Rose MacLeod Part 58

"Well, Billy," she said at last, "this is the pleasantest summer I shall ever have."

"Say the word," he admonished her again. "We've got more summers before us."

She smiled at him, and winked away the tears.

"Then come back and spend them here. Electra's going, too,--like a stowaway. You won't let her cross with you, and see at least that she doesn't hold services on board?"

"G.o.d forbid!" said Billy. "I'm afraid of her."

"I don't blame you. Billy, I suppose we ought to be saying solemn things to each other, if you're really going."

"Clip ahead, old lady. What do you want to say?"

"I'd like to clear up my accounts a little. I want to get my books in order. I don't intend to die in a fog. Billy, how much of it was real?"

"How much of what, Florrie?"

"Of life. Of the things we thought and felt. Is there such a thing as love, Billy?"

He got up under the necessity of thought and stood, hands in his pockets and legs apart, looking over the garden beds. He might have been gazing out to sea for the Islands of the Blest.

"Florrie," he said at length, "I guess there is."

"Did you love me, Billy? No compliments. We're beyond them."

"Yes," said Billy, after another pause. "I think I did. You were a great deal to me at that time. And when I found it was no use, other people were a great deal to me, one after another. Several of 'em. I looked upon it then as a species of game. But they didn't last, Florrie. You did. You always give me a kind of a queer feeling; you're all mixed up in my mind with pink and blue and hats with rosebuds on 'em and college songs."

It was not much like a grand pa.s.sion, but it was something, the honest confession of a boy.

"I thought it was a game, too," she said musingly. "Do you suppose it was, Billy? Or were we wrong?"

Billy whirled about and faced her.

"Dead wrong! No, Florrie, it never was meant for a game. It's earnest.

The ones that take it so are the ones that inherit the earth. No, not that--but they go in for all they're worth and they've something left to show for it. They don't put their money into tinsel and see it fade."

"Well, what else? Did Charlie Grant love me?"

"Yes. No doubt of it."

"But he loved Bessie afterwards."

"Yes. She lived the thing through with him. She built up something, I fancy. He probably remembered you as I did, all pink ribbons and fluff; but she helped him rear his house of life."

"And my husband didn't love me and I didn't love my husband," the old lady mused. "Well, Billy, it's almost the end of the play. I wish I understood it better. And I've written a naughty book, and I'm going to be comfortable on the money from it. And you wish I hadn't, don't you?"

He saw how frail she looked and answered mercifully,--

"I don't care much about the book, dear. Don't let's talk of that."

"You wish I hadn't written it!"

"I wish you hadn't been so infernally bored as to think of writing it."

"And I'll bet a dollar you wish you'd come back and found me reconciled to life and death, and reading daily texts out of little pious books, and knitting m.u.f.flers for sailors, instead of seething with all sorts of untimely devilishnesses. Don't you, Billy?"

What Billy thought he would not tell himself, and he said with an extreme honesty,--

"You're the greatest old girl there is, Florrie, or ever was, or ever will be."

"Ah, well!" she sighed, and laughed a little. "I can't help wishing there weren't so many good folks. It makes me uncommonly lonesome. For you're good, too, Billy, you sinner, you!"

He read the gleam in her eyes, the reckless courage, the unquenched love of life; after all, there was more youth in her still than there had ever been in him or in a hundred like him. He laughed, and said,--

"Oh, I do delight in you!"

XXIV

It was the early twilight, and MacLeod was going to Electra to say good-by. But first he tapped at Rose's door. He had seen her from time to time through the day, and nothing of significance had pa.s.sed between them. That unbroken level had been exciting to her. She knew he had things to say, and that he would not go leaving them unspoken; delay was only the withholding of bad news. Now she came to the door, a fan in her hand and the summer night reasonably accounting for the breathlessness she felt. Her pallor made a white spot in the dusk; she was like a ghost, with all the life drained out of her. MacLeod stepped inside and closed the door.

"Hot!" he breathed, taking a place by the window.

She could not quite compose herself, and stood near him, fanning him to give herself a pretext for movement. MacLeod looked up at her, smiling.

He saw how pale she was.

"Why," he said, with his beguiling kindliness, "you mustn't look as if you were afraid of me."

She moved a little, to escape his eyes.

"No," she said, in a low tone, "I don't mean to be afraid. But I am."

"What of, Rose?"

She wanted to say, from her confused suspicions, that he was inevitably contemplating some course that would involve her freedom. But he had turned, and was looking at her in a smiling candor. There was evidently no more guile in him than in the impartial and cherishing sun.

"I wish life didn't present itself to you as a melodrama," he volunteered, with almost a brightness of reproach.

She shook her head. The tremulous expectancy of her face remained unchanged.

"I wish so, too," she answered.

"Well!" He spoke robustly, with a quick decision. "I'm going back. I shall sail next week."

She drew a quick breath. Ready as she was to disbelieve him, it was impossible to deny herself an unreasonable relief. She held herself rigid with antic.i.p.ation, knowing what the next words would be, and how he would command or entreat her also to go. But they amazed her.