Chapter IX: "her Heart Was Otherwhere"

A few nights after the meeting in the woods, Leigh was hurrying along Birdseye Avenue, like the belated White Rabbit on its way to the Queen's croquet party. He was going to a lecture on Velasquez at the house of one of his colleagues, Professor Littleford. The beginning of the lecture was set for eight o'clock, and it was now past the hour, for he had been detained in the city by the joint debate between Emmet and Judge Swigart, put at half past five that the workingmen might have an opportunity to attend.

The time consumed in returning to the Hall, in dining and dressing, almost convinced him of the advisability of staying at home, but he reflected that to do so was probably to miss a chance of seeing Miss Wycliffe, and this was a risk he was by no means disposed to run. He was possessed by a desire to see her again and to test the permanency of her last mood with him, when she had demanded her gloves and left him in despair. If she were inclined to repentance, he felt that he would know it, even if he managed to meet her for only a moment in the midst of the crowd. But it chanced that fate was kinder to him than he had dared to hope.

As he had anticipated, he was one of the last arrivals, but he was not destined to experience the embarrassment he feared from this circumstance. The wide hallway of the great house was deserted, and he threaded his way through several dimly lighted drawing-rooms in the direction of a voice that indicated the location of the lecturer. Not until he stood in the doorway of what appeared to be an assembly hall, and was in reality the ballroom of the house, did he realise the reason of the obscurity through which he had passed. At the far end of the room, he saw one of the well-known portraits of Philip IV projected by a lantern upon a huge sheet of canvas. The widening shaft of light that traversed the intervening space dimly disclosed the audience as a series of heads, from which arose a sibilant wave of amused comment as the portrait of the king melted into that of his daughter, a serious infant with corkscrew curls, all unconscious of the monstrous absurdity of her voluminous skirts. This transition from one picture to another was accepted by one of the audience as an opportunity to shift his chair, and Leigh saw the bishop's salient profile thrown for a moment on the canvas, before he subsided again to the general level.

The young man supposed that in thus discovering the whereabouts of the bishop he had also located his daughter, and he marked the spot against the restoration of full light to the room. Meanwhile he maintained his position in the door, and would have continued to do so, had not his host tiptoed to his side and thrust him into a near-by chair.

For some time he remained almost rigidly still, as if he would make amends for the slight noise of his entrance by subsequent self-effacement. The succession of pictures, even the surrender of Breda and the scene of the jolly drinkers, shared his attention with that part of the room in which he had seen the bishop rise, but he soon realised that no further discoveries were possible as yet in that direction, and began to pay more heed to the lecturer.

He knew in a vague way that he was sitting beside a woman; but presently this consciousness increased till it became a delicate and pervasive atmosphere. There was a seduction in the shadowy presence that distracted his thoughts from the woman he loved, sitting somewhere there in the obscurity before him. He experienced a well-nigh guilty pleasure in this temporary yielding to a feminine influence other than that to which he had consecrated himself, and finally he admitted his deliberate appreciation. Leaning back in his chair and turning his head to satisfy his curiosity, he saw for the first time the trick his mind had played him. Convinced though he had been that Miss Wycliffe was in another part of the room, he had known all the time with his senses that she was sitting at his side. At least, it now seemed to him that his apparent disloyalty was in reality an involuntary tribute to her quality. She had made herself felt even when he thought she was another. As he looked down at her rounded cheek and white shoulders, she lifted her eyes with a recognition as suppressed as that of acquaintances in church, and then whispered inaudibly in the ear of a companion beyond. It was now that he saw a bunch of lilies of the valley in the hand that rested in her lap, and knew by what channel his imagination had been awakened.

