Chapter 11

Billy shook his head. He was not going to be dragged as far as that. He was sorry for her, but she had had her whistle and she must pay for it. The old lady was beginning again in a weak voice,--

"You see, Electra, that book isn't what you think. It isn't what anybody thinks. I--I made it up."

Electra was about to speak, but her grandmother forestalled her.

"Don't you go and offer me wine. You get it into your head once and for all that I'm telling you a fact and that you've got to believe it. I made up my book of recollections. They're not true, not one of them. As I remember, there isn't one. The letters I wrote myself."

Electra was staring at her in a neutrality which was not even wonder.

Finally she spoke; her awed voice trembled.

"The Brook Farm letters!"

Perhaps it was this reverent hesitation which restored Madam Fulton to something of her wonted state.

"For heaven's sake, Electra," she fulminated, "what is there so sacred about Brook Farm? If anybody is going to make up letters from anywhere, why shouldn't it be from there?"

Electra was looking at Billy Stark as if she bade him save her from these shocks or tell her the whole world was rocking. But Billy twirled his eyeglass, and watched it twirling. Finally he had to meet her eye.

"Yes," he said, with a composure he did not feel, "the book is apparently not quite straight--a kind of joke, in fact."

Electra rose. She looked very thoughtful and also, Madam Fulton thought, with a quaking at her guilty heart, rather terrible. She was pinched at the nostrils and white about the lips.

"What I must do first," she was saying, as if to herself, "is to notify the club we cannot possibly have our inquiry afternoon."

"Notify them!" repeated Madam Fulton, in a spasm of fearful admiration. "Are you going to tell all those women?"

Electra included her in that absent glance. Now that there were things to arrange, dates to cancel, topics to consider, she was on her own ground. She spoke with dignity:--

"I shall most certainly tell nobody. A thing like that had better die as soon as possible. I cannot"--she turned upon her grandmother, a look of passionate interrogation on her face--"I cannot understand you."

Madam Fulton answered humbly, yet with some eagerness, as if Electra might readily be excused from so stiff a task,

"You never would, Electra, not if you lived a hundred years."

Electra was the accuser now, age and kinship quite forgotten.

"Why did you do a thing like that?"

"For fun," said the old lady faintly.

"For fun!" The tree of sin grew and flowered as she thought upon it. "You offered to buy this house with that money, unclean money from the sales of that fraudulent book!"

Madam Fulton turned to Billy Stark with a childlike gesture of real surprise.

"Is it unclean money, Billy?" she asked. "Do you call it that?"

"We mustn't go too far," Billy temporized, with a warning look at Electra.

She was on the way to the door. There she paused.

"I do not fully understand it yet," she was saying. "It is monstrous. I dare say I never shall understand it." Then they heard her rustling up the stairs.

Madam Fulton and her old friend looked at each other. When a door closed overhead, Billy's face relaxed and Madam Fulton put a hand over her lips.

"Billy," said she weakly, "am I so bad?"

"You're a dear, Florrie. Don't you worry."

"But, Billy, is she right?"

"Oh, yes, my dear, she's right."

"I'm a shocking person, then!"

"Yes, you're truly shocking. But you're a dear, Florrie, you're a dear."

XV

And now it was night again and Rose hurried away to the tryst. She made no doubt that she should find him there.

"Playmate!" she called.

"Here," answered the voice. "There's your chair. There's your throne."

She plunged into the thick of the confidence intended for him.

"He has come."

"I know it. Peter told me."

"It's all as bad as I thought. Playmate, I'm afraid I shall have to go away."

"Can't you stand up to it?"

"I don't know. It's pretty bad."

"I guess it will have to come to your telling me about it."

"Yes. You see, the worst of it is, he wants to make me love somebody I can't love."

"Peter?"

"No, no, not Peter. Not nice, like Peter."

"Could you love Peter?"

"Why should you ask me that? Peter belongs to Electra."

"Not so very much. Could you love him if he asked you to?"

"Oh, that's not fair, playmate!"

"Yes, it is, when the night's as dark as this and it's only you and me. Could you love Peter?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"I want to know everything about you. Could you love Peter?"

