The Mayor of Warwick Part 17

"Oh, no, Tom," she cried. "She did n't say anything about that, but she seemed angry with me, though she was so quiet. I thought, Tom,--how foolish you will think me,--that she loved you and meant to take you away from me!"

He laughed harshly. "She love me!"

The bitter incredulity of his accent was too p.r.o.nounced to be feigned, as indeed it was not, and she lifted her head, rea.s.sured. "I might have known it," she said, dashing away her tears with a tremulous little laugh, "but I loved you so. And she warned me against you. She said you meant nothing good by me. I suppose she thought you would want to marry a lady, now that you are mayor; but at the time I felt somehow that she wanted you for herself!"

A subtler and more highly developed man would have foreseen all this suffering from the first; he would have sown the wind with some knowledge of the whirlwind to come. But Emmet was a child in matters feminine, and he stood aghast at the thought of the probable effect upon Lena of the inevitable discovery of the truth. If the very fancy caused her such grief, what would she do when she found out that her imagination had been prophetic? A frantic desire to postpone the blow that must fall upon her so soon gave him the skill of a Faustus. He scoffed at the absurdity of her fear, and a bitter conviction of his wife's selfishness gave his arguments the ring of truth. Only, when he drew a picture of the difference between his social position and that of women of Miss Wycliffe's cla.s.s, she stopped him with the a.s.sertion that not one of them, with all their money, was worthy to be his wife.

She added humbly that she knew how little worthy she was herself.

As if the approaching end of their journey drove her on to lay her soul bare before him, she told him every detail of that interview with her mistress in her room, down to the moment when she had groped blindly for the window and looked out through her tears to see him pa.s.s.

He had planned to leave her some distance from the bishop's house, but now caution was useless. The street, however, was deserted thereabouts, though the night was still young, and no one saw their farewell. As he drove away and glanced back to see her figure still motionless against the snow, he experienced some of the punishment that comes to him who plays at ducks and drakes with a woman's heart.

CHAPTER XII

THE CONFESSION

An hour later, Emmet approached the college through the maple walk with very different feelings from those he had entertained when he watched the sunset behind the towers. Then he had felt the glory of individualism, his own vivid power as opposed to the lethargy of inst.i.tutions. But his recent experience had started the pendulum back, and now it swung to the other extreme. His self-confidence had been followed by an exhibition of weakness. He who could defy and control men was helpless before the eyes of a woman; he who had burned with indignation at the corrupt politics of his enemies, who had sacrificed his interests to principle by showing Bat Quayle the door, had gone forth and sacrificed his principles to his pleasure at the very first opportunity.

Though by nature objective rather than introspective, his experiences since his first meeting with Felicity were teaching him by hard blows the rudiments of his own psychology. Had he been unmoral, he would have remained unscrupulous and unreflecting, but the claims of right would not down. He saw the better way and approved it, but followed the worse, and his knowledge of this inconsistency was gall and bitterness to his soul. He was as genuinely repentant as it is possible for a healthy man to be while the taste of life is still sweet; yet without doubt a large measure of his repentance was the fear of discovery. In the recesses of his mind lurked a hope that Leigh would be able to show him some way out of the labyrinth, would somehow help him to escape the consequences of his misdeeds.

Born a Catholic, his instinctive att.i.tude toward the established order of things was that of a dissenter. Yet here were religion and learning coming back, and not in vain, to claim their penny of tribute. He had defied the authority of the Church, and had nevertheless accepted her doctrine of the sanct.i.ty of marriage; he had scorned the College, and now he turned by preference to one of her representatives, influenced, in spite of prejudice and disillusioning experience, by respect for her ideals. There she loomed, seeming monolithic in her solidity, a part of the rock on which she was built, her windows sending out shafts of light into the surrounding darkness, an allegory in stone.

As he pa.s.sed the windows, he saw within characteristic glimpses of college life. Half a dozen students were gathered about a fireplace with their pipes, clothed in every variety of garment from the sweater or bath-robe to the evening dress of one who had dropped in for a chat on his way to a dance. In another room a game of cards was in progress; in still a third a thoughtful plodder sat close to his shaded lamp, his head resting upon his hand, an open book before him.

Somewhere above he heard a piano played with brilliancy and dash, and the rollicking chorus of the college song:--

Then we 'll drink to old St. George, (By George!) Then we 'll drink to our valiant knight, With his trusty spear, And never a fear, And the dragon pinned down tight, tight, tight, And the dragon pinned down tight!

