The Mayor of Warwick Part 27

"Mine," she admitted. "You know how I came to make it--the narrowness of my life that yet seemed so broad, the insignificance of the artificial men I knew, the longing for romance, for a love affair with a flavour of risk and adventure in it. You must n't hold me now to that girl's dream, since you were the one that waked me from it. You showed me first that we really did n't care for each other. If you loved me, why did you take up with the first pretty servant-girl you met?"

She had not meant to recall their difference in cla.s.s, but in Lena's station in life lay the chief sting of his offence, and the fact could not be concealed.

"Why? Why?" he echoed. "Because she loved me more than you did,--if you ever loved me at all,--because you starved my heart and made me feel that you were not my wife at all, but only a patroness who had taken me up to make something of me, with an indefinite promise of a reward at the end of it, if I would be a good little boy and do as you told me, and keep out of mischief, and win a prize. What kind of a position is that to put a man in?"

"I supposed the reward was worth working and waiting for," she retorted coolly. "You 're whipping yourself into a pa.s.sion now, Tom, but you know in your heart that my cruelty to you, if it was cruelty, was not as great as your cruelty to Lena. I would have kept my promise, and you know it, if you had not yourself forfeited all claim to my respect.

I supposed you were a strong man"--

"And have I no wrongs?" he broke in. "Did you think I was n't a man at all, but just a lump of putty to be moulded by your hands? How do you suppose I felt when we were married in New York, and you left me at the very door of the church?"

"I did n't realise till then what I had done," she gasped, the panic of that moment returning to her, "and I had to leave you."

"But I did realise it," he cried bitterly, "as any man would have realised it. I realised nothing else. I walked the streets, wondering whether it was a practical joke. You made a fool of me. You did n't tell me beforehand that you were going to play such a trick on me."

"Trick!"

"Yes, trick! What else, in the name of G.o.d, was it? It seemed like nothing else, at first. I could hardly remember what you said,--you spoke so confused and were so anxious to get away,--but finally I figured it out that you were just scared, and that I would have to wait a little while for you to get used to the idea that you were my wife."

He paused, choked by emotion. "I waited, G.o.d knows," he went on, "waited for nearly three years. And what did I get? A few stolen meetings and a few kisses, not very genuine ones at that. Somehow you carried the thing out in your father's high-handed way. I could n't break through and get at you. Every time we met I thought I would, but instead I took advice and promises, until it became a habit of mind. I became tired of the mockery, and heart-sick. You made yourself seem less and less my wife. And when I did n't see you for weeks at a time, and when I was filled with resentment, I met Lena"--

"And did the very thing that lost me to you forever," she supplemented relentlessly.

They had come to a point where the road ascended and ran along the margin of a great stone quarry, from which the material that went into the building of St. George's Hall had been hewn. The air had grown momently colder, condensing the mist, which now floated away in milky wreaths, disclosing the full moon shining down upon the wide sweep of the valley toward the west. Stung to madness by her words, he stopped and turned upon her, but his answer died on his lips, for he looked into a face of such surpa.s.sing beauty that he seemed never to have seen it truly before. The gathered crimson hood invested it with something of the sorcery that Leigh had felt, that any man must have felt. The divinity that had hitherto hedged about the bishop's daughter vanished for the first time like a vanishing mist, and left her only an irresistible woman standing alone with him in the moonlight.

The impulse that swept over him was one of sheer desire. Lena had taught him what a woman's kisses could be, kisses such as Felicity had never given him, such as he would now have from her as his right.

Before she could antic.i.p.ate his intention, he had seized her roughly and strained her to his breast with a violence that hurt.

"Felicity!" he cried in savage delight, "I could make you come to me now. You are my wife--I tell you, my wife!"

She managed to free herself from his grasp, and having retreated a few steps, she faced him, white with anger. Leigh's embrace had been pa.s.sionate, and had fired her blood with an answering emotion, but Emmet's was an a.s.sault, arousing within her an implacable resentment.

"I am not your wife!" she cried, quivering. "Marriage or no marriage, I am not your wife, and never will be. After what has pa.s.sed between you and that girl, how dared you kiss me--how dared you? When you came down to me--the other morning--from her room--and found me in the hall--did n't I see in your face--in your tears--the state of your mind?"

In her heart she believed it probable that he had wronged Lena to the greatest extent that a man can wrong a woman. He did not divine the extent of her suspicions, however, and unfortunately his next words deepened them to practical certainty.

"G.o.d help me," he groaned. "You 've told the truth. You 're not my wife and never have been, but you 've kept her from being, poor girl.

You 've made me wrong her--perhaps kill her, for all I know."

Something of the wild and tragic strain that lies so deep in the Celtic race now rose to the surface and transformed him. He took a step forward and seized her by the wrist.

"I could end it all at once by dragging you with me over the cliff, and I don't know but I will!"

