The Mayor of Warwick Part 4

"How can I?" he retorted. "Shall I go out and stump the town?"

"I 'll tell you," she said, bending forward and fixing him with a look of discovery. "What Mr. Emmet needs more than anything else is a friend out of his own cla.s.s, some one like yourself, who could correct his perspective a little. How shall I explain it? He seems in danger of becoming a demagogue, and of resting his case on an appeal to cla.s.s-hatred."

Leigh had not supposed that his semi-jocular wish would be taken so literally, but he soon discovered that she gave it its face value. She went on with growing earnestness.

"There is to be a joint debate between him and Judge Swigart in about a fortnight, and I 'm afraid that Mr. Emmet will injure his cause by overstatement, by that very bitterness I mentioned. If he could confine himself to the facts, he might win the support of many who are ready to follow a safe leader, but would be antagonized by a hint of socialism."

"Do you mean that I could accomplish all this in such a short time?" he asked. "To be perfectly frank, the prospect of the task dismays me.

He 'd be sure to resent the attempt."

"Not he," she answered with conviction. "He 'd be grateful for such support as yours. He 's really an awfully nice fellow, and I think you 'd find him rather interesting."

"I don't doubt it for a minute," he a.s.sured her. "But how am I to make his acquaintance in the first place?"

She considered the question awhile. "Just tell him I thought you would like to know each other. That would make it perfectly easy and natural."

Leigh could not fail to see that this method was the best, if the thing were to be done at all. She could not bring them together socially, and a note of introduction would be too formal. Doubtless the man looked up to her as his patroness, and would accept anything from her with something of feudal loyalty.

"I might meet him casually,--on purpose,--and if we happened to like each other and began to talk about politics"-- The sentence dwindled into a dubious smile.

"Do," she urged. "I really think you could influence him for good."

Leigh was less sure of it, and the other two men returned before he had committed himself to a plan that seemed, even when seen under her influence, to be little short of quixotic.

During the walk home he tried Cardington on the subject of Emmet, but found him uncommunicative, almost brusque, in his reticence. Leigh suspected that the subject might be a sore one with him, and that he thoroughly disapproved of Miss Wycliffe's odd charity. When a talker is silent, his silence has the tactile quality of Egyptian darkness, and so it now appeared in Cardington. Concerning Miss Wycliffe herself they made no comment, doubtless because they were thinking of her so intently. Leigh reviewed every moment he had pa.s.sed in her company, recalling each look and word. He was impressed now, more than he had been at the time, with the intensity of her interest in the election, and it occurred to him that to do as she desired, or at least to attempt it, would establish a claim upon her regard. This was his opportunity. If he desired to win her favour, he must regard her wish as mandatory. How much he desired to win it he did not try to conceal from himself.

His frankness extended even farther. When he recalled that it was the bishop and not his daughter who had shown humanity at the wedding, he was impressed by her curious insensibility. It seemed to him peculiarly feminine to take an interest in such a scene, and most of the women he knew would have looked on with tremulous sympathy. Was this mere instinctive selfishness on her part? If he vaguely condemned her att.i.tude in this matter, he appreciated her father's conduct the more by contrast. Somehow he guessed that the bishop did not altogether like him, but he felt that no matter what the future might bring forth in their relationship, he could never forget that charming episode. The bishop was a true aristocrat, he reflected, more inclined to be haughty to his equals than to his inferiors. Doubtless Emmet, had he been content with that station of life in which it had pleased G.o.d to place him, would have found no more affable acquaintance than Bishop Wycliffe.

The bishop presented no insoluble riddle to Leigh's mind. On the contrary, he had met his type before and knew it well; but with Miss Wycliffe the case was different. He recognized now the reason of Cardington's inability to describe her, for a categorical account of her features, or of what is commonly called her "good points," would have left the essential quality untouched. Yet this quality was the woman herself, and had fired Leigh's blood with a fever of longing that made him reckless of his judgment. In fact, he was not now absorbed in judging, but in realizing, the woman with whom he had fallen in love.

If she had appealed to him at any one moment more than at another, it was when she took him into her confidence with that sidelong look, as she slipped the novel into the large vase. Then, as at other times during the evening, but then more particularly, she had betrayed her consciousness of him as a young man, of herself as a woman and a beauty. He saw that she had no desire to talk with him on the impersonal plane of the mind, that she welcomed, rather than feared, the discovery of her femininity, even in her political interests. She might say this or that, as the fancy took her, but she knew it made no difference to an admirer what she said. Her peculiar fascination lay in a consciousness of s.e.x which is the explanation of the power to win men that distinguishes one woman above the many, to their envy and mystification.

