"I am not in mourning."
"Well, Electra is. She hasn't put on black, but it's all over her. She's
perfectly shameless. I asked her this morning why she was hurrying her
sailing, and she said it was because he would wish it. There were things
to do for him."
"That he would wish it?"
"Your father. Don't you see? She's got an idea that she's his earthly
vicegerent, and there's some majestic poppycock about the Brotherhood. I
can't understand it, and I don't want to. All I know is, she's mad.
Bessie Grant, when I told the Lord I wanted things to happen, I didn't
mean this kind, and He knew it perfectly well."
Rose had risen and stood in grave attention.
"Oh, she mustn't do that," she said earnestly. "I must tell her."
"Well, go and tell her, then," said the old lady, turning back to Mrs.
Grant. "If you can make her listen, you'll do more than I can. I ought
to chaperon her, though you might as well chaperon the Lion of Lucerne.
Bessie!" And then as Rose left the room, she bent forward, and leaned
her head on grannie's breast. "Bessie," she repeated, "it's a miserable
world."
To grannie all ages were as one. The old and the young were alike
defenseless, when they were in trouble, and she put her arms about the
frail creature and held her warmly.
"Hush, dear!" she said, and forgot this was not one of her own children.
"Mother's sorry." Then they both smiled a little, but grannie went on:
"You must come right here, you know. Electra will be gone, and Billy,
and you don't want to carry on the house alone. You come here, dear, and
stay with me."
"Could I?" Madam Fulton lifted her tear-wet face. "If I could stay here
a little while, maybe I might pull myself together. I don't know how to
do it, Bessie. I don't know how to live. I never did."
Rose had run over to the other house in an unreasoning haste. Electra
was in the library, putting her desk in order. Her firm white hands were
busy, assorting and arranging. She turned her head as Rose came in, and,
without rising, spoke to her collectedly and bade her be seated. She was
older, Rose thought; she looked even like a different woman, not merely
one whom middle age had overtaken. Purpose sat on her brow, and her eyes
looked straight at you, as if she bade you tell your business and be
gone. The one effect upon Rose was to make her sorry, infinitely sorry
for her. Electra had broken the globe of her hopes upon a rock, and she
was not even going to walk on and leave the shards forgotten there. Rose
spoke at once, to use her courage while she felt it hot.
"Madam Fulton tells me you are going abroad."
"Yes. I sail next week."
"Is it with any purpose? Electra, did my father make you love him?"
Electra faced her. Color flowed into her cheeks. Her eyes glowed beyond
any promise they had ever given.
"I am glad you ask me that," she said, and her full tone was strangely
unlike the even consonance of the old Electra's voice. At last she
forgot how she did things or why. Life was sweeping her along. "He never
made me love him. It was ordained. It was like nothing else on earth."
Rose felt cold with the sad knowledge of it.
"Yes," she said, "he had great power over people."
A smile stole upon Electra's lips.
"We had planned it all," she said. "I was to go to Paris. I was to work
with him. Now that he is gone, I must carry on the work for both of us."
Rose regarded her with a wistful compassion, not knowing how much she
might help her, and yet wishing to offer all she had.
"Electra," she said, "what do you mean by carrying on the work?"
"His work, the Brotherhood."
"But, dear child, you would have to submit yourself for years and years
to all sorts of tests before you would be trusted. I don't even know
whether it won't fall apart, now he has gone. It may do that and
reorganize in a different form. And how would you find it? You think of
it as a definite body with headquarters anybody can reach. Why, Electra,
you might stay a dozen years in Paris and not put your finger on it."
Still Electra turned to her that look of rapt allegiance. She heard
apparently, yet the words made no impression on her fixed resolve. Now
she spoke, and rather sweetly. All the tones of her voice, all her
looks, had a reminiscent value, as if they were echoes from her lost
relation with him.
"He told me where to write," she said, as if she were satisfied with
that. "I shall go there."
"I know, the address for his letters. But he was never there. Now that
he is gone, the place will be for other uses. Everything connected with
the Brotherhood keeps fluctuating, changing. There would be no safety
otherwise."
