One Man in His Time Part 15

"I am sure Father was right. He is always right," she said loyally.

"Well, he may have been. I'm not denying that; but it's an old story now, and I wouldn't bring it up again, if I were you. He has enough things to carry without that."

She hesitated a moment before replying. "Yes, I suppose it's better not to speak of it. He has too many worries."

"I knew you'd see it that way; you're a girl of sense. And if Mrs. Green should ever come here, must I tell her that you would like to see her?"

"Does she think of coming here? California is so far away."

"Well, people do come, don't they? And I know she'd like to see you. She was very fond of your mother. I used to know both of 'em in the old days when I was a boy."

"Of course I'd like to see her if she could tell me about my mother. I want to ask questions about her--only it makes Father so unhappy when I bring up the past."

"It would, I reckon. Things like that are better forgotten." Then, dismissing the subject abruptly, he remarked in the old tone of facetious familiarity, "I never saw you looking better. What have you done to yourself? You are always imitating some new person every time I see you."

"I am not!" Her temper flashed out. "I never imitate anybody." Yet, even as she pa.s.sionately denied the charge, she knew that it was true. For a week, ever since her first visit to the old print shop, she had tried to copy Corinna's voice, the carriage of her head, her smile, her gestures.

"Well, you needn't," he a.s.sured her with admiring pleasantry. "As far as looks go--and that's a long way--I haven't seen any one that was better than you!"

CHAPTER IX

SEPTEMBER ROSES

The afternoon suns.h.i.+ne streamed through the dull gold curtains into the old print shop where Corinna sat in her tapestry-covered chair between the tea-table and the log fire. She was alone for the moment; and lying back in the warmth and fragrance of the room, she let her gaze rest lovingly on one of the English mezzotints over which a stray sunbeam quivered. The flames made a pleasant whispering sound over the cedar logs; her favourite wide-open creamy roses with golden hearts scented the air; and the delicate China tea in her cup was drawn to perfection.

As she lay back in the big chair but one thing disturbed her serenity--and that one thing was within. She had everything that she wanted, and for the hour, at least, she was tired of it all. The mood was transient, she knew. It would pa.s.s because it was alien to the clear bracing air of her mind; but while it lasted she told herself that the present had palled on her because she had looked beneath the vivid surface of illusion to the bare structure of life. Men had ceased to interest her because she knew them too well. She knew by heart the very machinery of their existence, the secret mental springs which moved them so mechanically; and she felt to-day that if they had been watches, she could have taken them apart and put them together again without suspending for a minute the monotonous regularity of their works. Even Gideon Vetch, who might have held a surprise for her, had differed from the rest in one thing only: he had not seen that she was beautiful! And it wasn't that she was breaking. To-day because of her mood of depression, she appeared drooping and faded; but that night, a week ago, in her velvet gown and her pearls, she had looked as handsome as ever.

The truth was simply that Vetch had glanced at her without seeing her, as he might have glanced at the gilded sheaves of wheat on a picture frame. He had been so profoundly absorbed in his own ideas that she had been nothing more individual than one of an audience. If he were to meet her in the street he would probably not recognize her. And this was a man who had never before seen a woman whose beauty had pa.s.sed into history, a man who had risen to his place through what the Judge had described with charitable euphemism, as "unusual methods." "The odd part about Vetch," the Judge had added meditatively on the drive home, "is that he doesn't attempt to disguise the kind of thing that we of the old school would call--well, to say the least--extraordinary. He is as outspoken as Mirabeau. I can't make it out. It may be, of course, that he has a better reading of human nature than we have, and that he knows such gestures catch the eye, like long hair or a red necktie. It is very much as if he said--'Yes, I'll steal if I'm driven to it, but--confound it!--I won't lie!'"

After all, the sting to her vanity had been too slight to leave an impression. There must be another cause for the shadow that had fallen over her spirits. Even a reigning beauty of thirty years could scarcely expect to be invincible; and she had known too much homage in the past to resent what was obviously a lack of discrimination. Her disappointment went deeper than this, for it had its source in the stories she had heard of Vetch that sounded original and dramatic. She had imagined a personality that was striking, spectacular, or at least interesting; and the actual Gideon Vetch had seemed to her merely unimpressive and ordinary. Beside John Benham (as the thought of Benham returned to her, her spirit rose on wings out of the shadow), beside John Benham, in the drawing-room after dinner, Vetch had appeared at a disadvantage that was almost ridiculous; and, as Stephen Culpeper had hastened to point out, this was merely a striking ill.u.s.tration of the d.a.m.ning contrast between the Governor's chequered political career and Benham's stainless record of service.

