Rose MacLeod Part 49

"I said so," she repeated clearly, "because it is true. You are in love with her. Good-by."

Peter turned to her with one of his quick movements and held out his hand. She did not take it.

"Won't you shake hands, Electra?" he asked. "I should think we might be friends." Honest sorrow moved his voice. Now, at least, he was thinking of her only.

Electra meant to show no resentment, no pain. But she had to be true.

"I can't," she said, in a low tone. "Good-by."

And Peter, seeing the aversion in her face, not for him, perhaps, but for the moment, got himself hastily out of the room and into the summer road. And there, before he had walked three paces, Peter began to sing.

He sang softly, not at all because melody was unfitted to the day, but as if what inspired it were too intimate a thing to be revealed. He looked above him, straight ahead, and on every side.

The world was beautiful to him at this moment, and he had a desire to drink it up, to be as young and as rich as Apollo. He did feel very rich, not only in his youth, but in the unnamed possibilities trembling before him; and Peter denied himself no pleasure because it was inappropriate to the moment. It would have seemed to him a refusal of the good gifts of life and an affronting of the G.o.d who created plenty if, because he had lost Electra, he renounced the delight of a happiness he really felt. By and by he would remember Electra, how dignified she was, how irreproachable, in the moments when her virtues did not get the bit between their teeth and dash away with her; but now, under this abounding summer sun, with the leaves trembling, she withdrew into a gray seclusion like an almost forgotten task--one that had resolved itself into a beneficent fulfillment quite unlike what it had promised.

n.o.ble as it was, he had been excused from it, and he felt blissfully free. Something else that swam before him like the gleam of a vision did not look like another task. It was more like a quest for a hero's arming. It fitted his dreams, it went hand in hand with the visions he had had years ago about his painting, when that was all possibility, not work. This was the wors.h.i.+pful righting of an innocent lady.

She was there in view when he got home, as if she had waited for him, under a tree, trembled about by the summer green, her white dress flickered upon by leaves. She was pale; her mouth looked piteous to him, and his heart beat hard in champions.h.i.+p. She half rose from her chair, and let her unread book fall to the gra.s.s beside her.

There were two things Rose wanted very much to know: whether Electra had shocked him out of his trust in her, and why her father stayed so long in that visit to Osmond at the plantation. The last question was the great one, and she asked it first.

"What can my father be saying to him?"

"Osmond? I don't know. Equal rights, labor, capital, G.o.d knows. Rose, don't sit there. Please get up!"

She obeyed, wondering, brushed out her skirt and put her hair straight, and then glanced at him.

"What for?" she asked. "What do you want me to do?"

Peter looked to her about eighteen, perhaps, nothing but youth and gleam and gay good luck. She felt a thousand years older herself, yet she loved Peter dearly. She would do anything for him. This she told herself in the moment of smoothing down her hair. His face brimmed over with fun, with something else, too. The seriousness that dwells housemate to comedy was behind.

"I couldn't say it with you lying there and looking at me," said Peter.

"n.o.body ever made a proposal to a lady in a steamer chair unless he was in another and the deck was level."

"Peter," she said gravely, "don't make fun."

Peter shook back the lock of hair he encouraged to tumble into his eyes.

It was his small affectation. It kept him at one with his artistic brotherhood.

"I am rejected," he said, and do what he might, he announced it exultingly, and not in the least with the dignity he would have admired in the lady who had refused him. But at that moment Peter had had enough of dignity and the outer form of things. He wanted to be himself, light or sad, bad or good, and speak the truth as the moment revealed it to him. "But I am rejected," he continued, when she looked at him in a quick reproof, "turned down, jilted, smashed into a c.o.c.ked hat. And I came just as quick as I could. Rose--"

"Don't!" she warned him. "Don't say that, Peter."

"Just as quick as I could get here without running--I couldn't run, there were so many pretty things to look at--to tell you, to beg of you"--Peter's voice broke. He was behaving badly to conceal how much he was moved. "I came to offer it to you," he said seriously, in a low tone. "Not what was given back to me, but something else, so much better you couldn't speak of 'em in the same day. When I think of what might be, it's all light and color--and the leaves of the wood moving. It's a great big dream, Rose, and you fit into it. You fit into the dream." He was intoxicated with youth and life. She was not sure whether it was with her.

