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+Project Gutenberg's The Turnstile, by A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Turnstile
+
+Author: A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
+
+Release Date: January 27, 2012 [EBook #38689]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TURNSTILE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+   1. Page scan source:
+      http://www.archive.org/details/turnstile00masogoog
+
+   2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
+
+
+
+
+                            THE TURNSTILE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                       BOOKS BY A. E. W. MASON
+
+                 Published By CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+       The Broken Road.                          $1.50
+       At the Villa Rose. Illustrated.           $1.50
+       The Turnstile.                      _net_ $1.30
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE TURNSTILE
+
+
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                            A. E. W. MASON
+
+             AUTHOR OF "FOUR FEATHERS," "RUNNING WATER,"
+                       "THE BROKEN ROAD," ETC.
+
+
+
+
+                       CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+                       NEW YORK  :: :: ::  1912
+
+
+
+
+
+                      Copyright, 1911, 1912, by
+                       CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+                              *   *   *
+                        Published June, 1912
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+
+       CHAPTER
+
+         I. The Swinging of a Chandelier.
+
+        II. Of an Earthquake and James Challoner.
+
+       III. Challoner's Pilgrimage.
+
+        IV. Cynthia's Birthday.
+
+         V. The Reaper.
+
+        VI. A Visitor at the Estancia.
+
+       VII. Both Sides of the Door.
+
+      VIII. The Flight.
+
+        IX. Robert Daventry Explains.
+
+         X. Mr. Benoliel.
+
+        XI. A Man on the Make.
+
+       XII. Lungatine.
+
+      XIII. The Night Before the Poll.
+
+       XIV. Colonel Challoner's Memory.
+
+        XV. The Mayor and the Man.
+
+       XVI. Words Over the Telephone.
+
+      XVII. A Refusal.
+
+     XVIII. A Maiden Speech.
+
+       XIX. And a Proposal.
+
+        XX. At Culver.
+
+       XXI. Mr. Benoliel's Warning.
+
+      XXII. And an Instance to Enforce It.
+
+     XXIII. Cynthia on the House.
+
+      XXIV. The Man Who Had Walked in the Road.
+
+       XXV. Colonel Challoner's Revolt.
+
+      XXVI. The Picture at Bramling.
+
+     XXVII. Devenish Replies.
+
+    XXVIII. Wireless.
+
+      XXIX. In the Ladies' Gallery.
+
+       XXX. The Letter.
+
+      XXXI. M. Poizat Again.
+
+     XXXII. The Call.
+
+    XXXIII. A Letter from Abroad.
+
+     XXXIV. The Convict at the Oar.
+
+      XXXV. A Little Bit Extra.
+
+     XXXVI. The Telegram.
+
+    XXXVII. The Last.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE TURNSTILE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE TURNSTILE
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I
+
+                     THE SWINGING OF A CHANDELIER
+
+
+At the first glance it looked as if the midnight chimes of a clock in
+an old city of the Midlands might most fitly ring in this history. But
+we live in a very small island, and its inhabitants have for so long
+been wanderers upon the face of the earth that one can hardly search
+amongst them for the beginnings of either people or events without
+slipping unexpectedly over the edge of England. So it is in this
+instance. For, although it was in England that Captain Rames, Mr.
+Benoliel, Cynthia, the little naturalized Frenchman, and the rest of
+them met and struggled more or less inefficiently to express
+themselves; although, too, Ludsey, the old city, was during a period
+the pivot of their lives; for the beginnings of their relationship one
+with another, it is necessary to go further afield, and back by some
+few years. One must turn toward a lonely estancia in the south-west of
+Argentina, where, on a hot, still night of summer, a heavy chandelier
+touched by no human hand swung gently to and fro.
+
+This queer thing happened in the dining-room of the house, and between
+half-past ten and eleven o'clock. It was half-way through January, and
+Mr. and Mrs. Daventry were still seated at the table over a late
+supper. For Robert Daventry had on that day begun the harvesting of
+his eight leagues of wheat, and there had been little rest for any one
+upon the estancia since daybreak. He sat now taking his ease opposite
+his wife, with a cup of black coffee in front of him and a cigar
+between his lips, a big, broad, sunburnt man with a beard growing gray
+and a thick crop of brown hair upon his head; loose-limbed still, and
+still getting, when he stood up, the value of every inch of his six
+feet two. As he lounged at the table he debated with his wife in a
+curious gentle voice a question which, played with once, had begun of
+late years to insist upon an answer.
+
+"We are both over fifty, Joan," he said. "And we have made our money."
+
+"We have also made our friends, Robert," replied his wife. She was a
+short, stoutish woman, quick with her hands, practical in her speech.
+Capacity was written broad upon her like a label, and, for all her
+husband's bulk, she was the better man of the two, even at the first
+casual glance. There was a noticeable suggestion of softness and
+amiability in Robert Daventry. It was hardly, perhaps, to be localized
+in any feature. Rather he diffused it about him like an atmosphere.
+One would have wondered how it came about that in a country so stern
+as Argentina he had prospered so exceedingly had his wife not been
+present to explain his prosperity. It was so evident that she drove
+the cart and that he ran between the shafts--evident, that is, to
+others than Robert Daventry. She had been clever enough and fond
+enough to conceal from him their exact relationship. So now it was
+with an air of pleading that she replied to him:
+
+"We have not only made our friends, Robert. We have made them here. If
+we go, we lose them."
+
+"Yes," he answered. "But it wouldn't be as if we had to start quite
+fresh again. I have old ties with Warwickshire. Thirty years won't
+have broken them all."
+
+Joan Daventry answered slowly:
+
+"Thirty years. That's a long time, Robert."
+
+"And yet," said Robert Daventry with a wistfulness in his voice which
+almost weakened her into a consent against which her judgment no less
+than her inclinations fought. "And yet there's a house on the London
+road which I might have passed yesterday--it's so vivid to me now. A
+white house set back from the highway behind a great wall of old red
+brick. Above the coping of the wall you can see the rows of level
+windows and the roof of a wing a story lower than the rest of the
+house. And if the gates are open you catch a glimpse of great cedar
+trees on a wide lawn--a lawn of fine grass like emeralds."
+
+His eyes turned back upon his boyhood, and the thought of his county
+set his heart aching. Long white roads, rising and dipping between
+high elms, with a yard or two of turf on either side for a horse to
+canter on; cottages, real cottages, not shapeless buildings of
+corrugated iron standing gauntly up against the sky-line at the edge
+of a round of burnt, bare plain, but cottages rich with phlox and deep
+in trees--the pictures were flung before his eyes by the lantern of
+his memories as if upon a white sheet. But, above all, it was the
+thought of the greenery of Warwickshire which caught at his throat;
+the woods flecked with sunlight, the lawns like emeralds.
+
+He glanced at a thermometer which hung against the wall. Here, even at
+eleven o'clock of the night, it marked this January ninety-seven
+degrees of heat. The mosquitoes trumpeted and drummed against the
+gauze curtains which covered the open windows; and outside the windows
+the night was black and hot like velvet.
+
+Robert Daventry drew his handkerchief across his forehead and with his
+elbow on the table leaned his face upon his hand. His wife looked at
+him quickly and with solicitude.
+
+"You are tired to-night, Robert," she said gently. "That's why you
+want to give the estancia up."
+
+Robert Daventry shook his head and corrected her.
+
+"No, Joan. But I am more tired to-night and very likely that's the
+explanation." Then he laughed at a recollection. "Do you remember when
+the squadron came to Montevideo two years ago? There was a dinner at
+the legation at Buenos Ayres. I sat next to the commodore, and he
+asked me how old I was. When I told him that I was just fifty, he
+replied: 'Ah, now you will begin to find life very interesting. For
+you will notice every year that you are able to do a little less than
+you did the year before.' Well, I am beginning, my dear, to find life
+interesting from the commodore's point of view."
+
+Joan did not answer him at once, and the couple sat for awhile in
+silence, with their thoughts estranged.
+
+For Joan Daventry shrank, with all her soul, from that coveted white
+house on the London road. Old ties could be resumed, was Robert's
+thought. He was forgetful that the ties were his, and his alone. She
+had no share in them and she had come to a time of life when the
+making of new friends is a weariness and a labor. With infinite toil
+and self-denial they had carved out their niche here in the Argentine
+Republic. They spent the winter in their house in Buenos Ayres, the
+summer upon the Daventry estancia. Their life was an ordered,
+comfortable progression of the months. For both of them, to her
+thinking, the time for new adventures had long gone by. They had had
+their full proportion of them in their youth. And so while Robert
+Daventry dreamed of a green future Joan was busily remembering.
+
+"When we first came here to settle," she said slowly, as she counted
+up all that had been done in these twenty-seven years, "we drove for
+two days. If the house on the London road is vivid to you, that drive
+is as clear to me. Our heaviest luggage was our hopes;" and Robert
+Daventry smiled across the table.
+
+"I have not forgotten that either," he said; and there was a whole
+world of love in his voice.
+
+"When we reached here we found a tin house with three rooms and
+nothing else, not a tree, hardly a track. Now there's an avenue half a
+mile long, there are plantations, there's a real brick house for the
+plantations to shelter. There are wells, there's a garden, there's a
+village at the end of the avenue, there's even a railway station
+to-day. These things are our doing, Robert;" and her voice was lifted
+up with pride.
+
+"I know," replied her husband. "But I ask myself whether the time has
+not come to hand them on."
+
+Once more the look of solicitude shone in his wife's eyes.
+
+"I could leave the estancia," she said doubtfully, "though it would
+almost break my heart to do it. But suppose we did. What would become
+of you in England? I have a fear," and she leaned forward across the
+table.
+
+"Why a fear?" he asked.
+
+"Because I think that people who have lived hard, like you and me, run
+a great risk if they retire just when they feel that they are
+beginning to grow old. A real risk of life, I mean. I think such as
+you and I would be killed off by inactivity rather than by any
+disease."
+
+She did not deny that something was wrong in their present situation.
+But she had a different conception of what that something was; and she
+had a different remedy.
+
+"We should find life too dull?" he exclaimed. "Too lonely, Joan?" and
+he struck the table with his hand; "I find it lonely here;" and at
+that she uttered a low cry:
+
+"Oh, my dear, and what of me?" and the wistfulness of her voice struck
+him to silence, a remorseful silence. After all, his days were full.
+
+"There's our other plan," she suggested gently.
+
+"Yes. To be sure! There's our other plan," he said. He leaned back in
+his chair, his face upturned toward the ceiling, and a thoughtful look
+in his eyes.
+
+"We have talked it over, haven't we? But we have played with it all
+the time. It would be so big an experiment."
+
+He ended the sentence abruptly. The look of thought passed from his
+face. It became curious, perplexed. Then he cried with a start of
+dismay:
+
+"You see, Joan, even my eyes are beginning to play tricks with me. I
+could swear that the chandelier is swinging to and fro above our
+heads."
+
+Joan looked anxiously at her husband, and then up toward the ceiling.
+At once surprise drove the anxiety from her face and thoughts.
+
+"But it _is_ swinging," she exclaimed. Both of them stared at the
+chandelier. There was not a doubt about the phenomenon possible. Not a
+breath of wind stirred in the garden, not a sound was audible
+overhead. Yet very gently the chandelier, with its lighted globes,
+oscillated above their heads. Robert Daventry rose to his feet and
+touched it.
+
+"Yes, it is swinging," he said. He stopped it, and held it quite
+still. Then he resumed his seat.
+
+"Very well, Joan," he said with a new briskness in his voice, "we will
+make the experiment. Come! When we go to Buenos Ayres in the winter!
+We will try the other plan. Even if it fails it will be worth making."
+
+Joan's face lighted up.
+
+"If it fails, then we'll go home," she said.
+
+No doubt the relief which Robert Daventry felt in the proof that his
+eyes were not failing him led him thus briskly to fall in with the
+scheme which both approached with timidity; and so the swinging of the
+chandelier had its share in bringing them to their decision. But the
+chandelier had not done with them. For hardly had Robert Daventry
+ceased to speak when it began again to swing backward and forward
+before their eyes. So it swung for exactly five minutes and then of
+its own accord it stopped.
+
+"That's very strange," said Robert Daventry. He looked at the clock
+upon the mantel-shelf. It was five minutes past eleven.
+
+"It's unaccountable," he continued. But he was able to account for it
+the next day. For a local paper brought to them the news that at ten
+minutes to eleven o'clock on the evening before, seven hundred miles
+away on the other side of the great barrier of the Andes, an
+earthquake had set the shores of the Pacific heaving like a sea, and
+Valparaiso, that city of earthquakes, had tumbled into ruins.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II
+
+                 OF AN EARTHQUAKE AND JAMES CHALLONER
+
+
+The experiences of James Challoner on that day of ruin at Valparaiso
+were various, but none of them were pleasant. It was his twenty-eighth
+birthday and up to two o'clock in the afternoon he was, as for the
+last six weeks he had been, a clerk in the great house of R. C. Royle
+& Sons. There was no sort of business in Chile which R. C. Royle &
+Sons were not prepared to undertake and carry through with efficiency,
+from a colossal deal in nitrates to the homeward freight of your
+portmanteau. It was, to be sure, upon the latter class of work that
+James Challoner was asked to concentrate his abilities. But
+advancement was a principle of the house, and in the vast
+ramifications of its business, opportunities of advancement came
+quickly. James Challoner, who for the best part of five years had been
+drifting unsuccessfully up and down the Pacific Coast, between Callao
+and Concepcion, was consequently accounted a lucky man to have secured
+employment in that house at all.
+
+"If he can only keep it!" said his friends, shrugging their shoulders,
+and his young wife, in the little house up the hill, bent over her
+child and whispered the same words. But in her mouth they were a
+prayer.
+
+At two o'clock, then, upon his birthday, James Challoner returned from
+his luncheon to the office, but as he took his seat he was summoned to
+the manager's room. He walked down the long room between the tables on
+which samples of produce were exhibited, then past the cashier's
+brass-fenced desks where the banking business was done, to a little
+compartment partitioned off in a corner. There Wallace Bourdon, a
+young partner in control of this branch of the firm, sat in a tilted
+chair, with his knees against a table, awaiting him.
+
+"Mr. Challoner, it is within your knowledge, I suppose, that we are
+negotiating with the Government at Santiago for the construction of a
+new railway in the north."
+
+Challoner shook his head.
+
+"That's not in my department, sir," he said.
+
+"Quite true," said Wallace Bourdon. He opened a drawer of the table
+and threw half a dozen letters down on the top of it under Challoner's
+eyes. "These letters are copies of our proposals. There are two firms
+competing with us to which these copies would be valuable. They were
+found in your desk while you were out at luncheon. What were they
+doing there?"
+
+James Challoner stared at the letters and pulled at his moustache.
+
+"I can't think, sir. They must have been put there," he said, and then
+with a cry of indignation: "I must have an enemy in the office."
+
+"Well, that's hard," said Wallace Bourdon sympathetically. "For he
+seems to have got back on you good and strong. You can draw your money
+from the cashier, Mr. Challoner, and clear out of this house just as
+soon as you can find it convenient;" and Wallace Bourdon dropped the
+legs of his chair onto the floor.
+
+James Challoner took his money and went out into the town. He sat
+moodily on a high stool at a bar for an hour or so. Then some men of
+his acquaintance joined him, and from moody he became blusterful and
+boisterous. But both the moodiness and the bluster were phases of the
+one deep-seated feeling--a reluctance to go up the hill and meet his
+wife. It was seven o'clock before he had gained the necessary courage,
+and when he did face his wife he followed the usual practice of his
+kind and blurted out aggressively the news of his dismissal.
+
+"I was lowering myself by going into the office at all as a clerk," he
+cried. "I told you so when you urged me to do it. Upon my word it
+almost serves me right, Doris. I have never known any good come from a
+man's lowering himself. He is bound to make enemies amongst his new
+associates. Jealousy is a despicable thing, but there's a deal of it
+floating about in the world, and one's a fool to shut one's eyes to
+it. However, we can't let the business rest there. My honor's
+impugned. That's the truth of it, Doris. I lie under a dishonorable
+charge. There's a stigma on our child's name, and it must be removed."
+
+He drew a chair briskly up to the table, pulled a piece of note-paper
+toward him, and dipped his pen in the ink.
+
+"Let me see, now! Who can my enemy be? Who is it that hates me? Can't
+you think of some one?" and in an instant he pushed the blotting pad
+from him. "You might say something, Doris. You just stand and look and
+never open your mouth."
+
+That was James Challoner's trouble, and the cause of his uneasiness.
+His wife neither buoyed him up with high-sounding phrases, nor
+afforded him the opportunity by any reproach to work himself into a
+fine heat of indignation. She had given him one dreadful look, her
+whole countenance a quivering cry of dismay made visible, and
+thereafter she had just stood with no word on her lips, her great eyes
+disconcertingly fixed upon his face and her mind quite hidden. She
+went out from the room and left him sitting in great discomfort. He
+detested her habit of silence, but he feared still more the thought of
+him which it might conceal, and he dared not break it with acrimonies.
+When she returned again into the room it was to say:
+
+"Dinner is ready."
+
+"Well, we must dine," said Challoner.
+
+"It is fortunate that after all I didn't hire that servant at once,"
+said Doris.
+
+"Yes, that was lucky. We can't afford a servant now," said James
+Challoner.
+
+Fear lest his wife should "lower herself" did not trouble him at all.
+During dinner he talked in self-defence, flurriedly, about his enemy,
+pointing vaguely to this man or to that, and watching keenly for some
+droop of disdain about Doris's lips. But she gave no sign, and at the
+back of all his thought was the wounding question:
+
+"What does she think of me?"
+
+He smoked his pipe outside the door after dinner, with the lighted
+streets of the town spread out below him. The house stood apart, high
+up on the great amphitheatre of hills above Valparaiso; and on the
+opposite side of the road the ground fell steeply. The great bay lay
+open beneath his eyes to the distant tip of its northern horn; no
+inland pool could have slept more quietly than did the Pacific on that
+summer night; still water and mirrored stars, it widened out in the
+warm dusk to the sky's rim. A huge black steamer lay out beyond the
+edge of the jetty, with the great lights blazing from its saloon
+windows and the little lights steady on its masts. From the
+close-built streets at the water's edge there rose a pleasant murmur
+of many voices. No warnings were being given. Valparaiso, like any
+other tropical city, was taking its ease in the cool of the evening.
+
+At ten o'clock James Challoner, having nothing better to do and no
+money to spend, went indoors. He locked the front door and with a
+definite relief found that his wife had already gone to bed. He stood
+in the empty, barely furnished sitting-room, and his thoughts were
+swept back to the morning at Southampton, five years ago, when Doris
+had crept on board the steamer which was to take them to South
+America. He remembered bitterly the buoyant hopes with which that
+runaway marriage had begun and Doris's fears that her flight had been
+already discovered and that an attempt at the last moment might be
+made to stop her.
+
+"It has been a bad mistake for me," he said, as all the wonderful
+things which he might have done, had he not been hampered with a wife,
+glittered in his mind. The truth, however, was not to be grasped by
+him unless he would face truthfully the history of his marriage, and
+that he was not constituted to do. It was a story common enough: A
+young man with no will and caressing manners, who was hastily packed
+off to South America, with a few hundred pounds in his pocket, to
+avoid exposure in his own country, and a young girl too staunch to her
+beliefs--these were the characters, and, given them, the story tells
+itself. "Yes, it has all been a very bad mistake for me," thought
+James Challoner, and switching off the lights he betook himself to
+bed. A door in the inner wall of his bedroom opened into the room
+where his wife and child slept. He listened for a moment with his ear
+against the panel. All was silent in that room.
+
+"She can sleep," he grumbled, finding even a grievance here. But he
+did not sleep for long. For, just at the moment when the chandelier
+began to swing in Mr. Daventry's dining-room, he was shaken out of his
+slumber. He lay for a few seconds in the vague and pleasant space
+between wakefulness and dreams, playing with the fancy that he was in
+a cabin on a ship at sea. But the fancy passed, and he was beset by a
+stranger illusion. He happened to be lying upon his side, with his
+face turned toward the outer wall of his bedroom; and as he lay he saw
+quite distinctly the wall gently and noiselessly split open. It split
+open high up and near to the ceiling, and it let through the stars and
+a strip of sky. Then the wall closed neatly together again, brick
+fitting with brick, so that not a chink was left. The room once more
+was black, the stars shut out.
+
+Challoner was still pondering upon this remarkable phenomenon when a
+third sensation shook him altogether out of his lethargy. He was
+violently jolted. This could be no illusion. It was as if some one,
+crouching beneath the bed, had suddenly risen on hands and knees and
+struck the mattress with his shoulders. Challoner sprang out of bed,
+tottered, and clung to the bedpost for support. The room was rocking
+like a tree in a gale and underneath his feet the boards strained and
+heaved. It was his first experience of an earthquake, but he had no
+doubt that he was undergoing it, and fear made his hands grip the iron
+post of the bed so that his palms were bruised. His chief terror was
+the floor. The feel of it moving unstably beneath his feet, the sound
+of its boards cracking loosened his knees. At any moment it might
+burst upward and explode. At some moment and very soon it must. He had
+no fear that it would collapse and gape open; it would surely burst
+like a shell; and in his fear of that explosion the rocking of the
+walls was of no account.
+
+He tried to think, and instinct reminded him of civilized man's chief
+necessities.
+
+"My shoes, my money."
+
+He groped along the bed for the switch of the light, but light did not
+answer to the summons. In the darkness he stooped, found his shoes,
+and slipped them on. His few dollars, drawn that afternoon from the
+cashier of R. C. Royle & Sons, were in the drawer of a night-table by
+his bed. He found them. There was a cupboard in the inner wall. He
+lurched across to it, and, tearing a long overcoat from a hook,
+slipped it on and dropped the money in his pocket. Close by the
+cupboard was the door of his wife's bedroom. He remembered her now,
+and flung the door open.
+
+"Doris," he cried, and no answer was returned to him.
+
+"Doris," he cried again, and this time the wail of his child answered
+him from her cot.
+
+He crossed to the bed. He leaned over it and put out his hand to shake
+his wife by the shoulder out of her deep sleep. And with a shock he
+became aware that she was leaning upon her elbow in the darkness. She
+was wide-awake all the time.
+
+"Quick!" he cried, in a sudden exasperation. "There is an earthquake.
+The house is falling."
+
+She replied in a strange, quiet voice:
+
+"I know."
+
+She made no beginning of a movement. She was awake, had been, perhaps,
+longer awake than he himself; she knew the swift peril which had
+befallen them; yet she remained propped on her elbow in the darkness,
+passively expectant. Or was she dazed? Even at that moment the
+question flashed through Challoner's mind and brought him a queer
+relief. But it was answered in a moment.
+
+"I called to you twice," he said; and his wife answered:
+
+"I heard;" and there was again no hint of bewilderment in her voice.
+It was the voice of a woman who had all her wits about her; not of one
+who was stunned.
+
+Meanwhile the earth rumbled beneath them and the room shook. Challoner
+felt for a candle by the bedside, struck a match, and lighted it. His
+wife watched him quietly. Her dark eyes shone in the candle-light,
+inscrutably veiling her thoughts.
+
+"Quick!" he cried. "Get up. There's no time to lose." He lifted the
+child out of the cot, still wrapped in her bedclothes.
+
+"Come."
+
+His wife rose, as it seemed to him, with incredible slowness. He could
+have screamed in his terror. As he stumbled across the floor to the
+door, she opened a wardrobe and, taking out a cloak, drew it about her
+shoulders. In the door-way he turned and saw her.
+
+"Good God!" he cried, and the question in his mind leaped to his lips
+and was uttered. "Do you want to kill us all?"
+
+"I had to find a cloak."
+
+"A cloak!" he cried contemptuously. He himself had tarried to slip on
+his overcoat, but, no doubt, that was different. Certainly his wife
+made no rejoinder. "To be buried under this house for the sake of a
+cloak," he cried, his lips so chattering with terror that he could
+hardly pronounce the words.
+
+"Go first," she said; and he ran out of the doorway. She followed him,
+leaving the door open behind her, and the candle burning in the room.
+They were still in the passage when an appalling roar deafened their
+ears. The lighted candle shot up into the air and was extinguished,
+and in the darkness the splitting of timber, the overthrow and the
+wreckage of furniture, rent the air and ceased. Of a sudden the
+throats of the fugitives were choked with dust. The fear which had so
+terrified him was justified. The floor had exploded, like artillery,
+in the room he had this moment quitted. His terror became a panic. He
+would have killed his wife had she stood in his way. He rushed
+downstairs, inarticulately crying. He fumbled in the darkness for the
+bolt of the front door, sobbing and cursing. He found it, flung the
+door open, and leaped out into the open air. He ran across the road,
+and as he ran a great stone fell with a crash, from the archway of the
+door, and the walls of the passage clashed together behind him. With a
+loud clatter of thunder the whole house crumbled down into a smoking
+heap of bricks. Challoner turned. He was quite alone with the child in
+his arms. And for a little while he stood very still.
+
+But he was no longer in darkness. About many of the villas on the
+hillside the flames were creeping, and their inhabitants were racing
+upward to the open heights, or searching desperately among the ruins
+for those whom the earthquake had entrapped. While lower down by the
+water's edge the city was ablaze and over all the bay the sky was red.
+The ground still shook beneath Challoner's feet, and the child in his
+arms began to cry. He laid it down against the low wall of the path
+and crept cautiously back to the ruins of his house.
+
+"Doris," he called, and again, "Doris."
+
+His voice was low, but there was more of awe than grief audible in the
+cry. "Doris," he called a third time, but in a louder and more urgent
+tone. A few bricks, hanging to a fragment of wall dislodged themselves
+and clattered down upon the heap of ruin. But no other answer came. He
+stooped suddenly where the archway of the entrance door had been. The
+great stone had fallen with so much force that one end had sunk into
+the ground; the other, however, rested upon a fragment of the stone
+pillar of the door; and so the stone lay under a pile of bricks titled
+at an angle. Through the space left by the angle a woman's hand and
+arm protruded. It was not pinned down by the stone. It pointed with
+limp fingers toward Challoner, and beside it a trickle of blood ran
+out. Challoner knelt and touched the hand.
+
+"Doris," he said.
+
+Her voice had not answered to his, and now there was no response in
+her fingers to his touch. The arm moved quite easily. The walls of the
+passage had borne her down and crushed her. Challoner remembered with
+a shiver the crash and clatter of them as they had knocked together
+just behind his heels. His wife had been killed in that downfall. She
+could not have survived.
+
+Challoner rose again to his feet.
+
+"She was awake," he said, and he talked aloud to himself. "She should
+have hurried. She could have escaped had she hurried;" and the picture
+of her leaning upon her elbow in her bed in the dark troubled his
+soul. There is no terror like the terror which comes from the shaking
+of the earth and the overthrow of its houses. Yet she, a woman--so ran
+his thoughts--had endured it. Her hand pointing, from beneath the
+stones, accused him for all the limpness of its fingers. She had
+welcomed it.
+
+The child wailed from the other side of the road. Challoner crossed to
+it. He stood and looked at it doubtfully. Still in doubt, he looked
+away. From the blazing town rose a babel of cries, a roar of flames, a
+crash of buildings falling in, and every now and then, quite distinct
+from the confusion, a shrill, clear scream would leap into the air
+like a thin fountain of water. But the sea was calm; the great ship,
+with every cord of its rigging strung black against the glowing sky,
+lay without a movement. Boats were plying between it and the shore.
+Challoner could see the tiny specks of them on the red water.
+
+"There's no tidal wave," he said in a dull voice. "That's
+extraordinary;" and then he picked up his daughter in his arms, and
+climbed higher up the hill to await the dawn.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER III
+
+                        CHALLONER'S PILGRIMAGE
+
+
+There were two more shocks that night, the first at five minutes past
+one, the second half an hour before sunrise. James Challoner sat in
+the centre of the most open space he could find, his overcoat drawn
+close about him and his daughter clasped tightly to his breast. But it
+was almost unconsciously that he held her so. His brain was dazed, and
+the only image at all clear in his mind was that of his dead wife's
+hand protruding beneath the great stone and directing against him its
+mute accusation. But, even so, it was the limp look of the fingers
+which chiefly troubled him, and that only troubled him from time to
+time. For the greater part of the interval before daybreak he sat
+watching the roofs of the buildings below him burst in tongues of fire
+and topple down with a clatter of slates in bright showers of sparks,
+much as a child sits open-mouthed at the fireworks. Now he huddled his
+coat close about him, now some spire of flame towering skyward more
+terribly beautiful than the rest, drew a cry from his lips; and now
+again, looking out over the quiet pond of the bay, he asked dully,
+"Why is there no tidal wave?"
+
+Morning came at last over the hill behind him, gray and
+extraordinarily cold. All about him he saw people, huddled like
+himself upon the slopes, men, women, and children, shivering in their
+night-attire and their bare feet bloody from the stones. All at once
+Challoner was aware that he was hungry. His little daughter reached
+out her arms and wailed. Hunger, too, as the sun rose, mastered the
+fears of the refugees upon the hill-side. One by one, group by group,
+they rose stiffly and straggled down to the ruined ways by the
+water-side. Challoner went with the rest; and half-way down they all
+began to hurry, beset by the same fear. There would not be food enough
+for all. The thought seemed to sweep like a wind across the face of
+the hill, and the hurry became savage.
+
+Along the open esplanade families were squatting side by side. A few
+of the more fortunate had somehow secured and erected tents; and
+others were crowded into storage sheds. But the most of them were
+sitting in the open waiting desolately for they knew not what. And
+already in that town, though the earthquake was barely six hours old,
+catastrophe had made its sharp division between the sheep and the
+goats. For whereas upon the esplanade men and women, and amongst them
+many unexpected figures, were already organizing succor for the
+outcasts, amongst the smoking ruins the marauders were already at
+work, robbing, murdering. There was no longer any law in Valparaiso.
+
+Challoner made his way to the esplanade. A man whom he knew, the agent
+of a steamship company, hurried past him. Challoner stopped him.
+
+"Where can I get food?" he asked.
+
+Challoner was a strongly built, tall man, and the agent answered
+roughly.
+
+"You? You will have to wait. You are able to;" and then he caught
+sight of the child in Challoner's arms, still wrapped about with her
+bedclothes. His voice changed to friendliness.
+
+"Yours?" he asked.
+
+Challoner nodded.
+
+"Where's its mother?"
+
+Challoner answered simply:
+
+"Dead."
+
+The agent took out a piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket.
+"Sorry," he said. "Of course, that alters the case." He wrote a line
+upon the paper and gave it to Challoner. Then he pointed to a tin
+shed, around which a crowd was already collecting.
+
+"We are distributing a little food there. You'll be given your share,
+for you have a child to look after. But I should advise you to look
+slippy;" and the agent hurried off.
+
+Challoner did look slippy. Because of his child he got food for
+himself as well as for his child; and as he sat on the ground, in the
+shadow of a low wall, after his meal, that fact set him thinking.
+There is much loving kindness for children in South America. From east
+to west it runs across the continent, just as from east to west human
+life is cheap, provided that it is grown up. You might, anywhere in
+those days, and, in some places you may still, slay your neighbor and
+avoid anything like excessive inconvenience as a result of your
+slaying. But if you kick a boy into the gutter because he refuses to
+desist from whistling, to your distraction, outside your office
+window, you are liable to be fined heavily, and you may be sent to
+prison. For you have hurt the _dignidad del hombre_. Challoner was
+aware generally of the consideration for children which prevailed. But
+now it was brought very practically home to him in the particular. His
+little daughter Doris was a definite asset to him. He looked down upon
+her with new eyes as she slept on the ground at his side, with a
+chubby hand thrown across his knee. She was no longer a nuisance. She
+was as good as money--better, indeed, since money could not buy food
+to-day in Valparaiso. And there had been a moment when he had stood,
+up there before the ruins of his house, doubting whether he should
+leave her behind or no. James Challoner was quite chilled by the
+thought of the mistake he had almost made, and the fool he had almost
+been.
+
+Doris moved her head in her sleep.
+
+"Precious one," he said affectionately; and he proceeded in his turn
+to sleep.
+
+He woke up in time to see two great Chilian cruisers sweep round the
+point into the bay, and a stoutly built, square captain, whom he could
+have mistaken for an Englishman, come ashore with his sailors, to take
+command of the town. He obtained shelter in a hut for that night, and
+during the hours of darkness he thought out his own immediate problem.
+
+Valparaiso was not, and for some months would not be. Even when it
+should be rebuilt there would be no work for him, since--in his
+thoughts he clung to euphemisms--his enemies had ruined his good name.
+Therefore he must get away and he had his daughter at his hand to
+assist him.
+
+He obtained, through his good Samaritan, the agent, a rough suit for
+himself and some clothing for his child and a parcel of food. He slung
+the parcel over his shoulders, lifted his child in his arms, and
+walked out that afternoon from Valparaiso up the great post-road
+toward the Andes. He was strong and his girl inherited of his
+strength. It was summer, a summer of no rain. He tramped along the
+valleys of Chile, and his daughter was his passport and franked his
+way. He secured a night's shelter at a farm-house here, food and a
+trifle of money there, a ride for Doris upon a mule one day, a lift
+for both of them in a cart the next. The valley narrowed, the green
+floor of it became stones, the trees thinned, the great barrier of the
+cordilleras closed in about James Challoner and towered higher and
+higher above his head. The road wound sharply upward, now backward,
+and forward in a desolate, wild country of gray rock splashed with
+orange and yellow and deep red. He started early one morning and stood
+on the top of the Cumbre Pass, thirteen thousand feet above the sea,
+by mid-day. On the very summit he was overtaken by the post and driven
+down at a gallop to Las Cuevas. From Las Cuevas he walked to Punta del
+Inca. And at Punta del Inca he took his ease for a week, with the
+great snow-mass of Aconcagua showing in a gap of the hills across the
+valley.
+
+It was the season of the baths at Punta del Inca. The hotel was full
+and James Challoner prospered, as from the beginning he had thought
+that he would. He had reckoned upon Punta del Inca on that night in
+Valparaiso when he had determined upon his journey. He sat by the
+natural bridge, with his little daughter in his arms, a travel-stained
+and patient figure, and amongst those gigantic hills he told his
+moving story to such as passed and would listen. He went up to the
+hotel at night, and under the lights of the veranda he told it again.
+Amongst the many qualities which he misused was a vivid gift of
+narrative, and he possessed, at this time at all events, a gentle
+voice with an admirable note of emotion. Thus all was in his favor.
+The beauty and peace of the scenery, his manner, the prettiness of his
+child--even the story which he had to tell. But it was not quite the
+story which would have been told at Valparaiso where, to be sure, he
+had, as we know, enemies.
+
+"Why did you come to South America?" some curious soul would ask.
+
+"I was a younger son," he would answer; and then, with a charming
+modesty for the benefit of any English who might be present, "I am of
+the Dorsetshire Challoners. These old properties.... Land isn't what
+it was.... An estate mortgaged to the hilt. How could any one take an
+allowance that must be wrung from it at the cost of the very laborers?
+No, I thought I would make my own way in the new lands."
+
+He spoke without any arrogance of virtue, any contempt for other
+younger sons who had not his own compunction, any consciousness of
+heroism. He went on to tell the romantic story of his marriage and
+elopement.
+
+"I made my way," he continued, "at least I was making it. My wife, of
+course, helped me--" and perhaps here his voice would falter ever so
+slightly, he would turn his face aside and whisper to the stars, yet
+so that the whisper was audible to people nearer than the stars--"My
+God, how she helped me! We had dug out our little corner in
+Valparaiso. There was just room in it for a wife and a child and
+myself. And then the earthquake came and ruined all."
+
+He made no complaint; he stated the simple facts; he was reticent
+concerning his wife's death. But by his reticence he managed to wring
+from it the last ounce of profit; he did not, for instance, describe
+how he had found her leaning upon her elbow in the darkness, with the
+walls of her room tottering about her. James Challoner had not
+forgiven her for that. She had made it so plain that she preferred for
+her child and herself an appalling death beneath the bricks than the
+slower decline into misery which awaited them. He tried to omit that
+remembrance from his mind, as he certainly did from his story.
+
+A collection was made for him to send him on his way. He accepted it
+with dignity.
+
+"I do not ask for your names," he said. "It would be the merest
+pretence. I cannot promise to pay you back. I take it as from one man
+to another." And so with his pocket full he journeyed downward to the
+vineyards of Mendoza.
+
+At Mendoza he took the train and in a night and a day came to Buenos
+Ayres. It was in the cool of the evening that he stepped out upon the
+platform. He was in no doubt what he should do. He had stopped in
+Buenos Ayres for a month on his way out from England; and he had
+thought out his plan very carefully during his last night in
+Valparaiso. He took a train for Barracas, and in the train he tied an
+old bootlace about his daughter's arm. He left the train before it
+crossed the bridge, and walked up a hill where great houses stand back
+behind walls and gardens much as one may see them in Clapham. Some way
+up the hill he stopped in front of one of these houses.
+
+It was noticeable amongst the houses, because a curious turnstile was
+let into the garden wall. The turnstile supported a small circular
+platform partitioned off with screens. James Challoner placed his
+child upon the platform, rang the bell, and turned the stile. The
+platform revolved, the child disappeared from view within the garden,
+and the screens were so arranged that those who received the child
+within could not see James Challoner outside.
+
+James Challoner went back into the middle of the road, yawned, and
+stretched his arms above his head. To-day you may cross the Andes from
+Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres in forty-eight hours. James Challoner had
+taken four months. He thought of his journey with a chuckle. His
+daughter had made his way easy.
+
+"Nine hundred miles and I've done 'em on eiderdown," he said. "That's
+the only bit of comfort I've ever got out of my marriage."
+
+He had left his child in a foundling hospital kept by some wealthy old
+ladies. He had tied a bootlace round her arm, rather because it was
+the conventional thing to do, than with any intention of reclaiming
+her. He was now a free man. He lit his pipe and stuck his hands in his
+pockets. With a pleasant sense of lightness, he strolled down to
+exploit his freedom in the bright streets of Buenos Ayres.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV
+
+                          CYNTHIA'S BIRTHDAY
+
+
+Cynthia woke on the eighth of January to the knowledge that a
+thrilling day for her had just begun. She looked out beneath the sun
+blinds across the Daventry estancia. Not a hand-breadth of cloud was
+visible. The brown earth baked under a blinding sun and the sky fitted
+down-upon it like a cap of brass. Inside the room, however, there was
+neither glare nor heat; and Cynthia stood with her expectations of the
+day fluttering about her like a shower of rose leaves. She was
+seventeen this morning, and the pride of it set her heart dancing.
+There would be letters downstairs from her friends, she hoped. There
+was a string of pearls, she knew. It had been bought that winter in
+Buenos Ayres with so elaborate a secrecy, and after so much furtive
+discussion as to whether it was good enough, that she could not but
+know of it. Moreover, there was a most important telegram to be
+despatched immediately after breakfast; a telegram of so much
+consequence that no hand but hers must write it out and send it off.
+So Cynthia was quick this morning. She dressed herself in a cool white
+frock, her white shoes and stockings, and ran lightly down the stairs
+into that room where years before a chandelier had of its own accord
+swung to and fro.
+
+Valparaiso had long since been rebuilt, but Robert and Joan Daventry
+still kept house in Buenos Ayres through the winter, and made the
+estancia their summer home. The years, however, had brought their
+changes. Robert and Joan were frankly an old couple nowadays; a young
+Englishman was sitting at the breakfast table; he undertook the whole
+burden of management; and, finally, there was Cynthia. The "other
+plan," so often debated and so often shelved, had been adopted, after
+all; the experiment from which Robert Daventry had so shrunk had been
+risked; and Cynthia was the triumphant flower of it.
+
+She greeted the old couple tenderly, shook hands with Richard Walton,
+the young manager, and received his good wishes with a pretty
+assumption of great dignity. But her eyes strayed to the table, where
+her place was piled high with parcels and letters, and her dignity
+vanished in her delight.
+
+"I have many friends," she cried, with a sort of wonder in her voice
+very taking to those who looked on her while she spoke. For she could
+not but have friends, it seemed. So frank a wish to please and so
+sweet a modesty were linked to so much beauty. It was not the beauty
+of Argentina, though a rhapsodist might have maintained that some of
+its sunlight was held prisoner in the heavy ripples of her hair. But
+the hair was light brown in color, where the gold did not shine, and
+the rose was in her cheeks. A broad forehead, eyebrows thick and
+brown, curving across a fair skin above great eyes of a deep blue set
+rather wide apart, gave to her face a curious distinction. And her
+eyes looked out from so dark a wealth of lashes that they seemed
+unfathomable with mysteries--until she spoke. Then kindliness and a
+fresh joy in life lit them with soft fires. For the rest, she was
+neither short nor remarkable for height, the nose and the nostrils
+delicate, the chin small, but a definite chin. As for her mouth, it
+was not a rosebud, nor again was it a letter-box. It suited her and
+she could afford to smile. One granted her, at a glance, health and a
+look of race.
+
+She began to open her letters and her presents. "Yes, I have many
+friends," she repeated.
+
+"It may be surprising," said Robert Daventry. "But it seems to be
+true. In fact, I am not quite sure that I have not some small token
+about me that Joan and I don't dislike you altogether."
+
+He fumbled first in one pocket, then in another.
+
+"Really?" cried Cynthia. She leaned toward him, all eagerness and
+curiosity. Her lips were parted in a smile. She followed the movements
+of his hands with an air of suspense. She knew very well that half the
+pleasure of the givers would be spoilt if she betrayed any knowledge
+of the gift.
+
+"What can it be?" Her whole attitude asked, while Robert Daventry
+slapped himself and looked under the table in a great fluster lest he
+should have mislaid the present. His concern was sheer farce; she,
+with a subtle skill of comedy, played her little part of happy
+impatience.
+
+"Ah!" cried Robert Daventry at last. "It is not lost;" and he took out
+from his breast pocket a narrow case of green leather and from the
+white satin lining of the case the expected string of pearls. She
+stood up while Robert Daventry clasped it about her throat, and, as
+she took her seat again, she said in a low voice:
+
+"You are both extraordinarily kind to me. I often wonder what would
+have become of me but for you--where I should be now."
+
+For a moment both of the old people looked startled. Then Robert
+Daventry hastened to protest.
+
+"My dear," he cried in a flurry, "you are, after all, of my flesh and
+blood. And flesh and blood has its claims."
+
+Joan's quiet voice came to his help:
+
+"Besides, the debt is not all on one side, Cynthia. We were not very
+contented until you came to us, were we Robert?"
+
+"No, we weren't," he replied with relief, like a man floundering who
+finds solid ground under his feet. "We had lived hard and had done a
+great deal of work, and we were beginning to ask ourselves why. The
+heat and the ardor were over, you see. Our lives were cooling down. We
+had come to a time when one is apt to sit at night over the fire and
+wonder regretfully, now that no change is possible, whether we hadn't
+aimed at the wrong things and got less than we might have got out of
+our lives. We had piled up, and were still piling up, a great deal
+more money than we had any use for. We had made Daventry out of a
+plain as bare as the palm of my hand, and we had no one very dear to
+us to whom we could leave it. There didn't seem to be much use in
+things. Next week was going to be like this week, and the week after
+like next week, and life altogether nothing more than a succession of
+dull things. We were very nearly abandoning the estancia and retiring
+to England when my brother died."
