Her face was flushed by the buffeting of the wind, and its moist sweetness tingled with health. It was apparent to him at once that, as he was looking at her in the firelight, she also had fixed his face in the gloom. She was smiling at him, and her eyes were kind. Then she spoke.
"I came to see you, Mr. Osmond Grant."
Osmond was now upon his feet. He drew a chair into the circle of light.
"Let me take your cloak," he said. It seemed to him that no such exciting thing had ever happened.
"No, no. It isn"t wet." She tossed it on the bench by the door, and having put both hands to her hair with the rea.s.suring touch that is pretty in women, she turned to him, a radiant creature smiling out of her black drapery. "But I"ll sit down," she said.
The next moment, he hardly knew how it was, they were there by the fire, and he had accepted her. She was beautiful and wonderful, a thing to be worshiped, and he lost not a minute in telling himself he worshiped her, and that he was going to do it while he was man and she was woman, or after his clay had lost its spirit. Osmond had very little time to think of his soul, because he worked all day in the open and slept hard at night; but it always seemed to him reasonable that he had one. Now it throbbed up, invincible, and he looked at the lady and wondered again at her. The lady was smiling at him.
"I wanted to meet you," she said, in her soft, persuasive voice. "You don"t come to the house any more."
He answered her simply and calmly, with no token of his inward turmoil.
"I haven"t been there for some days."
"Is it because I am there?"
"Grannie hasn"t needed me."
"Is it because I am there?"
Then he smiled at her, with a gleam of white teeth and lighted eyes.
"I"ve been a little afraid of you," he owned.
"Well, you"re not now?"
"No, I"m not now."
"That"s what I came here for." She settled more snugly into the chair, and folded her hands on her knee. He looked at them curiously, their slender whiteness, and noted, with interest, that she had no wedding ring. She continued, "I got breathless in the house. Grandmother was tired and went to bed. Peter has gone to see his cruel lady."
"Why do you call her cruel?"
"She won"t hold out her hand to me."
That simple and audacious candor overwhelmed him. He had never known anything so facile yet direct. It made life incredibly picturesque and full of color. He laughed from light-heartedness, and it came into his head that, in her company, it would be easy to believe "as many as six impossible things before breakfast." But she was continuing:--
"Don"t you find her cruel?"
"Electra? We haven"t exchanged a dozen words in a year."
"Why not?"
"I"m not a notability. It"s not remarkable to raise seeds for sale."
"But isn"t she cruel?"
He thought a moment, and then answered gravely,--
"She is very opinionated. But she has high ideals. She would be unyielding. Has she been unyielding to you?"
"Hasn"t Peter told you?"
"Not a word."
"I came here expecting her to accept me as her brother"s wife. She won"t do it."
"Won"t do it? Does she say so?"
"She says nothing. But she ignores me." Her cheek took on a deeper flush. She did not look at him, and he followed her gaze into the coals.
"You are too proud to give her proofs?" he hesitated.
She stirred uneasily in her chair.
"Proud!" she said bitterly. "If I had been proud, I should never have come here at all. But I am here, and she must recognize me." Some dauntless lines had come into the delicate face and made it older. "It is absurd," she continued, "worse. Here am I living in your house--"
"No! no!" he corrected her. "Not that it matters. It would be yours just the same. But it"s grannie"s house."
"Taking her hospitality,--oh, it"s a shame! a shame!"
"Peter must make it right with Electra," he ventured.
"Peter! He has tried. He has tried too much. Things are not right between them any more. I know that."
Osmond, almost with no conscious will, went back to what he had been thinking when she came in.
"Peter belongs to your Brotherhood--"
"Don"t say mine. It is my father"s." She spoke with an unguarded warmth.
"But you belong to it, too."
"I used to. I used to do everything my father told me to--but not now--not now!" She looked like a beautiful rebel, the color deepened in her cheeks, her eyes darkening.
Osmond could not question her, but he went back to his own puzzle.
"The trouble is--about Peter--his painting has taken a back seat. He talks about the Brotherhood--little else."
She nodded, looking at the fire.
"I know. I know."
"I"ve no objection to his believing in the brotherhood of man; but can"t the brotherhood of man be preserved if we paint our pictures, and mind our own business generally?"
"Not while my father leads the procession. He will have no other G.o.ds before him."