Electra was looking at her in that removed, patient way that made
another woman of her. It was almost like a mother who has cares to think
of and can spare no time from them for alien presences.
"I must go," she said again. "He would wish it."
Rose now had her moment of delay. Her mind went back over that weary
road, to the past the present had so illumined for her. It tired her to
think the trouble ever attendant on her father's life was to go on,
ripple after ripple, now that he had sunken into the mystery of things.
Once over the horror of his death, there had been a throb of
thankfulness that at least an end had been made to his great power of
bringing pain. And now here was another life to be thrown into the void
after him, another woman to love a dream. She awoke from that momentary
musing, to hear Electra saying,--
"You will excuse me, if I go on working? I sail so soon, and I must
leave everything in order."
"Electra," said Rose. Then she called her name again, as if appealing to
the softest of her moods. "How can I tell you! Electra, you mustn't love
my father."
Again that swift smile came to Electra's face. The face itself was all a
burning truth. The old crude precision in her seemed suddenly to have
flowered into this warm candor that spoke and liked to hear itself
disclosing, regardless of its auditor.
"You cannot"--she looked at Rose with happy inspiration, as if she had
been the first to make the saying--"you can't kill love with reason."
Again Rose deliberated. When she spoke it was with an air of sad
decisiveness.
"Electra," she said wistfully, "did he ask you to marry him?"
"I never thought of it," said Electra at once, in the simplest
unreserve. "It would have seemed too small, to limit it and bound it."
"Yes. That is what he would have said, too small. You were a quick
pupil."
Electra glowed.
"I know what he would have said, if he had had time. He did not need to
tell me."
Rose sat wondering what argument would move her.
"Electra," she ventured, "have you had any curiosity about my father's
relations to other people?"
"He had no time to tell me," said Electra, with a proud dignity.
"No, he would not have told you. He never confused his relations. Did
you know he was adored by women?"
Electra's face flamed. She made no answer. If she could have set forth
adequately what was in her tumultuous thoughts, she would have told Rose
that nothing seemed so entirely her own as her part in Markham MacLeod's
life. She had no curiosity over his past, no doubt of what her future
would have been with him, accepting what he chose to give her, and
finding it enough.
Rose pursued her into the cloister of her thought.
"Do you know, Electra," she was urging, "do you know how women devoted
themselves to him?"
"They must have devoted themselves to him. I am one of them. I am proud
to be."
"Ah, but, Electra, to take so much and give nothing!"
"How do you dare to say he gave nothing?"
"I know. I was slow in learning. I learned it first through your
brother. No, don't put me off with a gesture. I must speak of him. It
was he who showed me the cruelty of my father's attitude toward women.
He laughed over it, but he showed me."
"He was never cruel." Electra seemed to be dreaming away in a sad
reminiscence of his kindness.
"But to promise so much, Electra, and give nothing! He implied to every
one, I have no doubt, that she was his great helper, that he would have
married her if he had not been set aside by his work. That was like him.
He was a sponge drinking up devotion."
"Yes, and he gave it back to the hungry and the thirsty and the cold."
"I don't know. I do know what he absorbed. One woman did translations
for him. She worked like a dog, and he paid her with one of his looks.
Another--she was a titled lady--kept his suite of rooms ready for him,
and when he came, treated him like a prince. And they all had this sense
of intimacy with him. Each thought she was the only one. Each felt she
was divided from him by hard circumstance, but she should possess him in
the end."
"In heaven?" asked Electra, eager for the slightest knowledge of him.
"No, not in heaven. My father always said his expectations stopped here.
He never carried the game on there."
"The great souls"--Electra began, and stopped. Trouble was upon her
brow. She knew there was a goodly reason for every act he did, yet human
jealousy was in her. She had to seek out arguments. "The great souls are
different," she halted. "They are many-sided. Look at Goethe--"
But Rose had heard that reason. She was tired of it.
"It's a pity they make it so hard for other people," she said wearily.
"Because they are great, must they be greedy, too? But that was my
father. He may have been a great man, but he was not the man you think
him. If you saw him as he was,--he was a big, dominating animal, that's
all."