Powerless in his grasp, she stood on the very edge of the rock that fell away sheer before them to the depth of two hundred feet. He looked down into the basin, showing here and there in the hollows a pool mirrored in the moonlight, and shapeless ma.s.ses of machinery and stone. Whether he had really been in earnest, or had only imagined himself to be, the vision of that cruel abyss made him pause, shuddering. But Felicity had not taken her eyes from his face. Now he turned to meet them, not distended with fear, but fixed upon him in discerning scorn. She even made no effort to free her wrist, but stood poised on the brink with an apparent unconcern, that reestablished her ascendancy as if by magic.

"You 're merely acting now, Tom," she said calmly. "You don't want to die, and you have no intention of killing me. You 've got too much to live for, to throw your life away in that fashion. When you 've had time to think it over, you 'll discover that it was n't love that made you want me, but ambition. The love was gone long ago, but the ambition remains. You want to live for that."

He dropped her wrist, and cowered away from the cliff as if he were shrinking from a nightmare horror, while she began to move slowly in the direction of the college. The very act of retreat aroused within her the emotion which, curiously enough, she had not experienced in the crisis of danger. It was not fear that made her flee, but her flight that produced the fear; and the possibility of the crime, the grewsome picture it suggested, flashed upon her with such sinister power that her knees weakened and caused her to stumble. He overtook her in a few long strides, and walked beside her in dumb penitence.

"You 'll never forgive me now, Felicity," he said, when he could bear the silence no longer, "never--never!"

"We 'll not talk of forgiveness any more on either side," she returned wearily. "We 're merely going round and round in a circle, without arriving at any conclusion."

His own nature shared her reaction from intense emotion to indifference, and again silence fell between them. Apparently, they were scarcely better able to understand each other than if they spoke in different languages, and each took refuge in incommunicable thoughts. It would always be thus, she reflected, if they lived together; no community of interests, herself living in a region apart, which he was generations short of being able to enter. Nothing would remain but practical politics, and already she sickened of the sordid subject. Unionism, public ownership of public utilities versus private privilege, charges and counter-charges of political corruption, problems of taxation--such things would const.i.tute his sole interest in life and the gist of his conversation. It was not enough that he talked intelligently, even eloquently, on these subjects. Her active mind had already exhausted their possibilities, and what to her was a mere by-play of the intellect was to him the be-all and end-all of existence. Of the books she had given him, he understood and appropriated only those parts that related to his subject. All the rest was lost: the literary quality, the atmosphere, the historic perspective. To him it could never mean anything that Plato saw the Parthenon.

This fact indicated a limitation, a reason why he could never develop from the politician into the statesman, why, for example, she knew that he was not the kind of man to become a cabinet officer or amba.s.sador.

She would be merely the wife of a mayor, or at the most, of a governor or representative. And she knew she would never respect his opinions, that he was one who might champion crude and undigested theories, theories which men trained as her father and Leigh and Cardington had been trained would weigh in the balance and find wanting. How rashly she had condemned this training, how effectually her experiment had cured her of radicalism, she herself now saw clearly. The problem of liberty within conventionality was still unsolved, and she had beaten her wings against the bars in vain.

On the other hand, just as she had once endowed Emmet with possibilities he never possessed, so now, in her disillusion, she lost sight of those primitive virtues that would always make him a force for good in whatever level he was destined to reach. Unjust to him in the beginning, she was unjust to him still.

Felicity Wycliffe was a mystery to herself no less than to others. The normal functions of her s.e.x had dropped so far below her ken, in the course of her complicated development, as to seem negligible.

Beginning with this negation, she had pa.s.sed rapidly on to an att.i.tude of universal scepticism, to which religion was merely a matter of taste, and prayer was a psychological phenomenon. She was not one to lend herself to the constructive dreams of men, or to attach herself to their theories. Her weariness of her father's academic plans presaged her disillusion in regard to Emmet's career, even if he had been what she first imagined him. Her colossal egotism demanded everything from a man, and was prepared to give nothing in return, except the precarious possession of herself. Yet what man, fascinated by the mysterious unrest and nocturnal splendour of her eyes, would not gladly pay for that possession whatever price she might demand?

Presently, when their silence had again become awkward, she began to speak of impersonal things; of the strange transformation of the night, lately so oppressive and obscure, now so dazzlingly serene; of the carrying power of sound in the stillness about--a dog's barking, the distant notes of the bell in the tower of the First Church striking the hour of eleven. As they pa.s.sed the Hall, she saw that the windows of Leigh's room were again dark, and imagined that he had taken advantage of the clearing atmosphere to ascend to the top of the tower and resume his observations. Emmet, following the direction of her eyes upward, divined her thought.

"The professor is probably looking at the moon through his telescope,"

he remarked.

"Yes," she answered, in a tone as casual as his own, "he would doubtless not lose this opportunity of examining the cracks that have appeared recently on its surface, if he can see them with that lens, which is n't likely. They are said to be hundreds, or even thousands, of miles long, and only a few yards in width."

Her knowledge of such a recent astronomical discovery confirmed his suspicion that she and Leigh saw much of each other. Knowing the man's infatuation with her by his own confession, he now became convinced that she returned it; that she had used his fault in regard to Lena Harpster to justify its counterpart in herself. Correct in his main surmise, he was nevertheless mistaken concerning the source of her information, a short press despatch from the Lick Observatory which he had overlooked in the morning paper.