For some reason, she felt constrained to use one of her small obstinacies.

"I couldn't love any man when another woman stood between us."

"That's a good girl. Did you love your husband?"

"My husband!" She choked upon the word. "Tom Fulton! Did you know him?"

"Oh, yes, I knew him."

"Was it likely I loved him?"

He was considering, it seemed.

"Yes," he said then, "it's very likely. Tom was a handsome devil."

"But he was--a devil."

"A woman wouldn't know that, not at first."

"No. I didn't, at first."

"Who is this other man?"

"A prince."

"So you would be a princess."

"No, I should not be a princess." Her voice had a curious sound.

"What has your father to do with it?"

"Everything. The prince can advance him in certain ways. My father plays for high stakes."

"Are you sure you don't want to be a princess?" The voice seemed to coax her. "Even if you do want it very much," it seemed to say, "why not relinquish it and stay here under the tree?"

"No," she said, "I don't want to be a princess, even if I could be. And I don't want anything my father can offer me, or buy for me, or steal for me."

"Then, playmate, when he comes back, you'll have to stand up to him or--cut."

At that moment he saw before him the imagined picture of her face with the tears upon it.

"It isn't easy," she was saying. "If you knew my father, you would see. You can't withstand him, he looks so kind. You can't refuse him, because he seems to want nothing but your good. You can't say you won't have a splendid time with him, because you simply have it."

"Are you sure he is so bad?"

"I am sure," she answered gravely. "He is very bad. And it is not because he wills to be bad. It is because he wills to have power, and as if he were better fitted to have power than almost anybody--except that he is not good. Why, do you know what power he has? He wears a ring, the seal of the Brotherhood. Whatever order is stamped with that seal is carried out, even if it is thousands of miles away. When Ivan Gorof died"--she stopped, shuddering.

"What was that?"

"I can't tell you. It is too dreadful. He withstood my father. And when he was found, they picked up in the chamber a bit of red wax on a shred of paper--there was nothing else--but I know and we all know it was a part of the seal that held the warrant they read to him--the assassins--before he died."

"Did your father sentence him to death?"

"Who else? Sometimes I get thinking about it at night, and then it seems to me as if all the people in the world had been delivered into his hand. That is because I know I have grown to be afraid of him."

"Was he always cruel to you?"

"Oh, never! never in the world! When I was little, I traveled about with him, and I had the best time a child ever had. I was fêted, and carried on shoulders, and made much of because I was his daughter. Then I grew up and it all--changed." Her voice fell. She remembered the snare of the fowler, but that she could not tell him.

"Is he unkind to you now?"

"Never! it is unbroken kindness,--a benevolence, shall I call it? But it terrifies me. For under it all is that unbending will. And I keep hardening myself against it, and yet I know the time will come when he will have his way, because he is stronger than I."

"You must not let him be stronger than you. The birch bends, but it can resist."

"You don't know! If he were outwardly cruel, I could defy him. But he is like the sun that nourishes and then burns. He seems to have such life in himself, such great inborn power, no one can resist it. You almost feel as if you were going against natural laws when you go against him; and you know you'll be beaten because the laws are inevitable."

"That wasn't what you said of him that first night down in the shack."

"No! I scoffed at him then a little. He was so far away! Now I have been near him again and I tremble."

"But as you picture him, he's all good, all benevolence. You could convince a man like that."

"Never! He hasn't any soul. He is this great natural force that radiates power."

"Power!" echoed Osmond. "No wonder he's drunk on it. I could go down on my knees and worship it."

"Not such as his!"

"Such as anybody's, so long as it is power."

For the first time she began to comprehend his mortal hunger.

"Don't you go over to him, too," she said jealously. "Peter is under his foot. So is Electra. If you go over, I shall be alone."

"I shall never go anywhere to leave you alone." Then, after a moment, he continued, "So you are not sure whether the prince loves you?"

"He would call it that. It is not that to me."

"Of course he loves you!"

"Don't be too sure, playmate. I know the world. You know your garden."

