The Mayor of Warwick Part 15

Left alone, Lena tottered as if she would have fallen; then sank upon her knees and crept to the window. With trembling fingers she raised the sash and let in the cool night air upon her bare neck and shoulders. She let in also a fuller burst of music and cheering, and through her tears she saw the lights dancing wildly, like a procession of fallen stars. Somewhere in that stream of splendour and sound he sat in his carriage, proud and triumphant, and with no thought of her.

In her own room Miss Wycliffe stood before her mirror, looking now at the white reflection of her face, and now at the recovered ring which she had tossed upon the bureau, while in her splendid eyes blazed the light of a great and implacable anger. For the man who was at that moment pa.s.sing by in the street, who had taken her gift and bestowed it upon a servant, had been her husband for more than two years.

CHAPTER XI

AT THE OLD CONTINENTAL

One snowy afternoon, shortly before Christmas, Mayor Emmet came out to his sleigh from the City Hall, drawing on his gloves with a sense of release from unaccustomed confinement. While others hurried along, shrinking into their coats as if they would withdraw as far as possible from the nipping cold, he strode slowly and breathed deep, showing a strong man's conscious enjoyment of Nature in one of her sterner moods.

His manner displayed a consciousness of something else also, of the position he meant to grace. He was already beginning to appreciate the discomfiture of his enemies. They had thought to find him bewildered and inefficient, and had encountered instead a man whose conception of his rights and duties was just and adequate. Strange also to superficial thinkers was his dignity of bearing, to which the _elite_ of Warwick paid the compliment of their resentment. But that ease and precision of movement, that steady glance of the eye, had been transferred from the baseball field to become singularly effective in the mayor's office.

It was now that his experience as a conductor also yielded its harvest, though few of those whose money he had formerly collected realised the valuable knowledge they had given him of human nature's more difficult side. They had unwittingly taught him to control his temper under trying circ.u.mstances, to hear much and say little, and now they wondered at the success of their teaching. Even his language was exasperatingly correct. They might claim that his speech for the joint debate had been written by another, but this would not explain the excellent quality of his ordinary conversation; and it never occurred to them to point to him with pride as a product of the public schools for which their city was justly famous.

That a man not connected with one of the old families, not possessed of a baccalaureate degree, should really be effective in the mayor's chair was such an unheard-of presumption that they denied the fact. Yet they could not claim that he a.s.sumed excess of air. His lack of exuberance was so marked, he had taken hold of his work with such seriousness and sobriety, that he seemed to be a man of great coldness, or one whose sense of triumph was tempered by a secret trouble.

Those whose condemnation was not altogether sweeping found the phrase "an imitation" capable of conveying some consolation. He was like a wooden cigar, a lead quarter; in short, he was a loaf baked in a different oven, and that was enough. How could a man that wore a heavy watch-chain possess the genuine quality? In the judgment of the First Church, that chain was heavy enough to bind him hand and foot and to sink him in the depths of the sea.

But criticisms from this source Emmet accepted as a matter of course, much as a Republican candidate for the Presidency would count on a solid Democratic South. A more serious menace to his future lay in the att.i.tude of some of his own supporters, who supposed that the mayor's office could now be their lounging-place and headquarters. Bat Quayle, the leader of a strong const.i.tuency of the submerged tenth, had already departed breathing vengeance, when he discovered that there was nothing in the new _regime_ for the Boys. They had given their votes to Emmet in the confident expectation of special privilege and protection; but he had made no promises, and had none to keep. No previous Democratic mayor of Warwick had ever been able to dispense with the Boys, and it remained for Emmet to offset their loss by winning new supporters during his administration. Bat Quayle, he knew, would be picked up by his opponents and used against him two years hence; but two years seemed a long time, and the mayor shook out the lines and started off with a burst of speed, as if he would tumble black care into the snow behind him.

