The Mayor of Warwick Part 30

Leigh's first words upon coming down the hill had betrayed his growing appreciation of the Hall, his gradual conversion to the ideal of the church college. Though a scientist, he had taken the degree of bachelor of arts, and he was an inheritor of church traditions. As for Felicity--the bishop recalled the times he had seen her with Leigh, and especially at the lecture at Littleford's. He had divined their mutual attraction from the first, though he credited them both with more conscience in the matter than they had shown.

Leigh reached the street and turned southward, following the course that Emmet had taken with his sleigh when he picked Lena up on that very spot some two months before. It wanted yet an hour of his lunch time, and he had come forth with no other thought than to get the fresh air and to turn over again in his mind the plans of which he had hinted to the bishop.

After his interview with Dr. Renshaw, he had written to the authorities of the Lick Observatory and asked permission to join one of the three expeditions that were soon to be sent out to observe the approaching eclipse of the sun. It was too early as yet for a reply, but he had reason to believe that his previous connection with the observatory and his record there would a.s.sure the granting of his request, if the number were not entirely completed. Already he imagined himself transported to Norway, or South America, or Egypt. He could not tell which expedition, if any, he would be permitted to join, but of the three, the last named was most to his mind.

Felicity had become interwoven with his consciousness of himself, and in thinking of Egypt he pictured her there with him, a vivid creation of memory and imagination. Some a.s.sociation of ideas between her and the country that had given birth to Cleopatra must have influenced him in his choice, he reflected with a disconsolate smile. The a.s.sociation did Felicity little justice in one way, but the impossibility of imagining her at home on the cold heights of Norway or the Andes showed her kins.h.i.+p with the land of colour and nocturnal mystery.

Sometimes he felt that he must brush aside all opposition of persons and circ.u.mstance and beg her to go with him, leaving the world to gape and wonder as it might. It was only a fevered dream, but it suggested another possibility that presently became a definite resolve. At least he would see her again, and beg her not to go blundering back into the arms of the man she did not love. He would plead with her not to try to rectify one mistake by making another more fatal still. Did he not owe it to her and to himself to make one last effort for their happiness?

Had he a right to desert her in her trouble, to yield supinely to a conventional prejudice?

He was in the glow of this new resolve when he climbed the hill to the south of the college and turned to follow the road along the ridge which Felicity and Emmet had taken that misty night. At the quarry he paused for a few moments to look down absently at the men working below, and then began to retrace his steps toward the Hall. His turning brought the tower of the college and the distant city before his eyes. The absence of foliage from the trees exposed to view innumerable glinting roofs that were hidden in summer as by a forest. He picked out the tower of St.

George's Church and the various steeples with which he had become familiar. Then he caught sight of the pale wings of the figure of Victory above the triumphal column in the park, poised like those of a b.u.t.terfly about to soar into the still, bright air.

Once more the beauty of the country made its great appeal: the magnificent valleys to east and west swelling upward to ridges of hills clothed in ever changing lights and shadows; the Hall standing sentinel over all; the city nestled below, a city of dreams.

CHAPTER XX

"PUNISHMENT, THOUGH LAME OF FOOT"----

The bishop sat in his study, awaiting the arrival of Mayor Emmet in a frame of mind that boded ill for the success of the interview. In reply to his letter suggesting a conference on a subject of mutual interest, the mayor had named the third morning as the one that would find him most free from his numerous engagements. The coolness of this reply was exasperating to the bishop, and he thought he divined in the delay a deliberate intention to keep him on the rack of uncertainty.

Being a man of ample leisure, he had found plenty of time to formulate the position he meant to take. He and his daughter had threshed out the subject, and now avoided it by mutual consent. Their relations.h.i.+p became unnatural and constrained. They met only at meal-times, and not always then, for each one sought more than one pretext to dine elsewhere. More words on the subject would only precipitate a repet.i.tion of the scene that still rankled in the memory of both, and the discussion was therefore closed until Emmet should have stated his own position.

While the situation remained thus stationary, the appearance of the world without had been so completely transformed that a whole season, rather than three days, seemed to have elapsed. Winter had returned in a storm of snow that threatened to a.s.sume the proportions of the historic blizzard, which piled such deep drifts about St. George's Hall that the students had leaped with impunity from the upper windows.

During the previous night, however, the sky had cleared, and now the air was filled with those familiar brumal sounds, the sc.r.a.ping of shovels and the ringing of sleighbells, that usually make such a pleasant appeal to those within-doors; but the bishop was merely moved to impatient longing for the spring.

