Rose MacLeod Part 39

"The prince?"

"You had written me he would come with you. When he saw me again, you said, he would not take 'no.' Peter was going home. Kind Peter! He said, 'Why don't you come with me?' He said Electra was beautiful, quite the most beautiful person in the world. I thought she would receive me. I could tell another woman--and so kind!--everything, and I could settle down for a little among simple people and get rested before--" She stopped, and he knew what she had meant to say: "Before you and your prince began pursuing me again."

But he did not answer that. It was a part of his large kindliness never to perpetuate harsh conclusions, even by accepting them.

"I shall go to see your Electra at once," he said.

She raised a forbidding hand.

"Do nothing of the kind. I insist on that."

But he was again reflecting.

"That puzzles me," he said at last; "that she should receive you at all if she does not believe you. Why?"

She looked at him steadfastly for a moment, a satirical smile coming on her face. These emotions he was awakening in her made her an older woman.

"I really believe you don't know," she said at length.

"Certainly I don't know."

"Why, it's you!" He stared at her. It was, she saw, an honest wonder.

"She adores you. They all do, all her ladies. They meet and talk over things, and you are the biggest thing of all. I am the daughter of Markham MacLeod. That is what she calls me."

"I see." He mused again. "I must go over there to-night."

"No! no! no!" It was an ascending scale of entreaty, but he did not regard it. He got up and offered her his hand.

"Come," he said. "Peter will be back. By the way," he added, as she followed him laggingly, "does Peter know why you came to America?"

"Peter thought it the most natural thing in the world to wish to be with Tom's relations."

"You haven't told him about the prince?"

"I have been entirely loyal to you--with Peter. Don't be afraid. He, too, adores you."

They walked on in silence. At the house they found grannie, now in her afternoon muslin, cheerfully ready for a new guest, and Peter in extreme delight at seeing him.

Markham MacLeod, once in his own room, sat down and stretched his legs before him. As he ruminated, his face fell into lines. n.o.body ever saw them,--even he,--because in public, and before his gla.s.s, he had a way of plumping himself into cheerfulness. His tortuous thoughts were for his inmost mind. Whatever he planned, no one knew he was planning; only his results came to him in the eye of the world.

XVII

After supper, which had been, grannie thought, a brilliant occasion, MacLeod took his hat and said to Peter, with an air of proposing the simplest possible thing,--

"I am going over to pay my respects to your neighbor."

Peter stared frankly.

"She was so kind as to invite me to luncheon, you know," MacLeod explained from the doorway. "I want to call at once."

"I'll go with you," said Peter.

"No, no! It's a first occasion. She'll want to catechise me, and you've heard all the answers. I rather depend on her putting straight questions."

It was not the custom to wonder at MacLeod. Whatever he did bore the stamp of privilege. He was "the chief." So he walked away through the summer dusk, and Peter and Rose, on the veranda, talked Paris while grannie listened, in a pleasant daze, not always sure, through age's necromancy, whether all the movement and action of their tone and subject belonged to the reality they knew, or to her own dream of a land she never saw.

Electra, the lights turned low, was sitting at the piano, nursing her discontent. She could hear the murmur of Madam Fulton's voice from the next room, broken by pauses when the old lady waited for Billy Stark to laugh. It all made Electra feel very much alone. Perhaps she had gone to the piano in a tacit emulation of the mastery Rose had shown, to see if, by a happy miracle, she also could bring to birth some of those magical things she never knew she felt until she heard others expressing them.

But when she struck a chord, it was no richer and no more responsive than she remembered it in her old practicing days. Then she tried singing a little:--

"'Drink to me only with thine eyes.'"

And all the time she was recalling the liquid flow of another voice, its restrained fervor and dying falls. A thing so beautiful as this song, so simple, had its root, she began dimly to feel, not in happy love but in despair, and as it often happened with her, she seemed to be timidly reaching out chilled fingers toward emotions she feared because they were so unrestrained, and yet which had to be reckoned with because the famous people made them of such account; they were like the earth where all creative power has life.

Electra had given carefully apportioned time to music. She knew something of harmony, in a painstaking way; but at this moment she felt more than ever outside the house of song. She was always having these experiences, always finding herself face to face with artists of various sorts, men and women who, without effort, as it seemed, could coax trees out of the ground and make them blossom before your eyes. And sometimes she had this breathless feeling that the incredible might happen and she, too, might do some of these amazing things. Often, it seemed to her, she was very near it. The turning of a key in the lock, a wind driving through vapor, and she might be on the stage of the world, no longer wondering but making others wonder. These were real hungers. She wanted great acknowledged supremacies, and her own neat ways of action had to end ingloriously.

And at the moment MacLeod came up the steps, without hesitation she went to meet him. Any one that night might have been a messenger from the richer world she coveted. She saw him there smiling at her in the dim hall light, and the old feeling came back that she had known him before and waited for him a long time. They had touched hands and he had gone with her to the sitting-room before she realized that such silent meetings were not the ordinary ones.

"Did Peter come with you?" she asked unnecessarily.

"No. He wanted to."

"I am glad to see you!"

MacLeod spared no time.

"You have been very kind," he said, "to my little girl."

Rose, as any sort of little girl, implied an incredible diminis.h.i.+ng; but the phrase served in the interest of conversational ease. Electra's eyes were on him, absorbed and earnest. There was nothing she believed in so much, at that moment, as the clarity of MacLeod's mind and heart. It seemed belittling him even to withdraw into the coverts of ordinary talk, and, if she wanted his testimony, to surprise it out of him by stale devices. She was wors.h.i.+ping the truth very hard, and there was no effort in putting her question crudely:--

"Mr. MacLeod, was your daughter married to my brother?"

He met her gaze with the a.s.surance she had expected. It seemed n.o.ble to her. At last, Electra reflected with a throb of pride, she was on the heights in worthy company.

"Yes," he said, not hesitating, "she was his wife."

Electra drew a long breath.

"Then," she answered, "I shall know what to do."

He bent toward her an embracing look. It promised her a great deal: comprehension, sympathy, almost a kind of love.

"What shall you do?" he asked.

Electra choked a little. Her throat hurt her, not at the loss of what she was going to relinquish, but at the greatness of sacrifice with somebody by to take cognizance of the act. He would not, like Madam Fulton, call her a fool. He might even see where the action placed her, on ground he also had a right to, from other deeds as n.o.ble.