The Mayor of Warwick Part 7

"If you did n't give him what he deserved, what did you do, Lena?" he demanded, going back to the incident that had aroused his jealousy.

"I drew away, Tom."

"As gentle as a kitten, and without a word, too, I 'll be bound. You 're altogether too pretty--that's the trouble with you. I ought to put you in a cage, to keep you safe."

"Tom, dear," she said suddenly, "I hear the Pyles talking about politics when I wait on the table. They say that you have n't the ghost of a chance to be elected. Now that you 've thrown up your job, what will you do if you are defeated?"

He emitted a short laugh, expressive of confidence and scorn. "You were n't such a little fool as to suppose I intended to stand on the back of a street-car all my life, were you? Five years of that sort of thing is about enough for me, and I 've worked it for all it was worth." A desire to impress her overcame his innate secretiveness.

"There 's more in that job than the measly salary the company pays; and a man 's ent.i.tled to take something of what would be his by rights if things were as they should be in this world. There 's a higher law than the law made by the privileged few for their own enriching, and sometimes a man has to take the matter into his own hands and decide what's due him." This was rather an elaborate way of telling her that, like most of his fellows, he was accustomed to "knock down" fares on crowded trips, when it could be done undetected. Perhaps he took some satisfaction in going over again the arguments by which he justified the practice. Perhaps he was curious to see whether she would make a condemnatory comment, but nothing was further from her thoughts, and he went on. "I have n't spent a cent of my baseball salary for years.

Where do you suppose it is?"

"In the savings bank?" she suggested.

He chuckled at her simplicity. "Better than that--salted down--invested. I could live on the interest of it, after a fashion, if I wanted to." He was flattered by her wide-eyed admiration and wonder, and moved to disclose himself to her still more. "Why, look here, Lena, there 's more than politics in this game. They say I have n't the ghost of a show. We 'll see about that; but whichever way it turns out, I shan't be a beggar. Only, if I am elected, I 'll take every cent I 've got and put it into the bonds the city is going to issue to build the new bridge. There's nothing better in the country than the bonds of this town. None of your Central America rubber bonds or Colorado mining stock for me. I want something I know about and can keep my eye on."

"Then you are n't poor!" she cried gladly. "You're rich!"

He squared his jaw determinedly, and his eyes glowed. "Not rich yet, but I will be--I will be yet!"

She did not doubt that he could be anything he wished, but from this very confidence in his power a great fear was born. She put her lips close to his ear, and whispered tremulously: "Tom, dear, I know you think I 'in pretty, and all that, but do you love me, Tom? When you get to be mayor, or when you 're rich, will you love me just the same?

You won't be too proud to think of marrying me then? Tell me you won't!"

She withdrew herself and placed her hands on his shoulders as before, an att.i.tude pathetically suggestive of her effort to fix his attention upon her words. The poise of her little head was extremely winning in her desire for his admiration. "Do you think I would make a pretty wife, even for a mayor?" she faltered.

He caught her once more in his arms, as if the word wife had awakened within him a curious intensity of feeling, but for once she was not satisfied. Gradually her slender form became shaken by a storm of convulsive sobs. He waited in silence, with all a primitive man's uncomprehending distress at a woman's tears.

"Don't borrow trouble, Lena," he said simply. The tone, more than the words, showed that his mood had become stern, almost resentful. In fact, it was the first time she had given him anything but pleasure, and pleasure was all he desired from her.

His answer was not what she had hoped for, but her woman's wisdom forbade her to press the matter then. Of his love she felt no doubt; the intensity of his look, the well-nigh fierce impulsiveness of his caresses, showed her that the appeal she made to him was almost irresistible. Almost, but not quite. She could never be in his company long without a consciousness of the warring elements within him--on this side love, on that side ambition, fighting foot to foot and point to point, neither strong enough to win the victory.

Sometimes he would gaze at her in silence, with his warm, speculative eyes, until, drawn like a fascinated bird, she fluttered to his arms in the hope of the great decision, but her hope was never realised. Now she divined that tears and prayers would not help her cause; he must be allured by her charm, not driven by her claims upon his compa.s.sion.

At this thought she recovered her composure and dried her eyes, and strove with success to make him forget her importunity. Disarmed and soothed, he sunk down to a lower seat beside her and rested his head boyishly upon her lap. He pushed back her short sleeve, nestled his face in the bend of her arm, and kissed it hungrily. The action, their relative positions, introduced a new element into their relationship, to which her deep maternal instinct made quick response. With a new tenderness she threw the fold of her cape about his head and shoulders, and held him close. Thus they sat for some time in silence. Beyond the warm shelter of her cape he heard the faint soughing of the wind, which had brought the rain at last, a drowsy and monotonous rain that lulled his senses. Instinctively he rested heavily upon her in weary abandonment. Finally his form relaxed, and she saw that he was fast asleep.