Electra sat staring at her, condemning, Rose knew, not Markham MacLeod,
but his daughter. The charm of his mastery was still upon her. Rose and
Peter, more mobile than she, had escaped with the cutting of his cord of
life. It was as if they had been under a crude natural magnetism, and
now that the magician had gone into another room, they were free. But
Electra had petrified in the attitude where he had left her. She had a
pitying certainty that Rose had never known him. Something like
indignation came now into her face. She spoke passionately:--
"Why do you want to take it away from me?"
Rose could not answer. Tears were in her eyes from pure pity at the loss
and pain of it all.
"We knew each other so short a time," brooded Electra; and it was
apparent that she believed the relation had been as much to MacLeod as
to her. "Why can't you let me have the comfort of it?"
"If it didn't mean so much time, so much energy wasted! If you wouldn't
devote your life to it,--you might, you know. It's quite like you,
Electra. And that would be a pity; because he was never for a minute
such a person as you think him,--never, Electra, never in the world."
Electra rounded upon her in a flash of indignation.
"Tell me what you think him."
Rose's mind ran back to that first night when, with the daring inspired
in her by their meeting, she had given Osmond a portrait of her father.
Now was the time to paint it again, but, for some reason, she could not.
The man had not changed, but his aims obscured him. Behind them, he was
nothing, but they were large enough to make his monument. Instead of
answering directly, she found herself saying,--
"I have had such letters about him!"
"From the Brotherhood?"
"Yes. And they will keep on coming for a long time now, because it is
everywhere, you know, in far, far-off places. And there's a tremendous
loyalty in them, not only to him but to the Brotherhood."
"How can you read them and not be loyal, too!"
Rose considered why she could. Was it because the Brotherhood seemed, in
her latest acquaintance with it, to have all the seeds of the old
conditions that made a world of hate? If it had been the pure bond it
promised to be, could even her father's sins have quenched the flame in
her? Then she remembered one night when, in her father's absence, some
one had spoken like a poet and created, in shining imagery, a new world.
She had seen it, the new world, hanging like a crystal in the rejoicing
sky.
"One night Ivan Gorof spoke," she began.
Electra's brows came together.
"He was the man that died."
"How did you know?"
"Peter told me."
"Yes. Well, there was a time when Ivan Gorof was like a flame. He was
more moved than any one. He was a student,--and so enthusiastic, so
believing,--I can't tell you! Afterwards he changed. That came suddenly.
But this night he spoke about the Brotherhood as he wanted it to be. He
said it could be a chain of hands round the earth, of people who wanted
to do justice and show mercy. The old oppressors killed, he said. The
Brotherhood must not kill. It can put to death,--but justly."
"What did he mean by justly?"
"Ah, that I don't know. I don't believe he knew, that night. He was like
a man seeing a vision. But if such a thing could grow and grow, he said,
that would be the kingdom of God. It would begin with the poor. Then
some day a king would join it, and there would be rejoicing and wonder
because some would think the king was mad and others would know it meant
a great step upward. And they would all choose law, not liberty as the
Brotherhood sees it. And then, he said, there would be a new heaven and
a new earth, and it wouldn't be possible for oppressors to live, because
everybody would love love and be afraid of hate. But it would all come
through men who hated injustice more when they did it than when it was
done to them."
"But that," said Electra, in no great interest, "is only Christianity."
"Is it? I don't know about that. I thought it was Ivan Gorof."
"What did he say?"
"My father?"
"The chief."
"It was reported to him, and I believe he said it was visionary. He
probably smiled a little. He said there would be no peace without the
sword. And afterwards Ivan told him to his face--I heard him--that it
would come by the sword, but not the sword of war. It must be the sword
kept hanging in the temple to be used for the god of the temple."
"Was the chief indignant?"
"He disapproved. Ivan was ignored, after that. He was quietly crowded
out. My father," she could not resist saying,--"my father was very
intolerant of new leadership."
"Naturally! He thought of the general good."
Rose sighed.
"Perhaps he did, Electra; I should like to think he did."
But she had told Electra nothing yet, she realized, to keep her from
going forth with an ignorant intent. She tried once more, not to destroy
the image of MacLeod, but to make it a just one. Yet if it were better
to have the image broken, that, too, must be done.
