Читать книгу Rose MacLeod - Alice Brown - Страница 5

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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."

He straightened as he spoke. An impulse of pride passed over him, and she read the betrayal in his kindling eyes and their widened pupils.

"Is there work for you?" she asked, "for men who don't speak and proselytize?"

"I do speak, Electra."

"You do?"

"I have spoken a little. I can't do it yet in the way he wants. What he wants is money."

"We have sent him money," she agreed. "The Delta Club gave a series of plays last winter and voted him the proceeds. The first was for labor in America. The second for free Russia."

"Yes, it pours in on him. It's his enormous magnetism."

"It's his cause."

She seemed to have reached something now that warmed her into life, and he took advantage of that kindling.

"Rose is his daughter," he reminded her. "She is very beautiful, very sad. She is worthy of such a father."

"Rose? Is that her actual name?"

"Yes. They are Americans, though since her childhood she has lived in France."

"What did she do before Tom—got acquainted with her? Live there in Paris with her father?"

"She sang. She has a moving voice. She always hoped she was going to sing better, but there never was money enough to give her the right training. Then she began going about with her father. She spoke, too."

"In public? For the Brotherhood?"

"Yes. She has great magnetism. But she stopped doing that."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I have heard her father ask her to do it, but she refused. She is beautiful, Electra."

Electra was looking at him thoughtfully.

"Did she persuade you to join the Brotherhood?" she asked.

"No," said Peter, unmoved, "the chief himself persuaded me. I went to a great meeting one Sunday night. I heard him. That was the end of me. I knew where I belonged."

Electra, her mind hidden from him as completely as if a veil had fallen between them, was, he could see, considering him. As for her, he hardly dared dwell upon her as she ruthlessly seemed. She was again like the bright American air, too determinate, too sharp. She almost hurt the eyes. He wondered vaguely over several things he was unwilling to ask her, since he could not bear to bring their difference to a finished issue: why she cherished a boundless belief in the father and only reprobation for the daughter, when she had seen neither the one nor the other; why she had this vivid enthusiasm for the charity that embraces the world and none for a friendless child at her door. Their interview seemed to have dropped flat in inconceivable collapse; what was to have been the beginning of their dual life was only the encounter of a hand-to-hand discussion. He tried to summon back the vividness to his fagged emotions, and gave it up. Then he ventured to think of his imperial lady, and found a satirical note beating into his mind. He took refuge in the practical.

"I have not seen Osmond yet."

"Wasn't he there to meet you?"

"No. Grannie said I should have to go down to the plantation, to find him. Does he keep up his old ways, Electra?"

"Yes. Sleeping practically out of doors summer and winter, or in the shack, as he calls it,—that log hut he put up years ago. Haven't you known about him? Hasn't he written?"

"Oh, he writes, but not about himself. Osmond wouldn't do that. Somehow grandmother never wrote any details about him either. I fancied he didn't want her to. So I never asked. She only said he was 'well.' You know Osmond always says that himself."

"I believe he is well," said Electra absently. She was thinking of the alien presence at the other house. "He looks it—strong, tanned. Osmond is very impressive somehow. It's fortunate he wasn't a little man."

Peter made one of the quick gestures he had learned since he had been away from her. They told the tale of give and take with a more mobile people. He could not ask her to ignore Osmond's deformity, yet he could not bear to hear her speak of it. Osmond was, he thought, a colossal figure, to be accepted, whatever his state, like the roughened rock that builds the wall. He rose, terminating, without his conscious will, an interview that was to have lasted, if she had gone to the other house with him and he had returned again with her, the day long.

"I must see Osmond," he hesitated.

Electra, too, had risen.

"Yes," she said conformably, though the table, she knew, would be laid for them both in what had promised to be their lovers' seclusion.

"I will come back. This afternoon, Electra?"

That morning, the afternoon had been his and hers only. She had expected to listen to the recital of his triumphs in Paris, and to scan eagerly the map of his prospects which was to show her way also. And she too opened her lips and spoke without preconsidered intent.

"This afternoon I shall be busy. I have to go in town."

"You won't—" he hesitated again. "Electra, you won't call at the house on the way, and see her, at least?"

"Your Rose?" She smiled at him brilliantly. "Not to-day, Peter."

Then, bruised, bewildered, he went back over the path he had come, leaving his imperial lady to go in and order the luncheon table prepared for one.

"Madam Fulton will not be home," she said to the maid, with a proud unconsciousness; and for the moment it sounded as if Madam Fulton had been the expected guest.