Chapter 22

"I wasn't sure you would take my present," she said. "It's dear of you to take it, Osmond."

"Your love, your wonderful love!"

"I selected it with great care, dear." She was laughing. "It's very shiny, and nice, and warranted to last. It's the strongest love I could find. I never saw one like it. Shall we live in the playhouse now, dear?"

"You will live in my heart. Rose, I kissed you."

She bent to him.

"Kiss me again. Kisses are little blooms budding out of my love. You are a gardener-man. You know the faster flowers are picked, the sooner they bloom again."

He was regarding her in wonder.

"You must be crazy to think you like me!" he said honestly. Again she laughed.

"I am! stark mad. I feel as if a thousand birds were singing and all the lilies opening: You remember how they smelled that night, Osmond? You wouldn't go with me to smell them. They've come to us. They're here."

He held her gaze.

"Be serious," he said.

"I can't, I like you so!"

"Only till I ask you this. You said once you had always been in love with love."

"Always. Ought I to be ashamed of it? I am not. I am proud. To find the half of you that you have been lonesome for, and then be faithful to it,--oh, beautiful!"

"Are you in love with love, or are you in love with me?"

"With you, dear Osmond." The clear eyes answered him in a joyous confidence.

"I must have taken hold of your imagination."

"Yes! You make me see visions and dream dreams. Hear how fast I talk to you! The words can't tumble out quick enough, there are so many more pushing them."

"No, I mean I have taken hold of your imagination because I am so queer."

"You are queer, Osmond. It's queer to be so darling."

"If I were sure!" He loosed her hands and looked away from her, and his face set gravely.

"What, Osmond?"

"If I were sure it was fair to you--best for you to let you know the truth--then I'd tell you."

"Tell me what?"

He drew her hands back into his. He was looking at her with the first voluntary yielding of his whole self. It lighted his face into beauty, the chrism of the adoring spirit laid upon trembling lip and flashing eye. "I have withheld from you," he said, in quick, short utterance, "because it had to be. But if you care, too, why deny us both one hour of happiness, if we part to-morrow?"

"Deny me nothing," she was murmuring. "Let me see your heart."

"You should see my soul, if it could be. Dearest, it was so from the first minute. I was afraid of you with the terrible fear of love. Don't you see how different it is with us? You longed for love because you are the angel of it. I was afraid of it because it would have to mean hunger and pain and thirst."

"But not now! not now! We have found each other, and it means the same thing for both of us."

"We have got to part, you know, for a couple of ages or so, or even till we die. Maybe I can get into some sort of trim by that time, if I give my mind to it; but here it's no use, dear, you see."

"No use! Osmond, I have given you my love. What do you mean to do with it?"

He caught his breath miserably.

"I am going to--God! what am I going to do! You are honest," he cried, "you mean it all, but--sweetheart, look at me, and see it is not possible. To-night ends it."

She withdrew her hands from his, and sat upright in her chair.

"Then," she said, "you are a coward."

"Am I?" He looked at her, blanched and sorrowful. "Am I, Rose?"

"You are a coward. You love me--"

"You know it! You do know that!"

"You know you do, and then you refuse to take the simple, sweet, faithful way with me."

"What way, my dear?"

She did not even flush at the words, sprung from a great sincerity.

"Shall I ask you? Shall I ask you to let me take your name and live with you, and be true to you?"

They looked at each other in the terrible recognition that brings souls almost too close.

"You are a great woman, my dear," said Osmond. He rose and stood before her. "Look at me. I hate my body. Could you love it?"

"I do love it," said the woman. "And I love your soul. And I am ashamed to think we can know the things we have known and then think of the bodies we live in. Grannie believes in immortal life. I believe in it too, since I have known you."

"There are a good many hours, my dear, when we forget immortal life. The world goes hard with us. In those times, shall you look at me and hate me?"

She was smiling at him through tears.

"I shall look at you and love you, stupid!" she said. "Oh, how little men know!"

