Chapter 15

"These things have ceased to mean anything to you. It is not a moral question. You see the woman is pretty and you--"

"No, no! She is beautiful, but that's not it. I can't theorize about it, Electra, only the whole thing seems to me monstrous. That he should wrong her! That he should be able to make her care about him in the first place--a fellow like him--just because he was handsome as the devil and had the tongue of angels--but that he should wrong her, that she should come over here expecting kindness--" It was Peter who put a hand before his eyes, not because there were tears there, but as if to shut her out from a knowledge of his too candid self. But in an instant he was looking at her again, not in anger, but sorrowfully.

"Isn't it strange?" she exclaimed, almost to herself.

"What, Electra?"

"Strange to think what power a woman has--a woman of that stamp."

"Don't, Electra. You mustn't classify her. You can't."

She was considering it with a real curiosity.

"You don't blame her at all," she said. "You know Tom did wrong. You don't think she did."

"Electra," he said gently, "we can't go back to that. It's over and done with. Besides, it is between those two. It isn't our business."

"You could blame Tom!" She clung to that. He saw she would not release her hold.

"Electra!" He put out his hands and took her unwilling ones. Then he gazed at her sweetly and seriously; and when Peter was in gentle earnest, he did look very good. "Electra, can't you see what she is?"

His appealingness had for the instant soothed that angry devil in her. She wrenched her hands free, with the one hoarse cry instinct with mental pain,--

"You are in love with her!"

Peter stepped back a pace. His face paled. He could not answer. Electra felt the rush of an emotion stronger than herself. It swept her on, her poise forgotten, her rules of life snapping all about her.

"I have always known it, from the first day you spoke of her. She has bewitched you. Perhaps this is what she really came for--to separate us. Well, she has done it."

Something seemed demanded of him, and he could only answer in her own words,--

"Has she done it?"

Her heat had cooled. Her soberer self had the upper hand again, and she spoke now like the gracious lady called to some dignified dismissal.

"I find," she said, "I must have intended to say this for days. We must give up--what we meant to do."

"You must give me up, Electra?"

"I give you up."

"I came to-day,"--Peter's voice sounded very honest in his endeavor to show how well he had meant,--"I came to ask you to go back to France. We would live on a little. We would serve the Brotherhood--the chief says you have joined already--" Electra bowed her head slightly, still in a designed remoteness.

"I shall go to France," she said, "later. But I shall never marry you. That is over. As you said of something else, it is over and done with."

She glanced toward the door, but he kept his place. Peter was conscious that of all the things he ought to feel, he could not summon one. It did not seem exactly the woman he had loved who was dismissing him. This was a handsome and unfriendly stranger, and in the bottom of his heart surged a sweet new feeling that was like hope and pain.

"Let us not talk any more," she was saying, with that air of extreme courtesy which still invited him to go.

Peter walked slowly to the door.

"I am wondering"--he hesitated. "Why do you say that, Electra? Why do you tell me I am in love with her?"

He looked as shy as a girl. It struck her full in the mind that even in this interview she had no part. She had refused a lover, and he was going away with his thoughts stirred by another woman.

"I said so," she repeated clearly, "because it is true. You are in love with her. Good-by."

Peter turned to her with one of his quick movements and held out his hand. She did not take it.

"Won't you shake hands, Electra?" he asked. "I should think we might be friends." Honest sorrow moved his voice. Now, at least, he was thinking of her only.

Electra meant to show no resentment, no pain. But she had to be true.

"I can't," she said, in a low tone. "Good-by."

And Peter, seeing the aversion in her face, not for him, perhaps, but for the moment, got himself hastily out of the room and into the summer road. And there, before he had walked three paces, Peter began to sing. He sang softly, not at all because melody was unfitted to the day, but as if what inspired it were too intimate a thing to be revealed. He looked above him, straight ahead, and on every side.

