One Man in His Time Part 5

"Rose Stribling! Beside you she is like a pumpkin in the basket with a pomegranate!"

Corinna laughed with frank pleasure. "There are a million who would prefer the pumpkin to the pomegranate," she answered. "Rose Stribling, you must admit, is the type that has been the desire of the world since Venus first rose from the foam."

"Can you imagine Mrs. Stribling rising from foam?" Stephen retorted impertinently.

"No, Venus has grown fatter through the ages," a.s.sented Corinna, "but the type is unchanged. Now, among all the compliments that have been paid me in my life, no one has ever compared me to the G.o.ddess of Love.

I have been painted with the bow of Diana, but never with the doves of Venus."

Because he felt that her gaiety rippled over an undercurrent of pain, Stephen bent forward and touched her hand with an impulse of tenderness.

"You are more beautiful than you ever were in your life," he said.

"There isn't a woman in the world who can compare with you." Then he laughed merrily. "I shall watch you two to-morrow evening, you and Rose Stribling."

"I am sorry," replied Corinna in a troubled voice. "I may tell you the truth since Father says it is the last thing any one ever believes--and the truth is that she makes me savage--yes, I mean it--she makes me savage."

"I know what the Judge means when he says you are like Vetch," returned Stephen abruptly. Then, without waiting for her reply, he added in an impulsive tone: "Triumph over her to-morrow night, Corinna. Go out to fight with all your weapons and seize the trophies from Mrs. Stribling."

"You funny boy!" exclaimed Corinna, but the sadness had left her voice and her eyes were shining. "Why, I am twelve years older than Rose Stribling, and those twelve years are everything."

"Those twelve years are nothing unless you imagine that you are in a novel. It is only in books that there is a chronology of the emotions."

"She is a fat blonde without a heart," insisted Corinna, "and they are invulnerable."

"Well, s.n.a.t.c.h Vetch away from her. He deserves something better than that combination."

"Oh, she can't hurt him very much, even though she no longer has a husband to get in her way. Have you ever wondered how George Stribling stood her? It must have been a relief to find himself safely dead."

"He stood her as one stands sultry weather probably, but with less hope of a change. He had that slow and heavy philosophy that wears well. I think it even dawned upon him now and then that there was something funny about it."

"Of course he knew that she married him for his money," said Corinna, "but that is the last thing the natural man appears to resent."

Stephen rose and bent over her. "Promise me that you will save Vetch,"

he implored mockingly.

"Why this sudden interest in Vetch?" Corinna rose also and reached for her fur coat. "It makes me curious to meet him. Yes, I promise you that I will go to-morrow night attired as for a carnival in all the mystery of a velvet mask. I may not save Vetch, but I think at least that I can eclipse Rose Stribling. My motive may not be admirable, but it is as feminine as a string of beads."

He kissed her hand. "Bless your heart because you are both human and my cousin." For an instant he hesitated, and then as they reached the door together, he turned with his hand on the k.n.o.b, and looked into her eyes.

"The Governor has a daughter. Did you know it?" he asked.

"Why, of course I know it. Isn't Patty Vetch as well advertised as the newest ill.u.s.trated weekly?"

"I was wondering," again he hesitated over the words, "if you had seen her and what you think of her?"

"I have seen her twice. She was in here the other day to look at my prints, and," her brilliant eyes grew soft, "well, I feel sorry for her."

"Sorry? But do you like her?"

"Haven't you always told me that I like everybody?"

He laughed. "With one exception!"

"With one particular exception!"

"But honestly, Corinna." His tone was insistent. "Do you like Patty Vetch?"

"Honestly, my dear Stephen, I do. There is something--well, something almost pathetic about the girl; and I think she is genuine. One day last week she came here and made me tell her everything I could about my prints. I don't mean really that she made me, you know. There wasn't anything forward about her then, though I hear there is sometimes. She seemed to me a restless, lonely, misdirected intelligence hungry to know things. That is the only way I can describe her, but you will understand. She has had absolutely no advantages; she doesn't even know what culture means, or social instinct, or any of the qualities you were born with, my dear boy; but she feels vaguely that she has missed something, and she is reaching out gropingly and trying to find it. I like the spirit. It strikes me as American in the best sense--that young longing to make up in some way for her deficiencies and lack of opportunities, that gallant determination to get the better of her upbringing and her surroundings. A fight always appeals to me, you know.

I like the courage that is in the girl--I am sure it is courage--and her straightforward effort to get the best out of life, to learn the things she was never taught, to make herself over if need be."

"Is this Patty Vetch, Corinna, or your own dramatic instinct?"

"Oh, it's Patty Vetch! I had no interest in her whatever. Why should I have had? But I liked the way she went straight as a dart at the thing she wanted. There was no affectation about her, no pretence of being what she was not. She asked about prints because she saw the name and she didn't know what it meant. She would have asked about Browning, or Swinburne, or Meredith in exactly the same way if this had been a book-shop. She wanted to know the difference between a mezzotint and a stipple print. She wanted to know all about the portraits too, and the names of the painters and who Lady Hamilton was and the d.u.c.h.ess of Bedford and the Ladies Waldegrave and 'Serena,' and if Morland's Cottagers were really as happy as they were painted? She asked as many questions as Socrates, and I fear got as inadequately answered."

"Well, she didn't strike me as in the least like that; but you can be a great help to her if she is really in earnest."

"She didn't strike you like that, my dear, simply because you are a man, and some girls are never really themselves with men; they are for ever acting a part; a vulgar part, I admit, but one they have learned before they were born, the instinctive quarry eluding the instinctive hunter.

The girl is naturally shy; I could tell that, and she covers it with a kind of boldness that isn't--well, particularly attractive to one of your fastidious mind. Yet there is something rather taking about her.