The strain of the position upon her back and arms grew greater each moment, till it was almost more than she could endure; but still she held out bravely, fearing to move lest she should wake him from the sleep he seemed so much to need. She knew also that his waking would mean separation, and she could not bear that thought as yet, before she had discovered the secret of success. What could she do more than she had done to make herself indispensable to him? That was the question which she turned over in her mind with such intensity that she almost lost her sense of growing distress. Indeed, the distress of body and mind seemed strangely one, the physical tension but an expression of the mental.

It was idle, she reflected, to think of studying politics to keep pace with his widening interests. She had only a vague conception of the extent to which his mind had been enlarged by contact with the world, but she was shrewd enough to know that companionship in such interests was not what he desired in her. In her he sought only rest and charm and love. Nor was it dress in which she lacked, unless, indeed, he desired her to deck herself like the rich women of the society he scorned. Just as a nurse's habit possesses a fascination for some men, so she had seen that her little cap, her very ap.r.o.n, though badges of servitude, made a peculiar appeal to his tenderness. Other men, too, had thought them becoming. It was a dress to reveal her beauty. Her curves were the softer for its severity, her colour the more radiant against that black and white. On the street also she knew he could find no fault with her. Like many a pretty woman of her cla.s.s, she possessed a skill in dressing like a lady, and ability in making small means cover great needs, that amounted to genius. No--there was only one thing to do, and that was to love him more and more, until a consciousness of her love so pervaded him, even when absent, that he must finally come back to her to stay.

The cars had long since ceased to pa.s.s, and the silence of the dead of night settled down over the city. She heard the coloured cook saying good-bye to her lover at the gate where she herself had waited, their low, melodious voices and happy gurgles of laughter as soft as the damp wind that came puffing in through the open window. After what seemed an interminable lapse of time, an automobile went past, like a miniature whirlwind, dashing the raindrops right and left from its gleaming sides, bearing some late revellers through the deserted streets at a rate of speed forbidden by the traffic of the day. Even that incident became a distant memory, and now only the occasional howl of a prowling cat broke the stillness, a strangely ominous and mournful sound. In the bar of light upon the floor at her feet the shadow of the tossing branches of a tree moved continually, till she closed her eyes in dizziness.

Hours pa.s.sed, hours that seemed a lifetime. The pain extended through her whole frame, and tears of mute suffering dropped slowly down upon the flap of the cape that kept her lover warm. From time to time she shifted her position gently and won a temporary relief, but presently the sense of strain returned, and yet she would not waken him and let him go. It was the first time she had ever seen him asleep,--one of love's tenderest experiences,--and moreover he was sleeping with a sense of absolute peace and security in her arms. She longed to slip down beside him, to rest her cheek against his, and to go with him into that shadowy world of dreams.

Suddenly out of the darkness a soft little form, wet with the rain, leaped lightly upon her. The discarded kitten had found its mistress at last. Gentle as the impact was, it sufficed to disturb her balance, and she sank slowly downward in a faint. Her arm, locked about his head, saved her from a fall, but the pressure of her body awoke him.

He struggled confusedly, oppressed by a sense of suffocation and by a vague fear; then, scarcely awake, he caught her in his arms.

"Lena!" he cried, startled by the inexplicable change. "Lena!"

He touched her cheek, he listened in vain to hear her breathe, and then an icy terror gripped his heart. Scarcely knowing what he did or why, he raised her carefully in his arms and carried her to the window, where the fine rain sifted in upon her face. He felt her shiver slightly, and then her eyes were looking into his.

"Thank G.o.d!" he said brokenly. "I thought that you were dead."

She smiled, and moved her face toward him. He took her once more to their former seat, and continued to hold her in his arms as if she were a child.

"I feel better now," she murmured. "It was nothing, Tom. You fell asleep, and I held your head until I toppled over--that was all. Were you frightened?"

"I thought you were dead," he repeated, deeply awed by the grim spectre so foreign to his experience.

"And did you care so very much?" she ventured, her heart beginning to beat high again. For answer he gently raised her cheek to his and held her close. There was no need of words to tell her how much he was moved, for he had never held her thus before. Through her lover's strange moods of fierce tenderness and stern denial she had won her way at last, as she now believed, to a perfect understanding. He could not live without her; it was merely a question of time.

