The Mayor of Warwick Part 25

Felicity! Your maid is here in the hall--dead!"

Emmet reached Lena's side first. He raised her in his arms and carried her into the room he had just left, where he laid her gently on a couch. Felicity had already run upstairs for brandy and smelling-salts. Emmet, standing over Lena in guilty solicitude, addressed Mrs. Parr.

"Open the window," he said brusquely, "and give her some air."

She obeyed without question, and Felicity, returning with restoratives, found her husband hovering over her maid with tell-tale anxiety written on every feature, while her friend stood at the window looking on in curious conjecture. Together they bent over the girl's white face and moistened her lips with brandy. Presently, Lena's eyelids fluttered and trembled open. The mayor lifted her once more, as if she were a child, and stood erect.

"I 'll carry her to her room," he said to Felicity, "if you 'll show me the way."

"It's two flights of stairs," she objected. "Perhaps she had better stay here for a while."

"She's as light as a feather, poor girl," he returned. "She 's nothing for me to carry."

"You forget, Felicity," Mrs. Parr put in, with double meaning, "that Mr. Emmet is an athlete."

Without further protest, Felicity led the way upstairs, and Emmet followed with his burden. It was inevitable that the gentle clinging of those arms about his neck, the pressure of her golden head, should melt his heart like wax and make temporary havoc of his resolution.

Impulsively he bent his face until it rested a moment in her hair.

Circ.u.mstances had thrown them together once more in their natural relationship, both of them scorned, each needing and understanding the other in a peculiar way. No bold claims or pa.s.sionate protests could have won the tender consideration her patient suffering drew from him.

Felicity opened the door, and stood aside to let him pa.s.s. He laid Lena carefully on her little bed and arranged her pillow, then turned toward the door. It was still open, though his wife no longer stood there, and he heard the diminishing rustle of her skirts. He stood looking first at the door and then back again at the bed, irresolutely.

Lena opened her eyes and smiled at him with ineffable sweetness, and the temptation was overpowering. He took one noiseless step and sank upon his knees beside her.

"Good-bye, Lena," he murmured brokenly, the stinging and unaccustomed tears springing to his eyes; "good-bye, my poor little girl. If she were not my wife--my G.o.d, Lena, if she were only not my wife!"

The revelation could add nothing to the emotions she had already experienced. She was sure of his love; in her weakness and spiritual exaltation, that was enough. They were now bound together by a common tragedy, and she knew his gain was loss. If he had made her suffer, he had brought no less suffering upon himself, and her eyes shone with a pitiful triumph. His arms were about her, and his cheek was pressed to her own upon the pillow. Too weak herself to speak, or even to weep, her eyes told him all she wished to say.

"Forgive me, Lena," he entreated, "forgive me before I go."

"I do, Tom, dear," she whispered. "You know I do."

Her words fell upon his soul with infinite consolation. He felt that he had received the pardon of Heaven for his sins, and could now depart bravely to work out his penance. Softened and exalted, he little realised that the penance was unnecessary and self-imposed, that the mood which now took on the heroic tone of self-sacrifice was still a mood of self-seeking, that his love for Lena was selfish now as it had always been, and utterly unworthy of the devotion he received. It was true that he loved her, but he loved himself and his ambitions and revenges more. Her forgiveness was but permission to indulge them to the end. Nevertheless, when he found Felicity at the telephone in the hall below, his eyes were still bright with tears. She hung up the receiver and turned to him coldly. One glance at his face told her his state of mind and justified her own. She had never seen him at his worst before. Hypocritical with himself, filled with mawkish emotion that sublimated him in his own eyes, yet still grimly bent upon his original purpose, he had reached the very nadir of unattractiveness.

"I have sent for the doctor," she informed him, in the tone of one who has done her duty. "He will be here soon."

"Your answer," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "I cannot leave without an answer."

"I will write--soon," she returned, "but leave me now."

Without further insistence he turned from her and ran downstairs. He was out on the sidewalk before he became aware that his head was uncovered. He returned to the drawing-room and found his hat on the floor, where it had fallen from his hand at Mrs. Parr's shrill alarm.

She stood there still, waiting for Felicity's return, but neither looked at the other or spoke a word, frankly and mutually contemptuous.

The door slammed behind him a second time, and almost immediately afterward Felicity entered.

"Well, Ella," she said, sinking into a chair, "did you ever see such an excitement? I never had a greater shock in my life than when you called out that she was dead. I 'm afraid she's a very delicate girl, but she 's coming around all right, and I 've sent for the doctor."

She showed unmistakably the strain she had endured.

"Felicity," her friend broke out excitedly, "there's something here I don't understand. You don't mean to tell me you actually allow that man to call on you!"

Miss Wycliffe opened her eyes in astonishment. "What a goose you are, Ella! He came to see father. I had n't time to find out what he wanted when you nearly frightened me out of my wits."

