The Mayor of Warwick Part 13

"They did n't swallow it," he said grimly, "and it took Emmet's personal appeal for fair play to make them stop their hissing and catcalls. I thought there 'd be a riot at one time, but instead, the men began to get up and walk out, leaving Swigart talking to their backs. I was swept along with the crowd, and that was the last I saw or heard."

He caught the flash of her eyes at the vivid picture he had drawn, and could no longer conceal his bitterness. "When I saw Emmet standing there, whipping up the mob and then holding it in check, and thought of his scanty schooling, I felt the handicap of professorial pursuits"--

"Oh, eloquence!" she interrupted, with a quick and tactful understanding of his hurt. "There's nothing easier in the world, if you only have the knack. I think I may say so, as the daughter of a bishop. Mr. Emmet moved them merely because he voiced their own hatreds and prejudices in a clear and convincing way, not that he said anything so very remarkable." There was undisguised scorn in her tone, and he understood that this was the heiress speaking. "A trumpet makes more noise of a certain kind than a telescope," she went on, "and the noise is what the people like. Have you ever read 'Numa Roumestan'?

At the risk of preventing you from doing so, I must recommend it."

She lifted the flowers as if to throw them away, preparatory to a return to the house, but he defeated her intention by deftly reaching forward and taking them from her hand.

"You must allow me to save them, Miss Wycliffe," he explained, in answer to the quick inquiry of her sidelong glance. "Let me indulge a romantic impulse to-night, though we have had such an interesting conversation on other matters." He thrust the lilies of the valley into an inside pocket of his coat, and sat looking at her with a speculative sadness that made a light or flippant comment on her part impossible. She said nothing, though her poise conveyed the suggestion of intended flight. She doubtless appreciated the fact that this was what she might have antic.i.p.ated, that she could not lead a young man who was in love with her to such a place without this result. Her purpose in so doing was best known to herself. In his mind there was evidently a doubt whether it was wanton cruelty, or a desire for information concerning her _protege_. He began to wonder, in view of the persistence of her interest in Emmet, whether she had not divined the cause of his late arrival from the first.

"When I first came in," he continued, "and Littleford thrust me into a chair beside you, I caught the scent of these lilies before I knew they were in your hands. It was something like an experience that befell one of my ancestors as he approached America after a two months' voyage in a sailing vessel. They were nearing Virginia one night in May, and a land breeze blew the fragrance of flowers to them across the water before they saw the sh.o.r.e. _On desperate seas long wont to roam_--You know the verse?"

She rose hurriedly to her feet, distressed, perhaps repentant. "You must not," she protested in a low voice. "You must not."

"There is some reason why I must not?" he questioned, confronting her with paling face. She nodded a confirmation of his fear. "Then I must ask just one question more," he persisted miserably. "Suppose the reason did not exist--I don't ask you to tell me now what it is--but suppose there were no reason. Would you forbid me to love you then?"

For a moment she did not reply, and he watched her face as one who would read an enigmatical page from the book of fate. The question demanded an answer, a definite reply, which she was not prepared to give. He saw dawning in her eyes a recognition of him in a new light; it was as if she now contemplated the possibility she had rejected. In this att.i.tude of mind, as in nothing else, the bishop's cold and calculating nature disclosed itself in the daughter, and Leigh divined that she did not wish to love him, though she allowed herself to desire the tribute of his love. It was this desire that enabled her to enjoy the situation, to convey to him a denial that was not absolute. She might withdraw herself,--she had said that she must,--yet something might remain, something more than friendship, less than the claims of an acknowledged love.

"If the reason did not exist," she repeated slowly, "then--perhaps."

He heard the words with a gesture of acquiescence, and followed her in silence down the aisle in the direction of the house, wondering why he did not stop her before it was too late and ask her whether he had heard aright, why he had not kissed her when he could have done it so easily, and thereby, perhaps, have shaken her allegiance to some other claim. For his intuition told him that though he was not her acknowledged lover, he was by no means a mere friend. It was this a.s.surance that gave him hope, and there was comfort in the thought that he had not lost all by daring too much.

About two hours later, Leigh descended from the billiard-room, where he had been playing an inattentive and indifferent game with one of his colleagues, and encountered Bishop Wycliffe coming into the hall from the library in company with his host and Anthony Cobbens. The major part of the company had already gone, leaving a few elderly talkers in various corners, and a group of young people dancing in the ballroom, which had been cleared after the lecture for that purpose.

"Ah, Littleford," the bishop was saying, "these entertainments of yours are entirely delightful. You give every one the particular thing he wants and send him away contented: to the artistic a glimpse of Velasquez; to the young, a turn of the 'light fantastic toe;' to me, one of your good cigars and a quiet chat in the corner about old times.

