One Man in His Time Part 38

"Even if everything were against it?"

Her head went up with a dauntless gesture. "Oh, my dear, what is everything?" It was a changed voice from the one in which she had lectured Alice Rokeby an hour ago. "Feeling is everything."

"It is real," he replied, looking away from her eyes. "I am sure of that because I have struggled against it. I can't explain what it is; I don't know what it was that made me care in the beginning. All I know about it is that it seems to give me back myself. It is only when I let myself go in the thought of it that I become really free. Can you understand what I mean?"

"I can," a.s.sented Corinna softly; and though she smiled there was a mist over her eyes which made the world appear iridescent. "Oh, my dear, it is the only way. Throw away everything else--every cause, every conviction, every interest--but keep that one open door into reality."

The car stopped before his office, and she held out her hand. "I shall see you to-morrow night?"

He glanced back merrily from the pavement. "Do you think I shall let you escape me?" Then he turned away and went, with a firm and energetic step, into the building, while Corinna took out her shopping list and studied it thoughtfully.

"Back to the shop," she said at last. "I have had enough for one morning." As the car started up the street, a smile stirred her lips, "I shall have three unhappy lovers on my hands for the dance to-morrow."

Then she laughed softly, with a very real sense of humour, "If I am going to sacrifice myself, I may as well do it in the grand manner," she thought, for Corinna had a royal soul.

CHAPTER XXI

DANCE MUSIC

At breakfast the next morning, Mrs. Culpeper observed, with maternal solicitude, that Stephen was looking more cheerful. While she poured his coffee, with one eye on the fine old coffee pot and one on the animated face of her son, she reflected that he appeared to have come at last to his senses. "If he would only stop all this folly and settle down," she thought. "Surely it is quite time now for him to become normal again."

As she looked at him her expression softened, in spite of her general att.i.tude of disapprobation, and the sharp brightness of her eyes gave place to humid tenderness. Of all her children he had long been her favourite, for the reason, perhaps, that he was the only one who had ever caused her any anxiety; and though she would have gone to the stake cheerfully for all and each of them, there would have been a keener edge to the martyrdom she suffered in Stephen's behalf.

"Be sure and make a good breakfast, Mr. Culpeper," she urged, glancing down the table to where her husband was dividing his attention between the morning paper and his oatmeal. "My poor father used to say that if he didn't make a good breakfast he felt it all day long."

"He was right, my dear. I have no doubt that he was right," replied Mr.

Culpeper, in the tone of solemn sentiment which he reserved for deceased parents. Though he was dyspeptic by const.i.tution, and inclined to gout and other bodily infirmities, he applied himself philosophically to a heavy breakfast such as his wife's father had enjoyed.

"Stephen is looking so well this morning," remarked Mrs. Culpeper in a sprightly voice. "He has quite a colour."

Mr. Culpeper rolled his large brown eyes, as handsome and as opaque as chestnuts, in the direction of his son. Though he would never have observed the improvement unless his wife had called his attention to it, his kind heart was honestly relieved to discover that Stephen looked better. He had worried a good deal in his sluggish way over what he thought of as "the effect of the war" on his son. With the strong paternal instinct which beheld every child as a branch on a genealogical tree, he had been as much disturbed as his wife by the gossip which had reached him about the daughter of Gideon Vetch.

"Feeling all right, my boy?" he inquired now, in the tone of indulgent anxiety which, from the first day of his return, had exasperated Stephen so profoundly.

"Oh, first rate," responded the young man lightly. "Is there anything you would like me to help you about?"

"No, there's nothing I can't attend to myself--" Mr. Culpeper had begun to reply, when catching sight of his wife's frowning face, he continued hurriedly: "Unless you would care to glance over that deed about those lots of your mother's?"

Stephen smiled, for he had seen the warning change in his mother's expression, and he was thinking that she was still a remarkably pretty woman. "With pleasure," he returned. "I shall be busy all day, but I'll look it over to-morrow. To-night I am going to the Harrisons' dance."

"Oh, you're going!" exclaimed Mary Byrd, who had come in late and was just taking her seat. "I suppose Mother is making you take Margaret Blair?"

Again Mrs. Culpeper made a vague frowning movement of her eyebrows and gently shook her head; but the gesture of disapproval to which her husband had responded obediently was entirely wasted upon her youngest daughter. "You needn't shake your head at me, Mother," she remarked lightly. "Of course I know you are making him take her when he would rather a hundred times go with Patty Vetch."

The frown on Mrs. Culpeper's face turned to a look of panic. "Mary Byrd, you are impossible," she said sternly.

"I saw Cousin Corinna yesterday," observed Victoria indiscreetly. "She is going to take Patty Vetch."

Mrs. Culpeper said nothing, but her fine black brows drew ominously together. She had worked so busily over the coffee urn and the sugar bowl that she had not had time to eat her breakfast, and the oatmeal in the plate before her had grown stiff and cold before she tasted it. When Stephen stooped to kiss her cheek before going out, she looked up at him with a proud and admiring glance. "I hope you remembered to order flowers for Margaret?"

He laughed. It was so characteristic of her to feel that even his love affairs must be managed! "Yes, I ordered gardenias. Is that right?"

When she nodded amiably, he turned away and went out into the hall, where he found his father waiting. "I wanted to see you a minute without your mother," explained Mr. Culpeper, in a voice which sounded husky because he tried to subdue it to a whisper. "It's just as well, I think, that your mother shouldn't know that I'm having those houses you looked at attended to."

