One Man in His Time Part 4

Frankly perplexed, he gazed wonderingly into her eyes. He knew that she saw a great deal of Benham; he believed that their friends.h.i.+p had developed into a deeper emotion on Benham's side at least; and it seemed to him unlike Corinna, who was, as he told himself, the most loyal soul on earth, to turn such an a.s.sociation into a cynical jest.

"I heard that too," he replied guardedly, "but of course n.o.body knows."

There was really nothing else that he could answer. Though he could discuss Alice Rokeby, one of those vague, sweet women who seem designed by Nature to develop the sentiment of chivalry in the breast of man, he felt that it would be disloyal to speak lightly of his hero, John Benham. "You could never guess where I've been," he said with relief because he had got rid of the subject. "I might as well tell you in the beginning that I have just left the Governor."

"Gideon Vetch!" exclaimed Corinna, as she dropped into a chair at his side. "Why, I thought you were as far apart as the poles!"

"So we were until ten minutes--no, until exactly an hour ago."

"It makes my blood boil when I think of that circus rider in the Governor's mansion," said the General indignantly. "Do you know what my father would have called that fellow? He would have called him a common scalawag--a common scalawag, sir!"

The Judge laughed softly. There was nothing, as he sometimes observed, that flavoured life so deliciously as a keen appreciation of comedy.

"Now, I should call him a decidedly uncommon one," he remarked. "The trouble with you, my dear Powhatan, is that you are still in the village stage of the social instinct. In your proper period, when we Virginians were merely one of the several tribes in these United States, you may have served an excellent purpose; but the tribal instinct is dying out with the village stage. If we are going to exist at all outside of the archaeological department of a museum, we must learn to accept--. We must let in new blood."

"Do you mean to tell me, Horatio," bl.u.s.tered the General, "that I've got to let in the blood of a circus rider, sir?"

"Well, that depends. I haven't made up my mind about Vetch. He may be only froth, or he may be the vital element that we need. I haven't made up my mind, but I've met him and I like him. Indeed, I think I may say that Gideon and I are friends. We have come to the same point of view, it appears, by travelling on opposite roads. I had a long talk with him the other day, and I found that we think alike about a number of things."

"Think alike about fiddlesticks!" spluttered the General, while he spilled over his waistcoat the water Corinna had given him. "Why, the fellow ain't even in your cla.s.s, sir!"

"I said we had thoughts, not habits, in common, Powhatan," rejoined the Judge blandly. "The same habits make a cla.s.s, but the same thoughts make a friends.h.i.+p."

"He told me he had talked to you," said Stephen eagerly, "and I wanted to know what your impression was. He called you a great old boy, by the way."

The Judge, who could wear at will the face either of Brutus or of Antony, became at once the genial friend of humanity. "That pleases me more than you realize," he said. "I have a suspicion that Gideon knows human nature about as thoroughly as our General here knows the battles of the Confederacy."

"I confess the man rather gripped me," rejoined Stephen. "There's something about him, personality or mere play-acting, that catches one in spite of oneself."

The Judge appeared to acquiesce. "I am inclined to think," he observed presently, "that the quality you feel in Vetch is simply a violent candour. Most people give you truth in small quant.i.ties; but Vetch pours it out in a torrent. He offers it to you as Powhatan used to take his Bourbon in the good old days before the Eighteenth Amendment--straight and strong. I used to tell Powhatan that he'd get the name of a drunkard simply because he could stand what the rest of the world couldn't--and I'll say as much for our friend Gideon."

"Do you mean, my dear," inquired Corinna placidly, "that the Governor is honestly dishonest?"

The Judge's suavity clothed him like velvet. "I know nothing about his honesty. I doubt if any one does. He may be a liar and yet speak the truth, I suppose, from unscrupulous motives. But I am not maintaining that he is entirely right, you understand--merely that like the rest of us he is not entirely wrong. I am not taking sides, you know. I am too old to fight anybody's battles--even distressed Virtue's."

"Then you think--you really think that he is sincere?" asked Stephen.

