Rose MacLeod Part 55

"Why, to me she never varied. 'Son,' she'd say, 'that isn't the way to do. We can't risk it.' So I turned aside and ate good crusty bread and drank milk. I didn't want cake. I didn't want Peter's coffee. But I wonder how it would seem to have ridden them all bareback, all vices, all indulgences, and conquered them after I'd known them--not turned aside and gone the other way."

In that mood she hardly knew him. The clean, sweet, childlike quality had gone; it had fled before this breath of the pa.s.sion of life. She felt vaguely how wrong he was. He was idealizing the world as he did not know it and the conquest of the world as it appeared in her father, the master of all its arts.

"Playmate," she said, though she was doubtful of her own wisdom.

"Yes, playmate."

"There isn't anything desirable in evil knowledge. I've heard him say--you know--"

"Tom Fulton?"

"Yes. I've heard him say he wanted to know everything about life--bad and good. He was black with knowledge. I might have learned it from him.

I thank G.o.d he spared me that. I wish you would be grateful for your clean life. I wish you'd see there's no magic in the things my father knows, for instance. It's better to make a lily grow."

"Ah, but I've discovered things in myself that are exactly like the things in other men--and other men are used to them. So when an ugly beast puts up its head, the man gives it a crack and knocks it silly.

Then it lies down a spell, and the man goes about his business. He gets used to its growling and clawing away at intervals. He's only to knock it down. But I don't fully know yet what is in that pit of mine. I discovered something to-day."

"What?"

"The l.u.s.t for fight."

She shuddered.

"I wasn't prepared for it. Another time I should be. It was an ugly devil--but I loved it."

She was silent, and after a moment he asked her, in his old anxious, friendly tone, "Have I hurt you?"

"No. But somehow it seems as if you'd gone away."

"I know. I'm still communing with that brute in me--the fighting brute.

I must be honest with you. I can't help thinking he'd give me a special kind of pleasure."

"Would he?" She asked it wistfully. He had opened the windows of their house to strange discords from without. "What kind of pleasure?"

He was glad to tell. The magnitude and newness of his emotion that day made it something to be flaunted while the disturbed currents of his blood kept their fervor. Later he might put it to the test of equable judgment. Now it was all a glory of hot action.

"Playmate," he said, "I wanted to kill him."

"My father? Oh, why, why?"

"Maybe for your sake. Yes! there was an instant when I said I would kill him and free you from him." She could not answer. He heard the rustle of her dress and added quickly, "Now, don't go. Of all nights, to-night is the night I can't spare you."

"I thought it was the one when you didn't need me."

"I need you to listen. I'm a blaring, trumpeting egotist to-night.

Please understand me! Stop being a woman a minute, and see how it would seem to be a man--not like me, but free to live and sin and refuse to sin."

"You are free," she said, in her low, pained voice. "You have refused all the ign.o.ble things."

"Ah, but I didn't even parley with them. I wish I could feel I'd whacked them and broken their skulls instead of going the other way."

"Playmate," she cried, "you are all wrong. You must not parley with them. You must refuse to look at them."

"Refuse to look at the worm that eats the root? No. Find him and stamp on him. The worst of it is, I begin to be rather terrified. I see that life is a bigger thing than I thought."

"Not to grannie. To her it's big and simple."

"Because she knows the way. Well, what if there are many ways,--not like hers, not the true way,--but ways we ought to look at before we can say we know life at all? Think of it, playmate. You are a woman, younger than I, delicate as a rose; yet you know more about life than I. You know how to meet men and women. There aren't surprises you can't master."

She sat wondering what it was that had moved him, and whether it was not simply the power of MacLeod's personality, equally compelling to love or hate. But Osmond was going on in that fierce monologue.

"I feel as if I had been waked up. Once I had my riding dream. Now I have a million dreams. Did I tell you my riding dream? Some nights--chiefly when there's a moon--I wake and lie there and fancy I am on a horse. There's the smell of the horse and the leather, the creak of the saddle, and we are riding like the devil or the wind, always over plains that stretch out into more miles, however far I ride. I am bent over the saddle, peering forward. That's what I had when my blood moved too fast for me. Now I shall dream of fight. Playmate, what is it?"

"It isn't anything. I didn't speak."

"Yes, but there was that quick little breath. I keep hurting you somehow. Do you suppose I want any of it except for you? I want to ride to you. I want to fight because I could fight for you."

"Ah," she said sadly, "you think so now for a minute. But you had forgotten me."

"Yes, I had," he owned. "That's being a man, too. We have to forget you or we couldn't ride and we couldn't fight. But it's all for you."

There was the thunder again.

"I must go back," she said.

"Yes, it's going to rain. You must go. One minute. It won't come yet.

Does he know you have told Electra?"

"My father? Yes."

"What did he say?"

"He--accepted it." For some reason, she dared not tell him how that acceptance troubled her. Osmond himself seemed like an unknown force as ready to bring confusion as calm.

But he knew.

"You are afraid of him," he said. "Dear child, don't be afraid. Sit down hard and say 'no' and 'no,' whatever he demands. You are here with us.

Grannie is an angel of light. She'll send for shining cohorts and they'll camp round about you. There's Peter--your Peter. And I'll die for you."

"No! no!" The a.s.surance of his tone was terrifying to her. She saw him dying in unnecessary sacrifice. "n.o.body must die for me. We must all live and be good children and do what grannie would want us to."

"Then the first thing is to run home and go to bed. The storm is coming.

Good-night, dear playmate. I'll follow on behind and see you don't get lost."

"One minute!" She paused, not knowing how to say it. "Can't you take it back?" she adventured. "What you said about my father?"

He laughed, with an undertone of wild emotion.