Rose MacLeod Part 15

Osmond could not tell him Rose had been to see him.

"I might," he said, remembering her requisition.

"Come soon. Maybe you could put an oar in. She needs help, poor girl!"

"Help to Electra's favor?"

Peter nodded into the gra.s.s.

"You could do it better than I. You can do everything better. You mustn't forget, Pete, that you're the Fortunate Youth."

There was something wistful in his tone. It stirred in Peter old loyalties, old responses, and he immediately wondered what Osmond wanted of him that was not expressed. Osmond had made no emotional demands upon him, as to his profession, but Peter always had a sense that his brother was sitting by, watching the boiling of the pot. This was a cheerful companionship when the pot was active; not now, as it cooled. He threw out a commonplace at random, from his uneasy consciousness.

"Art isn't the biggest thing, old boy."

"What is?"

Now Peter rolled over again, and regarded him with glowing eyes. To Osmond, who was beginning to know his temperament better than he had known it in all the years of the lad's journey upon an upward track, that glance told of remembered phrases and a dominating personality that had made the phrases stick.

"It's to give one man who works with his hands fresher air to breathe, fewer hours' work, a better bed."

"You're an artist, Pete. Don't forget that."

"I don't. But it isn't the biggest thing."

"If you should paint a picture for that workingman to look at while he says his prayers? what then?"

"You don't understand, Osmond," said the boy. "Labor! Labor is the question of the day."

Osmond looked over at a field of seedlings where five men with bent backs were weeding and where he himself had been bending until now. He smiled a little.

"I understand work, boy," he said gently. "Only I can't make hot distinctions. The workingman is as sacred to me as you are, and you are as sacred as the workingman."

Peter was making little nosegays of gra.s.s and weeds, and laying them in methodical rows.

"I can't paint, Osmond," he said abruptly. "These things are just crowding me."

"What things?"

"Capital. Labor."

Osmond was silent a long time because he had too many things to say, all of them impossible. He felt hot tears in his eyes from a pa.s.sion of revolt against the lad's wastefulness. He felt the shame of such squandering. To him, all the steps in the existence by which his own being had been preserved meant thrift and penury. He had conserved every energy. He had lived wholesomely, not only for months, but unremittingly for years. His only indulgences had been the brave temperate ones of air and sleep; and with their aid he had built up in himself the strength of the earth. And here was a creature whose clay was shot through with all the tingling fires of life, whose hand carried witchery, whose brain and eye were spiritual satellites, and he talked about painting by and by.

"What a hold that man has on you!" he breathed involuntarily.

Peter swept his little green nosegays into confusion and sat up. His eyes were brilliant.

"Not the man," he said. "It's not the man. It's the facts behind him."

Osmond's thought flew back to one night, and a girl's reckless picture of her father. It seemed now like a dream, yet it swayed him.

"What can you do for him?" he asked, forcing himself to a healthy ruthlessness. "What have you done?"

"For Markham MacLeod? Nothing. What could I do for him? He has done everything for me."

"What, Pete?"

"Opened my eyes. Made me realize the brotherhood of man. Why, see here, Osmond!"

Osmond watched him, fascinated by the heat of him. He seemed possessed by a pa.s.sion which could never, one would say, have been inspired save by what was n.o.ble.

"You know what kind of a fellow I've been: all right enough, but I like pleasures, big and little. Well, when I began to listen to MacLeod, I moved into a garret the poorest student would have grumbled at. I turned in my money to the Brotherhood. The money I got for the portrait--maybe I shouldn't have asked such a whacking big price if I hadn't wanted that money--I turned that in to the Brotherhood. Would a fellow like me sleep hard and eat crusts for anything but a big thing? Now I ask you?"

Osmond sat looking at him, and thinking, thinking. This, he understood perfectly, was youth in the divinity of its throes over life, life wherever it was bubbling and glowing. Always it was the fount of life, and where the drops glittered, there the eyes of youth had to follow, and the heart of youth had to go. The exact retort was rising to his lips: "That was my money, the money you gave away. I earned it for you.

I dug it out of the ground." But the retort stayed there. He offered only what seemed a blundering remonstrance: "I can't help feeling, Pete, that it's your business to paint pictures. If you can paint 'em and give the money to your Brotherhood, that's something. Only paint 'em."

"But you know, I've found out I can speak."

There it was again, the heart of youth on its new track, chasing the glow, whatever it might be, the marsh-lamp or star. Osmond shook his head.

"I don't know, Pete," he owned. "I don't know. I'm out of the world. I read a lot, but that's not the same thing as having it out with men. But I feel a distinct conviction that it's every man's business to mind his own business."

"You wouldn't have us speak? You wouldn't have him, Markham MacLeod?"

The boy's impetuousness made denial seem like warfare. Osmond put it aside with his hand.

"Don't," he said. "You make me feel like Capital. I'm Labor, lad. I always have been."

"Isn't it anything to move a thousand men like one? To say a word and bring on a strike of ten thousand? The big chieftains never did so much as that. Alexander wasn't in it. Napoleon wasn't. It's colossal."

"I don't know whether it seems to me very clever to bring on a strike,"

said Osmond. "It would seem to me a great triumph to make ten thousand men feel justly. Resistance isn't the greatest thing to me. I should want to know whether it was n.o.ble to resist."

"Ah, but it is n.o.ble! Resistance--for themselves, their children, their children's children."

Osmond was looking away at the horizon, a whimsical smile coming about the corners of his mouth.

"Yes, Pete," he said. "But you paint your pictures."

"Now you own I'm right! Isn't it anything to move ten thousand men to throw down their tools and go on strike?"

"Well, by thunder!" Osmond had awakened. "Now you put it that way, I don't know whether it is or not. That phrase undid you. Lay down their tools? Show me the man that makes me take up my tools in reverence and sobriety, because good work is good religion. That's what I'd like."

"But it means something,--starvation, maybe, death. You don't recognize it, do you? You won't recognize the war that's on--oh, it is on!--between Capital and Labor, between the high places and the low.

It's war, and it's got to be fought out."

"I do recognize it, lad." He spoke gently, thinking of his own lot, and the hard way through which he had come to his almost fevered championship of whatever was maimed or hurt. "Only, Pete, do you know what your opposing forces need? They need grannie."