The Mayor of Warwick Part 9

"Thank you, Miss Wycliffe--I think we shall win."

"I hope so," she returned, with a momentary side-long look at Cobbens.

The lawyer's eyes were upon her, and as Leigh caught their hungry glimmer, he remembered with a sharp contraction of the heart that he was a widower, and that sometimes the most hideous men possess a compelling fascination for women of great beauty.

"Oh, astrology is out of date," Cobbens broke in, with an easy chuckle.

"Isn't it, professor?"

"Yes," Leigh retorted, "but I believe politics is not."

The laughter with which this remark was greeted indicated the real tension that underlay all this appearance of good feeling.

"Politics is never out of date," Emmet declared, with grim emphasis, "as we mean to show you soon."

"Politics is like poker," Cobbens commented sententiously. "Just now we 're raising the ante, but presently there 'll be a show down, and may the best hand win."

"We ask nothing better," Emmet a.s.sured him, moving toward the stairs.

"Good-night. I must be off."

"Wait a moment!" Miss Wycliffe called after him. "Here--take this candle to light your way, and may good luck go with it."

Emmet had already begun to descend the stairs when her voice arrested him. He turned as she approached, and because of his lower position her form hid him entirely from the view of the two men she had just left. Leigh saw the fur edge of her wrap standing out like a mist against the flaring light of the candle as she stooped to hand it down, and he thought she lingered longer than was absolutely necessary, as if to speak some parting words of encouragement. The impression that further words had pa.s.sed between them was so disquieting, in view of his suspicion of Emmet's audacity, that he was fain to believe himself mistaken. It seemed that Cobbens also had lost nothing of this incident, for when she returned, he regarded her with as much disapproval as he dared to show.

"You 'll turn the poor beggar's head, Miss Wycliffe," he said. "It's a mistaken kindness. His fall will be all the greater for your whim."

"Sometimes beggars get on horseback," she retorted coolly, "and then they keep on riding."

Leigh's knowledge of the lawyer's career enabled him to appreciate the sharpness of this remark, but Cobbens was more adroit than he could have thought possible in the face of such a taunt.

"Well, when that poor beggar tries to mount the political horse, he 'll get thrown so hard that he 'll never try it again."

Miss Wycliffe vouchsafed no reply, but turned toward the cabin, and they followed her in silence. During the subsequent session about the telescope, Leigh was not surprised to find that she domineered over her friends, or that they accepted her tyranny without question. In her self-appointed office of the instructor's a.s.sistant, she gave this one or that the chair, until the young astronomer thought it high time to protest.

"I insist upon your taking a look yourself," he said. "I have something of peculiar interest reserved for you." And he trained the instrument upon Castor, in the constellation of the Twins. She took the chair and looked for a tantalising length of time in silence, while with one hand she waved off the questions and impatience of the others.

He bent over her, almost oblivious of their presence. "It's a double star, you see. What do you think of it?"

"Beautiful!" she answered. "I wondered why I was seeing double. Tell us about it."

"They are two suns in one sphere, swinging on through s.p.a.ce side by side. Two centuries of calculations have brought out the fact that it takes forty-four years for the light of Castor to reach us, and that a thousand years are consumed in one circuit of its...o...b..t."

"I must admit," she said, looking up at him with a mysterious splendour in her eyes, in which there yet lurked a suspicion of humour, "that a thousand years gives me a shiver."

Up to this time the moral atmosphere of the room had by no means attained the level reached by Leigh and Emmet alone, not only because of the restless presence of Cobbens, which refused to harmonise with the idea of sublimity, but also because, in any such gathering, the tendency is downward toward the plane of the most frivolous and common-place person present. The jest about the cla.s.s, intermittently revived, had reduced the stars to pretty baubles or, at most, to the fairy lamps of fanciful verse, in spite of figures of distance that grew more and more stupendous. But now a sudden hush fell upon them; it might have been a tardy appreciation, or the mere emotional reaction from little talk. For the moment Leigh forgot that they were not alone, and almost unconsciously he spoke the thought that had flashed from her eyes to his: "A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday, seeing that it is past as a watch in the night."

