Rose MacLeod Part 1

Rose MacLeod.

by Alice Brown.

I

Madam Fulton and her granddaughter Electra were sitting at the breakfast-table. It was a warm yet inspiriting day in early spring, and, if the feel and look of it were not enough, the garden under the dining-room windows told the season's hour like a floral clock. The earliest blossoms had been pushed onward by the mounting spirit of the year, and now the firstlings of May were budding. The great Georgian house, set in the heart of this processional bloom, showed the mellow tints of time. It had an abundant acreage, diversified, at first hand, not only by this terraced garden in the rear, but by another gone to wild abandon on the west, and an orchard stretching away into level fields and, beyond them, groves of pine.

These dining-room windows, three of them, side by side, and now unshaded, gave large outlook on a beautiful and busy world where the terrace mounted in green, to be painted later with red peony b.a.l.l.s, and where the eye, still traveling, rested in satisfaction on the fringe of locusts at the top.

Inside the house the sense of beauty could be fully fed. Here was a sweet consistency, the sacred past in untouched being, that time when furniture was made in England, and china was the product of long voyages and solemn h.o.a.rding in corner cabinets with diamond panes. Life here was reflected dimly from polished surfaces and serenely accentuated by quaint carvings and spindle legs. Here was "atmosphere"--the theatre of simple and austere content.

Madam Fulton outwardly fitted her background as a shepherdess fits a fan. She was a sprite of an old lady, slender and round, and finished in every movement, with the precision of those who have "learned the steps"

in dancing of another period. It was her joy that she had kept her figure, her commonplace that, having it, she knew what to do with it.

She had a piquant profile, dark eyes, and curls whiter than white, sifted over with the l.u.s.tre of a living silver. According to her custom, she wore light gray, and there was lace about her wrists and throat.

"Coffee, Electra?" she suddenly proposed, in a contralto voice that still had warmth in it. She put the question impatiently, as if her hidden self and that of the girl opposite had been too long communing, in spite of them, and she had to break the tacit bondage of that intercourse by one more obvious. The girl looked up from the letter in her hand.

"No, thank you, grandmother," she said. Her voice, even in its lowest notes, had a clear, full resonance. Then she laid the letter down. "I beg your pardon," she added. "I thought you were opening your mail."

"No! no!" Madam Fulton cried, in a new impatience. "Go on. Read your letter. Don't mind me."

But the girl was pus.h.i.+ng it aside. She looked across the table with her direct glance, and Madam Fulton thought unwillingly how handsome she was. Electra was young, and she lacked but one thing: a girl's uncertain grace. She had all the freshness of youth with the poise of ripest womanhood. She sat straight and well, and seemed to manage her position at table as if it were a horse. Her profile was slightly aquiline and her complexion faultless in its fairness and its testimony to wholesome living. Her lips were rather thin, but the line of white teeth behind them showed exquisitely. She had a great deal of fine brown hair wound about her head in braids, in an imperial fas.h.i.+on. Perhaps the only fault in her face was that her eyes were of a light and not sympathetic blue.

"Shall I open your mail, grandmother?" she asked with extreme deference.

Madam Fulton's hand was lying on a disordered pile of letters, twenty deep, beside her plate. She pressed the hand a little closer.

"No, thank you," she said. "I will attend to them myself."

Electra laid down her napkin, and pushed her plate to one side, to give s.p.a.ce for her own papers. She lifted one sheet, and holding it in her fine hands, began rather elegantly,--

"Grandmother, I have here a most interesting letter from Mrs. Furnivall Williams. She speaks of your book in the highest praise."

"Oh!" said the old lady, with a shade of satire, "does she? That's very good-natured of f.a.n.n.y Williams."

"Let me read you what she says." Electra bent a frowning brow upon the page. "Ah, this is it. 'It was to be expected that your grandmother would write what we all wanted to read. But her "Recollections" are more than welcome. They are satisfying. They are illuminative.'"

"f.a.n.n.y Williams is a fool!"

Electra, not glancing up, yet managed to look deeply pained.

"She goes on to say, 'What a power your dear grandmother has been! I never realized it until now.'"

"That's a nasty thing for f.a.n.n.y Williams to write. You tell her so."

"Then she asks whether you would be willing to meet the Delta Club for an afternoon of it."

"Of what?"

"Your book, grandmother,--your 'Recollections.'"

"Electra, you drive me to drink. I have written the book. I've printed it. I've done with it. What does f.a.n.n.y Williams want me to do now?

Prance?"

Electra was looking at her grandmother at last and in a patient hopefulness, like one awaiting a better mood.

