Rose MacLeod Part 23

Billy Stark glanced at the floor as if he wanted to get down and roll.

Then he lay back in his chair and went gasping off. Madam Fulton watched him seriously, that unquenchable spark still in her eyes.

"I don't know what you can do next," said Billy, getting out his pocket-handkerchief, "unless you become engaged to me."

Madam Fulton laid down her tatting, to look at him in a gentle musing.

"It would plague Electra," she owned.

"Come on, Florrie, come on! Get up early to-morrow morning, and we'll post off and be married."

"No," said Madam Fulton absently, still considering, "I don't want to be married. Harsh measures never did attract me. But I'd like very well to be engaged. Tell you what, Billy, we could be engaged for the summer, and when you go back to England we'll call it off."

Billy rose, and possessed himself of one of her hands. He kissed it ceremoniously, and returned it to its tatting.

"You do me infinite honor," he announced, with more gravity than she liked.

"Don't get too serious, Billy," she said quickly. "It'll remind us of being young, and mercy knows that isn't what we want."

"May I inform your granddaughter?" asked the gentleman gravely.

"No, no, I'll do it. That's half the fun."

At that moment Electra came in. She was dressed in white, as usual, but her ordinary dignified simplicity seemed overlaid, to the old lady's satirical gaze, with an added smoothness of glossy surfaces. Her dress fell in simple folds. She seemed to have clothed herself to meet a moral emergency. Her face was pale in its determination. She was like a New England maiden led to sacrifice and bound, at all hazards, to do her conscience credit. Madam Fulton, seeing her, hardened her heart. There were few pirouettes she would not have essayed at that moment to plague her granddaughter.

"Electra, my dear," she said, in a silken voice, "we have something to tell you, Mr. Stark and I. We have become engaged."

Electra looked from one to the other, not even incredulity in her gaze, all a reproachful horror. Yet Electra did not for a moment admit the possibility of a joke on such a subject. She saw her grandmother, as she often did, peering down paths that led to madness, and even, as in this case, taking one.

"Please do not mention it," grandmother was saying smoothly. "The engagement is not to be announced--not yet."

Electra could not look at Billy Stark, even in reproof. The situation was too intolerable. And at that moment, flushed from her walk, eager, deprecating as she had to be in this unfriendly spot, Rose came in. She went straight to Madam Fulton, as if she were the recognized head of the house.

"It was so good of you," she said. "I am so glad to come." Then she turned to Electra and Billy Stark with her quick, beautiful smile and her inclusive greeting. This was not the same woman who had run away to trysts under the tree, or even the woman Peter had seen when she returned, glowing, lovely, as if from a bath of pleasure. She was the Parisian, as Osmond had perhaps imagined her in his jesting fancy, regnant, subtle, even a little hard. Electra felt for a moment as if it were wise to be afraid of her. But they sat down, and she essayed the safe remark,--

"I believe luncheon is late."

"What have you been doing with yourself, my dear?" Madam Fulton asked Rose, who was looking from one to another with an accessible brightness, as if she only wanted a chance to respond to everything beautifully. She bent a little, deferentially, toward Madam Fulton.

"Reading aloud this morning," she said, "to grannie."

"You call her grannie, do you?"

"I begged to. I adore her."

"Does she like it?"

"Oh, yes, she likes it," Rose returned, with her lovely smile. "Don't you think she likes it?"

"I know she does. That's what I can't understand. Every time I hear Electra say 'grandmother' it's like a nail in my coffin."

"Grandmother!" exclaimed Electra, in an instant and quite honest deprecation.

"That's it, my dear," nodded the old lady. "That's precisely it. Nail me down."

Then luncheon was announced, and they went out, Rose with that instant deference toward Madam Fulton which suggested a hundred services while she delicately refrained from doing one.

"I know you," said the old lady dryly, after they had sat down. "I know quite well what you are."

"What, please?" asked Rose, bending on her that warm look which was yet never too flattering, and still promised an incense of personal regard not to be spoiled by deeds.

"I know exactly what you are," said the old lady, with her incisive kindliness. "You're a charmer."

Instantly Rose flushed all over her face, a flooding red. With the word she remembered the other voice out of the moonlit night, telling her the same thing. Now it was almost an accusation. Then it was a caressing loveliness of the night, as if an unseen hand had crowned her with a chaplet, dripping fragrance. In that instant, with a throb of haste and longing, she was away from the circle of these alien souls, back in the night where voice had answered voice. It was immediately as if she were hearing his call to her. "I will come to-night, to-night," she heard her heart repeating. "Did you wait for me last night, dear playmate, alone in the dark and stillness? And the night before? Did you think I was never coming? I will come to-night."

Meantime Billy Stark, seeing the blush and knowing it meant discomfort, was pottering on in his kindly optimism, throwing himself into the breach, and dribbling words like rain. He talked of Paris and continental life in general. Rose had been everywhere. She spoke of traveling with her father on his missions from court to court. When MacLeod's name recurred upon her lips, Electra, who presided, still and pale, roused momentarily into some show of interest. But Rose would not be led along that road. For some reason she refused to speak freely of her father. At a question, her lovely lips would fix themselves in a straight line. Back in the library again, she seated herself persistently by Madam Fulton, like a dog who has at last discovered the person friendliest to him.

"Run away, Billy, if you like," said the old lady indulgently. "You want your cigar on the veranda. I know you."

Billy was going, in humorous deprecation, when there was a running step along the veranda, and Peter came in with a bound. And what a Peter! He looked like a runner--not a spent one, either--with the news of victory.

It was in his face, his flushed cheeks and flaming eyes, but chiefly in the air he brought with him--all tension and immoderate joy. Electra held her hands tight together and looked at him. Rose got half out of her chair. In those days when she thought continually of her own affairs, it seemed to her that nothing could be so important unless it had to do with her. Billy Stark by the door waited, and it was Madam Fulton who spoke, irritated at the vague excitement.

"For heaven's sake, Peter, what's the matter?"

He addressed himself at once to Rose.

"I have heard from him. I have had a letter."

"From him!" She was out of her chair and facing him. For the moment, with that hidden communion with Osmond hot in her heart and sharp in her ears, she had almost cried, "Osmond!" But he went on,--

"I have heard from your father."

Instantly the blood was out of her face. Billy Stark wondered at the aging grayness, and reflected curiously that youth is not only a question of flesh and blood but of the merry soul. Peter could not contain his pleasure. He cried out irrepressibly, like the herald beside himself with news,--

"He is coming here!"

"Here!" Rose made one step to lay her hand upon a little cabinet, and stood supporting herself. Electra, who caught the movement, looked at her curiously. Her own enormous interest in Peter's news seemed to merge itself in watchful comment on the other girl.

"Here!" Peter was answering. "To America! He writes me the most stirring letter. I didn't think I knew him so well. He has so many friends here, he says, friends he never saw. He wants to meet them. The best of it is, he's coming here--to us."

"Here!" repeated Rose again. She seemed to be sinking into herself, but the tense hand upon the cabinet kept her firm.

Peter looked at her with eyes of innocent delight.

"Here, to us. I told him if he ever came over, we should grab him before anybody got a hand on him. I've told grannie. She's delighted."

"You told him that!" Her voice held a reproach so piercing that they were all staring at her in wonder. She looked like a woman suffering some anguish too fierce, for the moment, to be stilled. "You've been writing him!"

"Of course," said Peter. "Why, of course, I wrote him. I sent him word when we first got here, to tell him you were well."