_ CHAPTER XVIII. MYSTIFICATION
Walking slowly home across the Square, Patty told herself that the future had been taken out of her hands. She seemed to have been moved mentally, if not bodily, into another world, into a world where the sleepy old Square, wrapped in a soft afternoon haze, still existed, but from which Stephen Culpeper had vanished in a rosy cloud. She did not know why she had relinquished the thought of Stephen since her visit to the house in East Leigh Street; but some deep instinct warned her that she had widened the gulf between them by her excursion with Gershom. "I can't help it," she thought sensibly enough. "There wasn't anything in it before that, and I might as well go ahead and stop thinking about it." Her anger at Stephen's neglect had melted into a vague and impersonal resentment, a resentment, rather for the dying woman than for herself, against all the needless cruelties of life. Even Gershom, even the unspeakable Gershom, had had discernment enough to see that something good in that poor woman had been blighted and crushed. Was it true that no one was ever given the chance to be one's best? Was this true, not only of that dying woman, but of her father and Stephen and Corinna and herself and all human beings everywhere?
Lingering a moment near the Washington monument, she stood watching the straggling groups that were crossing the Square. Bit by bit, snatches of conversation drifted into her mind and then blew out again, leaving scarcely the shadow of an impression. "They tell me it's going up. I don't know, but I'll find out to-morrow." "I wouldn't wear one of those things for a million dollars, and he says--" "Yes, I've arranged to go unless the strike should be called next week."
The strike? Oh, she had almost forgotten it! She had almost forgotten the message she had promised to deliver to her father. With a gesture that appeared to sweep her last remaining illusion behind her, she started resolutely up the drive to the house. After all, whatever came, she would not let them think that she was either afraid of life or disappointed in love. She would not mope, and she would not show the white feather. On one point she was passionately determined--no man, by any method known to the drama of sex, was going to break her heart!
She had quickened her steps while she made her resolve; and, a minute later, she broke into a run when she saw that Corinna's car stood at the door and that Corinna waited for her in the hall. Had the girl only realized it, Corinna's heart also was troubled; and the visit was one result of the discouraging talk she had had recently with Stephen.
"I had to go down town, so I stopped on the way back to speak to you." Though she said no word of her anxiety, Patty could hear it in every note of her expressive voice and feel it in the protective pressure of her arm. "I want you to go with me to the Harrisons' dance Wednesday night, and I want you to look your very prettiest."
"But I'm not even asked."
"Oh, you are. Mrs. Harrison has just told me she was sending your invitation with a number that had not gone out." How like Corinna it was to put it that way! "They are giving it for that English girl who is staying with them. She is pretty, but you must look ever so much prettier. I want you to wear that green and silver dress that makes you look like a mermaid." The kind voice, so full of sympathy, so forgetful of self, flooded Patty's heart like sunshine after darkness.
"I will go, if you wish me to," she answered, raising Corinna's hand to her cheek. And the thought flashed through her mind, "Stephen will be there. Even if everything is over, I'd like him to see me."
"I'll come for you a little before ten," said Corinna; and then, as the door of the library opened and Vetch came out, she added hurriedly: "I must go now. Remember to look your prettiest."
"No, don't go," begged Patty. "Father will be so disappointed." She had remembered the message, and she felt that Corinna, whose wisdom was infallible, might help her to understand it. Though it had sounded so casual on the surface, her natural sagacity detected both a warning and a menace; and the very touch of Corinna's hand, in her long white glove, was reassuring and helpful.
Whatever may have threatened Vetch, he seemed oblivious of it as he came forward with his hearty greeting. "It's queer," he said, "but something told me you were here. I looked out to make sure." His simple pleasure touched Corinna like the artless joy of a child. It was impossible to resist his magnetism, she thought, as she looked up into his sanguine face, for what was it, after all, except an unaffected enjoyment of little things, an unconquerable belief in life?
"I stopped to ask Patty about a dance," she explained. "I must go on immediately."
He glanced at the girl a little anxiously. "Is she going to a party with you? I am glad."
In spite of his buoyant manner, there was an abstracted look in his eyes, as if his mind were working at a distance while he talked. After the first minute or two Patty observed this and it helped her to make her decision. "Are you busy, Father?" she asked. "I promised Mr. Gershom that I would give you a message--such a silly message it is too."
"Gershom?" He repeated, and his face darkened. "What did he say to you? No, don't go, Mrs. Page. Come into the library, and let us have the message."
