"It is a pity," she said gently, "for she still cares for you."

The hand that held his cigar trembled. She had penetrated his reserve at last, and she saw a shadow which was not the shadow of the wind-blown flowers, cross his features.

"Did she tell you that?" he asked as gently as she had spoken.

"There was no need to tell me. I saw it as soon as I looked at her."

For a moment he was silent; then he said very quietly, as one whose controlling motive was a hatred of excess, of unnecessary fussiness or frankness: "I am sorry."

"Have you stopped caring for her?"

The shadow on his face changed into a look of perplexity. When he spoke, she realized that he had mistaken her meaning; and for an instant her heart beat wildly with resentment or apprehension.

"I am fond of her. I shall always be fond of her," he said. "Does it make any difference to you, my dear?"

Yes, he had mistaken her meaning. He was judging her in the dim light of an immemorial tradition; and he had seen in her anxious probing for truth merely a personal jealousy. Women were like that, he would have said, applying, in accordance with his mental custom, the general law to the particular instance. After all, where could they meet? They were as far divided in their outlook on life as if they had inhabited different spiritual hemispheres. A curiosity seized her to know what was in his mind, to sound the depths of that unfathomable reserve.

"That is over so completely that I thought it would make no difference to you," he added almost reproachfully, as if she, not he, were to be blamed for dragging a disagreeable subject into the light.

Fear stabbed Corinna's heart like a knife. "But she still loves you!" she cried sharply.

He flinched from the sharpness of her tone. "I am sorry," he said again; but the words glided, with a perfunctory grace, on the surface of emotion. Suppose that what he said was true, she told herself; suppose that it was really "over"; suppose that she also recognized only the egoist's view of duty—of the paramount duty to one's own inclinations; suppose—"Oh, am I so different from him?" she thought, "why cannot I also mistake the urging of desire for the command of conscience—or at least call it that in my mind?" For a minute she struggled desperately with the temptation; and in that minute it seemed to her that the face of Alice Rokeby, with its look of wistful expectancy, of hungry yearning, drifted past her in the twilight.

"But is it obliged to be over?" she asked aloud. "I could never care as she does. I have always been like that, and I can't change. I have always been able to feel just so much and no more—to give just so much and no more."

He looked at her attentively, a little troubled, she could see, but not deeply hurt, not hurt enough to break down the wall which protected the secret—or was it the emptiness?—of his nature.

"Has the knowledge of my—my old friendship for Mrs. Rokeby come between us?" he asked slowly and earnestly.

While he spoke it seemed to her that all that had been obscure in her view of him rolled away like the mist in the garden, leaving the structure of his being bare and stark to her critical gaze. Nothing confused her now; nothing perplexed her in her knowledge of him. The old sense of incompleteness, of inadequacy, returned; but she understood the cause of it now; she saw with perfect clearness the defect from which it had arisen. He had missed the best because, with every virtue of the mind, he lacked the single one of the heart. Possessing every grace of character except humanity, he had failed in life because this one gift was absent.

"All my life," she said brokenly, "I have tried to find something that I could believe in—that I could keep faith with to the end. But what can one build a world on except human relations—except relations between men and women?"

"You mean," he responded gravely, "that you think I have not kept faith with Mrs. Rokeby?"

"Oh, can't you see? If you would only try, you must surely see!" she pleaded, with outstretched hands.

He shook his head not in denial, but in bewilderment. "I realized that I had made a mistake," he said slowly, "but I believed that I had put it out of my life—that we had both put it out of our lives. There were so many more important things—the war and coming face to face with death in so many forms. Oh, I confess that what is important to you, appears to me to be merely on the surface of life. I have been trying to fulfil other responsibilities—to live up to the demands on me—I had got down to realities—"

A laugh broke from her lips, which had grown so stiff that they hurt her when she tried to smile. "Realities!" she exclaimed, "and yet you must have seen her face as I saw it to-day."

For the third time, in that expressionless tone which covered a nervous irritation, he repeated gravely, "I am sorry."

"There is nothing more real," she went on presently, "there is nothing more real than that look in the face of a living thing."

For the first time her words seemed to reach him. He was trying with all his might, she perceived, he was spiritually fumbling over the effort to feel and to think what she expected of him. With his natural fairness he was honestly struggling to see her point of view.

"If it is really like that," he said, "What can I do?"

All her life, it seemed to Corinna, she had been adjusting the difficulties and smoothing out the destinies of other persons. All her life she had been arranging some happiness that was not hers. To-night it was the happiness of Alice Rokeby, an acquaintance merely, a woman to whom she was profoundly indifferent, which lay in her hands.

"There is something that you can do," she said lightly, obeying now that instinct for things as they ought to be, for surface pleasantness, which warred in her mind with her passion for truth. "You can go to see her again."



CHAPTER XX

CORINNA FACES LIFE

AT nine o'clock the next morning Corinna came through the sunshine on the flagged walk and got into her car. She was wearing her smartest dress of blue serge and her gayest hat of a deep old red. Never had she looked more radiant; never had she carried her glorious head with a more triumphant air.

"Stop first at Mrs. Rokeby's, William," she said to the chauffeur, "and while I am there you may take this list to market."

As the car rolled off, her eyes turned back lovingly to the serene brightness of the garden into which she had infused her passion for beauty and order and gracious living. Rain had fallen in the night, and the glowing borders beyond the house shone like jewels in a casket. Beneath the silvery blue of the sky each separate blade of grass glistened as if an enchanter's wand had turned it to crystal. The birds were busily searching for worms on the lawn; as the car passed a flash of scarlet darted across the road; and above a clear shining puddle clouds of yellow butterflies drifted like blown rose-leaves.

"How beautiful everything is," thought Corinna. "Why isn't beauty enough? Why does beauty without love turn to sadness?" Her head, which had drooped for a moment, was lifted gallantly. "It ought to be enough just to be alive and not hungry on a morning like this."

The house in which Mrs. Rokeby lived appeared to Corinna, as she entered it presently, to have given up hope as utterly as its mistress had done. Though it was nearly ten o'clock, the front pavement had not been swept, the hall was still dark, and a surprised coloured maid, in a soiled apron, answered the doorbell.

"Poor thing," thought, Corinna. "I always heard that she was a good housekeeper. It is queer how soon one's state of mind passes into one's surroundings. I wonder if unhappiness could ever make me so indifferent to appearances?" To the maid, who knew her, she said, "I think Mrs. Rokeby will see me if she is awake. It is only for a minute or two."

Then she went into the drawing-room, where the shades were still down, and stood looking at the furniture and the curtains which were powdered with dust. On the table, where the books and photographs were disarranged and a fancy box of chocolates lay with the top off, there was a crystal vase of flowers; but the flowers were withered, and the water smelt as if it had not been changed for a week. Over the mantelpiece the long gilt-framed mirror reflected, through a gray film, the darkened room with its forlorn disarrangement. The whole place had the vague depressing smell of closed rooms, or of dead flowers, the very odour of unhappiness.

"Poor thing!" thought Corinna again. "That a man should have the power to make anybody suffer like this!" And beneath her sense of fruitless endeavour and wasted romance, there awoke and stirred in her the dominant instinct of her nature, the instinct to bring order out of confusion, to make the crooked straight, to change discord into harmony, that irresistible instinct for things as they ought to be. She longed to fling up the shades, to let in the sunshine, to drive out the dust and cobwebs, to put fresh flowers in the place of the dead ones. She longed, as she said to herself with a smile, "to get her hands on the room." If she could only change all this hopelessness into happiness! If she could only restore pleasure here, or at least the semblance of peace! "It is just as well that all of us can't feel things this much," she reflected.

"Mrs. Rokeby ain't dressed, but she says would you mind coming up?" The maid, having attired herself in a clean apron and a crooked cap, stood in the doorway. As Corinna followed her, she led the way up the narrow stairs into the bedroom where Alice was waiting.