"Grandmother dear," she protested, "it almost seems as if you owe it to the world, having said so much, to say a little more."

"What, for instance, Electra? What?"

Electra considered, one hand smoothing out the page.

"People want to know things about it. The newspapers do. How can you think for a moment of the discussion there has been, and not expect questions?"

The old lady smiled to herself.

"Well," she said, "they won't find out."

"But why, grandmother, why?"

"I can't tell you why, Electra; but they won't, and there's an end of it." She rose from her chair, and Electra, gathering her mail, followed punctiliously. As they were leaving the room, her grandmother turned upon her. "Did you hear from Peter?" she asked.

"Yes. From New York. He will be here to-morrow." Electra's clear, well-considered look was very unlike that of a girl whose lover had come home, after a five years' absence, for the avowed purpose of marriage.

Madam Fulton regarded her for a moment with a softened glance. It seemed wistfully to include other dreams, other hopes than the girl's own, a little dancing circle of shadowy memories outside the actual, as might well happen when one has lived many years and seen the growth and pa.s.sing of such ties.

"Well, Electra," she said then, "I suppose you'll marry him. You'll be famous by brevet. That's what you'll like."

Electra laughed a little, in a tolerant way.

"You are always thinking I want to become a celebrity, grandmother," she said. "That's very funny of you."

"Think!" emphasized the old lady. "I know it. I know your kind. They're thick as spatter now. Everybody wants to do something, or say he's done it. You want to 'express' yourselves. That's what you say--'express'

yourselves. I never saw such a race."

She went grumbling into the library to answer her letters, or at least look them through, and paused there for a moment, her hand on the table.

She knew approximately what was in the letters. They were all undoubtedly about her book, the "Recollections" of her life, some of them questioning her view of the public events therein narrated, but others palpitating with an eager interest. She had written that history as a woman of letters in a small way, and a woman who had known the local celebrities, and she had done it so vividly, with such incredible originality, that the book was not only having a rapid sale, but it piqued the curiosity of gossip-lovers and even local historians. No names were mentioned; but when she wrote, "A poet said to me in Cambridge one day," everybody knew what poet was meant. When she obscurely alluded to the letters preceding some smooth running of the underground railway, historians of the war itched to see the letters, and invited her to produce them. The book was three months old now, and the wonder no less. The letters had been coming, and the old lady had not been answering them. At first she read them with glee, as a later chapter of her life story; but now they tired her a little, because she antic.i.p.ated their appeal.

A bird was singing outside. She c.o.c.ked her head a little and listened, not wholly in pleasure, but with a critical curiosity as well. She was always watching for the diminution of sound, the veiling of sight because she was old, and now she wondered whether the round golden notes were what they had been fifty years ago. She stood a moment thoughtfully, her hand now on the letters,--those tedious intruders upon her leisure. Then, with an air of guilty escape, though there was no one to see and judge, she left them lying there and stole softly out on the veranda, where she sank into her friendly wicker chair, and looking upon the world, smilingly felt it to be good. The sky was very bright, yet not too bright for pleasure; clouds not meant for rain were blotting it in feathery s.p.a.ces. There was a sweet air stirring, and the birds, though they were busy, said something about it from time to time in a satisfactory way. Madam Fulton felt the rhythm and surge of it all, and acquiesced in her own inactive part in it. Sometimes of late she hardly knew how much of life was memory and how much the present brilliant call of things. It was life, the thing she did not understand. Presently she closed her eyes and sank, she thought, into a deeper reverie. These excursions of hers were less like sleep, she always told herself, than a kind of musing dream. At last she was learning what other old people had meant when they explained, with a shamefaced air of knowing youth could never understand, "I just lost myself." To lose one's battered and yet still insistent self was now to be at peace.

When the forenoon was an hour or more along, she opened her eyes, aware of some one looking at her. There he was, an old gentleman of a pleasant aspect, heavy, with a thickness of curling white hair, blue eyes, and that rosiness which is as the bloom upon the flower of good living. His clothes were of the right cut, and he wore them with the ease of a man who has always had the best to eat, to wear, to look at; for whom life has been a well-organized scheme to turn out comfort. The old lady stared at him with unwinking eyes, and the old gentleman smiled at her.

"Billy!" she cried at last, and gave him both her hands. "Billy Stark!"

They shook hands warmly and still looked each other in the eye. They had not met for years, and neither liked to think what was in the other's mind. But Madam Fulton, after they had sat down, challenged it.

"I'm an old woman, Billy." She wrinkled up her eyes in a delightful way she had. "Don't you think that's funny?"