Chapter 2

"Florrie," said he, "you're simply a glorious portent, and you've no more moral sense than the cat."

"No, Billy, no!" She was answering in a happy acquiescence. "I never had any. I've always wanted some fun, and I want it to this day." Her old face changed surprisingly under a shade of gravity. "And see where it's led me." It was natural to conclude that her verdict embraced wider evidence than that of the erring book. Billy, quite serious in his turn, looked at her in candid invitation. She answered him earnestly and humbly: "Billy, I always took the wrong road. I took it in the beginning and I never got out of it."

"There's a frightful number of wrong turnings," Billy offered, in rather inadequate sympathy, "and a great deficiency of guideposts."

"You see, Billy, the first thing I did was to give up Charlie Grant and marry Mark Fulton. I was only a country girl. Charlie was a country boy. I thought Mark must be a remarkable person because he was a professor in Cambridge. I thought Charlie was going to be a poor little country doctor, because he was studying medicine with another country doctor, and he couldn't go to college to save his skin. There were eight children, you know, younger than he. He had to work on the farm. Well, Billy, I made a mistake."

Stark marveled at the crude simplicity of all this. He forgot, for the moment, that she was an old woman, and that for a long time she had been conning over the past like a secret record, full of blemishes, perhaps, but not now to be remedied.

"You did like Charlie," he ventured. "I knew that."

"I liked him very much. And I've never quite escaped from his line of life, if that's what they call it. Since Electra was alone and I came here to stay with her, I've been thrown with his widow. Bessie's an old woman, too, you know, like me. But she's a different kind."

"She was a pretty girl. Rather sedate, I remember, for a girl."

"Billy, she's a miracle. She lives alone, all but old Mary to do the work. She's stiffened from rheumatism so that she sits in her chair nearly all day, and stumps round a little, in agony, with two canes. But she's had her life."

"How has she had it, Florrie? In having Grant?"

"Because all her choices were good choices. She took him when he was poor, and she helped him work. They had one son. He married a singer, a woman--well, like me. Maybe it was in the blood to want a woman like me. Then this boy and the singer had two sons--one of them clever. Peter Grant, you know. I suppose he's a genius, if there are such. The other has--a deformity."

"I know," he nodded. "You wrote me."

"I didn't write you all. He wasn't born with it. He was a splendid boy, but when he had the accident the mother turned against him. She couldn't help it. I see how it was, Billy. The pride of life, that's what it is--the pride of life."

"Is he dwarfed?"

"Heavens! he was meant for a giant, rather. He has great strength. Somehow he impresses you. But it's the grandmother that built him up, body and brain. Now he's a man grown, and she's made him. Don't you see, Billy? she's struck home every time."

"Is she religious?"

"Yes, she is. She prays." Her voice fell, with the word. She looked at him searchingly, as if he might understand better than she did the potency of that communion.

"She's a Churchwoman, I suppose."

"No, no. She only believes things--and prays. She told me one day Osmond--he's the deformed one--he couldn't have lived if she hadn't prayed."

"That he would be better?"

"No, she was quite explicit about that. Only that they would be taught how to deal with it--his trouble. To do it, she said, as God wished they should. Billy, it's marvelous."

"Well, dear child," said Billy, "you can pray, too."

Her old face grew pinched in its denial.

"No," she answered sadly, "no. It wouldn't rise above the ceiling. What I mean is, Billy, that all our lives we're opening gates into different roads. Bessie Grant opened the right gate. She's got into a level field and she's at home there. But I shouldn't be. I only go and climb up and look over the bars. And I go stumbling along, hit or miss, and I never get anywhere."

He was perplexed. He frowned a little.

"Where do you want to get, Florrie?" he asked at length.

She smiled into his face engagingly.

"I don't know, Billy. Only where things don't bore me; where they are worth while."

"But they always get to bore us--" he paused and she took him up.

"You mean I'm bored because I am an old woman. I should say so, too, but then I look at that other woman and I know it isn't so. No, Billy, I took the wrong road."

Billy looked at her a long time searchingly.