"Then why does he want you?"

"It's a game. My father wants to buy him. He may want to buy my father. Then maybe he wants the prestige of owning the woman with the most beautiful hair in Europe."

"Is that your hair, playmate?"

"He says so."

"Well, a man might do worse than gamble for a thing like that."

"You amaze me." But he would not continue that, and presently she asked him, "What have you been thinking about lately?"

"About you."

"When?"

"All day long while I was at work, and every night when I sat here and you didn't come."

"Was it a happy thing to do?"

"Very happy."

"Even when I didn't come?"

"Even when you didn't come."

"Then it's just as nice to think about me as to talk to me?"

"Almost!" He said it quite cheerfully, and through her pique she had to laugh.

"What do you think, playmate?"

"I make a world and I put you in it. Then I put myself in, too."

When he spoke like this, simply and even with a gay indifference, she wondered whether the world was a pageant to him, which it cost him no pains to relinquish, and whether, too, though he had great kindliness and understanding, deep emotions were forbidden him. At least, since he was impersonal and remote, she could ask him anything.

"What is your world? Is it like this?"

"It isn't my world. It's yours and mine. We go about in it, having a bully time, and nobody looks at us or asks us questions."

"Don't they see us?"

"Oh, yes, I dare say. Only they don't stare after us and say, 'Why do they do thus and so?' They don't even speak of your beautiful hair. I talk about that myself, all the time, and you like to have me. But we should both think it mighty queer if anybody else did."

"Do we speak to the other people?"

"Sometimes. If we want to. If you see a diamond or a sapphire, or I see a new patent weeder, then we say, 'We want to buy that.' But we don't have much time for other folks. We travel a lot. You tell me about pictures and Alps and thrones and principalities, because I don't know much except about grafting trees and sowing seed at the best time. But always we come home here to the plantation because I find that's where I feel most at peace. And you are at peace here, too. I am delighted when I find that out."

"Be delighted now, then. I am at peace here, more than anywhere else."

"And when we are here, we live in our house. At first, I built a large one up there on the hill, and I had you bring over pictures for it from abroad, and I planted trees, and it was very grand. But I wasn't contented there, and you weren't, because of it. You saw at once that my shell had got to fit me, and the plain house did. So I kicked over the big house, and we lived in the old one."

"With grannie?"

"Yes, only I didn't think very much about her. She was always there, I suppose, like the sun through the windows, very kind and warm, and glad we were contented; but it was our house. That's what makes the charm of everything--that it's yours and mine. I couldn't sleep in the house though. It had to be outdoors."

"Did I have my hammock swung in the upper veranda?"

He laughed out delightedly.

"How did you know? Yes, I slept down here or under the fir by the house, but you were afraid of caterpillars and you had to be up there."

"I'm not afraid of anything else," she explained humbly. "Not of bears or anything in the deep woods. But caterpillars crawl so!"

"However, it didn't make any difference where you were, because while we were asleep it was just as it is while we are awake--there is a fine thread that goes from me to you. There might be processions of people between us, chariots and horses and marching armies, but they couldn't break the thread."

"And what do we do all day?"

"Talk. Think. I think to you and you think back to me."

"But we must work. If we don't, you'll get tired of me." She spoke out of sad knowledge.

"Why, playmate!"

The reproach in his voice recalled her, and she was ashamed to find her belief less warm than his.

"Well," he conceded, "maybe we work. I go on grafting and sowing seeds and sending things to market, and you sit on a stone and sing."

"Shall I sing to you now?"

"No, playmate. It makes me sad."

"I could sing happy songs."

"That wouldn't make any difference. When you sing, it wakens something in me, some discontent, some longing bigger than I am, and that's not pleasure. It is pain."

"Are you afraid of pain?"

He waited a long time. Then he asked her,--

"Have you ever known pain?"

"Yes. I thought my mind was going."

"But not pain of your body?"

"Oh, no, not that."

"The pain of the body is something to be afraid of. If we have it once, we cringe when we see it coming. But your singing--can I tell you what it wakens in me? No, for I don't know. Pain, the premonition of pain. Something I must escape."