Leigh was too attractive a man to have been allowed to reach his present age entirely ignorant of the psychology of women, though comparative poverty and laborious studies had limited his education in this direction, and left him unspoiled. He knew enough to realize the secret of Miss Wycliffe's charm, and to reflect consciously upon it in connection with himself. Mere beauty, he knew, would have left him cold, if it had not stirred within him the resentment aroused by a promise unfulfilled; intellectual gifts alone would have wearied and antagonised; evident virtue would have seemed humdrum and uninspiring.

It was this delicious appeal of the woman to the man that had won him.

He was yet to learn that this quality is not seldom accompanied by the most baffling counter-current, that holds its natural movement in apparent suspension. Why had a woman so imperially endowed remained so long unmarried? It was not that she looked her age, which he felt to be little less than his own, but that she implied it by her lack of inexperience. It was not that eight or nine and twenty made a spinster from the modern point of view, but that to reach that age unmarried she must have resisted many a suit. Had he lived longer in New England, he would have known more women of this kind, women who hide the pa.s.sionate heart of a Helen beneath the austere life of a Diana, h.o.a.rding their gifts of love as a miser h.o.a.rds his gold, partly because of cruel necessity, partly influenced by the impulse to deny inherited from Puritan ancestors.

Suddenly he became aware that Cardington had been talking again, and that he had shown indifferent courtesy as a listener. He roused himself to attention, and detected at once the unusual flavour of his companion's remarks, from which all jest had gone, showing instead a poetical and reminiscent mood.

"The silhouettes of the trees which the electric light throws upon the walk," he was saying, "remind me of a wonderful moonlight night I once spent at a.s.sisi. I was younger then than I am now, and it was my first journey in that land of enchantment. I travelled as lightly as one of the apostles, with staff and scrip, so to speak, and having resisted the efforts of the cabman at the station to rob me, I started to walk up to the city alone. I understand they have a trolley line now,--just imagine the profanation of a trolley line in the ancient city of St.

Francis!--but at the time of which I speak, the atmosphere of the Middle Ages still hung over the place unbroken.

"The city lay above the valley, white-walled and silent. I remember touching with my stick what appeared to be a streak of moonlight that had filtered through the branches of a tree, when a beautiful little serpent uncoiled himself and slipped away into the shadows. Well, the distance was greater than I had supposed, and the hour was late, so that by the time I reached the city gate, I found it closed for the night. There was nothing to do but to sit down and wait for morning.

I found a large, flat rock which seemed still to hold some of the heat of the sun, and looked out over the surrounding country. Just think of my situation! There I was, a young man fresh from America, full of the most extravagant romance, sitting alone in the moonlight before the gate of a mediaeval walled city, and a city, too, so rich with traditions that I grew dazed in trying to recall them. It may be that the moon became hypnotic in its influence, for I lay down and stared up at it like one bewitched.

"I don't know how long a time pa.s.sed in this manner before I was aroused by the appearance of an old peasant around the corner of my rock, bending under a huge bundle of f.a.ggots. I addressed myself to him in the best Italian I could then command, and asked whether it were possible to enter the city--_entrare la citta_. He rung a bell by pulling a rope that hung down over the wall, and we went in together.

Now, you know, I would have remained there all night without even looking for such an obvious way of arousing the gatekeeper."

"Yes," he continued, in answer to an appreciative comment from his listener, "you would have enjoyed it,--any one with a soul would have enjoyed it. And further adventures were in store for me in that ancient town. I remember particularly a girl who waited on the table at my _albergo_ and accompanied me at times on my tours of inspection.

From her I learned more of the history of the place, and upon her I practised most diligently my Italian. There was one mystery to which she would come back again and again. If I was an American, and poor, how did it happen that I was not an artist? She would turn her lovely eyes upon me twenty times a day and ask me this question. A charming experience, was it not? Long afterward I met an American professor on one of the boats in Holland, and when we compared notes on our travels, I discovered that he remembered that girl, too, and her eyes. Just think of the number of romantic young travellers upon whom she had turned them in that appealing way of hers!"

As his companion listened to this recital, he was impressed not so much by the story itself as by the essential happiness of the narrator.

