_ CHAPTER II. GIDEON VETCH
"Your daughter slipped on the ice," explained the young man, while the thought flashed through his mind that Patty's father was accepting it all, with ironical humour, as some queer masquerade.
It was the first time that Stephen had come within range of the Governor's personal influence, and he found himself waiting curiously for the response of his sympathies or his nerves. Once or twice he had heard Vetch speak--a storm of words which had played freely from the lightning flash of humorous invective to the rolling thunder of passionate denunciation. Such sound and fury had left Stephen the one unmoved man in the audience. He had been brought up on the sonorous rhetoric and the gorgeous purple periods of the classic orations; and the mere undraped sincerity--the raw head and bloody bones eloquence, as he put it, of Vetch's speech had been as offensive to his taste as it had been unconvincing to his intelligence. The man was a mountebank, nothing more, Stephen had decided, and his strange power was simply the reaction of mob hysteria to the stage tricks of the political clown.
Yes, the man was a mountebank--but was he nothing more than a mountebank? Like most men of his age, Stephen Culpeper was inclined to swift impressions rather than hasty judgments of people; and he was conscious, while he listened in silence to the murmuring explanations of the girl, that the immediate effect was a sensation, not an idea. At first sight, the Governor appeared merely ordinary--a tall, rugged figure, built of good bone and muscle and sound to the core, with the look of arrested energy which was doubtless an inheritance from the circus ring. There was nothing impressive about him; nothing that would cause one to turn and look back in a crowd. What struck one most was his air of extraordinary freshness and health, of sanguine vitality. His face was well-coloured and irregular in outline, with a high bulging forehead and thick sandy hair which was already gray on the temples. In the shadow his eyes did not appear remarkably fine; they seemed at the first glance to be of an indeterminate colour--was it blue or gray?--and there was nothing striking in their deep setting under the beetling sandy eyebrows. All this was true; and yet while Stephen looked into them over the Governor's outstretched hand, he told himself that they were the most human eyes he had ever seen. Afterward, when he groped through his vocabulary for a more accurate description, he could not find one. There was shrewdness in Gideon Vetch's eyes; there was friendliness; there was the blue sparkle of contagious humour--a ripple of light that was like visible laughter--but above all there was humanity. Though Stephen did not try to grasp the vivid impressions that passed through his mind, he felt intuitively that he had learned to know Gideon Vetch through his look and manner as well as he should have known another man after weeks or months of daily intercourse. Whatever the man's private life, whatever his political faults may have been, there was magic in the clasp of his hand and the cordial glow of his smile. He was always responsive; he stood always on the same level, high or low, with his companion of the moment: he was as incapable of looking up as he was of looking down; he was equally without reverence and without condescension. It was the law of his nature that he should give himself emphatically to the just and the unjust alike.
"He came home with me because I hurt my foot," Patty was saying.
Had she forgotten already, Stephen asked himself cynically, that it was not her foot but her ankle? His suspicions returned while he looked at her blooming face, and he hoped earnestly that she would not feel impelled to relate any irrelevant details of the adventure. Like Gideon Vetch on the platform she seemed incapable of withholding the smallest fragment of a fact; and the young man wondered if it were characteristic either of "the plain people," as he called them, or of circus riders as a class, that their minds should go habitually unclothed yet unashamed.
"Thank you, sir," said the Governor without effusion; and he asked: "Did you hurt yourself, Patty?" while he bent over and laid his hand on her ankle.
A note of tenderness passed into his voice as he turned to the girl; and when she answered after a minute, Stephen recognized the same tone of affectionate playfulness that she used when she spoke of him.
"Not much," she replied carelessly. Then she held out the drooping pigeon. "I found this bird. Is there anything we can do for it?"
The Governor took the bird from her, and examined it under the light with the manner of brisk confidence which directed his slightest action. The man, for all his restless activity, appeared to be without excess or exaggeration when it was a matter of practical detail. He apparently employed his whole efficient and enterprising mind on the incident of the bird.