The bright sun filled the study with a garish light reflected from the snow without, and the bishop pulled down the heavy shades, introducing thereby an effect of twilight in the room. At the same time the wood fire in the grate, which had previously seemed pale and thin, took on a ruddy and cheerful activity, relieved from the overpowering compet.i.tion of the sun.

The mayor finally arrived, half an hour behind the time he had appointed, drawn in his sleigh by the pacer that had stood by him so gallantly in his race with Anthony Cobbens. He fastened the mare to the post with careful deliberation, conscious the while that he might be under inspection from behind the drawn curtains of Felicity's room.

When he entered the bishop's study, it was evident at once that he came in no very conciliatory mood. The bold glance of his eyes was a trifle more bold than usual and swept the room rapidly, as if he antic.i.p.ated seeing Felicity there. Something of disappointment and resentment seemed to show itself in his manner, as he took the chair the bishop indicated; and now he waited, with the instinct of the politician, for his opponent to show his hand.

The bishop had always hated this man, and never more so than now. In addition to his special reason for hostility, Emmet's type was one peculiarly distasteful to him. Just as he had catalogued Leigh as a Westerner, and had a.s.sumed certain characteristics in him, so he had put Emmet, from the first, into the cla.s.s of loud-voiced, big-limbed, heavy-heeled centurions. It made no difference that the mayor showed marked deviations from the type; there was just enough of the feminine in his judge to keep him true to his prejudices, and never were they so nearly justified as now. He saw that he must make a beginning, and did so with his usual circ.u.mspection. His words were carefully selected to avoid giving offence, but the gist of their meaning was that he waited for his visitor to give an account of himself.

"I should like to speak in the presence of my wife," Emmet announced uncompromisingly.

"My daughter will not be present at this interview," the bishop declared, with marked austerity, "nor at any other interview that may subsequently become necessary, though I hope we shall come to such a satisfactory understanding to-day as to make further conferences superfluous. This arrangement is with her entire consent, or rather, is the fulfilment of her expressed wish. I must protest also against your designation of my daughter as your wife. She is not such in the full sense of the term. She has never appeared with you publicly as your wife, but by her desertion of you at the very altar she emphatically showed that she realised her mistake at once and repudiated it."

"Desertion is no cause for divorce, bishop," Emmet returned, with an ugly gleam in his eyes, "either in your Church or in mine. Your daughter's treatment of me has been such that the only amends she can make is to acknowledge our relations.h.i.+p and act accordingly."

"Come, come, Mr. Emmet," the other retorted, "I need scarcely remind you how far my daughter has already atoned for her mistake by helping you to realise your ambition, by suggesting it, in fact, and by lending you books for your instruction. It seems to me that a manly man would acknowledge this frankly, that he would not strive to hold the woman to the letter of the agreement after discovering that the spirit was no longer there to give it life."

"I could have won without her," the mayor declared hoa.r.s.ely.

The bishop smiled with exasperating, ironical amus.e.m.e.nt. "We will waive that point, then, Mr. Emmet. It suggests a fruitless discussion, that would merely serve to distract us from the main question. I was about to say, when you interrupted me, that if you always considered your marriage as binding as you now feign to consider it, you should have come to me and announced the fact. By your acquiescence in my daughter's desertion, you tacitly admitted that you released her, that you had nothing to announce. If you did not consider then that the marriage was binding, you cannot begin to do so at this late hour."

"Allow me to say that your daughter considered it binding," Emmet put in shrewdly. "She did not repudiate her mistake, as you call it, by leaving me at the altar. On the contrary, she intended all along to acknowledge our marriage as soon as I should be elected mayor."

"She did not, perhaps, realise the full significance of her instinctive action," the bishop answered. "A woman is a mystery to herself no less than to others. I am putting the case to you as man to man, hoping to kindle a spark of generous understanding in your heart. Could any woman who really loved a man do as she did? I tell you, and you know, that it was the folly of a romantic girl, a folly that does not deserve the penalty you would inflict. If my daughter did not actually, in so many words, repudiate her mistake in the beginning, she did so in a recent interview with you, and she does so finally now by me."

"And she did me a great wrong!" Emmet cried hotly. "If you are a man, bishop, you must know what it meant to be tricked and disappointed as I was."

The bishop's face grew livid, and he shrank within himself.

"You offer a pitiful excuse, sir!" he retorted. "It depends upon what kind of man you mean--the brute man, who regards women merely as the instruments of his pa.s.sion, or the chivalrous man, who knows that the woman is the weaker vessel and bears himself accordingly. I confess to you that I am not the former kind."