+
+"And left me to you," said Cynthia.
+
+Robert Daventry nodded.
+
+"And then our discontent vanished," said he.
+
+Cynthia shook her head.
+
+"I don't remember very much of those days, but I remember enough to be
+sure that I gave you a good deal of trouble." She spoke lightly to
+hide the emotion which the kindness of these friends had stirred in
+her.
+
+Joan Daventry smiled.
+
+"Yes, you gave us trouble, Cynthia," she said. "We are frightened by
+it still, at times. We are growing old and there is no other young
+spirit in the house, and it is possible that you might find your life
+rather dull, just as we did before you came to us."
+
+"Dull?" cried Cynthia. "With you two dear people?" She held a hand
+lovingly to each, and now was hiding nothing of what she felt.
+"Besides, I have my friends. I meet them in Buenos Ayres. They come
+here to visit me. You gave them to me, as you have given me
+everything. Look at the number of them!" and she proudly pointed to
+her letters. She read them through and she breakfasted, and at the end
+of the meal gathered them in her hands.
+
+"I must send some telegrams," she said. "I will drive to the railway
+station."
+
+"Now?" Joan Daventry asked anxiously. "Can't they be sent later, in
+the afternoon, Cynthia?"
+
+"No, mother," Cynthia replied. "Some might wait, but there's one which
+must go off now."
+
+Joan Daventry looked at Richard Walton. The blinds were down and the
+window closed; so that the room was dark and cool. But a glance at her
+manager's face told her sufficiently what the heat was like outside.
+He had been abroad since daybreak and he was the color of a ripe
+mulberry. Joan Daventry looked to him for assistance. But, though his
+eyes were fixed with a momentary intentness upon Cynthia, he did not
+give it. He spoke on another subject.
+
+"If you go, Miss Cynthia, I hope you will leave at home the pearls you
+are wearing round your throat. We are cutting the corn to-day and
+there are a good many men about of whom I know nothing at all. More
+hands came in last night than we had use for. It's all right, of
+course, but I shouldn't wear those pearls."
+
+"Of course not," said Cynthia. "I will put them away."
+
+"And you will take a man with you," said Robert Daventry. Neither he
+nor Joan had been brought up in cotton-wool; nor did they ever think
+to cloister Cynthia. She was left her liberty; and so half an hour
+afterward, with a big straw hat shading her face from the sun, she
+drove in her cart along the avenue to the railway station. She sent
+off the messages of thanks and then wrote out the important telegram
+which was to mark the day for her. She wrote it out without an
+alteration. For her thoughts had run fastidiously on the wording of it
+all through breakfast-time. She addressed it to:
+
+
+              Captain Rames, R. N.,
+                 _S.S. Perhaps_,
+                          Tilbury Docks,
+                                     London.
+
+
+And she handed it to the operator with a certain trepidation like one
+who does some daring and irrevocable deed. The operator, however, was
+quite unmoved. The important message to which so much consideration
+had been given, wore to him quite a commonplace look. It amounted,
+indeed, to no more than this:
+
+"Every heart-felt wish for a triumphant journey, from an unknown
+friend in South America."
+
+Thus, the very words were conventional and the sentiment no great
+matter to make a fuss about. But this was not Cynthia's point of view.
+
+She had spoken the truth at the breakfast table when she had told Joan
+and Robert Daventry that she did not find her life dull. But they were
+old people, and, in spite of her many friends, she was, to be sure,
+much alone with them. She was reticent of her feelings in their
+presence, not through any habit of concealment, but from modesty and
+the disparity of years. On the other side it was Joan's theory that
+youth should be trusted rather than pried upon. Cynthia was thus
+thrown back a good deal upon herself, and if she did not find life
+dull, it was, perhaps, because with life she had very little to do.
+She was seventeen, a girl of clear eyes and health and silver
+thoughts; and romance had its way with her. All that loving care could
+imagine for the clean and delicate training of mind and body had been
+lavished on her; and little by little she had fashioned for herself a
+wonderland of dreams and beautiful things. The only ugly thing about
+it was the iron turnstile in the wall by which you gained admittance.
+But that could not be helped. Its ugliness was recognized. The
+turnstile had been there from the beginning--why, Cynthia could not
+have told you. It was indeed itself the beginning. It was there in her
+dreams and her fancies, offering admission to somewhere, before the
+somewhere was explored, and found to be the wonderland.
+
+In this world, then, she moved amidst a very goodly company. She was
+careful about her company, choosing it from the world at large. She
+claimed the best of all the nations for her friends, yet with a pretty
+shyness which often enough set her blushing and laughing at her own
+pretension. She had a test. Unless you answered to it, there was no
+admission, the turnstile did not revolve. Coronets went for nothing,
+even brave deeds did not suffice. He who entered--and, by the way, it
+must regretfully be admitted that "he" does accurately represent the
+sex of those who were allowed to enter. For it had never occurred to
+Cynthia at all to let another woman into her world. She was modest,
+but her modesty had its limits. He who entered, then, must have given
+proofs that he was possessed with a definite idea, that his life moved
+to the tune of it.
+
+The population of Cynthia's private enclosure was consequently
+strictly limited; and, since she only knew her heroes through the
+newspaper and books, some even of those who were admitted came in
+under false pretences, and had summarily to be ejected. She was thus
+on the lookout for recruits. Captain Rames was the latest of them, and
+Cynthia knew less of him even than of the others. She had seen a
+blurred portrait of him in a daily paper; she knew that he was an
+officer in the navy, aged thirty-four, and it seemed to her that he
+had passed her test. For, this very afternoon, in command of a Dundee
+whaler, he was off southward into seas where no ship yet had sailed.
+
+The clerk stamped her telegram and took it behind the partition into
+his office. Cynthia climbed back into her cart.
+
+"I will drive back across the farm," she said. "I want to see the
+reaping."
+
+At the end of the short, wide street of one-storied huts and houses
+she turned through a gate in a wire fence onto a wide plain of brown
+grass. A mile across the plain, separated by no fence or hedge, the
+glistening acres of wheat began, and at the edge Cynthia could see
+little men seated on reaping-machines drawn by little horses like
+toys. She drove toward them thinking of the telegram, and, with a
+blush under her straw hat, of its reception. As a matter of fact,
+Captain Rames was rather busy that day, and anonymous telegrams did
+not receive from him the attention which was no doubt their due. In
+three hours' time, she thought, Captain Rames might be wondering what
+his unknown friend was like, with a heart full of gratitude for her
+unknown friendship. Meanwhile, she was driving nearer and nearer to
+the little toys at the edge of the wheat-field. The little toys were
+growing larger and larger. Cynthia came out of her rose-mist.
+
+"There are some new machines," she said, with interest, to the man who
+was with her. He was an old half-breed who had long been on the
+estate.
+
+"Yes, Senorita," he answered. He pointed to one longer than the rest
+and drawn by six horses. "It does everything. It cuts, it ties in
+sheaves."
+
+The whirring of the machinery came louder and louder to their ears.
+The young horse which she was driving cocked its ears and became
+restive. She gave the reins to the servant.
+
+"I will walk forward," she said. "You can wait here." She descended to
+the ground. She walked forward toward the edge of the wheat. There
+realities awaited her.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V
+
+                              THE REAPER
+
+
+The great reaping-machine came swaying over the uneven ground toward
+her, along the edge of those glistening acres. A huge arm of iron rose
+and fell, catching up the swathes of wheat and flinging them into the
+machine, whence they rolled out tied. Six horses harnessed behind
+pushed it and a man, perched upon a tiny saddle, steered and
+controlled it. The machine was about twenty paces from her when it
+came suddenly to a stop. The driver leaped down from his seat. It
+seemed to Cynthia that the mechanism must have gone wrong. She
+expected to see him bend over a joint or a spring. But he did not
+stoop. The moment his feet touched the ground, he ran straight toward
+her and very swiftly.
+
+He ran with his head down, and his shoulders bent. It was a heavy rush
+rather than a run. Cynthia recoiled. The words of Richard Walton
+sprang into her mind, and her hand rose instinctively to her throat.
+Could she have forgotten after all to remove the string of pearls? But
+she had removed it. And still the man was running toward her. The fear
+that she wore the pearls, and the proof that she did not, had followed
+so immediately upon his rush that he had as yet covered only half the
+ground between them. It was herself he aimed at then. She cast a rapid
+glance toward her cart. The Gaucho was leaning down over the opposite
+side, and talking to some one who stood by the wheel. A cry would not
+bring him to her side in time. She turned, with half a mind to run.
+But, though her white skirt reached only to her ankles, it would still
+impede her. She turned back and with a beating heart faced him. And a
+few feet from her he stopped.
+
+He looked at her, drew a great breath, and cried "Ah!" like a man who
+has reached his goal.
+
+"What do you want?" asked Cynthia, and in spite of her efforts her
+voice shook.
+
+A South American harvest finds no use for the weak. The man who stood
+opposite to her was broad and powerful, with a heavy, coarse face,
+burnt to the color of brick by the sun. The sweat streaked it, and the
+dirt of many a day clung to it, and it was seamed by exposure. He was
+of the men who move from estancia to estancia while the harvest lasts,
+working from sunrise to dark, living upon _mate_ tea and roasted
+sheep, and earning a pound a day, and thereafter lying soddened in
+some den until the last centavo has been squandered. A battered black
+hat was pressed low upon his clotted hair; a month's growth of beard
+straggled over his chin and cheeks. And his eyes were evil. That, more
+than any other quality of the man, Cynthia noticed. Their quick glance
+held her. She was terrified.
+
+"What do you want?" she asked a second time, and her voice wavered
+still more audibly.
+
+She stood in front of him, her lovely brows, under the big brim of her
+straw hat, troubled, and her great eyes wide and alert with fear. She
+was in the poise for flight like a startled deer, yet did not dare to
+turn to fly. And in the man, as he looked at her, there came a change.
+
+He did not answer her question. But very slowly he smiled, and the
+smile was spiteful. He nodded his head at her; a malicious contentment
+overspread his face; and from head to heel his eyes inspected her.
+They approved her beauty and the simple daintiness of her clothes;
+they took note of her slenderness of hand and foot; they remarked the
+lines and supple youth of her figure; and through her white frock they
+seemed to make sure of the roundness of her limbs. Cynthia grew
+suddenly hot with shame. This man was appraising her--nothing less.
+Appraising her as if for a market! Her fear dropped from her. She
+cried a third time, but with spirit:
+
+"What do you want of me?" and if her voice shook now, it was with a
+quiver of indignation.
+
+She heard the thud of a horse's hoofs behind her. The reaper heard it,
+too. Without a word, and without any hurry, he turned away from her
+and slouched back to his machine. Cynthia's cart the next moment was
+driven up to her side. She climbed into it and took the reins. The
+encounter had shaken her more than she had thought. She was trembling,
+and she drove over the ground quickly, until she saw the slate roof of
+the house, flashing like silver, from a clump of dark trees quite
+near.
+
+Then she reined in her horse and turned round. Far away at the edge of
+the wheat, the man and the machine and the six horses stood out black
+like a little toy. The clank and rattle of the iron came to her ears
+through the still air, faintly, like the mechanism of a toy. But
+Cynthia shivered as she looked back.
+
+"Who is he?" she asked of the old Gaucho. He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I do not know him, Señorita. I do not think he was here last year.
+They come in herds and go in herds when the corn is stacked."
+
+Up and down, along the glistening line, the man drove his horses and
+manipulated his machine. He stopped no more. With each journey a wide
+band of wheat went down. Thus he had been working, balanced in his
+saddle, since daybreak. So, with but a two hours' rest, he would go
+under the burning afternoon sun until darkness came and bade him stop.
+To the Gaucho he was one of a herd of men who did the like; for a few
+weeks here; then for another few weeks on another estancia further
+down the line. But for Cynthia this man stood strangely out from the
+herd. He had stopped her, and she did not know why. She sat and
+watched his slow, obstinate progression. The persistence, the physical
+strength of the man daunted her. There was something of nature's own
+relentlessness in his capacity to endure and work. She magnified him,
+and was, at the same time, interested and alarmed. For of this she was
+sure. He had not stopped her merely because she was a girl, and alone.
+He had stopped her because she was herself. She remembered his smile,
+his nods of the head, his malice. He had a personal feeling, a
+personal animosity. She could not understand it, yet she was sure.
+
+"How long will he stay?" she asked.
+
+"A month," said the Gaucho.
+
+"He was not here last year?"
+
+"I do not recognize him."
+
+"Why, then--" she began and did not finish the question. It was in her
+mind to ask, "Why does he hate me?" But she was aware at once that the
+Gaucho could not answer it. "And he will stay a month?" she asked
+again, uneasily.
+
+"Yes, unless the Señorita wishes him to go. It will be, of course, as
+the Señorita wishes."
+
+Cynthia nodded her head. There was a way out of the trouble, to be
+sure. But, on the other hand, she would have to say why she wished the
+man to go. At the recital of her story Mr. and Mrs. Daventry would be
+excited and alarmed. She herself would henceforth be surrounded with
+precautions. She determined to say nothing at all about her adventure.
+She would be careful during this month where she roamed. The man would
+be at work and it would be easy to avoid him. She gathered the reins
+again in her hands and drove to the house.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VI
+
+                      A VISITOR AT THE ESTANCIA
+
+
+Cynthia accordingly held her tongue. Nevertheless, that evening
+Richard Walton said to her across the dinner table:
+
+"So you were, after all, molested by one of the hands, Miss Cynthia."
+
+"Molested!" cried Robert Daventry indignantly.
+
+Cynthia's face flamed.
+
+"Who told you?" she asked of Richard Walton.
+
+"Pedro."
+
+Cynthia had not thought of the Gaucho. He had seemed so entirely
+uninterested, so utterly unalarmed.
+
+"'Molested' is too strong a word," she said hastily. She now meant to
+make as light of the encounter as she possibly could. "It was very
+likely my fault. I got out of the trap and walked toward the wheat. It
+may be that the man fancied I wished to speak to him."
+
+"What did he do?"
+
+The question came from Joan Daventry.
+
+"He sprang from his seat, ran to me, and stopped in front of me. That
+was all."
+
+"Quite all?"
+
+Cynthia nodded.
+
+"He just stood and stared at me until Pedro drove up."
+
+"Did he say nothing?"
+
+"Not a word."
+
+In spite of her resolve to treat the adventure lightly, Cynthia's
+voice grew troubled as she answered the questions. For she answered
+them with her eyes upon Joan Daventry's face, and she saw the
+perplexity there deepen into disquietude and misgiving. She turned
+toward Robert Daventry. Upon his face uneasiness was still more
+evident. He was plainly agitated. He sat listening in suspense. His
+indignation had gone.
+
+Cynthia's fear revived under the stimulation of their anxiety. She
+continued slowly:
+
+"But although he did me no harm, although he threatened none, there
+was something strange. He saw me at once. He ran so very quickly to me
+the moment I was within reach. He seemed almost to be looking out for
+me."
+
+Joan sank back into her chair with a gesture of helplessness, which
+was all the more alarming because it was so singularly out of keeping
+with her character. Her eyes sought her husband's and sought them in
+dismay. Cynthia noticed both the gesture and the look. They kindled a
+vague terror in the girl. The wide brown plain was as a picture before
+her. She saw the great wheat-field glistening in the heat, a
+wind-wheel in a corner above a well, and this man with the evil eyes
+and the face of malice looking her over from head to foot.
+
+"Yes," she said. "He seemed to be expecting me, and there was
+something else. He seemed to hate me;" and Robert Daventry with a cry
+sprang sharply to his feet.
+
+Joan raised a quick warning hand. But the cry had been uttered; and
+with a sob Cynthia buried her face in her hands.
+
+"I am frightened now," she said. "You frighten me."
+
+Robert Daventry stood over her, clumsily remorseful, and laid his
+great hand on her shoulder.
+
+"There's nothing to fear, Cynthia," he began. "Joan and I--" he broke
+off abruptly at a second warning from his wife. "We will pack that man
+off about his business to-morrow."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Daventry. She had mastered her agitation, and now
+affected carelessness. "We can't really have Cynthia's birthday spoilt
+in this way."
+
+"No, of course not," cried Robert Daventry, seizing upon this
+explanation of his distress. But he could not leave it in its
+simplicity. "It's abominable that Cynthia should have her birthday
+spoilt. She has only one a year, poor girl. That's what's troubling
+us, Cynthia. Nothing else. But it's enough to upset us, isn't it? To
+think that you should actually have your birthday spoilt--by one of my
+men, too."
+
+So he went on, like a commentator on an ancient text, expanding the
+explanation, underlining it, and forcing upon Cynthia's intelligence
+its complete improbability. Even in the midst of her fears she could
+not but look with amusement toward Joan; and the two women exchanged
+the smile of their sex at the perennial clumsiness of man.
+
+"He shall go first thing to-morrow morning," cried Mr. Daventry; and
+Richard Walton quietly rejoined:
+
+"He has gone already. I paid him off this morning."
+
+Mr. Daventry ceased abruptly from his vociferations.
+
+"Thank you, Walton," he said. "Then that's ended," and he sat down.
+
+But he had hardly taken his seat when the door opened and the
+parlor-maid brought to him upon a salver a folded slip of dirty paper.
+
+"A man came with this to the door, sir. He is waiting for an answer."
+
+Robert Daventry unfolded the slip and read the message written within
+it. He did not lift his eyes when he had read. He sat staring at the
+paper like a statue. And he sat amidst a deep silence. The cloud which
+had but now been lifted, had gathered once more above the heads of
+that small company. Though Robert Daventry did not speak, his long
+silence spoke for him; and though he schooled his face to composure,
+it was plain that he schooled it. A vague disquiet held the others at
+the table. Not one of them but had a conviction that this dirty,
+insignificant, scrap of writing announced a catastrophe.
+
+Joan was the first to move. She walked round the table and stood
+behind her husband. He did not hear the rustle of her gown; and he was
+not aware that she leaned over him to read the message until the
+pressure of her hand upon his shoulder reminded him that she was his
+ally.
+
+"You had better see the man, Robert," she said. "He calls late, but
+probably he needs help."
+
+Thus she sought to pass the message off.
+
+"Very well, I will," said Robert. He turned to the parlor-maid. "Bring
+him to my study when I ring the bell."
+
+"I will come with you," said Joan, as the servant went out from the
+room.
+
+Richard Walton rose from his chair.
+
+"Perhaps you would like me, too?"
+
+"No, I don't think that's necessary," replied Joan Daventry. "But
+perhaps you would stay within sound of the bell. We don't know who
+this man is or what he wants. If we ring again, you would know that we
+needed your advice."
+
+"Certainly, I will be upon the lookout," said Walton, and he went from
+the room and crossed to the servants' quarters. There he would hear
+the bell at once should it ring for him. Joan meanwhile turned with a
+smile to Cynthia.
+
+"We will leave you here for a few minutes," she said, and the
+composure of her voice almost reassured the girl; would, indeed, have
+quite reassured her but for Robert Daventry. She saw that his hands
+trembled so that the paper shook in them, even as her hands had
+trembled this morning when she climbed up by the edge of the wheat
+into her cart.
+
+"Yes, wait here, Cynthia," said Robert Daventry, as he got to his
+feet; and Cynthia noticed that while he spoke to her he altogether
+avoided the glance of her eyes. The old couple went out of the room
+together, leaving her alone, and carefully latched the door behind
+them. In the hall for a moment they stood resting from their pretence.
+A broken word or two burst from Robert Daventry:
+
+"What shall we do, Joan? This is what we have dreaded always."
+
+Joan raised her finger to her lips.
+
+"Hush! Speak lower. What I said was true. We don't know who he is, or
+what he wants. He may not be the man who stopped her in the field at
+all."
+
+Robert Daventry shook his head. It was rather his nature to run to
+meet misfortune if he saw its shadow in his way.
+
+"What shall we do?" he repeated. "Money will send him away," said
+Joan.
+
+"And bring him back again," replied Robert hopelessly. "Sooner or
+later Cynthia will know;" and Joan threw up her head at his words.
+
+"No," she said vigorously. "No."
+
+At her left hand a door stood open upon a dark room. This was the
+smoking-room. She entered the room and crossed it to the opposite
+wall. Then she opened a second door, and advancing into this inner
+room, felt for the switch in the darkness and turned on the light.
+Bookcases, filled for the most part with books on agriculture, lined
+the room, a round table, littered with papers, occupied the centre, in
+the recess of a window stood a writing-desk. This was Robert
+Daventry's study. Her husband followed her, and saw that her finger
+was already on the bell.
+
+"Let us decide what we are to do," he said, "before you ring."
+
+Joan shook her head.
+
+"We can't. We must be guided by what the man knows, and by what he
+wants. Only we admit nothing," she declared resolutely; and she
+pressed the bell. It rang in the passage by the kitchen, but Cynthia,
+left alone in the dining-room, heard it too.
+
+The moment she heard it, Cynthia rose from her chair, and ran silently
+to the door. She unlatched it without a sound, and drew it toward her
+until it was just wide enough open for her to see out. There she stood
+grasping the door-knob, and in a moment a heavy foot sounded in the
+hall. Cynthia set her eyes to the chink. She saw first a maid-servant
+cross the hall, and pass into the smoking-room, and after the maid a
+man. The man was the reaper who had leapt from his machine and rushed
+toward her that morning. The maid-servant came back alone and crossed
+the hall again to the servants' quarters. A door was shut loudly--the
+door of Robert Daventry's study--and then another door opened
+noiselessly, and opened wide--the door of the dining-room. Cynthia
+came out into the hall. All the color had gone from her face, her eyes
+were wide with terror. The man meant her harm--not a doubt of it. He
+had some power to inflict the harm--that was sure. Otherwise why was
+he admitted, why were her friends in such concern?
+
+Cynthia was quite alone in the hall now. Voices sounded faintly from
+the kitchen and in the room behind her a clock ticked. But there were
+no other sounds. She crossed to the threshold of the smoking-room and
+looked in. At the other end a bright bar of light on the floor held
+her eyes. The light came from the study. Cynthia watched it for a
+moment irresolute. But the temptation grew. She was sure that beyond
+that bright bar of light, behind that closed door, here in this
+far-away corner of Argentina, good and evil were at grips for her. A
+sense of loneliness suddenly possessed her, she longed for the
+neighborly noises of a city. And while she stood she heard her own name
+pronounced by Robert Daventry, and at once a harsh, strange voice rose
+in a laugh, loud and arrogant. She looked about her in a panic. She
+must fly, or she must know the truth, the whole of it, the worst of
+it. She stole swiftly and noiselessly into the room. Close by that bar
+of light a big, low chair stood against the wall. Cynthia crouched in
+the chair, her frock a blur of misty white in the darkness. There she
+remained, very still and quiet; and every word spoken in the study
+came clearly to her ears.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VII
+
+                        BOTH SIDES OF THE DOOR
+
+
+Within the room the three people were standing, the reaper upon one
+side of the table, Joan and Robert Daventry close together upon the
+other. The reaper was still laughing.
+
+"Cynthia!" he cried, repeating contemptuously the name which Robert
+Daventry had used. "There's no Cynthia. There's a very pretty little
+girl I saw this morning in the corn. But her pretty little name is
+Doris Challoner. And, taking all in all, it's the better name of the
+two."
+
+He spoke with an easy and most disquieting assurance, but Joan had
+enough of that quality to meet with him in the gate. She had always
+been a good fighter; she had stood by her husband often enough in the
+early days of the estancia, when his nerve would have failed him but
+for her; and she was for putting up to-night the best fight of her
+whole long, active life. Money, to her thinking, they could make
+again, old as they were, if the need came. But they could not open
+their hearts to a second Cynthia, even if they could find one.
+
+"Nonsense," she answered boldly. "Her name is Cynthia Daventry."
+
+"Where was she born, then?" asked the reaper.
+
+"In Patagonia."
+
+"Never in this world," cried the man. "She was born in Concepcion, and
+that's her farthest south."
+
+Joan shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"We ought to know. She is my husband's niece."
+
+A grin overspread the reaper's face.
+
+"And is that so?" he asked, in a mock surprise. "I wasn't aware of
+it."
+
+"Well, you are now," said Joan.
+
+"Yes, and the news alters our relations altogether, doesn't it?" he
+said pleasantly.
+
+He tossed his battered hat upon the table, pulled out a chair, and sat
+down in it at his ease, his legs stretched out, his hands deep in his
+pockets. He nodded familiarly to Joan.
+
+"How do you do, sis?" He turned his face toward Mr. Daventry, "You
+have got a nice little place, brother Robert. Shows what honest work
+can do if persevered with day after day for a great number of
+consecutive years. Quite a nice little place. You haven't, by any
+chance, got a nice little cigar, too, have you, Robert, for your
+long-lost brother?"
+
+Robert Daventry's face grew red, and the veins swelled upon his
+forehead. He was a man quickly moved to passion, and quick, too, the
+passion exhausted, to swing back into doubts and hesitations. He blew
+either hot or cold, and, sooner or later, he was sure to blow cold.
+Now, however, his temper was up, and he brought his great fist down
+with violence upon the table.
+
+"What do you mean by your insolence?" he shouted "Stand up!"
+
+Joan laid a hand upon the old man's arm to restrain him. The reaper,
+for his part, never budged from his attitude.
+
+"You have got a nerve," he said. "You tell me a pack of lies--that's
+all right, you've got money. But when I take you at your word, it's
+'insolence' and 'stand up.' How's that, if you please?" He sat and
+laughed for a little in contemptuous jerks. "Your niece, indeed! The
+girl's my daughter."
+
+Neither Joan nor Robert believed him for a moment. They thought of
+Cynthia, and compared that image at their hearts with the actual man
+who sprawled on the chair in front of them. Robert counted him up, his
+heavy features, his grime-engrained, spoilt hands, the whole degraded,
+unkempt look of him. Cynthia's father! The claim was preposterous.
+
+"Her father!" cried Robert Daventry, leaning across the table. "Look
+at yourself in the glass!"
+
+The sneer stung the reaper to a fury. He sprang to his feet, and from
+habit his hand slipped to the knife at the back of his waistband. But
+he mastered himself in a second or two. He was there for other ends
+than violence, and he withdrew his hand.
+
+"I sha'n't forget that," he said, in a perfectly quiet voice, which
+contrasted in the strangest way with the convulsion of his face. "You
+got home there. Right home;" and he sat down again.
+
+Joan interposed before her husband could say another word, and used
+soft words. The man was not Cynthia's father to be sure, but he knew
+something of the girl's history. That was certain--and he knew more
+than either Joan or Robert knew themselves. If she was to fight her
+battle with success, she must know what he knew.
+
+"You could not expect us to accept your mere statement," she said.
+
+"No, that's reasonable," said the reaper, and he began his story. But
+the insult rankled in his breast and as he spoke he kept turning a
+murderous eye on the man who had inflicted it.
+
+He told the story of the earthquake at Valparaiso, and the flight of
+James Challoner across the Andes. It was a story told with a wealth of
+detail, and difficult altogether to discredit. Neither Joan nor Robert
+did altogether discredit it. It might be true or it might not. This
+man might have obtained it from James Challoner, or might somehow have
+come across it by himself. But they were still convinced he could not
+be James Challoner himself.
+
+"We shall want more proof than that," said Joan calmly, and Robert
+nodded his head. Neither of them had felt more confidence than at this
+moment since the crumpled slip of paper had been brought into the
+dining-room.
+
+But outside the door Cynthia huddled in the great chair with her ear
+to the door, listened with a growing terror. She had never doubted
+until this hour that she was the daughter of Robert Daventry's
+brother. She had been secure in that belief. Now the security was
+going. She clutched the arms of her chair, feeling the whole world
+slipping from beneath her feet--even as it had slipped at Valparaiso.
+For certain memories, quite clear in her mind, were being explained to
+her. An open hill-side at night, a strange red light upon the world,
+the crash of houses, little flames creeping, and ships quietly at
+anchor on the smoothest of seas--that was one picture in her memories
+which had often puzzled her, which would puzzle her no longer if she
+believed the story which was being told on the other side of the door.
+She remembered, too, a long journey amongst mountains, and a bridge
+over a deep and narrow torrent, and many people with kind faces who
+spoke to her.
+
+"Of course, it isn't certain," she pleaded to herself desperately; and
+the husky voice behind the door began again:
+
+"I travelled down to Buenos Ayres by train. I had little money, and no
+prospects, and a child on my hands. I couldn't make a home for her. So
+I went straight to the foundling hospital. It stands back in a garden,
+and is kept by some wealthy sisters. There's a turnstile in the brick
+wall of the garden, a little iron turnstile--but you know it well,
+both of you;" and he broke off with a laugh.
+
+Inside the study Joan and Robert Daventry, still remained unconvinced.
+Outside Cynthia was persuaded.
+
+"It's true then," she whispered to herself. "It's quite true;" and she
+wrung her hands in the darkness, and her voice broke in a sob. She had
+no longer any shadow of doubt. The turnstile in the brick wall was for
+her the overwhelming proof.
+
+Examined in a court of law by the rules of evidence, it might seem
+flimsy enough. To Cynthia, it was complete corroboration of the
+testimony of her memories. The turnstile in the brick wall--the one
+ugly thing in her imagined wonderland of heroes--the turnstile which
+had always been there before the land was--how had it come there, she
+asked herself? And she was in no doubt as to the answer. The turnstile
+was a memory too. It was the turnstile of a foundling hospital, where
+her father had left her and gone his way. No wonder, she reflected
+bitterly, it was the one ugly thing in her world of fancies.
+
+She leaned back, shivering, with her hands covering her face. She was
+humiliated, but she was still more terrified. Shame cut deep, but fear
+touched the very nerves of her heart. The man who had this morning
+rushed at her was her father, and she remembered the malice of his
+smile, and the evil, covetous look of him as he appraised her. She
+grew hot, now, as she thought upon it.
+
+"What harm does he mean?" she asked; and suddenly she sat forward on
+the edge of her chair, quivering from head to foot like a spring some
+touch had released. For her father's voice rose again:
+
+"I tied a bootlace round the child's arm. I can't say that I ever
+thought to come back for her. But there's a convention in these
+things, isn't there?" he added with a grin. "I have been a
+conservative all my life, and now I have found the advantage of it."
+
+"How?" asked Joan. "Even if your story were true, your daughter
+wouldn't be wearing a bootlace or even the mark of it round her arm
+now."
+
+"No, from the look of her she'd be more likely to be wearing a diamond
+bangle, bless her! But all the same the bootlace helps."
+
+"How?"
+
+Again the implacable question was uttered by Joan. She must know all
+that this man had upon his side by way of argument. That was her first
+necessity.
+
+"How does the bootlace help?"
+
+"It helps because the child wearing that bootlace was received by the
+same old ladies who allowed you a few months afterward to adopt
+her--that's how. Don't you leave those old ladies out of your
+reckoning, Mrs. Daventry, or you will run up against a snag. I went
+back to the foundling a year ago and claimed my daughter."
+
+"You did?" cried Joan. She was startled. For a moment, too, she was
+disconcerted. She knew nothing of any such visit. But the statement
+was so easily capable of proof that the reaper would hardly have made
+it, had it not been true. And she was quick to see how strong a
+presumption such a visit would create, that he was the girl's father.
+Then she sprang to the weak point in the statement.
+
+"If it were true that Cynthia was your daughter, and that you claimed
+her a year ago, how is it that you wait until a chance meeting in a
+field brings you face to face?"
+
+"There's no chance about it, believe me," James Challoner returned.
+For it was he. The delicate manners had been rubbed off him, the
+gentle voice, which had charmed so many dollars from reluctant pockets
+long ago at Punta del Inca, had thickened and grown husky, the
+well-knit figure had spread to heaviness. But this was James
+Challoner, after fourteen years had told their tale. "The old ladies
+lied to me. Yes, actually lied to me," and he spread out his hands in
+indignation. "Lied to a father about his daughter! They were religious
+people too!"
+
+"If they did lie," Robert Daventry burst in, "they did the best thing
+they ever did in all their good lives."
+
+James Challoner waved Robert Daventry and his outburst aside. He kept
+his eyes fixed upon Joan's face.
+
+"Yes, they lied to me," he said. "I gave them the day and the month
+and the year, when I placed Doris on the turnstile. They pretended to
+make inquiries, and they lied to me. They told me she was dead. Ah!"
+and he suddenly leaned forward and pointed an accusing finger at Joan,
+"You are glad to hear that. Yes, I thought you would be."
+
+Try as she did, Joan had not been able to keep a flash of joy out of
+her face.
+
+"It's a matter of indifference to me," she replied, "since Cynthia is
+not your child."
+
+She still clung obstinately to that belief. He might have heard the
+story from James Challoner, and James Challoner might be dead. Any
+hypothesis was possible in her eyes, except the one which was true.
+She would not have it that this man was Cynthia's father.
+
+"Oh, it is a matter of indifference to you!" said Challoner
+ironically. "I will tell you something that won't be. Those old ladies
+lied just as clumsily as I have ever seen it done. Poor old souls,
+they were rattled out of their senses at the thought of the sin they
+were committing. A child could have seen they were lying--as I did who
+am no child. And I began to cast about for a reason for the lie. It
+wasn't very difficult to find it. Some one had adopted her, some one
+they didn't want me to discover, some one rich, then, I reckoned, who
+could give the girl a position."
+
+At the word "rich" Robert and Joan exchanged a glance. So much were
+they disconcerted by Challoner's knowledge and assurance that now they
+hoped rather than feared that blackmail was the end he had in view.
+
+"So I began to make inquiries," continued Challoner. "I found out who
+were the patrons, who took most interest in the institution, and
+amongst them who had adopted a child. I came upon you in the end." And
+again he began to laugh. "Those poor innocent old women had actually
+given me the date when you took Doris away as the date of the child's
+death. It took me a little time to find out all about you; and when I
+had found out I had no money. So I had to work my way along until I
+reached you. But I have reached you," he exclaimed, lolling back in
+his chair, "and, by George, the very first day I am at work here, out
+the girl comes to meet me. Why, I recognized her in a second;" and
+Joan slipped in, as she thought, under his guard. With a thrill of
+delight she believed that he had made a mistake, and a mistake which
+would discredit every word of his story.
+
+"Recognized her!" she repeated scornfully. "And the last time, when,
+on your own showing, you saw her she was three years old!"
+
+Challoner, however, merely smiled at her.
+
+"If you had a family at your back, old lady, you wouldn't be so high,"
+he said; and once more Robert Daventry interposed.
+
+"Speak respectfully to my wife," he cried.
+
+"What, are you butting in again?" asked Challoner, with a look of
+surprise. "You didn't do any good, you know, the last time you
+interfered."
+
+Once more Joan was called upon to restrain her husband. She saw the
+man convicted of a lie, and she did not mean to lose the advantage of
+that conviction.
+
+"How did you recognize her?" she asked, smiling in her turn. "How did
+you recognize in the girl of seventeen the child of three?"
+
+"I'll tell you," said Challoner confidently. "And, by the way, she's
+not seventeen to-day. It might interest you to know that. She's
+seventeen and a half. She was born on the seventeenth of July."
+
+"Keep to the point," said Joan.
+
+"Certainly, I will," replied Challoner, "though it's by no means
+necessary to substantiate my authority--yes," and his voice suddenly
+rang out loud upon the word, so that Cynthia in the darkness on the
+other side of the door shivered as if she had been struck, "yes, my
+authority. I don't say that she's like what she was when she was
+three. I don't even say she's like her mother. She isn't. She's a
+Challoner--and in the Challoner's home, by Wareham in Dorsetshire,
+there are some pictures worth looking at. I sat opposite one of them
+at the dinner table all through my boyhood, and whenever I was at
+home afterward--until I came out here. It was the portrait of my
+great-great-grandmother, painted by Romney, when she was a girl; and I
+tell you the girl who came stepping so prettily across the field this
+morning, in her white frock and big straw hat, might have stepped
+right out of that picture frame. That's how I recognized her."
+
+He ended on a note of triumph, and for the first time Joan's
+confidence failed her altogether. Again, it was not, of course, a
+conclusive piece of evidence, gauged by any laws of reasoning, but
+just as Challoner's description of the turnstile had convinced Cynthia
+outside the door because of the particular illumination it lent to an
+obscure fancy, so this detail of the picture did more to convince Joan
+Daventry than the rest of the story. Some portions of that story she
+knew to be true: the bootlace, the abandonment of the child. But what
+she had obstinately been combating was the contention that it was true
+of this man who sat before her. He might have learnt it all from the
+real father; he might now be seeking to make his profit out of the
+knowledge. That had been her hope. But it failed her now. For the
+particular detail of the girl's resemblance, now that she was
+seventeen, to the Romney portrait in the Challoners' dining-room he
+could not have learned from another. It did suggest that the man in
+front of her was the Challoner he claimed to be. Of course the detail
+might have been invented. But it did not sound to her invented; and,
+so far as her knowledge could test it, the rest of his story was true.
+She looked him over again with new eyes.
+
+"But you can't prove that," she said. "Even if it were true, you
+couldn't prove it."
+
+"Should I need to?" asked Challoner. "After I had put those old ladies
+from the Foundling into the witness-box, should I need to, Mrs.
+Daventry? Would they stick to their lie? Any tenth-rate attorney could
+turn 'em inside out as easy as an old glove, if they tried to. But
+they wouldn't try--and you know it as well as I do."
+
+Challoner had put his finger on the danger-spot of the Daventrys'
+position. Those two old ladies would have suffered much
+heart-searching before they told their lie, and not a little remorse
+afterward. Questioned upon their oaths they would speak the truth, and
+the whole truth. Of that Joan felt sure.
+
+"There are men, too, in Buenos Ayres who knew me when I was in Chile,"
+Challoner continued; and then once more Robert Daventry interposed.
+
+"But you wouldn't be mad enough to go to law with us," he cried, and
+Challoner laughed.
+
+"Oh, yes, I would, and I would put you into the witness-box, too. A
+pretty figure you would cut, with your Patagonian brother, eh? I
+wouldn't bring my action here, of course, in this district. You've got
+your local syndic in your pocket, I grant you. But the law runs in
+Buenos Ayres nowadays, and don't you forget it."
+
+Robert Daventry turned aside to hide his discomfiture, and walked once
+or twice across the room. He had no doubt that this man was James
+Challoner and Cynthia's father. His story was too circumstantial to be
+disputed. Moreover, neither he nor Joan could publicly dispute it.
+There had been no brother in Patagonia. He turned abruptly to
+Challoner: "How much do you want?"
+
+Joan moved quickly to his side with a cry of protest. Money it might
+be necessary to pay, but it must be asked for, not offered. To offer
+it was to admit the claim.
+
+"What are you saying, Robert?" she cried.
+
+Robert turned to her quietly.
+
+"It must come to that in the end. Why not now and have done with it?
+How much?"
+
+A smile of triumph broadened over Challoner's face. Outside the door
+Cynthia leaned forward, her hands clasped over her heart in an agony
+of suspense. Why didn't he answer? Why was he so long?
+
+The answer came at length:
+
+"I want my daughter, nothing else. She is not of age. I have a right
+to her; I'll take her away with me to-night."
+
+Cynthia crouched back in her chair, clasping its arms tightly with her
+hands, and making herself very small. To Joan and Robert Daventry the
+demand was incredible, even though their ears had heard it. Challoner
+could not mean it. It was an expedient to raise the price. But Cynthia
+had caught a note of malice in his voice which brought back before her
+eyes the malice of his looks as he had stood before her in the field.
+He meant to take her away, and that night. She glanced toward the
+door. To leave her home, to be swallowed up in the darkness with this
+stranger for her companion! She clung to the chair in a panic of
+terror. Then she heard Robert Daventry repeating the words in a daze:
+
+"You want to take her away? Cynthia?" And as though the meaning of
+Challoner's demand for the first time broke in on him, "Never!" he
+cried violently.
+
+"I want to take her away to-night;" and now the malice in Challoner's
+voice was audible to Joan too. She stared at him over the table. He
+sat nodding his head at her with little quick movements, his eyes very
+bright, and a horrid smile about his mouth. She remembered what
+Cynthia herself had said: "He seemed to hate me."
+
+"You grudge her her happiness, her life with us!" she exclaimed; and
+Challoner beat his fist upon the table in a sudden anger.
+
+"Is it strange?" he cried. "All these years here she has been sitting
+soft and walking daintily. What have I been doing? 'Look at yourself
+in a glass'--That's what you said," and he turned to Robert Daventry.
+"I told you I'd remember it, and I do. A fine life I have had of it
+for fourteen years. Mate tea and enough work a day to throw a
+trades-unionist into hysterics! No wonder I've lost my looks."
+
+All the bitterness of his fourteen years of degradation seemed to be
+concentrated in his words. The easy good-humor with which he had begun
+had vanished. He was a man venomous with grievances. He was still the
+old James Challoner in this; he had enemies, only now the enemies were
+not a few to be searched for through a list, but all who had a
+sixpence in their pockets. Joan herself was frightened. She realized
+the mistake which she and her husband had made in their eagerness to
+disbelieve the story of this man. She understood now that when she had
+thought of Cynthia and compared her with the reaper, she had been
+thinking only of the flower and had omitted her own assiduous
+cultivation of the plant. She recognized now that the look of race
+which fourteen years of luxury had refined in the girl, fourteen years
+of degradation might well have obliterated in the man.
+
+"I have had enough of it," cried James Challoner. "It's now her turn."
+
+"But we offer you freedom from that life," said Joan, and her voice
+began to plead.
+
+"I want my daughter," Challoner retorted implacably.
+
+"But you can't make a home for her," said Robert Daventry.
+
+Challoner chuckled and his voice lost its violence.
+
+"You must take me for a softy," he said with a drawl of amusement. "I
+mean her to make a home for me, where I can do a bit of sitting soft
+and recover my good looks."
+
+"But she can't make a home for you," said Joan.
+
+"Oh, yes she can."
+
+"How?"
+
+Cynthia outside the door waited in a despairing bewilderment. The
+changed tones of those whom she had looked upon as her parents assured
+her that the reaper had authority and rights, could claim her, could
+take her away. But how, she asked herself, was she to make a home for
+him? She had learned no profession, practised no art. The tears rose
+to her eyes and flowed down her cheeks; and the answer came.
+
+"She's a rare one for looks," said Challoner. His eyes narrowed to
+slits and his face became mean and despicable to look upon. "You'll
+not find her equal strolling under the lamps of Buenos Ayres."
+
+Joan flinched and uttered a cry. The movement was that of one who has
+been slapped in the face. Cynthia felt her heart stand still within
+her breast. She had lived in Buenos Ayres, where knowledge comes
+quickly to women. She was neither ignorant nor a fool. She understood,
+and once more her eyes went to the door. It was all quiet in the hall.
