Rose MacLeod Part 14

"Tell me about your father."

She turned on him a face suddenly irradiated by fun. An unexpected dimple came to light, and Osmond's pulse responded to it.

"Electra," she said, "found time to propose that I should give a little talk on my father. Last night I lay awake rehearsing it. Do you want to hear it? Markham MacLeod is the chief of spoilers. He preaches the brotherhood of man, and he gets large perquisites. He deals with enormous issues. Kingdoms and princ.i.p.alities are under his foot because the ma.s.ses are his servitors. Money is always flowing through his hands.

He does not divert it, but it has, with the cheerful consent of his followers, to take him from place to place, to shed his influence, to pay his hotel bills--and he must live well, mind you. For he has to speak. He has to lead. He is a vessel of the Lord." She had talked on unhesitatingly, straight into the fire. Now, when she paused, Osmond commented involuntarily,--

"How well you speak." Then as quickly, "Does your father know you think these things?"

"No," she answered. "I have not had occasion to tell him. Not yet! But about Peter." She faced round at him. "Peter is hypnotized by my father, as they all are in the beginning. He won't paint any more portraits while the spell lasts."

"Then he won't get Electra."

"He won't get her anyway,--not if he champions me. That's my impression."

"But what does your father want him to do?"

"Nothing, that I know. It isn't that he chokes people off from other channels. It's just that his yoke is heavy, for one thing, and that they can't do too much for him. Peter has taken him literally. He will sell all he has and give to the poor, and live on a crust. He'll think the chief, too, is doing it; but he'll be mistaken. The chief never denied himself so much as an oyster in his life."

They sat staring at each other, in the surprise of such full speech.

Osmond had a sense of communion he had never known. Peter and he had talked freely of many things in the last week, but here was a strange yet a familiar being to whom the wells of life were at once unlocked.

The girl's face broke up into laughter.

"Isn't it funny?" she interjected, "our talking like this?"

"Yes. Why are we doing it?" He waited, with a curious excitement, for her answer. But she had gone, darting at a tangent on what, he was to find, were her graceful escapes when it was simpler to go that way.

"It's very mysterious here," she said, glancing about the cabin, "very dark and strange."

"Shall I throw on more wood?"

"If you like. I am not cold."

But he did not do it.

"You don't speak like a Frenchwoman," he ventured.

"I am not. You know that. I am an American."

"Yes; but you have lived in France."

"Always, since I was twelve. But I have known plenty of English,--Americans, too. Shall I speak to you in French?"

He deprecated it, with hands outspread.

"No, no. I read it, by myself. I couldn't understand it, spoken."

She was smiling at him radiantly, and with the innocent purpose, even he, in his ecstasy, felt, of making herself more beautiful and more kind.

"Now," she was saying, "since we have met, you'll come to the house? You won't let me stand in the way?"

His tongue was dry in his mouth. He felt the beauty of her, the pang of seeing anything so sweet and having only the memory of it. Great instincts surged up in him with longings that were only pain. They seemed to embrace all things, the primal founts of life, the loyalties, devotions, hopes, and tragedies. At last he understood, not with his pulses only, but his soul. And all the time he had not answered her. She was still looking at him, smiling kindly now, and, he believed, not cognizant of the terror in his heart, not advertising her beauty as at first he had supposed. She seemed a friend home from long absence. He was speaking, and his voice, in his effort, sounded to him rea.s.suringly gentle.

"We'll see."

"You will come?"

"We'll see."

"Good-night." She wrapped her cloak about her and was gone.

He followed her to the door only, and heard her feet upon the spongy turf. With his impulse to follow farther walked the sane certainty that he ought not to let her find her way alone, even along that friendly road. But he could not do it. The rain had ceased, and there was a moist wind blowing in little temperate gusts, as if it ran over the land and gave it something, and then took brooding interval for another breath.

He looked up to heaven, and in the nebulous cloud reaches found a star.

So seemed the creature who had dawned in his dark room and lighted it: inaccessible, unchangingly bright, and, if one rashly approached her, armed with a destroying fire.

He went out and sat down upon the bench at his door, turning to lean his forehead against the rough casing. What had happened to him? He did not even own it was the thing that happens to all, the una.s.suageable longing, the reaching hand for a mate. He had felt safe in his garden ground, where no blossoms opened but innocent velvet ones, temperately, to ripen and then die. But now the portals of the world were wide. He saw beauty, and it roused him to a rage of worship. As the night went on, he grew calmer. Sweet beliefs, a holier certainty stole into that ecstasy of meeting. She seemed again, as she had in one moment of her stay, a dear friend happily returned. The sense of her familiarity was as convincing as if he had known her all his life. It was not recognition alone: it was reunion.