"My father," she said, "took life like a great play."
"A game!" put in Electra quickly. She had heard him use the word, though
as he said it, it seemed noble.
"Yes. He was always rearranging scenes on the big stage, ringing down
the curtain and putting it up on another act. But what Ivan Gorof
wanted--that silent spread of good--that he couldn't understand. He
wanted war and himself a big figure in the midst."
"He was a leader!" cried Electra jealously, "the greatest of all."
Rose smiled wistfully.
"I haven't weakened your faith, have I?" she asked. "You don't doubt the
wisdom of throwing yourself into this."
Electra rose suddenly from the desk, with an air of terminating the
interview. Her voice rang like metal.
"If you talked to me until you were an old woman, you couldn't convince
me. He was great--great! I should have followed him, if he had lived. I
shall follow him all the faster now."
Rose, too, came to her feet.
"I almost think," she said, "I shall hear of your speaking for the
cause."
A flush went over Electra's face. She looked wonderfully equipped for
some high task, and also as if she recognized her own value and was glad
she had that to give. Rose went back to Ivan Gorof and his great night.
"I keep remembering more and more of what he said," she mused. "He said
the Brotherhood, as he saw it, would have its way because it was so
beautiful. It would be like men in shining raiment regarded because they
made a light, and people would see the light and want to walk by it."
"I must put that down," said Electra absorbedly. "I may at any time have
to talk about him as I knew him."
"Ivan Gorof?"
"The chief. Was it Ivan Gorof who said that?"
Immediately, Rose saw, the words had lost their lustre. They were of no
value, save as they had the sanction of MacLeod. Electra moved a pace
nearer the door. She was impatient, Rose believed, to have her gone.
"Good-by, Electra," she said lingeringly and sadly. "I can't persuade
you, can I?"
"No, you can't persuade me."
"And you glory in it!"
"Yes. And I thank God I have something to glory in."
At last she had it, the purpose of her life, though it was only a
memory. But after all, what might she not turn it into? For she was
pressing on as rashly as if the army of her desires were not at the
cliff's edge below which foamed the sea, and in the sea, perhaps, lay
glorious disaster.
"I shall be in Paris within a month," Rose hesitated. "If I can do
anything for you there,--I told you the Brotherhood was not easily
found, but I could introduce you to the leaders."
"They will flock about you," said Electra, with a candid bitterness,
"because you are his daughter."
"Not long. There are things to do,--money to make over to them, money
that stood in his name. Everything was in his name. I don't know how
much he had of his own, so I shall keep my mother's and give back the
rest."
"That will be right," said Electra. She did not add "ethically."
Outlines had grown too sharp for that.
Rose held out her hand, and Electra, after a perceptible hesitation,
took it in her firm grasp. Having it, she seemed warmed, through the
contact, to something more humble and more natural. Still holding it,
she looked Rose in the face, as if she tried to read her deepest self.
"Tell me," she said, and stopped.
"Yes, Electra." The girl's voice was very soft. She felt as if she could
tell Electra anything that would help her.
"Did he love you?" The words came with difficulty, whether from jealousy
or pure interest Electra herself could not say.
Rose stood a moment, not so much considering her answer as grieved that
she must give it.
"No, Electra," she said then. "My father loved nobody,--but himself."
Then, as Electra dropped her hand, she went away. But after three paces
she returned, doubtful of her own judgment, but ready to venture it.
"Electra," she said, "the papers have begun already to report a woman's
speeches to the Brotherhood. You saw that yesterday."
Electra bowed her head silently. She was white to the lips.
"That woman was Ivan Gorof's mistress. My father separated them, for a
time, just as he is separating you now from all your past. Ivan Gorof
accused him of it, and next day he died. But I know, as well as I know
anything, that now she has gone back to Ivan Gorof's memory. She will
preach the Brotherhood as he saw it. Don't you see, Electra, until a man
rises that is strong enough, she will lead the Brotherhood herself?"
Electra struck her hands together in a passionate, unconsidered gesture.
But she recalled herself immediately.
"Good-by," she said coldly, and, turning about, went in.