+A few quick steps and she would be out of the house. She rose from her
+chair. For the dark night, which a minute before had so appalled her,
+now appealed to her as a friend and refuge. But as she turned, she
+heard Robert Daventry say in a choking voice:
+
+"Go! or I'll have you thrown out;" and the bell rang violently.
+
+"Oh, is that the game?" replied Challoner.
+
+Daventry strode round the room.
+
+"Not a word! Go! I loathe you."
+
+And the door was wrenched violently open. Cynthia had just time to
+drop into her chair. She heard her father's voice close to her, and no
+longer through the panels of a door. She cowered down, covering her
+face with her hands, and drawing in her feet.
+
+"All right, I'll go," said Challoner. "I can afford to go. For I have
+the law on my side."
+
+"The law! Try it!"
+
+"I will."
+
+Challoner was standing in the doorway now. He was looking back into
+the study. But he had only to turn his head to see that blur of misty
+white in the chair, only to bend down and draw the trembling hands
+from the girl's face to find his daughter in his grasp. Cynthia lay
+holding her breath, ready at a touch of him to swoon.
+
+"She's my daughter. All your money won't get over that. Just wait
+and see. I'll come back with the law at my side, and take her
+away--yes--if I have to tie her hand and foot to take her."
+
+He flung out across the smoking-room, looking neither to the right nor
+to the left. Joan and Robert Daventry followed quickly behind him,
+afraid lest he should force his way into the dining-room where they
+had left Cynthia. Not one of them saw the girl huddled in the great
+chair in the dark room. Richard Walton came into the hall.
+
+"I'll see you off the premises," he said to Challoner, and a moment
+afterward the front door slammed.
+
+With the slamming of that door Cynthia seemed to swim back into life;
+and all at once there came upon her a great longing for comfort and
+kind words. She was hurt and humiliated as she had never thought to
+be. It seemed to her that she was tainted, and she was terribly
+afraid. She took a swift step toward the door, and there Joan's voice
+speaking in a whisper arrested her.
+
+Joan was standing with her husband by the dining-room, and seeking to
+compose her agitation before she entered it. Her voice was still
+shaking from her encounter.
+
+"Not a word to Cynthia," she said. "We sha'n't let her go, Robert,"
+and her voice was very wistful, and appealed for confirmation of her
+words. "So there's no need to trouble her--as this story would trouble
+her."
+
+"No, we'll not say a word to her," replied Robert. He made an effort
+to be hearty, but it quite failed to hide his distress. "We shall find
+a way out somehow when we think it all over. No, we'll not breathe a
+word, my dear. Cynthia's birthday mustn't be spoilt," and, thoroughly
+miserable, the old couple went into the dining-room and closed the
+door behind them.
+
+Cynthia made up her mind. Since they wished her not to know, since it
+would add so much to their distress if they learned that she did know,
+she would keep her knowledge to herself. It seemed to her then a small
+return to make to them for their devotion, but it was to cost her much
+more than she imagined. She would wait, schooling herself to patience,
+hiding her fears. But she could not face her friends to-night and keep
+her secret. For that she had not the strength. She ran swiftly and
+silently up to her room and flung herself upon her bed and buried her
+face in the pillows. There she lay trembling until the thought came to
+her that Joan would not retire without coming to ask why she had gone
+upstairs so early. She undressed and was hardly in bed before Joan
+knocked on the door.
+
+"I had a headache," said Cynthia. "It is the heat, no doubt. I shall
+be myself in the morning."
+
+"You are sure? You wouldn't like the doctor?" Joan asked anxiously.
+
+"Oh, no!" exclaimed Cynthia.
+
+Joan put her hand to the switch of the light, and Cynthia started up
+in bed with a wild gesture.
+
+"Don't turn the light out, please, mother," she cried; and the next
+moment feared that Joan would have heard the terror underneath her
+words. But Joan herself was occupied. She kissed Cynthia and left her
+alone with the light burning in her room.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+
+                              THE FLIGHT
+
+
+But though the light burned in her room, Cynthia did not sleep till
+daybreak. For the first few hours there was a strange bustle about the
+passages of the house, for which she did not seek at all to find a
+cause. She welcomed it for its companionship. Familiar voices informed
+her that her friends were awake about her, and she was comforted. She
+tried to fall asleep before the noise should cease, but gradually the
+estancia sank into silence, and she was still awake. Then began her
+hours of terror. Her window was open, and every flutter of the night
+air which shook the curtains was her father's coarse, strong hand upon
+the sill. If she closed her eyes for a moment, his dark and evil face
+was already bending over her, as she lay helpless in her bed. If she
+heard a wardrobe crack it was he stepping clumsily about the room.
+Half the night she spent crouching up in her bed, her eyes wild with
+fear, her heart racing and stopping, while she listened for the sound
+of his footsteps outside the house. And she heard them; did a twig
+snap on a tree in the garden, she heard them. There was he, prowling
+about the walls, watching, perhaps, for just her light to be put out
+before he slipped in through a window to take her away. If she heard
+no sounds, then he was already in the house, creeping along the
+corridor toward her door. From the moment when this particular fear
+seized hold upon her, her eyes were fixed in an agony of suspense upon
+the long mirror in her room. The door was at her right hand, set in
+the wall against which the head of her bed was placed. A high screen
+stood by the side of the bed and hid it from her altogether. But
+across the room the long mirror faced her, and by looking at its
+bright surface she could see whether the door opened or not. It was a
+white door, with a round brass handle, and, continually, she was very
+sure that she saw the handle turn. In her frantic imaginings her
+father's very semblance changed. Gross though he was, still more she
+distorted him, making his likeness fit with the knowledge which she
+had of him. He meant to drag her away, and batten on what she had of
+youth and freshness and good looks; and this, out of malice almost as
+much as for profit, and to punish her for the happiness of her life.
+He swelled into some grotesque and corpulent thing of evil with a fat,
+loathsome face and gripping hands.
+
+The night was a night of disillusionment for Cynthia. Romance was
+stunned in her. All her pretty dreams, wherein she shyly walked with
+the bright ones of the earth, were rent and blown to space like
+gossamer. She seemed separated from them by a generation of years. She
+looked back upon them with derision. A fine heroine she was to be if
+that door opened. She was to walk--yes--but under the gas-lamps, and
+not shyly, and with any who would. That was the plan deliberately
+conceived for her and conceived by her own father. The mere thought of
+it seemed to sully her, to make her unworthy. She remembered that only
+that morning she had sent a telegram to Captain Rames, with a thrill
+of excitement, as though she were doing a remarkable thing. She had
+actually dared. She sat up, and in the bitterness of her heart laughed
+at the great significance she had set upon herself. Her father had a
+different view of her importance, and from head to foot she ached with
+the pain of her humiliation.
+
+Thus through the long hours she swung between terror and abasement,
+each one mastering her in turn. Once she started up with a despairing
+cry as she imagined her father driving her out into the street with
+blows.
+
+Could she make her living honestly if she ran away from him, she
+wondered miserably, bethinking that at the worst she must kill
+herself? At another moment she would recall with a pang of contempt
+her enchanted garden and scorch its flowers with her ridicule. She
+would walk in that garden no more. It was closed. She had been an
+impostor in it always. It was a place of falsities. There was but one
+true, real thing in it all--the turnstile in the wall which gave
+admission to its precincts. Yes, that was true, and the turnstile,
+with all it meant of shame and indifference, became to her a new
+epitome of life.
+
+Gradually the night wore through. A finger of gray light slipped
+through the curtains, and was laid upon the ceiling of the room. Birds
+began to sing in the garden. Cynthia turned out her light and fell
+asleep at last. She slept late and woke to just such another day of
+heat as yesterday. She lay for a moment, happily convinced that all
+which had occurred last night had occurred only in a dream. But she
+looked into the mirror across the room and saw the door, and the truth
+was made known to her. These things had happened.
+
+Certainly the door was still closed, the night had passed. But other
+nights would follow, and through the closed door, not her father, but
+fear and shame had passed to bear her company. She came down to
+breakfast pale and heavy-eyed, and found Joan and Robert Daventry
+already at the table. She was afraid lest they should remark the
+alteration in her looks, and she set herself to counterfeit an air of
+gaiety. It was not very successful, but Joan and Robert Daventry were
+making precisely the same pretence, with still poorer results. They
+could not meet her eyes any more than she theirs; and they were trying
+for the sake of her happiness to hide from her a catastrophe, her
+knowledge of which for the sake of their happiness she was trying to
+hide from them. Thus they all talked with great speed about things of
+no importance, and laughed noisily whether laughter was appropriate or
+not, until Robert Daventry suddenly turned to Cynthia and blurted out
+with an affected blitheness:
+
+"I hope, my dear, that you haven't made many absolutely unalterable
+arrangements for the summer." And Cynthia turned as white as the
+table-cloth and looked suddenly down to hide the terror in her eyes.
+They were going to give her up, then! That was her first despairing
+thought. No doubt it could not be helped. They were compelled to.
+
+"No," she answered faintly. "No arrangements that cannot be altered. I
+was going to stay for a week with--" and as she compared the summer
+which she had planned with that which awaited her, she stopped, lest
+the choking of her voice should betray her.
+
+"That's well," continued Robert, "for you have a journey to make,
+Cynthia. I have had a telegram this morning from England. I bought
+some property in Warwickshire a few years ago. We thought you would
+not, perhaps, want to live all your life in the Argentine after we had
+gone. So we bought it for you. But it appears there's some sort of
+lawyer's trouble over the title."
+
+"We have known there was some trouble," Joan hastened to explain, "for
+quite a long time. But until this telegram arrived we did not think it
+very serious."
+
+"Now we know what it is," continued Robert, "and I am afraid that we
+must go to England and attend to it. Luckily, we have Walton now to
+look after the estancia." And since Cynthia made no reply, but still
+looked upon the cloth, he continued in some perplexity: "I hope, my
+dear, you won't be disappointed. Joan and I, indeed, were inclined to
+be confident that you would enjoy the trip."
+
+"And, of course, I shall," cried Cynthia; and now she raised her head
+and gazed at her friends with shining eyes. She had not dared to yield
+her face to their scrutiny in the first revulsion of her feelings.
+Even now the room whirled about her. "I shall be delighted to go with
+you. When shall we start?"
+
+"Yes, that's the point," said Mr. Daventry, uncomfortably. "The
+telegram is very urgent, and there's a boat sailing from Buenos Ayres
+to-morrow. I am afraid, Cynthia, that we must catch it. There's
+certain to be no difficulty about cabins just at this time of the
+year, and, in fact, I have already telegraphed to retain them. So you
+see we must leave Daventry by the night train. Can you be ready?"
+
+"Of course," said Cynthia.
+
+The color came back again into her pale cheeks and made them rosy, and
+the smile returned to her lips. No telegram had come. The bustle in
+the corridors during the early hours of the evening was explained to
+her. Over night, Robert and Joan had made up their minds to an instant
+flight, and had set about their preparations. Cynthia drew her breath
+again. She resumed life and some part of her faith in life. The world
+was not peopled with James Challoners, as, in the shock of her horror,
+she had almost been persuaded. Here were two who, for her sake, were
+abandoning their home and the place which their labors had made for
+them in the country of their adoption. Her great trouble during that
+day of hurried preparation was to avoid blurting out to her two
+friends her gratitude and her knowledge.
+
+They travelled by night and, reaching Buenos Ayres in the morning,
+drove straight along the docks to their ship. Once on board, Cynthia
+noticed that Joan made this and that excuse about the arrangement of
+her cabin to keep her from the deck until the steamer had warped out
+into the basin. Then she gave a sigh of relief and sat down in a
+chair.
+
+"You won't mind, dear, will you?" she said. "We shall probably be kept
+some time in England. But you will soon make friends. Robert was
+speaking about it last night. He said it was a good hunting country,
+and that we could get you some fine horses and--" and suddenly she
+felt Cynthia's arms about her neck, and the girl's tears upon her
+cheeks.
+
+"My dear, my dear, you are too kind to me!" cried Cynthia. "I don't
+mind about the horses, if only you'll keep me with you."
+
+"Of course, of course," said Mrs. Daventry. "What should we do without
+you ourselves."
+
+The screw was churning up the mud of the River Plate, the flat banks
+dotted with low trees were slipping past the port-holes.
+
+"Let us go out and get the steward to arrange our chairs on deck,"
+said Mrs. Daventry. She put Cynthia's outburst down, not to any guess
+at the true reason of their flight, but to a young girl's moment of
+emotion.
+
+The steamer put into Montevideo, and Santos, and Rio, and glided
+northward along the woods and white sands of Brazil. It passed one
+morning into the narrows of the Cape Verde Islands, and there was
+dressed from stem to stern with flags.
+
+Cynthia asked the reason of the first officer, who was leaning beside
+her on the rail, and for answer he pointed northward to a small black
+ship which was coming down toward them, and handed to her his
+binocular.
+
+"That's the _Perhaps_, bound for the South," he said; and he saw the
+girl's face flush red.
+
+She put the glasses to her eyes, and gazed for a long while at the
+boat. The _Perhaps_ was a full-rigged ship, with auxiliary steam,
+broad in the beam, with strong, rounded bows. She had the trade-wind
+behind her, and came lumbering down the channel with every sail set
+upon her yards.
+
+"But she's so small," cried Cynthia.
+
+"She has to be small," replied the first officer. "Length's no use for
+her work. Look at us! We should crack like a filbert in the ice-pack.
+She won't."
+
+"But she's out for three years," said Cynthia.
+
+"There'll be a relief ship with fresh stores, no doubt. And there are
+not many of them on board, twenty-nine all told."
+
+Cynthia looked again, and held the glasses to her eyes until the boats
+drew level. She could make out small figures upon the bridge and deck;
+she saw answering signals break out in answer to their own good
+wishes; and then the name in new gold letters came out upon the black
+stern beneath the counter.
+
+"Thank you," she said as she handed back the glasses. But her eyes
+were still fixed upon that full-rigged ship lumbering heavily to the
+unknown South.
+
+"I am very glad to have seen the _Perhaps_," she said slowly.
+
+The first officer looked at her curiously. There was a quiver of
+emotion in her voice.
+
+"Perhaps you have friends on board," he said. "If you have, I envy
+them."
+
+"No," she said slowly. "I know no one on board. But I am glad to have
+seen the ship, for I was interested in it in a part of my life which
+is now over."
+
+The first officer was about to smile. Here was a remarkably pretty
+girl of seventeen or so, talking about a part of her life which was
+over! But the big, dark-blue eyes swept round and rested gravely on
+his face, and he bowed to her with a fitting solemnity.
+
+Cynthia exaggerated, no doubt, taking herself seriously as young girls
+will. But the shock of that last night in the estancia had wrought a
+revolution in her thoughts. Though James Challoner no longer seemed to
+grip her hand, she walked in the chill shadow of his presence. Nor did
+that shadow quite lift even when she had landed in England.
+
+They travelled into Warwickshire, and so came to that white house
+behind the old wall of red brick on the London road which Robert
+Daventry had once coveted for himself and had afterward bought for
+Cynthia. The Daventrys made it their home now. Though Cynthia never
+read a word about it in the papers, that disputed title took a long
+while in the settling. Robert Daventry resumed the old ties. Joan,
+with Cynthia at her side, found the making of new ones not the
+laborious business she had feared, and Cynthia had her horses and as
+many friends as she had room for in her life. But the shadow was still
+about her. James Challoner might have found the means to follow them
+to England. At any corner of a lane she might discover his gross and
+sinister figure upon the path. A few miles away, the ancient city of
+Ludsey lifted high its old steeples and its modern chimneys. She was
+always secretly upon her guard in its climbing streets. There was
+always in her life a mirror facing a closed door, and at her heart a
+great fear lest she should see the door open.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IX
+
+                       ROBERT DAVENTRY EXPLAINS
+
+
+Thus the greater part of three years passed, but toward the end of the
+third the influenza became virulent throughout that country. It was a
+winter of sharp frosts and sudden thaws. One week the lanes were deep
+in snow and the fields white squares ruled off by the hedges; the next
+the whole country-side ran water. The epidemic was at its worst in
+November, and during that month it attacked Joan Daventry. She was now
+a woman of seventy, and the activity of her life had worn out her
+heart. She died within a week of her seizure, and from that time
+Robert Daventry's strength steadily declined. It may have been that
+the loss of Joan loosened his hold on life, or, again it may have
+been, as Dr. Hill declared, that he caught a chill at the graveside
+which he could not shake off. But, whatever the cause, he ailed
+through November, and in the beginning of the following month, while
+sitting on the bench at Ludsey, he was seized with a great faintness.
+He was driven back to the white house, and took to his bed; and on the
+next day the snow fell again.
+
+Ten days after he had fallen sick, Dr. Hill came from the bedroom and
+found Cynthia waiting as ever for his news. He was an oldish man, and
+quite at home in that house. He slipped his arm through hers and said
+in a grave and gentle voice:
+
+"Your father wants you, my dear. He has something to say to you."
+
+Cynthia looked at him anxiously.
+
+"Won't it tire him too much to talk?"
+
+"He will not, I think, be tired for very long. You had better go to
+him at once, for his mind is quite clear now. I will come back
+to-morrow morning, unless you telephone to me before then that you
+want me. It is now, I am afraid, a matter of waiting."
+
+He drove away from the door. Cynthia walked back along the passages to
+the room where the old man lay in a great four-poster bed. The
+afternoon was closing in, and the room was not yet lit. But there was
+light enough for her to appreciate all that Dr. Hill had meant. Robert
+Daventry had grown so frail, his hands and face were so very nearly
+transparent.
+
+"I have a good deal to tell you, Cynthia," he said feebly, and his
+lips tried to smile. "So listen to me carefully."
+
+The nurse went out of the room. Cynthia sat down by the bed and took
+the old man's hand in hers. She made no pretence that another
+opportunity would come.
+
+"You will be very well off, my dear, I am thankful to say," he
+continued. "There's the estancia, about which I will say a word to you
+later, and a little more than four hundred thousand pounds in the
+stocks. It's practically all coming to you. Of course, the profit on
+the estancia varies with the season, and may in bad years mean
+nothing; but on the average, I reckon you ought to have about
+twenty-five thousand a year. That leaves out this house and the little
+farm which goes with it. They are yours already. I have made Hill one
+of my executors--he'll be rather a figurehead, I expect--and Isaac
+Benoliel, of Culver, the other. They are both friends and neighbors of
+yours, and understanding people. I have tied up half the money on you
+and your children. If you haven't any children you will bequeath it as
+you like. But I am hoping very much that you will have them. I once
+asked a woman what she looked back upon as the happiest time of her
+life, and she said the evenings when she and her husband used to sit
+alone together before their first child was born. I think that was a
+wise saying, Cynthia. It struck me very much at the time, and has
+never since seemed to me less true than it did then. And, you know,
+everybody can't expect quite the same luck as Joan and I had in
+finding you." He pressed her hand with such strength as he had, and
+lay for a little while silent, husbanding his strength.
+
+"I was advised by my lawyer," he resumed, "to tie my whole fortune up.
+But I talked it over with Joan and we were afraid that it might
+perhaps occur to you afterward that we didn't completely trust you."
+
+"Oh, father, I should never have thought that," Cynthia protested
+gently.
+
+The old man shook his head.
+
+"One can never be quite certain that queer, stinging ideas won't
+come," he said. "And we both were anxious that you should be sure
+always that we had no fear of the way in which you would manage your
+life. So you will be completely mistress of half your fortune," and he
+hesitated for a moment, "when you come of age. But I would like you,
+when you are in doubt, to consult Isaac Benoliel. I have a great faith
+in him."
+
+"I, too," said Cynthia. "I will consult him."
+
+A look of relief came into Robert Daventry's face.
+
+"I am glad of that," he said. "There are people, of course, who are
+prejudiced against him. He is a Jew, and he's new, and he has that
+queer sort of indefinable position which attracts criticism. But I
+think you will find him a valuable friend."
+
+Daventry's voice had weakened to a whisper, and he lay back upon his
+pillows with his eyes closed. Cynthia moved, but the pressure of his
+hand retained her. She sat and waited, speaking no word and holding
+back the tears which smarted in her eyes. Robert Daventry spoke again.
+
+"There's some medicine," he said. "Hill gave it me to keep me going.
+It's in a glass."
+
+Cynthia lifted a glass filled with some grayish liquid, and held it to
+the old man's lips. He drank, and resumed:
+
+"I have written down during the last day or two the heads of what I
+wanted to say on a paper."
+
+Cynthia found a slip of paper on the table by the bedside.
+
+"Just read."
+
+There were some words written one below the other on the paper in a
+straggling hand. Cynthia read them out.
+
+"Money."
+
+"I have said all I have to say, I think, about that."
+
+"Diana Royle," Cynthia read next. But she read the name slowly, so
+slowly that Robert Daventry noticed her deliberation.
+
+"I don't think you can see, Cynthia," he said. "It's getting dark."
+
+"Oh, yes, father, I can see quite clearly," she replied. "What of Mrs.
+Royle?"
+
+"You know her," said Robert. "You like her, too, I think, don't you?"
+Cynthia did not reply, but Daventry had not asked the question in
+the tone of one needing a reply. "You will want some one to live with
+you until you get married, which, by the way, you don't seem to be
+in a hurry to do, my dear. The young fellows round here don't seem
+to have made much impression. Oh! I am not bustling you, my dear.
+Only--only--don't leave it too long, Cynthia," he said, and his hand
+sought hers again.
+
+Cynthia stirred uneasily. It was the way of men, to want to marry
+every girl off as soon as possible, she knew. It was a form of vanity.
+But she wished to give no promise.
+
+"You will probably go to London, I don't want you to mope down here
+all the time. There's no reason that you should. You can have your
+house in town. But you will want some one with you, and I thought my
+cousin, Diana Royle, would be the most suitable person."
+
+Cynthia raised her head as if she was about to speak. But she did not,
+and Daventry said:
+
+"I wrote to her about it."
+
+"Oh," said Cynthia slowly. "You have already written?"
+
+"Yes, and she consented at once. You see her husband left her badly
+off when he died. So it will be an advantage to her. And though she is
+older than you are, she is not so much older that you won't be in
+sympathy with one another."
+
+Cynthia nodded her head.
+
+"I see," she said. "Yes, of course, I know her very well." But a note
+of reserve was audible, or rather would have been audible to any other
+in that room. But Robert Daventry was altogether occupied in the
+effort to master his overmastering weakness. There was more which he
+wished to say; there was something which he must say.
+
+"Then that's settled," he whispered; and with his eyes he asked for
+his cordial. Cynthia once more supported him, and held the glass to
+his lips.
+
+"Now, what comes next?" he asked, and Cynthia looked at the paper.
+
+"The estancia," she said.
+
+"Yes," said Daventry, and a smile suddenly illumined his face and made
+it young. "The estancia! You have the right to dispose of it, Cynthia.
+For one never knows what changes may come. But I don't want you to let
+it go unless there is some great necessity. It brings in, generally, a
+good income, and now that Walton looks after it, it gives very little
+trouble. Walton is a good man. I should give him an interest in it, if
+I were you, and as time goes on increase his interest. Keep him and
+keep it. I want you very much to do that. I am proud of the Daventry
+estancia, for one thing. For another, the best part of Joan's life and
+of mine was spent there. There, too, we first brought you when you
+came to us. There's yet another reason," and he stopped, and thought.
+"Yes, there's yet another reason why I care for it so much--but--" and
+he shook his head and gave up the effort to interpret it: "it's not
+very clear in my mind just now. I only know it's there--a strong
+reason."
+
+He was speaking with a depth of tenderness in his voice for which
+Cynthia was hardly prepared. Always he had seemed to her to look upon
+the estancia as a business proposition rather than as the soil in
+which his heart was rooted. Always, too, he had seemed so contented to
+live in England, and he had taken his part with so much zest in the
+local administration of the county. She was as puzzled now by this
+note of yearning--for it was no less than yearning--as by the reason
+which he could not interpret. It was all made plain to her in after
+years, but by another than Robert Daventry.
+
+"I want you very much to keep the estancia, Cynthia."
+
+"Of course I will keep it," she said, and again she made no pretence
+that the day was distant when it would be hers to keep. Her heart was
+heavy with grief, it went out in love to this dear friend of hers; she
+was young and the cry was loud in her bosom, "What will I do without
+you?" but her lips did not utter it. He would be quite sure of her
+love without her protests. There was comprehension enough, and to
+spare, between them to make her certain of that. And, since he wanted
+her to listen, she put aside her distress and the thought of the
+loneliness which awaited her and obeyed him.
+
+"I would even be glad"--and the old man hesitated with the timidity of
+one asking a heavy favor.--"Yes, I would be glad if you would go back
+there--oh, not often--but just once or twice to see that all was going
+on well."
+
+Cynthia's hand trembled for a moment. She looked at him with a sudden
+terror in her eyes. But he was lying now upon his side with his face
+to the window, and seeing things not to be seen through its panes. It
+cost Cynthia a great deal to make the promise he sought from her. She
+shrank from a return to the estancia with every fibre of her body. But
+she made it. He besought her in so wistful a voice.
+
+"Yes, I will go back, father."
+
+"Thank you," he said gently.
+
+Outside the window the snow lay white and deep upon the slate roofs of
+the outbuildings, and was piled upon the black branches of the trees.
+Overhead was a gray sky of winter. But for the glimmer of the snow it
+would almost have been dark. A smile shone again on the old man's
+face.
+
+"Perhaps Walton's cutting the corn to-day! Think of it!" he said, with
+a great longing, and before Cynthia's eyes there rose immediately
+the vision of a great glistening field of standing wheat and a
+reaping-machine like a black toy outlined against it. They remained
+thus in silence for a little while. Cynthia was thinking.
+
+"After all, he may not be in the Argentine.... I may not meet
+him.... He will have no power over me.... There is no reason why I
+should be afraid."
+
+And then, as though in answer to these arguments, Robert Daventry
+said:
+
+"You can go back now, Cynthia, without fear."
+
+The girl looked at him with startled eyes. Had she spoken aloud, she
+asked herself? Had she betrayed her secret just at this last moment?
+But her eyes fell upon the slip of paper in her hand, and there she
+saw written plainly under the word "estancia" the name "James
+Challoner."
+
+Robert Daventry looked toward a bureau which stood by the window.
+
+"The little drawer on the left. No, the one above that. There's a
+cutting from a newspaper."
+
+Cynthia found in the drawer half a column of a Spanish newspaper. The
+name was on the top of the column. It was a paper published in Buenos
+Ayres. She brought the cutting back to the bed and placed it between
+his fingers.
+
+"Yes, that's it," he said, and he lay back upon his pillows, and
+gathered his strength. "I have got to tell you now something which we
+have always kept a secret from you."
+
+"There is no need to tell it," said Cynthia.
+
+Robert Daventry stared at her.
+
+"If you do know it," he said slowly, "we have made the cruellest
+mistake we could possibly have made. You can't know it!"
+
+"It's about James Challoner--my father?" asked Cynthia, and Robert
+Daventry shut his eyes with a look of great distress upon his face.
+
+"How long have you known?" he asked.
+
+"From the night when he came to the estancia," she answered. And she
+told how she had slipped into the smoking-room and how, huddled in the
+great chair, she had heard all that James Challoner proposed for her.
+The shadow deepened upon Daventry's face as he listened, and when she
+had ended he asked with deep regret:
+
+"Why didn't you tell us this, Cynthia?"
+
+"Because, just outside the smoking-room door in the hall, you both
+decided not to tell me--not to breathe a word of--of my father's
+visit. You thought the knowledge would trouble and frighten me. You
+thought it would hurt. Well, I was as certain that you would be
+greatly distressed to know that already I had the knowledge. So I held
+my tongue."
+
+"And it did trouble you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"A great deal?"
+
+"Yes," Cynthia admitted. "I was frightened. I did not know what power
+he might have. I knew you had fled from him for my sake."
+
+"And since you have been here--during these three years--you have
+still been troubled, still frightened lest he should come and claim
+you with the law at his side?"
+
+Though the old man could hardly speak above a whisper, he was
+strangely insistent in his questioning. The words came unevenly, with
+breaks between, and now and then a weak gasp for breath. Cynthia
+replied quite simply:
+
+"Yes, here, too, I have thought that he might come. I used to be
+frightened at night. I used to hear him in the house."
+
+And with every word she spoke the compunction and distress deepened in
+Daventry's mind.
+
+"What a pity!" he said. "Neither of us guessed, not even Joan, who was
+quicker than I to notice things. And we thought we knew all about you,
+Cynthia!" A faint smile lit up his face. "How little, after all, we
+did know! For we could have spared you all this trouble. Read." And
+opening his hand he let her take from it the newspaper slip. She
+uttered a cry as she read the first lines.
+
+"It's true," said Daventry, from the bed.
+
+Cynthia carried the cutting over to the window and read by the fading
+light. It gave the account of an inquest held at a small town
+twenty-five miles up the line from the Daventry estancia on the body
+of an Englishman who had been stabbed to the heart by a Gaucho in a
+drunken quarrel at a tavern. There was a witness who had worked with
+the Englishman, and could identify him. He called himself James
+Challoner, and, when he was drunk, he would boast of his family.
+Cynthia looked at the date of the paper. It was almost three years
+old. James Challoner had been killed within a week of his dismissal by
+Robert Daventry. Cynthia let the slip of paper fall from her fingers,
+and stood by the window until Robert Daventry called her to his side.
+
+"You held your tongue so as not to distress us," he whispered. "We
+held ours so as not to frighten you. And so because we were careful of
+your happiness, and you of ours, you have gone through years of
+anxiety and terror. Needless anxiety! Terror without a cause! I am so
+sorry. It seems so pitiful. It seems rather grim to me, Cynthia."
+
+Cynthia answered quietly:
+
+"That's the way things happen." And when she had spoken, Robert
+Daventry, with an effort, raised himself upon his elbow and peered
+into her face.
+
+"You oughtn't to be able to say that, Cynthia," he said remorsefully.
+"You oughtn't to be able to think it. It's not the proper philosophy
+for twenty. I am afraid, my dear, that trouble has gone deep." He fell
+back and in a moment a little whimsical smile flickered upon his face.
+"I don't think I'll tell Joan about this," he said. "She wouldn't like
+it. She wouldn't forgive herself for not having noticed that you were
+troubled."
+
+"After all, it was my fault," said Cynthia. "For I hid in the room.
+However, it's all over now."
+
+But Daventry was not prepared to accept her word. Some flash of
+insight forbade him.
+
+"It has left its mark, my dear," he insisted, and in broken sentences
+he dwelt upon his theme. His mind began to wander after a little, but
+through his wanderings there ran the thread of this idea:
+
+"Joan was always so careful.... Even when you were quite a little girl
+... we were never to laugh at you.... 'Children and dogs' she used to
+say, 'you must never laugh at them. Little things warp children for
+life.' ... Do you remember when you used to write plays and perform
+them to us at Christmas, in a toy theatre, with small figures in tin
+slides?... Joan was always careful that we should take them seriously,
+and not laugh at the wrong place. I never did want to laugh at the
+wrong place. I thought you wrote very good plays, Cynthia. I used to
+say you were a genius. But Joan wouldn't have it. 'No!' she said, 'All
+children are born dramatists, but they forget the trick of it
+afterward.' ... I suppose she knew. She was a very clever woman--" and
+so he drifted off gradually into sleep. Cynthia stayed by his side
+while the twilight faded and the darkness came; and the light of the
+fire danced ever more brightly upon the ceiling of the room. The wind
+set from the west, and as the hours passed the chimes from the great
+clock in Ludsey Church tower came softly and faintly into the room.
+But they did not disturb the old man's rest. He went floating out on a
+calm tide of sleep to his death, and Cynthia sat by his side wondering
+in the intervals of her grief at the strange arrangement of life which
+ordained that the efforts of people to secure the happiness of others
+should only cause needless terrors and vain miseries.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER X
+
+                             MR. BENOLIEL
+
+
+"There are no ladies," Captain Rames said indignantly, as he took his
+seat in Mr. Benoliel's dining-room.
+
+His neighbor, a florid and handsome man, a little past the prime of
+life, glanced at the name on the visiting-card which marked Captain
+Rames's place, and smiled sympathetically.
+
+"I can quite understand," he returned with a pleasant pomposity, "that
+to a sailor who has been three years in the Antarctic the deficiency
+is a very lamentable business. But there are some elements of
+consolation. Amongst the twelve men seated at this round table of
+mahogany, you will hardly see one who has not made some stir in the
+world. Upon your right, for instance, you will see Mr. Winthrop, that
+long and sallow person. He is a political resident in one of the
+native States of Rajputana, and his work, in six volumes, on the
+Indian bangle, is, I believe, supposed to be the last word upon the
+subject. A little nearer to you you will see a youth, though he is not
+so young as he looks. He is M. Poileaux, and the only aviator who has
+not yet fallen into the sea. When he does, he will come here no more.
+I myself am a surgeon whose name, I believe, is not unknown."
+
+And with a large white hand the famous Sir James Burrell discreetly
+pointed out others of note to his companion.
+
+Captain Rames glanced indifferently round the table. A few of the
+twelve were in black coats, and amongst those few was Mr. Benoliel. It
+was the night of a court ball, and most of the guests were in some
+uniform or another, or shone in the gold of the privy councillor.
+
+"They are, no doubt, men of vast importance," replied Captain Rames
+bluntly. "But leaving you out of account, Sir James, I could dispense
+with the lot of them. When I dine in Grosvenor Square, in June, I do
+ask that there should be a petticoat on one side of me, at all
+events."
+
+The surgeon laughed good-humoredly. He studied his neighbor with a
+quick observing eye. Captain Rames was of the middle height with a
+squareness of build, which his gold epaulets exaggerated at this
+moment, and he was square, too, of face. His hair was thick and curved
+over from the side, parting in a dark turbulent comb, his forehead was
+broad, his eyes keen and very steady. Vigor rather than refinement was
+the mark of him; he had more character than intellect, more capacity
+than knowledge; thus Sir James Burrell defined him.
+
+"I have played the comforter," he said, "at so many bedsides that I
+should feel my vanity touched if I failed to console you," he
+returned. "Let me bring to your attention the menu. I am confident
+that it will appeal to you."
+
+"Yes, that's all right," Rames admitted, as he leaned forward and
+glanced at the card. "But why should it particularly appeal to me?"
+
+Sir James Burrell shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"My profession brings me into touch with interesting people. I take my
+pleasure in observing them. And I have always noticed that the men who
+cheerfully endure the greatest hardships are also the first to demand
+the best of the luxuries, when they are within reach."
+
+"Well, it's true," said Captain Rames. "I can make a shift with
+pemmican, but I honestly like a good dinner. It's the contrast, I
+suppose."
+
+Sir James shook his head.
+
+"It goes deeper than that," said he. "Your pale saints are no doubt
+profitable to the painters of glass windows, but I doubt if the world
+owes so very much to them. The great things are really done by the
+people who have a good deal of the animal in them; and animals like
+good dinners."
+
+Captain Rames was mollified, and his face took on a jovial look.
+
+"I am animal enough," he said, "to purr when my back is scratched."
+
+But Sir James Burrell was mounted on a hobby and hardly heeded the
+interruption.
+
+"I could quote historical instances, but I need go no further than
+this room. Do you see the man sitting next to our host, and upon his
+right?"
+
+Captain Rames saw a small thin man in the dress of a privy councillor,
+a man with a peaked, fleshless face, in which a pair of small eyes
+twinkled alertly. A scanty crop of gray hair covered the back of his
+skull, and left markedly visible the height and the narrowness of his
+forehead. Captain Rames leaned forward with a new interest.
+
+"Yes, and I recognize his face," he said. "Surely that is Henry
+Smale."
+
+"Exactly," returned Sir James. "He is in the cabinet, and, quite apart
+from politics, he is, upon scientific grounds, a man of great
+distinction."
+
+"But, surely, he disproves your theory. He looks an ascetic."
+
+"And is nothing of the kind," interrupted Sir James. "I admit that his
+look of asceticism has been a great asset to him in his career. But
+the public has quite misjudged him. He is a voluptuary, with the face
+of a monk--the most useful combination for public life in this country
+which you could possibly imagine. If he dines alone at his club, he
+will not dine under a guinea; and he has the animal weaknesses up to
+the brim of him. For instance, he is as jealous as a dog. Filch from
+him the smallest of his prerogatives, and he will turn upon you
+bitterly. Yet he has done great things, and initiated bold policies.
+Why? Because he has enough of the animal in him to do great things."
+And upon that Sir James broke off.
+
+The butler was standing at the elbow of Captain Rames, with a jug of
+champagne in one hand and a decanter of red wine in the other. He bent
+down and offered Captain Rames his choice. Sir James Burrell
+intervened.
+
+"By the way," he said, "have you any wish to stand particularly well
+with your host?"
+
+"I am now beginning to think that I have," replied Captain Rames.
+
+"Then I should choose his Burgundy. He has his fancies, like the rest
+of us, and to prefer his Nuits-St.-George to champagne is one way to
+his esteem."
+
+Captain Rames took the hint, and, as he raised his glass to his lips,
+Mr. Benoliel smiled to him across the table.
+
+"I will ask your opinion upon that wine, Captain Rames," he said, and
+so turned again to Henry Smale.
+
+"You see, he noticed at once," said Sir James.
+
+Captain Rames had noticed something too. At the mention of his name,
+Henry Smale had looked up with interest. He was even now obviously
+asking a question of Mr. Benoliel about him. Rames began to take more
+careful stock of his host. Mr. Benoliel was a tall, high-shouldered
+man, with a dark thin face in which delicacy seemed to predominate
+over strength. His hair was black, and a little black moustache drew a
+pencil line along his upper lip. His fingers were long and
+extraordinarily restless. It was difficult to make a guess at his age.
+A first glance would put him in the forties. But when Mr. Benoliel
+showed his eyes--which was not always, for he had a trick of looking
+out between lids half-closed--it seemed that he must have lived for
+centuries; so much of fatigue and so much of patience were suddenly
+revealed.
+
+"I wonder why he asked me to dine here," said Harry Rames.
+
+"You were certain to dine here," replied Sir James.
+
+"I met him but the once by the purest accident."
+
+"You were certain to meet him," said Sir James. "All famous people
+meet him. All famous people dine here once. But he is not really a
+snob. For, quite a number of them are never invited twice."
+
+"He can be a good friend?"
+
+"Of that I cannot speak," said Sir James.
+
+The courses followed one after the other, and Harry Rames found his
+eyes continually wandering back across the silver and bright flowers
+to the exotic figure of his host. He took his share in the
+conversation about him, but a movement of Mr. Benoliel would check him
+in his speech or cause him to listen with an absent ear. He watched
+the play of his delicate fingers upon the table-cloth, the continual
+restlessness of his body. Mr. Benoliel was of his race; there was in
+his aspect a queer mixture of the financier and the dilettante, the
+shrewd business man and the sensuous apprecitator of art. There was a
+touch, too, of the feminine in him.
+
+"I told you that you would not be bored," said Sir James Burrell
+toward the end of the dinner. "You are not the first man who has
+fallen under the spell of Mr. Benoliel."
+
+Harry Rames laughed.
+
+"I am under no spell, I assure you," he said frankly. "I was wondering
+whether he was likely to be of use to me."
+
+"It is very likely," returned Sir James. "He has been of use to many.
+He plays at omniscience. To anticipate a wish before it is expressed,
+to serve an ambition before it has been revealed--that is one of our
+host's little vanities. He may have asked you here with no other
+object than to gratify it."
+
+Harry Rames glanced quickly at his companion.
+
+"Is that so?" he asked eagerly. Then his face fell. "But I am not even
+a friend of his."
+
+"I do not think that matters," said the surgeon. "He likes to pose as
+Providence, and the posture will be more dramatic if it is assumed
+toward an acquaintance rather than a friend."
+
+"He is a sham, then," said Rames bluntly.
+
+"By no means," Sir James replied suavely. "Let us say, rather, that he
+is an artist."
+
+Captain Rames turned with a furrowed brow to his companion.
+
+"I am no great hand at subtleties," he said. "Will you tell me what
+you know of Mr. Benoliel? I am a beginner in the world, and he may be
+of importance to me."
+
+Sir James Burrell smiled. He was in his element. To supply a character
+much as some author of the seventeenth century might have done, was a
+foible which continually tempted him. He was not always successful.
+Paradox allured him into difficulties, cheap epigrams at times blazed
+before him, and would not be quiet until he had uttered them. But
+often he managed to hit off, with some happiness, at all events, the
+externals of the person whom he described. He drank his wine now
+slowly and set down his glass. Then, twisting the delicate stem with
+the finger-tips of his large and handsome hand, he began:
+
+"He is a Jew, of course, and an Oriental. But from what quarter of the
+Orient, who shall say? You may give him any birthplace, from the
+Levant to Casa Blanca, and no one will contradict you. Some hold him
+to be a charlatan, as you are inclined to do. But he is an accepted
+personage, not blown into notice and out of it by the favor of a
+season, but a permanency. How he became so, I cannot tell you. He is
+very busy all day, although when the darkness comes it would be
+difficult to point to any one thing which he has done. He is always at
+the top table at public dinners, and very near to the chairman. But he
+never proposes a toast or responds to one. If he writes a letter to
+the _Times_, it appears in leaded type. If you want secret information
+on any subject, he can get it for you. If you want help, he will find
+the man who can give it. He is a power in the city. He is a power in
+politics, and the motor-cars of prime-ministers stand at his door at
+ten o'clock in the morning. Yet he was never in the House, and has
+never made a speech on any platform. It is believed by many that he
+might achieve greatness if he chose. But he never chooses. He has the
+air at a discussion of being able to say the last word on any subject,
+but he does not say it. He seems, indeed, to stand high in the world
+on a pedestal which has no legs to it. That is how I describe him. For
+the rest, he is rich, and I have never heard him utter an opinion
+which was not derived from others or altogether banal. But, listen! He
+is going to speak to us."
+
+"However, I can recommend the old brandy," was all that Mr. Benoliel
+had at that moment to say.
+
+"There, what did I tell you!" said Sir James, triumphant at the
+success of his diagnosis.
+
+"Well, if his talk is banal his brandy isn't, God bless him," said
+Captain Rames. "But I interrupted you."
+
+"He has been guilty of one weakness," Sir James resumed. "He married
+into an old family of great poverty and the marriage lasted for six
+months. His wife lives handsomely in Eton Square--But I see that I am
+going to lose you, for our host is beckoning to you."
+
+Captain Rames obeyed the summons with alacrity and walked round the
+table.
+
+"I see that you are going on to Buckingham Palace," said Mr. Benoliel.
+"So I thought that I would interrupt your conversation with Sir James
+Burrell. For I want to introduce you to Mr. Smale."
+
+Mr. Smale held out his hand. At a sign from Benoliel, the butler
+brought up a chair and placed it between Smale and his host.
+
+"Sit down," said Benoliel, and Captain Rames obeyed.
+
+"Benoliel tells me," said Smale, "that you are thinking of
+Parliament."
+
+Captain Rames was startled. He could not remember that in his one
+brief conversation with his host he had even mentioned his ambition.