"And then," he was continuing, in his bitter honesty, "I am a laboring man. I told Peter you were a terrible Parisian."

She shook her head.

"You don't quite know what you are, Osmond. There's a good deal of grannie in you. Perhaps that is one of the things I love. You work with your hands. Everything is possible to you, every kind of splendid thing, because you have not been spoiled by artificial life, the ambitions of it, the poor, mean hypocrisies. Strange that I should be talking about labor!"

"Why strange?"

"Because I hated the mention of it while my father lived. But now I seem to have gone back to my old feeling of a kind of pity for them all,--the ones that work blindly out of the light,--I see them as Ivan Gorof saw them, that great sea of the oppressed."

"But not every workingman is oppressed."

"No, no! Not here. But in other countries where they are surging and trying to have their ignorant way. And they are no more to be pitied than the rich. And I keep wishing for them, not money and power and leisure, such as the rich have, but something better, something I wish the rich had, too."

"The heart that sees God, grannie would say."

"Maybe grannie would pray for it, Osmond. Maybe I could sing it--I hope to sing now--maybe you could put it into the land and bring it out in flowers."

"That's poetry!" said Osmond. He was smiling at her unconscious way of showing him how lovely she was and how loving. "I am going now, dear. I am going to take your present home carefully and look at it alone."

She knitted wistful brows a moment. Then she too smiled.

"You will see how valuable it is when you look at it," she said. "It will shine so."

He had risen and stood before her, looking at her.

"Rose," he said, "you're a darling."

"Am I?" She was radiant.

"I am going to think up the things lovers have said, and read Solomon's Song, maybe! But now I'm going back to the plantation, to let the Almighty God and the undergods have a chance to tell me how to give you up."

"Ask them now, Osmond," she breathed. "Ask here, while I am here to answer, too."

"No," said Osmond. He shook his head. "Not while we are together. I can't listen to Him."

* * * * *

In the road he met Peter. They stopped, and Peter said at once,--

"I've got three orders from New York. When they're finished, I'm going back to France."

Osmond could not at once recall himself, even for his boy. Peter seemed only a figure of the night, familiarly dear, and yet unrelated to the great dream that swept across the sky with banners. Peter spoke again bluntly.

"I shall paint again all right. You needn't worry. It's got hold of me."

Then they shook hands.

XXXI

Osmond went back to his little house, not to sleep, but to think. The old habit of his life was changed. Henceforward, whether he took a woman's love or left it, things would not be the same. Say she loved him with the enduring passion of a woman at her best, could he let her undertake the half of his strange lot? Could he cut her off from a thousand sources of happiness to be found in the world she knew, even though he forced her to go out into that world and sing, and lessened his claim on her to a swallow flight now and then back to his waiting heart? If her lot were to be a public one, she would have, in a measure, to make it herself; for here was he, with his plants and trees, almost one of them, and he could not give up his hardy life, lest he dwindle and fail utterly. Besides, this was his business, as music was hers. Whatever communion they had, it could never be a unison of pursuits, but rather an interchange of rich devotion. It looked, he concluded, very bad for her.

As he thought that, the night grew chill, and the stars waned in their shining. These were the dull old ways of a world that had swung so long in one orbit that it could never be otherwise. He was bringing the woman to break bitter bread with him, and though she ate it cheerfully in the morning of her hope, it would seem intolerable in the evening, and at night she might refuse it utterly. What right had he to let her vow herself to such things and swell the list of proven failure? But say she loved him! And after all, what was love? Was it the ever-living germ of desire to create new life, that life might live? Was it the gift shut in the hand when life left the creating source, to be squandered or hoarded, to be used for honor or dishonor, but always ignorantly, to serve the power behind creation itself? Was this beautiful creature the sport of her woman's blood, doing the will of the earth, and so most innocently walking into the lure of his arms because they longed for her? He wondered.