The world was beautiful to him at this moment, and he had a desire to drink it up, to be as young and as rich as Apollo. He did feel very rich, not only in his youth, but in the unnamed possibilities trembling before him; and Peter denied himself no pleasure because it was inappropriate to the moment. It would have seemed to him a refusal of the good gifts of life and an affronting of the God who created plenty if, because he had lost Electra, he renounced the delight of a happiness he really felt. By and by he would remember Electra, how dignified she was, how irreproachable, in the moments when her virtues did not get the bit between their teeth and dash away with her; but now, under this abounding summer sun, with the leaves trembling, she withdrew into a gray seclusion like an almost forgotten task--one that had resolved itself into a beneficent fulfillment quite unlike what it had promised. Noble as it was, he had been excused from it, and he felt blissfully free. Something else that swam before him like the gleam of a vision did not look like another task. It was more like a quest for a hero's arming. It fitted his dreams, it went hand in hand with the visions he had had years ago about his painting, when that was all possibility, not work. This was the worshipful righting of an innocent lady.

She was there in view when he got home, as if she had waited for him, under a tree, trembled about by the summer green, her white dress flickered upon by leaves. She was pale; her mouth looked piteous to him, and his heart beat hard in championship. She half rose from her chair, and let her unread book fall to the grass beside her.

There were two things Rose wanted very much to know: whether Electra had shocked him out of his trust in her, and why her father stayed so long in that visit to Osmond at the plantation. The last question was the great one, and she asked it first.

"What can my father be saying to him?"

"Osmond? I don't know. Equal rights, labor, capital, God knows. Rose, don't sit there. Please get up!"

She obeyed, wondering, brushed out her skirt and put her hair straight, and then glanced at him.

"What for?" she asked. "What do you want me to do?"

Peter looked to her about eighteen, perhaps, nothing but youth and gleam and gay good luck. She felt a thousand years older herself, yet she loved Peter dearly. She would do anything for him. This she told herself in the moment of smoothing down her hair. His face brimmed over with fun, with something else, too. The seriousness that dwells housemate to comedy was behind.

"I couldn't say it with you lying there and looking at me," said Peter. "Nobody ever made a proposal to a lady in a steamer chair unless he was in another and the deck was level."

"Peter," she said gravely, "don't make fun."

Peter shook back the lock of hair he encouraged to tumble into his eyes. It was his small affectation. It kept him at one with his artistic brotherhood.

"I am rejected," he said, and do what he might, he announced it exultingly, and not in the least with the dignity he would have admired in the lady who had refused him. But at that moment Peter had had enough of dignity and the outer form of things. He wanted to be himself, light or sad, bad or good, and speak the truth as the moment revealed it to him. "But I am rejected," he continued, when she looked at him in a quick reproof, "turned down, jilted, smashed into a cocked hat. And I came just as quick as I could. Rose--"

"Don't!" she warned him. "Don't say that, Peter."

"Just as quick as I could get here without running--I couldn't run, there were so many pretty things to look at--to tell you, to beg of you"--Peter's voice broke. He was behaving badly to conceal how much he was moved. "I came to offer it to you," he said seriously, in a low tone. "Not what was given back to me, but something else, so much better you couldn't speak of 'em in the same day. When I think of what might be, it's all light and color--and the leaves of the wood moving. It's a great big dream, Rose, and you fit into it. You fit into the dream." He was intoxicated with youth and life. She was not sure whether it was with her.

"I hope you haven't quarreled," she said soberly. She wished she might recall him. "But if you have and are patient--"

Peter could not let her go on. He put out his quick, clever hands in an eager gesture, as if he pushed something away.

"Ah," he said, "I don't want to be patient! I want to be rash. I don't want anything back. I want something new and beautiful. I want to tell you a million things in a minute--chiefly how much I love you."

His voice had deepened. It swept her on apace, in spite of herself, because it was like Osmond's. For a moment she felt the kinship between them, the same swift blood, the picturesque betrayals. There was something at the heart of each that was dear to her, and Peter, for the moment, speaking in the sunshine with her eyes upon him, was also the voice out of the dark. But she had nevertheless to recall him.

"Have you really given each other up?" she asked.