"Yet I was to sit by and sing to you while you were at work."

"Yes, but that would be when we were quite content." It was the first wistful hint that things were lacking to him. He could not be contented; yet, against reason, his manner told a different, braver story.

"You said," she began, "if armies came between us, they could not break the little thread. Suppose I go away?"

"That wouldn't break it. Don't you suppose my thought can run to London or Rome? It isn't worth much if it can't."

"Suppose I"--she stopped, appalled at herself for the thought, but jealously anxious to be told.

"Suppose you marry the prince? That would be dreadful, because you don't love him. But it wouldn't break the thread. It would muffle it, I guess. We couldn't think back and forth on it. But it would be there."

Immediately it seemed to her that she had something even more precious than she had guessed, something not to be imperiled.

"I must not do anything to muffle it," she said. "Either with the prince--or any one."

"The only thing I'm afraid of," he went on, "is that you won't stand up to your father. Why, you must, playmate, if you feel like that about him."

She answered bitterly.

"I am afraid, I suppose."

Osmond spoke out sharply in the tone of a man who dismisses dreams.

"Don't be afraid. Stand up and fight."

Her pathetic voice recalled him.

"But think! You said you were afraid of pain. You ought to know what fear is."

He answered slowly, and in what seemed almost exaltation,--

"I am afraid of pain; but when the time comes I shan't wait for it. I shall go out to meet it."

"What do you mean?"

He seemed another creature, all steel and fire, not an impersonal thing speaking out of the dark.

"Don't you know we all want something big, something bigger than we are to fight and conquer? Before we leave this earth, we want to make our mark on it, that shall not be washed away."

"Are you ambitious?"

"I don't know. I do know I mean to live--when I am free."

Alarm was quickening in her. He seemed to be withdrawing into dark halls where she could not see to follow. He was building the house of his heart, yet there were apparently other edifices, fortresses or dungeons, it might be, where he walked alone.

"When you are free?" she insisted.

"When Pete has got his gait and I needn't back him. When grannie is dead--dear grannie! Then I shall do my one free act."

She was so shaken that it seemed as if the night itself terrified her, not he alone.

"Not"--she paused, and then whispered it. "Do you mean--to kill yourself?"

He laughed.

"Not on your life! I am going to get all that's coming to me. But I am going to get it in my own particular way."

"I cannot understand you."

"Of course you can't. But remember all of you have something to bring to life. You give as well as take. You have your beauty and your voice. Peter has his brush. Grannie has her mothering gift. That's better than being a queen. There's power in it. Your prince has his inheritance. I have had to look about and choose my gift. I chose it long ago."

"Is it something that makes you happy?"

"It made me wild when I discovered it, because I saw it was mine. Nothing had ever been mine before. As it comes nearer and nearer, it looks pretty grim to me. But it's mine, still. When men used to go out to fight, they must have said a good many times, 'This is a nasty situation, but it's my quarrel.' And this is mine."

She felt her loneliness. At once it seemed that she had not yet known the real man. Their play at friendship, sympathy,--what was it?--had been only play. Like all men, he could bring the woman a flower, a crown even, "a rosy wreath," but the roses must wither while he chose his sword. She could not speak.

"What is it, playmate?" he asked presently. It was the old kindly voice.

"I must go back. I'm cold."

"Cold! It's warm to-night."

"Good-night."

He followed her.

"I did it. I chilled you somehow. Forgive me."

She could not speak, and he was at her side.

"I know. There are things that can't be talked about. They sound like twaddle. These things I've told you--they're well enough to think about. They can't be said. You're disappointed in me!"

But it was not that he had told her too much; he had told her too little. He had put her away from him.

"Good-night," she said again. "It's all right, playmate, truly."

His anxious voice came after her.

"It's not all right. I've muddled it."