VII

Osmond tried to cease thinking of the beautiful lady until his mind should be more at ease, and to consider Peter, who was acting like a changeling. It seemed possible that he might have to meet his boy bravely, even sharply, with denial and admonition. Peter, he knew, had deliberately put his wonderful gift in his pocket, and under some glamour of new desire was forgetting pictures and playing at the love of man. Playing at it? Osmond did not know; but everything seemed play to him in the divergences of a man who had a gift and stinted using it. If Osmond had had any gift at all, he knew how different it would have made his life. A tragedy of the flesh would have been slighter to a man who felt the surge of fancy in the brain. He had nothing, at the outset, but a faltering will and a deep distaste for any task within his reach. He remembered well the day when he first found Peter had that apt.i.tude for painting, and realized, with the clarity of great revealings, what it meant to them both. All through his boyhood Peter had been drawing, with a facile hand, caricatures, fleeting hints of homely life, but always likenesses. One day he came home from the post-office in a gust of rapture. A series of random sketches had been accepted by a journal.

From that time the steps had led always upward, and Osmond climbed them with him. But the day itself--Osmond remembered the June fervor of it when, after a word or two to the boy, surprising to Peter in its coldness, he went away alone and threw himself under an apple tree, his face in the gra.s.s, to realize what had come. His own life up to this time had seemed to him so poor that the hint of riches dazzled him. He saw the golden gleam, not of money, but of the wealth of being. Peter had the gift, but they would both foster it. Peter should sleep softly and live well. He should have every luxurious aid, and to that end Osmond would learn to wring out money from the ground. That was his only possibility, since he must have an outdoor life. Then he began his market-gardening. Grandmother was with him always. She even sold a piece of land for present money to put into men and tools, and the boy began.

At first there were only vegetables to be carried to the market; then the scheme broadened into plants and seeds. He was working pa.s.sionately, and so on honor, and his works were wanted. To his grandmother even he made no real confidence, but she still walked with him like a spirit of the earth itself. He knew, as he grew older, how she had drained herself for him, how she had tended him and lived the hardiest life with him because he needed it. There were six months of several years when she took him to the deep woods, and they camped, and she did tasks his heart bled to think of, as he grew up, and looked at her work-worn hands; but those things which bound them indissolubly were never spoken of between them. His infirmity was never mentioned save once when, a boy, and then delicate, he came in from the knoll where he had been watching the woodsmen felling trees. His face was terrible to her, but she went on getting their dinner and did not speak.

"Grannie," he said at last, "what am I going to do?"

She paused over her fire, and turned her face to him, flushed with heat and warm with mother love.

"Sonny," she said, "we will do the will of G.o.d."

"Did He do this to me?" the boy asked inflexibly.

She looked at the mountain beyond the lake, whence, she knew, her strength came hourly.

"The world is His," she said. "He does everything. We can't find out why. We must help Him. We must ask Him to help us do His will."

Then they sat down to dinner, and the boy, strengthening his own savage will, forced himself to eat.

He did not think so much about the ways of G.o.d as shrewdly, when he grew older, of toughening muscles and hardening flesh. Peter's talents, Peter's triumphs, became a kind of possession with him. Osmond had perhaps his first taste of happiness when Peter went abroad, and Osmond knew who had sent him and who, if the market-garden throve, had sworn to keep him there. The allowance he provided Peter thereafter gave him as much pleasure in the making as it did the boy in the using of it. Peter was like one running an easy race, not climbing the difficult steps that lead to greatness. It looked, at times, as if it were the richness of his gift that made his work seem play,--not Osmond's fostering. But now, coming home to more triumphs, Peter seemed to have forgotten the goal.

He found Osmond one morning resting under the apple tree, his chosen shade. Peter strode up to the spot moodily, angrily even, his picturesque youth well set off by the ease of his clothes. Osmond watched him coming and approved of him without condition, because he saw in him so many kinds of mastery. Peter gave him a nod, and threw himself and his hat on the gra.s.s, at wide interval. He quoted some Latin to the effect that Osmond was enjoying the ease of his dignified state.

"I've been up and at it since light," said Osmond, smiling at him. "You don't know when sun-up is."

Peter rolled over and studied the gra.s.s.

"Are you coming up to see Rose?" he asked presently.