Rose MacLeod Part 67

Rose now had her moment of delay. Her mind went back over that weary road, to the past the present had so illumined for her. It tired her to think the trouble ever attendant on her father's life was to go on, ripple after ripple, now that he had sunken into the mystery of things.

Once over the horror of his death, there had been a throb of thankfulness that at least an end had been made to his great power of bringing pain. And now here was another life to be thrown into the void after him, another woman to love a dream. She awoke from that momentary musing, to hear Electra saying,--

"You will excuse me, if I go on working? I sail so soon, and I must leave everything in order."

"Electra," said Rose. Then she called her name again, as if appealing to the softest of her moods. "How can I tell you! Electra, you mustn't love my father."

Again that swift smile came to Electra's face. The face itself was all a burning truth. The old crude precision in her seemed suddenly to have flowered into this warm candor that spoke and liked to hear itself disclosing, regardless of its auditor.

"You cannot"--she looked at Rose with happy inspiration, as if she had been the first to make the saying--"you can't kill love with reason."

Again Rose deliberated. When she spoke it was with an air of sad decisiveness.

"Electra," she said wistfully, "did he ask you to marry him?"

"I never thought of it," said Electra at once, in the simplest unreserve. "It would have seemed too small, to limit it and bound it."

"Yes. That is what he would have said, too small. You were a quick pupil."

Electra glowed.

"I know what he would have said, if he had had time. He did not need to tell me."

Rose sat wondering what argument would move her.

"Electra," she ventured, "have you had any curiosity about my father's relations to other people?"

"He had no time to tell me," said Electra, with a proud dignity.

"No, he would not have told you. He never confused his relations. Did you know he was adored by women?"

Electra's face flamed. She made no answer. If she could have set forth adequately what was in her tumultuous thoughts, she would have told Rose that nothing seemed so entirely her own as her part in Markham MacLeod's life. She had no curiosity over his past, no doubt of what her future would have been with him, accepting what he chose to give her, and finding it enough.

Rose pursued her into the cloister of her thought.

"Do you know, Electra," she was urging, "do you know how women devoted themselves to him?"

"They must have devoted themselves to him. I am one of them. I am proud to be."

"Ah, but, Electra, to take so much and give nothing!"

"How do you dare to say he gave nothing?"

"I know. I was slow in learning. I learned it first through your brother. No, don't put me off with a gesture. I must speak of him. It was he who showed me the cruelty of my father's att.i.tude toward women.

He laughed over it, but he showed me."

"He was never cruel." Electra seemed to be dreaming away in a sad reminiscence of his kindness.

"But to promise so much, Electra, and give nothing! He implied to every one, I have no doubt, that she was his great helper, that he would have married her if he had not been set aside by his work. That was like him.

He was a sponge drinking up devotion."

"Yes, and he gave it back to the hungry and the thirsty and the cold."

"I don't know. I do know what he absorbed. One woman did translations for him. She worked like a dog, and he paid her with one of his looks.

Another--she was a t.i.tled lady--kept his suite of rooms ready for him, and when he came, treated him like a prince. And they all had this sense of intimacy with him. Each thought she was the only one. Each felt she was divided from him by hard circ.u.mstance, but she should possess him in the end."

"In heaven?" asked Electra, eager for the slightest knowledge of him.

"No, not in heaven. My father always said his expectations stopped here.

He never carried the game on there."

"The great souls"--Electra began, and stopped. Trouble was upon her brow. She knew there was a goodly reason for every act he did, yet human jealousy was in her. She had to seek out arguments. "The great souls are different," she halted. "They are many-sided. Look at Goethe--"

But Rose had heard that reason. She was tired of it.

"It's a pity they make it so hard for other people," she said wearily.

"Because they are great, must they be greedy, too? But that was my father. He may have been a great man, but he was not the man you think him. If you saw him as he was,--he was a big, dominating animal, that's all."

Electra sat staring at her, condemning, Rose knew, not Markham MacLeod, but his daughter. The charm of his mastery was still upon her. Rose and Peter, more mobile than she, had escaped with the cutting of his cord of life. It was as if they had been under a crude natural magnetism, and now that the magician had gone into another room, they were free. But Electra had petrified in the att.i.tude where he had left her. She had a pitying certainty that Rose had never known him. Something like indignation came now into her face. She spoke pa.s.sionately:--

"Why do you want to take it away from me?"

Rose could not answer. Tears were in her eyes from pure pity at the loss and pain of it all.

"We knew each other so short a time," brooded Electra; and it was apparent that she believed the relation had been as much to MacLeod as to her. "Why can't you let me have the comfort of it?"

"If it didn't mean so much time, so much energy wasted! If you wouldn't devote your life to it,--you might, you know. It's quite like you, Electra. And that would be a pity; because he was never for a minute such a person as you think him,--never, Electra, never in the world."

Electra rounded upon her in a flash of indignation.

"Tell me what you think him."

Rose's mind ran back to that first night when, with the daring inspired in her by their meeting, she had given Osmond a portrait of her father.

Now was the time to paint it again, but, for some reason, she could not.

The man had not changed, but his aims obscured him. Behind them, he was nothing, but they were large enough to make his monument. Instead of answering directly, she found herself saying,--

"I have had such letters about him!"

"From the Brotherhood?"

"Yes. And they will keep on coming for a long time now, because it is everywhere, you know, in far, far-off places. And there's a tremendous loyalty in them, not only to him but to the Brotherhood."

"How can you read them and not be loyal, too!"

Rose considered why she could. Was it because the Brotherhood seemed, in her latest acquaintance with it, to have all the seeds of the old conditions that made a world of hate? If it had been the pure bond it promised to be, could even her father's sins have quenched the flame in her? Then she remembered one night when, in her father's absence, some one had spoken like a poet and created, in shining imagery, a new world.

She had seen it, the new world, hanging like a crystal in the rejoicing sky.

"One night Ivan Gorof spoke," she began.

Electra's brows came together.