One Man in His Time | Page 8

fine
old hall he saw the formal drawing-room and the modern octagonal
dining-room at the back of the house.
"Howdy, Marse Stephen," responded the negro, "I seed yo' ma yestiddy
en she sutney wuz lookin well an' peart."
He opened the door of the library, and while Stephen entered the room
with the girl's hand on his arm, a man rose from a chair by the fire and
came forward.
"Father, this is Mr. Culpeper," remarked Patty calmly, as she sank on a
sofa and stretched out her frivolous shoes.

In the midst of his embarrassment Stephen wondered resentfully how
she had discovered his name.

CHAPTER II
GIDEON VETCH
"Your daughter slipped on the ice," explained the young man, while the
thought flashed through his mind that Patty's father was accepting it all,
with ironical humour, as some queer masquerade.
It was the first time that Stephen had come within range of the
Governor's personal influence, and he found himself waiting curiously
for the response of his sympathies or his nerves. Once or twice he had
heard Vetch speak--a storm of words which had played freely from the
lightning flash of humorous invective to the rolling thunder of
passionate denunciation. Such sound and fury had left Stephen the one
unmoved man in the audience. He had been brought up on the sonorous
rhetoric and the gorgeous purple periods of the classic orations; and the
mere undraped sincerity--the raw head and bloody bones eloquence, as
he put it, of Vetch's speech had been as offensive to his taste as it had
been unconvincing to his intelligence. The man was a mountebank,
nothing more, Stephen had decided, and his strange power was simply
the reaction of mob hysteria to the stage tricks of the political clown.
Yes, the man was a mountebank--but was he nothing more than a
mountebank? Like most men of his age, Stephen Culpeper was inclined
to swift impressions rather than hasty judgments of people; and he was
conscious, while he listened in silence to the murmuring explanations
of the girl, that the immediate effect was a sensation, not an idea. At
first sight, the Governor appeared merely ordinary--a tall, rugged figure,
built of good bone and muscle and sound to the core, with the look of
arrested energy which was doubtless an inheritance from the circus ring.
There was nothing impressive about him; nothing that would cause one
to turn and look back in a crowd. What struck one most was his air of
extraordinary freshness and health, of sanguine vitality. His face was

well-coloured and irregular in outline, with a high bulging forehead and
thick sandy hair which was already gray on the temples. In the shadow
his eyes did not appear remarkably fine; they seemed at the first glance
to be of an indeterminate colour--was it blue or gray?--and there was
nothing striking in their deep setting under the beetling sandy eyebrows.
All this was true; and yet while Stephen looked into them over the
Governor's outstretched hand, he told himself that they were the most
human eyes he had ever seen. Afterward, when he groped through his
vocabulary for a more accurate description, he could not find one.
There was shrewdness in Gideon Vetch's eyes; there was friendliness;
there was the blue sparkle of contagious humour--a ripple of light that
was like visible laughter--but above all there was humanity. Though
Stephen did not try to grasp the vivid impressions that passed through
his mind, he felt intuitively that he had learned to know Gideon Vetch
through his look and manner as well as he should have known another
man after weeks or months of daily intercourse. Whatever the man's
private life, whatever his political faults may have been, there was
magic in the clasp of his hand and the cordial glow of his smile. He was
always responsive; he stood always on the same level, high or low,
with his companion of the moment: he was as incapable of looking up
as he was of looking down; he was equally without reverence and
without condescension. It was the law of his nature that he should give
himself emphatically to the just and the unjust alike.
"He came home with me because I hurt my foot," Patty was saying.
Had she forgotten already, Stephen asked himself cynically, that it was
not her foot but her ankle? His suspicions returned while he looked at
her blooming face, and he hoped earnestly that she would not feel
impelled to relate any irrelevant details of the adventure. Like Gideon
Vetch on the platform she seemed incapable of withholding the
smallest fragment of a fact; and the young man wondered if it were
characteristic either of "the plain people," as he called them, or of
circus riders as a class, that