"I thought you wouldn't be dressed," began Corinna cheerfully, "but it's the only time I have free, and I wanted to see you this morning."

"It is so good of you," responded Alice, putting out her hand. "Everything looks dreadful, I know; but I haven't been well, and one of the servants has gone to a funeral in the country."

"It doesn't matter," Corinna hesitated an instant, "only I wish you would make some one throw out those dead flowers downstairs."

"I haven't been in the room for a week," replied Alice, dropping back on the couch as if her strength had failed her. "I don't seem to care about the house or anything else."

As soon as her surprise at Corinna's visit had faded, she sank again into a listless attitude. Her figure grew relaxed; the faint animation died in her face; and she gazed at her visitor with a look of passive tragedy, which made Corinna, who was never passive, feel that she should like to shake her. Her soft brown hair, as fine as spun silk, was tucked under a cap of old lace, and beneath the drooping frill her melancholy features reminded Corinna of a Byzantine saint. Over her nightgown, she had thrown on a Japanese kimono of ashen blue, embroidered in plum blossoms which looked wilted. Everything about her, Corinna thought, looked wilted, as if each inanimate object that surrounded her had been stricken by the hopelessness of her spirit. To Corinna's energetic temperament, there was something positively immoral in this languid resignation. "Un-happiness like this is contagious," she thought. "And all because one man has ceased to love her! What utter folly!" Aloud she said only, "I came to ask you to go with me to the Harrisons' dance."

"To-morrow? Oh, Corinna, I couldn't!"

"Do you remember that blue dress—the one that is the colour of wild hyacinths?"

"Yes, but I couldn't wear it again, and I haven't anything else."

"Well, I like you in that, but wear whatever you please as long as it is becoming. You must look ethereal, and you must look happy. Men hate a sad face because it seems to reproach them, and, even if they murder you, they resent your reproaching them."

There was a deliberate purpose in her levity, for an intuition to which she trusted was warning her that there are times when the only way to treat refractory circumstances is to bully them into submission. "If you once let life get the better of you, you are lost," she said to herself.

"You can't understand," Alice was murmuring while she wiped her eyes. "You have always had what you wanted."

Corinna laughed. "I am glad you see it that way," she rejoined, "but you would be nearer the truth if you had said I'd always wanted what I had."

"It seems to me that you've had everything."

"Very likely. The lot of another person is one of the mountains to which distance lends enchantment."

"You mean that you haven't been happy?"

"Oh, yes, I've been happy. If I hadn't been, with all I've had, I should be ashamed to admit it."

But Alice was in a mood of mournful condolence. She had pitied herself so overwhelmingly that some of the sentiment had splashed over on the lives of others. It was her habit to sit still under affliction, and when one sits still, one has a long time in which to remember and regret.

"Your marriage must have been a disappointment to you," she said, "but you were so brave, poor dear, that nobody suspected it until you were separated."

"I am not a poor dear," retorted Corinna, "and there were a great many things in life for me besides marriage."

"There wouldn't have been in my place," insisted Alice, with a submissive manner but a stubborn mind.

Corinna gazed at her speculatively for a moment; and in her speculation there was the faintest tinge of contempt, the contempt which, in spite of her pity, she felt for all weakness. "I shouldn't have got into your place," she responded presently, "and if I ever found myself there by mistake, I'd make haste to get out of it."

"But suppose you had been like me, Corinna?" The words were a wail of despair.

A laugh rippled like music from Corinna's lips. It was cruel to laugh, she knew, but it was all so preposterous! It was turning things upside down with vehemence when one tried to live by feeling in a world which was manifestly designed for the service of facts. "You ought to have gone on the stage, Alice," she said. "Painted scenery is the only background that is appropriate to you."

Alice sighed. She looked very pretty in her shallow fashion, or Corinna felt that she couldn't have borne it. "You are awfully kind, Corinna," she returned, "but you have so little sentiment."

"I know, my dear, but I have some common sense which has served me very well in its place." As Corinna spoke she got up and roamed restlessly about the room, because the sight of that passive figure, wrapped in wilted plum blossoms, made her feel as if she wanted to scream. "You can't help being a fool, Alice," she said sternly, "and as long as you are a pretty one, I suppose men won't mind. But you must continue to be a pretty one, or it is all over with you."

The face that Alice turned on her showed a curious mixture of humility over the criticism and satisfaction over the compliment. "I know I've lost my looks dreadfully," she replied, grasping the most important point first, "and, of course, I have been a fool about John. If I hadn't cared so much, things might have been different."

Corinna stopped her impatient moving about and looked down on her. "I didn't mean that kind of fool," she retorted; but just what kind of fool she had meant, she thought it indiscreet to explain.

Suddenly, with a dash of nervous energy which appeared to run like a stimulant through her veins, Alice straightened herself and lifted her head. "It is easy for you to say that," she rejoined, "but you have never been loved to desperation and then deserted."

"No," responded Corinna, with the ripe judgment that is the fruit of bitter experience, "but, if I were ever loved to desperation, I should expect to be. Desperation does things like that."

"You couldn't bear it any better than I can. No woman could."

"Perhaps not." Though Corinna's voice was flippant, there was a stern expression on her beautiful face—the expression that Artemis might have worn when she surveyed Aphrodite. "But I should never have been deserted. I should have taken good care to prevent it."

"I took care too," retorted Alice, with passion, "but I couldn't prevent it."

"Your measures were wrong. It is always safer to be on the side of the active rather than the passive verb."

With a careless movement, Corinna picked up her beaded bag, which she had laid on the table, and turned to adjust her veil before the mirror. "If you will let me manage your life for a little while," she observed, with an appreciative glance at the daring angle of the red hat, "I may be able to do something with it, for I am a practical person as well as a capable manager. Father calls me, you know, the repairer of destinies."

"If I thought it would do any good, I'd go to the ball with you," said Alice eagerly, while a delicate colour stained the wan pallor of her face.

"Do you really think," asked Corinna brightly, "that John, able politician though he is, is worth all that trouble?"

"Oh, it isn't just John," moaned Alice; "it is everything."

"Well, if I am going to repair your destiny, I must do it in my own practical way. For a time at least we will let sentiment go and get down to facts. As long as you haven't much sense, it is necessary for you to make yourself as pretty as possible, for only intelligent women can afford to take liberties with their appearances. The first step must be to buy a hat that is full of hope as soon as you can. Oh, I don't mean anything jaunty or frivolous; but it must be a hat that can look the world in the face."

A keen interest awoke in Alice's eyes, and she looked immediately younger. "If I can find one, I'll buy it," she answered. "I'll get dressed in a little while and go out."

"And remember the hyacinth-blue dress. Have it made fresh for to-morrow." Turning in the doorway, Corinna continued with humorous vivacity, "There is only one little thing we must forget, and that is love. The less said about it the better; but you may take it on my authority that love can always be revived by heroic treatment. If John ever really loved you, and you follow my advice, he will love you again."

With a little song on her lips, and her gallant head in the red hat raised to the sunlight, she went out of the house and down the steps into her car. "Fools are very exhausting," she thought, as she bowed to a passing acquaintance, "but I think that she will be cured." Then, at the sight of Stephen leaving the Culpeper house, she leaned out and waved to him to join her.

"My dear boy, how late you are!" she exclaimed, when the car had stopped and he got in beside her.

"Yes, I am late." He looked tired and thoughtful. "I stopped to have a talk with Mother, and she kept me longer than I realized."

"Is anything wrong?"

He set his lips tightly. "No, nothing more than usual."

Corinna gazed up at the blue sky and the sunlight. Why wouldn't people be happy? Why were they obliged to cause so much unnecessary discomfort? Why did they persist in creating confusion?

"Well, I hope you are coming to the dance to-morrow night," she said cheerfully.