"I hope you haven't quarreled," she said soberly. She wished she might recall him. "But if you have and are patient--"

Peter could not let her go on. He put out his quick, clever hands in an eager gesture, as if he pushed something away.

"Ah," he said, "I don't want to be patient! I want to be rash. I don't want anything back. I want something new and beautiful. I want to tell you a million things in a minute--chiefly how much I love you."

His voice had deepened. It swept her on apace, in spite of herself, because it was like Osmond's. For a moment she felt the kins.h.i.+p between them, the same swift blood, the picturesque betrayals. There was something at the heart of each that was dear to her, and Peter, for the moment, speaking in the suns.h.i.+ne with her eyes upon him, was also the voice out of the dark. But she had nevertheless to recall him.

"Have you really given each other up?" she asked.

"Yes," said Peter, in the same glad acquiescence. "And what do you think she told me, the last thing of all?"

She shook her head.

"She told me I loved you. And I do, Rose. Oh, I do! I do!"

"But that mustn't part you. Think what it is to me--to know my coming here has done it."

"Oh, you had to come!" said Peter light-heartedly. "It was preordained.

It's destiny. I was a fool not to see it the first minute. She had to tell me."

Rose, in spite of herself, smiled a little. But her thoughts settled gravely back upon her own hard task.

"Did she tell you"--She hesitated, and then asked her question with a simple directness. "Did she tell you how much mistaken you are in me?"

"Please don't," said Peter. His face flushed. He looked his misery.

"You see she is the only one who was not mistaken in me. Those of you who believed in me--well, I must tell all of you. Even grannie, dear grannie! I am afraid--" She stopped because she meant to show no emotion; but it seemed to her that grannie, in her guarded life, must view her harshly. "I was wrong, Peter, ever to let you mix yourself in this miserable coil. If I could lie, well and good. Let me do it and take the consequences. But I should have known better than to bring you into it."

Peter stood thoughtfully regarding her in a very impersonal way, as if he debated how she could be moved.

"I wonder," he said at last, "how it is possible to tell you how lovely you are to everybody, how perfectly splendid, you know, quite different from anybody else! And when you add to that that you've been wronged and--and insulted--oh you've simply no conception how it makes a fellow feel! Why, I adore you, that's all. I just adore you."

He stretched out his hand like a bluff comrade and she put hers into it as frankly.

"You're a dear boy, Peter," she said, and her eyes were wet.

He spoke perversely, when she had taken her hand away:--

"That's all very well, you know, but I'm not a boy--not all the time. I love you awfully, Rose, in the real way, the bang-up old style, Tristan and all that, you know. I'm going to keep on and you'll have to listen."

"Shall I, Peter?" She was still smiling wistfully. Love, sweet, clean, young love looked very beautiful to her. She wished she could see it crowning some head, not hers, some girl quite worthy of him. "Well, not to-day."

"No, maybe not to-day," Peter agreed obstinately, "but other days, all the days. I can't give up the most beautiful thing there is, and you're that. You're simply the most beautiful there is."

"There's grannie coming out on the veranda." Then she added bitterly, "I wonder if she will think I am the most beautiful thing there is!"

XXI

MacLeod was not used to being summoned, except by high officials, and then if the meeting would not advantage his cause, he was likely to take a journey in another direction. But when Osmond's man invited him to go down to the shack that morning, he had agreed with a ready emphasis, and now walked along, smiling over the general kindliness of things. The change of air after his sea voyage was doing him good, and he had been able to command anew the sense of physical prosperity which had once been his habitual possession. That forbade him morbid premonitions and withdrawals relative to the bodily life. It hardly seemed possible, this robust guardian declared, that anything should happen to him, save after a very long period, when inevitable decay would set in. But in a harmonious mood and prospect retreated so far that it might almost as well not threaten at all. He had no doubt that when change fell upon the aged, it was as beneficent in its approach as the oncoming of sleep. But of these things he need not think, except as they might be brought to his mind by the disasters of other people. Acquiesce in the course of nature, said his philosophy, and refuse to antic.i.p.ate trouble as trouble. It could always be curbed or stamped out when it came. That abounding certainty was a part of his power.