"Yes," said Peter, in the same glad acquiescence. "And what do you think she told me, the last thing of all?"

She shook her head.

"She told me I loved you. And I do, Rose. Oh, I do! I do!"

"But that mustn't part you. Think what it is to me--to know my coming here has done it."

"Oh, you had to come!" said Peter light-heartedly. "It was preordained. It's destiny. I was a fool not to see it the first minute. She had to tell me."

Rose, in spite of herself, smiled a little. But her thoughts settled gravely back upon her own hard task.

"Did she tell you"--She hesitated, and then asked her question with a simple directness. "Did she tell you how much mistaken you are in me?"

"Please don't," said Peter. His face flushed. He looked his misery.

"You see she is the only one who was not mistaken in me. Those of you who believed in me--well, I must tell all of you. Even grannie, dear grannie! I am afraid--" She stopped because she meant to show no emotion; but it seemed to her that grannie, in her guarded life, must view her harshly. "I was wrong, Peter, ever to let you mix yourself in this miserable coil. If I could lie, well and good. Let me do it and take the consequences. But I should have known better than to bring you into it."

Peter stood thoughtfully regarding her in a very impersonal way, as if he debated how she could be moved.

"I wonder," he said at last, "how it is possible to tell you how lovely you are to everybody, how perfectly splendid, you know, quite different from anybody else! And when you add to that that you've been wronged and--and insulted--oh you've simply no conception how it makes a fellow feel! Why, I adore you, that's all. I just adore you."

He stretched out his hand like a bluff comrade and she put hers into it as frankly.

"You're a dear boy, Peter," she said, and her eyes were wet.

He spoke perversely, when she had taken her hand away:--

"That's all very well, you know, but I'm not a boy--not all the time. I love you awfully, Rose, in the real way, the bang-up old style, Tristan and all that, you know. I'm going to keep on and you'll have to listen."

"Shall I, Peter?" She was still smiling wistfully. Love, sweet, clean, young love looked very beautiful to her. She wished she could see it crowning some head, not hers, some girl quite worthy of him. "Well, not to-day."

"No, maybe not to-day," Peter agreed obstinately, "but other days, all the days. I can't give up the most beautiful thing there is, and you're that. You're simply the most beautiful there is."

"There's grannie coming out on the veranda." Then she added bitterly, "I wonder if she will think I am the most beautiful thing there is!"

XXI

MacLeod was not used to being summoned, except by high officials, and then if the meeting would not advantage his cause, he was likely to take a journey in another direction. But when Osmond's man invited him to go down to the shack that morning, he had agreed with a ready emphasis, and now walked along, smiling over the general kindliness of things. The change of air after his sea voyage was doing him good, and he had been able to command anew the sense of physical prosperity which had once been his habitual possession. That forbade him morbid premonitions and withdrawals relative to the bodily life. It hardly seemed possible, this robust guardian declared, that anything should happen to him, save after a very long period, when inevitable decay would set in. But in a harmonious mood and prospect retreated so far that it might almost as well not threaten at all. He had no doubt that when change fell upon the aged, it was as beneficent in its approach as the oncoming of sleep. But of these things he need not think, except as they might be brought to his mind by the disasters of other people. Acquiesce in the course of nature, said his philosophy, and refuse to anticipate trouble as trouble. It could always be curbed or stamped out when it came. That abounding certainty was a part of his power.

He found his way without difficulty. The neat rows of growing things led him in from the road, and directing his steps toward the shack, where he had understood Osmond lived, he saw a figure advancing to meet him, a man in a blue blouse, like a workman, beating his hands together as he came, to dust the soil from them. When they were at a convenient interval, the man looked at MacLeod with a measuring gaze, and MacLeod returned the challenge with what was, perhaps, too frank encouragement. He put out his hand, but Osmond shook his head. He opened his two palms, displaying them.

"I didn't expect you for a few minutes yet," he said, "or I should have washed. I'm just out of the dirt. Come on down to the house. We won't go in. There are some seats outside."