"Yes. Mother has asked me to take Margaret Blair."

"I am glad. Margaret is a nice girl. I am going to take Patty Vetch."

He started, and though she was not looking at him, she knew that his face grew pale. "Don't you think she will look lovely, just like a mermaid, in green and silver?" she asked lightly.

"I don't know," he answered stiffly. "I am trying not to think about her."

Corinna laughed. "Oh, my dear, just wait until you see her in that sea-green gown!"

That he was caught fast in the web of the tribal instinct, Corinna realized as perfectly as if she had seen the net closing visibly round him. Though she was unaware of the blow Patty had dealt him, she felt his inner struggle through that magical sixth sense which is the gift of the understanding heart, of the heart that has outgrown the shell of the personal point of view. If he would only for once break free from artificial restraints! If he would only let himself be swept into something that was larger than his own limitations!

"I am very fond of Patty," she said. "The more I see of her, the finer I think she is."

His lips did not relax. "There is a great deal of talk at the club about the Governor."

"Oh, this strike of course! What do they say?"

"A dozen different things. Nobody knows exactly how to take him."

"I wonder if we have ever understood him," said Corinna, a little sadly. "I sometimes think—" Then she broke off hurriedly. "No, don't get out, I'll take you down to your office. I sometimes think," she resumed, "that none of us see him as he really is because we see him through a veil of prejudice, or if you like it better, of sentiment—"

Stephen laughed without mirth. "I don't like it better. I'd like to get into a world—or at least I feel this morning that I'd like to get into a world where one was obliged to face nothing softer than a fact—"

Corinna looked at him tenderly. She had a sincere, though not a very deep affection, for Stephen, and she felt that she should like to help him, as long as helping him did not necessitate any emotional effort. "Has it ever occurred to you," she asked gently, "that the trouble with you, after all, is simply lack of courage?" At the start he gave, she continued hastily, "Oh, I don't mean physical courage of course. I do not doubt that you were as brave as a lion when it came to meeting the Germans. But there are times when life is more terrible than the Germans! And yet the only courage we have ever glorified is brute courage—the courage of the lion. I know that you could face machine guns and bayonets and all the horrors of war; but it seems to me that you have never had really the courage of living—that you have always been a little afraid of life."

For a long while he did not answer. His eyes were on the sky; and she watched the expression of irritation, amazement, dread, perplexity, and shocked comprehension, pass slowly over his features. "By Jove, I've got a feeling that you may be right," he said at last. "You probed the wound, and it hurt for a minute; but it may heal all the quicker for that. You've put the whole rotten business into a nutshell. I'm a coward at bottom, that's the trouble with me. Oh, like you, of course, I'm not talking about actual dangers. They are easy enough, for one can see them coming. It's not fear of the Germans. It's fear of something that one can't touch or feel—that doesn't even exist—the fear of one's imagination. But the truth is that I've funked things for the last year or so. I've been in a chronic blue funk about living."

She smiled at him brightly. "It is like a bit of thistle-down. Bring it out into the air and sunlight, and it will blow away."

"I wonder if you're right. Already I feel better because I've told you; and yet I've gone in terror lest my mother should discover it."

When she spoke again she changed the subject as lightly as if they had been discussing the weather. "You used to be interested in public matters. Do you remember how you talked to me in your college days about outstripping John in the race? You were full of ideas then, and full of ambition too." She was touching a string that had never failed her yet, and she waited, with an inscrutable smile, for the response.

"I know," he answered, "but that was in another life—that was before the war."

"Do those ideas never come back to you? Have you lost your ambition?"

"I can't tell. I sometimes think that it died in France. I got to feel over there that these political issues were merely local and temporary. Often, the greater part of the time, I suppose, I feel like that now. Then suddenly all my old ambition comes back in a spurt, and for a little while I think I am cured. While that lasts I am as eager, as full of interest, as I used to be. But it dies down as suddenly as it sprang up, and the reaction is only indifference and lassitude. I seem to have lost the power to keep a single state of mind, or even an interest."

"But do you ever think seriously of the part you might take in this town?"

The look of immobility passed from his face; his eyes grew warmer, and it seemed to her that he became more alive and more human. "Oh, I think a great deal. My ideas have changed too." He was talking rapidly and without connection. "I am not the same man that I was a few years ago. I may be wrong, but I feel that I've got down to a firmer basis—a basis of facts." Then he turned to her impulsively, "I wouldn't say this to any one else, Corinna, because no one else would understand what I mean—but I've learned a good deal from Gideon Vetch."

"Ah!" Her eyes were smiling. "I think I know what you mean."

"Of course you know. But imagine Father! He would think, if I told him, that it was a symptom of mental derangement—that some German shell had left a permanent dent in my brain."

"Perhaps. Yet I am not sure that you understand your father. I think he is more like you than you fancy; that if you once pierced his reserve, you would find him a sentimentalist at heart. There is your office," she added, "but you must not get out now. We will turn back for a quarter of an hour." She spoke to the chauffeur, and then said to Stephen, with a sensation of unutterable relief, "a quarter of an hour won't make any difference at the office to-day."

"Perhaps not when I've lost three hours already. I sometimes think they would never notice it if I stayed away all the time. But what I mean about Vetch is simply that he has set me thinking. He does that, you know. Oh, I admit that he is mistaken—or downright wrong—in a number of ways! He is too sensational for our taste—too flamboyant; but one can't get away from him. He has shaken the dust from us; he has jolted us into movement. I have a feeling somehow that his personality is spread all over the place—that we are smeared with Gideon Vetch, as the darkeys would say."

He was already a different Stephen from the one who had got into her car an hour ago, and she breathed a secret prayer of thanksgiving.

"I think even John feels that now and then," she said, and a moment afterward, "Is it possible, do you suppose, that we shall find when it is too late that this Gideon Vetch is the stone that the builders rejected? A ridiculous fancy, and yet who knows, it might turn out to be true. Stranger things have happened than that!"

"It may be. One never can tell." Then he laughed with tolerant affection. "I've found out the trouble with John."

"The trouble with John?" Her voice trembled.

"Yes, the trouble with John is that he lacks blood at the brain. He is trying to make a living organism out of a skeleton—to build the world over on a skull and cross-bones—and it can't be done. I admire John as much as I ever did. He is as logical as a problem in geometry. But Vetch is nearer to the truth of things. Vetch has the one attribute that John needs to make him complete."

She nodded. "I know. You mean feeling?"

"Human sympathy—the sympathy that means imagination and insight. That is the only power that Vetch has, but, by Jove, it is the greatest of all! It is the spirit that comprehends, that reconciles, and recreates. Both Vetch and John have failed, I think; Vetch for want of education, system, method, and John because, having all this essential framework, he still lacked the blood and fibre of humanity. In its essence, I suppose it is a difference of principle, the old familiar struggle between the romantic and the realistic temperament, which divides in politics into the progressive and the conservative forces. There is nothing in history, I learned that at college, except the war between these two irreconcilable spirits. Irreconcilable, they call them, and yet I wonder, I wonder more and more, if this is not a misinterpretation of history? It seems to me that the leader of the future, even in so small a community as this one, must be big enough to combine opposite elements; that he must take the good where he finds it; that he must vitalize tradition and discipline progress—"

"You mean that he must accept both the past and the future?" While her heart craved the substance of truth, she dispensed platitudes with a benevolent air.

"How can it be otherwise? That, it seems to me, is the only logical way out of the muddle. The difficulty, of course, is to remain practical—not to let the vision run away with one. It will require moderation, which Vetch has not, and adaptability, which John has never learned."

"And never will learn," rejoined Corinna. "He is made of the mettle that breaks but does not bend."

