Rose MacLeod Part 40

"I supposed I had inherited my brother's property," she said, in a low and penetrating voice. "I shall make it over to her."

MacLeod put out his hand, and she laid hers within it. When he spoke, it was with a moved restraint.

"That is a good deal to do."

"It is inc.u.mbent on me--ethically." At that instant she had a throb of high triumph in remembering that he, at least, would not gird at her choice of terms.

"It is what you would do," he said warmly. "It is exactly what you would do."

"I cannot do otherwise."

They seemed to be engaged in antiphonal praises of abstract right. It gave Electra a solemn satisfaction. She could hardly leave the subject.

"I wish to do everything in my power," she announced. "I cannot ask her to live here, because I may not be here long myself."

"You will marry Peter and go away!"

Electra felt her face growing warm in the dusk, and an unreasonable vexation possessed her against any one who should have mapped out her purposes and given him the chart. He might know her. He was evidently destined to, she intemperately thought, better than any one else, but she could herself induct him into the paths of intimacy. There was no pleasure in feeling that he was bound to prejudge her through cognizance of this other tie she had for the moment forgotten.

"Did Peter tell you that?" she asked.

"I'm afraid I guessed it."

His frankness put her back on their pleasant ground of intimacy; it even brought them nearer.

"Why did you guess it?"

Here was foolish talk, she following upon the heels of his venture, as if there were something in the very dust of his progress too precious to be lost. But MacLeod, who cared nothing about inanities once their purpose was served, whirled her away from further challenge and reply.

"You must come to Paris," he said; "with or without Peter, you must come."

Her heart warmed and her voice trembled as she answered,--

"I should like it. I should like nothing better."

"You have been in Europe?"

"Oh, yes, for a year at a time. Three times in all."

"Lately?"

"No. The last time I was very young."

"You will see things with different eyes."

He seemed to be promising her something, in the fervor of his speech.

Some one had said of him once that, in talking to women, he always said "you" as if it meant "you and I." It may not have been to women alone.

Young men felt that in the reconstruction of the earth it would not be merely MacLeod who led the van, but MacLeod and each one of them.

"I should like," she dared, "to see the things you are doing. I should like to know--the Brotherhood."

"You shall know it. There are as many women in it as men. When the starving citizens marched up to Paris to ask King Louis for bread, the women's voices were loudest, I fancy. There is no distinction in our membership. Men and women serve alike."

"When could I join it?"

"Not too fast, dear lady." He was smiling at her. That warm tone of personal consideration soothed her through the dusk. "It involves hardship, the laying down of self. Are you ready for that?"

"I am ready," said Electra. Her heart beat high. At last life seemed large enough and rich enough to satisfy her.

"Your entire allegiance and a tenth of your income," he went on. "Do not pledge it unless you can keep the pledge."

"I promise. I pledge it, myself and all I have."

In her uplifted state, it seemed as if some spell had been laid upon her, and she sought to recall her lost composure. The occasion, she knew, was a very large one, and she must not, she earnestly thought, deprive it of dignity. He rose.

"Stand up," he said; and she also was upon her feet, with a swift compliance. "Give me your hand." She laid her hand in his. "Do you believe in the Brotherhood of Man?"

To say "yes" was not enough. She repeated the words,--

"I believe in the Brotherhood of Man."

They stood so for a moment, and then he released her hand.

"That is all," he said.

Electra felt as if she had sworn allegiance not only to some unknown majesty, but to him, and she was ineffably exalted. They two seemed to be together in a world of wrong, pledged to right it, and taking the highest delight in their joint ministrations.

"When do I"--she hesitated--"when do I pay in--money?"

"Twice a year," he answered cheerfully. "Peter will tell you those things, if I am not here."

If he were not there! Her wings of pleasure drooped. It seemed as if he were always to be there. And Peter! he looked like a small and callow personage seen through the diminishing end of a gla.s.s, compared with this great presence.