He was in no mood to renew the struggle with her on the basis of these suspicions, but laid them away in his heart for future consideration.

About to reply indifferently, his words were checked by a sudden fit of coughing. The long exposure in the penetrating fog and the subsequent increase in the cold were producing their effect, and as they descended the hill, his cough became more frequent and severe.

She was concerned for him, much as she would have been concerned for any one under similar circ.u.mstances. Some hereditary instinct, a tradition of professional humanity, moved her to expressions of sympathy and advice; and when they arrived before her house, she insisted that he come in and get something warm to drink before exposing himself further to the cold night air. He followed her obediently through the dimly lighted hall into the dining-room, wondering at her apparent indifference to the possibility of meeting either Lena or the bishop.

The indifference was real. Wearied of her own efforts to disentangle herself from the meshes of her plight, she was ready to challenge chance. Had her father been sitting up for her, she would have led her husband into his presence, prepared to take the consequences. But as chance decided otherwise, she accepted the respite, not without relief.

She heated water over a small alcohol lamp, which she placed on the table, and called his attention to the reflection of the green flame in the polished mahogany surface. There was that in her manner and conversation which deprived her act of the tone of personal service.

She watched him sip his whiskey with a judicial expression, overruling the protest his principles suggested. She poured for herself a gla.s.s of wine and sat opposite him, the tall wax candles between them, and asked him for the first time how he found his duties as mayor. The question seemed to occur to her as one which ordinary courtesy should have prompted her to ask before.

Emmet felt her aloofness, and met it with unexpected dignity. In his answer he spoke of Bat Quayle, and of a plan forming against him among his enemies in the board of aldermen to lay all his appointments on the table indefinitely, and thus to make his administration a failure. But he did not a.s.sume, as he would once have done, that she was vitally interested, and his remarks were fragmentary.

Felicity noticed his sombre mood and attributed it partly to his physical condition, little dreaming how bitterly he resented, not her kindness, but the manner of it. It was the old grievance over again.

Like the bishop, like her whole cla.s.s, she was unconsciously patronising, he reflected, even when she meant to be charitable. For the time, at least, he asked nothing from her, and this indifference gave him more of a tone of the world, more the air of a gentleman, than she had ever seen in him before. For once the tables were turned, and it was he who appeared enigmatical. If he were any longer conscious of his conductor's uniform, it was a proud consciousness, and he seemed to wear it like the insignia of a soldier. When he left, it was without further appeals or personalities, but with brief thanks for her kindness and good wishes.

She stood and watched him going down the walk in the moonlight, the black shadows of the bare branches falling one after another across his shoulders, and suddenly the thought that this was her husband who was leaving her thus came over her with a wave of irresistible emotion.

Her throat ached with a piercing realisation of the tragedy of it, and without stopping to think, she ran down the steps and pursued him, panting and almost weeping. He turned at the sound of her hurrying steps, puzzled by the pursuit and on his guard against her influence.

He was suspicious of her intentions now, and waited for her to explain the meaning of this mercurial change.

"Tom," she said in a choking voice, laying a detaining hand upon his sleeve. But she was possessed by an emotion, rather than by a thought that could be expressed in words, and so she stood thus awhile in silence. His grim immobility and manly self-containment brought back some flavour of that early romance, when he, unaware as yet of her fancy, paid her slight heed, and for that very reason appealed to her imagination.

The change in her mood seemed to flow into him like a solvent that broke up his resentment and suspicion. That realisation of their relationship which had sent her after him was conveyed in the thrilling note of her voice when she uttered his name, and though at first he had refused to understand it thus, her lingering touch became its full interpreter. They searched each other's eyes mutely, and he knew before he began to speak that she was his.

"Felicity," he said, his eyes gathering an intense, exultant light, "you 've come after me of your own accord, and you 've got to abide by it. You 've played fast and loose with me long enough. Don't go back into the house--come with me now--you're my wife--why should n't you come with me? Whose business is it but our own? I say you must!"

With an effort she withdrew her eyes from his face and looked back at the open door of her father's house, imprinting every detail upon her memory: the dull red carpet, the antique chairs, the stairway hung with old engravings, climbing upward to the room which she was never again to enter as before. The temptation a.s.sailed her to cut once and for all the Gordian knot, and obeying its impulse, she began to walk down the flagging beside him.

At the street she paused once more and pressed her hands piteously against her heart, trying to think. This was the spot where Leigh had kissed her, and his ghost seemed to confront her there in the cold moonlight, looking at her with sad, reproachful eyes, eyes full of a deep, ethereal pa.s.sion that burned this other pa.s.sion to ashes. This, then, was the explanation of her vacillation. If his mere memory could stay her thus, while she vibrated to the influence of the man that was present, she must love him indeed. She looked up and saw Emmet's face distinctly, already hardening with new suspicion, without a trace of tenderness, marked only by the ravages of disappointment. By contrast she remembered that other face. She felt again Leigh's kisses and heard his murmured words of love.