Peter met his brother midway in the field, and waited for him.
"I"ll go with you," he said.
"No," said Osmond, "I"m not going now. Come back to the shack."
"You"re a regular night-owl," said Peter, as they turned. "When I don"t find you after dark, I know you"re in the woods, prowling. What makes you?"
"It"s a good place to think things out,--and swear over "em."
"What things, old man? You know I wouldn"t tell. Nothing would tempt me to."
Osmond laughed a little.
"If you care so much as that, I"ll tell you," he said, with a sudden harshness for himself in retrospect. "I go into the woods to think about life, my life, my difference from other fellows."
They sat down on the bench at the door, and a whippoorwill, calling, made the distance lonely. Peter had no answer for the truth he had evoked. It was too harsh. Only a woman could have met it, and that with kisses, not with words.
"Do you know," he said abruptly, "what all this makes me want?--this horrible excitement?"
"No, boy."
"It makes me want to paint. I want to paint everything I see: Markham MacLeod lying there in that bed of fern, Rose with all the life washed out of her, and you now, your face coming out of the dark. Everything"s been unreal to me since it happened--except paint--and you."
"Poor old chap!" said Osmond. But he fled on from that concurrent sympathy to a dearer plea. "Paint, Pete," he urged. "Let all the rest go. Let MacLeod die. But you paint."
Peter was looking at him now, fascinated. The pale face out of the dark was all one glowing life. Peter wondered at him, his strength, his beauty. Again he felt as he had that morning, as if he had never known his brother, and as if it would pay for any pains to comprehend that pathetic and yet adventurous soul. Peter was more than half woman, with his quick perception of what went on in other minds. He understood, at that moment, that the great adventure of all is life itself: not, as it seemed to him, to paint, to love, but to taste all things with this richness that was beginning to be Osmond"s, this hunger for the forbidden, even, so it was hunger. Osmond had begun to recognize his own nature, and for the first time his brother began to recognize him.
"Osmond," he said, in a wistful eagerness, very beguiling, "whatever you did, I should believe in it."
Osmond looked at him with that faint sweet smile upon his face, and his eyes offered hints of ineffable meanings.
"Would you, boy?" he asked.
Peter went on. It was almost like a woman"s confession of her love.
"Osmond, you say you think about your life when you are alone. What do you think?"
"I think it is full of pa.s.sions as an egg is of meat. They have been growing while I ignored them. I saw them marching before me and round and round me. They thought they were my masters."
"What then?"
Osmond remembered how the morning seemed when he met Rose in the sunlight, and touched her hand.
"Then," he said gravely, "I was their master. That"s all."
"Oh," said Peter exultingly, "you"d be the master in the end. You"re great!"
"Pete," said Osmond suddenly, "is this death coming?"
"Is what death?"
"It"s too queer for life."
"To sit here talking like this?"
"No, not that exactly, but the sense of things to come. It seems as if life wasn"t going to be the same again, and nothing was quite big enough to come after things as they"ve been lately,--but death, and that"s only big enough because it"s unknown."
"What will come?" asked Peter. He felt at once like a little boy, half afraid, and afraid of his fear, yet with his brother to uphold him.
"We won"t go to bed to-night, will we? We"ll sit here, even if we hold our tongues. I can"t go to bed."
They did sit there for an hour or so. Peter spoke.
"What are you thinking, old man?"
"Of Rose."
It was not strange to Peter to hear him speak of her familiarly. He returned,--
"I"ve been thinking of her, too."
XXVIII
The deed was over. The great emotional wave that mounted, in Europe and America, at the death of Markham MacLeod, threw its spray upon this quiet sh.o.r.e. Letters came from his disciples and his lovers, and Rose, wondering as she read them, answered in a patient duty. If a great man is one who moves things, then her father had been great. He was bigger to her now than when she feared him. Though there were mutterings afar of what must come now Markham MacLeod was dead, this country spot took on its old tranquillity. Peter sat in the garden and painted. He seemed to think of nothing else. Rose was too busy to sit, and he began a portrait of grannie; then his only communication with the world seemed to be his flashing glance at her and at his canvas. Osmond, in the plantation, bent his back and worked with the men, and no one knew what he thought. To Peter he was gravely kind, and Rose, with a growing emotion that seemed to her likely to become terror in the end, realized that he had not sought her.
One morning while Peter was in the garden smoking, before he called grannie to her chair again, and Rose was at the library table answering letters, Madam Fulton appeared at the door.
"Where"s Bessie Grant?" she asked.
Rose was at once on her feet and came forward to give her a chair, relieve her of her parasol, and stand beside her in a deferential waiting that, for some reason, never displeased this pulsating age with its memory ever upon the habitudes of youth.
"Where"s Bessie Grant?"
"She will be in presently. Peter is painting her."
The old lady lay back in the chair and gazed at her absently, as if she merely included her in a general picture of life. Madam Fulton had changed. Her eyes were wistful, and she looked very frail.
"Billy Stark sails on Sat.u.r.day," she volunteered, as if it were the one thing in her mind.
Grannie came in at the moment, and laid a kindly hand on her old friend"s shoulder. Rose went back to her chair, and left them to their talk, while she put up her papers before quitting the room. Madam Fulton looked at grannie now.
"You"ve had your morning coffee, haven"t you?" asked grannie, because she could think of nothing else to offer.