"When do I"—she hesitated—"when do I pay in—money?"
"Twice a year," he answered cheerfully. "Peter will tell you those things, if I am not here."
If he were not there! Her wings of pleasure drooped. It seemed as if he were always to be there. And Peter! he looked like a small and callow personage seen through the diminishing end of a glass, compared with this great presence.
"I must go," he said, and Electra pulled herself out of her maze. "May I tell my daughter you accept her?" He made it all very delicate and yet prosaic, as if he quite understood Rose could hardly expect to be received without difficulty, but as if Electra had made it magnificently possible. Still she felt a little recoil.
"I can't talk about it," she faltered, "to her. I could to you. Let me settle all the details, and my lawyer shall submit them to you. Would that satisfy you?"
She spoke humbly, and Markham MacLeod, the chief of the Brotherhood, bent over her hand and touched it with his lips. Then he was gone, and Electra was left standing with that incredibly precious kiss upon her hand. She was poor in imagination, but at the instant it flashed into her mind that this was actually the touch of the coal red from the altar.
Markham MacLeod, walking with long strides through the summer night, drew in deep breaths, and delighted, for the moment, in the voluptuousness of his own good health and the wonder that he had been able to carry youth on into middle age. He had not been accustomed to think about the past or what might come. It was enough to recognize the harmonious interplay of his muscles and the daily stability of a body which until now, and that briefly, had shown no sign of revolt. What insurrection there was he meant to quell, and meantime to forget its possibility, as a chief may, for the time, ignore rebellion. MacLeod was plagued neither by unsatisfied desires nor by remorse. In his philosophy, to live meant to feed upon the earth as it appeared to the eye and to the other senses. He believed, without argument, that all the hungers in him were good lusty henchmen demanding food. Now, in spite of certain grim warnings he had had of late, he was filled with the old buoyant feeling that his body was a well-to-do republic with his own impartial self at the head of it. Justice should be done to all its members that they might live in harmony. If discomforting forces assailed the republic, they must be crushed. Some of these he might have recognized as regrets, the sort of spectre that was ready to visit Napoleon on a night after the campaign in Egypt. They were, he thought, inseparable from great power and the necessities attending its administration. But they were enemies of the republic, and he killed them. So his voice was always hearty, his eye clear, and his cheek that healthy red.
Peter he found in fits of laughter, and Rose mimicking certain characters known to them in Paris. It was encouraging, he judged, to find Rose out of her dumps. But she was only keeping Peter by her until MacLeod should come and help detain him. Peter had said something in the early evening about going down to find Osmond, who had of late, he averred, been off at night on his deep wood prowls. "No," Rose wanted to say,—and there would have been a choking triumph in her throat,—"he has been in the playhouse waiting for me." And because she could not go that night to the wide liberty of the fields, she would not have Peter wandering off that way and hunting up her playmate, breaking spells and spoiling wordless messages. MacLeod had not seen her so gay, not since the days in Paris before she met Tom Fulton, when she had been one of a changing wave of artist life, made up of students delirious with possibilities and all bent toward the top notch of reputation. He joined her and Peter now in precisely their own mood, his laugh and voice reinforcing theirs. Rose warmed more and more. Not all her dreary memories could keep her from delighting in him. He carried her along on that high wave of splendid spirits, oblivious for the moment to all his faults. Thus, she paused to remember again, it had been in her too-wise childhood when, seeing her mother wan with tears, she had yet put her little hand in his and gone off with him for an hour's pleasuring, though he was the fount of grief as well as gayety. He compelled her, the sheer physical health of him.
Peter rose finally, to give them a moment alone, and wandered off down the garden, singing a light song and then whistling it farther and farther into the dark. Something constricted the girl's throat. She remembered, in the silence fallen between them, that she was alone with the enemy of her peace, and felt again that old passionate regret that he had not allowed her to keep the beauty of her belief in him. He had swept away something she had thought to be indestructible. That, more than any deed, was the wrong he had done—he had set his foot upon the flower of hope. But MacLeod, his forehead bared to the night air, hummed to himself the song Peter was singing, and then spoke with a commonplace assurance:—
"She asked me the question."