Rose MacLeod Part 30

"Well." She found some difficulty in answering more fully, because it somehow became apparent to her that he had not really placed her. Peter was his only clue in the town. It hardly looked as if he expected to find a daughter here.

"Is he painting?" MacLeod went on.

Electra frowned a little. Peter was doing nothing but idling, she suspected, up to yesterday, and then, driving past, she had caught a glimpse of him in the garden before a canvas and of Rose lying before him in her long chair. That had given her a keener, a more bitter curiosity than she was prepared for in herself. She had shrunk back a little from it, timid before the suspicion that she might like Peter more tempestuously and unreasonably than was consonant with self-mastery. But while these thoughts ran through her head she gazed at MacLeod with her clear eyes and answered,--

"I fancy he looks upon this as his vacation. He must have worked very hard in Paris."

MacLeod entered into that with fluency. Peter must have worked hard, he owned, but that was in the days before they met. When they met, Peter's talent was at its blossoming point. It was more than talent. It was genius, it was so free, so strong, so unconsidered. He implied that Peter had everything that belonged to a fortunate youth.

Electra's eyes glowed. Here was some one to justify her choice. The newspapers had done it, but she had not yet heard Peter's praises from the mouth of man.

"You have had an enormous influence over him," she ventured.

He deprecated that.

"He has an enormous affection for me, if you like," he owned, "but influence! My dear young lady, I couldn't influence a nature like that.

I'm nowhere beside it. All I could hope for is that it would think some of the things I think, feel some of the things I feel. Then we could get on together."

Billy Stark, coming in at the door, thought that sounded like poppyc.o.c.k, but Electra knew it was the wisdom of the chosen. She rose and indicated Billy.

"You know Mr. Stark?"

The two men recurred humorously to their meeting in the garden, and owned their willingness to continue the acquaintance. At the moment there were steps and MacLeod turned to see Rose coming into the room.

Electra's heart beat thickly. She felt choked by it. And there was, she could not help owning, a distinct drop of disappointment when MacLeod, with an exclamation of delighted wonder, went forward and kissed Rose on the cheek. Then he kept her hand while he gave the other one to Peter, and regarded them both with expansive kindliness. Rose was the one who had blenched under the ordeal. Yet she had herself immediately in hand.

She let her fingers stay in MacLeod's grasp. She looked at him, not affectionately nor in pride, but with a sad steadfastness, as if he were one of the monumental difficulties of life, not to be ignored. Peter was ecstasy itself.

"How did you get here?" he was insisting. "How did you know I might be over here? You hadn't met Electra."

Then the stranger dropped the hands he held and turned to her.

"I haven't met her yet," he said, with a humorous consideration that stirred her heart. "Is this Electra?" He put out his hand, and she laid hers in the waiting palm. She felt bound to something by the magnetic grasp. The certainty was not weakened by any knowledge that other men and women felt the same.

Madam Fulton came in then. She had removed the traces of past emotion, but with the red still burning in her cheeks she looked very pretty.

MacLeod greeted her with an extreme deference, which presently slipped into the ordinary courtesy of man to woman as he found she had no desire to exact any special consideration. They went out to luncheon with that air of accelerated life which contributes to the success of an occasion, and then MacLeod talked. Rose sat silent, looking on with a sad indifference, as at a scene she had witnessed many times before, to no good end, and Madam Fulton listened rather satirically. But Electra and Peter glowed and could hardly eat, and MacLeod addressed himself chiefly to them. Now he did exactly what was expected of him. The brotherhood of man was his theme, and it was no mere effusion of sympathetic propaganda. His memory was his immense storehouse behind emotion, his armory. He could mobilize facts and statistics until the ordinary mind owned itself cowed by them. When they rose from the table, the millennium was imminent, and it had been brought by the sword. At the library door, Peter, beside Electra for an instant, irrepressibly seized her hand, as it hung by her side, and gave it pa.s.sionate pressure.

Instantly she looked at him, responsive. The sympathy they lacked in their personal relation sprang to life under MacLeod's trumpeting.

Electra was in a glow, and Peter, with a surprised delight, felt all his old allegiance to his imperial lady.

MacLeod would not sit down.

"I must catch my train," he said.

There was outcry at once from two quarters. He was not to return to the city. He was to stay here, Peter declared. It was absurd, it was unthinkable that he should do anything else. MacLeod took it with a friendly smile and the air of deprecating such undeserved cordiality; but he looked at Electra, who was frankly beseeching him from brilliant eyes. It was settled finally that he should go back to his hotel for a day or two, see some newspaper men and meet a few public engagements, and then return for a little stay.

"Get your hat," he said to Rose, in affectionate suggestion, "and walk with me to the station."

And as it became apparent that father and daughter had had no time for intimate talk, they were allowed to go away together, Peter following them with impetuous stammering adjurations to MacLeod to rattle through his business and come back. When they were out upon the highroad, MacLeod turned to Rose.

"Well," he said, "you don't look very fit."

Rose had one of her frequent impulses to tell him the crude truth: to say now, "I did until you came." But she answered indifferently,--

"I'm very well."

They walked along in silence for a moment, and she felt the return of old aches, old miseries he always summoned for her. In the first moment of seeing him, she always recurred to the other days when to be with him was to be in heaven. n.o.body ever had so blest a time as she in the simple charm of his good-will. No matter what she was doing, for him to call her, to hold out a finger, had been enough. She would forsake the world and run, and she never remembered the world again until he loosed the spell. It was broken now, she thought, effectively, but still at these first moments her heart yearned back to the old playgrounds, the old lure.

"What did she call you," he was asking--"Madam Fulton? Mrs. Tom?"

"Yes," said Rose, with a quiet bitterness, "Mrs. Tom."

"Have they accepted you?"

She raised her eyebrows and looked at him.

"You heard," she answered.

"Extraordinary people! Who is Electra? I couldn't call her anything.

Everybody was saying Electra."

"She is Madam Fulton's granddaughter. She and Peter are engaged."

"Ah! I'd forgotten that. I rather fancied it was you--with Peter."

She summoned the resolution to meet him bluntly.

"Don't do that, please. Don't a.s.sume anything of the sort about me."

He went on with unbroken good humor. She had never seen him angry, but the possibility of it, some hidden force suspected in him, quelled her, of late, when she considered the likelihood of rousing it.

"No, of course not," he said, with his habitual geniality. "Why aren't you staying with them?"

She temporized, only from the general certainty that it was unsafe for him to know too much.

"Peter asked me to stay there. His grandmother is very kind. I like her."

"Ah! Have these people money?"

"What people?"

"Electra. Tom's family in general."

"I don't know."

"They must have. They have the air. Will they do anything for you?"

Her face contracted. The look of youth had fled and left her haggard.

"I have not accepted anything."

"Have they offered it?"