"Like my father; like all those who have petrified in the shape of a convention. And yet the new stuff—the ideas that haven't turned to stone—are full of froth—they splash over. Take Vetch and this strike, for instance. I myself believe that he wants to do the right thing, to protect the public at any cost; but he has gone too far; he has splashed over the dividing line between principle and expediency. Will he be able to stand firm at the last?"

"Father says there is to be a meeting Thursday night."

"Yes, and he'll be obliged to come to some decision then, or at least to drop a hint as to the line he intends to pursue. I am afraid there will be trouble either way."

"The Governor shows the strain," said Corinna. "I saw him yesterday."

"How can he help it? He has got himself into a tight place. Oh, there are times when temporizing is more dangerous than action! It's hard to see how he'll get out of it unless he cuts a way, and if he does that, he'll probably lose the strongest support he has ever had."

Stephen's face was transfigured now. It had lost the look of dryness, of apathy; and she watched the glow of health shine again in his eyes as it used to shine when he was at college. So it was not emotion that was to restore him! It was the ancient masculine delusion, as invulnerable as truth, that the impersonal interests are the significant ones. Well, she was not quarrelling with delusions as long as they were beneficent! And since it was impossible for her fervent soul to care greatly for general principles, or to dwell long among impersonal forms of thought, she found herself regarding this public crisis, less as a warfare of political theories, than as a possible cure for Stephen's condition. For the rest, except for their results, beneficial or otherwise, to the individual citizen, problems of government interested her not at all. The whole trouble with life seemed to her to rise, not from mistaken theory, but from the lack of consideration with which human beings treated one another. Happiness, after all, depended so little upon opinions and so much upon manners.

"Throw yourself into this work, Stephen," she urged. "It is a splendid opportunity."

He smiled at her in the old boyish way. "An opportunity for what?"

"For—" It was on the tip of her tongue to say "for health"; but she checked herself, remembering the incurable distaste men have for calling things by their right names, and replied instead, "an opportunity for usefulness."

His smile faded, and he turned on her eyes that were almost melancholy, though the fire of animation still warmed them. "I am interested now. I care a great deal—but will it last? Haven't I felt this way a hundred times in the last six months, only to grow indifferent and even bored within the next few hours?"

She looked at him closely. "Isn't there any feeling—any interest that lasts with you?"

He hesitated, while a burning colour, like the flush of fever, swept up to his forehead. "Only one, and I am trying to get over that," he answered after a moment.

"If it is a genuine feeling, are you wise to get over it?" she asked. "Genuine feeling is so rare. I think if I could feel an overwhelming emotion, I should hug it to my heart as the most precious of gifts."

"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," assented 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 attitude 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 constitution, 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 analyse 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 circumstances 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 assume 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 association 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 Willy 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 classification of Janet aroused his amusement. "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," assented 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.

The May night was as warm as summer, and swinging garlands of ferns and peonies concealed electric fans which were suspended from the ceiling. In the midst of the strong wind of the whirring fans, the dancers in the two long drawing-rooms appeared to be blown violently in circles and eddies, like coloured leaves in a high wind. For a few minutes after Stephen had entered, the rooms seemed to him merely a brilliant haze, where the revolving figures appeared and vanished like the colours of a kaleidoscope. Near the door he became aware of the resplendent form of his hostess, stationed appropriately against a background of peonies; and after she had greeted him with absent-minded cordiality, he passed with Margaret in the direction of the thundering sounds which came from the bank of ferns behind which the musicians were hidden.

"Shall we try this?" he shouted into Margaret's ear.

She shook her head. "It's one of those horrid new things." Her high, clear tones pierced the din like the music of a flute. "Let's wait until they play something nice. I hate jazz."

She was looking very pretty in a dress like a white cloud, with garlands of tiny rosebuds on the skirt; and he thought, as he looked at her, that if she had only been a trifle less fastidious and refined, she might easily have won the reputation of a beauty. Nothing but a delicate superiority to the age in which she had been born, stood in the way of her success. Sixty years ago, in modest crinolines, she might have made history; and duels would probably have been fought for her favour. But other times, other tastes, he reflected.

For the rest of the dance, they sat sedately between two bay-trees in green tubs that occupied a corner of the room. Then "something nicer" started,—a concession to Mrs. Harrison's mother, who shared Margaret's disapproval of jazz,—and Stephen and Margaret drifted slowly out among the revolving couples. After the third dance, relief appeared in the person of the young clergyman, who had come to look on; and leaving Margaret with him between the bay-trees, Stephen started eagerly to search for Patty where the dancers were thickest.

Across the room, he had already caught a glimpse of Corinna, in a queenly gown of white and silver brocade. She had stopped dancing now; and standing between Alice Rokeby and John Benham, she was glancing brightly about her, while she waved slowly a fan of white ostrich plumes. Among all these fresh young girls, she could easily hold her own, not because of her beauty, but because of that deeper fascination which she shed like a light or a perfume. She had the something more than beauty which these girls lacked and could never acquire—a legendary enchantment, the air of romance. Was this the result, he wondered now, of what she had missed in life rather than of what she had attained? Was it because she had never lived completely, because she had preferred the dream to the event, because she had desired and refrained, because she had missed both enchantment and disenchantment—was it because of the profound inadequacy of experience, that she had been able to keep undimmed the glow of her loveliness? It was not that she looked young, he realized while he watched her, but that she looked ageless and immortal, a creature of the spirit. While he gazed at her across the violent whirl of colours in the ballroom, he remembered the evening star shining silver white in the afterglow. Perhaps, who could tell, she may have had the best that life had to give?

Making his way, with difficulty, through the throng, he followed Corinna's protecting gaze, until he saw that it rested on Alice Rokeby, who was wearing a dress that reminded him of wild hyacinths. For a moment, the sight of this other woman's face, with its soft, hungry eyes, and its expression of passive and unresisting sweetness, gave him a start of surprise; and he found himself knocking awkwardly against one of the dancers. Something had happened to her! Something had restored, if only for an evening, the peculiar grace, the appealing prettiness, too trivial and indefinite for beauty, which he recalled vividly now, though for the last year or two he had almost forgotten that she ever possessed it. Yes, something had changed her. She looked to-night as she used to look before he went away, with a faint flush over her whole face and those soft flower-like eyes, lifted admiringly to some man, to any man except Herbert Rokeby. Then, as he disentangled himself from the whirl, and went toward Corinna, she came a step or two forward, and left John Benham and Alice Rokeby together.

"Everything is going well," she said; and he noticed, for the first time, that her charming smile was tinged with irony, as if the humour of the show, not the drama, were holding her attention. "I am having a beautiful time."

He glanced over her shoulder. "What have you done to Mrs. Rokeby?"

She shook her head, with a laugh which, he surmised sympathetically, was less merry than it sounded. "That is my secret. I have a magic you know—but she looks well, doesn't she? I did her hair myself. If you could have seen the way she had it arranged! That dress is very becoming, I think, it makes her eyes look like frosted violets. Her appearance is a success—but 'More brain, O Lord, more brain'!"

"Do you suppose that type will ever pass?" he asked.

She met his inquiring look with eyes that were golden in the coloured light. "Do you suppose that women will ever mean more to men than pegs on which to hang their sentiments? Alice and her kind will always be convenient substitutes for a man's admiration of himself."

"Which he calls love, you think?"

"Which he probably calls by the most romantic name that occurs to him. Have you seen Patty?"

Before he could reply, she turned away to speak to some one who was approaching on her other side; and a minute later, with a joyous smile at Stephen, she floated off in the dance. Was she really as happy as she looked, or was it only a gallant pretence, nothing more?