+
+"I inferred it from a casual word or two you let drop," said Benoliel
+with a smile.
+
+"Well, it's true," said Rames. "I should like to stand on your side
+very much, Mr. Smale, if I could find a seat to contest."
+
+Henry Smale nodded.
+
+"That, no doubt, could be arranged. You would be a strong candidate.
+You bring a reputation and some breath of romance to favor you.
+But--" and he pursed up his lips as if in doubt and looked at Captain
+Rames with a searching eye. Rames was disconcerted. He had been back
+in England for some six months, and during those six months he had
+been much sought after. At this period of his life, doubts of him had
+been rarely expressed behind his back, and never to his face. Young
+ladies whom he did not know had clamored for his autograph, young
+ladies whom he did know had approached him with a winning humility;
+established beauty had smiled at him; established fame had welcomed
+him as an equal. The calm scrutiny of Henry Smale was a displeasing
+splash of cold water.
+
+"Of course," he said, with a diffidence which he did not feel, "I
+might be a failure."
+
+And Henry Smale replied promptly:
+
+"That's just it. You might be a failure. Meanwhile you are a great
+success, and have the chance of standing quite alone in your career.
+For what you set out to do is not yet done. You leave the laurel for
+another to snatch."
+
+"That is quite true, Mr. Smale," Harry Rames replied. "But I have
+considered it. I am not yielding to an impulse. I have counted the
+risk!"
+
+He spoke with a nice adjustment of firmness and modesty. Henry Smale
+rose from his chair.
+
+"Very well," he said. "Will you come down to the House at four o'clock
+to-morrow afternoon? I will introduce you to Hanley, the chief whip."
+
+Captain Rames flushed with pleasure.
+
+"Thank you, I shall be delighted," he cried, rising in his turn; and
+as the two men shook hands, Mr. Benoliel said gently:
+
+"I was thinking of Ludsey. It has no candidate on your side, Smale."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XI
+
+                          A MAN ON THE MAKE
+
+
+A week later, and much about the same hour, Captain Rames was driven
+along the Mall in St. James's Park. Friday had come round again, and
+the light did not burn in the clock-tower at Westminster. But the
+windows of the admiralty blazed upon the horse-guards' parade, and its
+great doors stood open for a glittering company. It was the night of
+official dinners and receptions in honor of the king's birthday.
+Soldiers in scarlet, sailors in blue, ministers and privy councillors
+in gold, and ladies in their shimmering gowns thronged with the
+smaller fry in black coats up the shallow steps into a hall decorated
+with Union Jacks. There was a thrill of expectancy in the air that
+evening. Rumors were rife that the government was inclined to advise a
+dissolution. Members' wives were speculating whether they must go back
+to the constituencies and tread the ways of deference; their husbands
+how soon the time would come when they must exchange the erect dignity
+of the member for the supple curves of the candidate; and curious eyes
+dwelt, as if in hope of answer upon a sturdy white-haired man with a
+blunt, good-humored face, who, wearing a uniform with epaulets, left
+you in doubt whether he was a fireman or an admiral. He was, however,
+the Prime-Minister, and he stood in the hall amongst his friends,
+bearing the world lightly according to his wont. He stepped forward
+and shook hands with Rames as he passed, and so turned again to his
+friends. He was heard to say, "I have to-day achieved the ambition of
+my life;" and curious ears eager to glean a hint were inclined toward
+him.
+
+"To-day?" one of the group exclaimed. "You have been Prime-Minister
+for three years."
+
+The Prime-Minister laughed.
+
+"That's nothing," he said. "To become Prime-Minister was merely to
+take a step on the way. But to-night I wear for the first time the
+uniform of an Elder Brother of the Trinity, and that means that I need
+never wear knee-breeches again as long as I live."
+
+The curious ears were disappointed; Harry Rames shook hands with the
+First Lord of the Admiralty, passed on, and in the second room was
+touched on the elbow by Isaac Benoliel.
+
+"I have been asked by a young friend of mine to bring you to her, and
+I beg you to come at once, for she is in her most imperious mood,"
+said Mr. Benoliel in a voice of whimsical entreaty.
+
+"We will go to her as fast as we can," said Captain Rames.
+
+He had now been three months in England, and the shy warmth of many
+welcomes had made him thoroughly aware that he was a momentous
+personage to young ladies. He was human enough to enjoy his
+importance, and he followed Mr. Benoliel with alacrity toward a side
+of the room where Cynthia Daventry sat talking to a young man in the
+office of the Board of Trade. Rames noticed the clear and delicate
+profile of her face and the distinction which set her apart; he
+noticed, too, that, although she did not once look his way, the young
+gentleman in the Civil Service uniform was summarily dismissed.
+
+"Cynthia, this is Captain Rames," said Isaac Benoliel, and however
+imperious a mood Cynthia might have shown to him, she had reserved
+none of it for Captain Rames. Her eyes swept over him swiftly with the
+shy and eager look to which he had grown accustomed: she gave him her
+hand.
+
+"I am very glad to meet you," she said impulsively, "because--" and
+she halted suddenly upon the word, with the color like a rose in her
+cheeks, "I suppose that you are tired of congratulations."
+
+Captain Rames expanded: he laughed genially, a fastidious critic might
+have said too noisily.
+
+"By no means," he exclaimed. "Indeed, Miss Daventry, you may lay it on
+with a trowel."
+
+"I am not prepared to do that," answered Cynthia, and though she spoke
+lightly, her voice was guarded, and even in the eager eyes there was a
+constant watchfulness.
+
+Eight months had passed since Cynthia had sat by the bedside of Robert
+Daventry and listened to his instructions. She had taken Diana Royle
+to live with her as he had bidden, though she had taken her
+reluctantly. She had spent nearly all that time at the white house
+upon the London road, in spite of Mrs. Royle's repeated suggestion
+that Beaulieu, or preferably Cap D'Ail in the south of France would be
+more satisfactory places for wintering. Diana Royle was glad to be
+relieved from her genteel penury in Sussex Gardens, Kensington, but
+she had no liking for the country. Cynthia, however, was deaf to her
+hints. She lived for a while in solitude, broken only by the
+companionship of the few neighbors with whom she was most intimate.
+The swift deaths of the two old people who had so long lived for her
+and in her, left her desolate and inclined ever regretfully to search
+back across her life for occasions in which she had failed of kindness
+toward them, or hurt them by forgetfulness. She was young, however,
+and with no taint of morbidness. The sense of desolation passed, and
+Diana Royle began to urge a new plan.
+
+"You ought to take a house in town for the season, Cynthia. I know of
+one in an excellent position, which would just suit you. It's in
+Curzon Street, and the right end of the street, one of those nice,
+flat-fronted houses, old outside and tiled bath-rooms inside. I
+happened, I think, to see an advertisement of it to-day."
+
+Mrs. Royle handed the newspaper to Cynthia, looked it over.
+
+"We might think of it," she said.
+
+"I am sure neither Mr. nor Mrs. Daventry would have wished you to bury
+yourself always in the country."
+
+"That's true," said Cynthia. "My father looked forward to my taking a
+house in town."
+
+"I don't think you could do better than this, dear," said Diana Royle.
+"I know the house quite well by sight."
+
+"Well, we'll think of it," said Cynthia.
+
+Mrs. Royle suppressed a shrug of irritation.
+
+"You will find the house will be snapped up, dear, if you take too
+long thinking of it," she said with asperity.
+
+Cynthia looked at her with innocent eyes.
+
+"But I expect there will be other houses in London, won't there?" she
+asked.
+
+She had no wish to be churlish, she understood how deeply her
+companion longed for the paved roadways and the streets. And in her
+own heart, too, she was beginning to turn to the unknown world of
+London with an expectancy of adventure, which drew her and thrilled
+her, even while she hesitated.
+
+"I don't understand you, Cynthia," Diana Royle cried in exasperation.
+"Are you afraid?"
+
+The question was intended merely as a gibe, but Cynthia turned to her
+with startled eyes, and Mrs. Royle knew that she had chanced upon a
+truth.
+
+"Of what are you afraid?" she asked curiously, and Cynthia answered
+while she looked into the fire:
+
+"I once lay all night staring into a great bright mirror which
+revealed to me a shut door. I was in terror lest the door should open.
+I dreaded what might come through. I seem still to be looking into the
+great mirror, and with the same kind of fear. Only now the door opens
+upon the world, and not on the passage of a house."
+
+Diana Royle gathered up her embroidery and her book.
+
+"If you are going to talk that sort of nonsense, Cynthia, I shall go
+to bed," she remarked sternly, and left Cynthia still gazing into the
+fire.
+
+Cynthia had not been speaking with affectation. The terror with which
+her father had for so long inspired her had left its mark deep, as
+Robert Daventry upon his death-bed had understood. He was dead--yes,
+but she could not rid her thoughts of the dreadful destiny which he
+had proposed for her. By so little she had escaped it. She would look
+round the room with its books and its dainty appointments, and feel
+the arms of her chair to make sure that all was real.
+
+"If he had carried me away!" she would cry. "If he had come back with
+the law at his side and had carried me away!" And the streets of
+Buenos Ayres would pass before her eyes in a procession of blazing
+thoroughfares and dimly lighted lanes. And because she had escaped by
+so little, she looked out upon all unknown things with apprehension.
+Moreover, Daventry's disclosure to her upon his death-bed had, in a
+strange way, added to her apprehension. There were three people--thus
+her thoughts ran; two of them seeking to hide from her knowledge which
+they thought would cause her pain; and she the third, seeking to hide
+from them, just for the same reason, that the knowledge was hers
+already. The years of terror had been needless, yet they had been
+endured, and it was love itself which had inflicted them. Kindness
+then could do just the same harm as the deliberate will to hurt. She
+took that thought into her heart of hearts, and because of it dreaded
+what might come through when the door opened upon the world.
+
+With the coming of the spring, however, there came a stir in her
+blood. It was a spring of sunlit days and warm, soft nights. The great
+garden bursting into leaf and blossom, the annual miracle of tender
+green, the return of the birds, and the renewal of melody quickened
+the girl's pulses, gave to her a lightness of spirit, and made her
+dreamily expectant of wonders. She walked of an evening under her
+great cedar trees, with the flowers and the paths glimmering pale in
+the warm dusk, and the earth whispered to her of things as yet beyond
+her knowledge; throbbing moments of life, dreams minted in events. She
+woke eagerly to the clear, early mornings and the blackbirds calling
+on the lawn; she lingered on that lawn when the windows in the house
+were alight and the nightingales sang in the copses, and from some
+distant wood the clear, double note of a cuckoo was borne to her
+across the darkness. There came an evening in the middle of May when
+she burst her sheath like any bud on the bole of one of her chestnut
+trees. She stood a creature of emotion. The soft wind brought to her
+ears the chimes of the clock in the great church tower at Ludsey.
+Desire for the adventure overswept her fears. Her feet danced, and her
+youth had its way with her.
+
+She could see through the long open window Diana Royle in the
+drawing-room. She ran across the grass.
+
+"Di!"
+
+Some new sound in her voice, a leap, a thrill, made Diana look up. She
+saw a look in the girl's face, a light in her eyes, a soft color in
+her cheeks which quite transfigured her.
+
+"I have been rather a brute, Di," cried Cynthia. "We will go to
+London."
+
+"When?"
+
+"As soon as we can pack."
+
+A telegram was sent off to Mr. Benoliel, who was now in Grosvenor
+Square. He was bidden to work his quickest and his best. The furnished
+house in Curzon Street was still unlet. It was secured, and by the
+beginning of June Cynthia had come to town. There she was of course
+unknown. But she had made many friends in Warwickshire. Mr. Benoliel
+set his shoulder to the wheel; and she had a handsome balance at the
+bank. Add to these advantages her looks, and it will be seen that it
+was fairly smooth sailing for Cynthia during her first season. She
+danced, she dined, she lunched at Hurlingham, she went to plays and to
+the opera, she rode under the trees of the Row in the morning, she
+went up in a balloon; she came with both hands outstretched for new
+experiences. Yet she grasped them with a certain wariness. Eager she
+was, but her eagerness was guarded. For dim in the shadows at the back
+of her mind there was still the image of the mirror and the door. She
+had been in London less than a month when Harry Rames was brought to
+her side by Mr. Benoliel.
+
+They talked for a moment upon immaterial topics, and then Mr. Benoliel
+turned to Harry Rames:
+
+"So it is all settled, I hear."
+
+"Practically," replied Rames. "I have still to be formally adopted as
+prospective candidate by the Three Hundred, but that will be done at a
+meeting on Monday night."
+
+"Then there is no longer any reason why we should keep the matter
+secret, especially from Miss Daventry, who lives not five miles from
+your constituency. Cynthia," and both men turned toward her, "Captain
+Rames is going to stand for Ludsey at the next election."
+
+Captain Rames smiled modestly, expecting congratulations. He liked
+congratulations, especially from pretty girls, but he was
+disappointed. He saw only a wrinkle of perplexity upon Cynthia's
+forehead and a shadow in her eyes.
+
+"Why?" she asked.
+
+"You disapprove?" said Rames.
+
+Cynthia drew back.
+
+"I have no right to disapprove," she said coldly, and Harry Rames
+planted himself sturdily on both his feet in front of her.
+
+"Nevertheless you do," he insisted.
+
+In spite of herself, a faint smile of amusement played about Cynthia's
+lips as she watched him. She felt constrained to accept his challenge.
+
+"I should have thought--" she said with a trifle of hesitation; "it's
+not my business, of course--you may think it an impertinence--but
+since you challenge me, I should have thought that you would have done
+better to have gone back to the Antarctic again."
+
+"That's just what Smale said," remarked Mr. Benoliel, and he moved
+away.
+
+"That's just what Smale said, what every one will say. But it's all
+wrong," Rames exclaimed emphatically. "I was very glad to go South. I
+am very glad now that I went; but once is enough."
+
+A little wrinkle of disdain showed about Cynthia's mouth.
+
+"No doubt there were many hardships."
+
+Captain Rames was nettled.
+
+"Yes, there were, Miss Daventry, a great many, and singularly
+unpleasant ones. I have been twenty-four hours in a sleeping-bag with
+two other men. The sleeping-bag was sewn up on the inside, it was
+within a tent, we were so close together that we could only turn round
+one at a time, and we smoked in the bag, and still we were deadly
+cold. And I hate being cold. Yes, there were hardships, and though
+it's easy enough to remember them lightly here in the Admiralty, they
+were not delightful when they happened. But I should face them once
+more if I wanted to go back. Only I don't. I never want to see an
+ice-pack again as long as I live."
+
+The bluff confidence with which he spoke convinced Cynthia that it was
+not a fear of the hardships which had affected him. There she had been
+wrong, and she made amends.
+
+"I have no doubt the hardships wouldn't deter you if you wanted to
+go," she admitted. "But what I don't understand is why you don't want
+to." And a greater emphasis crept into her voice than she had meant to
+use, and gave to her words the wistfulness of an appeal. "I should
+have thought," she cried, "that you could never have rested until you
+had finished what you had begun."
+
+"That's true to the letter," he replied. "That's why I am standing for
+Ludsey."
+
+Cynthia looked up at him in surprise.
+
+"I don't think that I understand," she said quietly, and she made room
+upon the couch at her side. Harry Rames took the place. The appeal in
+her voice was a flattery which he quite failed to understand. Though
+Cynthia was young, and though she walked no longer in her enchanted
+garden, something of that spirit of romance, which had guided her
+there, had revived in her of late. Captain Rames was one of the chosen
+men for whom the turnstile had revolved; now that she met him in the
+flesh she could not forget it. He was of her dreams, he had marched in
+the procession of heroes, and though disillusionment had come to her
+he still wore a look of the heroic in her thoughts. All the more
+because disillusionment had come to her she wished him to retain the
+look. Her appeal was a prayer that he should stamp it upon his image
+for good and all.
+
+"May I explain it all to you?" he asked. He sat down beside her, and
+in answer to that gentle appeal of hers to make the best of himself,
+he drew for her clearly and succinctly and proudly the picture of a
+man on the make. "I went South, first and last, to get on in the
+world," he began. "As I say, I was very glad to go. The journey was a
+great experience. Yes, three years of my life were very well spent
+upon it; but they were very well spent, not because the journey was a
+great experience, but because it is now the great help to me in
+getting on, which I always thought it was going to be."
+
+He took no notice of the disappointment gathering upon Cynthia's face.
+He was not aware of it. Here was a girl of remarkable loveliness,
+wistfully appealing to him to explain the inner workings of his mind,
+and he was delighted to gratify her wish.
+
+"I can hardly remember the time when I was not diligently looking for
+a chance to get on. I was poor, you see. I am so still, indeed. I had
+none of those opportunities which money commands. I had somehow to
+create or find them. There's a motto in gold letters above the clock
+in the great hall at Osborne, the first of all mottoes in its superb
+confidence:
+
+
+               "'There is nothing the navy cannot do.'"
+
+
+Cynthia turned to him with eagerness.
+
+"Yes," she said with a smile. "For a boy to have that plain and simple
+statement before his eyes each day, that's splendid. I suppose a boy
+would never speak of it, but it would be to him a perpetual
+inspiration."
+
+"Yes," said Rames, "if all he thought of was the navy; if his
+ambitions were bound up with the navy. But mine weren't, you see, and
+I used to worry over that sentence even then. 'There is nothing the
+navy cannot do.' Very well. But that didn't mean that this little
+particular, insignificant cog-wheel in the navy machine was going to
+do anything special, or, indeed, anything at all. And I wanted to do
+things--I myself, not the navy."
+
+"To do things?" Cynthia asked quietly, and her lips drooped a little
+at the corners, "Or to become a personage?"
+
+Captain Rames laughed good-humoredly.
+
+"I can meet you there, Miss Daventry. There's no contradiction in the
+phrases. To become a personage is to secure the opportunity of doing
+things, and when you are a personage you soon find things which want
+doing. After all, how many of the great statesmen started out to be
+big men first. They had ideas, I grant you, but they had to make
+themselves big men by hook or by crook before they could carry them
+out. Look at Disraeli. I have been reading up these fellows. He did a
+lot of things. He got the Suez Canal shares. He is the author and
+begetter of the Imperial Idea. That's what you remember and admire him
+for. Yes; but don't forget his velvet trousers, and his habit of
+reciting his epic poems in the drawing-room after dinner. He set out
+first of all to be a personage. So do I in my small way. He chose
+velvet trousers and epic poems. I went down toward the South Pole. We
+each chose the path of least resistance."
+
+Cynthia was silenced, but not convinced. There must be hundreds of
+instances to confute him, only for the moment she could not remember
+any of them. And one quality in Captain Rames impressed her.
+
+"You speak as if you had thought all these things out," she said.
+
+"I have had to," he replied.
+
+"I wonder that you went into the navy at all."
+
+"My father put me there," he answered.
+
+Cynthia looked him over again, noting the strong, square face, the
+direct, the practical, common-sense, uninspired look of him. He would
+get on without a doubt. There was a great deal of force to push him
+on, and no great delicacy of character to hold him back. Scruples
+would not trouble him, and he would not fail of friends. He was of the
+type which makes friends easily. Even she herself was attracted. He
+would get on probably by trampling upon others, but he would do it
+good-humoredly, and with no desire to cause unnecessary pain. There
+are men, after all, who put nails in their boots to do the trampling.
+
+"I wonder, with your views," she said, upon an impulse, "that you
+didn't leave the navy long ago and go into the city."
+
+Harry Rames looked at her quickly.
+
+"It's rather curious that you should have said that; for, a few years
+ago, I was actually thinking of the city, and wondering whether I
+could make a fortune quickly there."
+
+Cynthia laughed suddenly. Her suggestion had been uttered in sarcasm.
+Youth is disinclined to rate the making of money high in its standard
+of careers. Captain Ramos would never have passed the turnstile had
+she spoken with him when the turnstile was.
+
+"What held me back," he continued, quite unconscious that he was
+toppling off a hero's perch,--and indeed he would have been totally
+indifferent had he known,--"what held me back was the knowledge that I
+should be beginning too old. One has so very little time," he
+exclaimed with a touch of passion in his voice. "I would like to go on
+living and living and living for a century. As it is, one begins at
+twenty at the earliest, and then with luck one may have fifty-five
+years--that's all," and the prospect of the disintegration of his
+powers at the early age of seventy-five affected him with so much
+melancholy that Cynthia laughed again, but this time with a clear and
+joyous ring of amusement.
+
+"Never mind, Captain Rames, I am sure you will live every day of your
+fifty-five years, and that is more than all can say."
+
+"They are only thirty-five now," he grumbled. "However,"--he was
+not to be diverted from the pleasant business of unfolding his
+character,--"I might still have gone into the city, when one morning
+in June, as I was walking round the corner of Buckingham Palace to
+Constitution Hill, I saw on the other side of the road the president
+of the Geographical Society. I knew him slightly. I had read of the
+expedition; I was aware that he was organizing it. It came upon me in
+a flash, 'By George, here's my chance at last,' and I ran across the
+road and applied for the command."
+
+Cynthia nodded her head.
+
+"So that's how you became connected with the expedition--a pure piece
+of chance," she said slowly. "If you hadn't turned round that corner
+to Constitution Hill----"
+
+"Oh, I should have dropped across something else, no doubt," said
+Rames.
+
+"And now you are going into Parliament."
+
+Cynthia was endeavoring to readjust her forecasts with the facts.
+
+"If I get elected," said Rames.
+
+"Oh, you will get elected," replied Cynthia confidently, but there was
+no admiration in her confidence. It was almost disdainful. "They will
+call you 'Breezy Harry Rames,' and they will elect you by an immense
+majority."
+
+"I am very glad you think that," Rames returned imperturbably; and he
+leaned forward with his elbow on his knees and spoke to her upon an
+altogether different note; so that the disdain died out of her face.
+He told her how in answer to Henry Smale's invitation he had gone down
+to Westminster in the afternoon, had sent in his card, had waited by
+the rails in the great round of St. George's Hall. Smale had come out
+from the House, and had fetched him down the stone passage into the
+lobby. A great man was speaking, and the lobby was nearly empty. But
+he finished his speech in a few moments, and the doors burst open and
+there was an eruption of members from the Chamber. Some stood in
+groups talking eagerly, others hurried to the libraries and the
+smoking-room, and barristers walked up and down in pairs, talking over
+their cases for the morrow. There was not a thing in that lobby, from
+the round clock above the doors of the House to the post-office and
+the whip's rooms which had not impressed itself vividly upon Rames's
+mind. Every now and then the doors would swing open as a member passed
+into the Chamber, and just for a moment Rames had a glimpse of the
+green benches, saw the great mace gleam upon the table, the books and
+the three clerks gowned and wigged behind it, and behind the clerks
+the dim figure of the Speaker under the canopy of his chair.
+
+Of what he saw on that afternoon Rames spoke with an enthusiasm and a
+modesty which quite took Cynthia by surprise. He saw dignity in every
+detail, was prepared to magnify with great meanings the simplest
+ceremony and form. He could not but impress her with his picture, so
+greatly impressed was he himself, so keenly had he longed to walk
+unchallenged down that forbidden way between the rails and to pass
+through the swing doors over the matting to his place on the green
+benches. People in the streets might sneer, or go about their business
+unconcerned. The cynics might talk of the Ins and Outs, and speak of
+Parliament as the most expensive game in which a race of players of
+games indulges, but there in that small room, with the soft light
+pouring down from the roof, and very often the morning light streaming
+in through the clerestory windows, the great decisions were ratified
+which might hamper or advance the future of forty millions.
+
+Henry Smale had paced the lobby for half an hour with Rames, setting
+before him clearly the risks which he would run.
+
+"I don't want to advise you one way or the other," said Smale, "but it
+is not as if you had no career, and you should come to your decision
+with your eyes open. I speak to you as to one of the ambitious. If you
+go in, I take it, you go in with an eye on the Treasury bench. Well, I
+can tell you this: the House of Commons makes a few, but it breaks a
+few, and if it advances some, it mars a good many. Poverty is a
+serious hindrance, for it means that you cannot give the time to the
+House of Commons which it now claims."
+
+"There are the barristers," objected Rames.
+
+"The House of Commons is in their line of business," returned Henry
+Smale. "The highest offices of the law are reached through the House
+of Commons. Moreover, the questions which arise for debate here have
+often been the subject already of suits in the law courts. They have
+acquired, too, the knack of extracting rapidly the essential things
+out of a paper or a bill. Thus, the barristers come especially
+equipped. Yet, even so, very often they do not make their mark. And
+here is a point for you, Captain Rames." Henry Smale turned with a
+warning finger upraised and stopped in his walk. "The most
+distinguished men enter this House and never get the ear of it. The
+House of Commons is not ungenerous, but for eight hours a day through
+a long portion of the year people are talking in that Chamber there,
+and it will not provide an audience unless, first, the speaker has
+something of his own to contribute, and, secondly, can express his
+contribution. It does not, on the one hand, ask for oratory; it is
+not, on the other, content even with exhaustive knowledge; it demands
+character, personality, the power of coining out of your knowledge
+some judgments of your own, the power of explaining your judgment in
+clear and intelligible phrases sufficiently vivid to arrest its
+attention. I admit at once that if you succeed, success here is
+sweeter than anywhere else; its recognition is so immediate. But, on
+the other hand, here disappointment is more bitter. To come in with
+ambition, and to be left behind in the race--there is no destiny more
+galling."
+
+"Yes," said Rames quietly, "I have thought over these things. There is
+that risk. I am prepared to take it."
+
+"Very well," returned Smale, and once more he turned on the stone
+pavement, and with Rames at his side retraced his steps. "Let us
+suppose that you have got the ear of the House, that the benches fill
+up when you rise, and men stand at the bar to listen to you. Well,
+even so, you may lose your seat, and you may not yet have established
+yourself firmly enough to make your party find you another. There you
+are--out, your dreams dissolved, your ambitions stopped, yourself
+miserable, and your presence in this lobby an insignificance. Where
+you walked by right, you come as a guest; you have been, and you are
+not; you must turn to something else, while your thoughts are here,
+and very likely you are already too old to turn to something else."
+
+"You put the worst side of it all in front of me, Mr. Smale."
+
+"No," replied Mr. Smale. "Visit the political clubs a couple of months
+after a general election, talk to the defeated candidates who two
+months back were members, you will know I am talking the truth. The
+place enmeshes you. And mind, not because of the sensations. The
+sensations happily are rare. It is a humdrum assembly. I remember once
+taking a foreigner into the strangers' gallery at the time of a
+European crisis. An indiscreet letter had been sent. The foreigner was
+elated. He said to me, 'This will be very interesting. The Commons
+will discuss the letter which has so convulsed Europe.' But it was
+doing nothing of the kind. It was discussing whether the Tyne, Durham,
+and Hartlepool Railway paid its employees sufficiently well to justify
+Parliament in allowing it to build a bridge across a stream of which
+you have never heard."
+
+Captain Rames smiled.
+
+"I see a good many men in this lobby," he rejoined. "I do not notice
+that any of them are bored. Indeed, for the most part, they seem very
+busy."
+
+"That is one of the tragedies of the House of Commons," Smale replied.
+"There are so many men in who during the whole of each session are
+extremely busy doing nothing; they haven't a moment to spare, they do
+nothing with so much energy and persistence. One moment they are in
+the library writing to a constituent who wants to know why the medal
+which his father earned in the Crimea has not yet arrived; the next
+moment they rush into the House because the famous Irishman with the
+witty tongue is up; they are off again to the outer lobby to tell a
+visitor that he can't see the Prime-Minister--'Industry without work,
+idleness without rest,' that is how this House was once described,
+and, believe me, the description is not inapt."
+
+Thus said Henry Smale, but Harry Rames was not to be turned aside.
+
+"I will take all these risks very willingly, Mr. Smale," he cried, "I
+want to be in here."
+
+Henry Smale smiled, ceased from his arguments, and clapped Rames in a
+kindly fashion on the shoulder. "I have done my duty," he said.
+"Come!"
+
+He led Rames through a little doorway at the side of which sat three
+or four messengers, and at the end of a narrow passage tapped upon a
+door.
+
+"Come in," said a voice, and as Smale ushered in Harry Rames a man of
+pleasant address and an exquisite suit of clothes arose and welcomed
+them.
+
+"Hamlin," said Henry Smale, "this is Captain Rames."
+
+Mr. Hamlin shook hands cordially with Rames and invited him to a
+chair.
+
+"We shall be very glad to have you in the House," he said. He beamed.
+He seemed to have been waiting for Captain Rames to complete his
+happiness. "I think Ludsey was suggested."
+
+"Benoliel suggested it," said Smale. "He's a good judge too."
+
+"There is no candidate arranged yet. I will write to Ludsey at once."
+
+Smale and Rames left the room together.
+
+"I should think you might consider that settled," said Smale.
+
+Rames thanked him and referred to Hamlin's charm of manner. Smale's
+small eyes twinkled.
+
+"That's why he sits in that room. He's the chief Whip." And shaking
+hands with Rames Mr. Smale abruptly returned to the House.
+
+The gist of the conversation with Smale Rames told to Cynthia in the
+reception-room at the Admiralty, and she listened with a growing
+interest. Then once more his note changed. He spoke with a boyish
+enthusiasm of his aims. To force an entrance into that arena; the
+entrance gained, to fight himself into the station of a great man;
+ultimately to govern and exercise authority--the note of personal
+ambition rose to a pitch of exultation in his voice. Of principles he
+obviously had no care, theories of politics were to him of no account.
+He was the political adventurer pure and simple. Cynthia sat with her
+eyes of dark blue clouded, and a real disappointment at her heart. She
+raised her face to his, and a little smile trembled upon her lips, and
+even her voice shook ever so slightly.
+
+"You have been very honest to me about it all," she said. "I thank you
+for that."
+
+Captain Rames was a trifle bewildered. He could not see that he had
+anything to conceal.
+
+"Good-night," she said as she rose, "I see my friend Mrs. Royle
+waiting for me."
+
+She gave him her hand and moved away for a few steps and then stopped.
+Harry Rames was at her side before she had stopped. She turned to him
+timidly with the blood mounting very prettily into her cheeks.
+
+"I suppose," she said, "that your journey to the South really counts
+now for very little in your thoughts. Yet you must have had a great
+many wishes for your success sent to you from all parts of the world
+before you started. I wonder you can forget them all, and leave that
+work unfinished."
+
+It seemed to Captain Rames that she had hit upon a rather far-fetched
+argument to persuade him to a second journey to the South.
+
+"Well, I am getting a good many wishes for my success now, and I hear
+them spoken," he said with a smile. "It is true that I got all sorts
+of messages and telegrams before I sailed to the South. But to tell
+you the truth I was rather too busy to read them. I have got them all
+tied up somewhere in a brown-paper parcel."
+
+Cynthia seemed actually to flinch. She turned away abruptly.
+
+"I wanted to ask of you a favor," said Rames. "Mr. Benoliel said that
+you lived near Ludsey. You could do a great deal if you would help me.
+Will you?"
+
+Cynthia turned back to him, her eyes shone angrily, the blood came
+into her cheeks in a rush.
+
+"No," she said decisively, and without another word she walked away.
+
+"I might have struck her," thought Captain Rames. He knew nothing
+of a telegram from the Daventry estancia which lay forgotten in that
+brown-paper parcel.
+
+None the less he walked home across the Mall treading upon air. Great
+people had moved out of their way to make his acquaintance; Cabinet
+ministers had promised to speak for him; important ladies had smiled
+their friendliest. He looked back upon the days of his insignificance,
+and his heart was buoyant within him. Certainly one girl with
+dark-blue eyes and a face like a rose-leaf had presumed to disapprove
+of him. But there! Girls! You never knew what odd notions nested in
+their pretty heads. If a man on the make steered his course by a
+girl's favor, he would soon shipwreck on a snag. However, this girl
+must be soothed down. Harry Rames could not afford to have an enemy at
+Ludsey. But he had no doubt that he could soothe her down. He walked
+home, softly whistling under his breath.
+
+Cynthia for her part went home in a different mood. She had lost
+another illusion to-night.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XII
+
+                              LUNGATINE
+
+
+The threatened dissolution was, after all, postponed, and through the
+autumn months Captain Rames went busily up and down between London and
+Ludsey. He made his head-quarters at an hotel on a climbing street in
+the thick of the town, and spent his days in the public view and his
+nights at meetings and at local festivities.
+
+Cynthia Daventry, five miles away, heard stories of his indefatigable
+energy and once or twice she met him in the streets; and once or twice
+he snatched an afternoon and swept over in a motor-car to see her. She
+welcomed him with a pleasure which she rather resented, and not for
+worlds would she have asked him how his campaign was faring. She did
+not, however, have to ask. For either Diana Royle was present and
+eagerly questioned him, or if Cynthia were alone he plunged into the
+subject himself. Captain Rames was at some pains to amuse her and he
+succeeded. Little incidents of the campaign, whether they told against
+himself or not; sketches of queer characters whom he came across; an
+anecdote now and then, drawn from the ancient history of the City--he
+poured them out to her, making it quite clear with an apparently
+ingenuous frankness that he had deliberately stored them in his memory
+purely for her amusement. He was engaged in the work of soothing her
+down. Diana Royle would rhapsodize after he had whirled away in a
+cloud of dust.
+
+"What a wonderful man! How energetic! How clever!"
+
+"And how complacent!" said Cynthia.
+
+"What high principle!" Diana gushed lyrically. "What character!"
+
+"And what cunning!" added Cynthia, with a droop of her lips.
+
+Diana tapped the floor with an irritable foot.
+
+"Very well, darling. Look for an angel, by all means. You will be very
+glad of a man later on." Then she laughed pleasantly. "But I am not
+deceived. You talk lightly of him when he is gone, but when he is here
+you fix your big eyes on him, and, though you say nothing, every
+movement of you asks for more."
+
+Cynthia was startled.
+
+"Well, perhaps I do," she admitted. "I suppose that I have a kind of
+hope that I will hear, not more, but something different from what I
+am hearing."
+
+"That's so like you, my dear," Diana rejoined; she was all sugar and
+vinegar. "If Julius Cæsar came back to earth, you would want him
+different. But that's the way with romantic people. They look for
+heroes all day and never see them when they knock at the front door."
+
+Cynthia laughed good-humoredly. There was this much of truth in Diana
+Royle's attack. She had been searching through the words of Harry
+Rames all the while when he was uttering them for a glimpse of some
+other being beside the man on the make. Certain qualities she
+recognized. Enthusiasm, for instance. But it was enthusiasm for the
+arena, not for any cause to be won there. A shrewd foresight again was
+evident. But it was foresight to pluck the personal advantage. Here,
+it seemed to her, was the conscience of the country stirring on all
+sides to the recognition of great and unnecessary evils in its midst,
+and Harry Rames was alone unaffected. Yet in a measure she was
+impressed. He had so closely laid his plans. He gave her yet more
+evidence when he came again.
+
+"I have got a rule or two," he said. "All demands for pledges from
+leagues and associations go into the waste-paper basket. I'll answer
+questions if they are asked me by a man in my constituency. I won't
+put my name to a general proposition and post it to London. Many a
+good man has been let down that way. Then I won't canvass. I won't
+solicit a vote. I don't believe in it. There's one only point of view
+for a candidate: that the electors are doing themselves a service by
+electing him, and not doing him one. You have got to persuade them of
+that."
+
+"Don't you find it difficult?" asked Cynthia, innocently.
+
+Rames laughed.
+
+"Yes, I do," he said. "The electors have their point of view, too. But
+I won't canvass, I am there at my hotel if any one wants to see me. I
+am at public meetings, and I go to social functions. That's a good
+move," and Captain Rames nodded his head. "You meet the fellows on the
+other side and if you can get them friendly, you stop them coming out
+hot against you. Makes a lot of difference, that. Then there's wisdom
+in taking a firm stand upon a point or so. Your own people, treat them
+properly, will always give you a bit of latitude, and a reputation for
+courage is a fine asset in politics as in anything else."
+
+"But you mustn't overdo it, I suppose," said Cynthia ironically.
+
+"Oh, no, you must be careful about that," replied Rames seriously.
+"What you want to produce is an impression that you are not pliable,
+that industries will be safe under your watch--that's for the business
+men--and that social advancement will not be neglected--that's for the
+artisans. You know the election is coming now," he suddenly exclaimed.
+"Do come to one of my meetings!"
+
+Cynthia looked doubtful.
+
+"I don't think," she said, "that I believe very much in any work
+which--I don't express what I mean very well--which hasn't a great
+dream at the heart of it."
+
+Rames looked up into her face quickly and grew suddenly serious. He
+made no comment upon her words, however.
+
+"After all that's no reason why you shouldn't come to one of my
+meetings."
+
+Cynthia smiled.
+
+"I will come to the last one on the night before the poll," she
+replied reluctantly.
+
+"I shall hold you to it," said Harry Rames, and he went away well
+pleased with his visit. Cynthia was popular in Ludsey. So Cynthia
+should sit on that momentous evening in the front row upon the
+platform. Also he would make for her benefit an unusually effective
+speech. Cynthia from the window watched his motor-car spin away in a
+whirl of dust. He was going to preside that evening at a meeting of
+the Salvation Army.
+
+The dissolution took place on the fifteenth of January. But the real
+contest had begun a fortnight before in Ludsey. Harry Rames rushed
+into it as if it had been a foot-ball rally. He spoke all day, in
+factories and outside factories, in halls and schoolrooms and from
+club-room windows. He ransacked the morning papers for new pegs on
+which to hang his arguments; he kicked off at foot-ball matches and
+the aim of the kick was entirely political; and at the end of three
+weeks even he was very tired and inclined to recognize an element of
+humiliation in the conduct of a successful campaign.
+
+It was eleven o'clock at night. There was to be but one more day of
+it, but one more meeting to-morrow night, the big, final rally on the
+eve of the poll. Harry Rames lay outstretched upon his sofa with his
+pipe between his lips cradled pleasantly upon that reflection, when
+the door of his room opened and a waiter brought in a card. Rames
+waved it aside.
+
+"I can see no one."
+
+"The gentleman said that his business was important."
+
+Rames grumbled and took the card from the salver.
+
+"M. Poizat," he read. "A Frenchman. Certainly not. I won't see him."
+
+The waiter, an old English servant, a rare being nowadays, even in a
+country hotel, stood his ground.
+
+"He's lived in Ludsey a long time, sir."
+
+"Oh, has he!" said Rames. "Tell him I am out."
+
+The waiter shook his head.
+
+"He has already told me that you are in, sir. Come, you had better see
+him, sir. Perhaps he's the ha'porth of tar."
+
+"Oh, very well," said Rames. "But I tell you, William, that I am in
+the mood to assert my rights as a man."
+
+"Mustn't do that, sir, until the day after to-morrow. You are only a
+candidate till then."
+
+William retired. Rames fell back upon his sofa. He meant to lie there
+prone upon his back, even if his visitor held all the votes of Ludsey
+in the hollow of his hand. Then the door opened and was shut again. A
+little, puckish old man stood in the room, danced lightly on his feet,
+skipped in the air, twirled before Captain Rames's astonished eyes and
+finally struck an inviting attitude, both arms extended and one foot
+advanced, like the pictures of the quack doctors in the newspaper
+advertisements.
+
+"Oh, he's out of a lunatic asylum," Captain Rames almost groaned
+aloud. "He won't even have a vote."
+
+The little man skimmed forward with agility, fixing a bright and
+twinkling pair of eyes upon the prostrate candidate.
+
+"How old do you think I am?" he asked, and he whirled his arms.
+
+"You are the youngest thing I have ever seen," replied Rames with
+conviction. "I didn't know that people were even born as young as you
+are."
+
+"I am seventy-three," exclaimed the little man with a chuckle. He
+squared up at an imaginary antagonist and delivered a deadly blow in
+the air.
+
+"Do you mind not doing that!" said Rames mildly. "My nerves are not
+what they should be, and if you do it again I shall probably cry. I
+suppose that you are M. Poizat----"
+
+"I am, sir," said the little man. He changed his tactics. He no longer
+whirled his arms in the air. He advanced to the sofa and suddenly put
+up his foot on the edge.
+
+"Feel my calf!" he said abruptly.
+
+Captain Rames meekly obeyed.
+
+"You ought to have a medal," he said languidly. "You really ought. At
+seventy-three, too! For myself I am like butter, and rather inferior
+butter, on a very hot day."
+
+M. Poizat nodded his head.
+
+"I know. That's why I am here!" He looked about the room and with the
+importance of a conspirator he drew out of his pocket a medicine
+bottle filled with a brown liquid. "Why am I so young?" he asked. "Why
+is my leg of iron? Listen to my voice. Why is it so clear?--It's all
+'Lungatine,'" and with immense pride he reverently placed the bottle
+on the mantel-shelf. He turned again to Captain Rames.
+
+"I heard you to-night. I suffered with you. What a voice! How harsh!
+How terrible! And yet what good words if only one could have heard
+them! I said to myself: 'That poor man. I can cure him. He does not
+know of Lungatine. He makes us all uncomfortable because he does not
+know of Lungatine.' So I ran home and brought a bottle."
+
+"It's very good of you, I am sure," said Rames, "But look!" He pointed
+to a table. Throat sprays, tonics, lozenges, encumbered it. "The
+paraphernalia of a candidate," he said.
+
+M. Poizat smiled contemptuously. He drew from his breast pocket a
+sheaf of letters.
+
+"See how many in Ludsey owe their health to me!" he cried, and he gave
+the letters to Rames, who read them over with an 'oh' and an 'ah' of
+intense admiration when any particularly startling cure was gratefully
+recorded.
+
+"You are a chemist here I suppose--naturalized, of course?" asked
+Captain Rames.
+
+"I have a restaurant," M. Poizat corrected him. "Lungatine is merely
+one of my discoveries."
+
+He sat down complacently. Captain Rames started up in dismay upon his
+elbow.
+
+"I have a great deal to do to-morrow," he said piteously. The plea was
+of no avail. Captain Rames was in the grip of that most terrible of
+all constituents, the amateur inventor. M. Poizat drew his chair to
+the side of the sofa and went through the tale of his inventions. It
+was the usual inevitable list--an automatic lift which would work with
+absolute safety in any mine, a torpedo which would destroy any navy, a
+steel process which would resist any torpedo, and a railway-coupling.
+
+"I'll bring you the models," he cried.
+
+"No, no," cried Rames, springing from his sofa in dismay. Then he laid
+his hand on the inventor's shoulder and smiled wisely:
+
+"Royal commissions for you," he said. "They're the fellows for models.
+I'll see about some. Royal commissions for you. Thank you for your
+Lungatine. Good-night, my friend, good-night."
+
+Gently, but firmly, he raised the inventor from his chair, while he
+shook hands with him, and conducted him toward the door.
+
+"You have your hat? Yes."
+
+"A tablespoonful six times a day in a wineglass of water."
+
+"Yes. The instructions, I see, are on the bottle."
+
+Captain Rames opened the door with his pleasantest smile.
+
+"To-morrow at your great meeting," said M. Poizat, "I shall be there.
