Rose MacLeod Part 74

"And then," he was continuing, in his bitter honesty, "I am a laboring man. I told Peter you were a terrible Parisian."

She shook her head.

"You don't quite know what you are, Osmond. There's a good deal of grannie in you. Perhaps that is one of the things I love. You work with your hands. Everything is possible to you, every kind of splendid thing, because you have not been spoiled by artificial life, the ambitions of it, the poor, mean hypocrisies. Strange that I should be talking about labor!"

"Why strange?"

"Because I hated the mention of it while my father lived. But now I seem to have gone back to my old feeling of a kind of pity for them all,--the ones that work blindly out of the light,--I see them as Ivan Gorof saw them, that great sea of the oppressed."

"But not every workingman is oppressed."

"No, no! Not here. But in other countries where they are surging and trying to have their ignorant way. And they are no more to be pitied than the rich. And I keep wis.h.i.+ng for them, not money and power and leisure, such as the rich have, but something better, something I wish the rich had, too."

"The heart that sees G.o.d, grannie would say."

"Maybe grannie would pray for it, Osmond. Maybe I could sing it--I hope to sing now--maybe you could put it into the land and bring it out in flowers."

"That's poetry!" said Osmond. He was smiling at her unconscious way of showing him how lovely she was and how loving. "I am going now, dear. I am going to take your present home carefully and look at it alone."

She knitted wistful brows a moment. Then she too smiled.

"You will see how valuable it is when you look at it," she said. "It will s.h.i.+ne so."

He had risen and stood before her, looking at her.

"Rose," he said, "you're a darling."

"Am I?" She was radiant.

"I am going to think up the things lovers have said, and read Solomon's Song, maybe! But now I'm going back to the plantation, to let the Almighty G.o.d and the underG.o.ds have a chance to tell me how to give you up."

"Ask them now, Osmond," she breathed. "Ask here, while I am here to answer, too."

"No," said Osmond. He shook his head. "Not while we are together. I can't listen to Him."

In the road he met Peter. They stopped, and Peter said at once,--

"I've got three orders from New York. When they're finished, I'm going back to France."

Osmond could not at once recall himself, even for his boy. Peter seemed only a figure of the night, familiarly dear, and yet unrelated to the great dream that swept across the sky with banners. Peter spoke again bluntly.

"I shall paint again all right. You needn't worry. It's got hold of me."

Then they shook hands.

x.x.xI

Osmond went back to his little house, not to sleep, but to think. The old habit of his life was changed. Henceforward, whether he took a woman's love or left it, things would not be the same. Say she loved him with the enduring pa.s.sion of a woman at her best, could he let her undertake the half of his strange lot? Could he cut her off from a thousand sources of happiness to be found in the world she knew, even though he forced her to go out into that world and sing, and lessened his claim on her to a swallow flight now and then back to his waiting heart? If her lot were to be a public one, she would have, in a measure, to make it herself; for here was he, with his plants and trees, almost one of them, and he could not give up his hardy life, lest he dwindle and fail utterly. Besides, this was his business, as music was hers.

Whatever communion they had, it could never be a unison of pursuits, but rather an interchange of rich devotion. It looked, he concluded, very bad for her.

As he thought that, the night grew chill, and the stars waned in their s.h.i.+ning. These were the dull old ways of a world that had swung so long in one orbit that it could never be otherwise. He was bringing the woman to break bitter bread with him, and though she ate it cheerfully in the morning of her hope, it would seem intolerable in the evening, and at night she might refuse it utterly. What right had he to let her vow herself to such things and swell the list of proven failure? But say she loved him! And after all, what was love? Was it the ever-living germ of desire to create new life, that life might live? Was it the gift shut in the hand when life left the creating source, to be squandered or h.o.a.rded, to be used for honor or dishonor, but always ignorantly, to serve the power behind creation itself? Was this beautiful creature the sport of her woman's blood, doing the will of the earth, and so most innocently walking into the lure of his arms because they longed for her? He wondered.

And his side of it, the man's side, what did it mean for him to know he wors.h.i.+ped the divinity of her beauty, the sun of her good pleasure, the might of her yieldingness? When he thought of her, the body of things became mysteriously trans.m.u.ted to what he had to call their soul, because it wore no other name. There was the flame of pa.s.sion and the frost of awe. The mystical call of her spirit to his had become the most natural of all created impulses. Yet, say that he, too, was in the grip of that greatest force, and nature was tricking the woman out with all the colors of the dawn, to blind him into stumbling along nature's ways.

Did nature want him to say, "This is Paradise," until she was ready to let him know it was the unchanged earth? If it was all a gigantic phenomenon of a teeming universe--well, it was good. It was to be wors.h.i.+ped as the savage wors.h.i.+ps the sun: but not greatly. For clouds hide the sun, and, in spite of it, men die. Better not spill too much blood for a savage G.o.d that gives but savage recompense. And, thinking so, he closed his eyes and lapsed into a dull recognition of the things of earth.