And his side of it, the man's side, what did it mean for him to know he worshiped the divinity of her beauty, the sun of her good pleasure, the might of her yieldingness? When he thought of her, the body of things became mysteriously transmuted to what he had to call their soul, because it wore no other name. There was the flame of passion and the frost of awe. The mystical call of her spirit to his had become the most natural of all created impulses. Yet, say that he, too, was in the grip of that greatest force, and nature was tricking the woman out with all the colors of the dawn, to blind him into stumbling along nature's ways. Did nature want him to say, "This is Paradise," until she was ready to let him know it was the unchanged earth? If it was all a gigantic phenomenon of a teeming universe--well, it was good. It was to be worshiped as the savage worships the sun: but not greatly. For clouds hide the sun, and, in spite of it, men die. Better not spill too much blood for a savage god that gives but savage recompense. And, thinking so, he closed his eyes and lapsed into a dull recognition of the things of earth.

How far his mind had rushed upon its track he did not know, but suddenly it came to a stop and jolted him awake. It was as if he had come to a great gulf, the darkness girdling the natural life, and across it were the colors of the dawn. They breathed and wavered in sheer beauty. And at that moment there began in him the fainting recognition of what love might be if men would have it so. First, there was the lure, the voice of the creature calling to its mate. Then there was the unveiling of the soul, the recognition, the sight of the soul as God sees it, so that the two creatures can only breathe, "How beautiful you are!" And that must not continue, because the soul is a delicate though an indestructible thing, and cannot walk naked through the assaults of time. It would consume the beholder; it would even scorch under the flame of its own being. It withdraws, only to appear again, like the god from the brake, when it is greatly summoned. But always it is there, and the two that hold high fealty remember what they have seen. When the flame sinks, they say: "But it is the flame on the altar. It must not die." So they renew it. When the outer habit of life fails in one of them, to grow poor and mean, the other remembers that one glimpse of the soul, and calls upon it tenderly.

"Revive," says his patient love, "I stay you with the flagons of my hope, I comfort you with the apples of my great belief." And always it is an interchange of life, the one feeding the other with eternal succor.

And now, to come back to the old question: Say a woman loved a man like this man. Osmond seemed not to be debating now, but hastening along the thread of a perfect certainty. Something had put a clue in his hand. Wherever it might lead him, he was running fast. It came upon him, like the lighting of a great fire, that this was a call for high emprise. He loved nothing so much as courage. Here was the summons to the world-old battle where all but a few fail and none are said to succeed unless they die for passion and so life drops a curtain on the after-fight. The great lovers--chiefly they are those for whom the fight never was finished, who chose death rather than endure. He had bitten his teeth all his life on the despair of adventure, but now it came upon him that life itself is the great adventure, and love the crown of it. Say he, loving a woman, went out to fight the dragons of the way. He had no armor such as youth delights in. He was not a Prince Charming, who wooes the eye even before he speaks. He had only the one treasure--love. Say he crowned the woman with it, and then challenged God to give their hungers food, be the unseen combatant and fight out the fight beside them? Say he vowed himself like a knight to her service, and their mutual worship scorned the body save as the instrument of life, and glorified the soul? "I am the soul," something cried out in him. "Do not deny me, or you blaspheme the God that also lives. Give me food, the large liberty to be faithful. Lay bonds upon me, patience and loyalty, and I shall rejoice in them and grow strong enough to break them, and delight in perfect liberty."

It all resolved itself, he found, into this question of the soul. Was the marvel true? Did it really exist? For if it did, it must have food and cherishing. Inevitably then he thought of grannie, and his struggling mind seemed to appeal to her clarity, question and answer, and to every question she smiled and told him the dream was true. It did live, this mystery, this imperishable one that came from the bosom of God and would return in safety there.

Osmond rose, in the dewy midnight, and stretched his arms to heaven. He felt what he never had before, in his iron acquiescence, an ecstasy of worship. This was what grannie felt, he knew; it was the daily draught that kept her spirit young. He made no doubt she was praying for him at that moment, and that their buoyant certainties were meeting in the air of quickened life. Hitherto he had walked. Now he saw the use of wings.

