One Man in His Time Part 27

Though Corinna did not see it, a glow that was like the flush of dawn broke over the girl's sensitive face. "He is so superior," she began as if she were repeating a phrase she had learned to speak; then in a low voice she added impulsively, "Oh, very much!"

"He is a dear boy," returned Corinna, really troubled. "Do you see him often?" Now, since she felt she had won the girl's confidence, her purpose appeared more difficult than ever.

"Very often," replied Patty in a thrilling tone. "He comes every day."

The luminous candour, the fearless sincerity of Gideon Vetch, seemed to envelop her as she answered.

"Do you think he cares for you, dear?" asked Corinna softly.

"Oh, yes." The response was unhesitating. "I know it."

How naive, how touchingly ingenuous, the girl was in spite of her experience of life and of the uglier side of politicians. No girl in Corinna's circle would ever have appeared so confiding, so innocent, so completely beneath the spell of a sentimental illusion. The girls that Corinna knew might be unguarded about everything else on earth; but even the most artless one of them, even Margaret Blair, would have learned by instinct to guard the secret of her emotions.

"Has he asked you to marry him?" Corinna's voice wavered over the question, which seemed to her cruel; but Patty met it with transparent simplicity.

"Not yet," she answered, lifting her s.h.i.+ning eyes to the sky, "but he will. How can he help it when he cares for me so much?"

"If he hasn't yet, my dear"--while the words dropped from her reluctant lips, Corinna felt as if she were inflicting a physical stab,--"how can you tell that he cares so much for you?"

"I wasn't sure until yesterday," replied Patty, with beaming lucidity, "but I knew yesterday because--because he showed it so plainly."

With a lovely protective movement the older woman put her arm about the girl's shoulders. "You may be right--but, oh, don't trust too much, Patty," she pleaded, with the wisdom that the years bring and take away.

"Life is so uncertain--fine impulses--even love--yes, love most of all--is so uncertain--"

"Of course you feel that way," responded the girl, sympathetic but incredulous. "How could you help it?"

After this what could Corinna answer? She knew Stephen, she told herself, and she knew that she could trust him. She believed that lie was capable of generous impulses; but she doubted if an impulse, however generous, could sweep away the inherited sentiments which encrusted his outlook on life. In spite of his youth, he was in reality so old. He was as old as that indestructible ent.i.ty, the spirit of race--as that impalpable strain which had existed in every Culpeper, and in all the Culpepers together, from the beginning. It was not, she realized plainly, such an anachronism as a survival of the aristocratic tradition. Deeper than this, it had its roots not in belief but in instinct--in the bone and fibre of Stephen's character. It was a part of that motive power which impelled him in the direction of the beaten road, of the established custom, of things as they have always been in the past.

Her kind heart was troubled; yet before the happiness in the girl's face what could she say except that she hoped Stephen was as fine as Patty believed him to be? "You may be right. I hope so with all my heart; but, oh, my dear, try not to care too much. It never does any good to care too much." She stooped and kissed the girl's cheek. "There, my car is at the door, and I must hurry back to the shop. I'll do anything in the world that I can for you, Patty, anything in the world."

As the car rolled through the gate and down the wide drive to the Was.h.i.+ngton monument, Patty stood gazing after it, with a burning moisture in her eyes and a lump in her throat. Terror had seized her in an instant, terror of unhappiness, of missing the one thing in life on which she had pa.s.sionately set her heart. What had Mrs. Page meant by her questions? Had she intended them as a warning? And why should she have thought it necessary to warn her against caring too much for Stephen?

The girl had started to enter the house when, remembering suddenly that Gershom was still there, she turned hurriedly away from the door, and walked back down the brick pavement to the fountain beyond the library.

The squirrels still scampered over the walk; the thirsty sparrows were still drinking; the few loungers on the benches still stared at her with dull and incurious eyes. Not a cloud stained the intense blue of the sky; and over the bright gra.s.s on the hillside the suns.h.i.+ne quivered like an immense swarm of bees.

As she approached the fountain where she had first met Stephen, it seemed to her that a romantic light, a visionary enchantment, fell over this one spot of ground, and divided it by some magic circle from every other place in the world. The crude iron railing, the bare gravel, the ugly spouting fountain which was stripped of every leaf or blade of gra.s.s--these things appeared to her through an indescribable glamour, as if they stood there as the visible gateway to some invisible garden of dreams. Whenever she looked at this ordinary spot of earth a breathless realization of the wonder and delight of life rushed over her. She knew nothing of the mental processes by which these external objects were a.s.sociated with the deepest emotions of the heart. Only when she visited this place that wave of happiness swept over her; and she lived again as vividly as she lived in the moments when Stephen was with her and she was looking into his eyes.

His voice called her while she stood there; and turning quickly, she saw that he was coming toward her down the walk. Immediately the loungers on the benches vanished by magic; the murmur of the fountain became like the music of harps; and the suns.h.i.+ne on the gra.s.sy hill was alive with the quiver of wings. As she went toward him she was aware of the blue sky, of the golden green of the trees, of the happy sounds of the birds, and over all, as if it were outside of herself, of the rapturous beating of her own heart.

"I was looking for you," he said when he reached her.

"And you found me at last." Her eyes were like wells of joy.

"I'd never have given up until I found you." The words were trivial; but it was the things he said without words that really mattered. Already they had established a communion that was independent of speech. He had never told her that he loved her; yet she saw it in every glance of his eyes and heard it in every tone of his voice.

