One Man in His Time Part 7

"I hope you will, my dear. It vexes your father." Even in his childhood Stephen had understood that his father's "vexation" existed only as an instrument of correction in the hands of his mother. Though he had discovered by the time he was three years old that the image was nothing more than a nursery bugaboo, there were occasions still when the figure was solemnly dressed up and paraded before his eyes.

"So it's the Dad, bless him!" he exclaimed, for if he loved his mother in spite of her virtues, he joined heartily in the family wors.h.i.+p of the head of the house. "Well, he has had a word with Margaret anyway, and he ought to thank me for that."

"Dear Margaret," murmured Mrs. Culpeper, "she is looking so sweet to-night."

That Margaret was looking very sweet indeed, Stephen acknowledged as soon as he entered the room, where the firelight suffused the Persian rugs (which had replaced the earlier Brussels carpet woven in a mammoth floral design), the elaborately carved and twisted rosewood chairs and sofas, upholstered in ruby-coloured brocade, the few fine old pieces of Chippendale or Heppelwhite, the ma.s.sive crystal chandelier, and the precise copies of Italian paintings in gorgeous Florentine frames. Here and there hung a family portrait, one of Amanda Culpeper, a famous English beauty, with a long nose and a short upper lip, not unlike Victoria's. This painting, which was supposed to be by Sir Joshua Reynolds, was a source of unfailing consolation to Victoria, though Stephen preferred the Sully painting of his grandmother, Judith Randolph, who reminded him in some subtle way of Margaret Blair. In his childhood he had believed this drawing-room to be the most beautiful place on earth, and he never entered it now without a feeling of regret for a shattered illusion.

As he took Margaret's hand her expression of intelligent sympathy went straight to his heart; and he told himself emphatically that after all the familiar graces in women were the most lovable. She was a small fragile girl, with a lovely oval face, nut-brown hair that grew in a "widow's peak" on her forehead, and the prettiest dark blue eyes in the world. Her figure drooped slightly in the shoulders, and was, as Mary Byrd pointed out in her das.h.i.+ng way, "without the faintest pretence to style." But if Margaret lacked "style," she possessed an unconscious grace which seemed to Stephen far more attractive. It was delightful to watch the flowing lines of her clothes, as if, he used to imagine in a fanciful strain, she were poured out of some slender porcelain vase. Her dress to-night, of delicate blue crepe, began slightly below the throat and reached almost to her ankles. It was a fas.h.i.+on which he had always admired; but he realized that it gave Margaret, who was only twenty-two, a quaint air of maturity.

"I am so sorry I am late," he said, "but I had to go back to the office for a paper I'd forgotten." It was the truth as far as it went; and yet because it was not the whole truth, because his delay was due, not to his return for the paper, but to his meeting with Patty Vetch in the Square, his conscience p.r.i.c.ked him uncomfortably. When deceit was so easy it ceased to be a temptation.

She looked at him with an expression of guileless sympathy. "After working all day I should think you would be tired," she murmured. That was the way she would always cover up his errors, large or small, he knew, with a trusting sweetness which made him feel there was dishonour in the merest tinge of dissimulation.

Mary Byrd was talking as usual in high fluting notes which drowned the gentle ripple of Margaret's voice.

"I was just telling Margaret about the charity ball," she said, "and the way the girls snubbed Patty Vetch in the dressing-room."

"And it was a very good account of young barbarians at play," commented Mr. Culpeper, who was a romantic soul and still read his Byron.

"Patty Vetch? Why, isn't that the daughter of the Governor?" asked Mrs.

Culpeper, without a trace of her husband's sympathy for the victim of the "snubbing." A moment later, in accordance with her mental att.i.tude of evasive idealism, she added briskly: "I try not to think of that man as Governor of Virginia."

Of course the subject had come up. Wherever Stephen had been in the past few weeks he had found that the conversation turned to the Governor; and it struck him, while he followed the line of girls headed by his mother's erect figure into the dining-room, that, for good or bad, the influence of Gideon Vetch was as prevalent as an epidemic. All through the long and elaborate meal, in which the viands that his ancestors had preferred were served ceremoniously by slow-moving coloured servants, he listened again to the familiar discussion and a.n.a.lysis of the demagogue, as he still called him. How little, after all, did any one know of Gideon Vetch? Since he had been in office what had they learned except that he was approachable in human relations and unapproachable in political ones?

