The Mayor of Warwick

by Herbert M. Hopkins

At the words his paleness became ashen, and the rigidity of his features was so ghastly that, forgetting everything else in her alarm, she ran to his assistance. He waved her away angrily.

"No—I am not going to faint—and I don't want anything to drink."

She resumed her chair obediently, and waited for him to ask more questions. Apparently he was unwilling or unable to do so, and the silence seemed interminable, though in reality it lasted but a few minutes. During that short time the bishop's thoughts ranged with characteristic rapidity over every aspect of the situation. Emmet as a son-in-law! First of all, the fact that he was the mayor of Warwick, a fact which the bishop had hitherto belittled, now presented itself as a mitigating circumstance. Then the thought that he was a Catholic followed immediately, to suggest complications and humiliations which the bishop's large experience enabled him to see with fatal distinctness. What was the man's paltry office compared with this stupendous fact? Nothing—a mere accident—a passing honour that would probably be plucked from him two years hence, leaving him—what? Tom Emmet, ex-professional baseball player and streetcar conductor, out of a job, no longer mayor, but always a Catholic, married to the richest woman in Warwick, and that woman his daughter, the daughter of Bishop Wycliffe!

It was inevitable that he should look at the situation from the point of view of the bishop rather than from that of the father simply. Had she been a son who had "gone over to Rome" after taking Anglican orders, the bishop's professional humiliation would not have been as great as that which now stared him in the face. It would have been a keen disappointment indeed, but lightened by the prospect of his son's preferment in an ancient communion. There would still have been the possibility of a career for the boy, a career which his father could watch, or at least anticipate, with emotions of pride; for the bishop was too purely an ecclesiastic to under-estimate professional success in the Church of Rome. The career of a Cardinal Newman, for example, was one that challenged his respect, however much he regretted the loss of such talents to the Anglican faith, however forcibly he might characterise the convert's action as apostasy.

But how different the actual case, how infinitely worse! Felicity's fortune was lost indeed to the great cause for which he had laboured a lifetime. Could he not imagine the delicately malicious triumph of the Catholic bishop, by whose side he had so recently sat on equal terms? Did he not know how the man would begin to scheme for the fortune of Emmet's wife from the very day the marriage was published, how he would strive to reach Felicity through her husband, flattering, threatening, moving heaven and earth to get the money for his parochial schools, his nunneries, his cathedral? Only one as intensely partisan as the bishop, and with his reasons for partisanship, could divine his sensations as he viewed the picture thus presented to his mind—the troops of Irish or Italian children screaming in their dusty playground, watched by the monkish forms of their teachers. And the other possibility had been St. George's Hall, the miniature Oxford of America!

But even if the money should not go in such a direction through the hands of Felicity,—and the bishop realised that a husband would not be likely to succeed where a father had failed,—it would ultimately reach the hands of her children. Baffled by the parents, the authorities of the Catholic Church would transfer their efforts to the children from their very cradles, and would bring the game to earth at last.

The thought of children reminded the bishop now far he had gone on the facts he knew thus far. What were they? That Felicity had married Emmet, that she did not love him, that she already repented the deed! It was characteristic of his mental processes that the consideration of love had been overlooked in his first agonised speculations, but now he clutched at it as a drowning man clutches at a straw.

It was a wonderfully interesting face that he turned upon her, transformed by his complicated emotions—his mechanical smile of suffering, humiliation, scorn, disgust; the sudden leaping into his eyes of a desperate hope. The master spirit within him was already awaking from the stunning blow she had dealt. Every faculty of his acute mind was once more alert, hungering for more facts, all the facts, as a basis of future action.

He spoke not one word of the terrible anger that racked him like a physical nausea. Even in this crisis, his temperament and training held fast. Reproaches on his part would only drive her more surely to the place from which she seemed desirous to return. His flurry at the table had shown him how she could match anger with anger, and over-power him by sheer vitality. An instinct of self-preservation, and an astuteness that now reached its final triumph, pointed the wiser way.

"Then you feel that you have made a mistake, Felicity?" he questioned. "I have long divined a great trouble in you, though of course this is far beyond my worst fears. If I am to be of any help to you, I must know all."