THE MAYOR OF WARWICK***
E-text prepared by Al Haines
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 18700-h.htm or 18700-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/8/7/0/18700/18700-h/18700-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/1/8/7/0/18700/18700-h.zip)
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.