"Well," he said at last, "what can we do about it? I mean, besides writing fake memoirs and then going ag'in our best friends when they beg us to own up?"

She put the question by, as if it could not possibly be considered, and yet as if it made another merry chapter to her jest. Billy had gathered his consolatory forces for another leap.

"Florrie," said he, "come back to London with me."

"My dear child!"

"You marry me, Florrie. I asked you fifty odd years ago. I could give you a good sober sort of establishment, a salon of a sort. I know everybody in arts and letters. Come on, Florrie."

Fire was in the old lady's eye. She rose and made him a pretty courtesy.

"Billy," said she, "you're splendid. I won't hold you to it, but it will please me to my dying day to think I've had another offer. No, Billy, no. You wouldn't like it. But you're splendid."

Billy, too, had risen. They took hands and stood like boy and girl looking into each other's eyes. There was a little suffusion, a tear perhaps, the memory of other times when coin did not have to be counted so carefully, when they could open the windows without inevitable dread of the night, its dark and chill. The old lady broke the moment.

"Come over and see Bessie Grant. What do you say?"

"Delighted. Get your hat."

But she appeared with a gay parasol, one of Electra's, appropriated from the stand with the guilty consideration that the owner would hardly be back before three o'clock. The old lady liked warm colors. She loved the bright earth in all its phases, and of these a parasol was one. They went down the broad walk and out into the road shaded by summer green, that quivering roof-work of drooping branches and many leaves.

"Billy," said she, "I'm glad you've come."

"So am I, Florrie; so am I."

It was not far to the old Grant house, rich in the amplitude of its size, and of the grounds, where all conceivable trees that make for profit and delight were colonized according to a wise judgment. The house was large, of a light yellow with white trimmings and green blinds, and the green of the shrubbery relieved it and endowed it with an austere dignity. There was a curving driveway to the door, and following it, they came to the wide veranda, where an old lady sat by herself, dozing and reflecting as Madam Fulton had done that morning. The two canes by her chair told the story of a sad inaction. She was of heroic stature and breadth. Her small, beautifully poised head had thick white hair rolled back and wound about in a soft coil. Her face, pink with a persistent bloom, soft with a contour never to break or grow old, was simply a mother's face. It had the mother look,--the sweet serious eyes, the low brow, for beauty not for thought, the tranquil mouth. She was dressed in a fine cambric simply made, with little white ruffles about her neck and above her motherly hands. Madam Fulton saw her debating as they came, frowning a little, wondering evidently about the stranger. She called to her.

"Who is this, Bessie Grant?"

The other woman laid a hand upon her canes, and then, as if this were an instinctive movement, yet not to be undertaken hurriedly, smiled and sat still, awaiting them. When they were at the steps, she spoke in an exceedingly pleasant voice. It deepened the effect of her great gentleness.

"I'm sure I don't know. Come right up and tell me."

They mounted the steps together, and Stark put out his hand. Mrs. Grant studied him for a moment. Light broke over her sweet old face.

"It's Billy Stark," she said.

"Of course it is," triumphed the other old lady. "Billy Stark come back from foreign parts as good as new. Now let's sit down and talk it over."

They drew their chairs together, and, smiles and glances mingling, went back over the course of the years, first with a leap to the keen, bright time when they were in school together. The type of that page was clear-cut and vivid. There were years they skipped then, and finally they came to the present, and Billy said,--

"You have two grandsons?"

"Yes. One lives with me. The other is coming home to-morrow. He's the painter."

"Engaged to Electra," added Madam Fulton. "Did you know that? They are to be married this summer. Then I suppose he'll go back to Paris and she'll go with him."

Mrs. Grant was looking at her with a grave attention.

"We hope not," she said, "Osmond and I. Osmond hopes Peter will settle here and do some work. He thinks it will be best for him."

"There's no difficulty about his getting it," said Billy. "I saw his portrait of Mrs. Rhys. That was amazing."

The grandmother nodded, in a quiet pleasure.

"They said so," she returned.

"It will do everything for him."

"It has done everything. Osmond says he has only to sit down now and paint. But he thinks it will be best for him to do it here--at least for a time."