But have you seen Felicity?"

Littleford, a comfortable-looking man, with a fresh colour, a yellow beard, and a general air of good living and goodfellowship about him, hurried off to the ballroom to inquire. Meanwhile, Cobbens helped the bishop into his coat with the solicitous attention due a swell official of the Church, who was at the same time the father of Felicity Wycliffe. Leigh, performing the same operation for himself, was chatting with the other two, when Littleford returned to say that his search had been in vain.

"She probably went home with Mrs. Parr," the bishop commented. "They came together, I believe."

"Mrs. Parr is still here," Littleford said, "and complaining that Miss Wycliffe has deserted her."

The bishop's residence was only about a block away, on the other side of the street, and Leigh saw that Littleford's information caused no particular concern. Seeking significance in everything she did, he wondered whether her early withdrawal contained any element of hope for himself, or whether she were ill. As he recalled the suppressed excitement of her manner, he feared that this latter conjecture might be the true one, and his heart contracted with anxiety. The three men descended the broad steps together, the bishop remarking upon the lateness of the season and the clemency of the air. When they reached the street, he turned with Cobbens in the direction of his house, with an absent-minded though courteous good-night.

Though the leaves of the elms had now in a large measure left the branches, the suggestion of a cathedral nave was still presented to the mind. The equidistant trunks were, as formerly, the supporting pillars, but the vista had suffered a mournful change, as if the roof had suddenly been blown away, leaving the springing ribs a black tracery against the autumnal sky. This ruinous work of the frost was strangely offset by the soft witchery of the breeze, which seemed either a reminiscence of the spring that was past, or a promise of the spring to come. Leigh's thoughts took a turn in harmony with this influence. He began to readjust his first conception of Miss Wycliffe,--she was now Felicity in his unspoken meditations,--and to realise that she was not like a Russian n.o.blewoman, ready to sacrifice all for socialism, as he had at first conceived her. Had she continued to be such a magnificent and heroic creature, he would have loved her less. She gained infinitely more than she lost by this more intimate view. She was no longer a possible reformer and a subject for the historian, but a woman pure and simple, with all a woman's alluring inconsistencies.

Immersed in this new conception, he was startled by a voice and hurrying step behind him, and turned to meet Cardington's outstretched hand and the hospitable offer of a cigar. As they went on together, his colleague commented in his voluminous way upon the evening they had just spent, and before long, with Velasquez as a starting-point, he had launched upon a compendious history of Spain, interspersed with anecdotes of his own travels in that romantic land.

In this way they had almost reached the end of the rows of elms, when they saw before them a man and woman walking with the slow and tentative steps of those absorbed in deep personal conversation. At their nearer approach the woman turned quickly for a moment, said something in a low voice, and then the two hurried abruptly down a side street, whose thicker shadows offered a screen from further observation. Leigh, listening but inattentively to his companion's disquisition and meditating still of Felicity, gave the couple only a fleeting glance, thinking, if he thought of them at all, that they were a maid from one of the neighbouring houses and her lover.

The next moment he realised that he had heard the intonation of Miss Wycliffe's voice, or had imagined it. He would doubtless have thought it mere imagination, some accidental resemblance to which his ear had given ident.i.ty, had not Cardington's manner registered a sudden emotional disturbance. He paused in his narration, like one smitten with mental atrophy and searching for the word that was about to reach his lips. His position on the inside of the walk offered a barrier between Leigh and the retreating couple, and he gave a curious impression of maintaining that position carefully as they pa.s.sed the street. Then he resumed his story with something of accentuated intensity. Neither made the slightest comment on the incident.

CHAPTER X

MISTRESS AND MAID

"Miss Felicity," said Cardington, standing before her with a humorous suggestion in his manner of presenting arms to a superior officer, "I have come to perform what is both a duty and a pleasure; I have come, in short, to--pay my bet." With these words he carefully laid a box of candy upon the table.

"You have my sympathy, Mr. Cardington," she returned, "not so much because you have lost the bet, as because you were under the necessity of ending your sentence with such an insignificant word. I saw that you were groping for a polysyllabic finish." She was in the best of spirits, and prepared for the exchange of quibbles in which they sometimes indulged.

"But my finish is best expressed by just that abrupt and insignificant monosyllable!" he cried, his solemnity swept away by a mood of extravagant banter. "Now, you know, since we have elected a professional baseball player to the mayor's office, I foresee great possibilities unfolding in munic.i.p.al affairs. I rather antic.i.p.ate that the city fathers will seek recreation from their arduous labours by indulging in an occasional game of ball in the park. I hope to have the pleasure of applauding our respected mayor as he walks up to the plate as of yore and knocks out a home run. Not a bad idea, bishop, is it?" For Bishop Wycliffe had entered the room quietly and stood behind his daughter, listening to the speech with a wide, appreciative smile.