+I shall hear what you say. Your voice will ring like a trumpet. And
+perhaps at the end of your speech, you will say that it is all due to
+Lungatine."
+
+A frosty silence followed upon the words. Captain Rames said
+indifferently:
+
+"You have been in England a long time. You are naturalized, of
+course?"
+
+M. Poizat did not reply to the question.
+
+"Perhaps you will say that it is all due to Lungatine," he repeated
+softly. "Perhaps you will say that. Who knows?"
+
+Captain Rames looked up at the ceiling.
+
+"Ah, who knows?" he said enigmatically.
+
+M. Poizat shook hands for a second time and went down the stairs.
+Captain Rames closed the door, took the cork from the bottle, wetted
+the tips of his finger, and tasted the brown liquid. It was a simple
+solution of paregoric.
+
+"I don't believe the fellow's naturalized," cried Rames, and he raised
+the bottle in the air above the coal-scuttle. But he did not let it
+drop.
+
+"Perhaps he is though," he thought. He poured away a portion of the
+liquid amongst the coal, replaced the cork, and set the bottle
+prominently upon the mantel-shelf so that if M. Poizat took it into
+his head to call again he would see it there. Then he betook himself
+to bed; and M. Poizat figured in his dreams, a grotesque, little,
+capering creature, a figure of fun, as indeed he was, to the eyes of
+wakefulness. There are people upon whose faces nature writes plainly
+hints of tragic destinies, and M. Poizat had certainly no relationship
+with these. But then nature is apt to be freakish.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIII
+
+                      THE NIGHT BEFORE THE POLL
+
+
+The walls of the great Corn Exchange were draped with banners and hung
+with gigantic mottoes. Cynthia sat in the front row of chairs upon the
+platform with Isaac Benoliel upon one side of her, and beyond him
+Diana Royle. It was the first public meeting at which she had ever
+been present, and now that the shy uneasiness at the prominence of her
+position which had troubled her when she took her seat was passing
+away, she gazed about her, eagerness in her eyes and a throb of
+excitement at her heart. In front of her a rostrum had been built out
+from the edge of the platform so that the speakers might stand upon
+the exact spot whence the voice carried with the greatest sonority.
+The rostrum was railed and hung with red cloth; the chairman's table,
+with the inevitable water-bottle, occupied it; and the small, square
+space was the only empty space in all that cavern of a hall. A few
+rows of chairs for members of the association were ranged at the front
+upon the floor; behind the chairs the people stood packed and massed
+to the doors, most of them men. The one gallery was crowded to its
+furthest nook; behind Cynthia the platform was thronged. Wherever her
+eyes turned she saw faces, faces, faces, all set in one direction, all
+white under the glare of light, all inclined toward the empty rostrum.
+It was the eve of the poll. There was a tingle of excitement in the
+air, a hushed expectancy. Only when Cynthia raised her eyes did she
+lose the vague feeling of suspense. Overhead a skylight in the roof
+was covered with a horizontal blind. One tattered corner hung down and
+as she looked up from the indistinguishable throng of faces, it
+arrested her attention as something especially individual and definite
+and single.
+
+Suddenly came a buzz and a stir. The chairman was seen to rise from a
+flight of steps at the side of the platform. He was followed by a
+tall, gaunt, loose-limbed man with a bony face, a white moustache, and
+a high, bald head. He had the look of a soldier. Cynthia took no heed
+of him. He stalked before her and sank unnoticed in his place. Behind
+him came Harry Rames, and as he passed along the narrow gangway
+between the crowded chairs, those who had seats sprang to their feet;
+and three thousand people broke like a wave into a flutter of
+handkerchiefs and a shattering thunder of applause. Above the applause
+a chant gradually swelled, two lines of a tune rather like a chime.
+Cynthia could not hear the words, but the sound, with its rise and
+fall, surged backward and forward against the walls of the Exchange
+for a full minute.
+
+Mr. Benoliel leaned toward Cynthia.
+
+"They have given him their foot-ball song. In a city of artisans, keen
+on foot-ball, that's a good sign."
+
+Cynthia nodded. But she hardly heard, she could not have answered.
+Here was something quite new to her, and overwhelmingly new. The
+thunderous outburst had taken her by the throat; for a second she felt
+choked; she had no part in politics, yet emotion woke in her and the
+tears sprang into her eyes.
+
+"What's the matter, Cynthia?" asked Diana Royle.
+
+Cynthia replied with a break in her voice between a laugh and a sob.
+
+"I don't know. It's just the crowd, I think."
+
+"And the enthusiasm of the crowd," added Mr. Benoliel. "You make me
+feel very old, Cynthia. I can listen to it quite unmoved now. But
+there was a time when I couldn't without a choking in my throat. It's
+the splendid faith of the crowd."
+
+Cynthia, arrested by the phrase, looked quickly at Benoliel. Greatly
+as she liked him she was never quite sure of him. Kind as he had been
+to her she always suspected some touch of the charlatan. He had the
+look of a man quite in earnest.
+
+"I wonder," she said, "whether mere magnetism is enough to arouse it."
+
+Mr. Benoliel did not answer; for the chairman rose at his table; and
+while he spoke the harmless necessary words, Cynthia took stock of
+Harry Rames, who was seated in the rostrum at the side of the table in
+front of her and a little to her left. The last weeks of exertion had
+left their marks; the flesh had worn thin upon his face; there were
+dark hollows beneath his eyes; he had gained a look of spirituality
+which did not belong to him. He was nervous; his hands, with the long
+fingers which never seemed to accord with the rest of him, moved
+uneasily and restlessly from the buttons of his coat to the slip of
+notes which he had placed upon the table. Cynthia was deceived by the
+look of him as she had been deceived by the fervor of the gathering.
+The outburst was not entirely, was not even chiefly, a tribute to the
+candidate. Ludsey was a political city, and by three weeks of speeches
+and agitation political feeling had been whipped to a climax of
+excitement. It sought and found its outlet to-night at this final
+rally before the poll.
+
+The cheers broke out again when Harry Rames rose and leaned his
+hand upon the rail of the rostrum. When they died down he began to
+speak--first a faltering word or two of thanks. Then his voice
+suddenly strengthened and rang firm. His fingers ceased to twitch, and
+he turned over in his mind the consecutions of his thoughts as though
+he were turning over the pages of a book. All that he had planned to
+say came clearly to him in its due order, and brought the comforting
+assurance that the rest would follow. He was master of himself, and
+being master of himself set his audience at ease to listen, Cynthia
+among the rest. Anxious as he himself, she knew now that the speech
+would go right on to its considered end. She leaned forward, all ears
+to catch the words, and all eagerness to read into them, if she could,
+the something more which was not there.
+
+But she could not; yet it was a night of triumph for Harry Rames,
+"Breezy Harry Rames." She recalled her own phrase with a disappointed
+droop of the lips more than once during the next hour. He was going to
+win. She had no doubt of it. Confidence swept from his audience to him
+and back again in waves. And he savored the joys of the orator as he
+never had before. He had the arts of the platform, and more than the
+arts, a power to bend his audience to sympathy. He knew that night the
+supreme reward, the hush of a mass of people constraining themselves
+to silence and even to immobility while a voice, low as a whisper,
+sounded audibly in every nook. He played with the suspense, prolonging
+it to the last moment of endurance, and then, by a sudden swoop to a
+sharp, clever phrase, drawing the audience to its feet and coining the
+silence in a stormy tumult of applause.
+
+He had the gift of speech; Cynthia gladly conceded it. An aptness of
+homely words, an absence of all extravagance, and a voice resonant and
+pleasant as a clear-toned, bell impressed her more than she had
+expected to be impressed. A day's rest had restored his voice for the
+time, even though M. Poizat's Lungatine had not contributed to the
+restoration.
+
+She was surprised, too, by a certain shrewdness in the matter of the
+speech. It was not so much of the platform as his manner. There was
+very little reference to the navy. "I don't mean to be considered a
+'service member,'" he had said to her once. "No one pays attention to
+the service member in the House of Commons." But here and there came
+views which struck her as new and worth consideration.
+
+"If you could teach the wives of the artisans to cook and to take an
+interest in cooking, you would have done a great deal more to solve
+the question of intemperance in this country than if you closed half
+the public-houses," he cried once and developed his theme with humor
+and some courage. He drew a picture of a wife putting her husband's
+supper on the fire, ready against the time when he should come home
+from his factory, and then running out into the street to talk to a
+neighbor and leaving the meat to grill to the toughness and dryness of
+leather.
+
+"The man comes home, sits down to it, and rises from it unsatisfied.
+What does he do? He goes out and strolls round to the public-house.
+Put a good meal, well-cooked, inside of him, and he'll not be so
+disposed to move. He'll be inclined to smoke his pipe by the fire in
+his kitchen."
+
+He passed on to other topics. The whole speech was clever and was
+uttered on a lift of enthusiasm. But again Cynthia argued, it was the
+enthusiasm for the arena, not for a cause. It was ambition without
+ideals, power without high motive.
+
+Diana Royle inclined toward her.
+
+"Aren't you satisfied now?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, he will get on," said Cynthia; and then she suddenly sat upright
+in her chair, with her lips parted and the blood bright in her cheeks.
+
+"But, after all," Rames was saying; his voice was beginning to grow
+hoarse and he raised his hand in an appeal for silence, "here are we
+discussing the work to be done, and leaving out in our discussion the
+great necessity. I don't know what you think, but to my notion there
+is no greatness in any work unless it has a dream at the heart of it.
+The world's work is done by the great dreamers. Well, here is my last
+word before the poll, perhaps the last word I shall speak in this
+constituency."
+
+He was interrupted as he had meant to be by loud repudiations of such
+a possibility.
+
+"No, no!"
+
+"You're a member already."
+
+"We'll put you in."
+
+Such phrases broke in upon the words and then a cheery voice, louder
+than the rest, shouted from the back of the hall:
+
+"Never fear! You're well patronized in Ludsey, Captain."
+
+A burst of laughter followed upon the words, and a flush of annoyance
+darkened Rames's face.
+
+"I will remind my friend that I am not a public entertainer," he said.
+"And it's really against the spirit represented in that sentence that
+I wish to direct my first words. I have my dream too--a dream. I speak
+openly to you--at my very heart. Let me tell it you. It involves a
+confession. When I first came to Ludsey six months ago, when for the
+first time I saw from the windows of my railway carriage across the
+summer fields the tall chimneys and high, long roofs of its factories,
+the delicate steeples of its churches, it was to me just a town like
+another. I will be frank, it was just a polling-booth. But as I got to
+know your city that error passed out of my thoughts."
+
+Cynthia leaned forward. He had used her own words. She could not but
+be flattered by his use of them. They had been acclaimed, too, by this
+great gathering, and she was proud of that. Not for anything would she
+have had their authorship revealed, but she was proud to hear them
+used, proud, too, because they seemed to have led, if she dared
+believe her ears, Harry Rames out of his detested breeziness into a
+contemplation of something other than the personal gain. She could
+hardly doubt him now; he spoke with so simple a sincerity. She had a
+sudden glimpse once more of her enchanted garden wherein she had
+walked with and helped the great ones of the earth. To help, herself
+unknown except by those she helped!--that had been the dream when she
+had encouraged dreams; and it sprang once more into life now as she
+listened.
+
+"It is a city," Rames continued, "where a few steps will take you out
+of the thronged streets into some old garden, quiet with the peace of
+ancient memories; some old close of plaster and black beams; some old
+room with windows deep-set in four-foot walls and wide hearths of
+centuries ago. And round about these old places stands a ring of
+factories where in good times the lights blaze until the morning and
+the whir of its machines never ceases from your ears. It is a city
+whose continuous life is written for all to see upon its buildings.
+Here kings and queens have tarried on their journeys; there chambers
+of commerce hold their meetings. From small and ancient beginnings it
+has been made by the activity of generations of men into a modern
+industrial city. Well, I have my dream. It is to be one little link in
+the continuity of its life and to do my share of service in the
+forwarding of its prosperity."
+
+A shout answered his words. He had his audience in hand. He stilled it
+with a swift gesture and his voice rang out with a laugh which had all
+the exultation of battle.
+
+"Well, we shall know to-morrow night. We are in the ice-pack now, but
+we are coming to the outer rim of it. We can see the blue water
+already. We shall be sailing smoothly upon it this time to-morrow
+night."
+
+He had been chary of references to the voyage which had made his
+reputation; all the more, therefore, this one struck home. He sat down
+tempestuously acclaimed, and turning in his chair held out his hand to
+Cynthia Daventry.
+
+"I am glad that you came," he said. "I have achieved two triumphs
+to-night. I have brought you and Mr. Benoliel to your first political
+meeting and both of you are on my platform."
+
+He shook hands with Isaac Benoliel and with Diana Royle. Cynthia
+leaned a little forward.
+
+"I, too, am glad that I came," she returned with a smile. Because of
+those last words of his, friendship was warm in her toward Harry
+Rames. She added, "You knew then that I was here--just behind you?"
+
+Rames nodded.
+
+"Yes, but I was too nervous to turn to you before I had made my
+speech. The flesh wears a little thin after three weeks of this. One
+gets jumpy. Even the tattered corner of blind hanging down there from
+the skylight seemed to-night charged with some important message." He
+spoke, ridiculing the fancy, and Cynthia, with a smile and a quick
+lift of her eyebrows, cried:
+
+"I noticed that too."
+
+"Then for the first time," said Rames, "we have something in common.
+You and I are probably the only people in the hall who noticed it. We
+have a bond of union."
+
+"A strip of tattered blind!" said Cynthia.
+
+"Well, there was nothing at all before," said Captain Rames, and he
+suddenly turned back to his seat. For the tall, gaunt man was on his
+legs.
+
+Cynthia neither heard his name nor followed his speech with any
+particular attention. It was indeed difficult to follow. He was an old
+hack of the platform with all the sounding phrases at the tip of his
+tongue. Rolling sentences, of the copybook, flowed out of him;
+declamations too vague to be understood were delivered with the vigor
+of a prophet. But he interspersed them with the familiar clichés of
+the day and each one received its salvo of applause. To Cynthia he was
+a man not so much stupid as out of place. She could imagine him at the
+head of a cavalry squadron. Here he seemed simply grotesque.
+
+On the other hand, Captain Rames did not; and the contrast between the
+two men bent her to consider whether, after all, she had not been
+wrong in her condemnation of his new career. She was in the mood to
+admit it; and when the meeting broke up and the crowd was pouring
+through the doors into the street, and those upon the platform were
+descending its steps, she found herself alone for a second on the
+rostrum with Harry Rames.
+
+"Perhaps I was wrong," she said. "I remember what you told me of Mr.
+Smale. A vivid gift of phrase--he thought that necessary. You have
+it."
+
+"On the platform--yes. But the platform's not the House," said Rames.
+"Smale told me that too. I have yet to see whether I shall carry the
+House."
+
+"Yet those last words," said Cynthia--"about the city and the
+continuity of its life and your pride to have a little share in it.
+Oh, that was finely done."
+
+And upon Rames's face there came a grin.
+
+"Yes, I thought that would fetch 'em," he said.
+
+Cynthia stepped back. Once again it occurred to Rames, as it had done
+on the night of their first meeting at the Admiralty, that just so
+would she look if he struck her a blow.
+
+"Then--then--the city is still a polling-booth," she stammered.
+
+"Yes," said Rames.
+
+The hero newly perched upon his pediment tumbled off again.
+
+"You used what I said to you because you just thought it would go
+down."
+
+Rames did not deny it. He remained silent.
+
+"I remember," she continued, "it was no doubt a foolish thing I said.
+But even when I said it, you were thinking this is the sort of thing
+that will take."
+
+That she was humiliated, her voice and her face clearly proved. Yet
+again Rames did not contradict her. Again he was silent. For there was
+nothing to be said.
+
+"You do not allow me many illusions about you," Cynthia said gently,
+and she began to turn away.
+
+But now he arrested her.
+
+"I don't mean to," he said quickly; and by the reply he undid some
+portion of the harm he had done himself in her eyes.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIV
+
+                      COLONEL CHALLONER'S MEMORY
+
+
+It had been arranged that Mr. Benoliel's small party should take
+supper with Harry Rames at his hotel. As they stood waiting at the
+foot of the platform the agent came to them from the outer doors.
+
+"The way's clear now," he said. "I think you can go."
+
+They passed through the empty hall, Cynthia first at Harry Rames's
+side, and in that order they came out upon the steps. A fine rain was
+falling, but the crowd had not dispersed. The great light over the
+door showed the climbing street thronged. Coat collars were turned up,
+hats were pressed down; and so as Rames and Cynthia came out they saw
+in the glare beneath the rain just a mass of swaying, jostling black
+things, round black things moving indecisively this way and that like
+some close-packed herd of blind animals. Just for a moment the
+illusion lasted. Then Rames was seen and of a sudden the heads were
+thrown back, the hats shaken high, and all those black round things
+became the white faces of living men, their eyes shining in the light,
+their voices shouting in acclamation.
+
+Captain Rames took a step back.
+
+"Did you see?" he cried to Cynthia.
+
+"Yes. They are not animals to draw your chariot," she replied. "They
+are men."
+
+"Yes, men--men to govern," he answered. His was the spirit of the old
+Whig families. Though he was not of them, he meant to force his way
+among them. To govern the people, not to admit it to government, to go
+far in appeasing it, but not to give it the reins, that was his
+instinct. He wished to retain the old governing class, but he meant to
+be one of it. His ambitions soared to-night, and reached out beyond
+this hilly, narrow street. He led these men now who stood acclaiming
+him in the rain. His thoughts shot forward to other days when every
+town in England might at his coming pour out its masses to endorse his
+words.
+
+He waved his hand toward his companions and the crowd made a lane for
+them across the street to the hotel. Rames himself was carried
+shoulder-high, and set down within the doors. He led the way up the
+stairs to a big room upon the first floor overlooking the street,
+where supper was laid. A great shout went up from the street as they
+entered the room.
+
+"They want you," said Mrs. Royle.
+
+"No," replied Rames. He opened a door into a smaller room in which no
+lights were lit and pulled up the blinds. Across the street under a
+great clock was a newspaper office and in the windows the election
+returns of the night were being, displayed. All along the line
+victories were gained for Rames's party. Arthur Pynes, a young
+manufacturer, and the chairman of the association, to whose energy the
+organization was due; an ex-Mayor, a Mr. Charlesworth, and one or two
+hard fighters of the old school joined the group in the dark room. One
+of them, a rosy-faced contractor with a high laugh, who had presided
+over the association in its darker days, leaned against the window by
+Cynthia Daventry.
+
+"He'll have to appear on this balcony to-morrow night, as soon as he
+can after the result's declared," he said. "You see, the windows are
+all boarded up on the ground floors opposite."
+
+"He'll speak from here?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"He'll speak, but they won't listen," replied Mr. Arnall. "I remember
+Sir William Harris, the last time he was elected before he was made a
+judge--" and he ran off into stories of the old days until the windows
+of the newspaper office were darkened and the crowd at last dispersed.
+
+"Let us go in to supper," said Rames, and they all passed into the
+next room. "Will you sit here, Mrs. Royle, and you here, Miss
+Daventry?" He placed Diana Royle upon his right hand and Cynthia upon
+his left. "Pynes, will you take the chair next to Mrs. Royle, and
+Colonel," he addressed the tall, gaunt man whose flowing platitudes
+had left nothing in Cynthia's mind but a recollection of sonority, a
+booming as of waves in a hollow cave, "will you sit next to Miss
+Daventry?"
+
+The colonel bowed and prepared to take his seat. But he was a
+punctilious old gentleman and stood upon the ceremonies.
+
+"You have not introduced me, Rames," he said.
+
+"I beg your pardon. Miss Daventry, this is Colonel Challoner. He
+has made his own seat a safe one--a county division which polls
+a week later than we do, and he lives in it. So when I applied at
+head-quarters for help at our last meeting Colonel Challoner was kind
+enough to volunteer."
+
+Cynthia shot a startled glance at her neighbor. Her own name was
+Challoner too; and all that was terrible in her recollections was
+linked with it. Of course, it did not follow that this Challoner was
+any relation of hers. There must be many families of that name.
+Nevertheless, the sudden sound of it caused her a shock. The blood
+rushed into her face. She made a movement. Almost she shrank away.
+Challoner, however, was taking his seat. He noticed the quick
+movement; he did not appreciate the instinct of fear which had caused
+it.
+
+"Ah, it is true then, Miss Daventry," he said. "We have already met.
+You remember it, too."
+
+Cynthia was startled.
+
+"No, Colonel Challoner," she replied quickly. "I don't think that we
+have. Indeed, I am sure we have not. I should surely have remembered
+if we had."
+
+"That is a pretty thing for a young lady to say to an old man," the
+colonel answered with a smile. "But my memory is a good one. I never
+forget a face."
+
+He had the particular pride of all men with good memories, and
+ambition had intensified it into an obstinacy. For he had his
+ambition, and successive disappointments had only strengthened its
+hold upon his heart. He aimed to be Under Secretary of State for
+Foreign Affairs. He had been military attaché at so many Embassies,
+the post, to his thinking, was marked out for him. At each new
+promotion to the Cabinet, at each general election, he was sure that
+he could no longer be overlooked. He ran from platform to platform to
+increase his claim upon the office should his party be returned. A
+telegram from the chief whip had brought him to Ludsey, would send him
+to-morrow into Yorkshire. Now, surely, his turn must come! He had one
+persistent fear, lest he should be thought too old. And he clung with
+an almost piteous reiteration to the accuracy of his recollections as
+a vindication of the alertness of his powers.
+
+"When I saw you upon the platform I was quite sure that it was not for
+the first time, Miss Daventry," he insisted.
+
+"During the season, perhaps," Cynthia replied. "At some reception or
+ball. Did you hear that, Colonel Challoner?" and she turned quickly
+toward Mr. Arnall, who was telling an old story of the days and the
+hustings when broken heads were common about the doors of the
+polling-booths.
+
+Cynthia laughed eagerly with the rest in her anxiety to keep Colonel
+Challoner from plying her with questions. She was ready with her
+answers, but greatly she feared, lest by probing into his memories he
+should understand of a sudden where he had seen her before. And for a
+time she was successful. The confidence which had run from man to
+man in the great Corn Exchange an hour before was present at this
+supper-table and kindled them all to cheeriness. The ex-Mayor said
+with a pleasant drawl, which was his habit:
+
+"Do you remember Taylor the Democrat, Arnall? He fought two elections
+here within three months and then went bankrupt. He was an adventurer
+and the most eloquent man I ever heard. But he was a caution."
+
+"Yes," cried Mr. Arnall, with a clicking laugh at the back of his
+throat. "Do you remember his meeting down by the club? 'Gag that
+calf,'" and Mr. Arnall spluttered with delight.
+
+"That's it," said the ex-Mayor. "You must know that Taylor stood as a
+Democrat, Captain Rames. That's where the fun comes in. He wore a blue
+swallow-tail-coat with brass buttons and his hair down to his
+shoulders. 'Your father was a miller,' one fellow shouted from the
+crowd. 'Gag that calf,' cried Taylor and he held up his arms in the
+air. 'Look at these fair hands. No work has ever sullied them.' That
+did him all right."
+
+A quiet, elderly man leaned over the table.
+
+"Did you notice the flag upon the chairman's table, Captain Rames?" he
+asked. "It was woven out of Ludsey silk fifty years ago. It's the true
+Ludsey blue. My father wove it for Sir William Harris's first
+election, and the other fellows swore they would have it on the
+polling-day. But we carried it about the streets from morning to
+evening, with twelve big fellows to protect it. It was nearly down
+once, I remember. I was a lad at the time--at the corner of Stapley's
+Lane. But we saved it and it was your table-cloth to-night, Captain
+Rames. It brought us victory then. It will again to-morrow."
+
+The stories were continued. They were often not very pointed; often
+enough the humor was far to seek; but they were alive. They were told
+with infinite enjoyment, and the smallest details were remembered over
+decades. Cynthia began now to listen to them for their own sake; she
+was learning with surprise the value of politics to the lives of men
+in a busy city of the provinces. But the colonel at her elbow was not
+longer to be diverted.
+
+"I think it must have been in Dorsetshire that we met," he said. "I
+live near to Wareham."
+
+Cynthia looked at him quite steadily.
+
+"I have never been in Dorsetshire in my life, Colonel Challoner."
+
+"Yet I associate you with that county," he persisted. "Now, why should
+I do that, Miss Daventry? You have not been to my house, I know. For
+since my wife died and my son went away, I have not had so many young
+people to stay with me as I should have liked."
+
+From the moment when Colonel Challoner had claimed her recognition,
+Cynthia had not doubted that she was sitting next to a relation. And
+Colonel Challoner's location of his home in Dorsetshire, near to
+Wareham, had confirmed her belief. She knew quite well how it came
+about that he had seemed to recognize her, that he associated her with
+his own parish. She knew because upon one unforgettable night she had
+crouched in a great chair in a dark room and through the panels of a
+door had heard her father claim her as his daughter. He, too, had
+recognized her as Colonel Challoner now did, and just by the same
+means. For there was a Romney hanging upon the dining-room wall in
+that house near Wareham which might have been a portrait of herself.
+But until this moment she had not guessed what degree of relationship
+bound her to the old man at her side.
+
+Now, however, she knew that too. The hesitation, the gentle
+wistfulness with which he had spoken of his son struck home at her.
+She was this man's granddaughter. She was moved by what he had said. A
+big house empty of young people must be a place of melancholy and
+hollow as a shell. Yet she would not reveal herself. She had it fixed
+now as an instinct of her nature that she would never wear the name of
+Challoner, nor admit a link with any of that name.... But she turned
+toward her grandfather with a greater sympathy.
+
+"You have given up your whole life to politics now?" she asked, and a
+wave of pity swept through her. It could not be possible that he
+should win any success in that sphere, and she was young and could
+hardly conceive of life at all without success.
+
+"Yes. I left the army twenty-five years ago. Sometimes I think that I
+may have made a mistake," he answered. "But it is too late for me to
+go back upon a mistake, even were I sure that I had made one. Politics
+is all I have now. I have no longer any family. And I have politics in
+my bones. I do not know what I should do if I lost my seat. I should
+probably die." He spoke with absolute simplicity, absolute sincerity:
+Cynthia was greatly moved. An old futile man without wife or family in
+a big, empty house, feeding himself from day to day with the
+disappointments of a hopeless ambition--it made for her a dismal
+picture. She contrasted it with the other one before her eyes--Harry
+Rames at the head of the table, confident, comfortable, young as
+politicians go, with the world a smooth sea for his conquering sails;
+and once again an unaccountable resentment against Harry Rames flared
+up within her. Almost she wished that for once he might fail. Almost
+she revealed herself then to Colonel Challoner. But she did not. She
+had painfully learned a great gift--silence.
+
+She knew very well with what relief she would wake on the morrow to
+the recollection that she was still Cynthia Daventry and not Cynthia
+Challoner.
+
+"I expect that what I say will sound extravagant to you, Miss
+Daventry," Colonel Challoner continued. "You at your age could hardly
+understand it."
+
+The spell which was upon Cynthia was broken. She looked thoughtfully
+about the table.
+
+"I should not have understood it an hour ago. I was inclined to think
+it really didn't matter very much in the long run who was in and who
+was out, that the things which wanted doing and which legislation
+could do, would get themselves done sooner or later by one side or the
+other and perhaps by both; and that for the rest the nation went on
+its way, leaving the talk and the honors to the politicians because it
+had no time for either and doing the work itself."
+
+Colonel Challoner laughed.
+
+"That's a definite point of view, at all events."
+
+"I expect that I was drawing my ideas from another--" she was about to
+say "country," but checked herself lest she should be asked what
+country and so put Colonel Challoner on the track of her relationship
+to him. She went on hastily: "But since I have been sitting here, I
+have learned how much of color politics can bring into the lives of
+men."
+
+And Colonel Challoner looked at her and cried:
+
+"That's it, Miss Daventry. Color! That's the great need. That's why
+the quack religions flourish in the back streets. We all need it--all
+except the man there at the head of the table," and Colonel Challoner
+looked a trifle enviously at Harry Rames. "He has it and to spare."
+
+The door opened by a few inches at this moment and a wrinkled pippin
+of a head was pushed in. A pair of little bright eyes surveyed the
+company and then the door was thrust wide open and M. Poizat stepped
+lightly in.
+
+Harry Rames rose and shook hands with the little Frenchman. Colonel
+Challoner stroked his white moustache.
+
+"You were present to-night?" said Rames. "What a difference, eh?"
+
+"Yes, I was proud," M. Poizat returned. "But always I waited for some
+little word--some little word which did not come."
+
+"One always forgets an important point and generally the most
+important. It is the experience of all speakers," said Rames. He
+turned to the table. "I must introduce to you M. Poizat, and if ever
+your voices are hoarse in Ludsey, please ask for Lungatine."
+
+Rames drew a chair to the table, pressed M. Poizat into it, and filled
+for him a glass of champagne. The little man was delighted. He drank
+Captain Rames's health, he bowed to the company; and his hand was
+arrested in mid-air, holding the wine-glass by its stem. Colonel
+Challoner was gazing fixedly across the table at him. A look of
+trouble took all the merriment out of M. Poizat's face.
+
+"I have seen you before, M. Poizat," said Colonel Challoner.
+
+Cynthia began to think that the colonel had a mania for recognizing
+people.
+
+"I am _Mr_. Poizat, an Englishman," the little confectioner answered
+hurriedly.
+
+"Naturalized," said the colonel.
+
+"It is true," said M. Poizat reluctantly.
+
+"If you had only said that last night," thought Harry Rames. "You
+would have got your advertisement, my friend."
+
+But he said not a word aloud, and M. Poizat continued:
+
+"But it was a long time ago. And all the years since I have spent in
+Ludsey."
+
+Colonel Challoner shook his head.
+
+"It was not in Ludsey that I saw you. For I was never here in my life
+before."
+
+M. Poizat shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"We have sat opposite to one another in a train perhaps. We have run
+against one another in the traffic of a London street."
+
+"No, it was on some occasion more important. I do not forget a face."
+
+"Nor I," said M. Poizat. "And I have never seen yours, sir, until this
+moment;" and though he spoke with spirit his uneasiness was apparent
+to every one at that table.
+
+Colonel Challoner sat back in his chair and let the subject drop. But
+he was not satisfied. He was even annoyed at his failure to identify
+the Frenchman, and he sat relentlessly revolving in his mind the
+changing scenes of his life. Meanwhile the talk drifted back to
+by-gone elections and this or that great night when some famous
+statesman was brought into the town and never allowed to speak one
+audible word. Mr. Arnall mentioned one whose name resounded through
+England.
+
+"Next night in Warrington he said that he had been struggling with the
+beasts at Ephesus," said Mr. Arnall with a chirrup of delight. The old
+Adam was strong in him at this moment and his own solemn exhortations
+to hear all sides clean forgotten. Suddenly Colonel Challoner broke in
+upon him. He leaned across the table and with a smile of triumph
+stared between the candles at M. Poizat.
+
+"It was in a corridor," he said, "a vast bare corridor--somewhere--a
+long time ago. You were coming out of a room--wait!--wait!--No, I
+cannot name the place," and he sank back again disappointed.
+
+But M. Poizat's face wore now a sickly pallor.
+
+"In no corridor--nowhere," he stammered and his eyes, urgent with
+appeal, turned toward Harry Rames.
+
+Harry Rames did his first service for an elector of Ludsey. He glanced
+toward Mr. Benoliel, who rose.
+
+"It is getting late," said Benoliel, "and Rames has a busy day in
+front of him."
+
+"I will order your motor-car round to the door," said Rames. He rang
+the bell and the rest of the company left the table. Diana Royle and
+Cynthia sought their cloaks in the adjoining sitting-room. Harry Rames
+took M. Poizat by the arm and led him to the door.
+
+"I am very grateful to you," he said. "Good-night." And even as M.
+Poizat's foot was over the threshold the voice of Colonel Challoner
+brought him to a halt:
+
+"One moment. I remember now. You come from Alsace, M. Poizat."
+
+"I come from Provence," cried the little man, facing about swiftly
+with a passionate, white face.
+
+Harry Rames had begun to think Colonel Challoner rather a bore with
+his incomplete reminiscences. That thought passed from him altogether.
+He had but to look at the two men to know that some queer and
+unexpected moment of drama had sprung from their chance meeting at
+this hotel at Ludsey. They stood facing one another, the little
+Frenchman in the doorway with fear and rage contending in his face,
+his mouth twisted into a snarl, his lips drawn back from his gums like
+an animal, his teeth gleaming; the colonel erect above the table with
+the candle-light shining upward upon a triumphant and menacing face.
+
+"You were in Metz in '71," cried Challoner. "So was I. I was a lad at
+the time. I was aide to our attaché. That's where I saw you, M.
+Poizat--in the long corridor of the Arsenal. Yes, you were in Metz in
+'71."
+
+And behind M. Poizat appeared the waiter announcing that Mr.
+Benoliel's motor-car was at the door.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XV
+
+                        THE MAYOR AND THE MAN
+
+
+St. Anne's Hall stands tucked away in a narrow street of Ludsey by the
+spacious square; and from its ancient windows you look out between the
+lozenges of stained glass upon the great church of St. Anne with its
+soaring spire and its wide graveyard. Into this hall the ballot-boxes
+were brought from the polling-booths on the next evening, and at long
+tables in the Council Chamber the voting papers were sorted and
+counted. Harry Rames walked from table to table. He seemed to see
+nothing but crosses against his opponent's name. He did not dare to
+put a question to any of the scrutineers standing behind the sorters.
+The very swiftness with which the votes were counted impressed him
+with a sense of disaster. For the first time he began to ask himself
+how he was to shape his life if to-night he were defeated. Thus an
+hour passed and then the chief constable drew him aside to a bench
+under the musician's gallery at one end of the room.
+
+"I've been watching the tables, Captain Rames," he said, "and I think
+you are going to be elected."
+
+"You do?" said Rames eagerly. "Yes, and I shall be very glad if you
+are."
+
+"Thank you," exclaimed Rames. He could have wrung off the chief
+constable's hand in the fervor of his gratitude.
+
+"Oh, I am not speaking as a politician," the chief constable returned
+with a smile. "I have the order of my city to look after. That's all I
+am thinking about. If you weren't by any chance to get in, I am afraid
+there would be trouble to-night in Ludsey. And I want you if you are
+returned to get back to your hotel at once. It's important from my
+point of view that you should show up on your balcony as soon as
+possible after the result is declared."
+
+"I see," said Rames.
+
+"I will take you out the back way through the police station," the
+chief constable continued, "and there's a lane opposite which will
+lead you straight to your back door. You had better run, I think. For
+your own friends would tear you to pieces to-night without noticing
+they were doing you any harm."
+
+The chief constable suddenly changed his tone. One of the scrutineers
+on the side of Rames's opponent had drawn close to them. The chief
+constable had no intention to allow a suspicion that he favored one
+side more than the other. He raised his voice.
+
+"You have noticed our tapestry, perhaps. It is quite invaluable, I
+believe. We lent it two years ago to the South Kensington Museum.
+There was an American millionaire here the other day who wished to buy
+it."
+
+Raines looked across the room.
+
+"Isn't there some portion of it missing?" he asked.
+
+"Yes. That disappeared in the Commonwealth times. Let us go and look
+at it."
+
+Rames walked at the chief constable's side up the floor of the room
+toward the dais where Mr. Redling the Mayor, with his chain of office
+about his shoulders, sat in his big chair in the centre of the long
+council table. His mace lay upon the table in front of him, and he
+surveyed the busy scene over which he presided with an imperturbable
+gravity. But Mr. Redling was a genial soul with a twinkling eye and a
+red, round face like a crumpled cherub's; and as Harry Rames advanced
+toward the dais, Mr. Redling beckoned to him with a discreet twist of
+the finger of a hand lying idle upon the table.
+
+Harry Rames took a seat beside the Mayor at the long table and again
+words of comfort were poured into his ears in a gentle undertone.
+
+"I think you are going to do it," said Mr. Redling, repeating almost
+word for word the utterance of his chief constable. "Of course, I
+couldn't take any part. But you know what I should have been doing if
+I hadn't been Mayor, don't you? But I have asked quietly here and
+there about your chance and I fancy it's all right."
+
+He winked, and his face broke into triumphant smiles. He was a man.
+Then he remembered again that he was a Mayor, and he sat a pillar of
+municipal propriety.
+
+"It's good of you to say that," cried Harry Rames in a low voice. "I
+needed to hear it, I can tell you."
+
+Mr. Redling looked at his face. The three weeks had taken a heavy toll
+of him. He had thinned and sharpened; his eyes were heavy and very
+tired; for the moment his buoyancy had gone.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Redling. "An election takes a good deal out of one.
+And these two hours are the worst of it when the fight's all over and
+there's nothing to do but wait. Gives you a kind of glimpse into what
+women have to put up with all their lives, eh?"
+
+Harry Rames glanced at the Mayor with interest.
+
+"Why, I suppose that's true."
+
+Mr. Redling nodded his head.
+
+"Yes. It teaches you that sitting with your hands in your lap isn't
+the same as sitting soft, after all."
+
+Harry Rames felt comfort steal in upon him from the neighborhood of
+the little Mayor. Mr. Redling was that rare bird, a strong politician
+without a fad, and, therefore, a veritable haven of refuge to a
+candidate in the cudgelling of an election. On the few afternoons when
+Harry Rames had been able to snatch a half hour of leisure he had been
+wont to run round to the Mayor's house and spend a restful interval
+with one of the Mayor's cigars. Mr. Redling laid his Mayoralty aside
+with the silk hat he invariably wore, and when he took off his chain
+of office he usually took off his coat too. He had had his ups and
+downs, and as he discoursed upon his city in his shirt-sleeves, Harry
+Rames never failed to draw comfort from his talk, so strong a spirit
+of human friendship breathed from him.
+
+"They like you here," continued Mr. Redling; "both sides. Take us for
+all in all we are not violent people. Give us the right sort of man,
+and we'll be sure he won't do us harm, whatever his politics," and
+then as Mr. Benoliel, who was acting as one of Rames's scrutineers,
+came to him with a doubtful voting paper, he switched off to another
+topic; and it happened quite naturally that he chose the very same
+subject as the chief constable had done.
+
+"Have you noticed our tapestry?" he asked. "We are proud of it. An
+American gentleman, a Mr. Cronin, came over here last week with Mr.
+Benoliel to see it. And after he had seen it, he wanted to buy it."
+
+"Oh, did he?" said Benoliel as he handed the voting paper to the
+Mayor. "But I might have guessed that he would. I brought him over
+from Culver, and we met Mrs. Royle just outside here. She came in with
+us. Mrs. Royle seemed as interested in the tapestry as Cronin
+himself."
+
+While Mr. Redling examined the voting paper, Harry Rames cast an eye
+over the tapestry. The æsthetic qualities formed a quite insignificant
+element in his nature. Of art he thought nothing at all. It noted in
+his mind long hair and an absence of baths--such was his ignorance.
+The only picture-gallery into which he had ever entered was the Royal
+Academy; and the only occasion upon which he had ventured over that
+threshold was the Academy dinner to which he had been invited after
+his return from his Antarctic expedition. He had a primitive
+appreciation of scarlet as a color and he recognized that women upon
+canvas could look beautiful. There for him art ended. So he gazed at
+the tapestry with a lack-lustre eye. There was no vividness of color,
+and the human forms worked upon it had an angularity and a thickness
+of joint which pleased him not at all.
+
+"I suppose it's very beautiful," he said.
+
+"It's unique," replied Mr. Benoliel; "that's why Cronin wanted it. Let
+a thing be unique, he'll not trouble his head so much about its
+beauty, and I am told he will ask no questions how it comes to be
+offered to him."
+
+"Well, he offered us a hundred thousand pounds," Mr. Redling remarked
+with half a sigh. Ludsey was growing at a pace which made it difficult
+for the borough council to keep up with it. Mr. Redling thought of
+baths and schools and houses. "A hundred thousand pounds--a good deal
+of money for a municipality to refuse. But of course, we did. We
+couldn't let that tapestry go." He returned to the voting paper and
+gave his decision upon it. Harry Rames drifted down again into the
+body of the hall. He troubled no more about the priceless tapestry
+swinging under the high carved roof in this ancient place. He was a
+man of his own day, absorbed in its doings, and wondering always in a
+great labor of thought how he might make his name familiar in all
+men's mouths before nightfall swept him into the darkness. His
+anxieties were now diminished, his heart beat high. For here were two
+men, both experienced in elections and both convinced that he would
+surely win. So the first small victory, it seemed, was won. He crossed
+to the row of windows and looked down through a lozenge of white in
+the painted pattern into the street below. And having once looked he
+could not again withdraw his eyes.
+
+It was a night of January, dreary and loud with a roar of falling
+rain. A light wind carried the rain at a slant so that it shot down
+past the street lamps like slender javelins of steel. And exposed to
+that pitiless assault a silent crowd of men stood packed together in
+the narrow street between St. Anne's Hall and the railings of the
+church. A few, a very few, carried umbrellas over their heads, the
+rest stood with their coat collars turned up about their throats and
+their hands deep in their pockets. No one moved, for there was no room
+to move; and all the faces were uplifted under the brims of their
+soaking hats to the great window beyond the hall whence the result
+should be declared. The patience of the throng, its acquiescence in
+discomfort, as though discomfort were the ordinary condition of its
+life, suddenly caught hold of Harry Rames. He took a step, nay, a
+stride forward. Last night when he had come out of the Exchange and
+the herd of animals had been transfigured into the uplifted faces of
+men, his thought had been:
+
+"This is for me."
+
+But now his thoughts changed. The men of Ludsey did not wait in vain
+that night. For Harry Rames the glamour faded off the arena. At the
+very moment when the bars were being withdrawn for him to enter it the
+exultation of battle died out of his heart. He woke to something
+new--the claim of the constituency. The longer he looked, the stronger
+the claim grew, the more loudly the silence of that throng proclaimed
+and shouted it. They stood under the javelins of the rain, the men who
+had voted for him. They emphasized their claim by their extraordinary
+quietude. Almost they menaced.
+
+"A queer sight," said a voice at his elbow.
+
+Harry Rames turned. It was Mr. Arnall who had interrupted him.
+
+"I shall not easily forget it," said Rames, drawing a breath, and then
+with an irritable outburst he said: "They look to Parliament for more
+than parliaments can do, to candidates for more than members can
+achieve. Each election is to open paradise for them."
+
+"And whose fault is that?" asked Mr. Arnall dryly.
+
+Rames nodded.
+
+"Ours, I suppose," he said; and behind him in the room there was a
+bustle and a grating of chairs upon the floor. The votes had been
+sorted. The candidates and their friends gathered about the long table
+on the raised dais.
+
+"They are taking yours first," said Mr. Arnall to Harry. "That's a
+good sign."
+
+The papers cast for Harry Rames were brought to the table in sets of
+fifty. They were placed crosswise, one set on the top of the first,
+and the third on the second, until five hundred had been counted.
