Later that same morning, Peter was hurrying along the road, for the
carriage was due and MacLeod had not returned. Peter was not more than
reasonably sorry to lose his chief, because he meant to follow soon. He
had the excited sense of being ready for flight, of great freedom before
him and strength in his wings, and of leaving Osmond and grannie with
regret, yet happily, for something untried and as wonderful as youth. He
ran along the road, hat in hand, in love with the morning breeze, and
Electra met him. She looked wan, he saw, and with an incredulous pang,
he questioned whether she could be moved by their separation. But he was
glad of a definite and hurried question to ask.
"Where is MacLeod?"
A look like hope flashed into her face. She stopped and turned half
about, as if for instant flight back to the house.
"Was he coming to me?" she asked breathlessly.
"We thought he might be there."
"Did he say he was coming?" Her eagerness looked like hunger for a
desired good, slipping, by some chance, away from her.
"No! no! he may have gone to the plantation. I'll run down there and
find him."
He hurried on, and Electra, watching his light, easy lopes, wished she,
too, were a man and running to find Markham MacLeod.
At the pasture-bars, in a bed of roadside fern, Peter found him. MacLeod
lay majestically, stretched at length, upon his side, as if some one had
disposed him in the attitude of sleep. Peter knew. Yet he stooped and
touched one of the beautifully shaped hands with his finger. He stood
there a long time, it seemed to him, looking not at the figure at his
feet, but off into the morning sky, and MacLeod was not in his mind:
only Osmond and what Osmond had said about the lust for fight. Osmond
seemed to fill the world. He had wished to kill the man, but God instead
had killed him. Yet the other thing might have been. Peter wondered that
he had not realized what his brother was to him, and again that he had
too often foregone Osmond's companionship, this summer of their reunion,
for lesser loyalties. He comprehended him, at the moment, with an
exaggerated passion that was pain: a gigantic figure, all sacrifice, all
patient truthfulness, and, in its own bounded life, as much to be loved
and protected as a woman, and yet untrained and ready for a savage deed.
And all the time Electra was advancing rapidly toward him on the road,
aimlessly, but, as she afterwards believed, drawn by some premonition of
what she was to find. Her approach broke Peter's fearful vision. She was
like a figure walking into his dream, and he hurried toward her,
remembering what she must not see. He motioned to her harshly with his
hand.
"Go back!" he called.
But Electra came inevitably on. Then Peter placed himself before her.
"Something has happened," he said quietly, while she looked him in the
face. "Go home."
But now she was gazing past him, and the figure in the bracken caught
her sight. With a low cry, the inarticulate sound that throws suffering
woman back to her kinship with the mother brute, she ran past him and
stooped over MacLeod; Peter, dull with feeling, thought she tried to
raise his head, and failing that, she took the hand and nursed it on her
bosom. Peter judged apathetically that he had never really known
Electra; she looked now like a woman numb with grief over a dead child.
Then he waked himself out of his maze.
"Don't!" he heard himself calling. "People will come."
"Who will come?" she returned sharply, as if she challenged them all to
show why this should not be her dead. Then she wakened. "Go!" she cried.
"Get help. It can't be true."
"I will call the men. We can get him home among us."
He ran over the wall and on to the field where men were hoeing. When
they had dropped their work and followed him, they found Electra sitting
there by the roadside, as if she were the one mourner over the dead, and
she did not rise until they stooped to lift him, and arranged how he
should be carried. Then she said to Peter, again as if it were her
right,--
"Have him taken to my house."
Peter stared at her, but he remembered Rose.
"That will be better," he said; and added, "but who will tell her?"
"His daughter?" said Electra, in her clear tone. "I will tell her. But
there is a great deal to do before that. She can wait."
So they walked along the road like a strange funeral procession, Electra
in front, as if she had a right to lead. She turned in at her own gate,
and they followed, and she walked on up the steps and into the library,
where they laid him down. Madam Fulton and Billy Stark had gone for a
drive, and the house, in its morning order, looked as if it had been
prepared for the solemnity of this entrance. Now Electra's methodical
capacity came into play. She sent one man for the doctor and another to
the kitchen for hot water and for brandy. But when they were hurriedly
dispersed, she turned to Peter and said, with a heart-breaking quiet,--
"And yet, he is dead!"
She sat down upon the floor beside the couch and laid her head on the
dead man's heart. Peter knew it was to listen for a flutter there, but
with his sensitive apprehension of all emotion, he felt also that she
was glad to put her head upon MacLeod's breast. He was conscious of
being useless in his inactivity, but he could only stand and stare down
at them, the dead man and the mourning woman. Presently Electra got up
and stood, dry-eyed, and looked at him.
"He was coming to me," she said, in awe at the loneliness of the event.
"I couldn't sleep last night. I wish I had known a little more. Instead
of thinking about him, I could have met him. I could have been with
him."
Peter shuddered.