"Sincere? Well, yes, in a measure. Nothing advertises one so widely as a reputation for sincerity; and the man has a positive genius for self-advertis.e.m.e.nt. He has found that it pays in politics to speak the truth, and so he speaks it at the top of his voice. It takes courage, of course, and I am ready to admit that he is a little more courageous than the rest of us. To that extent, I should say that he has the advantage of us."

"Do you mean to imply," demanded the General wrathfully, "that a common circus rider like that, a rascally revolutionist into the bargain, is better than this lady and myself, sir?"

"Well, hardly better than Corinna," replied the Judge. "Indeed, I was about to add that the two most candid persons I know are Corinna and Vetch. There is a good deal about Vetch, by the way, that reminds me of Corinna."

"Father!" gasped Corinna. "Stephen, do you think he has gone out of his mind?"

"That is the first sign that wisdom has broken its cage," commented her father. "No, my dear, I did not mean that you look like him; you are far handsomer. I meant simply that you both habitually speak the truth, and because you speak the truth the world mistakes you for a successful comedian and Vetch for a kind of political Robin Hood."

"Well, he is trying to hold us up in highwayman fas.h.i.+on, isn't he?"

asked Corinna.

"Does it look that way?" inquired the Judge, with his beaming smile which cast an edge of genial irony on everything that he said. "On the contrary, it seems to me that Vetch is telling us the things we have known about ourselves for a very long time. He says the world might be a better place if we would only take the trouble to make it so; if we would only try to live up to our epitaphs, I believe he once remarked.

He says also, I understand, that he is trying to climb to the top over somebody else; and when I say 'he' I mean, of course, his order or his cla.s.s, whatever the fas.h.i.+onable phrase is. Now, unfortunately, there appears to be but one way of reaching the top of the world, doesn't there?--and that is by climbing up on something or somebody. Even you, my dear Stephen, who occupy that high place, merely inherited the seat from somebody who scrambled up there a few centuries ago. Somebody else probably got broken shoulders before your nimble progenitor took possession. Of course I am willing to admit that time does create in us the sense of a divine right in anything that we have owned for a number of years, as if our inheritance were the crown of some archaic king. I myself feel that strongly. If it came to the point, though I have said that I am too old to fight for distressed Virtue, I should very likely die in the last ditch for every inch of land and every worthless object I ever owned. When Vetch talks about taxing property more heavily I am utterly and openly against him because it is my instinct to be. I refuse to give up my superfluous luxuries in the cause of equal justice for all, and I shall fight against it as long as there is a particle of fight left in my bones. But because I am against him there is no reason, I take it, why I shouldn't enjoy the pleasure of perceiving his point of view. It is an interesting point of view, perhaps the more interesting because we think it is a dangerous one. To approach it is like rounding a sharp curve at high speed."

As he rose to his feet and reached for his walking stick, Stephen remembered that in England the Judge was supposed to have the fine presence and the flas.h.i.+ng eagle eyes of Gladstone. Were they alike also, he wondered, in their fantastic mental processes?

"It's time for me to go, Corinna," said the old man, stooping to kiss his daughter, "so I shan't see you until to-morrow." Then turning to Stephen, he added with a whimsical smile, "If you are so much afraid of Vetch, why don't you fight him with his own weapons? What were you doing, you and John, when the people voted for him?"

"To tell the truth n.o.body ever dreamed that he would be elected,"

replied Stephen, flus.h.i.+ng. "Who would have thought that an independent candidate could win over both parties?"

The Judge had moved to the door, and he looked back, as Stephen finished, with a dramatic flourish of his long white hand. "Well, remember next time, my dear young sir," he answered, "that in politics it is always the impossible that happens." The long white hand fell caressingly on the shoulders of old Powhatan Plummer, and the two men pa.s.sed out of the door together.

When Stephen turned to Corinna, she was resting languidly against the tapestry-covered back of her chair, while the firelight flickering in her eyes changed them to the deep bronze of the marigolds on the table.

