One Man in His Time Part 10

"Have you any particular reason for wis.h.i.+ng to see the Governor?"

"Oh, no, I am a stranger here." Her accents were ordinary, yet there was a note of the unusual in her appearance and manner. Whatever she was, she was not commonplace.

"But you were waiting to see him?" he said.

Her gaze left his face and travelled uncertainly over the mansion. "Oh, yes, I thought I might see him. I've never seen a Governor."

"You do not wish to speak to him?"

"No; why should I wish to speak to him? I'm a stranger, that's all. I like to see whatever is going on. Was that his daughter who went out just now?"

"Yes, that was his daughter."

"Then she is pretty--almost as pretty as--Thank you, sir. I will go along now. I'm staying not far from here, and I come out when I get the chance to watch the squirrels in the Square."

The explanation sounded simple enough; yet he suspected, though he could not have defined his reason, that she was not telling the truth. Again he asked himself if she could have known Gideon Vetch in the past? It was possible; it was not even improbable. Once, even ten or fifteen years ago, she may have been handsome in her coa.r.s.e and showy style; and he had no proof, except Patty, that the Governor had ever possessed a fastidious taste.

The woman had turned with furtive haste in the direction of the outer gate; and when Stephen started on again toward the library, he crossed a man who was rapidly ascending the brick walk from the fountain at the foot of the hill. By his jaunty stride and his air of excessive joviality--the mark of the successful local politician--Stephen recognized Julius Gershom, the campaign-maker, as people called him, who had stood behind Gideon Vetch from the beginning of his career. "What an unconscionable bounder the fellow is," thought Stephen as he pa.s.sed him.

What an abundance of self-a.s.sertiveness he had contrived to express in his thin spruce figure, his tightly curling black hair, which grew too low on his forehead, and his short black moustache with pointed ends which curved up like polished metal from his full red lips.

"I suppose he is on his way to the Governor," mused the young man idly.

"How on earth does Vetch stand him?"

But to his surprise, when he glanced back again, he saw that Gershom had pa.s.sed the mansion, and was hurrying down the walk which the strange woman had followed a moment before. Stephen could still see her figure approaching a distant gate; and he observed presently that Gershom was not far behind her, and that he appeared to be speaking her name. She started and turned quickly with a movement of alarm; and then, as Gershom joined her, she went on again in the direction she had first taken. A few minutes later their rapidly moving figures left the Square and pa.s.sed down the street beyond the high iron fence.

"I wonder what it means?" thought Stephen indifferently. "I wonder what the deuce Gershom has got up his sleeve?"

By the time he reached his office the wonder had vanished; but it returned to him on his way home that afternoon when he dropped into the old print shop for a word with Corinna.

"I pa.s.sed that fellow Gershom in the Square to-day," he said. "Do you know him by sight?"

She shook her head. "What is he like? Patty tells me that he has become a nuisance."

"Ah, then you have seen Patty?"

A smile turned her eyes to the colour of November leaves. "She was here for an hour this morning. I have great hopes of her. I think she is going to supply me with an interest in life."

"Then she still amuses you?"

"Amuses me? My dear, she enchants me. She stands for the suppressed audacities of my past."

He looked at her thoughtfully. "I wonder how much of her is real?"

"Probably half. She is real, I think, in her courage, but not in her conventions."

"Well, I confess that she puzzles me. I can't see just what she means."

"I doubt if she means anything. She is a vital spirit; she chafes at chains; and she is smarting from a sense of inferiority. There is a thirst for power in her little body that may make her either an actress or a politician."

"Now, it seems to me that if she has any sense it is one of superiority.

She treated me like a brick under her feet."

For a minute Corinna was silent. The smile on her lips had grown tenderly humorous; and there was a softness in her eyes which made him sorry that he had not known her when he was a child. "Do you know what she told me to-day?" she said. "She studies a page of the dictionary every morning, and she tries to remember and practise all day the new words that she learns. She is now in the letter M."

A peal of merriment interrupted her. "That explains it!" exclaimed Stephen with unaffected delight, "maneuver--misinformation--mult.i.tude--"

"So she has practised on you too?"

"Oh, they all practise on me," he retorted. "It is what I was made for."

"Well, as long as it is only words, you are safe, I suppose."

He denied this with a gesture. "It is everything you can possibly practise with--from puddings to pigeons."

"My poor dear, so you have been eating Margaret's puddings. Weren't they good ones?"

"Oh, perfection! But I wasn't thinking of Margaret."

"I know you weren't. For your mother's sake I wish that you were."

His face looked suddenly tired. "Margaret is perfection, I know; but I feel sometimes that only perfect people can endure perfection."

"Yes, I know." Her smile had faded now. "I admire Margaret tremendously, but I feel closer to Patty."

"Perhaps. I am not sure. Somehow I have been sure of nothing since I came out of the trenches--least of all of myself. I am trying to find out now what I am in reality."

As he rose to go she held out her hand. "I think,--I am not certain, but I think," she responded gaily, "that Patty's dictionary may give you the definition."

CHAPTER VII

CORINNA GOES TO WAR

"Yes, I've had a mean life," thought Corinna, while she stood before her mirror carefully placing a patch on her cheek. In her narrow gown of black velvet, with the silver heels of her slippers s.h.i.+ning beneath the transparent draperies, she had more than ever the look of festival, of October splendour. If her beauty had lost in roundness and softness, it had gained immeasurably in authority, in that air of having been a part of great events, of historic moments which clung to her like a legend.

Romance and mystery were in her smile; and yet what had life held for her, she mused now, except the frustrated hope, the blighted fruit, the painted lily? Her beauty had brought her nothing that was not tawdry, nothing that was not a gaudy imitation of happiness. She had given herself for what? For the shadow of reality, for the tinted shreds of a damaged illusion. The past, in spite of her many triumphs, had been worse than tragic; it had been comic--since it had left her beggared.

Looking back upon it now she saw that it had lacked even the mournful dignity of a broken heart.

"I have had a mean life; but it isn't over yet, and I may make something better of the rest of it," she thought. "At least I have fighting blood in my veins, and I will never give up. After all, even if my life has been mean, I haven't been--and that is what really counts in the end.

If I haven't been happy, I have tried to be gallant--and it takes courage to be gallant with an aching heart--"

As she fastened the long string of pearls--one of Kent Page's early gifts--she drew back from the mirror, with the light of philosophy, if not of happiness, overflowing her eyes. With her grace and her radiance she stood for the flower of the Virginian aristocratic tradition; with her sincerity and her fearlessness she embodied the American democratic ideal. Her forefathers had brought representative government to the New World. They had sat in the first General a.s.sembly ever summoned in America; and through the generations they had fought always on the side of liberty tempered by discipline, of democracy exalted by patriotism.

They had stood from the beginning for dignity, for manners, for the essence of social culture which places art at the service of life.

Always they had sought to preserve the finer lessons of the past; always they had struggled against the tyranny of mediocrity, the increasing cult of the second best. From this source, from the inherited instinct for selection, for elimination, from the inbred tendency toward order and suavity of living, Corinna had derived her clear-eyed acceptance of life, her n.o.bility of mind, her loveliness and grace of body. She had been prepared and nurtured for beauty, only to bloom in an age when beauty had been bartered for usefulness. Would the delicate discriminations in which she had been trained, the lights and shadows of her soul, become submerged in the modern effort to reduce all distinctions to a level, all diversities to an average?