"I wonder if Stephen noticed the girl at the ball?" said Mrs. Culpeper suddenly, looking tenderly at her son across the lovely George II candlesticks and the dish of expensive fruit, for she could never reconcile with her ideas of economy the spending of a penny on decorations so ephemeral as flowers.

"Oh, he couldn't have helped it," responded Mary Byrd. "Every one saw her. She was dressed very conspicuously."

"Do you imply that you were not?" inquired her father, without facetious intention.

Mary Byrd beamed indulgently in his direction. "Oh, you don't know what it is to be conspicuous, dear," she answered. "What did you think of her dress, Stephen?"

He met her question with a blush. Was he really so modest after the war and France and everything?--Victoria wondered in silence.

"It was something red, wasn't it?" he rejoined vaguely.

"It was scarlet tulle." Mary Byrd, as her mother had once observed, "hadn't an indefinite bone in her body." Then she imparted an additional incident. "She got it badly torn. I saw her pinning it up in the dressing-room."

"I should have been sorry for her," said Margaret simply; and he felt that he had never in his life been so nearly in love with her.

"Is she pretty?" asked Mrs. Culpeper, appealing directly to Stephen as a man and an authority. It was the question the strange woman had put to him in the Square, and ironical mirth seized the young man as he remembered.

"Do you think her pretty, Stephen?" repeated Margaret, and waited, with an expression of impartial interest, for his reply.

For an instant he hesitated. Did he think Patty Vetch pretty or not? "I hardly know," he answered. "I suppose it depends upon whether you like that kind of thing or not. Why don't you ask Peyton?" At the time he couldn't have told himself whether he admired Patty or not. She surprised him, she struck a new note, the note of the unexpected, but whether he liked or disliked it, he could not tell. "There is something unusual about her," he concluded hurriedly, feeling that he had not been quite fair.

"Well, I think she's good looking enough," Peyton, the incurious young man of "advanced" tastes, was replying. "She seems to have a kind of fascination. I don't know what it is, but I dare say she inherited it from her father. The Governor may be unsound in his views and uncertain in his methods, but I've yet to see any one who could resist his smile."

"The Judge admires him," remarked Stephen, with the air of a man who tosses a bomb into a legislative a.s.sembly.

"Oh, Stephen," protested Victoria on a high note of interrogation, "how can he?"

"The Judge likes to keep up well with the times," observed Mr. Culpeper, whose final argument against any innovation was the inquiry, "What do you suppose General Lee would have thought of it?" Pausing an instant while the family hung breathlessly on his words, he continued heroically: "Now, it doesn't bother me to be called an old fogy."

"There's no use trying to hide the fact that the Judge isn't quite what he used to be," said Mrs. Culpeper in an unusually tolerant tone. "He has let his habit of joking grow on him until you never know whether he is serious or simply poking fun at you."

"The next thing we hear," suggested Peyton, who was quite dreadful at times, "will be that the old gentleman admires the daughter also."

"He doesn't like conspicuous women," rejoined Victoria. "He told me so only the other day when Mrs. Bradford announced that she was going to run for the legislature."

"That's the kind of conspicuousness we all object to," commented Peyton; "Patty Vetch isn't that sort."

Janet was more merciful. "Well, you are obliged to be conspicuous to-day if you want anybody to notice you," she said. "Look at Mary Byrd."

Mary Byrd tossed her bright head as gaily as if a compliment had been intended. "Oh, you needn't think I like to dress this way," she retorted, "or that I don't sometimes get tired of keeping up with things. Why, there are hours and hours when I simply feel as if I should drop."

"Well, as long as you look like that you needn't hope for a change,"

remarked Stephen admiringly. Then, turning his gaze away from her too obvious brightness, he looked into the tranquil depths of Margaret's blue eyes, and thought how much more restful the old-fas.h.i.+oned type of woman must have been. Men didn't need to bestir themselves and sharpen their wits with women like that; they were accepted, with their inherent virtues or vices, as philosophically as one accepted the seasons.

