The Mayor of Warwick

The Mayor of Warwick

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Title: The Mayor of Warwick
Author: Herbert M. Hopkins

Release Date: June 27, 2006 [eBook #18700]
Language: English
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THE MAYOR OF WARWICK
by
HERBERT M. HOPKINS
Author of "The Fighting Bishop"

[Frontispiece: "Have you noticed how silent it has grown?" he asked.]

Boston and New York Houghton, Mifflin and Company The Riverside
Press, Cambridge 1906 Copyright 1906 by Herbert M. Hopkins All
Rights Reserved Published April 1906

TO PAULINE

CONTENTS
I. THE MEETING IN THE MAPLE WALK II. THE TOWER III.
CARDINGTON IV. THE BISHOP'S DAUGHTER V. THE
CANDIDATE VI. LENA HARPSTER VII. THE STAR-GAZERS VIII.
"WHAT MAKES HER IN THE WOOD SO LATE?" IX. "HER
HEART WAS OTHERWHERE" X. MISTRESS AND MAID XI. AT
THE OLD CONTINENTAL XII. THE CONFESSION XIII.
FURNITURE AND FAMILY XIV. THE PRESIDENT TAKES A
HAND XV. "I PLUCKED THE ROSE, IMPATIENT OF DELAY"
XVI. THE BLINDNESS OF THE BISHOP XVII. CONDITIONS
XVIII. "TWO SISTER VESSELS" XIX. FATHER AND DAUGHTER
XX. "PUNISHMENT, THOUGH LAME OF FOOT" XXI. THE

MAYOR FINDS HIMSELF AT LAST

THE MAYOR OF WARWICK
CHAPTER I
THE MEETING IN THE MAPLE WALK
St George's Hall, situated on a high hill overlooking the city of
Warwick, was still silent and tenantless, though the long vacation was
drawing to a close. To a stranger passing that way for the first time, the
building and the surrounding country would doubtless have suggested
the old England rather than the new. There was something mediaeval in
the massive, castellated tower that carried the eye upward past the great,
arched doorway, the thin, deep-set windows, the leaded eaves and
grinning gargoyles, into the cool sky of the September morning.
The stranger, were he rich in good traditions, would pause in
admiration of the pure collegiate-gothic style of the low hall that
extended north and south three hundred feet in either direction from the
base of the great tower; he would note the artistry of the iron-braced,
oaken doors, flanked at the lintels by inscrutable faces of carven stone,
of the windows with their diamonded panes of milky glass peeping
through a wilderness of encroaching vines. Nor would this be all. Had
he ever viewed the quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge, he might be
able to infer that here, on this sunny plateau above the hill, devoted
men, steept in the traditions of old England, had endeavoured to
reproduce the plan of one of her famous colleges.
He would see, perhaps, that only one side of the quadrangle was built,
one fourth of the work done. Here, along the northern line, should be
the chapel, its altar window facing the east; on the southern, the
dining-hall, adorned with rafters of dark oak and with portraits of the
wise and great. To complete the plan, the remaining gap must be closed
by a hall similar in style to the one already built.

He might picture himself standing in the midst of this beautiful creation
of the imagination, taking in its architectural glories one by one, until
his eye paused at the eastern gateway to note the distant landscape
which it framed. And then, if he were in sympathy with the ideals of
which this building was the outward expression, he would wake from
his constructive reverie to realise sadly for the first time, not the beauty,
but the incompleteness, of the institution; not its proximity to the city
beyond, but its air of aloofness from the community in which it stood.
About ten o'clock of the morning in which this story begins, a stranger,
not quite such an one as we have imagined, left the car at the foot of the
long hill and turned his face for the first time towards St. George's Hall.
As he passed up the shaded street along the northern side of the campus,
his keen, blue-grey eyes swept eagerly the crest on which stood the
institution that was destined to be the scene of his professional labours
for at least a year, perhaps for many years, it might be, for life. Even a
casual glance at the tall, loosely hung figure of the young man, at his
clean-cut features and firm mouth, at the nervous,