He had not found Patty yet; and while he stood there, with his eyes eagerly searching the revolving throng for her face, he had a singular visitation, a poignant sense that some rare and beautiful event was eluding him in its flight, a feeling that the wings of the moment had brushed him like feathers as it sped by into experience. Once or twice in his life before he had received this impression; first in his boyhood when he rose one morning at sunrise to go hunting, and again in France after he had come out of the trenches. Now it was so vivid that it brought with it a sensation of fear, as if happiness itself were escaping his pursuit. He felt that his heart was burning with impatience, and there was a persistent hammering in his ears as if he had been running. What finding her would mean, what the future would bring, he did not know, he did not even seek to discover. All he understood was that the old indifference, the old apathy, the old subjective, tormenting egoism, had given place to a consuming interest, an impassioned delight. He felt only that he was thirsty for life, and that he must drink deep to be satisfied.

Then, suddenly, it seemed to him that the music grew softer and slower, and the wind-blown throng faded from him into a rosy haze. From the centre of the room, borne round and round like a flower on a stream, he saw her face and her romantic eyes looking at him with a deep expectancy that brought a pang to his heart. Her head was thrown back; the short black hair blew about her like mist; and her cheeks and lips were glowing with geranium red. At that instant she was not only the girl he loved—she was youth and spring and adventure.

The impatience had died now; the burning of his heart was cooled; and life had grown miraculously simple and easy. He knew at last what he wanted. His strength of purpose, his will to live had returned to him; and he felt that he was cured; that he was completely himself for the first time since his return. The dark depression, the shadows of the prison, were behind him now. Straight ahead were the roads of that hidden country, and for the first time he saw them flushed with an April bloom.

Then the music stopped; the throng scattered; and she came toward him with a tall young man, very slim and nimble, whose name was Willy Tarleton. In her dress of green and silver, with a wreath of leaves in her hair, she reminded him again of a flower, but of a flower of foam. As he held out his hand the dance began again; Willy Tarleton vanished into air; and Patty stood looking at him in silence. After the tumult of his impatience, it seemed to him that when they met, they must speak words of profound significance; but all he said was,

"It is so warm in here. Will you come out on the porch?"

She shook her head. "I thought you were with Miss Blair?"

"I am—I was—but I must speak to you before I go back. Come on the porch where it is so much quieter."

The deep expectancy was still in her eyes. "I have promised every dance. Mrs. Page saw that my card was filled in the beginning. Why don't you ask some of the girls who haven't any partners? It is so dreadful for them. If men only knew!"

"I don't know, and I don't care. I want you. If you will come on the porch for just three minutes—"

"Yes, it is quieter," she assented, and passed, with a dancing step, through the French window out on the long porch which was hung with Chinese lanterns. Beyond was the wide lawn, suffused with a light that was the colour of amethyst, and beyond the lawn there was a narrow view of Franklin Street, where the flashing lamps of motor cars went by, or shadowy figures moved for a little space in obscurity. From this other world, now and then, the sharp sound of a motor horn punctuated the monotonous rhythm of the music within the house; while under the Chinese lanterns, where the shadows of the poplar leaves trembled like flowers, the struggle in Stephen's heart came to an end—the struggle between tradition and life, between the knowledge of things as they are and the vision of things as they ought to be, between the conservative and the progressive principle in nature. After the long insensibility, spring was having her way with him, as she was having it with the grass and the flowers and the bloom on the trees. It was one of those moments of awakening, of ecstatic vision, which come only to introspective and imaginative minds—to minds that have known darkness as well as light. In that instant of realization, he knew, beyond all doubt, that he stood not for the past, but for the future, that he stood not for philosophy, but for adventure—for the will to be and to dare. He would choose, once for all, to take the risk of happiness; to conquer inch by inch a little more of the romantic wilderness of wonder and delight. While he stood there, looking down into her eyes, these impressions came to him less in words than in a glorious sense of youth, of power, of security of spirit.

"I looked for you so long," he said, and then breathlessly, as if he feared lest she might escape him, "Oh, Patty, I love you!"

Before she could reply, before he could repeat the words that drummed in his brain, the door into the present swung open, and the dream world, with its flower-like shadows and its violet dusk, vanished.

"Patty!" called Corinna's voice. "Patty, dear, I am looking for you." Corinna, in her rustling white and silver brocade, stepped from the French window out on the porch. "Some one has sent for you—your aunt, I think they said, who is dying—"

The girl started and drew back. Her face changed, while the light faded from her eyes until they became wells of darkness. "I know," she answered. "I must go. I promised that I would go."

"My car is waiting. I will take you," said Corinna.

She turned to enter the house, and Patty, without so much as a look at Stephen's face, went slowly after her.



CHAPTER XXII

THE NIGHT

As the car passed through the deserted streets, Corinna placed her hand on Patty's with a reassuring pressure. Without appearing to do so, she was studying the girl's soft profile, now flashing out in a sudden sharp light, now melting back again into the vagueness of the shadows. What was there about this girl, Corinna asked herself, which appealed so strongly to the protective impulse in her heart? Was it because this undisciplined child, with that curious sporting instinct which supplied the place of Victorian morality, represented for her, as well as for Stephen, some inarticulate longing for the unknown, for the adventurous? Did Patty's charm for them both lie in her unlikeness to everything they had known in the past? In Corinna, as in Stephen, two opposing spirits had battled unceasingly, the realistic spirit which accepted life as it was, and the romantic spirit which struggled toward some unattainable perfection, which endeavoured to change and decorate the actuality. More than Stephen, perhaps, she had faced life; but she had not accepted it without rebellion. She had learned from disappointment to see things as they are; but deep in her heart some unspent fire of romance, some imprisoned esthetic impulse, sought continually to gild and enrich the experience of the moment. And this girl, so young, so ingenuous, so gallant and so appealing, stood in Corinna's mind for the poetic wildness of her spirit, for all that she had seen in a vision and had missed in reality.

When the car reached the Square, it turned sharply north. Sometimes it passed through lighted spaces and sometimes through pools of darkness; and as it went on rapidly, it seemed to Corinna that it was the one solid fact in a night that she imagined. Patty was very still; but Corinna felt the warm clasp of her hand, and heard her soft breathing, which became a part of the muffled undercurrent of the sleeping city. In all those closely packed houses, where the obscurity was broken here and there by a lighted window, other human beings were breathing, sleeping, dreaming, like Patty and herself, of some impractical and visionary to-morrow. Of something which had never been, but still might be! Of something which they had just missed, but might find when the sun rose again! Of a miracle that might occur at any moment and make everything different! It was after midnight; and to Corinna it seemed that the darkness had released the collective spirit of the city, which would retreat again into itself with the breaking of dawn. Once a cry sounded far off and was hushed almost immediately; once a light flashed and went out in the window beneath a roof; but as the car sped on by rows of darkened tenements, the mysterious penumbra of the night appeared to draw closer and closer, as if that also were a phantom of the encompassing obscurity.

"Is this the aunt you told me of, Patty?" asked Corinna abruptly.

"Yes, I went to see her once—not long ago. I promised her that I'd come back when she sent for me. She wanted to tell me something, but she was so ill that she couldn't remember what it was. It was about Father, she said."

"Stephen will come for us after he has taken Margaret home. I gave him the number."

Patty turned and gave her a long look. They were passing under an electric light at the time, and Corinna thought, as she looked into the girl's face, that all the wistful yearning of the night was reflected in her eyes. What had happened, she wondered, to change their sparkling brightness into this brooding expectancy.

The car stopped before the house to which Patty had come with Gershom; and as they got out, they saw that it was entirely dark except for the dim flicker of a jet of gas in the hall. By the pavement a car was standing, and from somewhere at the back there came the sound of a baby crying inconsolably in the darkness. While they entered the hall, and went up the broad old-fashioned flight of stairs, that plaintive wail followed them, growing gradually fainter as they ascended, but never fading utterly into silence. When they reached the second storey, and turned toward the back of the house, a door at the end of the passage opened, and an old woman, with a hunch back, and a piece of knitting in her gnarled hands, came slowly to meet them. Standing there under the jet of gas, which flickered with a hissing noise, she looked at them with glassy impersonal eyes and a face that was as austere as Destiny. Afterward, when Corinna thought over the impressions of that tragic night, she felt that they were condensed into the symbol of the old woman with the crooked back, and the thin crying of the baby which floated up from the darkness below.