"The wings aren't broken," he said presently, lifting his head, "but it is weak from hunger and exhaustion," and he rang the bell for Abijah. "Rice and water and a warm basket," he ordered when the old negro appeared. "You had better keep it in the house until it recovers." Then dismissing the subject, he turned back to Stephen.
"Well, I am glad to see you, Mr. Culpeper," he said. "You had a hard beginning, but, as they used to tell me when I was a kid, a hard beginning makes a good ending."
For the first time a smile softened his face, and the roving blue gleam danced blithely in his eyes. A moment before the young man had thought the Governor's face harsh and ugly. Now he remembered that the Judge had said "the man was not half bad to look at if you caught him smiling." Yes, he had a charm of his own, and that charm had swept him forward over every obstacle to the place he had reached. A single gift, indefinable yet unerring--the ability to make men believe absurdities, as John Benham had once said--and the material disadvantages of poverty and ignorance were brushed aside like trivial impediments. A strange power, and a dangerous one in unscrupulous hands, the young man reflected.
"I remember your face," pursued the Governor, while his smile faded--was brevity, after all, the secret of its magic? "You were at one of my speeches last autumn, and you sat in the front row, I think. I recall you because you were the only person in the audience who looked bored."
"I was." Frankness called for frankness. "I am not keen about speeches."
"Not even when Benham speaks?" The voice was gay, but through it all there rang the unmistakable tone of authority, of conscious power. There was one person, Stephen inferred, who had never from the beginning disparaged or ridiculed Gideon Vetch, and that person was Gideon Vetch himself. John Benham had once said that the man was a mere posturer--but John Benham was wrong.
"Oh, well, you see, Benham is different," replied the young man as delicately as he could. "He is apt to say only what I think, you know."
So far there had been no breach of good taste in the Governor's manner, no warning reminder of an origin that was certainly obscure and presumably low, no stale, dust-laden odours of the circus ring. He had looked and spoken as any man of Stephen's acquaintance might have done, facetiously, it is true, but without ostentation or vulgarity. When the break came, therefore, it was the more shocking to the younger man because he had been so imperfectly prepared for it.
"And because he is different, of course you think he'd make a better Governor than I shall," said Gideon Vetch abruptly. "That is the way with you fellows who have ossified in the old political parties. You never see a change in time to make ready for it. You wait until it knocks you in the head, and then you wake up and grumble. Now, I've been on the way for the last thirty years or so, but you never once so much as got wind of me. You think I've just happened because of too much electricity in the air, like a thunderbolt or something; but you haven't even looked back to find out whether you are right or wrong. Talk about public spirit! Why, there isn't an ounce of live public spirit left among you, in spite of all the moonshine your man Benham talks about the healing virtues of tradition and the sacred taboo of your political Pharisees. There wasn't one of you that didn't hate like the devil to see me Governor of Virginia--and yet how many of you took the trouble to find out what I am made of, or to understand what I mean? Did you even take the trouble to go to the polls and vote against me?"
Though Stephen flushed scarlet, he held his ground bravely. It was true that he had not voted--he hated the whole sordid business of politics--but then, who had ever suspected for a minute that Gideon Vetch would be elected? His brief liking for the man had changed suddenly to exasperation. It seemed incredible to him that any Governor of Virginia should display so open a disregard of the ordinary rules of courtesy and hospitality. To drag in their political differences at such a time, when he had come beneath the other's roof merely to render him an unavoidable service! To stoop to the pettifogging sophistry of the agitator simply because his opponent had reluctantly yielded him an opportunity!
"Well, I heard you speak, but that didn't change me!" he retorted with a smile.
The Governor laughed, and the sincerity of his amusement was evident even to Stephen. "Could anything short of a blasting operation change you traditional Virginians?" he inquired.
His face was turned to the fire, and the young man felt while he watched him that a piercing light was shed on his character. It was as if Stephen saw his opponent from an entirely fresh point of view, as if he beheld him for the first time with the sharp clearness which the flash of his anger produced. The very absence of all sense of dignity impressed him suddenly as the most tremendous dignity a human being could attain--the unconscious dignity of natural forces--of storms and fire and war and pestilence. Because the man never thought of how he appeared, he appeared always impregnable.
