Rose MacLeod

								

"No."
"You have the girl's word. She has come over here with you. What for?"
Peter lifted a hand to his forehead. He answered gently as a man
sometimes does, of set purpose, to avoid falling into a passion.
"It was the natural thing, Electra. She has no home, poor child!--nor
money, except what Tom left in his purse. He'd been losing pretty
heavily just before. I say, it seemed the natural thing to come to you.
Half this place was his. His wife belongs here." The last argument
sounded to him unpardonably crude, as to an imperial lady, but he
ventured it. Then he looked at her. With his artist's premonition, he
looked to see her brows drawn, her teeth perhaps set angrily upon a
quivering lip. But Electra was again pale. Her face was marble to him,
to everything.
"I shall fight it," she said inexorably, "to the last penny."
He gazed at her now as if she were a stranger. It was incredible that
this was the woman whose hand he had kissed but the moment before. He
ventured one more defense.
"Electra, you have not seen her."
"I shall not see her. Where is she--in New York?"
"Here."
"Here!"
"At grandmother's. I left her there. I thought when we had had our
little talk you would come over with me and see her, and invite her
home."
"Invite her here?"
"I thought so."
"Peter," said Electra, with a quiet certainty, "you must be out of your
mind."
There they stood in the arbor, their lovers' arbor, gazing at each other
like strangers. Peter recovered first, not to an understanding of the
situation, but to the need of breaking its tension.
"I fancied," he said, "you would be eager to know her."
"Is she a grisette?"
His mind ached under the strain of taking her in. He felt dumbly her
contrast to the facile, sympathetic natures he had been thrown with in
his life abroad. When he had left her, Electra was, as she would have
said, unformed; she had not crystallized into the clearness and the
hardness of the integrity she worshiped. To him, when in thought he
contrasted her with those other types who made for joy and not always
for moral beauty, she was immeasurably exalted. In any given crisis
where other women did well, he would not have questioned that Electra
must have done better. Her austerity was a part of her virgin charm. But
as he looked at her now, in her clear outlines, her incisive speech, the
side of him that thrilled to beauty trembled with something like
distaste or fear. She was like her own New England in its bleakness,
without its summer warmth. He longed for atmosphere.
But she had asked her question again: "Is she a grisette?"
He found himself answering:--
"She is the daughter of Markham MacLeod."
"Not the author? Not the chief?"
"Yes," said Peter, with some quiet pride in the assurance, "chief of the
Brotherhood, the great Markham MacLeod."
Electra pondered.
"If that is true," she said, "I must call on her."