+Against that pile of five hundred votes a second rose. Gradually the
+orderly heaps of paper extended along the table's edge in front of the
+Mayor. There were half a dozen now. Rames's agent stood by them like a
+bull-dog on the chain. The half-dozen became ten, eleven, twelve. And
+as the twelfth heap was completed a quick movement ran among all of
+Rames's friends. He had polled now half the electorate of the city.
+One more set of papers and he was in.
+
+It was laid next to the others at that moment, and Rames's hands were
+silently grasped and shaken. But the heaping up of the votes went on.
+There were three more piles to be added before the end was reached.
+Eighty-four per cent of the electorate had recorded their votes. Harry
+Rames had won by a majority well on to two thousand. He stood there in
+a buzz of congratulations, with a sudden vacancy of mind and thought.
+He remembered the extraordinary agility with which Mr. Redling whipped
+out of the room, trying to say unconcernedly:
+
+"I'll just announce the result at once."
+
+He heard the storm of cheers in the street below. That patient silence
+was broken now in a hurricane of enthusiasm and even through it he
+could distinguish the words of the exultant cry:
+
+"Rames is our man!"
+
+He saw the Mayor return, much out of breath. He proposed the vote of
+thanks to the returning officers, with the usual eulogy of his
+opponents and depreciation of himself. But even at that moment the
+claim of the constituency would importunately obtrude and find
+acknowledgment in his words.
+
+"You look to me very likely for more than I can do," he said simply.
+"At all events you shall have what I can."
+
+But the most memorable achievement that night was the reply of Mr.
+Redling.
+
+As he rose to his feet to acknowledge the vote of thanks, the man ran
+forward and got a fair start of the Mayor. He cried out, all one
+bubble of delight:
+
+"I need hardly say, gentlemen, how utterly I rejoice at--" and then
+the Mayor put on a spurt and caught up the man--"at the admirable
+manner in which this contest has been conducted by both sides."
+
+But the correction deceived no one. Mr. Redling's politics were known,
+and so, in a general splutter of good-humored laughter, the Ludsey
+election came to an end.
+
+The Mayor turned from the table wiping his forehead.
+
+"I nearly made a bad break there," he said in a whisper. "They won't
+come at you again, I think. I reckon you have got Ludsey, Captain
+Rames," and then Rames felt the hand of the chief constable laid upon
+his arm. He was rushed across the Mayor's parlor, down the stairs
+through the police station, where the police at their supper rose and
+gave him a loud cheer.
+
+"Silence!" cried the chief constable savagely. He opened the street
+door and peeped out.
+
+"All's clear. Run--down that alley opposite. Say something from your
+balcony, never mind what--they won't hear more than two words."
+
+"That's just all that I want them to hear," cried Rames.
+
+He had foreseen that moment. He ran with one or two of his friends to
+the back door of his hotel. A path was made for them through the
+crowded hall. He came out upon the balcony, and up and down the hill
+as far as his eyes could see the street was thronged. He stretched out
+his hand. He had a second of absolute silence, and in that second his
+voice rang out:
+
+"My constituents----"
+
+The roar which answered him showed him that once more his foresight
+had served him well. No other word of his was heard. But any other
+words would have spoiled the two which he had uttered.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XVI
+
+                      WORDS OVER THE TELEPHONE
+
+
+The next two hours were for Rames of the tissue whence nightmares are
+woven. Rames was conscious that he made speeches and still more
+speeches and yet others on the top of those, until speech-making
+became a pain in the head for which there was no anodyne. He made them
+from windows--one at that very window where Taylor, the lily fingered
+democrat, had by a single sentence won immortality and certain
+defeat--he made them from tables in club-rooms which he no longer
+recognized; where men, packed tight as herrings, screamed
+incoherencies in a blaze of light and the atmosphere of a Turkish
+bath, or standing upon chairs beat him, as he passed beneath them, on
+the top of the head with their hats in the frenzy of their delight.
+For two hours Ludsey went stark mad and Harry Rames had reached
+exhaustion before a gigantic captain of the fire brigade lifted him
+panting and dishevelled out of the throng, and drawing him into a
+small committee-room locked the door against his votaries.
+
+"Better wait for a little while here, sir," he said; and it was one
+o'clock in the morning before he ventured to return to his hotel.
+
+By that time the madness was already past. There was still noise in
+the blazing rooms of the clubs. But the streets were empty and up the
+climbing hill the city was quiet as a house of mutes. A placard in the
+window of the newspaper office recorded the figures of the election,
+and the boarding which protected the shops opposite to his hotel shone
+white in the light of the lamps. But for those two signs, even Rames
+might have found it difficult of belief that so lately this very
+hill had rung with cheers and seethed with a tumultuous populace.
+To-morrow, however, the sirens of the factories would shrill across
+the house-tops at six and the work of a strenuous industrial town
+begin. Ludsey had no time to dally with victories won and triumphs
+which had passed.
+
+Nor indeed had Harry Rames. He rang the bell at the door and entered
+the hall quickly. There was something which he should have done before
+now, though only now he remembered it. With a word to the porter, he
+went into the office and switched on the electric light. He crossed to
+the corner where the telephone was fixed and called up the White
+House. A woman's voice, very small and clear, came back to him over
+the lines. He recognized it with a thrill of satisfaction. It was
+Cynthia Daventry's.
+
+"Oh, it's you yourself," he cried eagerly, and he heard Cynthia, at
+the other end of the telephone, laugh with pleasure at his eagerness.
+
+"Yes," she answered. "I thought perhaps you might ring me up."
+
+So she had waited--just that they might talk together for a few
+moments. Harry Rames, however, did not answer her. It seemed to him
+from the intonation of her voice that she had more to say if she would
+only make up her mind to say it. He stood and waited with the receiver
+at his ear, and after a little while Cynthia spoke again upon a lower
+note.
+
+"I am glad that you did. I should have been disappointed if you
+hadn't."
+
+"Thank you," said Rames.
+
+He spoke very gently. There was no smile of triumph upon his face. It
+had become of vast importance to him within the last two hours to know
+how her thoughts dealt with him; and he was not sure. There was
+friendship between them--yes. But how far on her side did it reach? He
+had no answer to that question.
+
+"You have heard the result?" he asked.
+
+"Yes. Mr. Benoliel telephoned to me at once from the Mayor's parlor."
+
+"I ought to have done that," said Harry Rames.
+
+"Oh, no. You were making speeches," replied Cynthia with a laugh. She
+was at all events not offended by his omission.
+
+"And you are glad that I have won?" he asked. And again she waited a
+while before she answered; and when she did speak it was with that
+little spirit of resentment which Rames had heard before in her voice.
+
+"Well,--since your heart was so much set on winning,--yes, there you
+have your triumph--I am glad that you won."
+
+Cynthia meant what she said, but she was reluctant to mean it. She
+spoke, too, under a constraint to speak. She had a picture before her
+eyes of the man at the other end of the line quietly waiting upon her,
+certain perhaps of what she would say. And the picture and the sense
+of compulsion were both an offence to her.
+
+"Good-night," she added curtly and with a sharp, quick movement she
+hung up the receiver. The little clang of metal travelled along the
+line to Harry Rames and emphasized her resentment.
+
+But he was not disturbed by that. On the whole he looked upon it as a
+favorable sign. So definite a resentment implied that she was
+interested and set a value on their friendship. Rames went upstairs to
+bed, but he was too tired to sleep and his thoughts raced ahead and
+scouted in the future. He had leaped the first obstacle in the race,
+but that once leaped and looked back upon became a tiny thing compared
+with those which lay ahead.
+
+"Will she? Will she not?" he asked. All hung upon the answers to those
+questions. He was poor. He must marry. He must marry money and even
+money was not enough. Other qualities were needed to help him to the
+great career. But they were all there, a few miles away, possessed by
+the young mistress of the White House. She had looks and manners and a
+distinction of her own. You could not be in a room with her, however
+crowded, and be long unaware that she was present too. Only--would
+she?
+
+He had very little to offer her--beyond this earnest of future success
+which he had won to-night. And six hundred and seventy others would
+have won just the same opportunity before the year was a fortnight
+older. Moreover, Cynthia was romantic and he was not. For all her
+friendliness he was a bitter disappointment to her. He recognized it
+all and began to regret that he had not donned the glittering cloak of
+romance which so often she had held out to him. But his foresight came
+to console him.
+
+"I could never have lived up to it," he reflected. "She would have
+found me out. I have been honest with her and she likes honesty."
+
+Certainly there were points in his favor. Rames took heart. She had
+run the gauntlet of the drawing-rooms through a London season. Men had
+gone down before her satin slippers, men ancient and modern. Mothers
+of daughters had frowned upon her, mothers of sons had smiled. Young
+Lord Helmsdale, adored of the ladies, had pursued her, and it was his
+habit to be pursued. Yet she had come out of the throng to
+Warwickshire heart-free. Of that he was sure.
+
+Besides, she had waited up to speak to him. That was something,--not
+very much, perhaps,--but surely something. Also, since he had wished
+to win, she was glad that he had won. Rames's memories took him back
+to the night when they first met at the Admiralty. Not thus had she
+spoken then. She had moved toward him since that night--reluctantly,
+slowly. Yet she had moved.
+
+He was still casting up this ledger of his chances when a lonely
+booming sound broke upon the stillness of the night and penetrated
+through the open window like some melancholy siren of the sea. It was
+repeated and repeated, growing louder with each repetition yet hardly
+more articulate, and without any change of intonation. And every now
+and then it was interrupted for a few seconds by a dull crash. Rames
+tried to thrust it from his notice.
+
+"Will she? Will she not?" he asked himself. But the booming sound
+would not be denied. It was as the wail of some utterly friendless man
+who cared not whether his fellows slept or waked. It was thoroughly
+pitiless. Nearer it came to the hotel, and now wavering, heavy feet
+could be heard to beat an irregular accompaniment. The occasional thud
+was explained. A very drunken man was staggering up the hill and from
+time to time he fell upon the pavement, unconscious that he fell,
+barely aware only that his long-drawn cry had ceased. Rames thought of
+him as a malignant creature determined to inflict torture--until the
+sound at last sifted itself into definite words. "Vote for Harry
+Rames!" the nightfarer cried aloud to a city which had already done
+so; and at times he dropped the Harry and inserted an epithet of color
+common no doubt in his vocabulary. He passed beneath the windows and
+with many a tumble faded into distance, invoking the unresponsive gas
+lamps.
+
+Rames turned over on his side with relief.
+
+"My dear," he whispered, "take his advice and vote for Harry Rames! I
+shall owe you much, but I'll make it up to you. I'll not ask you till
+I am sure I can. I must risk Helmsdale carrying you off."
+
+
+He fell asleep and even the tune the clock chimes in Ludsey church
+played at four o'clock in the morning did not make him stir. But at
+the White House just at that hour Cynthia waked. It was not the clock
+which waked her. It seemed to her that she had heard a step in the
+corridor. She sat up in her bed and in a few seconds was sure of it.
+Some one was moving very stealthily about the house. For a moment her
+old horror gripped her. Here was her father come at last with
+authority to claim her. She sat staring wide-eyed into the darkness,
+flung back to the days when she was a child. Then her reason
+reasserted itself. Her father was dead. The blood flowed again to her
+heart. But the stealthy sound continued. She heard a door gently
+latched. She sprang out of bed, opened her own door, and switched on
+the light. The corridor was empty to the edge of the shadows. She
+peered into them. She saw nothing, and no sound reached her now.
+
+"Who is it?" she asked in a loud voice, and no answer came to her. She
+waited in her doorway with a hand to her breast. The plank of a stair
+cracked loudly, close to her; but no footsteps made it crack. She went
+back into her room.
+
+Yet she had not been mistaken. Any one in the road that night might
+have seen a light ascending past the windows of the staircase and then
+moving through the upper rooms, until at last in one it remained for a
+long time. The light was carried by Diana Royle. She passed up the
+staircase to an unfurnished room used for the storage of old boxes and
+discarded things. From the corner of this room she rolled out a great
+bale, dusty with years, and tied up like a carpet with an old piece of
+rope. She cut the rope and spread it out upon the floor, cautiously
+and silently. Then lowering her candle she examined it. With a smile
+upon her lips she stood up again. She fastened the bale and dragged it
+back into its corner. The smile did not leave her lips. Chance had led
+her up here some weeks ago. She had discovered the bale and had
+wondered what it was. An old carpet? A disused curtain? Now she knew.
+In an attic of this old house she had discovered the lost strip of the
+Ludsey tapestry.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XVII
+
+                              A REFUSAL
+
+
+"So you have refused young Helmsdale."
+
+Three months had passed since the Ludsey election. The air was warm
+and golden and already the world whispered of summer, yet not too loud
+lest it should seem to boast and so be balked of its desire.
+Parliament had met, London was full, and in the country the foxes and
+the pheasants had leisure to attend to their own affairs. And with the
+rest Cynthia had come to town. She rode on this morning out of the
+park, where the buds were running along the branches of the trees like
+delicate green flames, about eleven o'clock, and turning out of South
+Audley Street into Curzon Street, she saw Mr. Benoliel waiting upon
+the pavement in front of her new house. As she stopped her horse
+before the door he reprimanded her:
+
+"Cynthia, you have refused him."
+
+Cynthia blushed. Then she exclaimed:
+
+"But how in the world could you know! It isn't half an hour since I
+refused him." Then she bent down over her saddle and gazed at him in
+the fulness of admiration. "But you know everything. It wouldn't be of
+much use trying to keep things from you, would it?"
+
+Mr. Benoliel smiled grimly.
+
+"Yes, that's the way, Cynthia, and no doubt a neater style of doing it
+will come in time."
+
+Cynthia sat upright, swift as a spring, and remained so, with her nose
+in the air, haughty for five complete seconds. Then curiosity restored
+her to her sex and she swooped again over her saddle.
+
+"How did you know?"
+
+"He borrowed a horse from me this morning," said Mr. Benoliel--"a good
+horse. He was very particular that it should be a valuable horse. So I
+gathered that he wanted to make on this morning of all mornings a
+specially favorable impression."
+
+Cynthia's lips twitched.
+
+"You lent him a very good horse," she said. "But the horse didn't tell
+you."
+
+"That's where you are wrong, Cynthia. The horse did," said Mr.
+Benoliel. "Ten minutes ago, as I was turning out of Grosvenor Square,
+I met my very valuable horse being led by a ragged beggarman whom I
+had never seen in my life before. I asked him what the dickens he was
+doing with it and he explained that as he was standing by the rails in
+Hyde Park a young man rode up to him in a violent rage, dismounted,
+tossed him the reins and a shilling and told him to lead the rotten
+beast back to Grosvenor Square. Just fancy that! My horse! I might
+have lost him altogether."
+
+Cynthia tried her best to look indignant at so treacherous a return to
+Mr. Benoliel's generosity, but she could not and she rippled suddenly
+into laughter.
+
+"He was horribly angry," she said.
+
+Mr. Benoliel turned his wrath again upon Cynthia.
+
+"And no wonder!" he said. "Helmsdale's not used to being refused. He
+is young. He is good-looking. He has a social position----"
+
+"And he has a profile," added Cynthia. "Please don't forget that. But
+you can't if you know him, or even if you don't, can you? Have you
+ever fixed your eyes steadily upon him, Mr. Benoliel? Do the next time
+you see him, and within twenty seconds he will show you his profile.
+He will turn his head quite slowly and show it you, just like a man at
+the music-halls disclosing the newest sensation. I couldn't marry a
+profile, even though it was mounted on your horse." Then she bent down
+to him again coaxing him: "You didn't really want me to marry him, did
+you? You see, I don't love him."
+
+Mr. Benoliel seemed to think this answer insufficient.
+
+"Love would come," he answered.
+
+"That's what he said," exclaimed Cynthia.
+
+"And you?" asked Benoliel.
+
+Cynthia bent her eyes steadily upon him.
+
+"I answered, 'Lovers would come.'"
+
+Mr. Benoliel looked up at her with a wry face.
+
+"You know too much, my dear," he said, and Cynthia threw back her
+head, with her face suddenly clouded and sullen.
+
+"Oh, yes," she cried bitterly. "I have eaten of the tree--and
+lately--very lately."
+
+And at the sight of her distress all Mr. Benoliel's indignation
+vanished.
+
+"I know," he said gently. "That's why I wanted you to marry, Cynthia."
+
+"Is that the remedy?" she asked. And she shook her head slowly. "I am
+frightened of it."
+
+She called to her groom, dismounted from her horse and taking Mr.
+Benoliel by the arm cried:
+
+"Come in. You haven't seen my house since I bought it. You shall tell
+me what you think of it, now that it's finished."
+
+She ran up the steps and turned to him at the top with a look of
+compunction in her face:
+
+"I talk to you of my troubles," she said. "I have no right to--no,
+neither to you nor to any one. I am ashamed of myself. I have food to
+eat, clothes to wear, money to spend, and friends. Yes, I am very
+fortunate," and her mind winged back to a dark night on the estancia
+when she had crouched in a big chair, listening to horrors set ready
+for her. "I ought to be grateful," she cried with a shudder at her
+memories. "Come in!"
+
+She led him through the rooms and claimed his enthusiasm for this or
+that rare piece of satin-wood or mahogany. It had been a great joy to
+her in the early days of the year to ransack the dealers' shops and
+grow learned of Hepplewhite and Chippendale. She told Mr. Benoliel
+stories of her researches, seeking to recapture some savor of that
+past pleasure. But her sprightliness became an effort and in her own
+sitting-room she turned abruptly to him:
+
+"But I have a distaste for it all now," she said and sat down in a
+chair. "I have no longer any pride in the house at all."
+
+Mr. Benoliel stood over her and nodded his head in sympathy. She was
+distressed. She had a look of discomfort.
+
+"Yes, I understand that, Cynthia," he said.
+
+She took off her hard hat. It pressed upon her temples and made her
+head throb.
+
+"How much do you know?" she asked.
+
+"That Mrs. Royle is leaving you."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia moodily. "We have agreed to separate. Do you know
+anything more?"
+
+"Yes. The missing panel of tapestry hangs again in Ludsey Town Hall."
+
+"Yes. It was lying in a lumber-room under the roof of my house in
+Warwickshire. How long it had been lying there, or how it came there,
+I can't discover. Diana ran across it by accident. It was tied up in a
+bale like an old carpet. She didn't think it of any value--until she
+went one morning to the Town Hall with an American millionaire who was
+anxious to see the tapestry and buy it if he could."
+
+"Yes. I took Cronin there myself. He was staying with me and I drove
+him into Ludsey and met Mrs. Royle in the street. That was the day
+before the election. We all three went into the Town Hall together. I
+remember Mrs. Royle saying that she had never been in the building
+before. I pointed out the tapestry and explained that a wide strip of
+it was missing. I think I suggested that it would one day be turned
+out of some old cupboard."
+
+Cynthia nodded.
+
+"That no doubt helped her to the truth. Anyway, she tried to persuade
+me to sell it. She merely told me that it was valuable and that I
+could get two thousand pounds for it. I didn't connect it with the
+Ludsey tapestry. I thought that it might be worth while to bring it up
+to this house; and I refused to sell. Diana urged me again, however,
+and but that I don't like selling things, I would have let her sell
+it, just because she was getting tiresome about it. Then Hartmann, the
+Bond Street dealer, called on me a month ago and told me what the
+strip was."
+
+"Why did he call?" asked Benoliel.
+
+"He was in the deal with another man. Both apparently were selling to
+Mr. Cronin, and they quarrelled over the division of the profits. So
+Hartmann came to me in revenge. He told me that Diana was to get eight
+thousand pounds if she could persuade me to sell and that they meant
+to sell the tapestry afterward to Mr. Cronin for twenty-five thousand
+pounds. It's not a pretty story, is it?"
+
+"No," said Benoliel. "So you gave it back to Ludsey?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Does Mrs. Royle know that you are aware of her share in the
+transaction?"
+
+"Yes. We haven't ever talked of it, but she knows and proposed of her
+own accord that we should separate. We couldn't go on living together,
+could we? It would be too uncomfortable. I couldn't trust her."
+
+"When does she go?"
+
+"In a week or two, now," said Cynthia. "She has taken a little house
+on the north side of the park. Of course, for my father's sake"--thus
+she always spoke of Mr. Daventry--"I am looking after her;" and she
+suddenly struck her hands together. "Oh, but it's all rather sordid,
+isn't it?"
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Benoliel. He was troubled and perplexed. "And what are
+you going to do?" he asked.
+
+Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"I must engage a companion."
+
+"That doesn't sound very satisfactory."
+
+"What else can I do?"
+
+"Marry!" said Mr. Benoliel.
+
+Cynthia rose petulantly to her feet.
+
+"No," she cried. "That I won't do." She turned away and looked out
+into the street, a storm of rebellion at her heart. Why should every
+one want to marry her off? Even her friend, her adviser, who should
+have stood by her, had turned, it seemed, against her. She came back
+to Mr. Benoliel, but he stood with so distressful a countenance that
+her indignation died away, and with a pretty compunction she made her
+apology:
+
+"I know that you are thinking of me. I am sorry if I seemed to forget
+it. Forgive me! But you can't really want me to marry just so that I
+may not be alone."
+
+"My dear," said Mr. Benoliel gently, "It's a very good reason."
+
+Cynthia shook her head.
+
+"For a girl?--I am little more. No. I may come to that belief in the
+end when I am older. But not yet. I must have a better reason now.
+There are too many years ahead of me."
+
+Mr. Benoliel smiled, with a little wistfulness in the smile.
+
+"Dreams, Cynthia, dreams," he said.
+
+"I am losing them," she returned, and with a smile too, the smile of
+humor, not of amusement. "I am making haste to lose them against my
+will. But this one I'll keep for still a little while. I'll still
+dream that while I am young I must have a better reason for marriage
+than the fear of being alone."
+
+"Very well, Cynthia," said Mr. Benoliel disconsolately. "I'll hope you
+are right."
+
+He left the house and Cynthia sat down for a long time in her room.
+She had run to the extreme of melancholy with the determination of
+youth to make the very worst or best of life's daily provision. She
+had never felt so keenly the vanity of her illusions. She had seldom
+felt so lonely, she was sure. Even Harry Rames nowadays left her
+severely to herself. Why didn't he come to see her? She asked the
+question with indignation. She had never seen him since the
+supper-party at his hotel in Ludsey on the night before the poll. She
+had never heard his voice since he had spoken to her over the
+telephone just after his election. Very likely he had grown tired of
+her appeals to him to be different from what he was. No doubt she was
+a bore. Sadly Cynthia admitted it. Yes, she was a bore, and Diana
+Royle was treacherous, and Harry Rames never came to see her, and,
+take it all in all, it was a gray and dismal world.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XVIII
+
+                           A MAIDEN SPEECH
+
+
+Yet to her astonishment Harry Rames came that very week on the Friday
+afternoon. Cynthia received him with an elaborate dignity. There was
+no acidity in her welcome, neither was there any joy. She seemed
+intensely unaware that she had not seen him for three months. Her nose
+was perhaps a trifle too high in the air, but she was not conscious of
+it. On the whole she was greatly pleased with her demeanor. She was
+behaving as a woman of the world to whom one acquaintance, more or
+less, is a matter of complete indifference. She offered him tea, and
+seating herself upon a sofa in front of the table poured it out. Harry
+Rames took his cup with humility. Cynthia was quick to notice it, no
+less quick to be gratified by his exhibition of a quality which
+hitherto he had lacked. He was abashed. He was ashamed. He was uneasy.
+No doubt he had come expecting the flattery of questions. Her
+unconsciousness of the length of his absence put him at a loss. When
+he spoke, it was with difficulty. And then, suddenly, Cynthia saw his
+lips twitching at the corners. He was not abashed at all. He was
+simply trying not to laugh. Cynthia grew hot. Alas! her great dignity
+had barely sustained her in contentment for five minutes! The old
+indignation shone in her eyes. The indifferent great lady vanished.
+Almost before she was aware of it she was talking in broken, resentful
+sentences--as any other ordinary girl might have done who had been
+wounded and whose wound had betrayed her into speech.
+
+"People who insist on making friends with other people who didn't at
+the beginning want to be friends at all, haven't the right afterward
+to drop being friends calmly, without a word of explanation. Of
+course, if people are bored--but even then they should have guessed
+they were going to be bored before they perhaps made other people
+count a little--oh, not so much, of course, but just a little--on
+their friendship. No, I object to that. It's hateful--and then you
+saunter in as if--No." Cynthia, oppressed with a sense of utter
+isolation in a most neglectful world, which probably hated her when it
+stopped to think of her at all, was perilously near to tears. She took
+refuge in sarcasm of a crude kind:
+
+"You probably wouldn't understand that suddenly to stay away after you
+have been friendly is rather humiliating to a girl. But you will take
+it from me, won't you, that it is so?"
+
+She spoke as one giving a kindly lesson in tact to a boorish person.
+But her lips shook. Harry Rames rose from his chair and crossing the
+room took up the _Times_ which lay still neatly folded in its original
+square upon a table.
+
+"You have not opened your paper to-day," he said; and once more he saw
+Cynthia flinch as though he had struck her a blow--flinch and sit
+dumb, with her great eyes full of pain.
+
+"Oh, please don't make any mistake," he said quickly, and with the
+newspaper in his hand he came back to her side. "I wasn't taking what
+you said carelessly. But if you had read your _Times_ to-day you would
+have understood, I think, why I have stayed away till now. You might,
+perhaps, have guessed why I have come this afternoon."
+
+Cynthia took the newspaper from him and unfolded it, with her eyes
+resting in doubt upon his. Then comprehension came to her. She turned
+the pages quickly and stopped at one particular sheet of closely
+printed columns. "Oh," she cried, "you have made your maiden speech."
+
+"Yes, last night."
+
+In a second her resentment was forgotten. She was all smiles. She
+reached out an eager hand to him. "It was successful? But why do I
+ask? I have watched the newspapers ever since the House met. I thought
+you were never going to speak."
+
+"I always meant to hold back at the beginning," said the wise Harry
+Rames. "There were new men tumbling over one another to speak on the
+address; I let them get that start of me without any fear. I wanted to
+learn the way of speaking which carries you home in the House of
+Commons."
+
+Cynthia laughed and made room for him on the sofa at her side.
+
+"Yes, there I recognize you."
+
+"Besides," Rames continued, "the address fights the election over
+again, sums it up, and parades its consequences--consequences already
+known to all. It's very difficult to make any real mark in the debate
+on the address. So while the other men talked I sat quiet. Night after
+night through the address, through the two months which followed it, I
+sat in the House, listening and watching. And I learned my lesson."
+
+"Yes?" said Cynthia.
+
+"I learned that the House scoffs at oratory and has no use for
+perorations; that it won't listen to leading articles; that it won't
+tolerate conceit, except in the biggest men, and hates it in them;
+that it is conscious of dignity and requires the same consciousness in
+the members who address it. It requires too that the man who
+intervenes in a debate should contribute something out of himself."
+
+"Does it always get that?" asked Cynthia in bewilderment.
+
+"No, indeed. But, on the other hand, it goes out into the lobby, or it
+talks. Smale's a wise man. He told me once that hardly ever did a
+Parliament produce more than three new men. Just think of it! For five
+or six years, for six or eight or ten months in each of those years,
+there's one perpetual flow of talk during eight hours of the day in
+that Chamber; and yet out of all that sludge of talk only three men
+emerge of any account. I want to be one of the three men in this
+Parliament. Otherwise you are right and I am wrong. I have mischosen
+my career. So I sat quiet and learned my lesson."
+
+"Until last night," said Cynthia.
+
+"Yes, my opportunity came."
+
+"With a subject on which you could contribute?"
+
+"Well, on which I thought I could," said Rames; and once again Cynthia
+wondered at the patience with which he had sat night after night
+awaiting his moment, and yet counting calmly as among the
+possibilities of failure his own incompetence. "It was Asiatic
+immigration."
+
+Cynthia made a grimace.
+
+"Sounds dull?" asked Rames. "Very likely. But it's an important
+question for us and one that's going to be still more important in the
+future. You see, as a power, we are in a queer position. We are at
+once the white people resisting the Asiatic immigrant, and the Asiatic
+immigrant wanting the outlet of immigration--but I won't make my
+speech over again to you. I raised the question myself on the colonial
+vote, and here is what I said,"--he took the newspaper from her hands,
+folded it, and gave it back to her. Then he sat quietly by her side
+while she read the speech through. She appreciated the labor and
+thought which had gone to its making; the half column which the
+_Times_ gave to reporting it enabled her to realize that it had been
+delivered with a vivid economy of phrase which gave his meaning aptly
+and never frittered it away. If only the trouble had been taken and
+the speech delivered for the sake of the question! The question was a
+big one. Cynthia understood that through the spectacles of Harry
+Rames's speech.
+
+"You made a great success?" she asked turning toward him. She noticed
+that he was sitting very still beside her, as though he set great
+store upon her judgment. And in a voice of greater warmth she said:
+
+"But of course you did."
+
+Again Rames took the newspaper and again he folded it. He pointed to
+the first leader, from which his name stood out in bigger type than
+the rest of the text.
+
+"It doesn't so very often happen that the _Times_ takes the subject of
+its chief leading article from a man's first speech in the House of
+Commons."
+
+Then he folded the paper again at the parliamentary report and pointed
+to a paragraph here and there. "That's what the leader of the
+opposition said. Here's the reference the colonial minister made when
+he wound up the debate. You see, both dealt with my speech."
+
+There was a note of quiet elation in Harry Rames's voice. He had taken
+another step along the chosen path. He had passed through another of
+the ordeals.
+
+Cynthia did not answer. She sat with the newspaper on her knees,
+gazing forward with perplexed eyes. She looked almost disheartened.
+
+Rames noticed the look and smiled.
+
+"I know what's troubling you, Miss Daventry. You are wondering whether
+it isn't, after all, the horrible truth that a desire to get on and
+excel can achieve quite as much, and be quite as useful to the world,
+as enthusiasm for a cause, the pure, genuine enthusiasm to make the
+world better."
+
+Cynthia turned to him with a start.
+
+"Yes, I was wondering just in that way."
+
+"Well, I'll answer you," said Rames firmly. "The desire to get on
+achieves more and better things than enthusiasm for an idea."
+
+"I can't believe it," cried Cynthia in revolt.
+
+"Think it over," continued Rames. "Enthusiasm for cause blinds you to
+the harm, the injustice which you may do in furthering your cause. The
+desire to get on makes you appreciate the cause, and weigh it, yes,
+but it makes you weigh also the methods of advance."
+
+"No, no," cried Cynthia. "You push a garden roller over all my frail
+illusions. Some day, I think, you'll pay;" and she turned suddenly
+toward him. "Yes, I'm afraid you'll pay."
+
+She glanced down at the paper and suddenly swept it off her knees. His
+were ignoble views; she was sure of it. But none the less he was her
+friend, and she took refuge from his views, as was her wont, in her
+friendship. After all, he had come hot from his little triumph to tell
+her of it. She recognized that she was making him an ungenerous
+return.
+
+"Tell me what you felt when you got up to speak! Were you nervous?"
+she asked, and Rames relaxed from his attitude of vigilance and leaned
+back with a laugh.
+
+"I should have run away if I could," he said. "But I couldn't. I had
+taken the trouble to make flight impossible. The House goes into
+Committee over the estimates. I had asked Smale to speak to the
+Chairman of Committees. He had done so. An opportunity had been made
+for me. I had to make the best of it I could."
+
+"Tell me," Cynthia insisted; and as more than once he had done before,
+having lost ground in her thoughts, he marched forward and
+unconsciously regained it. For he drew her with humor and a vivid
+truth the picture of a man in one of the ordeals of his life. He
+neither posed as the triumphant hero for whom there are no
+difficulties, nor did he exaggerate his terrors or apprehensions so
+that his ultimate success might glow the brighter. He was true to
+himself, as he had always striven to be with Cynthia. The labor of
+forethought, the stress of fear, the strain upon the nerves, and the
+tiny victory won as the consequence were set before her in their due
+proportions. He ceased to be a thing of cold calculations and
+inevitable triumphs. He became a man, stiffening his knees against
+tremors and alarms.
+
+He had walked down to the House early on that Thursday. For his speech
+had been thought out, and there was nothing more for him to do, and
+now he must keep moving. He went down onto the broad terrace over the
+Thames, and there, during the hour of questions which precedes debate,
+in a cold wind he wandered miserable. One tall and burly policeman was
+the calm guardian of that deserted place. Harry Rames walked from the
+Speaker's house to the House of Lords and back again, trying to repeat
+over to himself the argument of his speech. But the policeman loomed
+too large between him and it. Rames detected something supercilious in
+his imperturbability. No doubt he knew that Rames that day was going
+to make his maiden speech. He must have seen so many pace this terrace
+during the hour of questions with the same apprehensions. The signs
+would be visible.
+
+Rames turned his back upon the policeman and leaned on the parapet.
+But the speech would not come. He had left the opening sentences to
+the moment when he should be upon his legs. For he must link what he
+had to say onto what already had been said, lest he should lose
+altogether the effect of spontaneity. The rest he had prepared and
+rehearsed, and rehearsed again, with the intention to know it so well
+that he should be free to twist into its scheme the speeches made
+immediately before. But now that he tried to say it over on the
+terrace it lost altogether its continuity. The argument halted; the
+chosen words failed him; he stumbled from unconnected epigram to
+inappropriate metaphor; he clung to half-remembered phrases, and with
+a sinking heart repeated them, and repeated them--and repeated them.
+He shut his eyes. The great effort was going to be just a failure of
+fine talk--the mere scrap-heap of a speech.
+
+He looked down at the brown water, followed it eastward below the
+bridge; and then his eyes were caught by a small torpedo-boat lying
+opposite at a mooring in front of St. Thomas's Hospital. And the
+aspect of this familiar thing smote him down to the depths of
+abasement. But for presumption he might now be in command of a great
+battle-ship doing the things he had been trained to do, and doing them
+with confidence. And his thoughts swept him away to Spithead; and the
+vision of a great, dark battle-ship, sitting steadily in a tumbled sea
+between Southsea and the Isle of Wight, clear of the Solent fairway,
+and west of the checkered forts, rose up and drew him for a moment as
+with chains. He hated his ambitions; he thought of this dreadful hour
+to which they had lured him. He saw the day pass and the evening come
+up out of the sea and the lights begin to glow upon the foreshore, a
+cluster at Southsea pier, a little chain running up the hill of Union
+Street, at Ryde, and close down by the water's edge tiny lights in
+cottages and houses like glow-worms in a forest.
+
+Then another step sounded on the pavement and he turned away from his
+vision. After all he might be laughing at all these fears in an hour's
+time, he took the courage to reflect; and he went up the stairs and
+across the lobby into the Chamber itself. He looked for a seat on the
+second bench below the gangway, but the House was full.
+
+Colonel Challoner, again passed over in the choice of
+under-secretaries, looked up at him from the corner seat, and noticed
+the blue-book and a volume of Hansard under his arm.
+
+"Are you going to speak?" he asked.
+
+"If I can get called," said Rames.
+
+Challoner made room for him at his side.
+
+"I mean to say a word or two myself," he said, "but we shall probably
+neither of us get a chance. Those front-bench men think it beneath
+their dignity to take less than an hour."
+
+Certainly, so far as the first speech was concerned, Colonel Challoner
+was right. It was delivered from the opposition bench by an
+ex-minister, William Kenway, a man of a kindly and generous
+disposition who yet managed by some perversity of tact to rasp the
+temper of the House from wall to wall. For a full hour he stood there
+now, saying the wrong thing with determination, giving little lessons
+with the air of a school-master, irritating by a certain priggishness
+his friends behind him as well as his opponents in front.
+
+Rames sat and listened. He realized that the very opportunity which he
+wanted was being given to him. Kenway, with a white paper in his hand,
+came to the problem of Asiatic immigration. Rames was no longer trying
+to remember the consecution of his speech. He sat waiting for the long
+speech to end, making a note or two, grasping at a beginning for his
+speech, and clinging firmly to it.
+
+When Kenway sat down, he found himself standing upon his legs. He was
+aware at once that some one was standing beside him, Colonel
+Challoner. Both men had risen. Almost he resumed his seat, and then he
+heard his name called by the chairman, and from a very long way off an
+encouraging cheer reached his ears.
+
+He was conscious of the lack of a table in front of him or the barrier
+of a platform--something on which he could rest a hand. He felt
+strangely defenceless without it. He faltered through his opening
+sentences in a voice which sounded to his ears weak and thin as a
+ghost's. He saw a member take off his hat on the opposite benches,
+rise, and make his way out; and at once he was certain that he was
+making a dismal failure. Suddenly he remembered one member who had
+risen to speak, had been called upon and had sunk back in his seat
+without uttering more than a few unintelligible words. Was his to be
+the same fate, he asked himself? And asking himself he lost the thread
+of what he was saying and with a gasp retrieved it.
+
+"It seemed to me," he said in describing the scene to Cynthia, "that I
+stood there dumb and helpless for twenty seconds. As a matter of fact,
+the interval was so short that not even my neighbors noticed it. I
+suppose that I only paused for the fraction of a second, really."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia, and the trifle remained in her mind.
+
+He was speaking, too, with a haze before his eyes and his hands
+clutching at the edges of his coat. But he went on, and then quite
+suddenly the haze thinned so that he saw the House and he heard his
+voice ringing out clear and firm, not loud nor arrogant, filling the
+Chamber and with just that note of deference which he had planned to
+strike and had struck because the deference was sincere. He turned in
+his place. He was no longer conscious of the need of a table in front
+of him; he looked down the House toward the clock above the entrance
+door, and he saw that the bar was thronged with members. Curiosity, no
+doubt, had brought them in from the library and the smoking-room and
+the lobby when his name went up on the tape--he had, after all, a
+reputation. He, the least romantic of men, had some aura of romance
+about him in that assembly; enough at all events to invite a momentary
+interest. But they stayed, and as he spoke in a voice that went
+steadily forward with the rhythm of marching men, he saw now one, now
+another come out from the throng at the bar and slip into a seat. With
+a throb of joy he realized that he was not failing, that now he was
+not going to fail. The House had filled since he had risen and on all
+the benches there was a great quiet. He turned toward the Speaker's
+chair. The space at the sides of it was crowded too. He saw more than
+one cabinet-minister standing. Above, behind the grille, he saw the
+big hats and shadowy forms of the ladies in the gallery, and here and
+there the gleam of an ermine stole against the light behind them. That
+happened to him again which had happened in the Corn Exchange at
+Ludsey. He turned over the consecutions of his argument like the pages
+of a printed book. He was master of himself. He worked in his
+predecessor's points and replied to them with force and without
+offence because they were just the points he had foreseen. He provoked
+interruptions from his opponents; he had foreseen them and was ready,
+and the cheers broke out from the benches about him and behind him. He
+spoke for just twenty minutes. The applause, generous and friendly,
+came from both sides of the House when he resumed his seat. The
+Prime-Minister leaned across the gangway and shook him by the hand.
+And as for the great battle-ship at Spithead, anybody could have it as
+a gift.
+
+Rames leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. So the third step
+of the great career had been taken. He had been chosen candidate, he
+had been elected member, he had made something of a small triumph out
+of his maiden speech. Now he would wait without any hurry. He would
+make one speech more later on in the session, perhaps two--not more
+than two, certainly. And next session he would plunge boldly and take
+up his part in the impromptu debating on the Committee stages of
+Bills. In that work lay the real test of parliamentary capacity.
+
+
+Thus he planned, and content with his plan he opened his eyes again.
+At once he was made uneasy. He met the eyes of a small, white-haired
+man with a deeply lined, brown face who was watching him fixedly from
+the benches opposite. This was Albert Coulter, a man of many
+expeditions in untravelled countries, when there were countries still
+untravelled, whose name had become a signal for dark whispers. A
+callous selfishness, when selfishness might mean the life or health of
+his companions, and a relentless severity with his natives, was
+rightly or wrongly imputed. The survivors of his expeditions came back
+with queer stories. But he had never failed until the moment, when at
+the age of fifty and with the looks of seventy, he had entered the
+House of Commons. There, an interesting yet ineffective figure, he sat
+day after day, solitary, disliked, with brooding eyes under a bristle
+of gray eyebrows which seemed to be haunted with sinister memories of
+deep tropical forests and days long past. His eyes rested upon Harry
+Rames now, not enviously, not encouragingly, but without expression,
+almost indeed like the eyes of a dead man. Their fixed gaze chilled
+the blood of Harry Rames and all his satisfaction was marred. He had
+to move from his place and beyond the reach of those brooding eyes
+before he shook the impression off. And even now so distinct was it in
+his memories that he omitted it altogether and deliberately from the
+story he told that afternoon to Cynthia Daventry. He related in its
+place another incident which had happened later in the evening.
+
+"We had a division," he said. "I was walking through the lobby and
+just at the turnstiles where the clerks tick off our names, I found
+Henry Smale in front of me. The R's and the S's go through the same
+turnstile. He turned round as I passed through behind him, and said to
+me in a low voice, 'You have the ear of the House now. Keep your eye
+on the treasury bench.' That from Smale, who was dissuading me to
+enter Parliament, means a good deal."
+
+Harry Rames turned and looked at Cynthia.
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia.
+
+There was a smile upon her face rather wistful, rather ironic.
+
+"So you have turnstiles in your House of Commons," she said slowly.
+
+"No. Did I say turnstiles?" he asked. "There's no actual barrier which
+revolves. But there's only room for one at a time to pass between the
+desks. The clerks stand at the desks and register your votes for
+publication. Otherwise where would party government be?"
+
+"You mean if the votes weren't published men would vote according to
+their convictions?"
+
+Rames nodded.
+
+"But it's a superficial view," he said. "You have got to take the sum
+of your policy. As a whole, is it better than the other fellow's?
+That's what you have to ask yourself when you are going to register a
+vote upon some particular point which may help to turn your government
+out and let the other fellows in."
+
+"Yes, I see that," said Cynthia; and once more her eyes fell upon the
+_Times_ and she was suddenly conscious of a queer pride. Others to-day
+were aware of the success which Harry Rames had made; probably she
+alone was aware of the thought, and the apprehension and the
+tribulation of soul which had gone to the making of the success. To
+the others he would just be one of the inevitably successful--what
+indeed she had herself been wont to think him. To-day, however, he was
+to her human as he had never been. He had shown himself to her,
+bleating with fear like an ordinary man at the approach of the fateful
+moment which was to put him to the test. He had drawn the picture with
+a sense of humor, but he had not blurred it. Would he have drawn it
+for any one else, she asked herself? She turned impulsively toward
+him:
+
+"I wanted you to come to me this week," she said impulsively. "And I
+thank you very much for telling me not merely that you succeeded, but
+how near you were to breaking down. But," and she hesitated for a few
+moments, "I should have been still more grateful if you had come to me
+the day before you made your speech."
+
+"I almost did," said Harry Rames.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIX
+
+                            AND A PROPOSAL
+
+
+Cynthia smiled, but she did not believe.
+
+"I think," she said, "that this is the very first time you have gone
+beyond the truth to say a pleasant thing to me."