His continued tenderness gave her reason to believe that this a.s.surance was justified. Only at the gate, when he bade her good-night, did he seem to be seized once more in the grip of contending emotions. He started to go without a word or kiss, then, turning back, he took her in his arms with a grip that hurt, calling her his Lena, his little girl, his wife. The last word broke from him with an intensity that caused the blood to riot in her heart, a joy that was shot through with wondering fear of the pa.s.sion she had aroused.

When his figure had disappeared in the darkness, she left the gate and entered the kitchen through the low window which the cook had left unlocked against her coming. She lighted a candle, and looked at herself curiously in a mirror that hung on the wall. The grain of the cheap gla.s.s distorted her features, but reflected faithfully her heightened colour and the drops that sparkled like jewels in her light hair. Apparently she was satisfied with the inspection, for she smiled happily, and then went slowly upstairs to her narrow room beneath the roof.

Meanwhile, Emmet was striding along the gleaming street, regardless of the increasing rain that soaked him to the skin. From time to time he shot out his arm violently, as if he would push back some invisible foe, or would extricate himself from the meshes of a net that was closing in upon him. Again, he swore aloud, as one who curses a malign and unmerited fate.

CHAPTER VII

THE STAR-GAZERS

In the following night the storm terminated its triduan existence some time between darkness and dawn. It must have been in the earlier hours that the change occurred, for Warwick gazed from its windows in the morning to find the ground rimed with h.o.a.r-frost, that looked like streaks of crusted salt. The sun was scarcely three hours in the ascendant before the frost disappeared, like the withdrawal of a silvery veil, disclosing the bareness it had beautified so briefly.

Even the most casual observer could now see that autumn had made a long forward march in the last three days toward the confines of winter.

That afternoon Leigh called upon Miss Wycliffe, not without a thought that the interval which had elapsed since the dinner was decidedly short. Still, he would come ostensibly to report the result of the interview she had suggested, and, as the election was not far distant, he felt that this excuse, if one were needed, was entirely adequate.

To his chagrin, he found that she was not at home. The maid informed him further that she had gone to New York for a week. As he walked slowly away, he wondered almost resentfully at this sudden disappearance, as if he felt that she ought to stay in Warwick and watch the result of her experiment. But he did not consider that if the daughters of men would be clothed like the lilies of the field, they must seek periodically the place most remote from the solitude in which their models grow.

The week that followed was one in which autumn flung out all her brave banners in a final pageantry. The nights were cold and still, with stars peculiarly brilliant. Each morning the mists hung like fleecy cobwebs in the valley, filaments that parted and drifted away at the touch of the sun, disclosing the magic work of the nocturnal frosts upon the foliage of the trees. It seemed to Leigh, looking from his eyrie, that Nature had never before painted a panorama of such wondrous beauty. Here a solitary elm in the meadow below the cliff, in the region which the collegians called "over the rock," stood forth all crimson against the green sward; further on, the woods began, ma.s.ses of yellow and red maples, with scattered pines and oaks of more sombre hue, billowing gently upward toward the blue of the distant skyline.

It was now that the young astronomer began to take up once more the pursuit that had been so long interrupted. He felt that if he were to accomplish something, he must begin a series of observations with a definite end in view. There was also another motive than the desire of professional reputation--a wish to increase his worth in Miss Wycliffe's eyes by achievement. Her absence from town, though of only a few days' duration, freed him from the distraction which the very possibility of seeing her presented, and night after night he ascended to his watch-tower.

But he presently discovered that it was one thing to take observations on Mount Hamilton, where no other claims occupied part of his time, and quite another to watch by night and teach by day. The bishop was right in saying that his chief occupation must needs be the teaching of elementary mathematics to undergraduates. For any satisfactory results, prolonged observations must be made from twilight to dawn, and such periods of wakefulness were impossible when he must present himself before a cla.s.s at nine o'clock in the morning. Not that this was necessary each day. His hours were irregular, but the morning cla.s.ses were sufficiently numerous to break up the continuity of his observations, and to render their results unsure.

In this quandary, he ought, perhaps, to have abandoned his purpose and to have taken up some problem in pure mathematics, but here the perversity of human nature interposed. The forbidden, or at least difficult, road was the one he desired to travel, and he could not make up his mind to turn back, though he saw no prospect of going far.

Instead, he began to make a few preliminary observations at random, and enjoyed the sight of the familiar constellations as one enjoys a return to old faces and a.s.sociations. For the present he swept the skies leisurely, feasting on the infinite wonders which no consuetude could render commonplace. He longed for some unusual phenomenon in the sidereal tracts, a comet, or a temporary star, one of those strange wanderers that appear for a time, attain a brief and vivid maximum, and vanish into the darkness from which they have emerged. But only about a score of such objects had been credibly reported in historic times, and he searched the thoroughfare of the Milky Way, the region in which they were wont to appear, with small hope of reward.