The lecture was shorter than Leigh had anticipated, and all too short for his desire. There was in his present position a peculiar, unspoken intimacy of which he felt that she also must be aware. It seemed unlikely that he could see her alone, and he cherished every moment as perhaps the best that would be vouchsafed. Almost before he realised what had happened, the walls of the room sprang into view at the sharp click of the electric lights, and he saw the lecturer, previously a disembodied voice, making his final bow. As he rose with the others, he caught a glimpse of many faces already familiar, and felt unexpectedly at home. Among the crowd he recognized Cardington by the bishop's side, Cobbens's smiling face, several of his colleagues, and a number of the students. The tide set toward the door, and they were carried before it. Not until they reached the less crowded room beyond did Leigh perceive that Miss Wycliffe was still closely attended by the companion with whom she had exchanged an occasional whisper at the lecture.

"You remember Mrs. Parr?" she reminded him.

"I do indeed," he replied, though till now he had received merely the impression of a face vaguely familiar.

"But you passed me only yesterday on the street without recognition," Mrs. Parr complained. "I don't know whether I ought to speak to you or not."

The tone of her voice, which aimed at charming piquancy and realised only an airy affectation, attracted his attention, and revamped her upon his mind as one of the party of star-gazers. Her personality was acrid and insistent, and he imagined that the friendship between the two women was of her own making and maintenance. The nature of her greeting left him no choice but a flat and awkward confession of absent-mindedness. This trifling irritation, however, was of small moment compared with the fact that Miss Wycliffe was evidently content with his company and not disposed to leave him, as she could easily have done upon a reasonable pretext. The three continued together, drifting in the same direction through the rooms which now began to present a bewildering spectacle of changing groups and colours. Their talk was the usual art jargon which the recent lecture suggested, but in this Leigh bore perforce a subordinate part. It was Mrs. Parr who appealed to him from time to time for a confirmation of her views concerning composition, drawing, and high lights, and each appeal presented itself to him as an interruption. At last he was merely relieved to find that she had disappeared. Miss Wycliffe regarded him with a curious look, in which disapproval of his unconscious rudeness was mitigated by an indulgent appreciation of its cause.

"You 've succeeded in driving her away at last," she said, with a touch of severity.

He divined that he was not seriously under the ban of her displeasure. "I?" he echoed, disingenuously.

"She began by taking a great fancy to you," she went on, "that night on the tower, but you simply refused to pay any attention to her. And to-night you behaved in the same manner. When you came and sat beside us, she regarded it as quite a romantic little event."

"She has a husband, has n't she?" he questioned bluntly.

"Yes, but she still indulges fancies for 'stunning young men.'"

"Then Mr. Parr does n't answer to that description, I suppose?" he queried.

"Mr. Parr is more stunned than stunning," she achieved, quick as a flash.

"I don't wonder at it," he said, laughing heartily. "I seem to see the poor fellow sunk in a coma of marital despair."

"This is extremely wicked and ungrateful talk in both of us," she murmured, "and I shall encourage it no further."

Leigh was fairly intoxicated by Miss Wycliffe's manner toward him. She had never been so frankly sweet before, and he had never seen her as radiant as now. She had the air of one filled with a mischievous impulse, which she restrained with an effort. A suggestion of daring lurked in her momentary sidelong glance, and awoke in him a responsive exhilaration. To other eyes that watched them curiously she appeared to assume a certain proprietary right. If she introduced him to this one or that, if they ran into other groups from time to time, she contrived with exquisite skill to make these interruptions temporary and to keep him to herself.

Their progress, though he was but dimly aware of it, was something of a triumphal one for himself. He was sufficiently striking in appearance when alone to attract attention, and Miss Wycliffe's evident partiality now made him a special mark for speculative glances. He began to gain an appreciation of her absolutely entrenched position in that society in which the older women were inclined to pet her and the older men indulged in gallant little speeches. As for her contemporaries, they paid her tribute in their kind.

In this way they participated in the slow movement that for some time had been turning toward the dining-room. Through the open door they saw the solid phalanx of earnest eaters that surged about the tables. To disinterested eyes the sight might have appeared one of agonised appetition, in which, as in battle, some particular person or movement arrested the attention for a moment from the general effect: a stout and determined matron planted like James Fitz-James upon his rock; a tall youth with salad raised aloft as he turned to make his escape; the perspiring face of some bewildered darkey, who could have found ample use for the hands of a Briareus in the stress of conflicting orders. Leigh turned to his companion with an enquiring glance.