The street was like a vista of fairyland. A new fall of snow had covered all unsightly stains of traffic, and now lay heaped on every inch of horizontal s.p.a.ce, on branch and roof and post, on window-ledge and fence. The sky was clearing, and the last belated flakes were floating slowly downward, detached from the burdened roofs by light puffs of wind. To one glancing upward, the feathery visitors seemed to drop from the widening s.p.a.ces of pale blue sky. The ringing sound of snow shovels and the crisp crunching of pedestrians' feet indicated a falling mercury. The air was filled with the jocund jingling of sleighbells, now coming, now near at hand, now lessening into the distance, a pleasing confusion of silvery sounds, not inharmonious in their varying pitch and intensity.

Emmet, crouching low among his blankets, drew his cap down over his eyes and let out another link of speed. At last he was free to take up the problem that occupied his leisure moments. His wife had gone South with her father on the very day when he had expected her to lift the veil from their marriage, and an acknowledgement of the justice of her anger caused him to keep the secret still, awaiting her decision. He could count the times they had met during the last two years on the fingers of his hands. This relationship, which had promised so much at its inception, was the great mystery of his life, and every succeeding month it became more unreal, more inexplicable. Now he went back in his mind to the time when the bishop's daughter began to take his car rather than another, and conveyed to him in some subtle way the impression of her preference. By little and little he had played the dangerous game that made such an appeal to his vanity.

The poets were true in their psychology when they pictured the distress of mortal men beloved of G.o.ddesses: t.i.thonus and Aurora, Venus and Adonis, Diana and Endymion. How could aught but tragedy result from such loves as these? How could a mortal have dared to lift his eyes to such a height unbidden? The gulf between Miss Wycliffe, beautiful, rich, aristocratic, and Tom Emmet, the professional baseball player and street-car conductor, was to his mind as impa.s.sable. It was she who had first suggested the possibility of a bridge between them. His conception of her mental states was as dim as our dreams of the inhabitants of Mars. Of her ennui in that life which seemed to him all lightness and pleasure, of the romance with which she invested his commonplace days, of the possibilities she read in his personality, he had no conception; but to the lingering of her fingers in his own, to the glance of her eyes, the primitive man within him made response.

Love of adventure lured him on. The subtle courtship progressed apace, and if any of Miss Wycliffe's friends noted her growing friendship with the conductor, it was merely to praise her sweet and una.s.suming humanity. At the end of that period of increasing intimacy, marked by little incidents which no lover in the retrospect can ever arrange in their proper sequence, the night of his marriage loomed in his memory, every detail ineradicable. Their coincident absence from Warwick was naturally unnoted; and who, in all the range of human probabilities, would be present to see them meet at a certain day and hour on a certain street corner in New York?

Life is a careless maker of plots. The villain did not appear to shadow them to the obscure old church, to lurk in the darkening pews and see them married, to watch their exit in the twilight as man and wife, to observe from a safe distance their long talk on the corner of the street, and, most inexplicable of all, to see her call a pa.s.sing cab and drive away in evident haste, perhaps in sudden alarm.

Emmet would never have brooked such desertion from a woman of his own cla.s.s, but the ascendancy which she had established over him from the first was not materially shaken by the fact that she was now his wife.

He did not even know where she pa.s.sed the night, while he walked the streets, a deceived and baffled bridegroom, until in desperation he took the midnight train and arrived home at dawn, too weary to care for aught but sleep.

When they met again in Warwick, she resumed her mysterious power of direction as before, and his status as her husband gave him no advantage that he dared to press. He accepted the secret interviews she granted, and learned at last the part he had to play. On that promissory note which she had given him at the altar she paid the instalment of a few elusive kisses, and he discovered to his dismay that he must do some great thing to make himself worthy of her, before the note should be paid in full. It was she who had seen the possibilities of his connection with a union and of his interest in politics, and had suggested the career he was to follow. His election as mayor was to be crowned by her acknowledgement of him before the world. This was the plan in which he had acquiesced, as one who had only to obey and to wait humbly for his reward.