"I shall not argue," said the young man, with a smile which he endeavoured to make easy and natural. "The time for argument is over. You played trumps."
Vetch laughed. "And it wasn't my last card," he answered bluntly.
"The game isn't finished." Though Stephen's voice was light it held a quiver of irritation. "He laughs best who laughs last." The other had started the row, and, by Jove, he would give him as much as he wanted! He recalled suddenly the charges that there was more than the customary political log-rolling--that there were mysterious "discreditable dealings" in the Governor's election to office.
But it appeared in a minute that Gideon Vetch was adequate to any demand which the occasion might develop. Already Stephen was beginning to regard him less as a man than as an energetic idea, as activity incarnate.
"If you mean to imply that the laugh may be on me at the last," he returned, while the points of blue light seemed to pierce Stephen like arrows--no, like gimlets, "well, you're wrong about one part of it--for if that ever happens, I'll laugh with you because of the sheer rotten irony."
For the first time the other noticed how the Governor was dressed--in a suit of some heavy brown stuff which looked as if it had been sprinkled and needed pressing. He wore a green tie and a striped shirt of the conspicuous kind that Stephen hated. Though the younger man was keenly critical of clothes, and perseveringly informed himself regarding the smallest details of fashion, he acknowledged now that he had at last met a man who appeared to wear his errors of dress as naturally as he wore his errors of opinion. The fuzzy brown stuff, the green tie with red spots, the striped shirt--was it blue or purple?--all became as much a part of Gideon Vetch as the storm-ruffled plumage was part of an eagle. If the misguided man had attired himself in a toga, he would have carried the Mantle without dignity perhaps, but certainly with picturesqueness.
"I'll hold you to your promise--or threat," said Stephen lightly, as he turned from the Governor to his daughter. Why, in thunder, he asked himself, had he stayed so long? What was there about the fellow that held one in spite of oneself? "I hope you will be all right again in a few days," he said formally as his eyes met Patty's upraised glance. In the warm room all the glamour of the twilight--and of that hidden country within his mind--had faded from her. She looked fresh and blooming and merely commonplace, he thought. A brief half hour ago he had felt that he was in danger of losing his head; now his rational part was in the ascendant, and his future appeared pleasantly tranquil. Then the girl smiled that faint inscrutable smile of hers, and the disturbing green rays shot from her eyes. A thrill of interest stirred his pulses while something held him there against his will and his better judgment, as if he were caught fast in the steel spring of a trap.
"Oh, that's nothing," replied Patty, with her air of mockery. "If there were no worse things than that!"
He did not hold out his hand, though there was a flutter toward him of her fingers--pretty fingers they were for a girl with no blood that one could mention in public. There was a faint hope in his mind that he might still vanish unthanked and undetained. The one quality in father and daughter which had arrested his favourable attention--the quality of "a good sport"--would probably aid in his escape.
"Drop in some evening, and we'll have a talk," said the Governor in his slightly theatrical but extremely confident manner, "there are things I'd like to say to you. You are a lawyer, if I remember, in Judge Horatio Page's firm, and you were in the war from the beginning."
Stephen smiled. "Not quite." They were at the front door, and all hope of escaping into the desirable obscurity from which he had sprung fled from his mind.
"He is a great old boy, the Judge," resumed Gideon Vetch blandly, "I had a talk with him one day before the elections, when you other fellows were sitting back like a lot of lunatics and waiting for the Democratic primaries to put things over. He is the only one in the whole bunch of you who stopped shouting long enough to hear what I had to say. I like him, sir, and if there is one thing you will never find me doing it is liking the wrong man. I may not know Greek, but I can read men."
The front door was open, and the blast of cold air dispersed all the foolish fancies that had gathered in Stephen's brain. Beyond the fountain and the gate he could see the broad road through the Square and the dark majestic figure of Washington on horseback. The electric signs were blazing on the roofs of the shops and hotels which had driven the original dwelling houses out of the neighbouring streets.
Turning as he was descending the steps, the young man looked into the Governor's face. "Are you sure that you read Julius Gershom correctly?" he inquired.