Corinna glanced uncertainly over her shoulder. "I really must be going," she murmured, and then yielding suddenly either to inclination or to the pressure of Patty's hand, she crossed the threshold of the library and walked over to the front window. Outside, beyond the yard and the grotesque fountain, she saw the splendid outline of Washington, and beyond this the faint afternoon haze above the spires and chimneys of the city. "The sun will go down soon. I must hurry," she thought; yet she stood there, without moving, looking out on the monument and the sky. For a moment she gazed in silence; then turning quickly, she glanced with smiling eyes about the small, stiffly furnished room, with the leather chairs and couch and the business looking writing-table in the centre of the floor.
"How comfortable you look here," she observed lightly, "and how business-like."
"Yes, I work here a good deal in the evenings." He turned a chair toward the window, and when she sat down, he remained for a minute still standing, with his hand on the back of the chair, smiling thoughtfully not at her, but at the disarray on his desk. The glow of pleasure which the sight of her had brought was still in his face; and she thought that she had never seen him so nearly good-looking. It occurred to her now, as it had done so often before, that in the hour of trouble he would be like a rock to lean on. However else he might fail, she surmised that in human relations he would be for ever dependable. And what was life, after all, except a complex and intricate blend of human relations? She decided suddenly and positively that she had always liked Gideon Vetch. She liked the way his broad bulging forehead swept back into his sandy hair, which was quite gray on the temples; she liked the contrast between the quizzical humour in his eyes and the earnest expression of his generous mouth with its deep corners. He stood in her mind for the straight and simple things of life, and she had lost her way so often among the bewildering ramification of human motives. He had no trivial words, she knew. He was incapable of "making conversation"; and she, who had been bred in a community of ceaseless chatter, was mentally refreshed by the sincerity of his interest. It was as restful, she said to herself now, as a visit to the country.
"So Gershom asked you to give me a message?" remarked Vetch abruptly to Patty. "Where did you see him?"
"He joined me when I went out," replied Patty, speaking slowly and carefully with her eyes on Corinna. "I tried to slip away, but he wouldn't let me. He asked me to speak to you about something that was worrying him, and a great many others, he said. He didn't put it into words, but I think he meant the strike--"
Vetch looked up quickly. "Oh, that is worrying him, is it?"
"What is it all about, Father? Why are they going to strike?"
"Can you answer that, Mrs. Page?" The Governor turned to Corinna with a sportive gesture, as if he were casting upon her the burden of a reply. His smile was sketched so faintly about his mouth that it seemed merely to emphasize the gravity of his expression.
"I?" Corinna looked round with a start of surprise. "Why, what should I know of it?"
"Then they don't talk about it where you are?"
"Oh, yes, they talk about it a great deal." She appeared to hesitate, and then added with deliberate audacity, "but they think that you know more about it than any one else."
He did not smile as he answered her. "Do they expect the men to strike?"
Though she made a graceful gesture of evasion, she met his question frankly. "They expect them to, I gather--unless you prevent it."
A shade of irritation crossed his features. "How can I prevent it? They have a right to stop work."
"They seem to think, the people I know, that it depends upon how safe the leaders think it will be."
"How safe? I can't tie their hands, can I?"
"Of course I am only repeating what I hear." She gazed at him with friendly eyes. "No one could know less about it than I do."
"People are saying, I suppose," he continued in a tone of exasperation, "that these men had an understanding with me before I came into office. They seem to think that I can make the strike a success by standing aside and holding my hands. That, of course, is pure nonsense. If the men want to stop work, nobody has a right to interfere with them. Certainly I haven't. But have they the right--the question hangs on this point--to interfere with the farmers who want to get their crops to market as badly as the strikers want to quit work? The kind of general strike these people have in mind bears less relation to industry than it does to war; and you know what I think about war and the rights of non-combatants. They want to tie up the whole system of transportation until they starve their opponents into submission. The old damnable Prussian theory again, you see, that crops up wherever men take the stand, which they do everywhere they have the power, that might is a law unto itself. Now, I am with these men exactly half way, and no further. As long as their method of striking doesn't interfere with the rights of the public, they seem to me fair enough. But when it comes to raising the price of food still higher and cutting off the city milk supply--well, when they talk of that, then I begin to think of the human side of it." He broke off abruptly, and concluded in a less serious tone, "that's the only thing in the whole business I care about--the human side of it all--"
A phrase of Benham's floated suddenly into her mind, and she found herself repeating it aloud: "There are no human rights where a principle is involved."
Vetch laughed. "That's not you; it's Benham. I recognize it. He's the sort that would believe that, I suppose--the sort that would write a political document in blood if he didn't have ink."
"Oh, don't!" she protested. There was a grain of truth in the epigram, but she resented it the more keenly for this.
