We couldn"t think back and forth on it. But it would be there."
Immediately it seemed to her that she had something even more precious than she had guessed, something not to be imperiled.
"I must not do anything to m.u.f.fle it," she said. "Either with the prince--or any one."
"The only thing I"m afraid of," he went on, "is that you won"t stand up to your father. Why, you must, playmate, if you feel like that about him."
She answered bitterly.
"I am afraid, I suppose."
Osmond spoke out sharply in the tone of a man who dismisses dreams.
"Don"t be afraid. Stand up and fight."
Her pathetic voice recalled him.
"But think! You said you were afraid of pain. You ought to know what fear is."
He answered slowly, and in what seemed almost exaltation,--
"I am afraid of pain; but when the time comes I shan"t wait for it. I shall go out to meet it."
"What do you mean?"
He seemed another creature, all steel and fire, not an impersonal thing speaking out of the dark.
"Don"t you know we all want something big, something bigger than we are to fight and conquer? Before we leave this earth, we want to make our mark on it, that shall not be washed away."
"Are you ambitious?"
"I don"t know. I do know I mean to live--when I am free."
Alarm was quickening in her. He seemed to be withdrawing into dark halls where she could not see to follow. He was building the house of his heart, yet there were apparently other edifices, fortresses or dungeons, it might be, where he walked alone.
"When you are free?" she insisted.
"When Pete has got his gait and I needn"t back him. When grannie is dead--dear grannie! Then I shall do my one free act."
She was so shaken that it seemed as if the night itself terrified her, not he alone.
"Not"--she paused, and then whispered it. "Do you mean--to kill yourself?"
He laughed.
"Not on your life! I am going to get all that"s coming to me. But I am going to get it in my own particular way."
"I cannot understand you."
"Of course you can"t. But remember all of you have something to bring to life. You give as well as take. You have your beauty and your voice.
Peter has his brush. Grannie has her mothering gift. That"s better than being a queen. There"s power in it. Your prince has his inheritance. I have had to look about and choose my gift. I chose it long ago."
"Is it something that makes you happy?"
"It made me wild when I discovered it, because I saw it was mine.
Nothing had ever been mine before. As it comes nearer and nearer, it looks pretty grim to me. But it"s mine, still. When men used to go out to fight, they must have said a good many times, "This is a nasty situation, but it"s my quarrel." And this is mine."
She felt her loneliness. At once it seemed that she had not yet known the real man. Their play at friendship, sympathy,--what was it?--had been only play. Like all men, he could bring the woman a flower, a crown even, "a rosy wreath," but the roses must wither while he chose his sword. She could not speak.
"What is it, playmate?" he asked presently. It was the old kindly voice.
"I must go back. I"m cold."
"Cold! It"s warm to-night."
"Good-night."
He followed her.
"I did it. I chilled you somehow. Forgive me."
She could not speak, and he was at her side.
"I know. There are things that can"t be talked about. They sound like twaddle. These things I"ve told you--they"re well enough to think about.
They can"t be said. You"re disappointed in me!"
But it was not that he had told her too much; he had told her too little. He had put her away from him.
"Good-night," she said again. "It"s all right, playmate, truly."
His anxious voice came after her.
"It"s not all right. I"ve muddled it."
XVI
Electra felt very much alone in a world of wrongdoers. To her mind moral trespa.s.sing was a definite state of action fully recognized by the persons concerned in it. She made no doubt that everybody was as well able to cla.s.sify obliquity as she was to do it for them. She had stated times for sitting down and debating upon her own past deeds, though she seldom found any flagrant fault in them. There was now and then an inability to reach her highest standard; but she saw no crude derelictions such as other people fell into. It was almost impossible for her to think about grandmother at all, the old lady seemed to her so naughty and so mad. Billy Stark, too, though he was a man of the world, admirably equipped, was guilty of extreme bad taste or he could never have asked Madam Fulton to marry him. Why was he calling her Florrie and giving her foolish nosegays every morning? Rose and Peter, when it came to them, seemed pledged to keeping up some wild fiction beneficial to Rose; only Markham MacLeod was entirely right, and so powerful, too, that his return must shake all the warring atoms into a harmonious conformity with Electra and the moral law.
Moreover, she had the entire programme of the club meeting to reconstruct. Nothing, she inexorably knew, would tempt her to allow for a moment any further consideration of her grandmother"s pernicious book.
Yet the club was to meet with her, the honorable secretary, and it had no topic to whet its teeth upon. In her dilemma, she put on her hat and walked over to inquire of Rose when her father was to return. MacLeod"s bubbling kindliness seemed to her so generous that she made no doubt he would talk to them for an hour, or even allow her to give him a reception.
Rose was in the garden, as usual, in the long chair, and Peter was painting. Ostensibly he was painting her, but the mood escaped him and he was blurring in a background. Electra remembered, as she went up the path, that still nothing had been said to her about Peter"s painting. He might have been any sort of young "prentice for all she heard about his work; and here it was beginning incidentally, like an idle task, with no reference to her. She had thought painting was something to be carried on gravely, when one had reached Peter"s eminence. There ought to be talk of theories and emotions inspired by pictures in the inception, not merely this prosaic business of sitting down to work and characterizing beauties with a flippant jargon of words misused. "Very nice,"
"stunning"--that was what she had heard Peter say even of sunsets that ought to have moved him to the skies. He had a delicate-fingered way of touching everything, as if the creative process were a little one, of small simplicities: not as if art were long.
When she appeared that morning, behind the hollyhocks, Rose was about to spring up, and Peter did stand, expectant, with his charming smile.