"Will you allow me to forage for you, Miss Wycliffe?"

She shook her head. "Not yet, at any rate," she answered. "What a spectacle! We might step into the conservatory and rest awhile."

She led the way through a near-by door into the vistas of greenness beyond. There she paused from time to time to call his attention to some rare plant, to lift some blossom to her face, and then went on with the assurance of one entirely at home in her surroundings. Through the thick branches Leigh caught more than one glimpse of a white dress, and heard an occasional ripple of youthful merriment. The vision of one of his students hurrying down a parallel aisle with spoils from the table gave him a humorous sense of fellow feeling.

At length they found a seat of twisted branches, screened by a row of palms. From the hallway of the house the scraping of the violins came intermittently, like the sound of crickets in a distant field, so faint that they could also hear the puffing of the breeze through a raised panel in the slanting roof of glass above their heads. It seemed as if the wonderful Indian Summer night were trying to steal in among the guests through that small opening, to bid them be still. To look up at that vitreous, transparent roof was like gazing into the enchantment of a witch's mirror, so imminent was the mysterious depth of the night beyond. Miss Wycliffe emitted the ghost of a sigh, as if to express her relief and sense of escape, perhaps her weariness. Leigh, following her glance upward, caught sight of a solitary, brilliant star peeping through the triangular aperture, and reflected with keen appreciation that it was the planet Venus. There was an opportunity in this chance apparition, of which, however, he did not avail himself. It was true that she had drawn his eyes down from the stars to gaze into her own, and that the planet upon which they then looked together had been given the name of the goddess of love. These facts, beautifully coincident as they seemed to him, would not bear expression in words. She would think he was making conventional love to her, and his instinct forbade such an obvious beginning. He spoke, therefore, only of the refreshing contrast of their asylum with the noise and glare of the drawing-rooms, noting with a passing pang as he did so that the lilies of the valley which she had carried with her thus far were drooping in her lap, their expiring odour quenched by the heavy fragrance about them.

Perhaps it was a touch of feminine perversity that led her to acquiesce in his animadversions upon the scene they had just left. It was certainly a function in which she was peculiarly fitted to shine, and she had taken her part with every appearance of enjoyment; yet her comments were more caustic than his own.

"The lecture was the better part," she declared. "I wish it had been longer--but you missed a good deal of it."

"Yes," he explained. "I didn't get away from the debate till after six o'clock."

"The debate!" she echoed, fixing him with an interested gaze. "I had forgotten that this was the evening. Tell me about it. Did your tentative efforts with Mr. Emmet bear any fruit, after all?"

He shook his head, smiling. "It was an extraordinary spectacle," he mused. "The pit and the balconies, the aisles, the space at the back, and the stairs down to the sidewalk were filled with labourers, packed close together, their dinner-pails in their hands and their pipes in their mouths. You could have cut the air with a knife into chunks of tobacco smoke."

"And how did he seem?" she asked.

"You have good reason to be proud of your _protégé_, Miss Wycliffe," he answered, kindling with generous enthusiasm. "Emmet outclassed his opponent completely--in style, in delivery, in subject-matter, and, as it seemed to me, in the justice of his cause. I was so amazed and impressed that I carried the atmosphere of the thing with me until--until I dropped into the chair beside you, and then I forgot all about it."

She moved uneasily and toyed with the flowers in her lap, then glanced up at him, but not with the glance of a woman who is ready to listen to a declaration of love. His next words were determined by that look, and there was no little self-renunciation in his pursuance of a subject he would fain have dropped for one nearer his heart. He had to remind himself once more of the shortness of their acquaintance, and of her natural curiosity concerning one of the crises in a struggle which had interested her so keenly.

"It only shows how far one's judgments fall below the mark sometimes," he went on. "Not till this afternoon did I get a true perspective of the man, when I saw him standing there, perfectly self-possessed and powerful, reading his speech"--

"Reading!" she interrupted.

