XI
On the way back to the house, Peter kept looking solicitously at Rose, breaking now and then into quick regrets.
"What have I done?" he asked her, in his impetuous stammer. "Shouldn't I have written to your father? Rose, what have I done?"
She seemed not to hear him. Her face had a strained expression, the old look he remembered from the days of Tom's illness and her not quite natural grief. Then she had never given way to the irrepressible warmth of sorrow, like a loving wife. She had seemed to harden herself, and that he accounted for by his knowledge of Tom's hideous past. The woman had known him, Peter reflected, from illuminating intercourse, and his death meant chiefly the turning of a blotted page. But now! over her bloom of youth was the same shadowing veil. She was not so much a woman moved by strong emotion as made desperate through hidden causes. Still he besought her to forgive him, finally to look at him. Then she wakened.
"It's all right, Peter," she said absently. "It had to be."
But still he saw no reason for her blight and pain. It was not merely incredible, it was impossible that any one should shrink because Markham MacLeod was coming. At the door she did look at him. He was shocked at the drooping sadness of her face. Yet she was smiling.
"Don't bother, Peter," she said. "You've done nothing wrong, nothing whatever."
Then she went up the stairs, and Peter, after watching the last glimmer of her dress, strode away into the orchard and threw himself on the grass. Thoughts not formulated, emotions one yeast of unrest went surging through him, until he felt himself a riot of forces he could not control. It was youth that moved him, his own ungoverned youth, but it seemed to him life, and that all life was like it. Peter thought he had experienced enormously because he had lived in Paris and painted pictures. Yet he had never governed his course of being. It had been done for him. The greatest impression it had made on him thus far was of the extreme richness of things. There was so much of everything! He was young. There was a great deal of time, and if he did not paint his pictures this year, he could do it next. There were infinite possibilities. He had ease and talent and power. He had, even so far, won laurels enough to be a little careless of them. Since he had by the happy pains of art got so much out of life, he made no doubt that by superlative efforts, which he meant to make in that divine future where the sun was always shining, he should set all the rivers afire. There was money enough, too. He had never lacked it, thanks to old Osmond's thrift, Osmond who did not need it himself in the ordinary ways of man. He found such pure fun in the pleasures money bought that there was a separate luxury in giving it up, turning it in to the sum of things, and living straitly that labor might take some ease.
And here he lay on the grass, youth seething within him and pointing like a drunken guide, a vine-crowned reveler, to a myriad paths, all wonderful. His mind wandered to Rose and settled there in a delighted acquiescence. He had never before given himself wholly up to her spell, but now, whether the summer day beguiled him, or whether her mysterious trouble moved him, he thought of her until they seemed to be alone together on the earth,—and that was happiness. Beauty! that was what she meant to him, he told himself when thought was at last uppermost, and not mere passionate feeling. She was delight and harmony, and allegiance to her was like worship of the world.