While they walked slowly up the hill she wondered trustingly why, when he had told her so plainly in every other way that he loved her, he should never have put it into words. There could not be any doubt of it; perhaps this was the reason he hesitated. The present was so perfect that it was like the most exquisite hour of a spring afternoon. One longed to hold it back even though one knew that it led to something more lovely still.

"Are you happy?" she asked, and wondered if he would kiss her again when they parted as he had kissed her yesterday in the dusk of the hall?

"Yes, and no." He drew nearer to her. "I am happy now like this--here with you--but at other times I am troubled. I can't see my way clearly."

"But why should you? Why should any one be troubled when it is so easy to be happy?"

"Easy?" He laughed. "If life were only as simple as that!"

"It is if one knows what one wants."

"Well, one may know what one wants, and yet not know if one is wise in wanting it."

"Oh, wise!" She shook her head with an impatient movement. "Isn't the only wisdom to be happy and kind?"

He looked at her thoughtfully, while a frown drew his straight dark eyebrows together. "If you wanted a thing with all your heart, and yet were not sure--"

Her impatience answered him. "I couldn't want it with all my heart without being sure."

"Sure I mean that it is best--best for every one--not just for oneself--"

Her laugh was like a song. "Do you suppose there has ever been anything since the world began that was best for every one? If I knew what I wanted I shouldn't ask anything more. I would spread my wings and fly to it."

He smiled. "You are so much like your father at times--even in the things that you say. Yes, I suppose you would fly to it because you have been trained that way--to be direct and daring. But I am made differently. Life has taught me; it is in my blood and bone to stop and question, to look so long that at last I lose the will to choose, or to leap. There are some of us like that, you know."

"Perhaps," she smiled. "I don't know. It seems to me a very silly way to be." The song had gone out of her voice, and a heaviness, an impalpable fear, had descended again on her heart. Why did one's path lead always through mazes of uncertainty and disappointment instead of straight onward toward one's desire? A pa.s.sionate impulse seized her to fight for what she wanted, to grasp the fragile opportunity before it eluded her.

Yet she knew that fighting would not do any good. She could do nothing while her happiness hung on a thread. She could do nothing but fold her hands and wait, though her heart burned hot with the injustice of it, and she longed to speak aloud all the words that were rising to her tightly closed lips.

"Oh, don't you see--can't you see?" she asked brokenly, baring her heart with a desperate impulse. Her eyes were drawing him toward the future; and, in the deep stillness of her look, it seemed to him that she was putting forth all her power to charm; that her youth and bloom shed a sweetness that was like the fragrance of a flower.

For an instant every thought, every feeling, surrendered to her appeal.

Then his face changed as abruptly as if he had put a mask over his features; and glancing back over her shoulder, she saw that his mother and Margaret Blair were walking along the concrete pavement under the few old linden trees. As they approached it seemed to the girl that Stephen turned slowly from a man of flesh and blood into a figure of granite. In one instant he was petrified by the force of tradition.

"It is my mother," he said in a low voice. "She has not been in the Square for years. I was telling her yesterday how pretty it looks in the spring." He went forward with an embarra.s.sed air, and Mrs. Culpeper laid a firm, possessive touch on his arm.

"I thought a little stroll might do me good," she explained. "The car is waiting across the street at Doctor Bradley's." Then she held out her free hand to Patty, with a smile which, the girl said afterward to Corinna, looked as if it had frozen on her lips. "Stephen speaks of you very often, Miss Vetch," she said. "He talks a great deal about his friends, doesn't he, Margaret?"

Margaret a.s.sented with a charming manner; and the two girls stood looking guardedly into each other's eyes. "She is attractive," thought Margaret, not unkindly, for she was never unkind, "but I can't understand just what he sees in her." And at the same moment Patty was saying to herself, "Oh, she is everything that he admires and nothing that he enjoys."

Aloud the elder girl said casually, "It is so quaint living down here in the Square, isn't it?"

"But it is too far away from everything," replied Stephen hurriedly. "It must be very different from what it was when you came to b.a.l.l.s here, Mother."

"Very," answered Mrs. Culpeper stiffly because the cold hard smile was still on her lips.

"It doesn't seem far away when you are used to it," remarked Patty in a spiritless tone. The vague heaviness, like a black cloud covered her heart again. She was jealous of Margaret, jealous of her sweet, pale face, of her trusting blue eyes, of the delicate distinction that showed in the turn of her head, in her fragile hands, in the lovely liquid sound of her voice.

"Cousin Corinna has promised to bring me to see you," said Margaret in her kind and gentle way.

"I hope you'll come," replied Patty politely; but in her thoughts she added, "I hope you won't. I hope I'll never see you again." She couldn't be natural; she couldn't be anything but stiff and awkward; and she was aware all the time that Stephen was as embarra.s.sed as she was. All the things that she must fight against, that she must triumph over, were embodied in that small black figure with the ivory face, so inelastic, so unbending, so secure in its inherited authority. There was war between her and Stephen's mother; and she stood alone, with only her undaunted spirit to support her, while on the opposite side were entrenched all the immovable dead ranks of the generations. "I shall fight it out," thought the girl bitterly. "I don't care what she thinks of me. I shall fight it out to the end."

With her hand on Stephen's arm, Mrs. Culpeper turned slowly away. "I feel a little tired," she explained politely to Patty, "so I am sure that you won't mind yielding to an infirm old woman, and will let my son help me back to the car."