He knew what Rose was doing. She would not be waking. She would be lying in her bed asleep, too secure in her glad confidence to wonder over it. Another thought swept in and awoke his quivering sentience to the marvel of his life. Some recognition of the cherishing maternal seemed to grow in him, and as grannie had saved his body for him, so now Rose seemed to have given birth to his new soul. It was like a shining child. With his bodily eyes he almost saw it through the dark, and he longed to take it in his arms to where she slept and lay it on her breast. He could fancy how the shining child would lie there and how, sleeping, her sweet soul would cherish it. And whether he began the next day with the resolve to give her up or to relinquish his own doubts, at least he had had the vision. As the dawn broke he seemed to see her coming toward him, the spirit of it, rosy-clad, bearing in her hands, outstretched, a beaker for his lips. It was the water of life, and her face besought him to know finally that they were to drink of it together. He was shaken with the wonder of it. All his past had been preparing him for ignominy and loss. He trembled when he saw what the girl in the vision meant: that the greater quest is farther yet.

XXXII

Madam Fulton and Electra were busy, each in her own track, making ready to go. Electra was truly concerned because grandmother had fallen into this frenzy of setting her belongings in order and would even fly up to town to her little apartment, on mysterious errands. But Madam Fulton was as gayly confident as she was inscrutable, and even when Billy Stark warned her that she was doing too much, she only whispered,--

"Got the tickets, Lochinvar?"

On the last day, when the house was partly closed and the servants lingered only for an hour or two, Electra, ready to her gloves, came to kiss her grandmother good-by. Madam Fulton drew back a pace and looked at her.

"Electra," said she, "you'll be horribly shocked and you'll want to laugh at me. But don't you do it. Don't you do either of those two things."

Electra's brows came together in a perplexity that yet betokened only a tepid interest. Her own affairs were too insistent. They crowded out the pale, dim hopes of age.

"When, grandmother?" she asked. "Why should I want to laugh?"

"Never mind. But you will. And when you do, you say to yourself that, after all, youth and age are just about the same, only age has tested many things and found they're no good. So if it finds something that seems good--well, Electra, you're off on your fool's errand. Don't you deny other folks the comfort of theirs."

"I don't understand you, grandmother."

"No, of course you don't. But you will. Once I shouldn't have cared whether you did or not, but I've taken a kind of a liking to you. I told you I should when you turned human and made a fool of yourself like the rest of us. And now you're going out into the wilderness, to found a city or something of that sort."

"I am going to help the Brotherhood," said Electra, with punctilious truth.

"And build a monument to that handsome scamp that had the bad taste to come over here to die."

"Grandmother, you must not use such words."

"Must not? Don't you suppose I know a scamp when I see one? If I'd been fifty years younger, I dare say I should be starting out to build him a monument, too. But I'm glad of it, child, I'm glad of it. He's your preserver. He has roused in you the capacity for being a fool. Make much of it. Prize it. It's God's most blessed gift to man. When you've lost that, you've lost everything."

"There is the carriage, grandmother. I must go."

Madam Fulton presented a kindly cheek.

"Good-by, my dear," she said. "I'm sorry I've harried you. I had to, though. I should again. Now we'll meet in Paris, or London--or another world."

Electra, a perfect picture of the well-equipped traveler, in her beautiful suit, her erect pose, was at the door.

"The maids will go in an hour," she said. "Then you've only to turn the key and walk over to Mrs. Grant's. I wish you'd had your trunks taken out before."

"My trunks can wait," chuckled the old lady. "They'll be sent for."

As Electra's carriage turned from the driveway into the road, Madam Fulton laughed again.

Electra had five minutes at the station, and there appeared Peter, wearing the air of haste. He had been painting in the garden, when the carriage went by, and he had dropped brush and palette to run. Why, Peter could not have said, only it seemed cold and miserable to have an imperial lady taking the train alone and then setting sail with no one by.

