Rose MacLeod Part 54

She watched him down the walk, and as if he knew that, he turned, as the shrubbery was closing about him, and waved his hat to her. That seemed another bit of prescience,--to know she was to be there. Electra was very happy. She sat down again in a swoon of the reason and a mad hurry of what cried to her as the higher part of her nature, unrecognized until now, and thought of her exalted fortune.

MacLeod found Rose ready to question him. She was at the gate, to have her word immediately. He noted the signs of apprehension in her face, and, taking her hand, swung it as they walked.

"Has anything happened?" she asked irrepressibly.

"I've been down to--what do they call it?--the plantation."

"What did you talk about?"

"Oh, crops!"

"You don't know anything about crops!"

MacLeod laughed.

"Well, the other man did. I can always listen."

"Have you been there all the time?"

"No. I went in to see Electra."

Rose stopped short in the path between the banks of flowers. It was a still day, and the summer hush of the plot--a velvet stillness where the garden held its breath--made the time momentous to her. Unconsciously she gripped her father's hand.

"She has told you!" she breathed. Her eyes sought his face. MacLeod was looking at her smilingly, fondly even. She shuddered.

"You are a goose, Rose," he said lightly. He released his fingers from the clasp of hers and gave her hand a little shake before he dropped it.

"But I can't help it. If you will go on tipping over your saucer of cream, why, you must do it, that's all."

They walked on, and at the steps she paused again, though she heard Peter's voice within.

"You're terribly angry with me, aren't you?" she said, in a low tone, seeming to make it half communion with herself.

"Angry, my girl! Don't say a thing like that."

"You look exactly as you did the night Ivan Gorof defied you--and the next day he died."

MacLeod laughed again, so humorously that Peter, coming forward from the library, his own face serious with unwelcome care, smiled involuntarily and returned to his every-day mood of belief that, on the whole, things go well.

"I didn't kill him," MacLeod was saying, as he mounted the steps.

Rose shivered a little.

"No," she insisted. "But he died."

MacLeod was beguilingly entertaining at dinner that day, and in the afternoon he and Peter went to drive. At supper, too, he was in his best mood, and that evening Rose, worn out by the strain of his persistent dominance, escaped to her own room. There she sat and counseled her tense nerves. She was afraid. Then when she heard the closing of grannie's door, she slipped downstairs to her tryst. The night was dark, and there was a grumble of thunder from the west. In her excitement she took swift steps, as if all her senses were more keenly awake than they had been in the light, and kept the path unerringly. She had no doubt that he was there, but he called to her before she could ask. His voice vibrated to the excitement in her own heart.

"Good child, to come!"

She found her chair and sank into it.

"I had to come." At once she felt light-hearted. There seemed to be no bounds to his protection of her. "I have told Electra."

"I knew you would."

"She has told Peter. They know it now,--all but grannie,--dear grannie."

"She can wait. She won't flicker. She won't vary. Nothing can shake grannie's old heart."

"What did he say to you to-day?"

Osmond laughed. It was a low note of pleasure.

"Plat.i.tudes," he rejoined.

"And what did you say to him?"

"Plat.i.tudes again. He said his kind, I said mine. I learned a few truths."

"About his business?--that's what it is. I can say it when I'm not in the same room with him--business."

"About me. I learned what other fellows know when they are boys."

"Did he teach you?"

"He? No. Yes. Through my hatred of him."

"Ah, then you hated him! Was it because I taught you to?"

"Partly. Partly because he is an insolent animal. He is kind because he is well-fed. Yet I think it was chiefly because he has ill-used you."

"Yes," she owned sadly. "I betrayed him to you."

But Osmond had escaped from recollection of the day into a mood half meditative, half excited fancy.

"I have been thinking back, since he left me," he said, "ever so many years. I see I haven't had any life at all."

"Ah!" It was a quick breath of something sweeter than pity. It could not hurt.

"I have been turning away from things all my life, because they were not for me. But now I think--what if I didn't turn away? What if I met them face to face?"

"What, playmate? You puzzle me."

"Grannie indulged Peter. Even in his eating, she couldn't refuse him anything."

"But she loved you best!"

"No doubt of it. But he was well. He could have anything, even hunks of cake. Grannie hates to deny pleasures to any living thing. 'I guess it won't hurt you!' I've heard her say it to him over and over. But to me--"

"To you?"