"How in the world can Osmond tell before he sees him?" objected Madam Fulton. "You haven't set eyes on Peter for five years. He may be Parisian to the backbone. You wouldn't want to tie him by the leg over here."

"So Osmond says. But he hopes he won't want to go back."

"I can tell him one thing," said the other old lady; "he'd better make up his mind to some big centre, Paris or New York, or he won't get Electra. Electra knows what she wants, and it isn't seclusion. She is going to be the wife of a celebrated painter, and she'll insist on the perquisites. I know Electra."

Mrs. Grant smiled in deprecation; but Stark had a habit of intuitive leaps, and he judged that she also knew Electra. His mind wandered a little, as his eyes ran over the nearer features of the place. It hardly suggested wealth: only comfort and beauty, the grace that comes of long devotion, the loving eye, the practiced hand. Somebody's heart had been put into it. This was the labor that was not hired. He had a strong curiosity to see Osmond, and yet he could not ask for him because Madam Fulton had once written him some queer tale of the man's sleeping in the woods, in a house of his own building, and living the wild life his body needed. One thing he learned now: Osmond's name was never out of his grandmother's mouth. She quoted his decisions as if they stood for ultimate wisdom. His ways were good and lovely to her.

The forenoon hour went by, and finally Madam Fulton remembered.

"Bless me!" she said. "It's luncheon time. Come, Billy."

The road was brighter now under the mounting sun. Madam Fulton was a little tired, and they walked silently. Presently, at her own gate, she suggested, not grudgingly, but as if the charm of goodness was, unhappily, assured,--

"I suppose she's lovely!"

"Great! She's one of those creatures that have good mother-stuff in them. It doesn't matter much what they mother. It's there. It's a kind of force. It helps--I don't know exactly how."

"Now can't you see what I mean? That woman has had big things. She had one of the great loves. She built it up, piece by piece, with Charlie. He kept a devotion for her that wasn't to be compared with the tempest he felt about me. I'm sure of that."

Stark looked at her as they walked, his eyes perplexedly denying the evidence of his ears.

"Do you know, Florrie," he said, "it's incredible to hear you talk so."

"Why?"

"You have a zest for life, a curiosity about it. Why, it's simply tremendous."

"No, Billy, no. It's not tremendous. It's only that I am quite convinced I haven't got my money's worth. Late as it is, I want it yet. I'll have it--if it's only playing jokes on publishers!"

They ate together in the shaded room, and Madam Fulton, looking out through the windows at the terrace, realized, with an almost humble gratitude, that the world itself and the simple joys of it were quite different tasted in comradeship. She forgot Electra and the irritated sense that her well-equipped granddaughter was wooing her to the ideals of a higher life.

"Billy," she said again, "I'm uncommon glad you came."

Billy's heart warmed with responsive satisfaction He had expected a more or less colorless meeting with his old love, a philosophic reference here and there to vanished youth, a twilight atmosphere of waning days; but here she was, living as hard as ever. And he had brightened her; he had given her pleasure. The complacency of it reacted upon him, and he sought about in his clever mind for another drop to fill the beaker. By the time they had finished their coffee, he knew.

"Florrie," said he, "what if you should put on your hat and take the train with me?"

"My stars, Billy! Run away?"

"Come up to town. We'd scare up some kind of a theatre this evening, and in the morning you could see Gilbert and Wall."

"And 'fess? Not by a great sight! But I'd like to go, Billy. Leave out Gilbert and Wall, make it you and me, and I'm your man."

"Come along."

"Worry Electra to death!" she proffered brightly. "I'll do it, Billy. Here's the key of my little flat, right here on the writing-desk. I never stayed there alone, but there's no reason why I shouldn't. You can come round in the morning, to see if I've had a fit, and if I haven't we'll go to breakfast. But we must take the three o'clock. She'll be back by four."

She got her bonnet and her handbag, and when Electra did come back at four, her grandmother had flown, leaving a note behind.