"Well, I may have intended it as a compliment," rejoined Vetch gaily. "He would take it that way, I reckon. And, anyhow, you have heard him make worse flings at me."
She coloured, admitting and denying at the same time, the truth of his words. "You could never understand each other. You are so different."
He looked at her gravely; but even gravity could not wholly drive the gleam of humour from his eyes. "At any rate I admire Benham. I have the advantage of him there." The quickness of his wit made her smile. "But, as you say, we are different," he added after a moment. "I reckon I've turned my hand at times to jobs of which Benham would disapprove; but I'd be hanged before I'd write the greatest document ever penned in--well, in the blood of one of those squirrels out yonder in the Square!"
As he finished he turned his face toward the window, and following his gaze, she saw the sunlight sparkling like amber wine on the rich grass and the delicate green of the trees. As she looked back at him, she wondered what his past could have been--how deep, how complex, how varied was his experience of life? She was aware again of that curiously primitive attraction which she had felt the other afternoon in the shop. It was as if he appealed, not to the beliefs and sentiments with which life had obscured and muffled her nature, but to some buried self beneath the self that she and the world knew, to some ancient instinct which was as deep as the oldest forests of earth. After all, was there a hidden self, a buried forest within her soul which she had never discovered?
"But Patty has not given you her message!" she exclaimed, startled and confused by the strangeness of the sensation.
"Oh, there isn't much to tell," answered Patty, wondering if she could ever learn, even if she practised every day, to speak and move like Corinna. "It was only that you ought to stand by your friends."
"To stand by my friends," repeated Vetch; then he drew in his breath with a whistling sound. "Well, I like his impudence!" he exclaimed.
Corinna rose with a laugh. "So do I," she observed, "and he seems to possess it in abundance." Then she folded Patty in a light and fragrant embrace. "You must be the belle of the ball," she said. "I have a genius for being a chaperon."
When she had gone, and they watched her car pass the monument, the girl turned back into the hall, with her hand clinging tightly to Vetch's arm.
"Father, what do you suppose that message meant?"
"Is it obliged to mean anything?"
"Things generally do, don't they?"
Vetch smiled as he looked down at her; but his smile conveyed anxiety rather than amusement to her observant eyes. "Oh, if things are said by Gershom, they generally mean hell," he responded. "Perhaps I'll find out Thursday night; there's to be a meeting then, and it looks as if somebody might make trouble." Then he patted her shoulder. "Don't worry about Gershom, honey," he added in the way he used to speak when she fell and hurt herself as a child. "Don't worry your mind about Gershom. I'll take care of him."
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that she was not worrying about Gershom, but about the woman dying all alone in that dark room in Leigh Street. If he had only looked less disturbed she might have done so; and when she thought of it afterward, she understood that frankness would have been by far the wiser course. However, while she wondered what she ought to say, the opportunity slipped by, and the ringing of the telephone on his desk called him away from her.
Corinna, meanwhile, was rolling down the drive over the slanting shadows of the linden trees. She looked thoughtful, for she was trying to decide what it was about Vetch that made her believe in him so profoundly when she was with him and yet begin to distrust him as soon as she got far enough away to gain a perspective? Gossip probably, she reflected. When she was with him her confidence was the natural response of her own unbiassed perceptions; when she left him she passed immediately into an atmosphere that was charged with the suspicions of other people. She remembered the stories, true or false, which had been hinted and whispered before the last election. Malicious gossip that, and as unfounded no doubt as the rest. She recalled the muttered insinuations of fraudulent political stratagems, of what Benham had called the Governor's weathercock principles. In Vetch's presence, she realized that she invariably lost sight of these structural or surface blemishes, and judged him by some standard which was different from the one she had inherited with the shape of her nose and the colour of her eyes. What troubled her was not so much the riddle of Vetch's personality as the fact that there was another mental world beyond the one she had always inhabited, and that this other world was filled, like her own, with obscure moral and spiritual images.
As she approached the club at the corner she saw Benham come out of the door; and stopping the car she waited, smiling, until he joined her. While she watched him cross the pavement, she rejoiced in the thoroughbred fineness and thinness of his appearance--in his clear-cut Roman features and in the impenetrable reticence of his expression. Yes, she loved him as well as she could love any man; and that, she told herself, with a touch of cynical amusement, was just so much and no more, just enough to bring happiness, but not enough to bring pain.
"I'll take you home," she said, as he reached her, and there seemed to her something delightful and romantic in this accidental meeting.
"What luck!" The severity melted from his features while he took his place beside her. "I was thinking only this morning that I owe a sacrifice to the god of chance. May I tell the man to drop me at my rooms?"