But a sense of power developed with the struggle. It was true that she had directed his feet into the right path; but once there, he began to feel that he would have found it unaided. She was secret with him, giving and withholding as she chose. He saw her with other men, and his strong nature rebelled. Should she be free, while he was bound?

At a certain meeting he presented this point of view, but she said truly enough that the men she met were nothing to her, and that to do as he wished would only excite surprise and suspicion. She would fain play the part of Egeria and lay down the law to him in stolen interviews beyond the city. But Emmet had never heard of that delightful arrangement, and the role of a Numa in the making began to be intolerable to him. When they met again, he no longer upbraided her, for he had met Lena Harpster at a lodge dance in the interval, and in the culmination of a reckless mood, he had taken his revenge. Only a consciousness of his own duplicity saved Felicity from his insistence and restored her power.

Emmet meant that the affair with Lena should go no further, but the memory of the kiss she had given him drew him back at last and he sought her out, as the first man might have sought again the first woman in the Garden of Eden, after an ingenuous shame had driven them asunder. And hereupon began a t.i.tanic struggle in his soul. He knew that he loved his wife and meant to be true to her, but Lena's kisses more deeply stirred his blood. She was wonderfully pliant to his will, as pliant in reality as he seemed to be to the will of his wife. For longer or shorter periods he neglected her, only to come back again to find her more helpless in his grasp, himself more than ever fascinated by his power over her. It was a milestone in their nameless relationship when he feigned jealousy of her other admirers, when she admitted his right to question. Then came the night when she had fainted beside him in the half-finished building, and he knew that the jealousy was real. After that wild moment of parting at the gate, he resolved to see her no more. The prize he had sought so long was almost within his grasp,--the mayoralty and a wife who would make that office but a stepping-stone to something higher,--and he would not forfeit his reward. He meant also, as he had meant all along, to be essentially true to his moral obligations.

The pathos of Lena's position he but dimly discerned, and his cruelty was unconscious. The election almost swept her from his mind, and the note in which she disclosed her refuge in his wife's house stirred only a momentary anxiety. He would deny whatever she might say, and he felt that she would quietly acquiesce in her fate when she knew the truth.

But he had forgotten the ring, and the ring was his undoing.

At the very moment when he turned his sleigh into Birdseye Avenue he pressed his hand to his side and felt Felicity's letter crinkle beneath his touch. He had carried it continuously with him, and knew its brief contents by heart. She had hoped the letter might have been one of pure congratulation; she had intended to keep her promise and to come to him as his wife before the world, but now he must wait until she had time to think over her course of action by herself. An explanation would be useless; but she had recovered her ring, and she knew the value he put upon her gifts, both this one and the greater gift of which it was a symbol. And that was all.

The fact remained that she had not utterly cast him off. He would be punished, but not forever, and he divined that his probation would end with her return. He had a firm conviction that her sense of obligation was like his own, that repentance and good conduct would restore him to her, and he longed for an opportunity to tell her how it had happened, how much less guilty he was than she might suppose. If he had been weak with Lena, he knew that he had also been strong. He had withheld his hand from taking all, when she would have offered no resistance to his will. Surely, that counted for much, and his temptation had been great. Cheered by this thought, little realising that the very simplicity of his position would make it difficult for his wife to understand, that the vulgarity of his temptation was to her its worst feature, he glanced down the long avenue with a sudden sentiment at the thought of pa.s.sing her home.

This street, because of its width, the absence of car-tracks, and its comparative freedom from heavy traffic, was often the scene of races in the winter, and now he saw a group of sleighs ready for the start. As the bunch drew away, his own horse came abreast of the others, and without prearrangement he found himself racing side by side with Anthony Cobbens.

"Well met, Mr. Mayor!" the lawyer cried cheerily. "I 'll race you down to College Street."

