Rose MacLeod Part 42

"He came several times, but either he was too rough and he frightened me, or too common and he repelled me, or--"

"And Tom Fulton came!"

"Yes, walking just the right way, neither too fast nor too slow, and all chivalry and honor. Oh, my heart! my heart!" She was sobbing to herself.

There was a long pause.

"So you married him," Osmond reminded her.

"Osmond!" At last she had said his name. She knew it with her mind, but how did her heart have it so ready? To him it seemed natural that she should use it, until he thought of it next day. She continued in that hurried voice that pleaded so, "I must make you see how I had thought of those things always."

"What things, dear child?"

"Loving and being loved. It was like your plants, coming to flower.

There was to be one person who would give me a perfect devotion. There would be music and dancing and bright weather, day after day, year after year. That was coming to flower, like your plants."

"A rose in bloom!" he murmured.

"It was a kind of possession with me. I can't tell you what hold it took on me. There were years when I tried not to have a wrong thought or do an ugly act, so that I could be beautiful to him when he came."

"Behold, the bridegroom cometh!" mused the voice, in involuntary comment, as if it responded to the man's own wondering mood.

"He came. He made himself irresistible to me. He knew my father first."

"Were they friends?"

"My father has no friends--not as you would understand it. He touches people at one little point. They think they have everything; but it is nothing. Still, they understood each other. My father sold me to him."

There was silence from the darkness under the tree; only she heard him breathe.

"I was to blame, too," she cried. "But I did not see it then. I truly did not see it. My father told me it was n.o.bler and purer to go with my lover so. Marriage, he said, had been profaned a million, million times.

Where was the sacrament, he asked, in a church that was all rotten? He told me so, too--Tom Fulton. I went with him. I never married him." She paused for the answering voice, but it delayed. The silence itself constrained her to go on. "Do you know what Tom Fulton was?"

"He was a handsome beast."

"You never knew the half. But my father knew. He knew men. He knew Tom Fulton. And he delivered me over to the snare of the fowler. I lived a year with him. I left him. He had the accident, and I went back. He died. I thanked G.o.d."

Osmond had not often, to his remembrance, formulated grat.i.tude to any great power, but he also said, "Thank G.o.d!" In a way he did not understand, she seemed to him austere in her purity and her rebellion against these bitter facts. There was no hesitation and no shame. She had only wrong to remember, not willful sin. One thing he had to know.

He asked his question. "Was Fulton--kind to you?"

"At first. Not at the last."

"How was he--not kind?"

That, too, she was apparently thinking out.

"I can hardly tell you," she said at length. "He seemed to hate me."

"You!"

"I have seen the same thing twice, with other men and other women. You see, it was a terrible blow to him--his vanity, his pride--to stop loving me."

"I don't understand."

"You may not, ever. But he had had unworthy things in his life, attachments, those that last a short time. When he cared for me, he thought he cared tremendously. He believed it would last. But it didn't.

He had nothing left to give me."

"He had gambled it away!"

"I think it hurt his pride. He could only justify himself unconsciously--it was all unconscious--by finding fault with me. By proving I was not worthy to be loved. Do you see?"

"You are a strange woman to have guessed that. You must be very clever."

"No, oh, no! It was because I thought so hard about it. For a long time, night after night, I thought of nothing else. When it died--what he called love--I thought the world died, too."

"My dear good child!"

"When he was dead, what was I to do? I thought I should sing. But my father was coming from the East with another suitor, the prince. The prince had seen me here and there for a couple of years. I had always been known as Madam Fulton. I called myself so at first, proudly, honestly. Then other people called me so, and even when I had left him, I let them do it. Peter stepped in then, honest Peter in his ignorance.

He wondered why I didn't come here to Tom's people. Electra was a kind of G.o.ddess. I came. That is all." She paused.

Osmond spoke musingly.

"So you were not his wife! And Electra knew it."

"She did not know it."

"But she suspected it. She refused to own you."

"She suspected me because she knew Tom too well. I believe he had shocked her and frightened her until his world was all evil to her.

There was another reason." This was a woman's reason, and she was ashamed to have put her finger on it. Electra's proud possession of her lover and her instant revolt at his new partisans.h.i.+p, what was it but crude jealousy? Yet there were many things she could not even dimly understand in Electra's striving and abortive life--the emulation that reached so far and met the mists and vapors at the end. "But there was one thing I did not want," Rose cried--"their money. I never thought of it. I only thought how I might come here for a little and be at peace, away from my father. Then when Electra hated me, I had to stay, I had to fight it out. Why? I don't know. I had to. But now it's all different."

"How is it different?"

"Because she has accepted me."

"But you wanted her to accept you."

"Ah, yes, on my own word! I believe I had it in my mind to tell her the next minute,--to throw myself on her mercy, the mercy of the G.o.ddess, and beg her to see me as I was, all wrong, but innocent. It is innocent to have meant no wrong. But when she met me like an enemy, I had to fight."

"And now she has accepted you."

"Yes." The a.s.sent was bitter. "On my father's word."

"His word?"

"Yes. He stands by me. He confirms me. She asked him if I had been married to her brother. 'Yes,' said my father."

"Why?"