His eyes a.s.sumed a keen, inquisitorial look that required all of Emmet's false fort.i.tude to meet.

"Mr. Emmet, I venture to say that I give you the benefit of a very considerable doubt in a.s.suming that you have not given my daughter statutory grounds for divorce by your conduct with some other woman.

It seems pa.s.sing strange that you should have been so acquiescent under an arrangement which you describe as such a hards.h.i.+p, if you were not kept so by a consciousness of duplicity. But I have no desire to pursue that line of inquiry. This so-called marriage must be dissolved. Let us admit that you have not given statutory grounds; there are other grounds concerning which there exists no manner of doubt whatever. I do not speak now of the eternal fitness of things, of those humane and ethical considerations to which I find you impervious, but of legal grounds. My daughter cannot bring an action for non-support against you, because she left you voluntarily. It remains for you to inst.i.tute proceedings of divorce against her on the ground of desertion. We will not defend the suit."

There was something almost clairvoyant in the bishop's guess of the mayor's infidelity, for pride had caused Felicity to keep Lena out of her confession. She had told only as much as she chose to tell, leaving her father to imagine himself in possession of all the facts.

Had she told all, she would have strengthened her case at the expense of her pride; but this was a sacrifice she could not bring herself to make.

Before the bishop finished speaking, his listener had discerned that the veiled accusation was a guess, and nothing more. This knowledge helped him to remain apparently unmoved. It did more. It showed him Felicity's pride in remaining silent concerning a rival so much beneath her. This had been her att.i.tude all along,--to consider Lena beneath contempt,--and he burned to make her suffer for it. He was filled with fury against himself also for yielding at the last to his pa.s.sion for Lena, after a long and successful struggle. It was this that made it impossible for him to say plainly that he would not give Felicity up, though he had tormented her father by implying it. This method of revenge was the only one now left him.

"But your religion," he suggested, with a sneer.

"Excuse me," the bishop returned, with patient dignity, "if I feel that I am not accountable to you for the manner in which I defend or fail to defend the canons of my Church. My daughter acts as an individual who is of age, and her reckoning is with the civil law. To clear up your evident confusion of mind, I will explain that I violate no canons of the Church in eliminating myself officially from the situation. I am merely suggesting to you, as one individual to another, a way out of a most unhappy complication. Besides, you evade the hard fact that this was no marriage in the full sense of the word."

Emmet realised that his shaft had fallen short, and the knowledge stung him to fury.

"I will not bring any such action!" he cried recklessly, rising in white heat. "I will not release her!"

"We shall accomplish nothing by violence," the bishop interposed.

"Pray, resume your chair and hear me out. A marriage without love is a mere mockery and sham. You do not love my daughter, and she does not love you. We will not argue about that, if you please, for it is not possible to contradict an evident fact. You are an ambitious man, and marriage is only one of the ways by which ambition can be furthered.

In this case, the marriage is out of the question; but if you will name a compensation which you deem adequate recompense for your disappointment, we shall be ready to listen to the proposition."

Emmet had taken his seat at the bishop's request, but this cynical proposal to buy him off caused him to spring to his feet again in an indignation that was not altogether unjustified. He was a money-maker himself, and had not coveted Felicity's wealth. From her he had sought only social advantage and revenge upon his enemies; but it was his pride to be the builder of his own fortune.

"If you were not an old man," he said tempestuously, "you would not make such an offer with impunity. You will find I have no price. I wish you good day."

"Wait!" the bishop cried, raising his trembling hand and clearing his throat from suffocating emotion. "Only one word more. You shall not have her--that is all. And this house is mine--you shall not enter it again."

The other's face became diabolical in its pa.s.sion. He leaned against the jamb of the open door and folded his arms mockingly, as if inviting an effort to eject him.

"You were speaking pretty freely of statutory grounds," he said, raising his voice. "It has n't occurred to you, perhaps, that I may name a co-respondent myself. You ought to have a care, bishop, what kind of professors you employ in your college." With these words he turned and strode from the house.

The bishop's speechless indignation presently gave way to the first touch of pity he had yet felt for Felicity in her trouble. The mayor was more of a brute than even he had thought possible, and should receive no quarter in the future. The front door had scarcely closed when his daughter's figure took the place her husband had just occupied before him.

"Well?" she asked simply.

He searched her face with haggard eyes, and guessed from its pallor that his fears were justified.

"Did you hear what the fellow said," he demanded--"his last words?"

The colour came back to her cheeks with a rush. "I could n't very well help it. I was in the dining-room, and the door was open."