Rose MacLeod Part 27

"You said you didn't care. You said what we had lived through--what I had--these twenty-five years, made no difference!"

"Not to me. But when it comes to you, why, maybe I could help you."

She thought a while and then answered definitely and coldly,--

"No, I can't do it. I should have to tell--too many things."

"Then we won't think of it," said the voice. "Only you must remember, there's money and there's--Peter to take you off and hide you somewhere.

You can trust Peter." Again he seemed ready to break their companions.h.i.+p, and she wondered miserably.

"You seem to think of nothing but my going away."

"I must think of it. Nothing is more likely."

"You don't seem to care!"

"Playmate!" Again the voice reproached her.

"Well!"

"There's but one thing I think of--really. To give you a little bit of happiness while you are here. After that--well, you can make the picture for yourself. I shall come to the playhouse every night--alone."

The one thing perhaps that had been the strongest in guiding her romantic youth had been eternal faithfulness. Her heart beat at the word "forever." Now her grat.i.tude outran his calm.

"Will you do it?" she cried.

"Shall I promise?"

"No! no! I would not have you do it really--only want to do it. Do you think you will remember--to want to come?"

He said the words after her, so slowly that they seemed to come from lips set with some stern emotion.

"I shall remember. I shall want to come."

She rose.

"Good-night," she said. "Shake hands?"

"No," said the voice, "not that. In playhouses you can't shake hands.

Good-night--dear lady."

She turned away, and then, because she was silent the voice called after her,--

"Playmate!"

"Yes."

"I shall follow you to the wall and watch you home. You're not afraid?"

"No, I'm not afraid."

"And you're almost happy?"

At the anxiety in his voice, she was unreasonably happy.

"Yes," she called back. "Good-night."

"Got the key safe?"

"All safe. Good-night."

"G.o.d bless you, playmate." That was what she thought she heard.

XII

Madam Fulton was at the library table, considering her morning mail, and Billy Stark sat on the veranda just outside the window where she could call to him and be cheerfully answered. Presently Electra came in, a book, a pencil, and some slips of paper in her hand. There was intense consideration on her brow. She had on, her grandmother thought with discouragement, her clubwoman's face. Billy Stark, seeing her, got up and with his cigar and his newspaper wandered away. He had some compa.s.sion for Electra and her temperament, though not for that could he abstain from the little observances due his engagement to Madam Fulton.

He had a way of bringing in a flower from the garden and presenting it to the old lady with an exaggerated significance. Electra always winced, but Madam Fulton was delighted. He called her "Florrie," prettily, and "Florrie, dear." Again Electra shrank, and then he took the wrinkled hand. One day Madam Fulton looked up at him with a droll mischief in her eyes.

"I suppose it's an awful travesty, isn't it, Billy?"

"Not for me," said Billy loyally. "Can't I be in love with a woman at the end of fifty years? I should smile."

"It's great fun," she owned. Then more than half in earnest, "Billy, do you suppose I shall go to h.e.l.l?"

This morning Electra had found something to puzzle her.

"I've been working on your book a little, grandmother," she began.

"What book? My soul and body!" The old lady saw the cover and laid down her pen. "That's my 'Recollections.' What are you doing with that?"

"They are extremely interesting," said Electra absorbedly. She sat down and laid her notes aside, to run over a doubtful page. "We are going to have an inquiry meeting on it."

"We? Who?"

"The club. Everybody was deeply disappointed because you've refused to say anything; but it occurred to us we might give an afternoon to cla.s.sifying data in it, naming people you just refer to, you know. I am doing the Brook Farm section."

Madam Fulton sank back in her chair and looked despairingly from the window for Billy Stark.

"I shall never," she said, "hear the last of that book!"

"Why should you wish to hear the last of it?" asked Electra. "It is a very valuable book. It would be more so if you would only be frank about it. But I can understand that. I told the club it was your extreme delicacy. You simply couldn't mention names."

"No, I couldn't," murmured the old lady. "I couldn't."

"But here is something, grandmother. You must help me out here. Here where you talk about the crazy philanthropist who had the colonization scheme--not Liberia--no, that's farther on--Well, you say he came to grandfather and asked him to give something to the fund." She was regarding Madam Fulton with clear eyes of interrogation.