The situation had grown suddenly and unexpectedly dramatic. It was as if a troupe of revellers had torn aside a curtain in their mad rush, and had come face to face with the silence and blackness of an abyss.

Miss Wycliffe rose from the chair as if starting back from such a vision, and though her tone, when she spoke, was light, it was apparently so by design.

"If you insist upon quoting from the Burial Service, Mr. Leigh, I shall take it as a hint to go home at once."

"And it's time we did," Cobbens put in. "We 're much obliged to you, sir. We 've had a charming time, and owe you a vote of thanks."

When Leigh had lighted them downstairs, he ascended once more to his cabin, tortured by an acute self-consciousness. The evening had been far from satisfactory; never had the difference between antic.i.p.ation and realisation been more impressively ill.u.s.trated. In his afternoon dreams he had not considered Miss Wycliffe's companions, except as shadows, and it was they who had disturbed what would otherwise have been a charmed atmosphere. His quotation would have been natural had he been alone with the woman he loved, but in that company it seemed inept and melodramatic, deserving the rebuke she so easily administered. In his humiliation he thought that he must have appeared extremely youthful in her eyes, one who could not conceal his emotions before the gaze of the curious and shallow. Could he have overheard the conversation which took place between Cobbens and Miss Wycliffe on their way home, his distress would have been in no way lightened.

The lawyer allowed the machine to run more slowly, that its jar and noise might not drown his voice.

"Your friend with the comet-coloured hair," he began, "will never fit into the life of St. George's Hall. I can see he has n't the true Hall traditions or spirit."

She was apparently more interested in his views than inclined to express her own. If she reflected at all upon the speaker's lack of that physical distinction which he selected in Leigh for the exercise of his wit, and if she derived some enjoyment from an understanding of his resentment, she kept it to herself.

"What makes you think so?" she asked serenely. "What was he doing with that Tom Emmet up there?" he demanded, by way of answer. "In my day, the professors of the Hall were more select in the company they kept."

"Times have changed since then," she commented, "and the world has grown democratic."

He suspected her mood of mockery, but his intelligence could not hold his spleen in check.

"Yes," he went on malevolently, "I suppose it has; and soon we shall have a lot of muckers in the college instead of the gentlemen that used to go there in my day. So that's the prize poor old Renshaw drew from the Western grab-bag! It's too bad your father was away."

"Is n't it?" she a.s.sented. "But then, you know, he is here on a year's appointment, and perhaps he will leave in the spring."

"I can't understand," he resumed, "how he came to know Tom Emmet, of all men, in this short time, and how he happened to have him up there on the tower."

As she seemed unable to throw any light upon this mystery, he was left to grapple with it alone.

CHAPTER VIII

"WHAT MAKES HER IN THE WOOD SO LATE?"

The City Hall in Warwick was a three-storied brick building of dignified Colonial style, built during Washington's first administration. The foundations had settled somewhat, as more than one crack, zig-zagging upward from window to window, bore witness; and many an iron clamp had stained the walls, suggesting to the sentimental mind that the old building was weeping rusty tears over the degeneracy of the times. However, the Hall was only in the first stages of an old age that might be described as green, for the huge beams were sound to the core, and the figure of a Roman lady still stood firmly upon the cupola, extending with one chubby arm the impartial scales of Justice.

About a block to the south, and across the street, surrounded by rows of crumbling gravestones carved with quaint epitaphs and heads of ghastly cherubs, stood the First Church. Any stranger, carried hither in a magic trunk and asked to name that corner of the world in which he found himself, would have glanced but once at the four white pillars of the First Church and once at the venerable City Hall, before answering that he was in the heart of New England. No one could fail to identify the architecture of these two characteristic edifices, or of the shops whose roofs slanted toward the street; no one could mistake the speech and countenance of many a pa.s.ser-by. Evidences of modernity, buildings that might have been anywhere else, were not lacking; but these huge piles of iron and stone served only to bring into sharper contrast the remnants of an earlier civilisation.

