He would say you do not care for him."
Then Electra saw her good fortune. She was enchanted with the freedom
which had fallen upon her in time for her to accept a more desirable
bondage. She lifted her head and looked at him in a proud happiness.
"No," she said, "I do not care for him. I never did. I see it now. I am
free."
"Are you glad to be free?"
MacLeod had a way of asking women persuasive questions. Though they were
interrogative, they had the force of suggestion, of the clinching
protest he might make in answer, when confession came. And they only
noted, long after, that he never did answer. Electra did not know that
form of communion, and it struck her as something holy. She looked him
in the eyes, with a clear and beautiful gaze.
"Yes," she said, "I am very glad. Now I am free to devote myself to the
most wonderful things, to worship them if I like."
There was passionate sincerity in her tone. It would have made a smaller
thing of her vow if she could have said she was free to worship him.
"I am going to tell you something. You must not repeat it."
"I never will."
"I am going back to France."
"You have been summoned!"
He smiled at her and shook his head slightly, as if the manner of it
were the only thing he could deny. She followed with another question,
rather faintly, for his news left her shivering.
"To France, you said?"
"That is all I can say," he assured her. "It will be France first."
"You will be in danger!" She did not put that as a question. It was an
assertion out of her solemn acceptance of his task. But that he did not
seem to hear.
"When are you coming to France?" he asked her.
Electra had now no more doubt of the unspoken pact between them than if
it had been sealed by all the most blessed vows. It would have cheapened
it rather if he had delegated her to the classified courts of sympathy.
Instead, it left them a universe to breathe in. It pointed to
undiscovered cities beyond the marge of time. It made her his in a way
transcending mutual promises. This same full belief rose passionately to
assert itself, and perhaps to soothe that small sharp ache in her heart,
the kind that rises in woman when man, though he takes the cup, yet
offers none in turn.
"Immediately," she answered, without question. "Or, when you tell me to
come."
"Will you write to me there?" He scribbled a street and number on a
blank card and gave it to her. "I shall not get word from you for a
month, at least. Perhaps not until the late autumn. But I shall get it.
And if I don't answer, you will know I shall answer by coming--when I
can."
Even that seemed enough. It was evident that until he came she would be
upholding something for him, keeping the faith. It was beautiful in a
still, noble way, one that left her indescribably uplifted. Her eyes
were wet when he looked at her. Seen thus, Electra was a fine creature,
her severity of outline softened into womanly charm. It seemed
unnecessary to claim from him any high assurance of what he had for her
to do, yet she did say, for the pleasure of saying it,--
"You are going to let me help you?"
"What else is there for either of us to do," he said quickly, "but to
help everybody?"
The blood rushed swiftly to her face and showed her in a glow. She
leaned toward him in a timid and what seemed to her, for a moment, an
ignoble confidence, because it touched such sordid things.
"I have some money. I will give that--and anything I have. You must
teach me. I have everything to learn."
He seemed to promise that, as he seemed to promise other things, partly
by his answering smile, partly by the inexplicable current of persuasion
pouring from him. He rose.
"Now," he said, "I must go. It is nearly noon."
"You won't stay to luncheon?"
"Won't the others be here?"
"My grandmother and Mr. Stark."
She was hardly urging him, because it seemed to her, too, a doubtful
pleasure, if it must be shared.
"Not to-day, then. But I shall see you again."
"Before you go."
Her face called upon him like a messenger beseeching news.
"Many, many times," he told her smilingly. "Many times, even if they
have to be within a few days. Now, good-by."
She watched him down the walk, and as if he knew that, he turned, as the
shrubbery was closing about him, and waved his hat to her. That seemed
another bit of prescience,--to know she was to be there. Electra was
very happy. She sat down again in a swoon of the reason and a mad hurry
of what cried to her as the higher part of her nature, unrecognized
until now, and thought of her exalted fortune.
MacLeod found Rose ready to question him. She was at the gate, to have
her word immediately. He noted the signs of apprehension in her face,
and, taking her hand, swung it as they walked.
"Has anything happened?" she asked irrepressibly.
"I've been down to--what do they call it?--the plantation."
"What did you talk about?"
"Oh, crops!"
"You don't know anything about crops!"
MacLeod laughed.
"Well, the other man did. I can always listen."
"Have you been there all the time?"
"No. I went in to see Electra."
Rose stopped short in the path between the banks of flowers. It was a
still day, and the summer hush of the plot--a velvet stillness where the
garden held its breath--made the time momentous to her. Unconsciously
she gripped her father's hand.
"She has told you!" she breathed. Her eyes sought his face. MacLeod was
looking at her smilingly, fondly even. She shuddered.