"Yes, reading, and actually gaining in effectiveness by doing so. It seems that each speaker was allowed only twenty minutes, and rather than run the risk of going off on a tangent, he had written the whole thing out--but he knew it practically by heart."

"It was like him," she commented. "He's clever. But what did he say?"

Her eager interest, her knowledge of the man, the compliment she paid him, filled Leigh with bitterness of which he was ashamed. He found himself under the necessity of describing to the woman he loved the triumph of another man, who had, as he now saw clearly, appealed to her imagination. To be sure, it was nothing more than that, but as far as it went, it hurt his own cause to play the rôle of the narrating messenger. He was focussing her attention upon an exciting drama in which he had borne the inglorious part of witness; but he was too proud a man to be ungenerous in his comments, or to let her see the duality of his mental state.

"His speech was a frank setting off of the masses against the classes," he returned. "He said the same things I had heard him say in conversation, only with more pith and point. Emmet has the Irish gift of expression when he's aroused--there's no doubt of it. He practically took for his text: The Man in the One-storied House against the Man in the Mansion. One thing struck me as especially keen. His opponents have been claiming that the city is a great business corporation, in which the citizens are stockholders and the officials directors; but Emmet pointed out the fact that in a stock company a man is entitled to as many votes as he has shares, while in a municipal corporation the individual, not the stock he possesses, is the unit. He made a good point there in maintaining that the corner-stone of democracy is manhood suffrage, not property suffrage. He tore apart that apparently reasonable comparison, and showed beneath it an attempt to rob the poor man of his rights."

She nodded her appreciation. "It was a good point, but I don't agree with him, nevertheless. Property-holders ought to have more to say in the management of a city than those who have nothing at stake. If I had my way, I would confine manhood suffrage to state and national elections."

Leigh was struck by these words into silence. For the first time she had made him realise that she was a rich woman, though he had heard from Cardington that the bishop merely held his wife's large property in trust for the daughter. Now he detected in her a shrewd and practical strain, perhaps an inheritance from some ancestor who had laid the foundations of her fortune. He saw also that her revolt against the moribund spirituality of the wealthy class to which she belonged was offset by a consciousness of possession, so that she could support Emmet one moment and condemn his theories the next. On one side of their natures, Leigh and Miss Wycliffe touched in sympathetic understanding; on the other, they were as far apart as the poles. No poor man, however civilised he may be, can range himself on the side of wealth, unless he is either a fortune hunter or a sycophant, and Leigh was neither. At the present moment he merely felt, with a sinking of spirit, the existence of an artificial barrier between them of which he had previously been but dimly conscious.

"I 'm something of a socialist myself," he said, "only, I 'm waiting for a great leader and a reasonable propaganda."

"You 'll never find either," she retorted with spirit. Then her face softened into the expression of a listener to a good story. "But don't let us discuss these endless and stupid questions. What I want is the personal and spectacular side of it. How did the two men compare? And with which of them did the people side?"

"With their own representative, naturally. I was impressed with the tenseness of the feeling. The audience cheered Emmet until he had to remind them that they were cutting into his twenty-minute allowance. Then they kept silent, but more like animals held in leash, I thought, and I could n't help wondering what would happen if the cork should suddenly pop off and let out all that bottled sense of ill usage. When Judge Swigart got up, he did n't mend matters by referring continually to Emmet as his 'distinguished antagonist,' in a tone that suggested irony rather than respect. He said he was pained and astonished to hear Mr. Emmet declare that there was class feeling in Warwick; he himself had never detected any; he objected to the setting off of aristocrat against democrat, when all were democratic; he denied that the city was run by a clique."

"Really," Miss Wycliffe remarked, laughing, "he could n't expect them to swallow that. Of course Warwick is run by a clique--it always has been--and I 'd like to see them turned out for once."

Leigh was no longer astonished at the sudden swinging of the pendulum. "They did n't swallow it," he said grimly, "and it took Emmet's personal appeal for fair play to make them stop their hissing and catcalls. I thought there 'd be a riot at one time, but instead, the men began to get up and walk out, leaving Swigart talking to their backs. I was swept along with the crowd, and that was the last I saw or heard."