Emmet listened to the refrain with a curious mixture of envy and contempt. Many a time these fellows had taken his car and discussed football news with him, but at no time, in his hearing, had their conversation indicated intellectual interests or risen even to the level of the socialistic problems that were dear to his heart. He had yet to learn more of college life than is disclosed by the sporting clique to a street-car conductor; but with characteristic self-a.s.surance he thought he had penetrated to the very heart of the machine. The quiet and un.o.btrusive student, the leaven of the loaf, the future poet or statesman, had never attracted his attention or that of men of his kind. They saw only what was on the surface. It was the froth of college life that gave him a not unwelcome excuse to form caustic generalisations upon a privileged cla.s.s.

He hurried along, relieved to meet no one on the walk, for there were few who would not have recognised him, and his mood was all for concealment. Observing from without that the light in Leigh's windows was dim, he concluded that he was still upon the tower and went on up the stairs, striking match after match to guide his steps. As he paused to extinguish the embers, he encountered the blank darkness of the walls, relieved by ghostly slits of windows holding here and there a star; and the hollow drumming of the wind was like the sea. It was a release to emerge at last from this series of aerial prisons and to stand beneath the wide sweep of the sky. In answer to his knock Leigh opened the door and confronted him, clothed like a Siberian Cossack.

"Still at it, professor?" Emmet inquired. "I should think you would be frozen out."

"Come in, Mr. Emmet," Leigh answered. "This is a welcome interruption.

I 've been working at a problem now for a month, and was just beginning to get a little lonely."

His eyes shone bright in the dim light and his face was somewhat thinner than Emmet had remembered it, but his manner was buoyant and alert. The visitor took a chair and glanced about him with interest, noting the changes that had been made since he last saw the place. He observed an improvised windbreak of canvas, and a charcoal brasier in the corner.

"And how do you manage to work that sliding roof in snowy weather?" he asked.

"A broom, a shovel, some salt to melt the ice, and a little oil for the wheels"--

"Well, I saw your telescope rising up above the towers about half-past four, and was so surprised to think that you were still taking observations that I came up to see how the place looked."

"I 'm making observations for the parallax of Arcturus," Leigh explained. "The atmosphere is clearer in winter, you know."

"How long might it take, now," Emmet asked jocosely, "to get at the facts?"

"Who knows? Others have been working at the same problem for twelve years."

Emmet emitted a low whistle. "What does it all amount to?" he demanded. "Suppose you do find the what's its name--parallax? It sounds like the name of some kind of weapon. Why don't you go in for some other line of business, before it's too late? There's the law, now--a short cut to politics. You could get somewhere in the world, if you did n't shut yourself up on this tower and spend your time in looking through that telescope."

The reproach was in reality a compliment, and Emmet would have been disappointed had his suggestion been received with favour.

"Since we 're comparing politics with astronomy," Leigh answered, "let me ask who was the governor of this State fifty years ago? Perhaps he spent a lifetime struggling for the place, and after his two years of office he was down and out for good, with the privilege of hanging his portrait among a hundred others on the walls of the State Library. But take any name connected with a scientific discovery, and it lasts as long as the world endures. Take even a lesser name--never mind your Galileos and Herschels. There's Asaph Hall, who discovered the moons of Mars, and already, before his death, he is enjoying his immortality."

"But I thought you told me the instrument was no good," Emmet persisted.

"Not as bad as that. It is n't what I should like, but a man must do something, even if it's only to keep in practice. It might stand him in stead some day in a larger place."

Emmet was too much absorbed in himself to catch the hint of restlessness these words conveyed. Leigh's profession, like the ministry, made him, in the mayor's eyes, a being apart from the life with which he was familiar. It naturally did not occur to him that the astronomer had been driven back to his duty by the scourge of suffering, much less that his own wife had wielded the whip. He saw only an inexplicable devotion to an ideal pursuit.

"Well," Leigh continued, with a sudden change of manner, "and how is the mayoralty getting on?"

Emmet's face darkened. "I had it out with Bat Quayle this morning and turned him down hard. He 'll get back at me sooner or later. But that is n't what I came up to see you about. The fact is, I 'm in trouble."

Leigh glanced tentatively at the sheets of paper on his table, covered with unfinished calculations, and hesitated; but his visitor's manner implied an urgent need.

"If I can be of any help to you"--he suggested.

