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.
"Everything. He's been Electra's right-hand man. I'll run down to see him a minute presently."
He hoped Rose would send some word of appreciative thanks. Old Osmond, he knew, would like it. But she got up and gave him her hand, in her grave affectionate way, and said good-night. She remembered how Osmond and her father had met in contest, and she knew Osmond would not seek her until Markham MacLeod was wholly gone.
Peter met his brother midway in the field, and waited for him.
"No," said Osmond, "I'm not going now. Come back to the shack."
"You're a regular night-owl," said Peter, as they turned. "When I don't find you after dark, I know you're in the woods, prowling. What makes you?"
"It's a good place to think things out,--and swear over 'em."
"What things, old man? You know I wouldn't tell. Nothing would tempt me to."
"If you care so much as that, I'll tell you," he said, with a sudden harshness for himself in retrospect. "I go into the woods to think about life, my life, my difference from other fellows."
They sat down on the bench at the door, and a whippoorwill, calling, made the distance lonely. Peter had no answer for the truth he had evoked. It was too harsh. Only a woman could have met it, and that with kisses, not with words.
"Do you know," he said abruptly, "what all this makes me want?--this horrible excitement?"
"It makes me want to paint. I want to paint everything I see: Markham MacLeod lying there in that bed of fern, Rose with all the life washed out of her, and you now, your face coming out of the dark. Everything's been unreal to me since it happened--except paint--and you."