"You wouldn't let me go up to town with you?" he ventured, with his eager stammer.

"No," returned Electra, "thank you."

"I'd like to awfully," said Peter. "Maybe I could be of use."

"Everything is done. My luggage is on board. We sail at three."

"It seems an infernally lonesome thing to do!"

Electra smiled. She had gained that smile of late. It was a subtle indication of the secret knowledge she had of the resources of her own future. With a perfect and simple conviction, she believed she should be guided by Markham MacLeod or some unseen genius of his life. She should follow his star. She should know where to go.

"Rose said you didn't take the letters she offered you. Is that wise, Electra? If you want to know the Brotherhood--"

"I shall know it," said Electra, with entire simplicity. "The way will open."

She did not say that she could not bear to blur her secret by sharing it overmuch with any one. She was going on a mission for the chief. Other voices would confuse the message. The medium must be kept clarified between his soul and hers. Peter stood back, feeling, in another form, Madam Fulton's hopeless admiration of this magnificent futility.

"Well," he said, "I shall be there in the late autumn, and I shall find you."

"I may not," said Electra decisively, "want to be found."

But when he thought of the elements into which she meant to hurl herself, he was of the opinion that she would as gladly long to be found as the maiden in the arena before the beasts walked in. Then the train came, and she bade him a civil and correct good-by and was taken away.

Peter went home wondering, his eyes on the ground. Life seemed to resolve itself, not into the harmonious end of tragedy, but into more tragedy. Human things, when a solution was reached, deliberately began a new act. Peter had the childlike egoism of the very religious or the devotee of art. He never could help feeling that, in a way, the world was created for him. Its fortuitous happenings strengthened that belief. He had come home to lose Electra whom he did not love. Markham MacLeod, who, he now saw, had been too bright a sun, blinding his eyes to his own proper work, had been removed. Perhaps that, too, was done for him. And now he should paint his pictures. The Brotherhood still seemed far off and, if not vain, at least a clamorous sea of discontent, the hope of a palace beautiful beyond the touch of time. But near him were dear and intimate things: the feel of the brush in his fingers, the adorable combination of colors as delirious as the sunsets God could make. And in the future there were men and women who also would go singing along the path to perfect pictures and leafy glades. In them was infinite possibility of more pleasure, more delight. And there was his broken heart! For Peter's heart was truly broken. That he knew. He had lost Rose, for she had gravely told him so, and given the simple reason, if he needed it. There was no man for her but one. And the one was Osmond, to whom he would gladly relinquish even the delight of her. So, thinking of his brother who was the best thing born, of his broken heart, of his pictures and the general adorableness of the world, crammed full of things to paint, Peter threw his stick into the air, caught it, and burst into song.

* * * * *

When the maids had left, after their good-by to Madam Fulton, giving the keys into her hand, she sat awhile in the silent house, and took a comfortable nap. It was amazing, she thought, as she sank off, what a lessening of tension it was to have Electra gone. When she awoke, it was still quiet and Billy Stark had not come. He was to run down from town, his last preparations made; the country minister was to meet them at the Grant house, and there they would be married. Then they would take the late afternoon train, and, in due course, sail for Liverpool. Even Bessie Grant did not guess they were to be married; but she, Madam Fulton knew, was ready for the last trump and welcoming evangels, and that prepared her for all lesser things.

It seemed a little chilly in the house, shut up as it was for the flitting, all except the room where Madam Fulton sat, and she took her chair out of doors, not pausing on the veranda, but going on to the garden beds. It would be pleasant, she thought, to sit there in the sun with the bees humming on their way, and take her last look at the place. As well as she knew she was going to leave it, she knew she should return to it no more. It was not only that her age made it improbable,--for she had no doubt of Billy's ability to run over a dozen times yet; it was some inward certainty that told her she was going for good. It pleased her in every way. She liked new peoples and untried lands.