She reminds me of a small, bright tropical bird."

"Of a Virginia redbird, you mean."

"A redbird? Then you have seen her?"

"Yes, I've seen her--only twice--but the last time she indulged her sense of humour in a practical joke about a sprained ankle."

"I suppose she would joke like that. Even the modern girl that we know isn't in the best possible taste. And you must remember that Patty Vetch is something very different from the girls that you admire. I hope she'll let me help her, but I doubt it. She is the sort that wouldn't come if you tried to call and coax her. You said her father was like that, didn't you? Well, with that kind of wildness, or shyness, one can't put out a cage, you know. The only way is to scatter crumbs on the window-sill and then stand and wait. Will you let me take you home?"

They had crossed the pavement to her car, and she waited now with her smile of whimsical gaiety.

"If you will. It is only a few blocks, but I want to hear about the gown you will wear for your triumph."

It seemed to him that there was the chime of silver bells in her laughter. "Oh, my dear, must every victory of my life end in a forlorn hope!"

CHAPTER IV

THE TRIBAL INSTINCT

The spirit of the age, the worship of the many-headed G.o.d of magnitude, was holding carnival in the town. Faster and faster buildings were rising; the higher and more flimsily built, the better it seemed, for it is easier to demolish walls that have been lightly erected. Everywhere people were pushing one another into the slums or the country.

Everywhere the past was going out with the times and the future was coming on in a torrent. Two opposing principles, the conservative and the progressive, had struggled for victory, and the progressive principle had won. To add more and more numbers; to build higher and higher; to push harder and harder; and particularly to improve what had been already added or built or pushed--these impulses had united at last into a frenzied activity. And while the building and the pushing and the improving went on, the village grew into the town, the town grew into the city, and the city grew out into the country. Beneath it all, informing the apparent confusion, there was some crude belief that the symbol of material success is size, and that size in itself, regardless of quality or condition, is civilization. For the many-headed G.o.d is a G.o.d of sacrifice. He makes a wilderness of beauty and calls it progress.

Long ago the village had disappeared. Long ago the s.p.a.cious southern homes, with their walled gardens of box and roses and aromatic shrubs in spring, had receded into the shadowy memories of those whom the modern city pointed out, with playful solicitude, as "the oldest inhabitants."

None except the very oldest inhabitants could remember those friendly and picturesque streets, deeply shaded by elms and sycamores; those hospitable houses of gray stucco or red brick which time had subdued to a delicate rust-colour; those imposing Doric columns, or quaint Georgian doorways; those gra.s.s-grown brick pavements, where old ladies in perpetual mourning gathered for leisurely gossip; those wrought-iron gates that never closed; those unshuttered windows, with small gleaming panes, which welcomed the pa.s.ser-by in winter; or those gardens, steeped in the fragrance of mint and old-fashioned flowers, which allured the thirsty visitor in summer. These things had vanished years ago; yet beneath the noisy commercial city the friendly village remained. There were hours in the lavender-tinted twilights of spring, or on autumn afternoons, while the shadows quivered beneath the burnished leaves and the sunset glowed with the colour of apricots, when the watcher might catch a fleeting glimpse of the past. It may have been the drop of dusk in the arched recess of a Colonial doorway; it may have been the faint sunshine on the ivy-grown corner of an old brick wall; it may have been the plaintive melody of a negro market-man in the street; or it may have been the first view of the Culpeper's gray and white mansion; but, in one or all of these things, there were moments when the ghost of the buried village stirred and looked out, and a fragrance that was like the memory of box and mint and blush roses stole into the senses. It was then that one turned to the Doric columns of the Culpeper house, standing firmly established in its gra.s.sy lawn above the street and the age, and reflected that the defeated spirit of tradition had entrenched itself well at the last. Time had been powerless against that fortress of prejudice; against that cheerful and inaccessible prison of the tribal instinct. Poverty, the one indiscriminate leveller of men and principles, had never attacked it, for in the lean years of Reconstruction, when to look well fed was little short of a disgrace in Virginia, an English cousin, remote but clannish, had died at an opportune moment and left Mr. Randolph Byrd Culpeper a moderate fortune.

Thanks to this event, which Mrs. Culpeper gratefully cla.s.sified as the "intervention of Providence," the family had scarcely altered its manner of living in the last two hundred years. To be sure there were modern discomforts which related to the abolition of slavery and the prohibition of whiskey; but since the Culpepers had been indulgent masters and light drinkers, they had come to regard these deprivations as in the nature of blessings. Solid, imposing, and as richly endowed as an inst.i.tution of learning, the Culpeper generations had weathered both the restraints and the a.s.saults of the centuries. The need to make a living, that grim necessity which is the mother of democracy, had brushed them as lightly as the theory of evolution. Saturated with tradition as with an odour, and fortified by the ponderous moral purpose of the Victorian age, they had never doubted anything that was old and never discovered anything that was new. About them as about the hidden village, there was the charm of mellowness, of unruffled serenity. Some ineradicable belief in things as they have always been had preserved them from the aesthetic derangement of the Mid-Victorian taste; and in standing for what was old, they had stood, inadvertently but courageously, for what was excellent. Security, permanence, possession--all the instincts which blend to make the tribe and the community, all the agencies which work for organized society and against the wayward experiment in human destiny--these were the stubborn forces embodied in the Culpeper stock.

The present head of the family, that Randolph Byrd Culpeper who had been only ten years old when Providence intervened, was now a fine-looking, heavily built man of sixty-five, with prominent dark eyes under sleepy lids, abundant iron-gray hair which was brushed until it shone, and a drooping moustache that was still as brown as it had been in his youth.