Emmet glanced at his opponent, and shouted his acceptance of the challenge, his sporting-blood surging suddenly to his very finger-tips.

As he gave his mare the whip and held her in from breaking, he looked once more at the figure whizzing along by his side against the western light. Something in the pink, pinched face, the red, eager eyes, appealed to his sense of humour, and he laughed aloud. Emmet had more than one reason for wishing to beat this man. He had worsted his candidate in the election, and now he would show him a clean pair of heels in the race. His heart beat with exultation as they two drew away from the others. For a moment the thought of Felicity flashed through his mind as they pa.s.sed her house and the nose of his pacer was shoved an inch ahead of her opponent.

"Good girl," he murmured, squaring his jaw; "good girl. Steady there, steady."

The feathery snow flew up in whirls from the flying heels. Pedestrians on the sidewalk paused and cheered as they flashed by under the bending branches of the elms, under the electric lights that were just then beginning their sputtering struggle for supremacy against the sunset.

Emmet had learned to handle horses during an apprenticeship at the race-track in his boyhood, and now the judgment with which he had selected his pacer was amply vindicated. Her steaming flanks swung powerful and free; her long stride just missed the dashboard of the sleigh. As he lightly touched her swaying back with the whip for a final burst of speed, he loved the beast as only a horseman can, and murmured terms of endearment that were equally applicable to a sweetheart.

The head of Cobbens's horse was just in a line with Emmet's shoulder as they pa.s.sed the goal. The mayor turned while the other began to drop behind and shouted a derisive farewell, with a parting flourish of the whip. The victory was as sweet to his heart as the taste of honey to the lips. The race had changed his mood completely, filling him with a joyous truculence. He would gladly have embraced the opportunity of a rough knock-down and drag-out fight with a picked champion from the enemy's camp.

As he pa.s.sed along the eastern border of the campus and glanced up at St. George's Hall, it no longer appeared the impregnable fortress of privilege he had once thought it. Yet, in reality, the towers of the college had never looked more formidable. Rising magnificently at the crest of a bleak expanse of snow, the embrasured battlements, silhouetted against the sunset sky, might well have suggested to a beholder grim thoughts of mediaeval strongholds and robber barons. The red orb of the sun, hovering just above the rim of the western hills, flashed successively through the windows of the long, low hall, like a running trail of fire. Emmet was directly opposite the towers when he saw the muzzle of the telescope rise slowly above the topmost line of coping, as if it were a living thing stretching itself to take a look at the surrounding country. Evidently Professor Leigh was preparing the instrument for an observation. Emmet pictured the platform heaped with snow, imagined the cold air rushing into the small shed through the open roof, and wondered that his friend's enthusiasm could brave such discomforts to win a knowledge so remote from the interests of life.

He turned his eyes once more to the road and winked away the glare of the sun. The floating spots, changing from crimson to green and from green to purple, so obscured his vision that he failed to see the figure of a woman plodding slowly on in the centre of the track. The wind was directly ahead, and the hood of a golf cape so closely enveloped the woman's head that she for her part was deaf to the sound of coming sleighbells. Emmet had been driving slowly to give his mare a breathing-s.p.a.ce. Now, as she veered suddenly of her own accord, he drew in the reins with a jerk, and brought the sleigh to a standstill so near to Lena Harpster that he could have touched her with his hand.

Her first alarm was followed immediately by such a chaos of deeper emotions that the cry died away on her lips. She stood looking at him with shining eyes from behind the fringe of her tall, peaked hood, then, in a voice as low as the wind, she spoke his name. At the same moment she laid her hand on the edge of the seat, either obeying the impulse that would draw her to him, or because she must otherwise have fallen.

Since their last meeting, their night together in the shelter of the half-finished building, he had resolutely put her from his thoughts.