He caught the flash of her eyes at the vivid picture he had drawn, and could no longer conceal his bitterness. "When I saw Emmet standing there, whipping up the mob and then holding it in check, and thought of his scanty schooling, I felt the handicap of professorial pursuits"--

"Oh, eloquence!" she interrupted, with a quick and tactful understanding of his hurt. "There's nothing easier in the world, if you only have the knack. I think I may say so, as the daughter of a bishop. Mr. Emmet moved them merely because he voiced their own hatreds and prejudices in a clear and convincing way, not that he said anything so very remarkable." There was undisguised scorn in her tone, and he understood that this was the heiress speaking. "A trumpet makes more noise of a certain kind than a telescope," she went on, "and the noise is what the people like. Have you ever read 'Numa Roumestan'? At the risk of preventing you from doing so, I must recommend it."

She lifted the flowers as if to throw them away, preparatory to a return to the house, but he defeated her intention by deftly reaching forward and taking them from her hand.

"You must allow me to save them, Miss Wycliffe," he explained, in answer to the quick inquiry of her sidelong glance. "Let me indulge a romantic impulse to-night, though we have had such an interesting conversation on other matters." He thrust the lilies of the valley into an inside pocket of his coat, and sat looking at her with a speculative sadness that made a light or flippant comment on her part impossible. She said nothing, though her poise conveyed the suggestion of intended flight. She doubtless appreciated the fact that this was what she might have anticipated, that she could not lead a young man who was in love with her to such a place without this result. Her purpose in so doing was best known to herself. In his mind there was evidently a doubt whether it was wanton cruelty, or a desire for information concerning her _protégé_. He began to wonder, in view of the persistence of her interest in Emmet, whether she had not divined the cause of his late arrival from the first.

"When I first came in," he continued, "and Littleford thrust me into a chair beside you, I caught the scent of these lilies before I knew they were in your hands. It was something like an experience that befell one of my ancestors as he approached America after a two months' voyage in a sailing vessel. They were nearing Virginia one night in May, and a land breeze blew the fragrance of flowers to them across the water before they saw the shore. _On desperate seas long wont to roam_--You know the verse?"

She rose hurriedly to her feet, distressed, perhaps repentant. "You must not," she protested in a low voice. "You must not."

"There is some reason why I must not?" he questioned, confronting her with paling face. She nodded a confirmation of his fear. "Then I must ask just one question more," he persisted miserably. "Suppose the reason did not exist--I don't ask you to tell me now what it is--but suppose there were no reason. Would you forbid me to love you then?"

For a moment she did not reply, and he watched her face as one who would read an enigmatical page from the book of fate. The question demanded an answer, a definite reply, which she was not prepared to give. He saw dawning in her eyes a recognition of him in a new light; it was as if she now contemplated the possibility she had rejected. In this attitude of mind, as in nothing else, the bishop's cold and calculating nature disclosed itself in the daughter, and Leigh divined that she did not wish to love him, though she allowed herself to desire the tribute of his love. It was this desire that enabled her to enjoy the situation, to convey to him a denial that was not absolute. She might withdraw herself,--she had said that she must,--yet something might remain, something more than friendship, less than the claims of an acknowledged love.

"If the reason did not exist," she repeated slowly, "then--perhaps."

He heard the words with a gesture of acquiescence, and followed her in silence down the aisle in the direction of the house, wondering why he did not stop her before it was too late and ask her whether he had heard aright, why he had not kissed her when he could have done it so easily, and thereby, perhaps, have shaken her allegiance to some other claim. For his intuition told him that though he was not her acknowledged lover, he was by no means a mere friend. It was this assurance that gave him hope, and there was comfort in the thought that he had not lost all by daring too much.

About two hours later, Leigh descended from the billiard-room, where he had been playing an inattentive and indifferent game with one of his colleagues, and encountered Bishop Wycliffe coming into the hall from the library in company with his host and Anthony Cobbens. The major part of the company had already gone, leaving a few elderly talkers in various corners, and a group of young people dancing in the ballroom, which had been cleared after the lecture for that purpose.