One morning he received a letter from Miss Wycliffe, in which she named that night, if the skies were clear, for the observation she had mentioned at the dinner. He had almost forgotten the wish she then expressed in the greater importance she seemed to attach to her plan to help Emmet. Now he was surprised to discover that this matter, which had put him to such pains, had apparently slipped from her mind altogether. It gave him a conception of the multiplicity of her interests. It was as if she could not attend to all her charitable plans in person, but, having chosen a responsible agent, she dismissed the subject from her mind. Nor was he offended that she did not seem to consider the possibility of his having another engagement. On the contrary, the omission might imply her knowledge of the absolute unimportance to him of any claims compared with those she chose to make. Thus his love fed on crumbs invisible to her from whose table they had inadvertently fallen.

Had he been less infatuated, he might have divined in this omission one of those unconscious revelations of character--the selfishness of a spoiled and petted woman, who has come to a.s.sume that the convenience of others must necessarily coincide with her own. But Leigh saw only a hint of something confidential between them. He experienced also that peculiar intensity of interest which attends a lover's first glimpse of his mistress's handwriting. Even if it were commonplace, it would seem to him like no other in the world; but here there was really something distinctive. The letters were almost microscopically small, and crowded into the centre of the page with the effect of a decorative panel. He carried the epistle about with him all day, and observed the weather with solicitous attention, but no change occurred. The turquoise sky remained without a cloud. Fires from burning leaves sent up sluggish pillars of smoke, that spread out equilaterally above the trees in the windless air.

It so happened that he had the afternoon to himself. The prospect of inaction was intolerable, so he went down into the cool vaults below the Hall to take out his wheel for an afternoon of exploration. In these subterranean regions, perhaps more here than elsewhere, the imaginative appeal of the Hall was still present. As he prepared his wheel for the trip, which he meant should be a long one, he glanced up at the arched windows, down whose wide, slanting sills the sunlight poured in a flood of dusty gold. The walls of these foundations were five feet in thickness, built as if to keep out an invading host. Even in this unfrequented place, each stone was carefully cut, and fitted with exact nicety in its place. There was no rubble, no mere filling.

Here was a lavishness of expenditure, a conscience in building, rare in modern times. Leigh looked down the long succession of ma.s.sive archways, dwindling into the distance, with vague thoughts of the Castle of Chillon and the Man with the Iron Mask. When he ascended again into the warmth and sunlight of the open air, he had a pa.s.sing sense of having emerged from a brief incarceration.

He pushed his bicycle through the maple walk to the brow of the hill from which he had first looked over the valley toward the west. There in the distance the village he had noted sparkled like a handful of white dice thrown carelessly down against the earth. He fixed upon this point as the terminus of his ride, and began to coast down the long slope, leaving a trail of grey dust to mark his flight. There was a peculiar exhilaration in the dry heat of the October afternoon.

Flocks of crows pa.s.sed over his head with raucous cries. The cornstalks were stacked in serried array, like Indian wigwams, and heaps of apples, red and yellow and russet brown, lay ungathered in the orchards.

Through this rich and varied scene he sped swiftly, filled with all a Westerner's keen appreciation of a New England landscape, constantly contrasting the arid glories of deserts he had seen with the plenty about him. The farms of the fertile tracts of California were infinitely greater, the methods by which they were worked more modern, but about these smaller homesteads hung an atmosphere of history and romance. Leigh might champion the West in the presence of the bishop, but now, alone with his own thoughts, he paid tribute to the land in which the liberties of his country had been cradled. He seemed to have known it of old, though he now saw it for the first time. This experience was not a discovery, but a reacquaintance. From these old farmhouses, with their sagging roof-trees and windows filled with small panes, the minute men had issued with their muskets to repel the invader. At yonder sweep-well some English soldier had perhaps stopped in his dusty retreat for a drink of water, and had paid the penalty of his life for the delay. Above all, the fact that this was the native country of the woman he loved was ever present in his mind to add radiance to the afternoon.

At a point where the road took a sudden dip and curved in a wide sweep toward the southwest, his attention was arrested by an old house that lay nestled in the bend as in an encircling arm. The colour had once been red, but was now faded by many suns and washed thin by innumerable rains. A rampart of loose stones, overgrown with brambles and broken in places as if for the pa.s.sage of cattle, enclosed the premises, and the typical well of the country lifted its curving pole in the front yard only a few feet from the roadway. Two women were seated on the worn stone slab in the opening that served for a gate, evidently basking in the afternoon sun and engaged in desultory chat. When Leigh dismounted from his wheel and asked for a drink of water, they moved slightly to let him pa.s.s, and he went up to the well to help himself.