With her slenderness, her grace, her brilliant darkness, she seemed to him to belong in one of the English mezzotints on the wall.

"Did you buy that print because it is so much like you?" he asked, pointing to an engraving after Hoppner's portrait of the d.u.c.h.ess of Bedford.

She laughed frankly. "Every one asks me that. I suppose it was one of my reasons."

As he sat down again in front of the fire, his eyes travelled slowly over the walls; over the stipple engravings of Bartolozzi, over the rich mezzotints of Valentine Green and John Raphael Smith, over the bewitching face of Lady Hamilton as it shone back at him from the prints of John Jones, of Cheesman, of Henry Meyer. Was not Corinna's place among those vanished beauties of a richer age, rather than among the sour-faced reformers and the Gideon Vetches of to-day? The wonderful tone of the old prints, the silvery dusk, or the softly glowing colours that were like the sunset of another century; the warmth and splendour of the few brocades she had picked up in Italy; the suave religious feeling of the worn red velvet from some church in Florence; the candles in wrought-iron sconces, the s.h.i.+mmering firelight and the dreamy fragrance of tea roses--all these things together made him think suddenly of suns.h.i.+ne over the Campagna and English gardens in the month of May and the burning reds and blues and golden greens of the Middle Ages. Corinna with her unfading youth became a part of all the loveliness that he had ever seen--of all beauty everywhere.

"I haven't had a chance to tell you," she said, "that I am going to meet the Governor."

"Where? At the Berkeleys'?"

"Yes, at the Berkeleys' dinner on Thursday. Are you going?"

He laughed. "Mrs. Berkeley called me up this morning and asked me if I would take somebody's place. She didn't say whose place it was, but she did divulge the fact that the dinner is given to Vetch. I told her I'd come--that I was so used to taking other people's places I could fill six at the same time. But a dinner to Vetch! I wonder why she is doing it?"

"That's easy. Mr. Berkeley wants something from the Governor. I don't know what he wants, but I do know that whatever it is he wants it very badly."

"And he thinks he'll get it by asking him to dinner? There seems to me an obvious flaw in Berkeley's reasoning. I doubt if Vetch is the kind of man who follows when you hold out an apple. He appears to be exactly the opposite, and I think he's more likely to dash off than to come when he is called. I wonder, by the way, if they are going to have Mrs.

Stribling?"

"Rose Stribling?" A gleam of anger shone in Corinna's eyes. "Why should that interest you?"

"Oh, they say--at least Mrs. Berkeley says, and if there is any misinformation abroad she ought to be aware of it--that Mrs. Stribling's latest attachment to her train is the Governor himself."

He had expected his gossip to arouse Corinna, and in this he was not mistaken. Springing up from her relaxed position, she sat straight and unbending, with her indignant eyes on his face. "Why, I thought the war had cured her."

"The war was not a cure; it was merely a temporary drug for our vanity,"

he rejoined gaily. "It didn't cure me, so you could hardly regard it as a remedy for Mrs. Stribling's complaint. I imagine coquetry is a more obstinate malady even than priggishness, and, Heaven knows, I tried hard enough to get rid of that."

"I hoped you would," admitted Corinna. "But, dear boy, the way to make you human--and you've never been really human all through, you know--was not with a uniform and glory." She was talking flippantly, for they made a pretence now of alluding lightly to his years in France--he had gone into the war before his country--and to the nervous malady, the disabled will, he had brought back. "What you need is not to win more esteem, but to lose some that you've got. Your salvation lies in the opposite direction from where flags are waving. If you could only deliberately arrange to do something that would lower your reputation in the eyes of gouty old gentlemen or mothers with marriageable daughters!

If you could manage to get your nose broken, or elope with a chorus girl, or commit an unromantic murder, I should begin to have hopes of you."

"I may do something as bad some day and surprise you."

"It would surprise me. But I'm not sure, after all, that I don't like you better as you are, with your fine air of superiority. It makes one believe, somehow, in human perfectibility. Now, I can never believe in that when I realize how I feel about Rose Stribling. There is nothing perfectible in such emotions."