For a minute--it could not have been longer--the Governor did not reply. Was he surprised for once into open discomfiture, or was his nimble wit engaged in framing a plausible answer? Within the house, where so much was disappointing and incongruous, Stephen had not felt the lack of harmony between Gideon Vetch and his surroundings; but against the fine proportions and the serene stateliness of the exterior, the Governor's figure appeared aggressively modern.
"Julius Gershom!" repeated Vetch. "Well, yes, I think I know my Julius. May I ask if you do?" The ironical humour which flashed like a sharp light over his countenance played with the idea.
"Not by choice." Stephen looked back laughing. There was one thing to be said in the Governor's favour--he invited honesty and he knew how to receive it. "But I read of him in the newspapers when I cannot avoid it. He does some dirty work, doesn't he?"
Again the Governor paused before replying. There was a curious gravity about his consideration of Gershom in spite of the satirical tone of his responses. Was it possible that he was the one man in town who did not treat the fellow as a ridiculous farce?
"If by dirty work you mean the clearing away of obstacles--well, somebody has to do it, hasn't he?" asked Gideon Vetch. "If you want a clean street to walk on, you must hire somebody to shovel away the slush. It is true that we put Gershom to shovelling slush--and you complain of his methods! Well, I admit that he may have been a trifle too zealous about it; he may have spattered things a bit more than was necessary, but after all, he got some of the mud out of the way, didn't he? There are people," he added, "who believe that the wind he raised swept me into office."
"I object to his methods," insisted Stephen, "because they seem to me dishonest."
"Perhaps." The blue eyes--how could he have thought them gray?--had grown quizzical. "But he wasn't moving in the best company, you know. He who sups with the Devil must fish with a long spoon."
"You mean that you defend that sort of thing--that you openly stand for it?"
"I stand for nothing, sir," replied Gideon Vetch sharply, "except justice. I stand for a square deal all round, and I stand against the exploitation or oppression of any class. This is what I stand for, and I have stood for it ever since I was a small, gray, scared rabbit of a creature dodging under hedgerows."
It was the bombastic sophistry again, Stephen told himself, but he met it without subterfuge or evasion. "And you believe that such people as Gershom can serve the cause of justice through dishonest means?" he demanded.
"I'll answer that some day; but it's a long answer, and I can't speak it out here in the cold," responded the Governor, while his blustering manner grew sober. "Gershom is a politician, you see, and I am not. You may laugh, but it is the Gospel truth. I am a reformer, and all I care about is pushing on the idea. I use any tools that I find; and one of the greatest of reformers has said that he was sometimes obliged to use bad ones. If I find good ones, so much the better; if bad--well, it is all in the day's job. But the cause is what matters--the thing you are making, not the implements with which it is made. You dislike my methods of work, but you must admit that by the only test that counts, the test of achievement, they have proved to be sound. I have got somewhere; not all the way; but still somewhere. Without advertisement, without patronage, without a cent I could call my own, I put my wares on the market. I became Governor of Virginia in spite of everything you did, or did not do, to prevent it." There was a strange effectiveness in the simplicity of the man's speech. It was natural; it was racy; it was like nothing that Stephen had ever heard before. He wondered if it could be traced back to the phraseology of the circus? "Of course you think I am an extremist," concluded Gideon Vetch abruptly, "but before you are as old as I am you will have learned that the only way to get half a loaf is to ask for a whole one. Come again, and I'll talk to you."
"Yes, I'll come again," Stephen answered, and he knew that he should. Whether he willed it or not he would be drawn back by the Governor's irresistible influence. The man had aroused in him an intense, a devouring curiosity. He wanted to know his thoughts and his life, the mystery of his birth, of his upbringing, of his privations and denials. Above all he wanted to know why he had succeeded, what peculiar gift had brought him out of obscurity, and had given him the ability to use men and circumstances as if they were tools in his hands.
When the young man ran down the steps there was a pleasant excitement tingling in his veins, as if he were feeling the glow of forbidden wine. Turning beside the fountain, he glanced back as the Governor was closing the door, and in his vision of the lighted interior he saw Patty Vetch darting airily across the hall. So it was nothing more than a hoax! She hadn't hurt herself in the least. She had merely made a laughing-stock of him for the amusement doubtless of her obscure acquaintances! For an instant anger held him motionless; then turning quickly he walked rapidly past the fountain to the open gate.