"Oh, you are!" returned Stephen, with a curious mixture of thankfulness and humility. So the old chap was the best sport of them all! In his slow way he had accomplished what Stephen had merely talked about. For the first time it occurred to the young man that his father was not by any means so obvious or so simple as he had believed him to be. Had Corinna spoken the truth when she called him a sentimentalist at heart?

"It's better not to mention it before your mother," Mr. Culpeper was saying huskily, while Stephen wondered. "She's the kindest heart in the world. There isn't a better woman on earth; but she'd always think the money ought to go to one of the married children. She couldn't understand that it's good business to keep up the property. Women have queer ideas about business."

"Well, you're a brick, Father!" exclaimed the young man, and he meant it from his heart. His voice trembled, and he put his hand on his father's arm for a minute as he used to do when he was a child. Words wouldn't come to him; but he was deeply touched, and it seemed to him that the barrier which had divided him from his family had suddenly fallen. Never since his return from France had he felt so near to his father as he felt at that moment.

"Well, well, I thought you'd like to know," rejoined Mr. Culpeper, and his voice also shook a little. "I must be getting down town now. May I take you in my car?"

"No, I rather like the walk, sir. It does me good." Then, without a word more, but with a smile of sympathy and understanding, they parted, and Stephen went out of the house and descended the steps to the street.

It was true, as his mother had observed, that he was happier to-day than he had been for weeks; but this happiness was founded upon what Mrs.

Culpeper would have regarded as the most reprehensible of deceptions. He was happier simply because, in spite of everything he had done to prevent it, Fate had decreed that he was soon to see Patty again. The longing of the past few weeks was to be appeased, if only for an hour, and he was to see her again! He did not look beyond the coming night. He did not attempt to a.n.a.lyse either his motive or his emotions. The future was still obscure; life was still evolving its inscrutable problem; but it was enough for him, at the moment, to know that he should see her again. And this certainty, coming after the hungry pain of the last three weeks, brought a glow to his eyes and that haunting smile, like the smile of memory, to his lips.

The light that Corinna had kindled illumined not a political career, but the small vivid image of Patty. Wherever he looked he saw her flitting ahead of him, a figure painted on sunlight. He had never found her so desirable as in those few days since he had irrevocably given her up.

His self-denial, his vain endeavours to avoid her and forget her, seemed merely to have poured themselves into the deep rebellious longing of his heart. He lived always now in that hidden country of the mind, where the winds blew free and strong and the sun never set on the endless roads and the far horizon.

And yet, so inexplicable are the laws of the mind, this escape from the tyranny of convention, from the irksome round of practical details, recoiled perversely into an increased joy of living. Because he could escape at will from the routine, he no longer dreaded to return to it.

The light which irradiated the image of Patty transfigured the events and circ.u.mstances amid which he moved. It shed its glory over external incidents as well as into the loneliest vacancy, the deserted places, of his being. Everything around and within him, the very youth in his soul, became more intense in the hours when he allowed this emotion to a.s.sume control of his thoughts. Just to be alive, that was enough! Just to be free again from the sensation of stifling in trivial things, of suffocating in the monotony which rushed over one like a torrent of ashes. Just to escape with Patty into that wild kingdom of the mind where the sun never set!

When he returned home that evening, his mother met him as he entered the hall, and followed him upstairs.

"It is a beautiful evening for the dance, dear. They are having the garden illuminated."

Though he smiled back at her, his smile had that dreamy remoteness, that look of meaning more than it revealed, which was bewildering to an acute and practical intelligence. From long and intimate a.s.sociation with her husband, Mrs. Culpeper was accustomed to dealing with ponderous barriers to knowledge; but this plastic and variable substance of Stephen's resistance, gave her an uncomfortable feeling of helplessness. Even when her son acquiesced, as he did usually in her demands, she suspected that his acquiescence was merely on the surface, that in the depths of his mind he was, as she said to herself resentfully, "holding something back."

"Margaret is looking so sweet," she began in her smoothest tone. "Of course she isn't the beauty that Mary Byrd is, but, in her quiet way, she is very handsome."

"No, she isn't the beauty that Mary Byrd is," conceded Stephen, so pleasantly that she realized he was repeating parrot-like the phrase she had uttered. His thoughts were somewhere else, she observed bitterly; it was perfectly evident that he was not paying the slightest attention to anything that she said.

"You must use your father's car," she remarked, as amiably as before.

"It is better to have a chauffeur, and Mary Byrd is going with w.i.l.l.y Tarleton."

"And the other girls?" he asked, for her words appeared at last to have penetrated the haze that enveloped his mind.

"Harriet is spending the night with Lily Whittle, and she will go from there. Of course Victoria has given up dancing since she came home from France, and poor Janet stopped going to parties the year she came out."

This pitiless maternal cla.s.sification of Janet aroused his amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Well, I'd be glad to take Janet anywhere, even if her nose is a little longer than Mary Byrd's," he retorted. "She's the jolliest of the lot, and she seems to me very well contented as she is."

"Oh, she is," a.s.sented his mother eagerly. "I always tell her that her disposition is worth a fortune; and she has a very good figure too. But, of course, a pretty face is the most important thing before marriage and the least important thing afterward," she added shrewdly, as she left him at his door.

In a dream he dressed himself and went down to the dining-room; in a dream he sat through the slow ceremonious supper; in a dream he got into his father's car; and in a dream he stopped for Margaret and drove on again with her fragrant presence beside him. When he entered the glaring, profusely decorated house of the Harrisons, he felt that he was still only half awake to the actuality.