"Ah, Littleford," the bishop was saying, "these entertainments of yours are entirely delightful. You give every one the particular thing he wants and send him away contented: to the artistic a glimpse of Velasquez; to the young, a turn of the 'light fantastic toe;' to me, one of your good cigars and a quiet chat in the corner about old times. But have you seen Felicity?"

Littleford, a comfortable-looking man, with a fresh colour, a yellow beard, and a general air of good living and goodfellowship about him, hurried off to the ballroom to inquire. Meanwhile, Cobbens helped the bishop into his coat with the solicitous attention due a swell official of the Church, who was at the same time the father of Felicity Wycliffe. Leigh, performing the same operation for himself, was chatting with the other two, when Littleford returned to say that his search had been in vain.

"She probably went home with Mrs. Parr," the bishop commented. "They came together, I believe."

"Mrs. Parr is still here," Littleford said, "and complaining that Miss Wycliffe has deserted her."

The bishop's residence was only about a block away, on the other side of the street, and Leigh saw that Littleford's information caused no particular concern. Seeking significance in everything she did, he wondered whether her early withdrawal contained any element of hope for himself, or whether she were ill. As he recalled the suppressed excitement of her manner, he feared that this latter conjecture might be the true one, and his heart contracted with anxiety. The three men descended the broad steps together, the bishop remarking upon the lateness of the season and the clemency of the air. When they reached the street, he turned with Cobbens in the direction of his house, with an absent-minded though courteous good-night.

Though the leaves of the elms had now in a large measure left the branches, the suggestion of a cathedral nave was still presented to the mind. The equidistant trunks were, as formerly, the supporting pillars, but the vista had suffered a mournful change, as if the roof had suddenly been blown away, leaving the springing ribs a black tracery against the autumnal sky. This ruinous work of the frost was strangely offset by the soft witchery of the breeze, which seemed either a reminiscence of the spring that was past, or a promise of the spring to come. Leigh's thoughts took a turn in harmony with this influence. He began to readjust his first conception of Miss Wycliffe,--she was now Felicity in his unspoken meditations,--and to realise that she was not like a Russian noblewoman, ready to sacrifice all for socialism, as he had at first conceived her. Had she continued to be such a magnificent and heroic creature, he would have loved her less. She gained infinitely more than she lost by this more intimate view. She was no longer a possible reformer and a subject for the historian, but a woman pure and simple, with all a woman's alluring inconsistencies.

Immersed in this new conception, he was startled by a voice and hurrying step behind him, and turned to meet Cardington's outstretched hand and the hospitable offer of a cigar. As they went on together, his colleague commented in his voluminous way upon the evening they had just spent, and before long, with Velasquez as a starting-point, he had launched upon a compendious history of Spain, interspersed with anecdotes of his own travels in that romantic land.

In this way they had almost reached the end of the rows of elms, when they saw before them a man and woman walking with the slow and tentative steps of those absorbed in deep personal conversation. At their nearer approach the woman turned quickly for a moment, said something in a low voice, and then the two hurried abruptly down a side street, whose thicker shadows offered a screen from further observation. Leigh, listening but inattentively to his companion's disquisition and meditating still of Felicity, gave the couple only a fleeting glance, thinking, if he thought of them at all, that they were a maid from one of the neighbouring houses and her lover.

The next moment he realised that he had heard the intonation of Miss Wycliffe's voice, or had imagined it. He would doubtless have thought it mere imagination, some accidental resemblance to which his ear had given identity, had not Cardington's manner registered a sudden emotional disturbance. He paused in his narration, like one smitten with mental atrophy and searching for the word that was about to reach his lips. His position on the inside of the walk offered a barrier between Leigh and the retreating couple, and he gave a curious impression of maintaining that position carefully as they passed the street. Then he resumed his story with something of accentuated intensity. Neither made the slightest comment on the incident.