"We came to see Mrs. Green," explained Corinna.

The old woman nodded, and as she turned to limp down the passage, her ball of gray yarn slipped from her grasp and rolled after her until Corinna recovered it. In silence the cripple led the way, and in silence they followed her, until she opened the closed door at the end of the hall, and they entered the room, with the sickening sweetish smell and the window which gave on the black hulk of the ailantus tree. From behind a screen, which was covered with faded wall paper, the figure of the doctor emerged while they waited, an ample middle-aged man, with the air of having got into his clothes in a hurry and the face of a pragmatic philosopher. He motioned commandingly for them to approach; and going to the other side of the screen, they found the dying woman gazing at them with eager eyes.

"She is doing nicely," remarked the doctor, with the cheerful alacrity of one in whom familiarity has bred contempt of death. "Keep her quiet. One can never tell about these cases."

He made an explanatory gesture in the direction of his pocket. "I'll go down on the porch and smoke a cigar, and then if she hasn't had a relapse, I think it will be safe for me to go home. You can telephone if you need me. I am only a few blocks away." He went out with a brisk, elastic step, while his hand began to feel for the end of the cigar in his pocket.

"She's bad now," said the old woman. "It's the medicine, but she'll come to in a minute." She brought two wooden chairs with broken legs to the foot of the bed. "You'd better sit down. It may be a long waiting."

"I hope she'll know me," returned Patty. "She must have wanted to see me, or she wouldn't have sent." Her eyes left the stricken face and clung to the calla lily on the window-sill, as they had done that afternoon when she came here with Gershom. The single blossom on the lily had not faded; it was still as perfect as it had been then—only two days ago!—and not one of the closed buds had begun to open beside it.

"Oh, she wanted to see you," answered the old woman, in a croaking voice which seemed to Corinna to contain a sinister note. "As long as she was able to keep on her feet she used to go and sit in the Square just to watch you come out—"

"Do you mean that she cared for me like that?" asked the girl, in a hushed incredulous tone. "Was she really fond of me?"

The cripple turned her glassy eyes on the fresh young face. "Well, I don't know that she was fond," she responded bleakly, "but when you're as bad off as that, there ain't many things that you can think of."

A murmur fell from the lips of the dying woman, while she rolled her head slowly from side to side, as if she were seeking ease less from physical pain than from the thought in her mind. Her thick black hair, matted and damp where it had been brushed back from her forehead, spread like a veil over the pillow; and this sombre background lent a graven majesty to her features. At the moment her head appeared as expressionless as a mask; but in a few minutes, while they waited for returning consciousness, a change passed slowly over the waxen face, and the full colourless lips began to move rapidly and to form broken and disconnected sentences. For a time they could not understand; then the words came in a long sobbing breath. "It has been too long. It has been too long."

"That goes on all the time," said the old woman. "I've been up with her for three nights, and she rambles almost every minute. But sick folks are like that," she concluded philosophically. She had not laid down her knitting for an instant; and standing now beside the bed, she jerked the gray yarn automatically through her twisted fingers. The clicking of the long wooden needles formed an accompaniment to the dry, hard sound of her words.

"Why doesn't some one hush that child?" asked Corinna impatiently. Through the open window a breeze entered, bringing the thin restless wail of the baby.

"The mother tries, but she can't do anything. She thinks the milk went wrong and gave it colic."

The woman on the bed spoke suddenly in a clear voice. "Why doesn't he come?" she demanded. Raising her heavy lids she looked straight into Corinna's eyes, with a lucid and comprehending expression, as if she had just awakened from sleep.

Holding her knitting away from the bed with one hand, and bending over, until her deformed shape made a hill against the bedpost, the old woman screamed into the ear on the pillow, as if the hearer were either deaf or at a great distance. Though her manner was not heartless, it was as impassive as philosophy.

"He is coming," she shrieked.

"Is he bringing the child?"

"She is already here. Can't you see her there at the foot of the bed?"

The large black eyes, drained of any human expression, turned slowly toward the figure of Patty.

"But she is a little thing," said the woman doubtfully. "She is not three years old yet. What has he done with her? He told me that he would take care of her as if she belonged to him."

The old hunchback, bending her inscrutable face, screamed again into the ear on the pillow.

"That was near sixteen years ago, Maggie," she said. "Have you forgotten?"

The woman closed her eyes wearily. "Yes, I had forgotten," she answered. "Time goes so."

But it appeared to Corinna, sitting there, with her eyes on the strip of sky which was visible through the window, that time would never go on. A pitiless fact was breaking into her understanding, shattering wall after wall of incredulity, of conviction that such a thing was too terrible to be true. She longed to get Patty away; but when she urged her in a whisper to go downstairs, the girl only shook her head, without moving her eyes from the haggard face on the pillow. The minutes dragged by like hours while they waited there, in hushed suspense, for they scarcely knew what. Outside in the backyard, the flowering ailantus tree shed a disagreeable odour; downstairs the feeble crying, which had stopped for a little while, was beginning again. While she remained motionless at the foot of the bed, wild and rebellious thoughts flocked through Corinna's mind. If she had only held back that message! If she had only kept Patty away until it was too late! She thought of the girl a few hours ago, flushed with happiness, dancing under the swinging garlands of flowers, to the sound of that thunderous music. Dancing there, with the restless pleasure of youth, while in another street, so far away that it might have been in a distant city, in a different world even, this woman, with the face of tragedy, lay dying with that fretful wail in her ears. A different world it might have been, and yet what divided her from this other woman except the blind decision of chance, the difference between beauty and ugliness, nothing more. In this dingy room, smelling of dust and drugs and the heavy odour of the ailantus tree, she felt a presence more profoundly real, more poignantly significant, than any material forms—the presence of those elemental forces which connect time with eternity. This little room, within its partial shadow, like the shadow of time itself, was touched with the solemnity of a cathedral. It seemed to Corinna, with her imaginative love of life, that a window into experience had opened sharply, a wall had crumbled. For the first time she understood that the innumerable and intricate divisions of human fate are woven into a single tremendous design.

While they waited there in silence the hours dragged on like years. At last the woman appeared to sleep, and when she opened her eyes again, her gaze had become clear and lucid.

"Have you sent for them?" she asked.

"Yes, I sent for them," answered the old woman, lowering her voice to a natural pitch. "The girl is here."

"Patty? Where is she?"

Drawing her hand from Corinna's clasp, Patty moved slowly to the head of the bed, and standing there beside the deformed old woman, she looked down on the upturned face.

"I came as I promised. Can I help you?" she asked; and her voice was so quiet, so repressed, that Corinna looked at her anxiously. How much had the girl understood? And, if she understood, what difference would it make in her life—and in Stephen's life?

"I couldn't tell you the other day because of Julius," said the woman, in a strangled tone. "I couldn't say things before Julius." Then, glancing toward the door, she asked breathlessly, "Didn't Gideon Vetch come with you?"

"Father?" responded Patty, wonderingly. "Do you want Father to come?"

A smile crossed the woman's face, and she made a movement as if she wanted to raise her head. "Do you call him Father?" she returned in a pleased voice.

At the question, Corinna sprang up and made an impulsive step forward. "Oh, don't!" she cried out pleadingly. "Don't tell her!"

"But he is my father," Patty's tone was stern and accusing. "He is my father."

The smile was still on the woman's face; but while Corinna watched it, she realized that it was unlike any smile she had ever seen before in her life—a smile of satisfaction that was at the same time one of relinquishment.