"You are a goose, Rose," he said lightly. He released his fingers from
the clasp of hers and gave her hand a little shake before he dropped it.
"But I can't help it. If you will go on tipping over your saucer of
cream, why, you must do it, that's all."
They walked on, and at the steps she paused again, though she heard
Peter's voice within.
"You're terribly angry with me, aren't you?" she said, in a low tone,
seeming to make it half communion with herself.
"Angry, my girl! Don't say a thing like that."
"You look exactly as you did the night Ivan Gorof defied you--and the
next day he died."
MacLeod laughed again, so humorously that Peter, coming forward from the
library, his own face serious with unwelcome care, smiled involuntarily
and returned to his every-day mood of belief that, on the whole, things
go well.
"I didn't kill him," MacLeod was saying, as he mounted the steps.
Rose shivered a little.
"No," she insisted. "But he died."
MacLeod was beguilingly entertaining at dinner that day, and in the
afternoon he and Peter went to drive. At supper, too, he was in his best
mood, and that evening Rose, worn out by the strain of his persistent
dominance, escaped to her own room. There she sat and counseled her
tense nerves. She was afraid. Then when she heard the closing of
grannie's door, she slipped downstairs to her tryst. The night was dark,
and there was a grumble of thunder from the west. In her excitement she
took swift steps, as if all her senses were more keenly awake than they
had been in the light, and kept the path unerringly. She had no doubt
that he was there, but he called to her before she could ask. His voice
vibrated to the excitement in her own heart.
"Good child, to come!"
She found her chair and sank into it.
"I had to come." At once she felt light-hearted. There seemed to be no
bounds to his protection of her. "I have told Electra."
"I knew you would."
"She has told Peter. They know it now,--all but grannie,--dear grannie."
"She can wait. She won't flicker. She won't vary. Nothing can shake
grannie's old heart."
"What did he say to you to-day?"
Osmond laughed. It was a low note of pleasure.
"Platitudes," he rejoined.
"And what did you say to him?"
"Platitudes again. He said his kind, I said mine. I learned a few
truths."
"About his business?--that's what it is. I can say it when I'm not in
the same room with him--business."
"About me. I learned what other fellows know when they are boys."
"Did he teach you?"
"He? No. Yes. Through my hatred of him."
"Ah, then you hated him! Was it because I taught you to?"
"Partly. Partly because he is an insolent animal. He is kind because he
is well-fed. Yet I think it was chiefly because he has ill-used you."
"Yes," she owned sadly. "I betrayed him to you."
But Osmond had escaped from recollection of the day into a mood half
meditative, half excited fancy.
"I have been thinking back, since he left me," he said, "ever so many
years. I see I haven't had any life at all."
"Ah!" It was a quick breath of something sweeter than pity. It could not
hurt.
"I have been turning away from things all my life, because they were not
for me. But now I think--what if I didn't turn away? What if I met them
face to face?"
"What, playmate? You puzzle me."
"Grannie indulged Peter. Even in his eating, she couldn't refuse him
anything."
"But she loved you best!"
"No doubt of it. But he was well. He could have anything, even hunks of
cake. Grannie hates to deny pleasures to any living thing. 'I guess it
won't hurt you!' I've heard her say it to him over and over. But to
me--"
"To you?"
"Why, to me she never varied. 'Son,' she'd say, 'that isn't the way to
do. We can't risk it.' So I turned aside and ate good crusty bread and
drank milk. I didn't want cake. I didn't want Peter's coffee. But I
wonder how it would seem to have ridden them all bareback, all vices,
all indulgences, and conquered them after I'd known them--not turned
aside and gone the other way."
In that mood she hardly knew him. The clean, sweet, childlike quality
had gone; it had fled before this breath of the passion of life. She
felt vaguely how wrong he was. He was idealizing the world as he did not
know it and the conquest of the world as it appeared in her father, the
master of all its arts.
"Playmate," she said, though she was doubtful of her own wisdom.
"Yes, playmate."
"There isn't anything desirable in evil knowledge. I've heard him
say--you know--"
"Tom Fulton?"
"Yes. I've heard him say he wanted to know everything about life--bad
and good. He was black with knowledge. I might have learned it from him.
I thank God he spared me that. I wish you would be grateful for your
clean life. I wish you'd see there's no magic in the things my father
knows, for instance. It's better to make a lily grow."
"Ah, but I've discovered things in myself that are exactly like the
things in other men--and other men are used to them. So when an ugly
beast puts up its head, the man gives it a crack and knocks it silly.
