Rose MacLeod Part 64

She sat down upon the floor beside the couch and laid her head on the dead man's heart. Peter knew it was to listen for a flutter there, but with his sensitive apprehension of all emotion, he felt also that she was glad to put her head upon MacLeod's breast. He was conscious of being useless in his inactivity, but he could only stand and stare down at them, the dead man and the mourning woman. Presently Electra got up and stood, dry-eyed, and looked at him.

"He was coming to me," she said, in awe at the loneliness of the event.

"I couldn't sleep last night. I wish I had known a little more. Instead of thinking about him, I could have met him. I could have been with him."

Peter shuddered.

"I am glad you were not with him."

Electra was not listening. She had placed her hand on the hair of the fallen man, tenderly and yet with reverence.

"He is splendid, Peter, isn't he?" she said, as if she wondered at life and its fleeting forms. "He looks like a G.o.d, sleeping." Some echo of her words came back to her, and she felt a momentary pleasure at their sound. Then, very shortly it seemed, men came, the doctor and others who had authority, and Electra was turned out of the room.

"Go upstairs," Peter besought her.

But she stepped out, bare-headed, into the air.

"No," she answered, "I am going to tell his daughter."

"No!" Suddenly Peter remembered how little she was fitted to be a kindly messenger. "No, Electra. I will go."

Electra looked at him in a calm surprise.

"He would wish it," she said. "He would wish me to do everything." And she was gone.

Peter went back into the room, where there were quick voices and peremptory demands. Markham MacLeod was being interrogated in a way that had never befallen him before. His body was being asked to bear witness of the fashion by which it had come to its dumb estate, wherein it could not compel others, but was most ruthlessly at their will.

Rose, at grannie's knee, in a mute grat.i.tude that now she was to stay here, because it had been wonderfully decreed, saw Electra coming up the walk. She ran to meet her light-heartedly; in her flooding delight it seemed to her as if even Electra might acquiesce in her reprieve.

At the foot of the steps they met, Rose all pleadingness, as if again she begged Electra to love her. But Electra delivered her news straightway. She felt like nothing but the messenger of MacLeod.

"He is dead," she said, with the utmost quietude.

Rose stared at her.

"Who is dead?" she managed to ask.

"Markham MacLeod."

Rose leaned forward and gazed still in her face. She was well convinced that this look was real: a look of hopeless grief, though the words were so fantastic.

"Electra," she said gently, and even put out a hand and touched her on the arm. "Electra! What is it?"

"I have told you," said Electra, "he is dead. We found him in the ferns, Peter and I. He is at my house. We thought you ought to know it."

"Come!" said Rose. She seized her hand, and Electra pulled it away again, quietly, and yet as if it had no business in that hasty grasp.

"Let me go home with you."

"If you wish," said Electra. "I suppose you have a right to be there.

They may want you." And in silence they hurried down the path together and out into the road. At Electra's own gate, she turned to Rose.

"It is strange, isn't it?" she said.

"What, Electra?"

"That he could die."

"Electra, he has not died. No one has died." Rose spoke gently, knowing that in some way the other woman had been shocked and her reason shaken.

"Come into the house and we'll find Peter."

But at the moment Peter and the doctor appeared together in the doorway, and the doctor turned to give orders to a servant in the hall. Peter saw them and came quickly down to them. It was apparent to Rose that something had happened.

"Tell her, Peter," said Electra, in some impatience. "She won't believe me. Tell her he is dead."

Peter and Rose stood looking at each other, she questioning and he in sad a.s.sent. Then there crept upon her face a look that was the companion to Electra's. The color faded, her eyes widened.

"My father?" she breathed, and Peter nodded.

"Yes," said Electra, as if she were astonished at them both and their dull wits, "Markham MacLeod is dead."

That evening grannie was in her own room, and Peter and Rose, below, talked intermittently of that strange morning.

"It is incredible, Peter, isn't it," she began, "for him to die like this?"

He nodded.

"I expected violence," he said. "We all expected it."

"Isn't it strange, too, that I can't feel grief! I'm neither glad nor sorry. I feel very still."

"The whole world will feel grief," said Peter loyally.

"Yes, but to me--Peter, it is just as if he were not a man, not something I had loved, but a thing that was great to look at and had no soul. It was like a tree falling, or a huge rock undermined. Don't you see? As if it were the natural thing, and there was no other way possible."

She began to feel the inexorability of great revenges, and to see that when a soul has for a long time denied us answer in our needs, we refuse to believe that it can speak. MacLeod had grown to be a beautiful spectacle of the universe, full of natural health and power. Now that he had fallen, there was nothing left. She had no vestige to remember of those responses in the dim reaches of being when one calls and another answers: homely loyalties, sweet kindnesses, even overlaid by later pain. He had lived what he called the natural life, and its breath had failed him and he was no more. Some time, she knew, in this dull brooding, she might try to whip herself up into an expected grief; but now, in the bare honesty of the moment, she accepted the event as it was.

"Osmond has been great," said Peter.

She started back to life.

"What has he done?"

"Everything. He's been Electra's right-hand man. I'll run down to see him a minute presently."

He hoped Rose would send some word of appreciative thanks. Old Osmond, he knew, would like it. But she got up and gave him her hand, in her grave affectionate way, and said good-night. She remembered how Osmond and her father had met in contest, and she knew Osmond would not seek her until Markham MacLeod was wholly gone.

XXVII