"They thought I was married to him," she said slowly. "Julius thought, or pretended to think, that he could harm him by making me swear that I was married to him. They gave me drugs. I would have done anything for drugs—and I did that! But the old woman there knows better. She's got a paper. I made her keep it—about Patty—"

"Don't!" cried Corinna again in a sharper tone. "Oh, can't you see that you must not tell her!"

For the first time the woman turned her eyes away from the girl. "It is because of Gideon Vetch," she answered slowly. "I may get well again, and then I'll be sorry."

"But he would rather you wouldn't." Corinna's voice was full of pain. "You know—you must know, if you know him at all, that he would rather you spared her—"

"Know him?" repeated the woman, and she laughed with a dry, rattling sound. "I don't know him. I never saw him but once in my life."

"You never saw him but once." The words came so slowly from Patty's lips that she seemed to choke over them. "But you said that you knew my mother?"

Again the woman made that dry, rattling sound in her chest. "Your mother never saw him but once," she answered grimly. "She never saw him but once, and that was for a quarter of an hour on the night they were taking her to prison. I would never have told but for Julius," she added. "I would never have told if they hadn't tried to make out that I knew him, and that he was really your father. It would ruin him, they said, and that was what they wanted. But when they bring it out, with the paper they got me to sign, I want you to know that it is a lie—that I did it because I'd have died if I hadn't got hold of the drugs—"

"But he is my father," repeated Patty quite steadily—so steadily that her voice was without colour or feeling.

The only reply that came was a gasping sound, which grew louder and louder, with the woman's struggle for breath, until it seemed to fill the room and the night outside and even the desolate sky. As she lay back, with the arm of the old cripple under her head and her streaming hair, the spasm passed like a stain over her face, changing its waxen pallor to the colour of ashes, while a dull purplish shadow encircled her mouth. For a few minutes, so violent was the struggle for air, it appeared to Corinna that nothing except death could ever quiet that agonized gasping; but while she waited for the end, the sound became gradually fainter, and the woman spoke quite plainly, though with an effort that racked not only her strangled chest, but her entire body. Each syllable came so slowly, and now and then so faintly, that there were moments when it seemed that the breath in that tormented body would not last until the words had been spoken.

"You were going on three years old when he first saw you. They were taking me away to prison—that's over now, and it don't matter—but I hadn't any chance—" The panting began again; but by force of will, the woman controlled it after a minute, and went on, as if she were measuring her breath inch by inch, almost as if it were a material substance which she was holding in reserve for the end. "Your father died the first year I married him, and things went from bad to worse—there's no use going over that, no use—They were taking me to prison from the circus, and I had you in my arms, when Gideon Vetch came by and saw me—" Again there was a pause and a desperate battle for air; and again, after it was over, she went on in that strangled whisper, while her eyes, like the eyes of a drowning animal, clung neither to Patty nor Corinna, but to the austere face of the old hunchback. "'What am I to do with the child?' I asked, and he stepped right out of the circus crowd, and answered 'Give me the child. I like children'—" An inarticulate moan followed, and then she repeated clearly and slowly. "Just like that—nothing more—'Give me the child. I like children.' That was the first time I ever saw him. He had come to see some of the people in the circus, and I've never seen him since then except in the Square. The trial went against me, but that's all over. Oh, I'm tired now. It hurts me. I can't talk—"

She broke into terrible coughing; and the old woman, dropping her knitting for the first time since they had entered the room, seized a towel from a chair by the bed. "Talking was too much for her," she said. "I thought she'd pull through. She was so much better—but talking was too much."

"She is so ill that she doesn't know what she is saying," murmured Corinna in the girl's ear. "She is out of her mind."

"No, she isn't out of her mind," replied Patty quietly. "She isn't out of her mind." In her ball gown of green and silver, like the colours of sunlit foam, with a wreath of artificial leaves in her hair, her loveliness was unearthly. "It is every bit true. I know it," she reiterated.

"She's bleeding again," muttered the old woman. "You'd better find the doctor. I ain't used to stopping hemorrhages." Then, as Corinna went out of the room, she added querulously to Patty: "She didn't have no business trying to talk; but she would do it. She said she'd do it if it killed her—and I reckon she don't mind much if it does—She'd have killed herself sooner than this if I'd let her alone." From the street below there came the sound of a motor horn; then the noise of a car running against the curbstone; and then the opening and shutting of a door, followed by rapid footsteps on the stairs.

"That's the doctor now, I reckon," remarked the old woman; but the words had scarcely left her lips when the door opened, and Corinna came back into the room with Gideon Vetch.

"Where is Patty?" he asked anxiously. "She oughtn't to be here."

"Yes, I ought to be here," answered Patty. As she turned toward Gideon Vetch, she swayed as if she were going to fall, and he caught her in his arms. "Go home, daughter," he said almost sternly. "You oughtn't to be here. Mrs. Page, can't you make her go home?"

"I have tried," responded Corinna; then a moan from the bed reached her, and she turned toward the woman who lay there. To die like that with nobody caring, with nobody even observing it! Exhausted by the loss of blood, the woman had fallen back into unconsciousness, and the towel the old cripple held to her lips was stained scarlet.

"The doctor had gone to bed. He will come as soon as he gets dressed," said Corinna. "He warned us to keep her quiet."

"If he don't hurry, she'll be gone before he gets here," replied the old woman, looking round over her twisted shoulder.

"Oh, Father, Father!" cried Patty, flinging her arms about his neck; and then over again like a frightened child, "Father, Father!"

He patted her head with a large consoling hand. "There, there, daughter," he returned gently. "A little thing like that won't come between you and me."

With his arm still about her, he drew her slowly to the bedside, and stood looking down on the dying woman and the old cripple, who hovered over her with the stained towel in her hand.

"I don't even know her name," he said, and immediately afterward, "She must have had a hell of a life!" Though there was a wholesome pity in his voice, it was without the weakness of sentimentality. He had done what he could, and he was not the kind to worry over events which he could not change. For a few minutes he stood there in silence; then, because it was impossible for his energetic nature to remain inactive in an emergency, he exclaimed suddenly, "The doctor ought to be here!" and turning away from the bed, went rapidly across the room and through the half open door into the hall.

Outside the darkness was dissolving in a drab light which crept slowly up above the roofs of the houses; and while they waited this light filled the yard and the room and the passage beyond the door which Gideon Vetch had not closed. Far away, through the heavy boughs of the ailantus tree, day was breaking in a glimmer of purple-few birds were twittering among the leaves. Along the high brick wall a starved gray cat was stealing like a shadow. Drawing her evening wrap closer about her bare shoulders, Corinna realized that it was already day in the street.

"She's gone," said the old hunchback, in a crooning whisper. Her twisted hand was on the arm of the dead woman, which stretched as pallid and motionless as an arm of wax over the figured quilt. "She's gone, and she never knew that he had come." With a gesture that appeared as natural as the dropping of a leaf, she pressed down the eyelids over the expressionless eyes. "Well, that's the way life is, I reckon," she remarked, as an epitaph over the obscure destiny of Mrs. Green.

"Yes, that's the way life is," repeated Corinna under her breath. Already the old cripple had started about her inevitable ministrations: but when Corinna tried to make Patty move away from the bedside, the girl shook her head in a stubborn refusal.

"I am trying to believe it," she said. "I am trying to believe it, and I can't." Then she looked at them calmly and steadily. "I want to think it out by myself," she added. "Would you mind leaving me alone in here for just a few minutes?"

Though there was no grief in her voice—how could there be any grief, Corinna asked herself?—there was an accent of profound surprise and incredulity, as of one who has looked for the first time on death. Standing there in her spring-like dress beside the dead woman who had been her mother, Corinna felt intuitively that Patty had left her girlhood behind her. The child had lived in one night through an inner crisis, through a period of spiritual growth, which could not be measured by years. Whatever she became in the future, she would never be again the Patty Vetch that Corinna and Stephen had known.