She nodded, watching him contentedly while he spoke to the chauffeur and then turned to look at her with his level impersonal gaze. Happiness had brought the youth back to her face. Her hair swept like burnished wings under her small close hat, and the eyes that she raised to his were dark and splendid. There was about her always in moments of happiness the look of a beauty too bright to last or to grow old; and now, in this last romance of her life, she appeared to be drenched in autumn sunshine.
"One does want to make sacrifices," she answered. "That is the penalty of joy. One can scarcely believe in it before it goes."
"Well, I believe in this. You are very lovely. Where have you been?"
"To the Governor's. I wanted to speak to Patty. I feel sorry for Patty to-day. I feel sorry for almost every one," she added, with an enchanting smile, "except myself."
"And me. Surely you don't waste your pity on me? But what of Miss Vetch? Hasn't she her own particular happiness?"
"I wonder--" Then, without finishing her sentence, she left the subject of Patty because she surmised from Benham's tone that he would not be sympathetic. "I had a long talk with the Governor. John, what do you think will come of the strike?"
He answered her question with another. "What did he tell you?"
"Nothing except that the men have a right to strike if they wish to."
He laughed. "Well, that's safe enough. But don't talk of Vetch. I dislike him so heartily that I have a sneaking feeling I may be unjust to him."
It was so like him, that fine impersonal sense of fairness, that her eyes warmed with admiration. "That is splendid," she responded. "It is just the kind of thing that Vetch could never feel." Suddenly she knew that she was ashamed of having believed in Vetch when she contrasted him with John Benham. How could she have imagined for an instant that the Governor could stand a comparison like this?
He pressed her hand as the car stopped before the apartment house where he lived. "In a few hours I shall see you again," he said; and his voice, in its eagerness, reminded her of the voice of Kent Page when he had made love to her in her girlhood. Ah, she had learned wisdom since then! Just so much and no more, that was the secret of happiness. Give with the mind and the heart; but keep always one inviolable sanctity of the spirit--of the buried self beneath the self.
The streets were almost deserted; and as the car went on, Corinna thought that she had never seen the city look so fresh and charming. Through the long green vista of the trees, there was a shimmer of silver air, and wrapped in this sparkling veil, she saw the bronze statues and the ardent glow of the sunset. Everything at which she looked was steeped in a wonderful golden light; and this light seemed to come, not from the burning horizon, but from the happiness that flooded her thoughts. She saw the world again as she had seen it in her first youth, suffused with joy that was like the vivid freshness of dawn. The long white road, the arching trees, the glittering dust, the spring flowers blooming in gardens along the roadside, the very faces of the people who passed her; all these things at which she looked were illuminated by this radiance which seemed, in some strange way, to shine not without but within her heart. "It is too beautiful to last," she said to herself in a whisper. "It is youth, more beautiful even than the reality, come back again for an hour--for one little hour before it goes out for ever."
Then, because it seemed safer as well as wiser to be practical, to discourage wild dreaming, she tried to direct her thoughts to insignificant details. Yet even here that rare golden light penetrated to the innermost recesses of her mind; and each drab uninteresting fact glittered with a fresh interest and charm. "I forgot to order that cretonne for the porch," she thought disconnectedly, in an endeavour to conciliate the Fates by pretending that life was as commonplace as it had always been. "That black background with the blue larkspur is pretty--and I must have the porch furniture repainted the blue-green that they do so well in Italy. That reminds me that Patty must be the belle of the dance in her green dress. I shall see that she has no lack of partners--at least I can manage that;--if I cannot make her happy. I am sorry for the child--if only Stephen--but, no--I left the book I was reading in the shop. What was the name of it? Silly and sentimental! Why will people always write things they don't mean and know are not true about love? Yes, the black background with the blue larkspur was the best that I saw. I wonder what I did with the sample. Oh, why can't everybody be happy?"
The car turned out of the road into the avenue of elms, which led to the Georgian house of red brick, with its quaint hooded doorway. In front of the door there was a flagged walk edged with box; and after the car had gone, Corinna followed this walk to the back of the house, where rows of white and purple iris were blooming on the garden terrace. For a moment she looked on the garden as one who loved it; then turning reluctantly, she ascended the steps, and entered the door which a coloured servant held open.
"A lady's in there waiting for you," said the man, who having lost the dialect, still retained the dramatic gestures of his race. "She would wait, and she says she can't go without seeing you."
With a faintness of the heart rather than the mind, Corinna looked through the doorway, and saw the face of Alice Rokeby glimmering narcissus white in the dusk of the drawing-room. _