How far his mind had rushed upon its track he did not know, but suddenly it came to a stop and jolted him awake. It was as if he had come to a great gulf, the darkness girdling the natural life, and across it were the colors of the dawn. They breathed and wavered in sheer beauty. And at that moment there began in him the fainting recognition of what love might be if men would have it so. First, there was the lure, the voice of the creature calling to its mate. Then there was the unveiling of the soul, the recognition, the sight of the soul as G.o.d sees it, so that the two creatures can only breathe, "How beautiful you are!" And that must not continue, because the soul is a delicate though an indestructible thing, and cannot walk naked through the a.s.saults of time. It would consume the beholder; it would even scorch under the flame of its own being. It withdraws, only to appear again, like the G.o.d from the brake, when it is greatly summoned. But always it is there, and the two that hold high fealty remember what they have seen. When the flame sinks, they say: "But it is the flame on the altar. It must not die." So they renew it. When the outer habit of life fails in one of them, to grow poor and mean, the other remembers that one glimpse of the soul, and calls upon it tenderly.

"Revive," says his patient love, "I stay you with the flagons of my hope, I comfort you with the apples of my great belief." And always it is an interchange of life, the one feeding the other with eternal succor.

And now, to come back to the old question: Say a woman loved a man like this man. Osmond seemed not to be debating now, but hastening along the thread of a perfect certainty. Something had put a clue in his hand.

Wherever it might lead him, he was running fast. It came upon him, like the lighting of a great fire, that this was a call for high emprise. He loved nothing so much as courage. Here was the summons to the world-old battle where all but a few fail and none are said to succeed unless they die for pa.s.sion and so life drops a curtain on the after-fight. The great lovers--chiefly they are those for whom the fight never was finished, who chose death rather than endure. He had bitten his teeth all his life on the despair of adventure, but now it came upon him that life itself is the great adventure, and love the crown of it. Say he, loving a woman, went out to fight the dragons of the way. He had no armor such as youth delights in. He was not a Prince Charming, who wooes the eye even before he speaks. He had only the one treasure--love. Say he crowned the woman with it, and then challenged G.o.d to give their hungers food, be the unseen combatant and fight out the fight beside them? Say he vowed himself like a knight to her service, and their mutual wors.h.i.+p scorned the body save as the instrument of life, and glorified the soul? "I am the soul," something cried out in him. "Do not deny me, or you blaspheme the G.o.d that also lives. Give me food, the large liberty to be faithful. Lay bonds upon me, patience and loyalty, and I shall rejoice in them and grow strong enough to break them, and delight in perfect liberty."

It all resolved itself, he found, into this question of the soul. Was the marvel true? Did it really exist? For if it did, it must have food and cheris.h.i.+ng. Inevitably then he thought of grannie, and his struggling mind seemed to appeal to her clarity, question and answer, and to every question she smiled and told him the dream was true. It did live, this mystery, this imperishable one that came from the bosom of G.o.d and would return in safety there.

Osmond rose, in the dewy midnight, and stretched his arms to heaven. He felt what he never had before, in his iron acquiescence, an ecstasy of wors.h.i.+p. This was what grannie felt, he knew; it was the daily draught that kept her spirit young. He made no doubt she was praying for him at that moment, and that their buoyant certainties were meeting in the air of quickened life. Hitherto he had walked. Now he saw the use of wings.

He knew what Rose was doing. She would not be waking. She would be lying in her bed asleep, too secure in her glad confidence to wonder over it.

Another thought swept in and awoke his quivering sentience to the marvel of his life. Some recognition of the cheris.h.i.+ng maternal seemed to grow in him, and as grannie had saved his body for him, so now Rose seemed to have given birth to his new soul. It was like a s.h.i.+ning child. With his bodily eyes he almost saw it through the dark, and he longed to take it in his arms to where she slept and lay it on her breast. He could fancy how the s.h.i.+ning child would lie there and how, sleeping, her sweet soul would cherish it. And whether he began the next day with the resolve to give her up or to relinquish his own doubts, at least he had had the vision. As the dawn broke he seemed to see her coming toward him, the spirit of it, rosy-clad, bearing in her hands, outstretched, a beaker for his lips. It was the water of life, and her face besought him to know finally that they were to drink of it together. He was shaken with the wonder of it. All his past had been preparing him for ignominy and loss. He trembled when he saw what the girl in the vision meant: that the greater quest is farther yet.

x.x.xII

Madam Fulton and Electra were busy, each in her own track, making ready to go. Electra was truly concerned because grandmother had fallen into this frenzy of setting her belongings in order and would even fly up to town to her little apartment, on mysterious errands. But Madam Fulton was as gayly confident as she was inscrutable, and even when Billy Stark warned her that she was doing too much, she only whispered,--

"Got the tickets, Lochinvar?"

On the last day, when the house was partly closed and the servants lingered only for an hour or two, Electra, ready to her gloves, came to kiss her grandmother good-by. Madam Fulton drew back a pace and looked at her.

"Electra," said she, "you'll be horribly shocked and you'll want to laugh at me. But don't you do it. Don't you do either of those two things."

Electra's brows came together in a perplexity that yet betokened only a tepid interest. Her own affairs were too insistent. They crowded out the pale, dim hopes of age.

"When, grandmother?" she asked. "Why should I want to laugh?"

"Never mind. But you will. And when you do, you say to yourself that, after all, youth and age are just about the same, only age has tested many things and found they're no good. So if it finds something that seems good--well, Electra, you're off on your fool's errand. Don't you deny other folks the comfort of theirs."

"I don't understand you, grandmother."

"No, of course you don't. But you will. Once I shouldn't have cared whether you did or not, but I've taken a kind of a liking to you. I told you I should when you turned human and made a fool of yourself like the rest of us. And now you're going out into the wilderness, to found a city or something of that sort."