Then it lies down a spell, and the man goes about his business. He gets
used to its growling and clawing away at intervals. He's only to knock
it down. But I don't fully know yet what is in that pit of mine. I
discovered something to-day."
"What?"
"The lust for fight."
She shuddered.
"I wasn't prepared for it. Another time I should be. It was an ugly
devil--but I loved it."
She was silent, and after a moment he asked her, in his old anxious,
friendly tone, "Have I hurt you?"
"No. But somehow it seems as if you'd gone away."
"I know. I'm still communing with that brute in me--the fighting brute.
I must be honest with you. I can't help thinking he'd give me a special
kind of pleasure."
"Would he?" She asked it wistfully. He had opened the windows of their
house to strange discords from without. "What kind of pleasure?"
He was glad to tell. The magnitude and newness of his emotion that day
made it something to be flaunted while the disturbed currents of his
blood kept their fervor. Later he might put it to the test of equable
judgment. Now it was all a glory of hot action.
"Playmate," he said, "I wanted to kill him."
"My father? Oh, why, why?"
"Maybe for your sake. Yes! there was an instant when I said I would kill
him and free you from him." She could not answer. He heard the rustle of
her dress and added quickly, "Now, don't go. Of all nights, to-night is
the night I can't spare you."
"I thought it was the one when you didn't need me."
"I need you to listen. I'm a blaring, trumpeting egotist to-night.
Please understand me! Stop being a woman a minute, and see how it would
seem to be a man--not like me, but free to live and sin and refuse to
sin."
"You are free," she said, in her low, pained voice. "You have refused
all the ignoble things."
"Ah, but I didn't even parley with them. I wish I could feel I'd whacked
them and broken their skulls instead of going the other way."
"Playmate," she cried, "you are all wrong. You must not parley with
them. You must refuse to look at them."
"Refuse to look at the worm that eats the root? No. Find him and stamp
on him. The worst of it is, I begin to be rather terrified. I see that
life is a bigger thing than I thought."
"Not to grannie. To her it's big and simple."
"Because she knows the way. Well, what if there are many ways,--not like
hers, not the true way,--but ways we ought to look at before we can say
we know life at all? Think of it, playmate. You are a woman, younger
than I, delicate as a rose; yet you know more about life than I. You
know how to meet men and women. There aren't surprises you can't
master."
She sat wondering what it was that had moved him, and whether it was not
simply the power of MacLeod's personality, equally compelling to love or
hate. But Osmond was going on in that fierce monologue.
"I feel as if I had been waked up. Once I had my riding dream. Now I
have a million dreams. Did I tell you my riding dream? Some
nights--chiefly when there's a moon--I wake and lie there and fancy I am
on a horse. There's the smell of the horse and the leather, the creak of
the saddle, and we are riding like the devil or the wind, always over
plains that stretch out into more miles, however far I ride. I am bent
over the saddle, peering forward. That's what I had when my blood moved
too fast for me. Now I shall dream of fight. Playmate, what is it?"
"It isn't anything. I didn't speak."
"Yes, but there was that quick little breath. I keep hurting you
somehow. Do you suppose I want any of it except for you? I want to ride
to you. I want to fight because I could fight for you."
"Ah," she said sadly, "you think so now for a minute. But you had
forgotten me."
"Yes, I had," he owned. "That's being a man, too. We have to forget you
or we couldn't ride and we couldn't fight. But it's all for you."
There was the thunder again.
"I must go back," she said.
"Yes, it's going to rain. You must go. One minute. It won't come yet.
Does he know you have told Electra?"
"My father? Yes."
"What did he say?"
"He--accepted it." For some reason, she dared not tell him how that
acceptance troubled her. Osmond himself seemed like an unknown force as
ready to bring confusion as calm.
But he knew.
"You are afraid of him," he said. "Dear child, don't be afraid. Sit down
hard and say 'no' and 'no,' whatever he demands. You are here with us.
Grannie is an angel of light. She'll send for shining cohorts and
they'll camp round about you. There's Peter--your Peter. And I'll die
for you."
"No! no!" The assurance of his tone was terrifying to her. She saw him
dying in unnecessary sacrifice. "Nobody must die for me. We must all
live and be good children and do what grannie would want us to."
"Then the first thing is to run home and go to bed. The storm is coming.
Good-night, dear playmate. I'll follow on behind and see you don't get
lost."
"One minute!" She paused, not knowing how to say it. "Can't you take it
back?" she adventured. "What you said about my father?"
He laughed, with an undertone of wild emotion.
"Not even for you! I did want to kill him. If I got my hands on him, I
should want it again. But it was for you."
"Good-night."