It was a dull supper, he thought, because his mind was distracted; but a little later, when they had returned to the drawing-room, and the family had drifted away in separate directions--Mary Byrd and Peyton to a dance, his father to his library, and his mother and the three other girls to a game of bridge in the next room, he received an amazing revelation of Margaret's point of view. His sentiment for the girl had always suffered, he was aware, from too many opportunities. He had sometimes wished that an obstacle might arise, that the formidable parents would try for once to tear them apart instead of thrust them together, but, in spite of the changeless familiarity of their a.s.sociation, he was presently to discover how little he had known of the real Margaret beneath the flowing grace and the nut-brown hair and the eyes like blue larkspur. Though the tribal customs had shaped her body and formed her manners, a rare essence of personality escaped like a perfume from the hereditary mould of the race.

As he looked at her now, sitting gracefully on the ruby brocade of one of the rosewood chairs, with her lovely head framed by the band of intricate carving, he was aware that the delicate subtleties and shadings of her feminine charm made an entirely fresh appeal to his perceptions, if not to his senses. He had never admired her appearance more than he did at that instant; and yet his gaze was as dispa.s.sionate as the one he bestowed on the Sully portrait of which she reminded him.

Her eyes were very soft; there was a faint smile on her thin pink lips which gave the look of coldness, of reticence to her face. With her head bent and her hands folded in her lap, she sat there waiting pensively--for what? It occurred to him suddenly with a shock that she was deeper, far deeper than he had ever suspected.

"You are so different from the other girls, Margaret," he said at last, oppressed by the old difficulty of making conversation. "You don't belong to the same world with Mary Byrd and--" He was going to add "Patty Vetch," but he checked himself before the name escaped him.

She seemed to melt rather than break from her att.i.tude of waiting, so gently did her movements sink into the shadowy glow of the firelight.

"No, I don't," she replied, with a touch of sadness. "I sometimes wish that I did."

"You wish that you did!" Here was surprise at last. "But, why, in Heaven's name, should you wish that when you are everything that they ought to be?"

"As if that mattered!" There was a tone in her voice that was new to him. "It's gone out of fas.h.i.+on to be superior. n.o.body even cares any longer about your being what you ought to be. I've been trained to be the kind of girl that doesn't get on to-day, full of all sorts of forgotten virtues and refinements. n.o.body looks at me because everybody is staring so hard at the girls who are improperly dressed. There is only one place where I can be sure of having attention, and that is in an Old Ladies' Home. Old ladies admire me."

For the second time that day he found himself startled by the eccentricities of the feminine mind; but in Margaret's pa.s.sive resignation there was none of Patty's rebellion against the cruelty and injustice of life. Generations of acquiescence were in the slender figure before him; and he realized that the completeness of her surrender to Fate must have softened her destiny. Both girls were victims of the changing fas.h.i.+on in women, of an age that moved not in a stream, but in a whirlpool.

"I admire you," he said in a caressing voice, "more than I admire any one else in the world."

She had been gazing into the fire, and as she turned slowly in answer to his words, it seemed to him that the blue of a summer sky shone on him from beneath the tremulous shadow of her eyelashes.

"The trouble," she replied, with an appealing glance, "is that I don't know how to be common. There isn't any hope of a girl's being popular if she doesn't know how to be common. I would be if I could," she confessed plaintively, "but I haven't the faintest idea how to begin."

"I hope you'll never learn," he insisted. In awakening his sympathy she had awakened also a deep-rooted protective instinct. He felt that he longed to guard and defend her, as a brother of course, and if this newer and tenderer sentiment was the result of feminine calculation, he was too chivalrous or too inexperienced to perceive it. What he perceived was simply that this lovely girl, whom he had known from infancy, had opened her heart and taken him into her confidence. To admit that she was not a success in her small social world, proved her, he felt, to be both frank and courageous.

"Of course they don't call their way common," she pursued, with what seemed to him the most touching candour. "Their word for it is 'pep'."

She p.r.o.nounced the vulgar syllable as if she abhorred it. "That is what I haven't got, and that's why I have never been a real success in anything except church work. Even in the Red Cross it was 'pep' that counted most, and that was the reason they never sent me to Europe.

Mother tried to make me into the kind of girl that men admired when she was young; but the type has gone out of fas.h.i.+on to-day just as much as crinolines or a small waist. If I were clever I suppose I could make myself over and begin to jump about and imitate the sort of animation I never had; but I'm not really clever, for I've tried and I can't do it.

It only makes me feel silly to pretend to be what I am not."