"Yes," said Electra, as if she were astonished at them both and their dull wits, "Markham MacLeod is dead."
That evening grannie was in her own room, and Peter and Rose, below, talked intermittently of that strange morning.
"It is incredible, Peter, isn't it," she began, "for him to die like this?"
He nodded.
"I expected violence," he said. "We all expected it."
"Isn't it strange, too, that I can't feel grief! I'm neither glad nor sorry. I feel very still."
"The whole world will feel grief," said Peter loyally.
"Yes, but to me—Peter, it is just as if he were not a man, not something I had loved, but a thing that was great to look at and had no soul. It was like a tree falling, or a huge rock undermined. Don't you see? As if it were the natural thing, and there was no other way possible."
She began to feel the inexorability of great revenges, and to see that when a soul has for a long time denied us answer in our needs, we refuse to believe that it can speak. MacLeod had grown to be a beautiful spectacle of the universe, full of natural health and power. Now that he had fallen, there was nothing left. She had no vestige to remember of those responses in the dim reaches of being when one calls and another answers: homely loyalties, sweet kindnesses, even overlaid by later pain. He had lived what he called the natural life, and its breath had failed him and he was no more. Some time, she knew, in this dull brooding, she might try to whip herself up into an expected grief; but now, in the bare honesty of the moment, she accepted the event as it was.
"Osmond has been great," said Peter.