Mrs. Parr, only partially convinced, was forced to accept the explanation; and though her eyes adumbrated reproach, she dared not say more. She remembered, however, the picture of Leigh and Felicity going off together in the moonlight the previous evening, and was rea.s.sured.

In fact, she had run in to gossip about the young man, and to sound his praises with design, but the situation she encountered at her entering had revived her old suspicions concerning Emmet. Now she told herself that they were merely a habit of mind, without justification. She recalled the mayor's emotion as he bent over Lena, his averted face when he returned for his hat, and plunged at once into an account of the episode at the inn, which she had hitherto kept to herself. Before long they were discussing the probable nature of the tie between Emmet and Lena with apparently equal interest and conjecture.

About this time, the bishop, coming from Dr. Renshaw's office, met Leigh face to face on the walk as he was returning to his room from a recitation, and stopped to speak to him.

"Mr. Leigh," he remarked, with an observant twinkle in his eyes, "you look as if last night's experience had been too much for you."

"We had enough strenuous excitement to keep any one awake," was the reply. "It was too violent a break in my monastic life."

The bishop's smile widened; his innuendo had been skilfully parried.

"When you get to be my age," he said, "you will doubtless take your politics more calmly. I never lose sleep now over the vicissitudes of those whom the fickle crowd has raised to honour. How does the line run? _Hunc, si mobilium turba Quiritium_--but you probably remember your Horace better than I do."

It was one of Bishop Wycliffe's little perversities to quote Latin at the devotees of science, and to maintain an ironical a.s.sumption of their appreciation.

"I don't remember a word of my Horace," Leigh declared. It was not the first time he had given the bishop the same information, and this fact lent emphasis to his tone.

"Too bad, too bad," the old man murmured. "I fear the rising generation has no atmosphere." And he went on his way, chuckling genially.

CHAPTER XVII

CONDITIONS

"Dr. Leigh," said President Renshaw, in his gentle and measured utterance, "I sent for you on a little matter of business, for a few minutes of conversation, if you are at leisure."

The young astronomer signified that his time was the president's, and waited for his next words with an oppressive sense of vague foreboding.

They were sitting in the room he had first entered, and Dr. Renshaw occupied the chair in which he then sat. As Leigh glanced about the room and back again at the old man's face, that first meeting seemed but yesterday, so unaltered was the scene. The tall clock, the old chair, the black cloth mitre with its tarnished gold insignia, the framed plans of St. George's Hall, were all in the same places. The president had not changed in the interim; it even seemed that he had not moved. But beyond the shapely oval of the old man's head a glimpse of wintry landscape was framed by the narrow window, instead of that earlier vision of the September morning.

In Leigh's alert and sensitive mood, these relics taunted him with their own permanence in the face of change. Those sticks of wood, those drawings, that piece of black cloth, were as ancient in a sense as the pyramids, and would retain their places while generations came before them, laboured their brief day, and then vanished as a puff of steam vanishes into blue sky. The clock had long since run down for good, and seemed by virtue of this very fact to have gained a victory over time.

"You remember, doubtless," the president resumed, "that your appointment was for this year only, and I asked you to come in to--in short, I should like to inquire whether you have made any plans for the future."

The form of the question was such that it might have been merely a preface to an offer of a permanent appointment, but Leigh divined too clearly the doctor's inward distress to give it such an interpretation.

The dismissal of which he now felt a.s.sured was scarcely a surprise. It seemed but natural that the greater loss of Felicity should include the lesser loss of his position, and he smiled bitterly.

"You mean to suggest, sir, that some such plans on my part are advisable?"

"We might say it amounts to that," Dr. Renshaw returned reluctantly.

His age, the kindness of his manner and tone, were disarming, and his listener entertained no more personal resentment toward him than if he were an ancient sibyl uttering of necessity the will of the Fates.

"I had not thought it necessary to make plans for next year," he said, "not being conscious of any shortcomings on my part sufficient to cause my dismissal. I am well aware that you are strictly within your rights, and that I have no legal redress, perhaps even no cause of complaint. I know how subordinates in business are turned away to suit the convenience, or at the whim, of their superiors; but in most colleges there is a sort of unwritten law that promotion shall follow efficient service. As a rule, the one year appointment is merely a safeguard to protect the inst.i.tution from a man seriously incompetent or depraved."

"I know--I know," the president interposed, raising his hand as if to ward off more words. "And I would not have you think for a moment that we view you in any such light. On the contrary, I may say that personally I entertain for you the highest regard and consideration."

"What is the matter, then?" Leigh demanded. "It seems no more than fair that I should be told definitely where the trouble lies."

The other reflected awhile. "If I were to mention the one definite complaint, Mr. Leigh, it would not sum up the whole situation; it would be an explanation that only partially explained. However, the complaint has to do with your discipline in the cla.s.s-room."