MacLeod knew at once, through the keen sense that served him in his fellowship with men, that the excuse was a true one, yet that Osmond was glad he had it to offer. He evidently had no desire to shake hands. That seemed reasonable enough. The man was quite unlike other men in his unstudied speech, the clear, healthy, and yet childlike look of his eyes. It was as if, working in the earth, he had become a part of it. When they were in the shade of the great oak tree by the house, each in his rough chair, MacLeod stretched out his legs, with much enjoyment, and offered his host a cigar.

"No, thank you," said Osmond. He felt briefly, and was ashamed of himself for entertaining it, a childish regret that he did not smoke. Every easy habit gave the man of the world an advantage the more. "Light up," he said grimly, as MacLeod, after a questioning look which seemed also a commiserating one, was about to return the case to his pocket. "I like to see it--and smell it--rather."

So MacLeod brought out his pipe and did light up.

"I smoke very little," he explained. "That's the way to skim the cream. It's the temperate man for flavors. Know that?"

Osmond, temperate in all ways from necessity, hardly knew how he should have felt about it if desires and delight had presented themselves to him as companions, not as foes. He pulled himself up, with an effort. MacLeod's effect on him was something for which he was not prepared. The man's physical fitness, his self-possession in the face of anything that might be required of him, made hot blood in Osmond. There was no ground for them to meet upon. Temperance of life in order to enjoy the more keenly? Then, to be honest, he would have to confess that for him temperance was his master, and that was a confidence he would not give. There could be no easy commonplaces. He spoke bluntly:--

"I wanted to see you."

"I wanted to see you, too," said MacLeod cordially. "Of course I know all about you. Peter talks about you by the yard."

Osmond's rebellious tongue formed the words, "I don't believe it." But he did not utter them.

"You've worked out a mighty interesting scheme down here," MacLeod continued, taking his pipe out of his mouth and looking about him.

"We have worked," said Osmond.

"It's like the older peasant life of Europe." MacLeod spoke rather at random, seeking about for some thoroughfare with his crusty host. "A sort of paternal government--"

"Not in the least," said Osmond. "My men are my neighbors. They work for me and I pay them."

"Without discontent?"

"I hope so. If I found a man doing half time and grumbling, I should kick him out."

"They don't combine?"

"We all combine. I get good work. They get good wages. It's a square deal."

"Profit-sharing?"

"No, not exactly."

"It strikes me as a sort of community," said MacLeod. "Everybody at work and everything in common."

"Now, why does it strike you that everything is in common? The place is mine."

"Ah, my dear fellow!" MacLeod forgot the simplicity of the moment and put on his platform voice. "Nothing is ours."

Osmond regarded him with a slow smile coming,--his perfect clothes, his white hand, his air of luxurious equipment.

"Isn't it?" he asked ironically. "Well, it looks mighty like it. But I haven't any data. I know what goes on inside my own fences. I don't know much more. What do you want of Peter?"

"To-day?"

"Any time. All the time. He has joined your league. What do you intend to do with him?"

MacLeod put his hands in his pockets and stretched his legs a little farther. He regarded the outer circle of hills, and then brought his gaze back over the pleasant rolling land between. Finally he looked at Osmond and smiled at him in what seemed a community of feeling.

"My dear fellow," he said, "I am not considering the individual."

"I am," said Osmond, with an offensive bluntness. "I am considering Peter. What are you going to do with him?"

"Your brother joined us of his own free will."

"Yes. But now you've got him, what do you want to do with him?"

"Isn't it of any use for me to tell you that when a man joins us, he has passed beyond personal recognition or privilege? Outside our circle, he is an individual; he counts. Inside--well, it is difficult to say what he is. We want him then to consider himself one of the drops that make a sea. The sea washes down things--even the cliffs. The drop of water is of no importance alone. With a million, million others, it moves. It crushes."

Osmond sat looking straight at him with eyes that burned. His hands, hanging at his side, were clenched. He recognized the might of the man, the crude physical power of him like an emanation, and he felt the despairing helplessness of trying to move a potency like that. Cliffs might be corroded by the sea; but a human force that respects no other cannot be easily invaded. He spoke without his own will, and heard himself speaking:--

"You haven't any soul!"