XVI

Electra felt very much alone in a world of wrongdoers. To her mind moral trespassing was a definite state of action fully recognized by the persons concerned in it. She made no doubt that everybody was as well able to classify obliquity as she was to do it for them. She had stated times for sitting down and debating upon her own past deeds, though she seldom found any flagrant fault in them. There was now and then an inability to reach her highest standard; but she saw no crude derelictions such as other people fell into. It was almost impossible for her to think about grandmother at all, the old lady seemed to her so naughty and so mad. Billy Stark, too, though he was a man of the world, admirably equipped, was guilty of extreme bad taste or he could never have asked Madam Fulton to marry him. Why was he calling her Florrie and giving her foolish nosegays every morning? Rose and Peter, when it came to them, seemed pledged to keeping up some wild fiction beneficial to Rose; only Markham MacLeod was entirely right, and so powerful, too, that his return must shake all the warring atoms into a harmonious conformity with Electra and the moral law.

Moreover, she had the entire programme of the club meeting to reconstruct. Nothing, she inexorably knew, would tempt her to allow for a moment any further consideration of her grandmother's pernicious book. Yet the club was to meet with her, the honorable secretary, and it had no topic to whet its teeth upon. In her dilemma, she put on her hat and walked over to inquire of Rose when her father was to return. MacLeod's bubbling kindliness seemed to her so generous that she made no doubt he would talk to them for an hour, or even allow her to give him a reception.

Rose was in the garden, as usual, in the long chair, and Peter was painting. Ostensibly he was painting her, but the mood escaped him and he was blurring in a background. Electra remembered, as she went up the path, that still nothing had been said to her about Peter's painting. He might have been any sort of young 'prentice for all she heard about his work; and here it was beginning incidentally, like an idle task, with no reference to her. She had thought painting was something to be carried on gravely, when one had reached Peter's eminence. There ought to be talk of theories and emotions inspired by pictures in the inception, not merely this prosaic business of sitting down to work and characterizing beauties with a flippant jargon of words misused. "Very nice," "stunning"--that was what she had heard Peter say even of sunsets that ought to have moved him to the skies. He had a delicate-fingered way of touching everything, as if the creative process were a little one, of small simplicities: not as if art were long.

When she appeared that morning, behind the hollyhocks, Rose was about to spring up, and Peter did stand, expectant, with his charming smile. Electra at once made proper disclaimers, and insisted that the sitter's pose should not be broken and that it would be an immense entertainment to see the work go on. Peter brought a chair out of the arbor, and she sat down, erect and handsome, while Rose sank back into her unconstrained reclining. Rose wore the simplest dress, and her slender arms were bare. There were about her the signs of tasks abandoned, even of pleasures dropped and not remembered--the book half closed upon her finger, the rose and fan. Her great hat with its long feather lay beside her on the ground, and Electra, justly appraising its picturesqueness and value, thought, with brief distaste, that it looked as if it might belong to an actress. She asked her question at once and Rose answered. No, her father would not be here in time for the important meeting. She had no doubt he would indeed have said more than a few words, since the entertainment had fallen through. Here Electra interrupted her delicately and challenged the use of that term for so serious an issue. It could hardly be called an entertainment; they had simply been unable to consider the topic fixed upon, and it was necessary to find a substitute.

"Let me do something," said Rose, with her appealing grace. "I'll sing for them."

That accounted for her again, Electra thought, the unconsidered ease, perhaps the boldness. She belonged to public life; yet as such she might well be taken into account.

"What do you sing?" she asked.

Rose forgot all about her picture and sat up, looking quite in earnest. Peter held his brush reproachfully poised.

"I tell you what I can do," she said, after a moment's thinking. "I can give a little talk on contemporary music--what they are doing in France, in Germany. I can give some personal data about living musicians--things they wouldn't mind. And I really sing very well. Peter, boy, tell the lady I sing well."

"She sings adorably," said Peter. "She has a nightingale in her throat:--

"'Two larks and a thrush, All the birds in the bush.'

"You never heard anything more sympathetic. I never did."

The "Peter, boy," had spoiled it. Electra grew colder. She wished she were able to be as easy as she liked; but she never could be, with other people perpetually doing and saying things in such bad taste.

"The club is composed of ladies who know the best music," she heard herself saying, and realized that it sounded like a child's copy-book.