A smile curved her lips as she gazed at the quivering sunbeams. Was that deep instinct for perfection, the romantic vision of things as they ought to be, awaking again? Did the starry flower bloom not in the dream, but in reality? The pa.s.sion to create beauty, to bring happiness, which had been extinguished for years, burned afresh in her heart. Yes, as long as there was beauty, as long as there was n.o.bility of spirit, she could fight on as one who believed in the future.

A shadow darkened the window, and a moment afterward there was a fall of the old silver knocker on her door. She thought at first--the shadow had seemed so young--that it was Stephen; but when she opened the door, she saw, with a lovely flush, that it was John Benham.

"You expected me?" he asked, raising her hand to his lips.

"Yes, I knew that you would come," she answered, and the flush died away slowly as she turned back to the fire. In the moment of recognition all the despondency had vanished so utterly that it had not left even a memory. He had brought not only peace, but youth and happiness back to her eyes.

He came in as impressively as he presented himself to an audience; and with the glow of pleasure still in her heart, she found her keen and observant mind watching him almost as if he were a stranger. This had been her misfortune always, the ardent heart joined to the critical judgment, the spectator chained eternally to the protagonist. She received a swift impression that he had prepared his words and even his gestures, the kiss on her fingers. Yet, in spite of this suggestion of the actor, or because of it, he possessed, she felt, great distinction.

The straight backward sweep of his hair; the sharp clearness of his profile; the steady serenity of his gray eyes; the ease and suppleness and indolent strength of his tall thin figure--all these physical details expressed the reserves and inhibitions of generations. The only flaw that she could detect was that dryness of soul that she had noticed before, as of soil that has been too heavily drained. She knew that he excelled in all the virtues that are monumental and public, that he was an honourable opponent, a scrupulous defender of established rules and precedents. He would always reach the goal, but his race would never carry him beyond the end of the course; he would always fulfil the law, but he would never give more than the exact measure; he would always fight for the risen Christ, but he would never have followed the humble bearer of the Cross. His strength and weakness were the kind which had profoundly influenced her life. He represented in her world the conservative principle, the accepted standard, the acknowledged authority, custom, stability, reason, and moderation.

As he sat down in front of the fire, he looked at her with a gentle possessive gaze.

"Of course you have never sold a print," he remarked in a laughing tone, and she responded as flippantly.

"Of course!"

"Why didn't you call it a collection?"

"Because people wouldn't come."

"Then why didn't you keep them at home where you have so much that is fine?"

She laughed. "Because people couldn't come. I mean the people I don't know. I have a fancy for the people I have never met."

"On the principle that the unknown is the desirable."

She nodded. "And that the desirable is the unattainable."

His gray eyes were warmed by a fugitive glow. "I shouldn't have put it that way in your case. You appear to have everything."

"Do I? Well, that twists the sentence backward. Shall we say that the attainable is the undesirable?"

"Surely not. Can you have ceased already to desire these lovely things?

Could that piece of tapestry lose its charm for you, or that Spanish desk, or those English prints, or the old morocco of that binding? Do you feel that the colours in that brocade at your back could ever become meaningless?"

"I am not sure. Wouldn't it be possible to look at it while you were seeing something else, something so drab that it would take the colour out of all beauty?" She was looking at him over the tea-table, and while she asked the question she raised a lump of sugar in the quaint old sugar tongs she had brought home from Florence.

He shook his head. "I am denied sugar. Has it ever occurred to you that middle age ought to be called the age of denial?" Then his tone changed.

"But I wonder if you begin to realize how fortunate you are? You have the collector's instinct and the means to gratify it. To discover with you is to possess--don't you understand the blessing of that? You love beauty as a favoured daughter, not as one of the disinherited who can only peer through the windows of her palace."

"But you also--you love beauty as I do."

"But I can't own it--not as you do." He was speaking frankly. "I haven't the means. At least what I have I have made myself, and therefore I guard it more carefully. It is only those who have once been poor who are really under the curse of money, for that curse is the inability to understand that money is less valuable than anything else on earth that you happen to need or desire. Now to me the most terrible thing on earth is not to be without beauty, but to be without money--"

She smiled. "You are talking like Gideon Vetch."

He caught at the name quickly. "Like Gideon Vetch? You mean that I sound ign.o.ble?"

The laughter in his eyes made him look almost boyish, and she felt that she had come suddenly close to him. After all he was very attractive.

"Is he ign.o.ble?" she asked. "I have seen him only once, and that was at the dinner a week ago."

He looked at her intently. "I should like to know what you think."

"I hardly know--but--well, I must confess that I was disappointed."

"You expected something better?"

She hesitated over her answer. "I expected something different. I suppose I looked for the dash of purple--or at least of red--in his appearance."

"And he seemed ordinary?"

"In a way--yes. His features are not striking, and yet when he talks to you and gets interested in his own ideas, he sheds a kind of warmth that is like magnetism. I couldn't a.n.a.lyse it, but it is there."