+
+"It is the truth," he insisted. "I almost did more than come to you. I
+almost asked you to let me inflict my speech on you before I made it
+in the House."
+
+"Oh, I wish you had!" cried Cynthia. "It would have made a difference
+to me this last week--a great difference." Then she turned swiftly
+toward Harry Rames with a glance of distrust. "Why didn't you come
+then?" she asked coldly. "There was nothing to hinder you. You knew
+that you would be very welcome. I should like to have known beforehand
+what you were going to say;" and once more a gentle wistfulness crept
+into her voice. "I should have liked also to have heard you in the
+House. I should have liked, in a word--not to have been shut out."
+
+"You weren't shut out," Harry Rames exclaimed. "You mustn't fancy
+that! It's not true. If I did not come, it was really because I had
+you in my thoughts. Yes. I stayed away deliberately because of a
+saying of Smale's which I know to be true, which I quoted to you at
+Ludsey."
+
+The distrust grew stronger in Cynthia's mind. What had Smale to do
+with the matter? Her face hardened. Harry Rames had, till this moment,
+at all events, been honest, had always stood apart in her eyes by
+reason of his honesty. Must she strip him now of that quality even as
+she had to do of the other, the imagined ones?
+
+"What saying?" she asked.
+
+"That many a man may cut a great figure upon the platforms who will
+never get the ear of the House of Commons. I wanted to be sure that I
+was not one of those--before I came to you."
+
+A particular significance in the intonation of the words warned
+her--and then troubled her. She looked at him swiftly, and as swiftly
+looked away. The blood mounted into her face and flushed her throat.
+
+"I wanted to be sure that I should come not quite empty-handed," he
+continued.
+
+Cynthia made no pretence to misunderstand him, and no answer. All was
+explained to her now: why he had stayed away, why he now returned--all
+those particulars which he had told her she might have guessed, and
+not one of which had to this moment entered her head. She had never
+stepped beyond the border-line of friendship in her thoughts of Harry
+Rames--never once. She was startled now that she was asked to. She
+needed time to adjust herself to the new point of view. He had been
+honest with her, after all. That was her first instinctive
+recollection.
+
+"So I am here now to ask you to marry me," he continued. He spoke very
+quietly and simply. He did not simulate any passion, and again in her
+heart comparing him with that other wooer in the Row, she thanked him
+for his honesty.
+
+Still she made no answer, but calmness had returned to her. She sat
+looking out of the window, straight ahead of her, with her chin
+propped in the palm of her hand. She was quite still, and the
+stillness of her attitude was no greater than the stillness of her
+mind. There was no throb of joy at her heart. But Harry Rames had been
+honest with her, and she had been taught not to expect so very much.
+
+"I think you know whom you will be marrying," he resumed. "I have
+tried to make what I know about myself clear to you as well as to me.
+You once agreed that I left you no illusions about me."
+
+"Yes. On the platform at the Corn Exchange in Ludsey," Cynthia
+replied. "I remember quite well. I remember your answer too: That you
+did not mean to."
+
+"Yes," said Harry Rames. "That was my answer."
+
+Cynthia paused for a few seconds. Then in her turn she began to
+question him.
+
+"So even then you were thinking that if you succeeded in
+Parliament--this afternoon would come?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Perhaps even before then?"
+
+"Yes, even before then."
+
+Cynthia nodded her head. With a smile in which there was irony and a
+little of her old resentment, she remarked:
+
+"Yes, you have always looked ahead."
+
+Harry replied simply and gravely:
+
+"Always."
+
+"Thank you," said Cynthia.
+
+She thanked him because he was so perfectly honest with her. He
+admitted--for his words were no less than such an admission--that he
+had deliberately thought of her because she had money. On the other
+hand, it was true that he had stood by and left the opportunity open
+for any one to snatch until he could himself bring something into the
+partnership. That weighed with her in his favor.
+
+"Will you tell me when you first began to think of me in this way?"
+she asked with an earnestness which to Harry Rames appeared quite
+singular. To his direct mind the one question which needed answering
+was whether she meant to marry him or no.
+
+"Does the exact date matter?"
+
+"Very much."
+
+Rebellion again broke out in Cynthia. "I believe it is quite a usual
+question for maidens to ask on these occasions. But no doubt I ought
+to have asked it with a deeper bashfulness."
+
+Harry reflected. Here was one of the nice subtleties of the feminine
+mind which somehow he must satisfy.
+
+"It was after I had driven out once or twice from Ludsey to see you.
+That is as near as I can put it. It was after I had got to know you a
+little."
+
+"As soon, in a word, as you concluded that I would suit the place."
+Though the sentence was phrased still in the ironical form, the irony
+had suddenly gone from her voice. She was so relieved that a smile
+trembled about her lips. Her next words gave the reason of her relief.
+
+"So really and truly you want me personally--as well."
+
+The question would have sounded vague to a stranger, but these two
+understood that it was her fortune which she omitted to name. Cynthia
+knew, as she could not but know, that her wealth had first set his
+thoughts running toward her. But it was some personal quality which in
+the end had decided him to ask for her. He must have money--yes, but
+other help than money as well. It was a satisfaction to her pride that
+he found it in her.
+
+"Yes," he returned. "A wife can do so much for a man in politics if
+she is the right wife. I should be very glad if you would marry me,"
+Rames resumed. "I think that we should get along together very well,
+and together we might do important things."
+
+"Be important things," Cynthia corrected.
+
+Harry Rames smiled.
+
+"That's an old quarrel of ours, Cynthia. I mean 'do' this time."
+
+Cynthia looked at him quickly. She was in the mood to find in that
+hope the strongest of appeals.
+
+"You really think so?"
+
+"I do. I should owe so very much to you. I should be conscious of my
+debt. I should try with all my strength to pay it back."
+
+Cynthia gave him her face frankly now. A smile of confidence quite lit
+it up.
+
+"I have no doubt of that," she said; and then the smile faded, and
+there came a look of longing.
+
+"But I would rather, of course, that it were work for love of me, than
+work to repay me. There's a difference, isn't there? But I suppose one
+can't have everything, and--perhaps--I might be content to help you
+on."
+
+She fell again to a wistful silence, pursuing the vision of a
+happiness which might have been down an avenue of bright imagined
+years. The happiness did exist. She had seen the evidences of it often
+enough. All men were not _tant soit peu cochons_, as she had once
+heard an unhappy French lady describe them, nor were all women
+neurotic. She had heard of lovers who felt that they had been waiting
+for one another since the beginning of the world. But it seemed that
+such happiness was for others, not for her.
+
+"Tell me!" she said. "When you were making your speech, after the
+agitation had passed and when you were master of yourself, you looked
+up to the ladies' gallery, you said, and noticed the women behind the
+grille?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well--it is a little difficult to ask the question--But"--she stopped
+for a moment or two, and then went on with an appealing timidity,
+while the color once more mounted into her face--"but I suppose that
+then--when you knew you were making a success--it never came into your
+mind that you would have liked to have got me up there in the gallery
+while you were speaking?"
+
+The temptation to lie was strong upon Harry Rames now. The very
+timidity of her appeal moved him. It taught him that the truth would
+hurt her much more than he had ever dreamed. He hesitated. For the
+first time in her company he was at a loss.
+
+"The truth, please," she pleaded earnestly. "You said that your mind
+was free, that you could stand outside yourself and look on at what
+you were doing, as artists do. It never once occurred to you that you
+wanted me up there in the ladies' gallery, too, at the moment of your
+success, to witness it--to--yes, to share it with you?"
+
+The word was out at last--the word which she had been striving with
+her modesty to reach.
+
+"Be frank, please," she prayed.
+
+Harry Rames was at a loss how to wrap the brutal truth up so that it
+should not hurt overmuch. He had no other intention at this moment. He
+was for once not considering what effect his answer would have upon
+his own prospects and future.
+
+"You were in my thoughts," he said. "That's true. For I was thinking
+that now I could come to you. But, yes, I wanted to be sure of myself
+first."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia slowly, and with humility she analyzed the meaning
+of his words. "You never thought of me as a kind of inspiration to an
+even greater success in the future if you succeeded now, or as a kind
+of consolation if you failed. It may be vanity to say so, but I think
+that is what a woman in whom you were interested, and who was
+interested in you, would have liked you to have thought. I was, after
+all, shut out, wasn't I? I was to hear of the achievement after it was
+done and over, and I was neither to share the preliminary fears, nor
+feel the revulsion when the triumph came."
+
+"Yes, but look at it from my point of view. There are many who want to
+marry you--men with something to offer. It wouldn't have been fair if
+I didn't bring something in my basket too."
+
+"Fair!" cried Cynthia scornfully. "Oh, I know, that's the point of
+view of the man--at least," and as she realized that she had been
+unjust, her face dimpled to smiles, "of the men one rather likes." For
+it occurred to her that Lord Helmsdale would have been troubled by no
+such scruples.
+
+"No," she said. "You wouldn't have borrowed another man's thoroughbred
+so that you might cut a dashing figure while you proposed."
+
+Rames had no idea of what she meant, and he behaved as he usually did
+when unintelligible things were said to him by women. He asked for no
+explanations and just took no notice of Cynthia's words. He sat
+quietly at her side and waited.
+
+The clock struck the hour. He put his hand into his pocket, and at the
+movement Cynthia started.
+
+"There is no hurry," said Harry Rames. "I was only getting out my
+cigarette case. May I smoke?"
+
+"Of course," replied Cynthia; she was relieved that she need not
+answer upon the moment. She was still in a great perplexity; and while
+Harry Rames smoked his cigarette she sought this way and that for a
+light to guide her. Here was not the marriage of which she had
+dreamed. No. But he was honest. It was possible, too, that she might
+be able to help him on, as he had said. And it might be well worth
+doing. It might be true that the ambitious men are the world's best
+servants, and not the men possessed with ideas. Ideas, she remembered,
+with a bitter little smile at her folly, had once given the right of
+entrance to her enchanted garden. But she had travelled far from its
+gateway, and the flowers were all dead in it, and its pathways
+overgrown. It might be that the fixed idea meant the narrow vision.
+Harry Rames might be right; and if he were, by helping him on, she
+would make her money of real and great value. It was a gray world
+anyway--and Harry Rames was honest. She could trust him--though he
+wounded her.
+
+She turned suddenly toward him.
+
+"Do you remember the supper party at Ludsey?" she asked.
+
+"Of course," he replied: "And the little Frenchman, Monsieur Poizat."
+
+"I was not thinking of him," said Cynthia. A sentence or two spoken at
+that table by Colonel Challoner had leaped into her memory. Politics
+meant color in the lives of men. It was the craving for color which
+fired enthusiasm in the towns of the provinces. Well, she herself
+craved for bright colors in her life too. Might she not get them out
+of the paint-pot of politics just as men did?
+
+"If I were to say yes," she remarked, "I would not be content to be
+merely the witness of your success. I must share the fears which go to
+make it. I could not sit quiet and twirl my thumbs, shut out from the
+hopes and apprehensions and endeavors, and just smile admiringly at
+the result. I must share everything."
+
+"Of course," said Harry Rames. "From the moment you say 'yes,' you
+share everything. I meant that too when I said that I needed your
+help."
+
+He spoke gravely and sincerely, and again Cynthia said, "Thank you."
+
+She sat for a little while longer, hesitating upon the brink. To say
+"yes" would solve the question of a companion. Oh, certainly, there
+were practical advantages in the acceptance of Harry Rames's proposal.
+She would have to abandon the hope of beauty in her life. Color,
+excitement, interest, she might get. But the beautiful life would not
+be for her. Still, under no circumstances, perhaps, might it have been
+for her. No one, she reflected, and with some sadness--no one by his
+approach had ever set her heart beating to a quicker tune. Perhaps
+there was some defect in her, some want of human passion, she
+reflected, which placed her in the second rank of women. When Cynthia
+was humble there was no girl so humble as Cynthia. And, after all,
+Harry Rames was honest. To that one stable point all her questions
+brought her back.
+
+She moved at last, and Harry Rames rose and stood before her.
+
+"Well?" he asked.
+
+Cynthia dropped her hands loose at her sides and answered with a
+smile:
+
+"Why not?"
+
+It was in those words that she accepted him. There was no spirit in
+them, and very little of expectation. But she had come to expect not
+very much; and she had travelled a long way from the garden of her
+dreams.
+
+"After all, there's a turnstile in this affair, too," she said, with a
+note of bitterness. "A very important one too. For it leads not into a
+garden, but straight to the treasury bench."
+
+Harry Rames was bewildered. But he made no comment. Women were queer,
+and it was good to disregard their moments of excitement. Cynthia
+sprang up the next moment and laid her hand upon his arm.
+
+"Oh, yes, we'll follow Mr. Smale's advice, Harry," she cried, "and
+we'll keep our eyes on the treasury bench. Why not? Now go, and come
+back to-morrow."
+
+She was laughing a little wildly, and Harry Rames had the sense to
+take her at her word. He went out of the room, and Cynthia flung
+herself down upon the cushions and cried for an hour by the clock.
+
+"Well," she said to herself at the end, as she rose and dried her
+eyes, "Mr. Benoliel will be satisfied. That's one thing." Almost she
+seemed to blame Mr. Benoliel for the fact of her engagement.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XX
+
+                              AT CULVER
+
+
+The odd thing in the affair, however, was that Mr. Benoliel did not
+seem satisfied. Cynthia asked him over the telephone the next day to
+come to her, and when he came she told him of her engagement.
+
+"But no one knows of it as yet except yourself," she added; "and no
+one is to know, for the present. I want it kept a secret."
+
+"Oh!" said Mr. Benoliel, looking at her curiously. "And why?"
+
+"There will be a certain amount of ill-natured talk," Cynthia returned
+in a confusion. "And I want the time for it to be as short as
+possible. It will cease after we are married."
+
+"People will say that Rames is an adventurer, who is marrying you for
+your money," said Mr. Benoliel bluntly, and Cynthia turned on him with
+spirit.
+
+"Lord Helmsdale's mother will, and other mothers would have said the
+same of Lord Helmsdale if I had married him."
+
+"So it's to spare the feelings of Harry Rames that you are keeping
+your engagement secret," said Mr. Benoliel with an ironical wonder. "I
+should never have suspected him of such delicate susceptibilities."
+
+"Well, I should be uncomfortable too!" cried Cynthia, bending puzzled
+and indignant brows at him. "I think you are quite horrid."
+
+Benoliel sustained her indignation unabashed.
+
+"Is that the only reason, Cynthia?" he asked.
+
+"You wanted me married," Cynthia continued. "You ought to be very,
+very pleased."
+
+Mr. Benoliel, however, was not to be lured from his question into a
+discussion upon the propriety of his feelings. He repeated it.
+
+"Is fear of gossip the only reason, Cynthia, which makes you keep your
+engagement secret?"
+
+Cynthia again showed signs of confusion. Mr. Benoliel wore his air of
+omniscience. She sat down upon a chair.
+
+"What do you mean, Mr. Benoliel?"
+
+"This," said he. "I have noticed that the young ladies who keep their
+engagements secret are not, as a rule, very much in love with the men
+they are engaged to. They leave themselves a loop-hole of escape."
+
+Cynthia's cheeks flamed. Certainly she had intended to spare Harry
+Rames and herself some uncomfortable weeks. But would she have minded
+those weeks had she cared for him? The question came swiftly, and as
+swiftly was answered. Had she cared for him she would have wanted to
+wear him like a ribbon on her breast for all the world to see. She
+realized it with a pang. She would have run quickly forward to meet
+the gossip and do battle. But she had not run forward. It was true
+that she had left herself a pathway of retreat, and rather by instinct
+than from any deliberate plan. Her wariness had prompted her. Once
+more she had wanted to be safe. But nothing of this was she going to
+acknowledge to Mr. Benoliel.
+
+"I think you are extraordinarily horrid," she said again with a cold
+dignity, and hoped that her stateliness would crush her inquisitor.
+
+"When do you propose to marry, then?" he asked.
+
+"Just before Whitsuntide. The House will rise for ten days, I hear, at
+the least. We shall announce the marriage just before the House
+rises;" and that indeed was the plan upon which she had agreed only
+that morning with Harry Rames.
+
+"Then there is no hurry," said Mr. Benoliel. "Perhaps you and Captain
+Rames will pay me a visit in the country before Whitsuntide comes."
+
+He spoke as though he accepted the situation, and turned to other
+subjects, fearing to confirm Cynthia in obstinacy by any show of
+opposition.
+
+"Certainly," she said; "we shall be pleased to come;" and a month
+later she and Harry Rames came one Friday afternoon to Culver.
+
+The house stood within hearing of the bells of Ludsey, but on that
+side of the city opposite to the White House. Benoliel had built it
+himself, and to those who knew the man but slightly it was an
+astonishing production. Captain Rames, for instance, whose taste was
+not very meticulous, never ceased to marvel at it. Even this Friday
+afternoon, as the car swung round a turn of the country road and the
+thing stood before him, he contemplated it with amazement. It was
+nothing but a monstrous new villa of red and yellow brick, a
+pretentious ghastliness of towers and flashing glass rising from the
+middle of a small bare field within twenty yards of the roadway. An
+avenue of fir-trees not yet shoulder-high wound to the front door, and
+there was no need for it to wind. Circular beds of glaring flowers
+disfigured the new lawns, and little bushes of evergreens, which would
+one distant day make an effort to be shrubberies, gave to the house a
+most desolate and suburban look. It seemed wonderful to Harry Rames
+that so nice and delicate a person as Mr. Benoliel could bear to live
+in it at all; and still more wonderful that with a dozen of the most
+beautiful houses in England bosomed in deep meadows and whispered to
+by immemorial elms, within an easy motor-ride to choose from as his
+models, he should have devised this unconscionable edifice.
+
+Sir James Burrell, the surgeon, however, who was sitting opposite to
+Harry Rames in the car, and next to Cynthia, took a different view. He
+gazed at the house with satisfaction. For it would add yet another
+subtle paragraph to his character sketch of Mr. Benoliel.
+
+"How extraordinary," he cried, "and yet how like the man! That's just
+the house which Benoliel would have built. Only one had not the
+insight to guess it. I love it!" and he leaned his head out of the
+window and chuckled at the building's grotesqueness. "Yes, I love it.
+The fitness of things appeals to me." And he turned to the astonished
+Captain Rames. "You don't see the exquisite appropriateness of
+that--let us not call it a house--that detached residence to Isaac
+Benoliel?"
+
+"Well, I don't," said Harry Rames. "He always seemed to me to set up
+as a lover of beautiful things."
+
+"And the love is genuine," said Sir James, fairly off at a gallop upon
+his hobby. "He doesn't set up. The love is almost a quality of his
+race. Yes, but his race doesn't always know what things are beautiful.
+There's the explanation of that building--race, which confounds logic
+and is quite untroubled by inconsistencies. There's Benoliel's race in
+every line of it. He's of the Orient. He loves flamboyancy and
+gaudiness. He may conceal it carefully from us. But every now and then
+it must break out, and it has run riot here. Does the East repair and
+mend? No, it lets its old buildings decay and builds afresh. That's
+why Mr. Benoliel passes by your stately houses all up for sale in
+their parks and builds this villa. Remember, Captain Rames, though Mr.
+Benoliel talks with you and walks with you, he doesn't think with you.
+Behind those old tired eyes of his, he thinks as the East thinks."
+
+Thus Sir James Burrell, and the car stopped at the front door before
+he could utter another word. He was not sorry, nor indeed were the
+other occupants of the carriage. He was merely trying his new
+paragraph on the dog, so to speak. He needed time to eliminate the
+unnecessary, and make it vivid with the single word, and fix it up
+with a nice juxtaposition of paradoxes and altogether to furbish it
+for presentation.
+
+"He does talk!" said Harry Rames to Cynthia.
+
+"Yes, doesn't he," she replied with a laugh, and then grew serious.
+"But I wonder whether he's right. I wonder whether Mr. Benoliel thinks
+and judges from principles which are true to him, but not true to us."
+Her eyes rested with a strange and thoughtful scrutiny on Harry's
+face.
+
+"Why should you trouble?" said Harry Rames.
+
+"It makes a little difference to me," said Cynthia. "Perhaps more than
+a little."
+
+For old Daventry's last words weighed upon her. He had bidden her in
+troubles and difficulties to seek advice from Isaac Benoliel. He had
+thought much of his wisdom. She had herself accepted it as a thing
+beyond question, and a timely help. Now, she began to ask herself, was
+his wisdom, if it was born of the East and tempered by the instincts
+of his race, fit for service in her generation and for her people? She
+pondered the question during the next two days, and leaned more and
+more to Sir James Burrell's way of thinking from a trivial reason; the
+inside of Culver agreed so completely with its exterior. Its
+flamboyancy set the eyes aching. Its wall papers were indigestibly
+rich with colored flowers, and never was there a blue so vividly blue
+as the blue of his velvet curtains and triple-pile carpets. It is true
+that there were treasures of art in Culver, glowing pictures of the
+early Flemish school, with their crowds of figures, each one a
+finished miniature, and behind the crowds the clear sky and
+translucent air; there were marvels of jade, and glorious little
+statues of silver and marble, but their delicate beauty was spoilt and
+lost in the riot of gorgeousness which framed them.
+
+One homely place alone there was in that building. The great hall, all
+colonnades and galleries, occupied the centre of the house. But on
+each side of the wide chimney, where of an evening, even in the
+summer, a fire usually burned, a great screen was drawn; and these
+screens enclosed a space before the fire set about with comfortable
+chairs, a sofa or two, and little mahogany tables, and made of it a
+place of comfort. In this space on the Sunday night Cynthia came to
+grips with Isaac Benoliel, and understood at last his life, and
+something of his philosophy.
+
+It was eleven o'clock, or a little later. The ladies were retiring for
+the night. Cynthia herself had her foot upon the lowest step of the
+stair, and was thinking that after all she was to be spared an
+argument, when Mr. Benoliel came from the corridor of the smoking-room
+where he had left the men.
+
+"Will you give me a few minutes, Cynthia?" he asked, and she turned at
+once and walked to the fire. She stood with a foot upon the rail of
+the hearth and a hand upon the mantel-shelf, quiet but mutinous. Mr.
+Benoliel followed her and sat down in a straight-backed arm-chair,
+facing the fire, and a little way behind her.
+
+"You have not yet announced your engagement, Cynthia?" he began.
+
+"No."
+
+"Yet Whitsuntide is very close. Perhaps you have thought better of
+it?"
+
+"No."
+
+Mr. Benoliel looked at her as she stood, aggressively showing him her
+back, and smiled at her, with some amusement, a great deal of
+affection, and a little pity.
+
+"Of course," he said, "I have not much right to interfere, and yet I
+should like you to hear, Cynthia, what I have to say. Otherwise I
+shall fail your father."
+
+Cynthia turned about at once, and her manner toward him changed with
+her movement. The appeal of his voice and words had its effect upon
+her, and not that alone. Mr. Benoliel was so neat and supple, he sat
+with so upright a figure in his chair, his hair was so black and sleek
+and thick that she was seldom really conscious of his age. But at
+times, as now, when by chance she looked straight into his eyes and
+noticed their fatigue and their patience, and how the light had quite
+gone out of them, it came upon her almost as a shock that this was an
+old, old man; and because she was surprised she exaggerated his age,
+and gave to him in return for his pity the cruel pity of youth. She
+was in the mood almost to admit his right to interfere. But her gift
+of silence and the weariness which had become instinctive checked her.
+She moved forward to him with a gracious deference--that was all--and
+said, standing in front of him:
+
+"I am glad of course to hear anything you have to say, Mr. Benoliel.
+You disapprove of my marriage."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Yet you wanted me married."
+
+"To the right person."
+
+"Lord Helmsdale," said Cynthia, with a little pout of disdain.
+
+"Youth should marry youth," returned Mr. Benoliel.
+
+He looked the girl over from head to foot. She stood in front of him
+in her delicate frock of soft white satin and lace, long-limbed and
+slender, with the gloss of youth upon the heavy curls of her fair
+hair, and the rose of youth on her cheeks, and the sheen of youth upon
+her white and pretty shoulders. She was the color of a flower, and had
+the freshness of a flower upon a morning of dew. From the tip of her
+slim satin slipper to the ribbon in her hair, she was dressed with a
+daintiness which set her beauty proudly off. To Mr. Benoliel she was
+radiant and wonderful with youth.
+
+"Yes," he repeated, "youth should marry youth, Cynthia, especially
+when it is such rare youth as yours."
+
+Cynthia was pleased. She knew a compliment when she heard it.
+
+"You have shifted your ground, Mr. Benoliel," she said, smiling down
+at him.
+
+"No," he answered.
+
+"It was social position, which you wanted me to marry in Lord
+Helmsdale."
+
+"That, too. Yes. I don't make light of it. I am old enough not to blow
+a trumpet round the walls of Jericho in these days," he said. "But I
+did not tell you all my thought. I am an old man, and there are
+certain things I am shy of talking about. I am like you in that,
+Cynthia, eh? We neither of us wear our hearts upon our sleeves or are
+fond of talking sentiment. But I am compelled to to-night. I think the
+most beautiful thing in the world is a couple of young lovers facing
+all the unknown future, hand in hand, high of hope and courage, and
+serious with the uplifting seriousness of love. Now you are not in
+love, Cynthia, and he's not young. So, from my point of view, on both
+sides this marriage falls short of the marriage which should be."
+
+"Captain Rames is not old," replied Cynthia. She omitted all reference
+to the point in which she herself failed according to Benoliel's
+standard. Isaac Benoliel noticed her admission, and, though he made no
+comment, he became still more determined to prevent the marriage if by
+any means he could. He had drawn his bow at a venture. With that touch
+of charlatanism which made him delight in posing as omniscient, he had
+stated as a fact what he only suspected. But she would have denied the
+suggestion, and indignantly, had it been false. He was sure now that
+she did not care for Harry Rames as a young woman should care for the
+man she is to marry. Moreover there had been a note of involuntary
+regret in Cynthia's voice as she had answered him. It seemed that she
+too agreed with him as to what should have been, and grieved that it
+was not to be.
+
+"No," he conceded, "Captain Rames is not old. But neither is he young.
+He is forty, or thereabouts. He has lived by eighteen years longer
+than you have. And so--I will tell you the truth, Cynthia"--and he
+leaned forward with his hands upon his knees and his eyes shrewdly
+watching her face--"and so I am afraid. Yes, I look forward into your
+future, and I am afraid."
+
+He saw Cynthia wince. So often had she spoken just such words to
+herself. Ever since she had crouched by the door in the dark room at
+the estancia, fear had walked at her heels with its shadow thrown upon
+the road beyond her feet. Was it to lie in front of her all her life?
+Here was her chosen adviser thinking her thoughts. She was not to be
+comforted by Sir James Burrell's reasonings. Mr. Benoliel might be
+altogether compact of the Orient. None the less his words knocked
+shrewdly at her heart. She sank down at the end of a sofa close at Mr.
+Benoliel's side, her face all troubled and discouraged.
+
+"But I accepted Harry so that I might be safe," she cried tremulously,
+"so that I might no longer be afraid," and then sat with her cheeks
+afire, conscious that she had betrayed herself.
+
+"I mean--" she corrected herself hastily.
+
+"Just what you said, Cynthia," rejoined Mr. Benoliel. Once more he had
+shot his arrow at a venture and reached the mark. He had now for the
+first time the key to her. Much was explained to him. But he spoke as
+though the explanation had long been known to him.
+
+"Yes, ever since I have known you, you have lived in fear, Cynthia,"
+he said.
+
+Cynthia did not again deny the truth. She found a better argument in
+the recollection of old Mr. Daventry's death-bed.
+
+"But there was no reason for the fear," she cried. "It was groundless.
+I tortured myself for nothing. It was all due to a foolish mistake."
+She hesitated, choosing her words so that they might carry some
+sort of conviction and yet reveal nothing. "The mistake arose
+because--people--were silent--and they were silent because they wished
+to spare, and thought that knowledge would hurt. It was the silence
+which hurt."
+
+"This time," said Mr. Benoliel, "silence shall not do harm. Nor shall
+a thought to spare. I will be frank with you as to why I am afraid, if
+you will listen to me. I shall have to tell you a little about myself.
+I shall not spare myself."
+
+He spoke with reluctance. For he was reticent about himself. Cynthia
+realized suddenly how very little she knew of him, though she probably
+knew him more intimately than any one else, except the separated wife
+in Eaton Square. He had kept his secrets better than she had kept
+hers. Now he was going to reveal himself, and certainly to open old
+wounds for her sake.
+
+"Thank you," she said gently. "I shall know of what you are afraid, of
+something perhaps which I may now be able to avert. But I ought to
+tell you at once, that nothing which you say can change me."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXI
+
+                        MR. BENOLIEL'S WARNING
+
+
+Mr. Benoliel, however, persisted.
+
+"I daren't be silent, Cynthia. There are just three great crises--some
+would say three great catastrophes--birth, marriage, and death. The
+first and the last happen. They are outside our control. But about the
+middle one we do ourselves have a word to say; we can direct it. And
+it's the most important of them all. For it means the beginning of
+life for others, and the making or undoing of our own. Therefore you
+can't afford to trust to luck, Cynthia."
+
+"I am not trusting to luck at all," said Cynthia confidently.
+
+"Aren't you?" asked Mr. Benoliel. "You are proposing to marry a man,
+nineteen years of whose life--whose man's life--if you understand me,
+you have had no share in, no influence upon, and have now no real
+knowledge of. I am not suggesting that the conventional other woman is
+somewhere in the background, waiting to appear at the marriage
+ceremony with a baby in her arms," he continued with a smile. "But
+during those nineteen years how many things must have happened to him,
+trials and miseries and elations, to modify and mould his character?
+And since you are ignorant of the things which happened to him, how
+can you know the man?"
+
+"Yet I think I do know him," said Cynthia, and her confidence
+increased. She could meet Mr. Benoliel on this battle-ground. "And
+without laying claim of any particular insight. For he has always been
+careful that I should know him. From the very first day of our
+acquaintanceship he has spoken and acted quite deliberately in order
+that I might have no illusions about him. He has wanted me to know him
+just as clearly as he knows himself."
+
+Mr. Benoliel shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Does he know himself?" he asked.
+
+"Better than most men," said Cynthia. "He has set out to use himself
+as a machine and he has studied the machine unceasingly, its limits
+and its capacities, so that he might use it to its fullest power." She
+recalled Harry Rames's foresight, the careful laying of his plans, the
+queer modesty which underlay his ambition to excel. She turned
+triumphantly to Mr. Benoliel. "Oh, yes, he knows himself a good deal
+better than youth can know itself."
+
+"Ah!" said Mr. Benoliel, raising a warning finger. "I was waiting for
+that. I admit that youth doesn't know itself. But then it's not so
+important that it should. There's not, after all, as yet, so very much
+to know. But take it this way. Suppose that you and Captain Rames were
+both young and of an age! Suppose that he had the nineteen years which
+separate you in front of him instead of behind him!"
+
+"Well?" said Cynthia.
+
+"Why, then, when he reached forty, you, the wife, would know him
+better than he would know himself. A wife always does, if she lives in
+sympathy with her husband. I am presuming that. You would know him a
+good deal better than he knows himself now. The solitary nineteen
+years, of which now I dread the consequences, you would have shared.
+That's the point. And you wouldn't be running the danger you are
+running now."
+
+"What danger?" asked Cynthia impatiently. "Of what are you afraid?"
+
+"I am afraid of the latent things," Mr. Benoliel answered. "I am
+afraid of the seeds which may have been sown in him during these
+nineteen years, and of which the plant has not yet shown. I am afraid
+of latent desires, fancies, ambitions, latent cravings of which he is
+not yet aware, and which may some day come to life with overwhelming
+strength. Haven't you seen men suddenly change for no apparent reason
+to the ordinary observer, drop from all their established habits,
+begin again upon another plane? I have, and that's the change I am
+afraid of now. For it's one you would be powerless to avert, since you
+would not even suspect it until it had actually begun."
+
+He turned toward Cynthia, and with a smile upon his face summed up his
+argument.
+
+"Make no mistake, Cynthia. I am not making light of Captain Rames. In
+a way my fears are an actual tribute to the man. But I am afraid that
+out of a life so busy, and so keen as his has been, so fraught with
+incidents, so varied, something may suddenly seize him and catch him
+back and hold him; some craving, some ambition in which you will have
+no share, and which will separate you forever."
+
+He spoke with so much earnestness that Cynthia was impressed against
+her will. She was sure that he was speaking with knowledge of a
+kindred case. Certain words he had dropped made her certain that the
+kindred case was his own.
+
+"But supposing that such a change came," she said with hesitation,
+"must it separate?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Benoliel gently, "not if both bring to the marriage
+love. Then I don't think it need." He glanced at her swiftly, and said
+with a sudden sharp note in his voice: "But what if the marriage be
+only a bargain, Cynthia? What then?" and the blood rushed into the
+girl's face as he looked at her.
+
+"I'll tell you," he cried. His voice rose and a kind of sombre
+passion rang in it. "One party doesn't keep the bargain, or keeps it
+half-heartedly, as an irksome thing, and day by day the separation
+grows more complete, until you are living with your enemy or living
+quite alone."
+
+His voice dropped again to a whisper on the last words. He finished
+and sat lost wistfully in his own recollections, and forgetful of
+Cynthia at his side. After a little while his lips moved, and, as an
+old man will, he spoke a word or two to himself. Cynthia's ears caught
+the words.
+
+"It was my fault, and it couldn't be helped," he said, and so again
+fell into a long silence, with his eyes upon the coals of the fire. At
+length Cynthia touched him gently upon the sleeve.
+
+"I should like--the instance," she said timidly.
+
+Isaac Benoliel roused himself with a start.
+
+"Yes. I mean to give it you."
+
+"But I have no right to it," Cynthia insisted. "You must remember
+that."
+
+Benoliel shook his head and smiled.
+
+"You are a young girl starting out on life. You have every right to
+it, Cynthia."
+
+"I mean that it cannot change me," she said. "I would like to hear
+it--yes. But it is only that I may understand and be ready. And if you
+think that reason insufficient, don't tell me. I shall thank you, all
+the same, for offering to tell me."
+
+"You mustn't take the warning literally," he said. "I am of the East,
+you know. So is my story"; and a sudden relief swept over Cynthia. He
+was not of her people, his stand-point would not be hers, his warning
+might not apply to her. She thought of Sir James Burrell's words.
+Discouragement sat more lightly upon her than it had done during the
+last hour. There were certain curious phases in Mr. Benoliel's life
+which were not understood--sudden disappearances, for instance, during
+which no one met him to bring back to London the place of his abode.
+He was recognized as a man apart. Yes, he was of the Orient, and he
+might have no message for her ears.
+
+"It was my race which caught me back," Benoliel began, and Cynthia's
+courage increased. But his story was only just begun.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXII
+
+                    AND AN INSTANCE TO ENFORCE IT
+
+
+"You knew, I suppose, that I was married?"
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia.
+
+"And that my wife lives?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Mr. Benoliel nodded and shifted in his chair.
+
+"You have also very possibly heard a good many speculations about my
+origin?"
+
+"A good many," said Cynthia.
+
+"Well, here's the truth. I am a Barbary Jew. I come out of Morocco,
+the one country where you'll find the East to-day. Already in Tangier,
+the city given over to the foreigner, you will come across some traces
+of it. But ride for a few hours out of Tangier, straight to the south,
+pay your dues and cross the Red Hill, and you'll have both feet
+planted in the East, and may breathe in some of its enchantment. Go
+forward for another day or so, and you may pass perhaps some tall
+Arab, striding through the crowd outside El Ksar, carrying a stick
+stretched across his shoulder-blades. He'll speak to no one, stop for
+nothing, and all will make way for him. That's the Imperial Courier,
+on his way to the coast from Fez. He'll not sleep upon the way, and
+he'll take no food lest he should sleep. He'll be in Tangier three
+days after he has left Fez. He's the penny post. Ride on still
+further, cross the Sebou, travel over a vast plain by a track beaten
+by the feet of men and animals, yet strangely enough a track which
+never runs straight, though the plain is bare, but winds and turns,
+and winds again over the face of the country." Mr. Benoliel's eyes
+were fixed upon the fire; he spoke, lingering upon his words. He had
+grown forgetful of the purpose which drove him to reveal himself.
+Another and a strange aspect of him was presented suddenly to Cynthia.
+The dilettante and the exquisite had vanished. He spoke with a kind of
+yearning in his voice. His thoughts had drifted out through the
+doorway of his abominable villa. He was walking in the starshine over
+the wide empty plain of the Sebou, steeped in the enchantment of which
+he had spoken. Dimly she foresaw whither he was leading her.
+
+"Yet a day and you come to a wall of hills. Right ahead of you a cleft
+opens--that's the pass to Fez--a troublesome place, by the way, for
+Barbary Jews, since the Z'mur tribe has a way of taking toll in that
+narrow pass," Benoliel explained with a smile, and seemed to become
+once more aware of Cynthia's presence.
+
+"But a little further to the right from a break in the sky-line of the
+wall, a regular broad staircase seems to descend. It becomes a track,
+it zigzags across the face of the cliff, like a piece of string, to
+the plain. That's the road to my home," and he suddenly threw back his
+head and sat alert--"the city of Mequinez--the most eastern of the
+cities of the East, where the great gateway of mosaic, built by
+Christian captives, crumbles slowly to ruin, and the Jew must not wear
+shoes in the street, must walk barefoot with a black gaberdine upon
+his body, and a black cap upon his head. I ought to resent that, eh,
+Cynthia?"
+
+He looked at her, and answered the question himself. "But I was born
+there," and to him the answer was sufficient.
+
+"In Mequinez!" said Cynthia, striving to bridge the distance between
+this actual house in the green of Warwickshire and that distant city
+with the great mosaic gate in Barbary. Mr. Benoliel helped her a
+little to see it.
+
+"Yes, in the Mellah of Mequinez, Cynthia. That's where the Jews are
+crowded; an evil-smelling place you would call it, close and airless,
+with narrow alleys and houses huddling together, and a reek of rancid
+cookery. Yet it's a town of spaces; there's a good square before the
+gate. There are great silent palaces, with gardens and lakes. There's
+room in Mequinez--but not for us. We were shut up in the Mellah at six
+o'clock at night like children. And we were not all poor. The Mellah
+was gaudy with the bright handkerchiefs and dresses of the women, and
+their satin and silk scarves. There was a great deal of money in the
+Mellah of Mequinez, and a great deal more owed to it by its Moorish
+lords and masters in the city. But that didn't make any difference.
+Remember you are in the East in Mequinez, and a Moor who owed me a
+thousand pounds would make me strip off my shoes in the street, if he
+met me wearing them. A pretty picture of dignity, eh, Cynthia?"
+
+Cynthia did not answer. She was puzzled by Benoliel now, and she did
+not wish to interrupt him. He sat beside her, neat and trim and
+scrupulously clothed, with no jewellery but a pearl stud in his
+shirt-front, and pearl links at his cuffs, a person utterly modern and
+used to good manners. Yet he spoke of the Mellah in Mequinez not with
+the air of one recollecting unclean days, now, thank God, altogether
+done with, but rather with a kind of relish and contentment that such
+places should be. She had to cast an eye about that flamboyant hall
+before she could in any way reconcile Mr. Benoliel with his words.
+
+"I was not one of the rich, however," he continued. "I was a poor boy.
+I lived with an aunt, for both my parents were dead, and picked up a
+few copper flouss from time to time as I could. My aunt wasn't very
+kind. I was terrified of the Moors and their dark, contemptuous faces.
+There's a wall outside Mequinez, one of many which run out into the
+country and stop--but this one runs further than the rest. It was
+built or rather begun--for, like all things in Morocco, it was never
+finished--by some old king, so that a blind man might be able to find
+his way from Mequinez to Morocco City without a guide. I was always
+fascinated by that wall, and wanted to follow it--and never to come
+back. I hated Mequinez. Finally I ran away one morning with a pedlar
+of my race who wanted a boy to help him. He and I and a donkey, which
+carried his stock in trade, slipped out early from the town, and
+climbed northward onto a great rolling plateau of grass and asphodel,
+which reached away past the white sacred city of Mulai Idris, on the
+hill of Jebel Zarhon, past the Roman ruins of Volubilis, to that gap
+in the sky-line of the cliff where the road leads down to the plain of
+the Sebou. It was spring-time, there were irises up to our knees, the
+asphodel bushes were in flower and the air on this wide upland, with
+Jebel Zarhon on our right hand, was sweet and clean. We walked,
+brushing through the bushes, our shadows shifting as the sun rose--I
+had a sense of freedom. We stopped and ate at a little stream, and
+went on again. I can remember all the details of that day, even to a
+great glowing field of mustard, which shone like yellow silk----"
+
+Mr. Benoliel pulled himself up with a laugh.
+
+"But I needn't tell you about all that," he cried. "Here's the point.
+At the top of a roll in the turf, just by a miserable little tent
+village, I sat down upon the ground, while the pedlar bargained over
+his wares, and I took what I meant to be my last look at Mequinez. I
+could see the city below me far away, and very small in the sunshine,
+with its buildings all confused. I made up my mind then that I would
+be a rich man, and that never--never would I pass between the ruined
+walls up to the gateway of Mequinez again, that never--never would I
+look on it even from a spot so far away as this. We went over the brow
+of the hill, and I saw Mequinez no more. In a fortnight we came to
+Rabat upon the sea. There I learnt the great lesson."
+
+He sat still for a few moments, with his chin sunk upon his chest. He
+seemed to be wondering whether, after all, the lesson was so great a
+lesson, and worth the learning.
+
+"Yes?" asked Cynthia. "What lesson?"
+
+"We crossed the river from Sallee to Rabat, where the great plants and
+cactuses hang down the walls," he explained. "It was evening. I said
+to the pedlar: 'We must hurry to the Mellah.' And he answered: 'In
+Rabat there is no Mellah.'"
+
+"No Jews, then," said Cynthia.
+
+Mr. Benoliel shook his head and laughed.
+
+"That's what I thought, Cynthia. But I was wrong. There were Jews in
+Rabat, but they wore European clothes, they lived in houses, in the
+best positions--for of course they had all the money, that goes
+without saying, in Morocco as in most other places--they were people
+of importance, consuls and vice-consuls; they were allowed to walk in
+the governor's orange garden. I was astounded. I asked how this could
+be. And I got my answer between cuffs from my pedlar. It was the
+influence of the Europeans. Rabat is a sea-port with European trade.
+That was the great lesson: the Europeans do not have Mellahs."
+
+"So you decided to come to Europe," said Cynthia.
+
+"Not quite at once," said Mr. Benoliel shrewdly. "I was a boy and very
+ignorant. I had to find out first whether a Jew could make as much
+money in Europe as he could in Morocco."
+
+Cynthia laughed in spite of herself; and Mr. Benoliel quite
+misunderstood the reason of her laughter.
+
+"Well, I didn't know anything about Europe at all," he said seriously.
