CHAPTER III
CARDINGTON
Leigh stood before the mirror in his bedroom and wrestled with his tie in preparation for the bishop's dinner. The week had brought in due course that procession of events which makes the opening of a college term a period of exceptional activity, but for the first time he had passed through the trial untaxed. He was slowly recovering from a sense of disappointment similar to that felt by a metropolitan at some Arcadian retreat, when he stands on the lonely platform at nightfall, listening to the trilling of the frogs increasing as the rumble of the train diminishes in the distance, and experiences a wild impulse to return at once to the fulness of life from which he has fled.
In the ample leisure afforded by his new position Leigh discovered an analogous consciousness of loss, with its consequent dismay. He had known many solitary hours when, as a student in the Lick Observatory, he had searched the skies for long months together; but the experience was overlaid by one more recent, so that now, with the varied life of a great university still ringing in his ears, he looked about and asked himself disconsolately if this were all. Had he plumbed the possibilities of the place in so short a time? And, if so, what was left for him in the year to come?
An answer to this question was suggested by his present occupation. If he could now and again leave the rarefied atmosphere of the hill for some such diversion as the one in prospect, he would return better able to make good use of that solitude in which real achievement is shaped.
As yet there seemed small chance that such diversions would become sufficiently numerous to interfere with his work. He had met the other nine members of the faculty, and while he found them courteous, he became at once aware that their attitude toward him as a newcomer was one of indifference. The smallness of their number did not operate to draw them more closely together, as might have been supposed. Each returned to the city at the end of his day's work, and was lost to view in his own peculiar circle. Some time, no doubt, their social obligation to the new professor in the tower would become imperative, but the time was not yet. Meanwhile, he felt himself regarded warily, an attitude which to his friendly Western nature seemed to betoken a vague disapprobation. He did not realise that there was nothing personal in this aloofness, except in so far as he personified a larger life, whose hopeful outlook stirred in more cabined natures an unacknowledged resentment. Here he found no remnant of the traditional hospitality of the borderland. The conditions of this old community of specialised interests were the opposite of those he had encountered in the West, where a stranger was welcomed on the slim credentials of his appearance.
Leigh had been told that the road to promotion led through the small college, and he had taken that road hopefully; but now he felt like one who had drifted into an eddy below the bank, while the great stream of the national educational tendency went tossing and foaming past.
These unaccustomed circumstances gave an unwonted significance to the simple occupation in which he was employed, and focussed his mind expectantly upon the event which, in the fuller life he had left, would have been accepted as a matter of course.
His preparations completed, he donned his overcoat and hat, and stood looking from his window over the valley toward the west. The sun was setting in an angry splendour that threatened storms, Even as he looked, the wind attained increased velocity and began to whine and whistle about the solid masonry of the tower. Leigh drew in the heavy, leaded panes against the possible beating of the rain. He passed his fingers lightly down the cold stone casement, thinking of its immense thickness and of the beauty of its careful cutting. Never had he lived in such rooms. His was an habitat fit for a prince of the Middle Ages, and some glimpse of the fascination which this secluded life might come to possess was given him at that moment. Evidently, Professor Cardington, his neighbour across the hall, had felt it and succumbed; else how could a man of his extraordinary talent have remained so long buried, as it were, from the world?