The snow was dimly lighted on the long slope to the library; and straight ahead, in the circle beneath the statue of Washington, the bronze silhouette of a great Virginian stood sharply cut against the luminous haze of the street. From the chimney-stack of a factory near the river a wreath of gray smoke was flung over the tree-tops, where it broke and drifted in feathery garlands. Across the road a group of three trees was delicately etched, with each separate branch and twig, on the slate-coloured evening sky.
He had passed through the gate when a voice speaking suddenly at his side caused him to start and stop short in his walk. A moment before he had fancied himself alone; he had heard no footsteps; and the place from where the words came was a mere vague blur in the shadows. There was something uncanny in the muffled approach, and the sensation it produced on his nerves was like the shock he used to feel as a child when his hand was unexpectedly touched in the dark.
"I beg your pardon," he said to the vague shape at the foot of a tree. "Did you speak to me?"
The shadows divided, and what seemed to him the edge of darkness moved forward into the dimly lighted space at his side. He saw now that it was the figure of a woman in a long black cloak, with the dilapidated remains of a mourning veil hanging from her small bonnet. As she came toward him he was stirred first by an impulse of pity and immediately afterward by a violent repulsion. In her whole figure there were the tragic signs of poverty and desperation; but it was the horror of her eyes, he told himself, that he should never forget. They were eyes that would haunt his sleep that night like the face of the drowned man in the nursery rhyme.
"Will you tell me," asked the woman hurriedly, "who lives in this house?"
It was a queer question, he thought, for any one to ask in the Square; but she was probably a stranger.
"This is the Governor's house," he answered courteously. "I suppose you are a stranger in town."
"I got here a few hours ago, and I came out for a breath of air. I was four days and nights on the way."
To this he made no reply, and he was about to pass on again, when her voice arrested him.
"You wouldn't mind telling me, would you, the Governor's name?"
"Not in the least. His name is Gideon Vetch."
"Gideon Vetch?" She repeated the name slowly, as if she were impressing it on her memory. "That's a queer name for a Governor. Was he born in this town?"
"I think not."
"And who lives with him? I saw a girl come out awhile ago. Is she his daughter, perhaps--or his wife--though she looked young for that."
"It must have been his daughter. His wife is not living."
"Is she his only child? Or has he others?" There was a quiver of suspense in her voice, and turning he looked at her more closely. Was it possible that she had known Gideon Vetch in his obscure past?
"She is his only child," he replied.
"Well, that's nice for her. Is she pretty?" An odd question if it had been put by a man; but he had been trained to accept the fact that women are different.
"Yes, you would call her pretty." As he spoke the words there flashed through his mind the picture of Patty Vetch as he had seen her that afternoon, in her red cape and her small hat with the red wings, against the snowy hill under the overhanging bough of the sycamore. Was she really pretty, or was it only the witchery of her surroundings? Now that he was out of her presence the attraction had faded. He was still smarting from the memory of that dancing figure.
"Well, it's a fine house," said the woman, "and it looks large for just two people. I thank you for telling me."
The pathos of her words appealed to the generous chivalry of his nature. He felt sorry for her and wondered if he might offer her money.
"I hope you found lodgings," he said.
"Yes, I've found a room near here--on Governor Street, I think they call it."
"And you are not in want? You do not need any help?"
She shook her head while the rusty mourning veil shrouded her features. "Not yet," she answered. "I'm not a beggar yet." Though her tone was not well-bred, he realized that she was neither as uneducated nor as degraded as he had at first believed.
"I am glad of that," he responded; and then lifting his hat again, he hurried quickly away from her up the road beneath the few old linden trees that were left of an avenue. Glancing back as he reached the Capitol building, he saw her black figure moving cautiously over the snow toward one of the gates of the Square.
"That was a nightmare," he thought, "and now for the pleasant dream. I'll go to the old print shop and see my Cousin Corinna." _