He had supposed the victory won, and never more so than on this very day, when self-interest and moral obligations had marshalled such invincible arguments before his mind. If he had seen her from a distance, if she had been on the sidewalk instead of in his very path, would he have had time to wrestle with his temptation and to overthrow it? Would he have whipped up his horse and pa.s.sed her by without a look of recognition? But the hypothesis is contrary to the fact, and suggests a fruitless speculation. It would seem that his evil genius had planned deliberately to put his resolution to the supreme test, first by filling him with arrogant self-confidence, then by firing his blood with a triumph over his enemy, and finally by placing within the reach of his hand the very woman whom most of all, in his heart of hearts, he longed to see.

As she stood there before him, all her soul concentrated in her eyes, her lips apart in breathless waiting on his will, it seemed that trouble had never put a marring finger upon her beauty; and suddenly he knew the overmastering hunger of his nature. This was the woman that loved him without question, the woman he wished to take into his arms and carry off. The place and time were propitious. Already the sun had set--there was no one in sight--and just beyond the ridge the open country beckoned.

"Lena," he said, his voice vibrant with reckless abandonment to his desire, "jump in here, quick!"

There was no previous greeting, no inquiry or explanation, no dalliance with emotion. His first words were a command, her inevitable response was to obey. Now, as always, she threw the whole responsibility upon him. And Emmet felt equal to the burden. He was like a G.o.d, knowing good and evil. He meant to do good in the main, but just now it was his pleasure to deviate a little. To-morrow he would come back into the straight road and hold it to the end. This resolve gave him a peculiar exhilaration, a special license for the definite indulgence.

The next moment she was nestling close to his side, borne swiftly along as in a dream to the music of the bells. Putting his left arm behind her shoulders, he drew the robe up across her face to ward off the whistling wind. For some time she was content to lie thus in silence, lost in a sense of his strong embrace and in a consciousness of the romance that had come to her so unexpectedly out of loneliness and despair. This was her own lover, come back to her again, but he had never come thus before; and she remembered with a thrill that he was now the mayor of Warwick, taking his pleasure in his own sleigh. She wondered whether he had admired her golf cape; she had no need to wonder what he thought of its wearer. As if to rea.s.sure her on this very point, he spoke aloud.

"Lena, I had clean forgot you were so pretty."

"What did you say, Tom?" she asked, thrusting her head above the robe to hear again the praise she feigned to miss.

"I had forgotten," he repeated, "that you were so confoundedly pretty."

"I should think you would have forgotten it," she retorted. "You gave yourself time enough to forget almost anything."

This unexpected show of spirit invested her with new piquancy, and he laughed aloud. At that moment the sleigh emerged upon the brow of the hill and caught the full force of the wind. A violent gust filled her hood and threw it back upon her shoulders, disclosing, as by the touch of a magician's wand, the ma.s.s of soft curls blowing wildly about her little head, her flushed cheeks and shining eyes. She saw the wide, desolate sweep of the valley, dotted here and there with twinkling lights, the belt of crimson against the distant hills; and then she saw his eyes bending near her own, as if they would drink in the beauty of every line of her face and every curl. His head blotted out the western sky, and their lips met.

The sleigh began to drop below the hill, faster and faster, and her pulses kept time to the jingling of the bells. Without premeditation she had struck a new note in their relationship. The resentment which she had scarcely acknowledged to herself had grown during the weeks of unmerited neglect, and its expression had given her an advantage, had filled him with strange pleasure. He would find it harder to stay away from her so long again. From now on she was armed with a new knowledge of her lover.

Emmet too was seeing new light. He did like opposition in a woman, but not that of a superior mind and a higher station. He would have enjoyed the tingle of Lena's little hand smiting his cheek, that helpless little hand which he could so easily control. Out of this special indulgence which he allowed himself sprang an unexpected menace for the future.

"Where are you taking me, Tom?" she asked presently.

"To Hillside," he answered, "for supper. I can have you home by eight o'clock. There's no hurry about your getting back?"

"Oh, no," she a.s.sured him. "The housekeeper thinks I have gone to my sister's."