III

The next morning Electra, dressed in white and rather pale at the lips, walked about the garden with a pretense of trimming a shrub here and there and steadying a flower. But she was waiting for her lover. She had expected him before. The ten o'clock would bring him, and he would come straight to her without stopping to see his grandmother and Osmond. But time went by, and she was nervously alert to the fact that he might not have come. Even Electra, who talked of poise and strove for it almost in her sleep, felt a little shaken at the deferred prospect of seeing him. It was after those five years, and his letters, voluminous as they were, had not told all. Especially had they omitted to say of late whether he meant to return to France when he should be able to take her with him. To see a lover after such a lapse was an experience not unconnected with a possibility of surprise in herself as well as in him. She had hardly, even at the first, explicitly stated that she loved him. She had only recognized his privilege of loving her. But now she had put on a white dress, to meet him, and the garden was, in a sense, a protection to her. The diversity of its flowery paths seemed like a shade out of the glare of a defined relation. At last there was a step and he was coming. She forced herself to look at him and judge him as he came. He had scarcely changed, except, perhaps from his hurrying gait and forward bend, that he was more eager. There was the tall figure, the loose tie floating back, the low collar and straight black hair--the face with its aquiline curve and the wide sweet mouth, the eager dark eyes--he looked exactly like the man who had painted the great portrait of the year. Then he was close to her, and both her hands were in his. He lifted them quickly to his lips, one and then the other.

"Electra!" he said. It was the same voice, the slight eager hesitancy in it like the beginning of a stammer.

Electra, to her surprise, said an inconsequent thing. It betrayed how she was moved.

"Grandmother is away. She has gone to town."

"We will go into the summer-house," said the eager voice. "That is where I always think of you. You remember, don't you?"

He had kept her hand, and, like two children, they went along the broad walk and into the summer-house, where there was a green flicker of light from the vines. There was one chair, a rustic one, and Peter drew it forward for her. When she had seated herself, he sat down on the bench of the arbor close by, and, lifting her hand, kissed it again.

"Do you remember the knock-kneed poem I wrote you, Electra?" he asked her. "I called it 'My Imperial Lady.' I thought of it the minute I saw you standing there. My imperial lady!"

The current was too fast for her. She could not manage large, impetuous things like flaming words that hurtled at her and seemed to ask a like exchange--something strong and steady in her to meet them in mid-air and keep them from too swift an impact. His praise had always been like the warriors' shields clanging over poor Tarpeia,--precious, but too crushing. They disconcerted her. If she could not manage to escape after the first blow, she guessed how they might bruise.

"When did you come?" she asked.

Peter did not answer. He was still looking at her with those wonderful eyes that always seemed to her too compelling for happy intercourse.

"Electra," he said, and stopped. She had to answer him. There must be some heavy thing to break to her, which he felt unequal to the task of telling unless she helped him. "Electra," he said again, "I didn't come alone. Some one came with me. I wrote you about Tom."

Electra drew her hand away, and sat up straight and chilled. There had been few moments of her grown-up life, it seemed to her, unspoiled by Tom, her recreant brother. In the tumultuous steeple chase of his existence he had brought her nothing but mortification. In his death, he was at least marring this first moment of her lover's advent.

"You wrote me everything," she said. The tone should have discouraged him. "You were with him at the last. He knew you. I gather he didn't send any messages to us, or you would have given them."

"He did, Electra."

"He sent a message?"

"I simply couldn't write it, because I knew I should be home so soon. It was about his wife. He begged you to be kind to her."

"His wife! Tom was not married."

"He was married, Electra, to a very beautiful girl. I have brought her home with me."

Electra was upon her feet. Her face had lost its cold sweet pallor. The scarlet of hot blood was upon it, a swift response to what seemed outrage at his hands.

"I have never--" she gasped. "It is not true."

Peter, too, had risen. He was looking at her rather wistfully. His imperial lady had, in that instant, lost her untouched calm. She was breathing ire.

"Ah, don't say that," he pleaded. "You never saw her."

"I can't help it. I feel it. She is an adventuress."

"Electra!"

"What did he say to you? What did Tom say?"

"He pointed to her as she stood by the window, her back to us--it was the day before he died--and said, 'Tell them to be good to her.'"