"It is extremely probable," he now answered. "I shall be surprised if some such innovation is not introduced. And why not? _Tempera mutantur_, my friend. We have a President who so far forgets the traditions of his office as to beguile his spare moments by whacking the heads of his friends in a game of singlestick. Why not a mayor who plays baseball in the park? What an old fogy you are, Cardington!"

"Old!" Cardington echoed ruefully. "My dear bishop! And you baptised my infant head after you came to your Episcopal office!"

"Ah, but I was young then," the bishop retorted, "or I should never have a.s.sumed that responsibility."

They were still laughing at this sally when the maid appeared in the door to announce that dinner was served. Seeing a late caller, she hesitated, and Cardington broke in.

"I must go now," he announced. "Remember, Miss Felicity, not to overdo the matter of eating sweetmeats. There would be a certain unnecessary redundancy in such an indulgence, a carrying of coals to Newcastle, so to speak."

"No, you must stay to dinner," she urged, "and afterward smoke one of father's cigars to solace you for the loss of the box you might have had if the election had gone the other way."

"Might have had!" he retorted. "You mean would have had. I hope there was no doubt of your intention to pay your honest debts."

"Come," the bishop interrupted, taking him by the arm and marching him away, "enough of these quibbles. You must stay, of course."

"But this is the irony of fate," he continued, glancing back fondly at his daughter, "that in spite of all my preaching, I have not been able to convince the one nearest me of the iniquity of gambling."

"I am reminded of that historic occasion," Cardington answered, "when you preached a sermon against the putting on of apparel and the plaiting of the hair, and extolled the inward adornment of a meek and quiet spirit, quoting St. Peter and Tertullian with singular effect"--

"But how was I to know," Miss Wycliffe put in, "that the return of that sermon from the bottom of the barrel would coincide with the appearance of my new hat?"

"It was just that lack of cooperation between you and your right reverend father which scandalised the congregation," Cardington commented.

"It was a beautiful hat," she mused regretfully. "Every one admired it."

"Yes, yes," said the bishop. "'And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.'"

Strange to say, this quotation, so lightly uttered, was destined to strike the keynote of the dinner. The subject of the mayor-elect was too vividly present in the minds of all three to be long absent from their conversation, and a discussion inevitably followed a reminder from Cardington that this was the evening in which the people were to celebrate their victory by a procession. Miss Wycliffe jestingly proposed an illumination of the house; but her father's patience with her perversity was exhausted. Doubtless the triumph of the cause he hated intensified his emotion. Had the judge been elected, he could easily have been magnanimous, or could have twitted her with good humour. But there comes a time, even to the most philosophical parent, when the independent judgment of a child seems a personal affront, an ingrat.i.tude "sharper than a serpent's tooth." He loved the beautiful old city in which his life had been spent, and wished to see it ruled always by men of his own cla.s.s. To him the outcome of the election was really a significant calamity, the beginning of the end of the aristocratic democracy he cherished. Not Lincoln, the dissenter and man of the people, but Washington, the gentleman and Churchman, was his ideal of an American statesman. It is perhaps not too much to say that he would prefer to see the wheels of government falter for a while in the hands of an aristocrat rather than to see them turn smoothly under the propelling power of a plebeian, were it in his suffrage to make the choice.

"An illumination of the house," he echoed bitterly. "We might put some flaming hoops out in the street, so that the clown can turn a somersault through them as he pa.s.ses by."

The taunt was greeted by Cardington with something of excessive appreciation, and the bishop, softened by his success, threw back his head and smiled broadly at his daughter, regarding her through half-closed eyes.

It was evident that Miss Wycliffe did not relish the absurd picture of her _protege_ thus presented to her mind, and a reply in kind seemed to hover in the scornful curves of her lips; but she was a woman of finer mettle than to show either her anger or her hurt.

"Mr. Cardington," she said with subtle mockery, "your part in the performance is plain"--

She broke off, attracted by the unusual manner of the maid, whose hand, as she placed a plate before her mistress, shook violently, so that she overturned a gla.s.s of wine. Miss Wycliffe glanced up, surprised at this awkwardness in one usually so adroit, and pushed back her chair to avoid the crimson stain that was slowly spreading toward the edge of the table. Unconsciously all three suspended their conversation to watch the simple operation of putting salt upon the cloth. Cardington, turning his eyes toward his hostess with an antic.i.p.atory relish for the rest of her sentence, was suddenly struck by an inexplicable change.

Her face had become white in a moment, and she was regarding the maid's trembling hands with curious intensity.

"You were saying, Miss Felicity,"--he reminded her.