"I am glad you were not with him."
Electra was not listening. She had placed her hand on the hair of the
fallen man, tenderly and yet with reverence.
"He is splendid, Peter, isn't he?" she said, as if she wondered at life
and its fleeting forms. "He looks like a god, sleeping." Some echo of
her words came back to her, and she felt a momentary pleasure at their
sound. Then, very shortly it seemed, men came, the doctor and others who
had authority, and Electra was turned out of the room.
"Go upstairs," Peter besought her.
But she stepped out, bare-headed, into the air.
"No," she answered, "I am going to tell his daughter."
"No!" Suddenly Peter remembered how little she was fitted to be a kindly
messenger. "No, Electra. I will go."
Electra looked at him in a calm surprise.
"He would wish it," she said. "He would wish me to do everything." And
she was gone.
Peter went back into the room, where there were quick voices and
peremptory demands. Markham MacLeod was being interrogated in a way that
had never befallen him before. His body was being asked to bear witness
of the fashion by which it had come to its dumb estate, wherein it could
not compel others, but was most ruthlessly at their will.
Rose, at grannie's knee, in a mute gratitude that now she was to stay
here, because it had been wonderfully decreed, saw Electra coming up the
walk. She ran to meet her light-heartedly; in her flooding delight it
seemed to her as if even Electra might acquiesce in her reprieve.
At the foot of the steps they met, Rose all pleadingness, as if again
she begged Electra to love her. But Electra delivered her news
straightway. She felt like nothing but the messenger of MacLeod.
"He is dead," she said, with the utmost quietude.
Rose stared at her.
"Who is dead?" she managed to ask.
"Markham MacLeod."
Rose leaned forward and gazed still in her face. She was well convinced
that this look was real: a look of hopeless grief, though the words were
so fantastic.
"Electra," she said gently, and even put out a hand and touched her on
the arm. "Electra! What is it?"
"I have told you," said Electra, "he is dead. We found him in the ferns,
Peter and I. He is at my house. We thought you ought to know it."
"Come!" said Rose. She seized her hand, and Electra pulled it away
again, quietly, and yet as if it had no business in that hasty grasp.
"Let me go home with you."
"If you wish," said Electra. "I suppose you have a right to be there.
They may want you." And in silence they hurried down the path together
and out into the road. At Electra's own gate, she turned to Rose.
"It is strange, isn't it?" she said.
"What, Electra?"
"That he could die."
"Electra, he has not died. No one has died." Rose spoke gently, knowing
that in some way the other woman had been shocked and her reason shaken.
"Come into the house and we'll find Peter."
But at the moment Peter and the doctor appeared together in the doorway,
and the doctor turned to give orders to a servant in the hall. Peter saw
them and came quickly down to them. It was apparent to Rose that
something had happened.
"Tell her, Peter," said Electra, in some impatience. "She won't believe
me. Tell her he is dead."
Peter and Rose stood looking at each other, she questioning and he in
sad assent. Then there crept upon her face a look that was the companion
to Electra's. The color faded, her eyes widened.
"My father?" she breathed, and Peter nodded.
"Yes," said Electra, as if she were astonished at them both and their
dull wits, "Markham MacLeod is dead."
That evening grannie was in her own room, and Peter and Rose, below,
talked intermittently of that strange morning.
"It is incredible, Peter, isn't it," she began, "for him to die like
this?"
He nodded.
"I expected violence," he said. "We all expected it."
"Isn't it strange, too, that I can't feel grief! I'm neither glad nor
sorry. I feel very still."
"The whole world will feel grief," said Peter loyally.
"Yes, but to me--Peter, it is just as if he were not a man, not
something I had loved, but a thing that was great to look at and had no
soul. It was like a tree falling, or a huge rock undermined. Don't you
see? As if it were the natural thing, and there was no other way
possible."
She began to feel the inexorability of great revenges, and to see that
when a soul has for a long time denied us answer in our needs, we refuse
to believe that it can speak. MacLeod had grown to be a beautiful
spectacle of the universe, full of natural health and power. Now that he
had fallen, there was nothing left. She had no vestige to remember of
those responses in the dim reaches of being when one calls and another
answers: homely loyalties, sweet kindnesses, even overlaid by later
pain. He had lived what he called the natural life, and its breath had
failed him and he was no more. Some time, she knew, in this dull
brooding, she might try to whip herself up into an expected grief; but
now, in the bare honesty of the moment, she accepted the event as it
was.
"Osmond has been great," said Peter.
She started back to life.
"What has he done?"
"Everything. He's been Electra's right-hand man. I'll run down to see
him a minute presently."
He hoped Rose would send some word of appreciative thanks. Old Osmond,
he knew, would like it. But she got up and gave him her hand, in her
grave affectionate way, and said good-night. She remembered how Osmond
and her father had met in contest, and she knew Osmond would not seek
her until Markham MacLeod was wholly gone.