Rose MacLeod Part 63

MacLeod smiled again, as if he were smiling down on something. Osmond opened the door, knowing where he should find her. She was there at the end of the hall, sitting in one of the high-backed chairs, her hands in her lap, her head bent sweetly as she listened. She was pale, and there was terror in her face. As Osmond read that, his own pa.s.sion quieted, and he spoke with perfect gentleness:--

"Rose, will you come here?"

She obeyed at once, and they three were in the room together and Osmond had closed the door. He put out his hand to her, and without hesitation she gave him hers.

"Rose," he said, "I have been telling your father you will not go back with him."

Her eyes dilated. Her lips parted eagerly.

"I have said I would," she began; but he forestalled her.

"I have forbidden it, Rose. I have told him I forbid it."

His touch on her hand seemed to be leading her, drawing her into his own breast. They looked at each other, and both forgot the other presence in the room. The color came back slowly to her cheeks, and Osmond's eyes filled with tears.

"Answer, dear," he said, with the same gentleness. "Let me hear you answer."

"Very well," she returned, like a gentle child. "Shall I go now, Osmond?"

He led her to the door, opened it, and closed it after her. Then he glanced at his adversary. MacLeod had sunk into a chair and was sitting astride it, his chin bowed upon its back. He looked terror-stricken. One hand held a little box, and he was tendering it to Osmond.

"Open it," he gasped. "Crush one in your handkerchief. Let me smell it."

Osmond ignorantly but deftly did it, and held the handkerchief to MacLeod's face. MacLeod breathed at it greedily. He lifted his left hand as if it were half useless to him. "Rub it," he said savagely. "Wring it off. Such pain! my G.o.d, such pain!"

In a moment more the attack was over, and he looked like an old man, inexplicably ravaged. Osmond's question sprang impetuously.

"Is it--excitement?"

MacLeod smiled a little and moistened his lips.

"You think you did it?" he suggested. "No. You didn't do it. It comes--of itself--like a thief in the night, like the very devil.

n.o.body's to know it. Understand that."

"Then you need her with you!" Osmond broke out, in a fresh understanding.

"Need her? need Rose? Get that out of your mind. The world is full of women. She'll go back with me, but not because I need her."

He walked past Osmond and out through the empty hall, and slowly, but still erect, to the driveway and the road. Osmond stood watching him. He saw him straighten more and more, and a.s.sume his wonted carriage though without its buoyancy. Osmond followed for a little distance, but when MacLeod turned to look at him and then went on again, he stepped over the wall and crossed the lot to his own plantation. MacLeod, he knew, was going to Electra's for a last word, and for himself, he had struck his one sharp, quick blow for Rose. She should have an interval alone, to make her abiding decision calmly, and when the moment came for MacLeod's going, Osmond would be there again, to hearten her.

But MacLeod, when Osmond had really turned aside, halted more and more.

At last he was sick with fear of that enemy inside his breast. There was no moment now, he knew, when he might not expect it, tearing away at the delicate harmonies within the gates of life. What would happen when the pain grew fiercer still? The enemy would let in that other he refused to think upon, though even that was more tolerable than having this evil creature claw at him when men could see him cringe. And as life itself is death when it is once sapped of power, he threw up his head and strode on faster. One step with the old vigor and abandon--and there it was again.

XXVI

Later that same morning, Peter was hurrying along the road, for the carriage was due and MacLeod had not returned. Peter was not more than reasonably sorry to lose his chief, because he meant to follow soon. He had the excited sense of being ready for flight, of great freedom before him and strength in his wings, and of leaving Osmond and grannie with regret, yet happily, for something untried and as wonderful as youth. He ran along the road, hat in hand, in love with the morning breeze, and Electra met him. She looked wan, he saw, and with an incredulous pang, he questioned whether she could be moved by their separation. But he was glad of a definite and hurried question to ask.

"Where is MacLeod?"

A look like hope flashed into her face. She stopped and turned half about, as if for instant flight back to the house.

"Was he coming to me?" she asked breathlessly.

"We thought he might be there."

"Did he say he was coming?" Her eagerness looked like hunger for a desired good, slipping, by some chance, away from her.

"No! no! he may have gone to the plantation. I'll run down there and find him."

He hurried on, and Electra, watching his light, easy lopes, wished she, too, were a man and running to find Markham MacLeod.

At the pasture-bars, in a bed of roadside fern, Peter found him. MacLeod lay majestically, stretched at length, upon his side, as if some one had disposed him in the att.i.tude of sleep. Peter knew. Yet he stooped and touched one of the beautifully shaped hands with his finger. He stood there a long time, it seemed to him, looking not at the figure at his feet, but off into the morning sky, and MacLeod was not in his mind: only Osmond and what Osmond had said about the l.u.s.t for fight. Osmond seemed to fill the world. He had wished to kill the man, but G.o.d instead had killed him. Yet the other thing might have been. Peter wondered that he had not realized what his brother was to him, and again that he had too often foregone Osmond's companions.h.i.+p, this summer of their reunion, for lesser loyalties. He comprehended him, at the moment, with an exaggerated pa.s.sion that was pain: a gigantic figure, all sacrifice, all patient truthfulness, and, in its own bounded life, as much to be loved and protected as a woman, and yet untrained and ready for a savage deed.

And all the time Electra was advancing rapidly toward him on the road, aimlessly, but, as she afterwards believed, drawn by some premonition of what she was to find. Her approach broke Peter's fearful vision. She was like a figure walking into his dream, and he hurried toward her, remembering what she must not see. He motioned to her harshly with his hand.

"Go back!" he called.

But Electra came inevitably on. Then Peter placed himself before her.

"Something has happened," he said quietly, while she looked him in the face. "Go home."

But now she was gazing past him, and the figure in the bracken caught her sight. With a low cry, the inarticulate sound that throws suffering woman back to her kins.h.i.+p with the mother brute, she ran past him and stooped over MacLeod; Peter, dull with feeling, thought she tried to raise his head, and failing that, she took the hand and nursed it on her bosom. Peter judged apathetically that he had never really known Electra; she looked now like a woman numb with grief over a dead child.

Then he waked himself out of his maze.

"Don't!" he heard himself calling. "People will come."

"Who will come?" she returned sharply, as if she challenged them all to show why this should not be her dead. Then she wakened. "Go!" she cried.

"Get help. It can't be true."

"I will call the men. We can get him home among us."

He ran over the wall and on to the field where men were hoeing. When they had dropped their work and followed him, they found Electra sitting there by the roadside, as if she were the one mourner over the dead, and she did not rise until they stooped to lift him, and arranged how he should be carried. Then she said to Peter, again as if it were her right,--

"Have him taken to my house."

Peter stared at her, but he remembered Rose.

"That will be better," he said; and added, "but who will tell her?"

"His daughter?" said Electra, in her clear tone. "I will tell her. But there is a great deal to do before that. She can wait."

So they walked along the road like a strange funeral procession, Electra in front, as if she had a right to lead. She turned in at her own gate, and they followed, and she walked on up the steps and into the library, where they laid him down. Madam Fulton and Billy Stark had gone for a drive, and the house, in its morning order, looked as if it had been prepared for the solemnity of this entrance. Now Electra's methodical capacity came into play. She sent one man for the doctor and another to the kitchen for hot water and for brandy. But when they were hurriedly dispersed, she turned to Peter and said, with a heart-breaking quiet,--

"And yet, he is dead!"