"How could you! Oh, how could you!"
At her tone, the inexplicable reproach of it, he lost his gay a.s.surance.
Peter forgot the others. There was n.o.body in the room, to his eager consciousness, but Rose and his erring self; for somehow, most innocently, he had offended her. He took a step toward her, his boyish face all melted into contrition. There might have been tears in his eyes, they were so soft.
"Sit down," he implored her. "Rose! What have I done?"
It was like a sorry child asking pardon. Electra gave him a quick look, and then went on watching. At the tone Rose also was recalled. She shook herself a little, as if she threw off dreams. Her hand upon the cabinet relaxed. Her face softened, the pose of her body yielded, She seemed almost, by some power of the will, to bring new color into her cheeks.
Peter had drawn forward her chair, and she took it smilingly.
"I"m not accustomed to long-lost fathers appearing unannounced," she said whimsically. "Dear me! What if he brings me a Paris gown!"
But Peter was standing before her, still with an air of deep solicitude.
"It was a shock, wasn"t it?" he kept repeating. "What a duffer I am!"
"It was a shock," said Electra, with an incisive confirmation. "Mayn"t I get you something? A gla.s.s of wine?"
Rose looked at her quite pleasantly before Peter had time to begin his persuasive recommendation that she should spare herself.
"Let me take you home," he was urging.
It was as if Rose had been drawing draughts from some deep reservoir, and now she had enough to carry her on to victory.
"No, no, Peter," she denied him. "I won"t go home. Thank you, Electra,"--a delicate frown wrinkled Electra"s brows. The girl had never used her familiar name before--"thank you, I won"t have any wine. Well, my father is coming. Let"s hope he won"t turn the country upside down, and keep the trains from running. Get in your supplies, all of you. He may instigate a strike, and if the larder isn"t full, you"ll starve."
"Stop the trains?" repeated Electra, who was not imaginative. "Why should he stop the trains?"
"Ah, Miss Fulton, you don"t know my father," Rose answered gayly. She had seen that tiny frown punctuating her first familiarity, and took warning by it. "Don"t you know how, in great gardens, you can take a key and turn on the fountains? Well, my father can turn on strikes in the same manner. He has the key in his pocket."
Electra warmed, in spite of herself.
"I should like"--she hesitated.
"You"d like to see him do it? You may. Perhaps you will. We"ll sit in a circle and point our thumbs down and all the bloated capitalists shall go in and be killed." She was talking, at random, out of a tension she might not explain. Billy Stark, the coolest of them, saw that Madam Fulton had some vague inkling of it. Billy, as usual, began talking, but Rose had risen. Having proved her composure, she was going. She listened to Billy with smiling interest, and then when he had finished, humorously and inconsequently, nodded concurrence at him and said good-by. She had a few pretty words for Madam Fulton, a gracious look for Electra, and she was gone, Peter beside her. Billy Stark followed and stayed on the veranda with his cigar. But Electra remained facing her grandmother. She looked at her, not so much in triumph as with a fixed determination. Suddenly Madam Fulton became aware of her glance and answered it irritably.
"For mercy"s sake, Electra, what is it?"
Then Electra spoke, turning away, as if the smouldering satisfaction of her tone must not betray itself in her face.
"Do you realize what this means?"
"What what means?"
"She is terrified at his coming--Markham MacLeod"s."
"Well, you don"t know Markham MacLeod. Perhaps if you did, you"d be terrified yourself."
"But his daughter, grandmother, a girl who calls herself his daughter!"
Madam Fulton stared.
"Don"t you believe that either?" she inquired. "Don"t you believe she is his daughter?"
"Not for a moment." Electra had turned and was walking toward the door, all her white draperies contributing to the purity of her aspect.
Madam Fulton continued, in the same inadequacy of amaze,--
"But Peter knows it. He knew them together."
"Peter knew her with Tom," said Electra conclusively. "One proof is worth as much as the other."
At the door she turned, almost a beseeching look upon her face, as she remembered another shock that had been dealt her.
"Grandmother!" she said.
"Well!"
"You spoke of Mr. Stark--"
The old lady"s thought went traveling back. Then her face lighted.
"Oh," she said. "Yes, I know. I"m engaged to Billy."
"Grandmother--" Electra blushed a little, painfully--"You can"t mean--grandmother, are you going to marry him?"
Madam Fulton laid her head back upon the small silk pillow of her chair.
She never owned to it, but sometimes the dull hour after luncheon brought with it a drowsiness she was ceasing to combat. She smiled at Electra, who seemed very far away from her through the veil of that approaching slumber and through the years that separated them.
"We shan"t marry at once, Electra," she said, dropping off while the girl looked at her. "Not at once. I expect to have a good many little affairs before I settle down."
XI
On the way back to the house, Peter kept looking solicitously at Rose, breaking now and then into quick regrets.
"What have I done?" he asked her, in his impetuous stammer. "Shouldn"t I have written to your father? Rose, what have I done?"
She seemed not to hear him. Her face had a strained expression, the old look he remembered from the days of Tom"s illness and her not quite natural grief. Then she had never given way to the irrepressible warmth of sorrow, like a loving wife. She had seemed to harden herself, and that he accounted for by his knowledge of Tom"s hideous past. The woman had known him, Peter reflected, from illuminating intercourse, and his death meant chiefly the turning of a blotted page. But now! over her bloom of youth was the same shadowing veil. She was not so much a woman moved by strong emotion as made desperate through hidden causes. Still he besought her to forgive him, finally to look at him. Then she wakened.
"It"s all right, Peter," she said absently. "It had to be."
But still he saw no reason for her blight and pain. It was not merely incredible, it was impossible that any one should shrink because Markham MacLeod was coming. At the door she did look at him. He was shocked at the drooping sadness of her face. Yet she was smiling.
"Don"t bother, Peter," she said. "You"ve done nothing wrong, nothing whatever."
Then she went up the stairs, and Peter, after watching the last glimmer of her dress, strode away into the orchard and threw himself on the gra.s.s. Thoughts not formulated, emotions one yeast of unrest went surging through him, until he felt himself a riot of forces he could not control. It was youth that moved him, his own ungoverned youth, but it seemed to him life, and that all life was like it. Peter thought he had experienced enormously because he had lived in Paris and painted pictures. Yet he had never governed his course of being. It had been done for him. The greatest impression it had made on him thus far was of the extreme richness of things. There was so much of everything! He was young. There was a great deal of time, and if he did not paint his pictures this year, he could do it next. There were infinite possibilities. He had ease and talent and power. He had, even so far, won laurels enough to be a little careless of them. Since he had by the happy pains of art got so much out of life, he made no doubt that by superlative efforts, which he meant to make in that divine future where the sun was always shining, he should set all the rivers afire. There was money enough, too. He had never lacked it, thanks to old Osmond"s thrift, Osmond who did not need it himself in the ordinary ways of man.