Rose MacLeod. Alice Brown

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      "What evidence have you brought me? Did you see them married?"

      "No," said Peter, with the same unmoved courtesy.

      "You see! Have you even found any record of their marriage?"

      "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."

      "True? I tell you it is true. Electra, what are you saying?"

      But Electra was looking at him with those clear eyes where dwelt neither guile nor tolerance of the guile of others.

      "Did she tell you so," she inquired, "or do you know it for a fact?"

      He had himself well in hand now, because it had sprung into his wise artist brain that he must not break the beauty of their interview. It was fractured, but if they turned the hurt side away from the light, possibly no one would know, and the outer crystalline sheen of the thing would be deceptively the same.

      "I know Markham MacLeod," he said. "I have seen them together. She calls him father."

      A wave of interest swept over her face.

      "Do you mean you really know him, Peter?"

      "Assuredly."

      "As the leader of the Brotherhood?"

      "Yes, the founder."

      "He is proscribed in Russia and watched in France. Is that true?"

      "All true."

      "He gave up writing for this—to go about organizing and speaking? That's true, isn't it?"

      "Quite true."

      "How much do you know about the Brotherhood, Peter?"

      "I belong to it."

      He straightened as he spoke. An impulse of pride passed over him, and she read the betrayal in his kindling eyes and their widened pupils.

      "Is there work for you?" she asked, "for men who don't speak and proselytize?"

      "I do speak, Electra."

      "You do?"

      "I have spoken a little. I can't do it yet in the way he wants. What he wants is money."

      "We have sent him money," she agreed. "The Delta Club gave a series of plays last winter and voted him the proceeds. The first was for labor in America. The second for free Russia."

      "Yes, it pours in on him. It's his enormous magnetism."

      "It's his cause."

      She seemed to have reached something now that warmed her into life, and he took advantage of that kindling.

      "Rose is his daughter," he reminded her. "She is very beautiful, very sad. She is worthy of such a father."

      "Rose? Is that her actual name?"

      "Yes. They are Americans, though since her childhood she has lived in France."

      "What did she do before Tom—got acquainted with her? Live there in Paris with her father?"

      "She sang. She has a moving voice. She always hoped she was going to sing better, but there never was money enough to give her the right training. Then she began going about with her father. She spoke, too."

      "In public? For the Brotherhood?"

      "Yes. She has great magnetism. But she stopped doing that."

      "Why?"

      "I don't know. I have heard her father ask her to do it, СКАЧАТЬ