Here was a nature as untrammelled as the wind, that delighted to roam from land to land. Local interests, people, events, might hold him for a time, but presently he would be gone in search of new adventures. If he loved Felicity Wycliffe, Leigh reflected, it was only as a wanderer loves.

Cardington was laughing in his peculiar fashion. "You will say that my little story has a disappointing sequel; but, after all, perhaps it is less commonplace as it is. She will remain enshrined in my memory, and in the memory of those other travellers, as we saw her then, always young and beautiful, and always turning upon us those lovely, enquiring eyes. And, by the way, it is strange, is it not, that Miss Wycliffe should have eyes similar to those of my young guide in a.s.sisi? As far as I know, she is of pure New England ancestry, and one does not meet very often in this climate a glance that suggests nocturnal mystery.

No, no. The women here are different, as a rule. I remember her mother; she was something like, but in less perfection."

Leigh, fearing that he might perhaps say too much, said nothing at all by way of comment. Cardington's phrase, "nocturnal mystery," was a reminder of the scene through which he had pa.s.sed thus far unheeding, and suggested its kinship with the woman of his thoughts. The vista seemed to stretch away interminably, disclosing unexpected glimpses of colour where the boughs displayed their changing leaves within the radius of an electric light. Between the lights the darkness gathered with the greater intensity because of the clouds which had now traversed the whole expanse of the sky and bidden the stars from view.

He was conscious also of the ceaseless murmuring of the wind in the leaves, like many voices whispering in an unknown tongue.

CHAPTER V

THE CANDIDATE

Leigh awoke the next morning with a sense that some profound change had come into his life. His mood was similar to that of a man on the verge of a trip to foreign lands, who, with all the humdrum existence that had earned it behind him, and all the delights of adventure before, waits only the turn of wind or tide to be away. The comparison is not inept, for he had lived laborious days, postponing deliberately or missing by chance, he scarcely knew which, the experience he now felt to be impending. His time of life was peculiarly favourable for the growth of a master pa.s.sion, one which, as the old saying has it, might make or mar him. The feverish struggles of early youth had landed him in a position somewhat better than that attained by the majority of his contemporaries. He had reached a breathing-place, where he could pause with a sense of deeds accomplished and of possible rewards in the future.

A realisation of the fact that his circ.u.mstances and position fairly justified him in entertaining seriously the thought of love lessened in no way the ideality of that thought. It was not because Felicity Wycliffe was the first attractive woman to come into his life at the right moment that he had fallen in love with her. He told himself that he could have met any other woman in the world at that time with impunity; and, conversely, had he met her years before, when his suit must needs have been hopeless, he would have loved her no less, reckless of worldly considerations. As it was, he did not feel that the situation was conventional, but that the fates were kind. His desire, and the right to strive for its attainment, had synchronised by happy chance.

In the history of a pa.s.sion, it is doubtful if any mood is more elysian than that which accompanies the waking moments on the morning after the great discovery. Leigh wandered for some time in this imaginary paradise, where everything seemed not only possible, but actually accomplished. His rising, however, shook some of these iridescent colours from his thoughts, until they gradually began to a.s.sume the more sober hue of fact, a change like that which he now discovered had come over the outside world.

The storm, which had promised to be wild and spectacular, had somehow miscarried in the night, and instead of pelting showers and tossing branches he saw a pale grey wall of mist against his windows. All excitement had gone from the atmosphere, leaving the dreary certainty that the mist would presently clear only to condense into a slow, persistent, autumn rain. It is conceivable that he would not have exchanged his waking dreams so quickly for more definite thoughts and speculations had his eyes rested upon the blue hills of the western skyline, for he was peculiarly susceptible to the moods of nature.

There being now practically no outside world to lure his fancy on, he began to think of his actual situation, and to ask himself what he intended to do with regard to the man in whom Miss Wycliffe had taken such an interest. If her plan appeared quixotic to him now, he feared that on second thoughts it might seem no less so to her, and he resolved to do the thing she desired, and to gain thereby a common interest with her, before she might discourage the attempt. This resolve taken, he went to breakfast at the college commons, and thence to chapel.

Attendance at chapel, he had discovered, was obligatory upon the students and upon those clerical members of the faculty who conducted the services. Personally he was drawn thither by the peculiar flavour which the exercises gave his daily life. It was pleasant to sit alone in his pew against the wall above the tiers of students, to watch the morning sunlight streaming through the stained gla.s.s windows, and to listen to the antiphonal singing of a fine old Rouen meditation.