"You see! You don't even know whether he meant it as a message to me or some of his associates. He didn't say she was his wife?"

"No."

He answered calmly and rather gravely, but the green world outside the arbor looked unsteady to him. Electra was one of the fixed ideas of his life; her nobility, her reserve, her strength had seemed to set her far above him. Now she sounded like the devil's advocate. She was gazing at him keenly.

"Her story made a great impression on you," she threw out incidentally.

The effort was apparent, but Peter accepted it.

"Yes," he answered simply. "She makes a great impression on everybody. She will on you."

"What evidence have you brought me? Did you see them married?"

"No," said Peter, with the same unmoved courtesy.

"You see! Have you even found any record of their marriage?"

"No."

"You have the girl's word. She has come over here with you. What for?"

Peter lifted a hand to his forehead. He answered gently as a man sometimes does, of set purpose, to avoid falling into a passion.

"It was the natural thing, Electra. She has no home, poor child!--nor money, except what Tom left in his purse. He'd been losing pretty heavily just before. I say, it seemed the natural thing to come to you. Half this place was his. His wife belongs here." The last argument sounded to him unpardonably crude, as to an imperial lady, but he ventured it. Then he looked at her. With his artist's premonition, he looked to see her brows drawn, her teeth perhaps set angrily upon a quivering lip. But Electra was again pale. Her face was marble to him, to everything.

"I shall fight it," she said inexorably, "to the last penny."

He gazed at her now as if she were a stranger. It was incredible that this was the woman whose hand he had kissed but the moment before. He ventured one more defense.

"Electra, you have not seen her."

"I shall not see her. Where is she--in New York?"

"Here."

"Here!"

"At grandmother's. I left her there. I thought when we had had our little talk you would come over with me and see her, and invite her home."

"Invite her here?"

"I thought so."

"Peter," said Electra, with a quiet certainty, "you must be out of your mind."

There they stood in the arbor, their lovers' arbor, gazing at each other like strangers. Peter recovered first, not to an understanding of the situation, but to the need of breaking its tension.

"I fancied," he said, "you would be eager to know her."

"Is she a grisette?"

His mind ached under the strain of taking her in. He felt dumbly her contrast to the facile, sympathetic natures he had been thrown with in his life abroad. When he had left her, Electra was, as she would have said, unformed; she had not crystallized into the clearness and the hardness of the integrity she worshiped. To him, when in thought he contrasted her with those other types who made for joy and not always for moral beauty, she was immeasurably exalted. In any given crisis where other women did well, he would not have questioned that Electra must have done better. Her austerity was a part of her virgin charm. But as he looked at her now, in her clear outlines, her incisive speech, the side of him that thrilled to beauty trembled with something like distaste or fear. She was like her own New England in its bleakness, without its summer warmth. He longed for atmosphere.

But she had asked her question again: "Is she a grisette?"

He found himself answering:--

"She is the daughter of Markham MacLeod."

"Not the author? Not the chief?"

"Yes," said Peter, with some quiet pride in the assurance, "chief of the Brotherhood, the great Markham MacLeod."

Electra pondered.

"If that is true," she said, "I must call on her."

"True? I tell you it is true. Electra, what are you saying?"

But Electra was looking at him with those clear eyes where dwelt neither guile nor tolerance of the guile of others.

"Did she tell you so," she inquired, "or do you know it for a fact?"

He had himself well in hand now, because it had sprung into his wise artist brain that he must not break the beauty of their interview. It was fractured, but if they turned the hurt side away from the light, possibly no one would know, and the outer crystalline sheen of the thing would be deceptively the same.

"I know Markham MacLeod," he said. "I have seen them together. She calls him father."

A wave of interest swept over her face.

"Do you mean you really know him, Peter?"

"Assuredly."

"As the leader of the Brotherhood?"

"Yes, the founder."

"He is proscribed in Russia and watched in France. Is that true?"

"All true."

"He gave up writing for this--to go about organizing and speaking? That's true, isn't it?"

"Quite true."

"How much do you know about the Brotherhood, Peter?"

"I belong to it."