Peter met his brother midway in the field, and waited for him.
"I'll go with you," he said.
"No," said Osmond, "I'm not going now. Come back to the shack."
"You're a regular night-owl," said Peter, as they turned. "When I don't
find you after dark, I know you're in the woods, prowling. What makes
you?"
"It's a good place to think things out,--and swear over 'em."
"What things, old man? You know I wouldn't tell. Nothing would tempt me
to."
Osmond laughed a little.
"If you care so much as that, I'll tell you," he said, with a sudden
harshness for himself in retrospect. "I go into the woods to think about
life, my life, my difference from other fellows."
They sat down on the bench at the door, and a whippoorwill, calling,
made the distance lonely. Peter had no answer for the truth he had
evoked. It was too harsh. Only a woman could have met it, and that with
kisses, not with words.
"Do you know," he said abruptly, "what all this makes me want?--this
horrible excitement?"
"No, boy."
"It makes me want to paint. I want to paint everything I see: Markham
MacLeod lying there in that bed of fern, Rose with all the life washed
out of her, and you now, your face coming out of the dark. Everything's
been unreal to me since it happened--except paint--and you."
"Poor old chap!" said Osmond. But he fled on from that concurrent
sympathy to a dearer plea. "Paint, Pete," he urged. "Let all the rest
go. Let MacLeod die. But you paint."
Peter was looking at him now, fascinated. The pale face out of the dark
was all one glowing life. Peter wondered at him, his strength, his
beauty. Again he felt as he had that morning, as if he had never known
his brother, and as if it would pay for any pains to comprehend that
pathetic and yet adventurous soul. Peter was more than half woman, with
his quick perception of what went on in other minds. He understood, at
that moment, that the great adventure of all is life itself: not, as it
seemed to him, to paint, to love, but to taste all things with this
richness that was beginning to be Osmond's, this hunger for the
forbidden, even, so it was hunger. Osmond had begun to recognize his own
nature, and for the first time his brother began to recognize him.
"Osmond," he said, in a wistful eagerness, very beguiling, "whatever you
did, I should believe in it."
Osmond looked at him with that faint sweet smile upon his face, and his
eyes offered hints of ineffable meanings.
"Would you, boy?" he asked.
Peter went on. It was almost like a woman's confession of her love.
"Osmond, you say you think about your life when you are alone. What do
you think?"
"I think it is full of passions as an egg is of meat. They have been
growing while I ignored them. I saw them marching before me and round
and round me. They thought they were my masters."
"What then?"
Osmond remembered how the morning seemed when he met Rose in the
sunlight, and touched her hand.
"Then," he said gravely, "I was their master. That's all."
"Oh," said Peter exultingly, "you'd be the master in the end. You're
great!"
"Pete," said Osmond suddenly, "is this death coming?"
"Is what death?"
"It's too queer for life."
"To sit here talking like this?"
"No, not that exactly, but the sense of things to come. It seems as if
life wasn't going to be the same again, and nothing was quite big enough
to come after things as they've been lately,--but death, and that's only
big enough because it's unknown."
"What will come?" asked Peter. He felt at once like a little boy, half
afraid, and afraid of his fear, yet with his brother to uphold him.
"We won't go to bed to-night, will we? We'll sit here, even if we hold
our tongues. I can't go to bed."
They did sit there for an hour or so. Peter spoke.
"What are you thinking, old man?"
"Of Rose."
It was not strange to Peter to hear him speak of her familiarly. He
returned,--
"I've been thinking of her, too."