Chapter 21. Dance Music

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_ 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. _

Read next: Chapter 22. The Night

Read previous: Chapter 20. Corinna Faces Life

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