As one looked up and down the curving street, the thing that immediately attracted his attention was a succession of church steeples or cupolas that broke the roof-lines at almost regular intervals, and the fashion of these structures left no doubt in the mind that Warwick, in spite of foreign immigration, was still a stronghold of Puritanism.

All suggestion of Romish or Episcopalian tradition was scrupulously avoided, even to the omission of the cross and the subst.i.tution of a weather-vane or gamec.o.c.k. Only one church told a different story. At some distance north of the City Hall a gothic edifice in brown stone, with a beautiful square tower of elaborate design, gave a touch of colour and richness to a vista otherwise somewhat cold and bare. This was St. George's Church, whose vestry, in the days when it required some degree of heroism to be an Episcopalian in that uncongenial atmosphere, had founded St. George's Hall. The present edifice, though numbering seventy-five years of life, was young compared with the First Church; and the lapse of time had not served to alter their respective positions in the community. In Warwick the Episcopalians were still a small minority; they were still the dissenters of this dissenting commonwealth.

Around the City Hall, which a pious care had preserved in spite of its present inadequacy, circled an almost unbroken procession of trolley-cars; for this point was the very centre of the web of tracks whose various termini were pegged out here and there in the neighbouring towns. It might be added that this spot was enshrined in the heart of every loyal citizen of Warwick as the true umbilicus of the visible universe.

In the eyes of Llewellyn Leigh, however, the place had no such mystic significance. On the afternoon following the visit of Miss Wycliffe to the tower, he had walked hither from the college, down the long, winding street on whose well-worn pavements the yellowing leaves of the elms threw a sheen like gold. He had noted many a colonial house built close to the sidewalk in the original New England fashion; he had seen glimpses of deep back gardens; but his appreciative att.i.tude of the previous afternoon was gone, giving way to mild melancholy, such a mood as is sometimes induced by the perusal of an old romance dear to the youth of one's grandparents. The experience of the previous night had some hand in this disillusion. Some of the dissatisfaction with which it had left him still hung about his spirit, and drove him on in a vague search for diversion. He stood in front of the City Hall and watched the open cars go by, then took one, almost at random, that bore the label of Evergreen Park. As soon as he had swung himself aboard, he found that he was sitting beside Emmet, and the meeting was not altogether welcome in his present self-absorption. Emmet also seemed somewhat subdued as he asked him his destination, but he suspected that this impression might be merely a reflection of himself.

"I 'm going wherever this car goes," he answered. "Evergreen Park, is n't it? I 'm gradually exploring the surrounding country, and one direction will do as well as another. But where are you bound for?"

"Politics," Emmet said briefly. Whether he had left the tower the previous evening with a sore heart and was inclined to identify his new friend with his old enemy, or whether he was merely occupied with his own thoughts, Leigh now felt that his manner really exhibited some constraint. He was a man of keen intuitions, and divined a sensitiveness on his companion's part in regard to the rather inglorious figure he had cut, in spite of Miss Wycliffe's openly expressed interest. After all, might not this interest of hers savour of ostentatious patronage? At this thought he experienced a kind of fellow-feeling for the candidate, a change of emotion which his manner was quick to register. His interest in politics was the academic interest of the typical Mugwump he had confessed himself to be, and too much confined to an occasional vote of protest. He had never attended a primary meeting in his life, always having been too busy with his own career to realise this duty, and too nomadic in his habits to acquire a personal interest in local affairs. To him politics was the pastime of the rich, who could afford it, or the business of the poor, who used it as a means of support. The very word, as Emmet used it, conveyed an impression to his mind like that which Borrow received when his gipsy friends mentioned the mysterious "business of Egypt." He made a comment that drew his companion on to speak of Cobbens with his former bitterness, though in a smothered tone, as if he feared some chance listener in the car that was now filling rapidly.

"But you'll find nothing doing in the park," Emmet said presently, with an abrupt change of subject. "The season has just closed, and there is n't a person on the place."

"So much the better," Leigh answered. "I 'm not in the mood for merry-go-rounds and picnickers."