MacLeod was regarding him with as direct a gaze.

"What do you mean by that?" he asked, with a moderate interest. "Do you mean I haven't any mercy, any kindness? Is that what you mean?"

It was not what he meant. It was the indwelling spirit such as he saw in grannie, the mobile thing in Peter that, changing, blossoming in errant will here and there as the sun of life bade it, seemed in one form or another to proclaim itself undying. He shook his head.

"No," he said, "that's not what I mean."

A smile ran over MacLeod's face and moved it most delightfully.

"Well," said he, "if we're going to take inventories--have you a soul?"

Osmond shook his head again.

"I don't know," he answered.

"Well, then, what's the use of slanging me? If you're in the same box yourself--Come, who has one? has anybody?"

Osmond thought then of Rose, and of the fire of the spirit playing over her, that brightness he could neither classify nor define. Yet he must believe in it.

"Yes," he said. "I have seen it."

"You have? And you think I'm exempt. Why?"

Osmond was not getting anywhere. MacLeod and his own ineptitude of speech seemed to be forcing him into the solicitous fright of the mother, bent on shielding her child from the wolf.

"You are too powerful," he said, and realized that he was using the evidence Rose had given him, thought for thought.

"I hope so. I ought to be. I've got to overturn power."

"What's the use? You're a czar yourself. You're only another kind."

MacLeod looked at him thoughtfully, as if struck by the form of words.

"My dear fellow," he said, "is it possible you believe in the present state of things? Do you want one man to possess everything and the next man nothing?"

Osmond frowned his negation. MacLeod, unfairly it seemed to him, made him feel young and inadequate to the matter. He had the eyes to see what cause was just, yet he had not the equipment to maintain any cause at all.

"What is the use," he essayed, "for you and men like you to head revolts? It only means you are ruling instead of the rulers you overturn. It will all be done over again. The big man will rise to the top. The little man will go under. And in time you will have the same conditions repeated. It's because you are not teaching love. You are teaching envy and hate."

"How do you know I am?"

Osmond kept on as if he were speaking to himself, groping painfully for what he found.

"You are not preaching good work. You are preaching revolt against work--class hatred and discontent."

"Do you believe in non-resistance?"

"No."

"Do you believe in Midas, king of gold, swelled up with power, sitting smiling on the throne he has forced others to build for him, and saying, 'I am not as other men are'?"

"No. But I believe in work. You mustn't take it out of a man, that certainty that his own work is the greatest privilege he's got. Oh, you mustn't do that!"

There it was again, his hungry worship of achievement. It might even have seemed to him that oppression was not much to bear if, at the same time, a man had the glory of setting his hand to something and seeing it prosper. MacLeod, who knew something about his life, but nothing of its inward processes, began to feel that here was more than at first appeared, and answered rather temperately,--

"I don't believe you know much about the general conditions under which work is done. Work means to you Peter's painting a picture. Let it mean, for example, a great many Peters in a mine delving all day for some smug capitalist who wants to endow monuments to himself and get his children into society. What then?"

What then, indeed? Osmond could not answer; but a moment later he said again, tenaciously,--

"I don't want you to destroy the idea of good work."

"Well, now!" MacLeod spoke impatiently. He realized that here was not a man whom his torrent of bloody facts would move, but who demanded also a more persuasive rhetoric. "Well, now, you acknowledge the world is upside down. Shall we leave it so?"

Osmond shook his head dumbly.

"Shall we say the great scheme counteracts its own abuses, and we won't interfere? When an empire gets sufficiently corrupt, it tumbles apart of its own rottenness? Or when we see just cause, shall we go to war?"

"Grannie has the whole secret of it in her hand." This he said involuntarily, for he had no idea of talking to MacLeod about grannie. But the subject had passed beyond their predilections of what was best to say. "Science won't do it--war won't do it. Religion will."

"Ah! You are an enthusiast."

"No. But there is something beyond force and beyond reason."

"Religion, you mean."