"I'm not so sure of that," Emmet answered gloomily, "as that I want to tell some one what an awful fool I 've made of myself."

"There are others," Leigh replied, with a bitter grin. "I know a triple-expansion a.s.s not a hundred miles from here; so fire away."

Emmet went over to the brasier and warmed his hands, as if embarra.s.sed for words with which to begin. Leigh fumbled in the pocket of his greatcoat and produced his pipe, then drawing up his chair opposite, he sat down to listen. No premonition came to him at that moment that the story his visitor had to tell in any way concerned himself, or would deepen the even melancholy of his present days. He settled himself comfortably, with a sense of justifiable relaxation from toil. The troubles of another might arouse his intellectual sympathy, but they could add no burden to his heart. He even experienced a pleasurable curiosity. Emmet was to some degree a mysterious character to him, though he no longer thought of him in connection with Felicity. Her departure from Warwick had put an end to that suspicion, and made it something of which he was ashamed. He divined indeed that the trouble concerned a woman, but not the woman who had gone away with such evident indifference to any man in Warwick.

"Well, Emmet," he said at last, "here I am, all ears. Perhaps it will help you to a beginning if I suggest that there's a woman somewhere at the bottom of the trouble."

The other placed his chair snugly in the corner, buried his hands deep in his pockets, and looked at the brasier with a fixed stare. "It's not one woman," he began, with a sensible effort, "it's two. I don't know any better way to give you an idea of the tangle I've gotten myself into than by going back to the beginning of the story. About five years ago, I hadn't any more idea of going into politics than you have now. I was playing baseball in the summer and running a car in winter, and saving my money. My parents were both dead, and I was thinking that it was pretty near time for me to get married. I was never one to throw away my money with the boys,--it came too hard,--I didn't even smoke or drink, and"--

"That's a bad beginning," Leigh interrupted, shaking his head with mock seriousness. "No small vices--women."

Emmet took the comment with good humour. "No, I was n't an easy mark for women, either. I tell you my main idea was to get ahead, to save some money. I could n't stand poverty; I had seen too much of it.

When I was a boy, I carried the washing for my mother after school hours. In summer I played baseball and hung around the race-track. If I had n't been so heavy, I 'd have become a jockey and made my fortune quicker; but anyhow I had ten thousand dollars salted away by the time I was twenty-five. I 'm thirty now."

Leigh was secretly somewhat amused by this prologue, which seemed to spring partly from the egotism of a self-made man, partly from an instinctive unwillingness to embark upon the confession to which he was committed. However, he was far from being bored. "I'm about thirty myself," he remarked, "and I'm worth about thirty cents. But that's a digression."

"Well, as I was saying," Emmet resumed, "I wasn't an easy mark for women. I had too much at stake to get tangled up that way, but I was thinking that it was pretty near time for me to find a wife. There's a lady in this town--you 'll hardly believe it--I did n't myself, at first--that took a fancy to me. She was rich and fashionable, and all that, the sort of woman I would n't have thought of in any such way; but gradually I began to notice that she took my car nearly every day.

Even when she told me straight out that she preferred to ride with me, I did n't suspect anything, for she always had a pleasant word for all the boys. But after a while I woke up to the fact that she knew just when I would be at the City Hall, and managed her shopping so as to ride home with me. After that I began to take particular notice. When I took her fare, I was embarra.s.sed by the look in her eyes. She had fine eyes, and a way of sizing me up that seemed to mean something.

Sometimes our hands would touch for a moment, and then it was n't by accident; and by Christmas time I knew as well as if she had told me that if she was n't in love with me, she thought she was."

"You were a lucky dog," Leigh said, filling an impressive pause with the first chance comment that came to him. Afterward he wondered at the obstinate torpidity of his mind, for not even the reference to her deliberate look and fine eyes gave him the clew. All this talk of early hardship and of street-cars had put the narrator for the time on another level from that he now occupied in the world, and made his past seem his present. The very confession, and the manner of it, belittled the confessor, and Leigh took his characterisation of his admirer as rich and fashionable with a grain of salt, making some allowance for the point of view, some for natural vanity and a desire to impress him.

"I did n't think I was so lucky," the mayor answered simply. "Of course I was pretty well set up, but I never thought it would amount to anything, and it was a dangerous game to play. I was n't sure how far I could go, or how far she wanted me to go, and besides, I had mighty little chance to see her alone. There was always somebody near, and I thought if I overstepped the mark she might be offended, or her father might get on to it and have me fired for impertinence."