Yes, she had a right to be alone. Beckoning to the old woman to follow her, Corinna went out softly, closing the door after her.



CHAPTER XXIII

THE DAWN

Outside in the narrow passage, smelling of dust and yesterday's cooking, the pallid light filtered in through the closed window; and it seemed to Corinna that this light pervaded her own thoughts until the images in her mind moved in a procession of stark outlines against a colourless horizon. In this unreal world, which she knew was merely a distorted impression of the external world about her, she saw the figure of the dead woman, still and straight as the effigy of a saint, the twisted shape of the old hunchback, and after these the shadow of the starved cat stealing along the top of the high brick wall. What was the meaning in these things? Where was the beauty? What inscrutable purpose, what sardonic humour, joined together beauty and ugliness, harmony and discord, her own golden heritage with the drab destinies of that dead woman and this work-worn cripple?

"I can't stand it any longer," she thought. "I must breathe the open air, or I shall die."

Then, just as she was about to hurry toward the stairs, she checked herself and stood still because she realized that the old woman had followed her and was droning into her ear.

"Yes, ma'am, that's the way life is," the impersonal voice was muttering, "but it ain't the only way that it is, I reckon. I sees so many sick and dying folks that you'd think I was obliged to look at things unnatural-like. But I don't, not me, ma'am. It ain't all that way, with nothing but waiting and wanting, and then disappointment. Even Maggie had her good times somewhere in the past. You can't expect to be always dressed in spangles and riding bareback, that's what I used to say to her. You've got to take your share of bad times, same as the rest of us. And look at me now. I've done sick nursing for more'n fifty years—as far back as I like to look—but it ain't all been sick nursing. There's been a deal in it besides.

"Naw'm, I've got a lot to be thankful for when I begin to take stock." Her wrinkled face caught the first gleam of sunlight that fell through the unwashed window panes. "I've done sick nursing ever since I was a child almost; but I've managed mighty well all things considering, and I've saved up enough to keep me out of the poor house when I get too old to go on. When I give up I won't have to depend on charity, and the city won't have to bury me either when I'm dead. And I've got a heap of satisfaction out of my red geraniums too. I don't reckon you ever saw finer blooms—not even in a greenhouse. Naw'm, I ain't been the complaining sort. I've got a lot to be thankful for, and I know it."

Her old eyes shone; her sunken mouth was trembling, not with self-pity, Corinna realized, with a pang that was strangely like terror, but with the courage of living. The pathos of it appeared intolerable for a moment; and gathering her cloak about her, Corinna felt that she must cover her eyes and fly before she broke out into hysterical screaming. Then the terror passed; and she saw, in a single piercing flash of insight, that what she had mistaken for ugliness was simply an impalpable manifestation of beauty. Beauty! Why it was everywhere! It was with her now in this squalid house, in the presence of this crippled old woman, unmoved by death, inured to poverty, screwing, grinding, pinching, like flint to the crying baby, and yet cherishing the blooms of her red geranium, her passionate horror of the poor house, and her dream of six feet of free earth not paid for by charity at the end. Yes, that was the way of life. Blind as a mole to the universe, and yet visited by flashes of unearthly light.

"Thank you," said Corinna hurriedly. "I must go down. I must get a breath of air, but I will come back in a little while." Then she started at a run down the stairs, while the old woman gazed after her, as if the flying figure, in the cloak of peacock-blue satin and white fur, was that of a demented creature. "Air!" she repeated, with scornful independence. "Air!", and turning away in disgust, she limped painfully back to wait outside of the closed door. Here, when she had seated herself in a sagging chair, she lifted her bleak eyes to the smoke-stained ceiling, and repeated for the third time in a tone of profound contempt: "Air!"

At the foot of the stairs, Corinna ran against Gideon Vetch. "She died soon after you went out," she said, "but Patty is still there."

"I'll go up to her," he answered; and then as he placed his foot on the bottom step, he looked back at her, and added, "I tried to spare her this."

She assented almost mechanically. Fatigue had swept over her from head to foot like some sinister drug and she felt incapable of giving out anything, even sympathy, even the appearance of compassion. "Then it is all true?" she asked. "Patty is not your child?"

A shadow crossed his face, but he did not hesitate in his reply. "I never had a child. I was never married."

"You took her like that—because the mother was going to prison?"

He nodded. "She was a child. What difference did it make whether she was mine or not? She was the nicest little thing you ever saw. She is still."

"Yes, she is still. But you never knew what became of the mother?"

"I didn't know her real name. I didn't want to. The circus people called her Queenie, that was all I knew. She'd stuck a knife into a man in a jealous rage, and he happened to die. They said the trial would be obliged to go against her. I was leaving California that night, and I brought the child with me. I have never been back—" He spread out his broad hand with a gesture that was strangely human. "You would have done it in my place?"

She shook her head. "No, I should have wanted to, but I couldn't. I am not big enough for that."

He was already ascending the stairs, but at her words, he turned and smiled down on her. "It was nothing to make a fuss about," he said. "Anybody would have done it."

Then he mounted the stairs lightly for his great height, taking two steps at a time, while she passed out on the porch where Stephen was waiting for her. As he rose wearily from the wicker rocking chair beside the empty perambulator, she felt as if he were a stranger. In that one night she seemed to have put the whole universe between her and the old order that he represented.

"I kept my car waiting for you," he began. "It was better to let your man go home."

She smiled at him in the pale light, and he broke out nervously: "You look as if you would drop. What have they done to you?" Though she wore the cloak of peacock-blue over her evening gown, the pointed train wound on the floor behind her, and the fan of white ostrich plumes, which she had forgotten to leave in the car, was still in her hand. Her face was wan and drawn; there were violet circles under her eyes; and she looked as if she had grown ten years older since the evening before. It was the outward impression of the night, he knew. In this house one passed back again into the power of time; youth could not be prolonged here for a single night.

"I don't know what it means," he said, with a mixture of exasperation and curiosity. "I wish you would tell me what it means."

"I feel," she answered, in an expressionless tone, as if the insensibility of her nerves had passed into her voice, "that I have faced life for the first time."

"Tell me what it means," he reiterated impatiently.

Dropping into the chair from which he had risen, she drew her train aside while the doctor passed them hurriedly, with a muttered apology, and went into the house. Then, leaning forward, with the fan clasped in her hands, and her eyes on the straight deserted street, which ended abruptly on the brow of a hill, she repeated word for word all that the dying woman had said. The sun had not yet risen, but a faint opalescent glow suffused the sky in the east, and flushed with a delicate colour the round cobblestones in the street and the herring-bone pattern of the pavement, where blades of grass sprouted among the bricks. Though she did not look up at Stephen's face, she was aware while she talked of some subtle emanation of thought outside of herself, as if the struggle in his mind had overflowed mechanical processes and physical boundaries, and was escaping into the empty street and the city beyond. And this silent struggle, so charged with intensity that it produced the effect of a cry, became for her merely a part, a single voice, in that greater struggle for victory over circumstances which went on ceaselessly day and night in the surrounding houses. Everywhere about her there was the vague groping toward some idea of freedom, toward independence of spirit; everywhere there was this perpetual striving toward a universe that was larger. The dwellers in this crowded house, with their vision of space and sunlight; the village with its vision of a city; the city with its vision of a country; the country with its vision of a republic of the world—all these universal struggles were condensed now into the little space of a man's consciousness. To Corinna, in whose veins flowed the blood of Malvern Hill and Cold Harbor, it seemed that the greater victory must lie with those who charged from out the cover of philosophy into the mystery of the unknown. If she had been in Stephen's place, she knew that she should have taken the risk, that she should have flung herself into the enterprise of life as into a voyage of discovery. Yet, at the moment, appreciating all that it meant to him, she asked herself if she had been wise to let him see the thought in her mind. For an instant, after telling him, she hesitated, and in this instant Stephen spoke.