Occasionally the services began with a Sapphic ode by Gregory the Great, whose opening line, _Ecce iam noctis tenuatur umbra_, set to music from the Salisbury Hymnal, resounded through the arches of the chapel like a call to the duties of the day. In the inst.i.tution from which he had recently come, the jealousy of rival sects had resulted in the complete elimination of all outward forms of worship; and he found the change grateful. There was novelty and charm in a service attended wholly by men, and in the music, as mediaeval in character as the architecture of the Hall itself. Like most of his contemporaries, Leigh could by no means have formulated his religious beliefs, but in all the chaos of modern thought he still retained a certain piety, in the old Roman sense of the word, a loyalty to the traditions of his fathers which he would never have dignified by the name of faith.

He was happily unconscious of the fact that the eyes of many of the students were fixed upon him with keen observation. The self-contained young professor was as much an unknown quant.i.ty as any he asked them to find in the recitation-room. They were baffled by the impersonal att.i.tude he had brought from the university, where the individual counted for little, and were inclined to attribute it to a disposition to be severe in his marking.

It chanced that this morning he was free from recitations, but though his time was his own, he had no definite plan with which to fill it.

After lingering in his room for some minutes, he descended once more to the walk, finding relief in simulating a purpose by definiteness of action. Instead of following the line of the building northward, he struck out directly across the plateau, past the flagstaff and the great bronze statue of the bishop, and descended the slope along a path that marked the future grand approach.

As he recalled the bishop's elaborate description, he turned and gazed at the towers which loomed ghost-like beyond the ridge. He was now in the midst of the wide field from which he had heard the tinkle of cow-bells on the morning of his arrival. The place was deserted, save for his own presence. The gra.s.s was heavy with clinging globules of moisture, and every head of goldenrod seemed encrusted with glimmering pearls. Everywhere there was a curious and oppressive silence, as if the world were deprived not only of light, but also of life. The great towers appeared unsubstantial, carved from blocks of mist only a degree thicker than that which spread about him. He indulged the odd fancy that a rising wind might sweep the whole away, leaving only a bare hilltop beneath the clearing sky.

The clang of a gong from the car barn beyond came like a reminder of his purpose, a summons to make a tentative effort, at least, to achieve it. So he turned resolutely away, leaving academic dreams in the mist behind him.

The street-car barn was perhaps the dreariest spot in Warwick. Its proximity to the college grounds had caused the bishop to view it with disfavour, and already a fine ivy, planted at his suggestion, covered part of the bare brick walls. The bishop would fain have recalled the days that antedated electric roads, before the company had driven this peg at the corner of his academe and stretched therefrom another gleaming thread of its intricate web of trolley lines. Those were the golden days when one drove up to the Hall in a comfortable carriage, when the richer students went horseback riding along the country roads, when the _chug, chug_ of the motor-car and its attendant smell of gasoline were unknown.

Though Leigh was far from sharing the bishop's whimsical indignation at this change, even he felt the chill unloveliness of the long reaches of the barn filled with lifeless cars, where an occasional electric bulb burned like an _ignis fatuus_ in the misty gloom. How much more attractive a railroad roundhouse, with iron monsters on its converging tracks, each with his cyclopean eye of fire, each panting deeply with slow jets of steam!

The place was comparatively deserted. Far back in the barn dim figures moved, and from the workhouse in the rear came the clang of metal. One or two pa.s.sengers were waiting for the next car, and Leigh spied a conductor coming to his work, finishing the last few puffs of his morning pipe. He was an elderly man, with a sweeping grey moustache and a gait that suggested the sea. Behind him two small boys came racing with a cart.

"h.e.l.lo!" cried the conductor, stepping aside with agility. "What 's this? A j.a.panese torpedo boat?" He turned to Leigh genially. "I 'll have to spread a net before my bows. These youngsters take me for a Rooshyan battleship."

It occurred to Leigh that this man might know Emmet well, and when the car came in, he stood on the back platform for the purpose of engaging him in talk that might help him in his project. The heavy morning traffic was over, and as the conductor was comparatively unoccupied, he accepted his pa.s.senger's advances readily. In a few minutes Leigh became aware that the man knew who he was.

"That's nothing wonderful," he explained. "I've been on this line for years, and I know everybody that travels this way. I thought you were the new professor at the Hall, the minute I set eyes on you."