Rose MacLeod

								

"You will come?"
"We'll see."
"Good-night." She wrapped her cloak about her and was gone.
He followed her to the door only, and heard her feet upon the spongy
turf. With his impulse to follow farther walked the sane certainty that
he ought not to let her find her way alone, even along that friendly
road. But he could not do it. The rain had ceased, and there was a moist
wind blowing in little temperate gusts, as if it ran over the land and
gave it something, and then took brooding interval for another breath.
He looked up to heaven, and in the nebulous cloud reaches found a star.
So seemed the creature who had dawned in his dark room and lighted it:
inaccessible, unchangingly bright, and, if one rashly approached her,
armed with a destroying fire.
He went out and sat down upon the bench at his door, turning to lean his
forehead against the rough casing. What had happened to him? He did not
even own it was the thing that happens to all, the unassuageable
longing, the reaching hand for a mate. He had felt safe in his garden
ground, where no blossoms opened but innocent velvet ones, temperately,
to ripen and then die. But now the portals of the world were wide. He
saw beauty, and it roused him to a rage of worship. As the night went
on, he grew calmer. Sweet beliefs, a holier certainty stole into that
ecstasy of meeting. She seemed again, as she had in one moment of her
stay, a dear friend happily returned. The sense of her familiarity was
as convincing as if he had known her all his life. It was not
recognition alone: it was reunion.

VII

Osmond tried to cease thinking of the beautiful lady until his mind
should be more at ease, and to consider Peter, who was acting like a
changeling. It seemed possible that he might have to meet his boy
bravely, even sharply, with denial and admonition. Peter, he knew, had
deliberately put his wonderful gift in his pocket, and under some
glamour of new desire was forgetting pictures and playing at the love of
man. Playing at it? Osmond did not know; but everything seemed play to
him in the divergences of a man who had a gift and stinted using it. If
Osmond had had any gift at all, he knew how different it would have made
his life. A tragedy of the flesh would have been slighter to a man who
felt the surge of fancy in the brain. He had nothing, at the outset, but
a faltering will and a deep distaste for any task within his reach. He
remembered well the day when he first found Peter had that aptitude for
painting, and realized, with the clarity of great revealings, what it
meant to them both. All through his boyhood Peter had been drawing, with
a facile hand, caricatures, fleeting hints of homely life, but always
likenesses. One day he came home from the post-office in a gust of
rapture. A series of random sketches had been accepted by a journal.
From that time the steps had led always upward, and Osmond climbed them
with him. But the day itself--Osmond remembered the June fervor of it