"I must go," he said, and Electra pulled herself out of her maze. "May I tell my daughter you accept her?" He made it all very delicate and yet prosaic, as if he quite understood Rose could hardly expect to be received without difficulty, but as if Electra had made it magnificently possible. Still she felt a little recoil.

"I can't talk about it," she faltered, "to her. I could to you. Let me settle all the details, and my lawyer shall submit them to you. Would that satisfy you?"

She spoke humbly, and Markham MacLeod, the chief of the Brotherhood, bent over her hand and touched it with his lips. Then he was gone, and Electra was left standing with that incredibly precious kiss upon her hand. She was poor in imagination, but at the instant it flashed into her mind that this was actually the touch of the coal red from the altar.

Markham MacLeod, walking with long strides through the summer night, drew in deep breaths, and delighted, for the moment, in the voluptuousness of his own good health and the wonder that he had been able to carry youth on into middle age. He had not been accustomed to think about the past or what might come. It was enough to recognize the harmonious interplay of his muscles and the daily stability of a body which until now, and that briefly, had shown no sign of revolt. What insurrection there was he meant to quell, and meantime to forget its possibility, as a chief may, for the time, ignore rebellion. MacLeod was plagued neither by unsatisfied desires nor by remorse. In his philosophy, to live meant to feed upon the earth as it appeared to the eye and to the other senses. He believed, without argument, that all the hungers in him were good l.u.s.ty henchmen demanding food. Now, in spite of certain grim warnings he had had of late, he was filled with the old buoyant feeling that his body was a well-to-do republic with his own impartial self at the head of it. Justice should be done to all its members that they might live in harmony. If discomforting forces a.s.sailed the republic, they must be crushed. Some of these he might have recognized as regrets, the sort of spectre that was ready to visit Napoleon on a night after the campaign in Egypt. They were, he thought, inseparable from great power and the necessities attending its administration. But they were enemies of the republic, and he killed them. So his voice was always hearty, his eye clear, and his cheek that healthy red.

Peter he found in fits of laughter, and Rose mimicking certain characters known to them in Paris. It was encouraging, he judged, to find Rose out of her dumps. But she was only keeping Peter by her until MacLeod should come and help detain him. Peter had said something in the early evening about going down to find Osmond, who had of late, he averred, been off at night on his deep wood prowls. "No," Rose wanted to say,--and there would have been a choking triumph in her throat,--"he has been in the playhouse waiting for me." And because she could not go that night to the wide liberty of the fields, she would not have Peter wandering off that way and hunting up her playmate, breaking spells and spoiling wordless messages. MacLeod had not seen her so gay, not since the days in Paris before she met Tom Fulton, when she had been one of a changing wave of artist life, made up of students delirious with possibilities and all bent toward the top notch of reputation. He joined her and Peter now in precisely their own mood, his laugh and voice reinforcing theirs. Rose warmed more and more. Not all her dreary memories could keep her from delighting in him. He carried her along on that high wave of splendid spirits, oblivious for the moment to all his faults. Thus, she paused to remember again, it had been in her too-wise childhood when, seeing her mother wan with tears, she had yet put her little hand in his and gone off with him for an hour's pleasuring, though he was the fount of grief as well as gayety. He compelled her, the sheer physical health of him.

Peter rose finally, to give them a moment alone, and wandered off down the garden, singing a light song and then whistling it farther and farther into the dark. Something constricted the girl's throat. She remembered, in the silence fallen between them, that she was alone with the enemy of her peace, and felt again that old pa.s.sionate regret that he had not allowed her to keep the beauty of her belief in him. He had swept away something she had thought to be indestructible. That, more than any deed, was the wrong he had done--he had set his foot upon the flower of hope. But MacLeod, his forehead bared to the night air, hummed to himself the song Peter was singing, and then spoke with a commonplace a.s.surance:--

"She asked me the question."

"Electra?"