+"But I made inquiries. Oh, I heard stories. The Jews of Rabat talked
+of London, and of hotels in London. There was one who said--and it was
+repeated to the pedlar, who told it to me, but I would not believe
+it--'We kept it up all June, every night, till four o'clock in the
+morning, in the American Bar.' They were gay dogs in London, the Jews
+of Rabat, and they made money enough to keep it up all night till four
+o'clock in the morning, in the American Bar. So I decided to come to
+London."
+
+All Mr. Benoliel's humor had deserted him. He was speaking with
+intense seriousness. He was a little Barbary boy again, learning with
+amazement the extraordinary latitude which Europe allowed to its Jews.
+
+"So I ran away from the pedlar," he resumed; and now at last he
+smiled. "You will never guess, Cynthia, in what capacity I came to
+England. I came with a troupe of Moorish acrobats who were going to
+appear at one of the music halls in London."
+
+"You!" Cynthia exclaimed.
+
+"Yes. I found them on the beach at Rabat, with their baggage, waiting
+for the surf to go down. The Elder Dempster steamboat was lying
+outside the bar, a mile from the shore. They wanted a boy who was
+light. They took me."
+
+"And you appeared at the music halls?" Cynthia asked.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Mr. Benoliel, "I appeared. I learnt some simple
+somersaults and balancings, and I looked after the baggage. That
+lasted for a year. By that time I had learnt some English and I left
+them. I am not going to bother you with the next twenty years of
+my life. I got on as others have done--office-boy to confidential
+clerk--the usual process. I meant to make money, you see--all the
+time, hour by hour, I meant to make money. I was with a great firm of
+financiers who had got themselves into a tangle over some Eastern
+business. I had mastered the subject; I was by my origin fitted to
+cope with it; and I saw a way out of the trouble. The firm came to me,
+and with the firm my opportunity. I asked for a salary of seventeen
+thousand pounds a year. The firm refused. I went on at my old two
+hundred and fifty for another month. By that time the trouble had
+grown more grave. It was a real crisis, meaning perhaps dishonor. The
+firm came to me again and accepted my terms. It took me a year to put
+matters right, and at the end of the year I was, of course, dismissed.
+But I had seventeen thousand pounds, and I knew what to do with it."
+
+"You made it into a great fortune," said Cynthia.
+
+"By the time I was forty," replied Mr. Benoliel. "And then I began to
+think about marrying."
+
+Cynthia stirred and leaned forward. Benoliel turned swiftly toward
+her.
+
+"Ah," he said, "you are beginning to appreciate the similarity between
+my case and Rames's. But it doesn't date from the age of forty at
+which we both began to think about marrying. No! Strip our careers of
+the accidents of race and country and occupation, and you will find
+the similarity right there in our boyhood and our youth. We were both
+adventurers, both determined to get on, he to his ends, I to mine.
+Well, at forty-one I married."
+
+Mr. Benoliel hesitated. His wife was living. He was a man of some
+sensibility, and a delicate reticence of mind made it repugnant to him
+to lay before another the manner of his marriage and its troubles. But
+he looked again at Cynthia, and the freshness and the youth of her,
+and the trouble in her big dark-blue eyes, which were fixed so
+intently upon his face, persuaded him. He might be exaggerating. His
+fears might be quite vain. But suppose that they were not? Every line
+of grief graven in the girl's young face would be a whole epistle of
+condemnation.
+
+"Our marriage was a bargain, too," he said frankly. "My wife brought
+social position, I money. But there was less risk in our bargain than
+there will be in yours."
+
+"Why less risk?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"Because we who are Jews make good husbands," said Mr. Benoliel; and
+Cynthia cried out indignantly:
+
+"I am not afraid that Harry will make a bad one."
+
+"I don't say either that he will," Mr. Benoliel returned calmly. "I
+only say that as a rule the Jew makes a good husband. He believes in
+the family. Can you say as much of the Christian? No. Therefore there
+was less risk in our bargain. And still it did not turn out well."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I was forty-one and my wife twenty-three. Yes, that's the
+truth at the end of it all. There were eighteen years of experiences
+and struggles in my life which my wife had not shared; and out of
+those eighteen years there sprang a passion in me which I, least of
+all, expected, and which I could not combat. I became homesick for my
+country, and for that city on which I had turned my back with joy."
+
+"You?" cried Cynthia. For a moment she thought herself listening to a
+fairy tale. "You wanted to go back to the humiliations, to the
+Mellah?"
+
+She recalled the feminine nicety of his house in Grosvenor Square, the
+bright silver--not too much of it--the elegance of its mahogany
+furniture, which was never allowed to crowd the rooms. She recollected
+those dinner-parties at which the great men of the earth were
+entertained with so much pride. It could not be that he wished to
+return to the crowded Jewish quarter, noisome with the reek of rancid
+cookery, where the gates were locked on its inhabitants at six o'clock
+of the night! But Mr. Benoliel replied with an energy and a fire which
+she had never known him manifest before.
+
+"Yes. I wanted to go back. How and when the longing first came to me,
+I can't tell you. But it did come, and, having come, it grew. I felt
+day by day more and more of a stranger amongst a strange people. That
+road winding up the cliffs to the break in the sky-line above the
+plain of the Sebou--I began to dream of it! Then I used to lie awake
+at night and travel along it, past the pillars and arches of
+Volubilis, and the little white city of Mulai Idris, on the shoulder
+of Jebel Zarhon--right over the upland, and down through the asphodel
+to Mequinez. Finally, I had to go. I told my wife. We had got on
+together up till then, no better, no worse than other people. She
+stared at me with amazement, with suspicion, as at a stranger, and
+from that moment our relations changed. She knew quite well to what I
+was going back, to what I wanted to go back--the Mellah, the
+gaberdine, and the rest of it. And--it was natural, I think--she
+despised me. I was quite aware of her contempt, and--was indifferent
+to it. I wanted to go back. And I did."
+
+"You did?" said Cynthia. And then, "I see. I see."
+
+She understood now these mysterious disappearances of Mr. Benoliel
+when he vanished from his clubs and his haunts, and no man brought
+news of him.
+
+"Yes, I went, and as I went London and the years in London dropped
+away from me. I was happy. I went down with my mules into Mequinez,
+and put my European clothes away in a cupboard in the Mellah. I stayed
+in Mequinez three months."
+
+"But how?" asked Cynthia. "What did you do?"
+
+Mr. Benoliel smiled.
+
+"Business," he said. "I traded. I lent money. Then I came back to
+England--refreshed as a man comes from his bath. But my wife hated the
+whole business. At first she would not hear a word of what I had been
+doing. Then she became curious--morbidly curious. There was no end to
+her questions. What humiliations, what indignities had fallen to me
+amongst the Moors--she was never tired of hearing. And as she
+questioned and I answered, she would sit looking at me, with eyes in
+which contempt grew ever more bitter, looking at me as one looks upon
+a stranger. Quarrels followed. I went back to Mequinez, after a year
+or two, and again after another period. And every time the pull of the
+place became stronger. It was after my third visit that our marriage
+came to an end. We gave a great dinner-party, and when our guests had
+gone, she told me that our life had become intolerable to her."
+
+Mr. Benoliel did not spare himself. It was rather a grim scene which
+he had to describe--the last one of many quarrels which had sprung
+from their estrangement. "You leave me for those squalors. You return
+to me fresh from them;" that was the burden of her accusation. She was
+not of his race or of his people. She had no sympathy with, or
+comprehension of, the intense craving which from time to time assailed
+him to go back to his own place, or of the utter weariness which
+overtook him of the life of London, in which he played an actor's
+part. The squalor and humiliation of his days in Mequinez got upon her
+nerves, filled her with disgust, and made his companionship repugnant.
+
+"You can understand that, Cynthia?" he asked, and Cynthia, since
+frankness was demanded of her, agreed.
+
+"Yes, I can understand that," she answered gently. His story was to
+her fantastic and fabulous. It belonged to the East--as he did. Only
+by keeping in mind that he, underneath the veneer of his manners, was
+of the East could she accept it as truth. She did so accept it. But
+she looked at Mr. Benoliel with curious eyes, and was conscious of a
+feeling very like aversion. Within the half-hour he had grown a
+stranger to her even as he had done to his wife. That he should leave
+the order and the cleanliness of his home, depart from the company of
+cultured people--he the dilettante--don the gaberdine, go joyfully
+back to the dirt and squalor of his Mellah, humbly take off his
+slippers and walk bare-foot at the bidding of any Moor who passed him
+by--that Cynthia could not understand. But that his wife should find
+life with him intolerable when he came back from his degradation,
+refreshed as by a bath, to resume existence at her side--that she did
+thoroughly understand.
+
+"So we separated," said Mr. Benoliel.
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia. "But there's no parallel between your case and
+ours. What happened to you cannot happen to us."
+
+She was not sure. There was appeal in her voice. She pleaded to him to
+agree with her. She clung desperately to her one small piece of
+knowledge. Mr. Benoliel was of the East. Harry Rames was not.
+
+"There is a parallel, and a close one," Mr. Benoliel insisted. "What
+happened to us may happen to you. Out of the experiences of eighteen
+years in Captain Rames's life, experiences in which you have no share,
+some unsuspected craving may even now be fermenting which may turn the
+course of his thoughts, and snatch him back from you."
+
+"He would fight against it," said Cynthia.
+
+"Even so, it would stand between you, and it would grow."
+
+Cynthia was silent for a moment. Then she said timidly:
+
+"Even then there is one condition according to you which would avert
+the risk."
+
+"Yes, one. Love."
+
+And again Cynthia was silent. Then she burst out, striking her hands
+together in a violence of revolt:
+
+"But I know him! I know him!" and with the words still in her ears,
+she doubted them. Mr. Benoliel's warning had alarmed her. But it had
+alarmed her chiefly because it had brought home to her how very little
+she might really know of those whom she met daily, and with whom she
+was most intimate. Here was Mr. Benoliel. She had thought she knew
+him, and so well that she could play with him, and twist him to her
+wishes. He had spoken for half an hour, and, lo! she had never known
+him.
+
+"Do all men hide themselves?" she cried. "Do you all build up barriers
+about you, and lie hidden within? Oh, but Harry's honest--honest;" and
+again she caught at her old argument and consolation.
+
+She rose from her seat abruptly.
+
+"Thank you very much for all you have said. I am grateful. I shall not
+forget it. Good-night;" and she moved away to the foot of the stairs.
+She stopped then and turned back, as though in half a mind to say
+more. But as Mr. Benoliel rose, and she looked at him, a shadow
+darkened her eyes and she seemed to shrink from him with that slight
+sense of repulsion.
+
+"Good-night," she said again, and hurriedly went up the stairs. His
+story was too new in her thoughts. What she had it in her mind to say,
+she left untold.
+
+But Mr. Benoliel was none the less to be informed of it that night. He
+sat late in the hall after the lights had been turned out, with only
+the firelight flickering on the hearth. He had read the aversion in
+Cynthia's face which his story had provoked. He had made a sacrifice
+of her affection. But he had made it for her sake, and he did not
+regret that he had spoken. None the less he was disturbed. He might
+have done no good, and he had reopened an old wound of his own.
+He sat there knowing that if he went to bed he would not sleep; and
+in a little while he heard a noise in the corridor leading to the
+billiard-room. The door into the hall was softly opened, and the
+wavering light of a candle dimly lit up that cavernous place. The
+screen stood between Benoliel and the intruder. He could see nothing
+but the light of the candle shaking upon the walls above the screen.
+He did not move, he heard some one moving across the floor of the
+hall; he kept his eyes fixed upon the opening between the screens; and
+he saw Captain Rames pass across the opening. He sprang up with a low
+cry. Rames was coming from the corridor where his bedroom was to the
+foot of the stairs up which Cynthia had gone. At the cry Rames
+stopped, and, holding the candle above his head, peered into the
+shadows. Mr. Benoliel came quickly toward him.
+
+"Where are you going, Captain Rames?" he asked.
+
+"To my wife," said Harry.
+
+Mr. Benoliel stared at Harry Rames.
+
+"You and Cynthia are married?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When are you going to make your marriage public?"
+
+"On the day the Whitsunday holidays begin. We shall have it announced
+in the evening papers. We shall already have left for Fontainebleau."
+
+So after all Mr. Benoliel had spoken in vain. He might have spared his
+breath, and retained in a fuller degree Cynthia's liking and respect.
+He knew now what she had turned back from the stairs to tell him.
+
+"Give her this message," he said. "Tell her to forget what I said to
+her;" and he moved away.
+
+But the message was of no use. He had said what he had to say, and
+Cynthia could not forget. She watched. She was afraid; as since her
+seventeenth birthday she had always been afraid.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXIII
+
+                         CYNTHIA ON THE HOUSE
+
+
+On the morning after Parliament had risen the newspapers announced the
+marriage of Cynthia Daventry to Harry Rames. The ceremony had taken
+place by special license early one morning at a little church in
+Mayfair, with a girl friend of Cynthia's, and a member of Parliament
+named Robert Brook, as witnesses. A good many people were surprised;
+still more, however, declared that they had foreseen the marriage all
+along, and that of course it couldn't last; while Lord Helmsdale's
+mother simply remarked in accents of pity: "Poor thing! Double her
+age, isn't he? And she was so pretty, too, a few months ago."
+
+On the other hand, however, a good many honest telegrams of
+congratulations reached the couple honeymooning in the woods of
+Fontainebleau; and when Harry and Cynthia returned to London, there
+were fresher incidents than their marriage for people to discuss. They
+settled down in Curzon Street to keep their bargain loyally.
+
+If Cynthia's heart ached at times, as it had done amongst the trees of
+Fontainebleau, for a life struck to fire by passion, she gave no
+outward sign of her pain. She was to help forward the great career,
+and to the best of her powers she did. She threw open her house to her
+husband's party; she entertained; she attended social gatherings; she
+walked abroad in Ludsey with a good memory for faces; she spent many
+hours on the train. Harry, on his side, was assiduous at Westminster.
+He sat upon committees in the morning, and on one of the green benches
+below the gangway during the afternoon and evening, with an occasional
+rush home at a quarter to eight to take his wife out to dinner.
+
+"Be there!" was one of Henry Smale's maxims which he had taken to
+heart. "Sit in the House. Never mind the library or the smoking-room,
+or the lobby, or the terrace. Sit in the House! However dull the
+debate, and however inviting the sunlight streaming through the high
+windows, sit in the House. All the great Parliamentarians have done
+it. The lawyers can't do it, of course. But you haven't their excuse.
+You can. It may seem a waste of time. You'll find that it isn't."
+
+So Harry Rames sat in the House, and Cynthia, when she had no other
+engagement to detain her, came down to Westminster, dined with him
+there, and spent an hour afterward in the ladies' gallery. She became
+acquainted with many men of different calibre, and amongst them with
+Mr. Devenish, the Secretary for Agriculture, who was just beginning to
+do a little more than make a vociferous noise in the world. Mr.
+Devenish happened to pass through the dining-room when Harry and his
+wife were finishing dinner, and catching sight of them he turned off
+toward their table.
+
+He was a brisk, smallish man, and Cynthia was astonished by his
+aspect. She had seen him often enough upon the floor of the House of
+Commons, and had taken him for a person of a commanding height. But it
+was not the first time she had made this mistake. The House of
+Commons, like the theatre, magnifies men to the galleries. Mr.
+Devenish dropped his hand upon Rames's shoulder.
+
+"I want a word with you to-night, Rames," he said
+
+"Why not now?" asked Rames. "This is my wife, Mr. Devenish."
+
+Mr. Devenish bowed to her.
+
+"I knew that very well," he said.
+
+Cynthia disbelieved him. Also she had formed a dislike of him. There
+was something too acrid in his speeches. She thought of him as a man
+going about with a phial of vitriol hidden in the palm of his hand.
+
+"I am not famous," she said coldly. "How should you know, Mr.
+Devenish?"
+
+"I saw you in the lobby, and--I asked;" he smiled as he spoke, and she
+found his smile singularly disarming; it was so friendly and genuine a
+thing. Mr. Devenish turned again to Harry Rames.
+
+"We want you to help us. A vote on account for the navy is coming up
+on Thursday. There will be a motion for the reduction of armaments. We
+want you to speak."
+
+Harry Rames shook his head.
+
+"I rather propose to leave those questions alone. I don't want to get
+the reputation of being a service member."
+
+"I appreciate that," said Mr. Devenish. "But you are asked to speak in
+this debate by the government."
+
+"On the general question?" asked Rames.
+
+"Not so much on that. The point is the economy of the big ship. You
+can speak from practical experience. You know. You are here in
+Parliament to contribute your knowledge." Mr. Devenish turned to
+Cynthia, and again his smile illumined his face. "Persuade him, Mrs.
+Rames."
+
+It occurred to Cynthia that Mr. Devenish did not trouble to inquire
+whether Harry Rames believed the big ship to be an economical thing.
+Harry was to support the government. The rest of his argument she
+agreed with. It was Harry's duty, since he was in Parliament, to
+contribute of his knowledge.
+
+"Very well," said Captain Rames. "Of course if the government wishes
+it, I shall be proud to take part in the debate. Won't you sit down
+and have some coffee?"
+
+"Yes, do!" said Cynthia cordially, and she was not altogether engaged
+in helping her husband on when she spoke. Mr. Devenish now puzzled
+her. She had begun by disliking him. He had spoken very few words to
+her, and yet she no longer disliked him. There was a charm in his
+manner of which he seemed quite unaware. At close quarters he lost the
+narrowness, which she had thought the mark of him. He seemed broadly
+human, comprehensively sympathetic. Yet he obviously wore no mask. He
+was simple, and he gave a pleasant impression of being a good fighter.
+Mr. Devenish drew up a chair and sat down.
+
+"You come to many of our debates," he said to Cynthia. "What do you
+think of us?" and with an unaffected interest in the views of a pretty
+woman, he led her on to express her opinion.
+
+"Well," she said frankly, "I think most of your debates are very
+dull."
+
+"That's quite true," Mr. Devenish replied with a laugh at the little
+spurt of complaint in her voice. "Nine out of ten are dull, and if you
+were in the government you would wish the tenth was too. The debate
+which sparkles and amuses you in the gallery means keen opposition on
+the floor of the House. The debate which is dull means that the
+government gets its bill. And the government is there to get its
+bills."
+
+"Yes, I suppose that's true," said Cynthia, and then Harry Rames
+intervened.
+
+"It's curious," he said, "but I no longer find any debate dull. I used
+to be bored, I admit it, but I can sit through anything now and find
+it interesting."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia, nodding her head; "I have noticed that, Harry,
+from the gallery, and--I think it's a bad sign."
+
+"The sign of the true Parliamentarian," said Mr. Devenish.
+
+"Perhaps," said Cynthia stubbornly. "Still a bad one."
+
+"Now why?" asked Mr. Devenish indulgently. Cynthia was certainly a
+very pretty woman. Let her talk! Cynthia colored and replied hotly:
+
+"Because it means that the four walls of that little chamber are
+closing in on you. The game inside, with its pauses, its coups, its
+man[oe]uvres, is becoming more important than the great interests and
+issues outside which you are there to decide. It means that in your
+thoughts the country and the constituency are growing smaller, and the
+green leather benches on which you sit becoming more and more
+important. If you don't find any debates dull, you are growing aloof
+from the country. You are becoming, as you say, a Parliamentarian.
+That means Parliament first, the country a bad second."
+
+Cynthia stopped abruptly. She had allowed herself to be betrayed into
+delivering a lecture upon politics to a past-master in the art, a man
+who, out of his forty-five years, had spent twenty in the House of
+Commons. She flushed. "But you must think me a fool," she cried.
+
+"I don't," Mr. Devenish exclaimed. "Yours is a definite point of
+view." He was not speaking seriously. For he was eager to learn so
+long as the learning came to him by word of mouth, and not from the
+printed page. "Tell me some more."
+
+He was considering no longer the prettiness of the woman, the changing
+lights upon her face. He was conceding respect to her judgment.
+Cynthia was mollified. She continued:
+
+"And here's something which to me makes many of the debates tedious
+and unreal. You all behave as if your ideal of a member of the House
+of Commons were a fossil on a shelf."
+
+Mr. Devenish laughed.
+
+"Why do you say that, Mrs. Rames?"
+
+"Because if a man changes his opinions ever so little during a course
+of years, he at once has the reports of his old speeches flung at his
+head in scathing accents, as though he had committed the meanest of
+crimes."
+
+"It's a party score," said Mr. Devenish.
+
+"Yes, but why?" Cynthia insisted. "You must all know that a man who is
+any use at all does change his opinions as his experience widens.
+Surely that's true. What's the use of thought at all if it leaves you
+precisely where you were?"
+
+"Mrs. Rames," said Mr. Devenish, "I cannot dispute it."
+
+Cynthia had long been puzzled by this extraordinary childishness on
+the part of men of reputed intelligence. She was determined if she
+could to get at the truth. "Then why?" she asked. "Why, when one of
+the opposition proves that a member of the government has changed his
+view, does all the opposition shout with derision, and why do all on
+the government side look glum? Why must the minister labor to show
+that he really hasn't changed any views? Why does he rise so quickly
+to do it? And why, when he has risen, doesn't he say: 'Of course I
+have changed my views. I am a better man than I was two years ago.'"
+
+"Well, upon my word, I can't tell you why," said Mr. Devenish
+honestly. "I suppose we haven't the courage. Don't you approve of us
+at all?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I do," said Cynthia quickly; "and much more than I expected
+to do." She was induced to give her impression of the body of members.
+
+"I had got an idea that everybody was in here to get something." She
+grew suddenly red, and in a flurry, which Mr. Devenish did not
+understand. She continued, "I suppose I got the idea from newspapers.
+I made a wrong inference. They are here, of course--the rich men who
+want honors to put a crown upon their wealth, the office-hunters, the
+speculator, and the financier, who use their membership to help their
+city business--But there are others one is apt to overlook, the silent
+people, who make no mark, and don't want to make one. You see them in
+the lobby, rather disconsolately busy about nothing. They are probably
+not particularly intelligent. Some of them, no doubt, are quite
+stupid. But one rather respects them, because membership of the House
+of Commons means to them a real daily loss. They would be more
+prosperous if they devoted the time they spend here to their business.
+But they seem to be here because they believe that some things want
+doing, some definite things, and that they can help to get them done
+by their votes. There is a lot of them. Then there are the country
+gentlemen who would be happier on their estates, and would be there
+but for their conviction that the solid judgment of the country
+gentleman is absolutely necessary in the council of the nation." She
+spoke with pomposity and a friendly mimicry of the class she
+described. "But I like them. I think they are of value because to
+them, too, membership here means a real loss."
+
+"Well, I agree," said Mr. Devenish.
+
+"You! You do?" asked Cynthia in surprise. "I thought that--" and she
+stopped.
+
+"Well, what?" Mr. Devenish pressed for her opinion with a laugh.
+
+"Never mind," said Cynthia. "There's another class, too, which
+attracts me. The failures. The ambitious men who just don't succeed,
+and fail by so very little, but fail completely."
+
+"Yes," Mr. Devenish agreed, "their lot is not attractive. They can't
+bring themselves to admit failure. They drift along here until the
+time is past for them to do anything else. The four walls, as you say,
+have closed about them. They sit here, eating out their hearts,
+jealous of the others who succeed, and making a bitter pretence of
+contentment."
+
+"They are the prisoners of the House of Commons," said Cynthia, and
+the phrase struck pleasantly upon Mr. Devenish's ears so used to the
+slipshod metaphors of the average speaker.
+
+"Yes," he said with a quick look of interest. "Yes, that's a true
+saying. How did you think of it, Mrs. Rames?"
+
+"I have sympathy with failures," she replied.
+
+"Ah," said Mr. Devenish. "But it's easy to have that when one is
+married to success," and he turned genially to Captain Rames.
+
+A junior whip hurried up to the table.
+
+"You are wanted, Mr. Devenish, in the House," he said.
+
+Devenish looked at his watch and sprang up. "I have stayed longer than
+I ought to. We can count upon you then, Rames, for Thursday," and he
+hurried away. Cynthia followed him with her eyes. He attracted her and
+he left with her an impression of power, which made his interest in
+her, obviously expressed, a subtle flattery. She turned back to her
+husband.
+
+"I was mistaken in that man," she said, and as Harry Rames did not
+answer her, she continued: "You see, Harry, I am doing my best to help
+you on."
+
+"You are indeed," said Harry Rames sulkily. Cynthia stared at him. The
+sulkiness in his voice set her blood tingling. He could be jealous
+then! She laughed out loud suddenly, with a girl's joyousness, and, as
+Harry lifted inquiring eyes to her, the blood mantled into her cheeks,
+and she sat in a pretty confusion. For a moment both of them were
+embarrassed, and neither could have told why. Cynthia broke through
+the embarrassment with the first words which occurred to her:
+
+"I can't reconcile Mr. Devenish with his speeches," she said.
+
+"Yet there's a continuity," replied Harry. "He is one of your
+instances of men big enough to widen out. But he's an enthusiast, and
+he has done in his day a deal of platform work so that the old phrases
+come trippingly to his tongue. He says, when he's carried away, more
+than he thinks now, but less than he used to think ten years ago. I
+fancy that's the explanation."
+
+Cynthia looked toward the door through which Mr. Devenish had
+disappeared.
+
+"Tell me about him, Harry," she said.
+
+"I will, certainly," said Rames. His ill-humor had passed. He leaned
+toward his wife with a smile upon his face. It seemed to Cynthia that
+the moment of embarrassment so quickly gone had brought now as its
+consequence another moment quite as inexplicable--a moment during
+which she and Harry were nearer to one another than as yet they had
+been.
+
+"The one thing I think to remember about Devenish is this," Rames
+continued. "As a boy he had always to walk in the road and he has not
+forgotten it."
+
+The division bell began to ring before he could say another word to
+elaborate his sketch of the man. He led Cynthia out through the arches
+to the door where her carriage waited, and he left her to drive home
+puzzled by his phrase.
+
+He spoke, as he had promised to do, on the following Thursday. Cynthia
+heard the speech from the ladies' gallery, not siding with it at all,
+nor against it, but simply attentive to its effect. He rose in a full
+House, which did not diminish as he spoke, and the space behind the
+bar grew crowded. He was brief; he worked his own intimate knowledge
+of the mechanism of a modern ship of war into the scheme of his
+speech. He was nervous, Cynthia knew, but he gave no outward sign of
+nervousness; he spoke with a quiet resonance of voice, as though he
+had the measure of that assembly; and he brought into play that
+remarkable gift of counterfeiting sincerity, which always astonished,
+and sometimes frightened her. It was difficult even for her to realize
+that he had no real opinion about the value of the big ship, one way
+or the other, and that he had merely crammed his subject diligently
+with her help during the last few days. He spoke, indeed, with telling
+effect. There were friends of Cynthia in the gallery who were quick to
+congratulate her. She herself was filled with admiration, but it was
+the admiration for the fine performance of an actor; and when she went
+down in the lift to join him after the debate was over, the cry was
+loud in her heart: "If only he believed one word of it!"
+
+He met her at the gate of the lift, and she caught his arm and pressed
+it against her side.
+
+"Thank you," said Harry. "That's better than words."
+
+"It wasn't a congratulation," she replied. "It was an appeal."
+
+Harry Rames spoke once more during that session, late at night, in a
+thin House, and to try himself in unprepared debate, rather than with
+any intention to arrest notice. But the moment was well chosen, for a
+speaker on the government side was needed; and when the House rose for
+the autumn, he took down with him to Warwickshire the reputation of a
+rising man. He had kept his bargain, Cynthia gratefully acknowledged
+it, and the fears which Isaac Benoliel had aroused in her began for a
+time to lose their substance.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXIV
+
+                  THE MAN WHO HAD WALKED IN THE ROAD
+
+
+Harry Rames and Cynthia passed the autumn at the white house, and
+hardly a day passed but one or the other was seen in the climbing
+streets of Ludsey. Harry presided at the social gatherings of the
+city, the musical clubs, the horticultural society, and the rest. He
+was busy with his town clerk over a railway bill which the
+municipality meant to oppose. He made friends with his public
+opponents. Cynthia herself was hardly less active. She threw herself
+into the work of committees and councils, not from enthusiasm, but in
+a desperate search for that color which Mr. Arnall and his fellows had
+got from politics, and her own youth demanded for herself. And with
+the work, interest in it came, if color did not. They were
+establishing Harry Rames in his seat--that was certain, and she had
+her share in it. They were winning and, being a woman, she loved to
+win. Cynthia was a success in Ludsey--she could not but know it. For
+the demands for her presence and her time grew with every morning's
+post. There came to her a sort of exultation of battle. She was doing
+her work; she was helping to make the great career, and in the
+pleasure of helping to make, she lost sight of the essential emptiness
+of the thing she was making.
+
+"Yes," said Harry one night to her. "You are making this seat safe for
+me, Cynthia, for the next election."
+
+Cynthia looked at him with her eyes bright.
+
+"Do you think so?" she asked eagerly, asking for praise, and Arthur
+Pynes, the young chairman of the association, who had been dining with
+them, corroborated her husband.
+
+"We once had a candidate whose wife would sing at the public meetings.
+We couldn't stop her, and every time she sang she cost us fifty votes.
+We have always stipulated for a bachelor since. But you have changed
+our views now, Mrs. Rames."
+
+"I am very glad," said Cynthia; and the trio fell to discussing plans
+for the next session. "We want to see you in office before three years
+are out," said Pynes to Harry Rames. "There's no reason why we
+shouldn't."
+
+"Yes, there is," said Harry Rames. "A large majority. They want you to
+keep quiet and vote and, being strong, they would just as soon put
+into office men who have never opened their mouths in the House as
+not, and probably sooner."
+
+"Then you must force 'em," said Arthur Pynes.
+
+They discussed the government programme for the next session, and what
+opportunities would arise from it. But the changes and transitions of
+Parliament are rapid. However sternly the government may cling to its
+ordered sequence of legislation, great questions will arise which have
+not been foreseen, and the ballot will give to private members their
+opportunity of discord. Thus the man who sits next to you may be in
+hot debate with you to-morrow, and those who smiled at you from the
+treasury bench yesterday may see you stroll with a fine air of
+indifference into the opposition lobby to-day. Harry Rames was well
+aware of the pull of the undercurrents, but neither he nor Cynthia,
+nor Arthur Pynes had a suspicion that night that the next session was
+to see him in definite antagonism to Devenish, the man who had been
+forced to walk in the road.
+
+It was not, indeed, until the session was more than half-way through
+that Cynthia herself learnt it. She had dined with her husband at the
+House. It was a warm night of early summer, and after dinner they took
+their coffee upon the terrace. A private bill was occupying the
+attention of a thin House, and the terrace was fairly full of members
+waiting for the resumption of public business. Amongst them was Mr.
+Devenish. He strolled up to the couple, and after shaking hands with
+Cynthia, turned to Harry Rames:
+
+"I hear you are against Fanshawe's bill."
+
+"Yes," said Harry Rames.
+
+"It comes on next Friday," continued Devenish. "The government will
+accept the principle, and give the bill a second reading."
+
+"It won't go further than that," said Harry Rames.
+
+"Not this year. But next year we shall embody the principle in a
+measure of our own, and then--?" He looked inquiringly at Harry.
+
+"Then," said Harry deliberately, "I suppose we must try to get it
+amended."
+
+A beam of light pouring from one of the windows showed Devenish's face
+clearly to Cynthia. She saw it harden and narrow. When he spoke his
+voice was sharp.
+
+"I shall be in charge," he said. "I shall not accept any amendment
+which strikes at the principle."
+
+"I am sorry," said Rames. He lit his cigar. He had not the air of a
+man receding from his position.
+
+Cynthia was leaning forward, her eyes travelling curiously from one to
+the other. She had noticed the quick snap in the voice of Devenish,
+the quiet indifference to it in her husband's. But she did not know on
+what point they disagreed. Harry Rames turned toward her and
+explained:
+
+"Fanshawe is bringing in a land bill on Friday afternoon. I didn't
+think that the government would take it up or I would have told you
+about it, Cynthia, and talked it over with you."
+
+Devenish looked quickly toward the girl. Since Rames consulted her,
+could he enlist her upon his side? Cynthia read the unspoken question
+in his face, and turned gratefully to her husband who had made it
+clear that she had her word in his decisions.
+
+"Fanshawe proposes that the State should buy compulsorily so much land
+at intervals of so many years, split it into small holdings and lease
+them," Rames continued.
+
+"And you disapprove?" said Cynthia.
+
+"Yes. I am against the small holding. I think that's waste. I am in
+favor of the small farm. But I want the farm owned, not taken on
+lease. That's my chief objection. The State's a hard landlord."
+
+"Is a bank a better one?" asked Devenish.
+
+"I think so," returned Rames. "A bank's a business; the State's a
+machine. There's a big difference there."
+
+"Well, I shall be interested to hear what you have to say on Friday,"
+said Devenish, as he rose from his chair. "It would be a pity if we
+lost your support--a great pity." He spoke with a slow significance.
+The words were half a compliment, and the other half a menace. He
+turned at once lightly to Cynthia. "You must persuade him, Mrs. Rames,
+to be sensible, you really must," he said. "To create owners is a
+long, slow process, and I can't wait." A sudden violence flamed in his
+voice, and with a characteristic action he brought a clenched fist
+sharply down into the open palm of his other hand. He looked out
+across the Thames and leftward to the lights on Westminster bridge. He
+seemed to be assuring himself that he stood at last where he had
+always meant to stand, that the moment for which he had lived was
+surely coming. "No, I can't wait. I want to set about the land system
+in this country. With tenancies one can begin at once."
+
+As he walked away from them Cynthia recalled the description of him
+which Harry Rames had given to her. "As a boy he had always to walk in
+the road, and he has not forgotten it." She began to understand the
+phrase now. Devenish's swift and bitter outburst had been an
+illumination.
+
+He had been forced to walk in the road. Rames had shown a shrewd
+insight into a complex character when he coined the phrase. Devenish
+was the son of a small struggling tradesman, in a little town
+surrounded by land which was carefully preserved. Therefore he was
+chased out of the woods and off the grass. The game-keeper was his
+enemy, and an enemy always at hand. To feel the turf beneath his feet
+he must use stealth like a criminal. He lived in a good grass country,
+and all the share he had of it was the dust kicked up from the road by
+the wheels of carriages. In his boyhood he had brooded over his
+exclusion, and through the hard struggles of his youth his thoughts
+had been rancorous. Now, it is true, the rancor had diminished. At the
+age of forty-five he had reached high office, and with high office,
+for the first time, a regular and sufficient income. He was freed for
+a while, at all events, from the desperate endeavor to pay his way
+outside and keep his footing inside the House of Commons. He met men
+of diverse pursuits from the far corners of the earth. The world
+broadened out before him magically.
+
+He entered late, as it were, upon his youth; the arts swept into his
+view, a glittering procession, and enchanted him. All was new to him
+as to a child. The natural charm of the man found an outlet; he had
+good-humor now, and a pleasant friendliness. Gradually the doors of
+great houses had been opened to him--and he had looked in. It was to
+his credit that he had only looked in. He had come away unspoilt,
+uncaptured. But though he recognized that for him the world had become
+wonderfully a place of amenities, he had not forgotten that as a boy
+he had been forced to walk in the road; and the dust of it was still
+bitter in his mouth. "For those who come after me," he had said to
+himself, "it shall not be so," and he was in a hurry to set about the
+change. To create peasant proprietors? There was a world of obstacles
+in the way. To create tenants of the State? A single budget would
+suffice. Fanshawe's scheme should be the chief item in the government
+programme of next year, and Captain Rames must look to himself if he
+stood firm to oppose it.
+
+Captain Rames, on his side, had no intention to give way. He drove
+away from the House that night with Cynthia, and in the carriage he
+said:
+
+"I shall put up as big a fight as I can, Cynthia, on this question."
+
+"Against Mr. Devenish?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Cynthia was silent, and Harry Rames turned to her swiftly with a
+question upon his lips. "You think it rash?" he was going to ask, but
+he never did. He saw her eyes shining at him out of the darkness, and
+in a low tone she said:
+
+"You feel very strongly about it, strongly enough to risk your future.
+Oh, I am so glad!"
+
+There was a throb of joy in her voice. She was still a girl. Though
+she professed to laugh at the enchanted garden of her dreams, there
+was still some yearning for it at her heart. The men with ideas had
+peopled it. It seemed that after all her husband, since at all costs
+he meant to stand up against Mr. Devenish for an idea, must be one of
+them. But a slight, almost an uneasy gesture, which Harry made,
+stopped her on the threshold of a great happiness. She lay back,
+chilled with disappointment.
+
+If Harry had spoken, he would have said: "No, I don't feel strongly
+about it. I don't feel about it, at all. I simply recognize that it is
+my opportunity." And thus he would have spoken before their marriage,
+perhaps, too, during the first few weeks after it. But a change had
+inevitably come for both of them. The frankness which Rames had
+deliberately used, so that she might know him for what he was, no
+longer served. Always it had hurt Cynthia, even though she had
+welcomed it. More than once he had seen her flinch from it as from a
+blow. But now that they were so much together, a hint or silence had
+to take its place. Blunt honesty was all very well twice a week or so,
+but repeated every hour, it bruised too heavily. So, too, with
+Cynthia. Her business as a wife was to help, not chide. Their year of
+marriage had taught them the little diplomacies and managements which
+made life together possible for them. Frankness was to save them--so
+they had planned. What was saving them was reticence.
+
+This time, however, Cynthia was told the truth by her husband's
+gesture. He was going to follow the old historic, dangerous road, the
+road of the third parties, the short cut to power which has lured so
+many ambitious men to disappointment, and advanced a very few before
+their time. And he had chosen William Devenish to tilt against, a man
+supple and quick in debate, sharp of tongue, with a gift of ridicule
+and a wealth of language; a speaker who hit with a nice discrimination
+just above the belt in the House, and just a little bit lower outside
+of it. To Cynthia it seemed that Harry must be gambling on his
+success; that he had cast his prudence from him like a cloak. Harry
+Rames answered some part of her thought.
+
+"It's not so mad as it appears to be," he said. "In the first place
+the question of tenancy against ownership is an open one. You are not
+breaking away from your party whatever view you take. You may be
+breaking away from a minister, but that's a different thing."
+
+Cynthia's fears were assuaged. In her relief she turned eagerly to
+Rames.
+
+"But your minister is Mr. Devenish," she cried.
+
+"I know," he returned. "A hard fighter. All the more gain then, if I
+can stand square to him, and remain standing. Besides, Devenish has a
+peculiar weakness."
+
+"Yes?" cried Cynthia. "You can make use of it?" and she stopped,
+wondering at herself. She was startled to realize that for the first
+time she herself was keeping his eyes from lifting to the high path
+above.
+
+"I have noticed it," Rames continued. "He can stand any amount of
+opposition from his opponents. If he gets heated, he remains master of
+his wit and tongue. But he cannot endure criticism from the benches
+behind him. It strikes some hidden string of arrogance in him. He
+loses his control. He says foolish things. He hands himself over a
+victim, if his critic has courage and skill enough to use his chance."
+
+"I see," said Cynthia. "And the third point?"
+
+"Oh," said Harry carelessly. "The question is an important one for the
+country. It must provoke discussion. Yes, I shall move the rejection
+of Fanshawe's bill if I get the chance."
+
+He put down on the notice paper, with some twenty members on the
+opposition side, a motion for rejection. He rose on the Friday,
+immediately after Fanshawe had sat down, and was called upon by the
+Speaker. He was content with two objections. But either of them, if
+established, was fatal to the bill. He argued against the small
+holding, which he regarded as the pastime of the well-to-do tradesman
+in the neighboring town, rather than as a serious method of settling a
+genuine peasantry on the land; and he pleaded for the farm of sixty or
+seventy acres. It is a matter nowadays of ancient dispute, yet he
+managed to say a new thing about it, not parading his knowledge--for
+there were too many in that House who had made land the study of their
+lives--but suggesting it with a deference, which took his audience.
+The great farm, he maintained, was a modern product, due to quite
+other causes than natural development. It came from the vanity of the
+eighteenth century, its love of spaciousness and show. The monstrous
+porticoed houses and the huge farms were the symbols of its parade.
+But in the seventeenth century, when agriculture really prospered, the
+small farm of seventy acres was the rule. It was at a return to this
+condition that policy and legislation ought to aim.
+
+He passed to his second argument. Tenancy under the State was bad. For
+the State was a hard landlord, and could be nothing else. It took no
+account of bad seasons or the shortness of money. It had to collect
+its revenues and rents within the year. Moreover, the idea was petty
+in its conception. (Here Mr. Devenish turned an outraged head toward
+the orator.) Legislation should aim at something beyond the immediate
+benefit it conferred. Otherwise let them commit the fortunes of the
+country to a parish council, and themselves go home.
+
+"There is to my mind one question by which all legislation can be
+tested," said Rames, "and that question is not: 'Does it supply an
+immediate need?' but 'Does it help to strengthen the character of the
+race?'"
+
+The bill failed according to that test. For it meant no more than the
+substitution of one landlord for another, and left the tenant pretty
+much where he was. If Mr. Fanshawe had taken a bold course and
+produced a just measure, with the object of creating owners, then the
+bill would not have failed. For the desire to possess land was the
+surest sign of a sound and healthy race. It was that desire in men
+which good legislation would try to keep alive. This bill merely
+fobbed them off with a miserable makeshift, and shut the door against
+ownership. Ownership with its obligations and its responsibility, and
+its response to the most primal and most durable of all ambitions, was
+the only policy worthy of a great Parliament.
+
+Mr. Devenish replied later in the afternoon, and quite briefly, He did
+not, he said, propose to enter into the discussion, but simply to
+state the intention of the government. It would give the bill a second
+reading, accepting thus the two principles of small holdings and
+tenancies under the State; and next year it would introduce a measure
+of its own, based upon those principles, and press it through until it
+was placed upon the statute-book. Mr. Devenish studiously refrained
+from any reference to Captain Rames, and as soon as he sat down, the
+hands of the clock then pointing within a minute of five, Mr. Fanshawe
+moved the closure, and the Speaker accepted the motion. The closure
+was accepted without a division, and the main question was put.
+
+In the interval, while the division bells were ringing, a slim,
+middle-aged man, with a moustache which was beginning to grow gray,
+and a handsome, ineffective face, passed into the House from the
+lobby, and took a seat on the bench by Rames's side.
+
+"What are you going to do, Rames?" he asked.
+
+"Vote as I spoke," said Harry.
+
+"Then I'll go with you," said his companion. "I didn't hear your
+speech, or indeed anything of the debate. But I am sure Devenish is
+wrong."
+
+Harry Rames laughed.
+
+"That sounds like a good working rule. Thank you, Brook. Let us go and
+vote."
+
+The two men, alone of their party, strolled into the opposition lobby,
+and that was the beginning of the great cave. It was a Friday
+afternoon in summer, the weather was very hot, the House very thin and
+Mr. Devenish and his under-secretary the only men present on the
+treasury bench. No one paid any attention to the revolt; the
+newspapers next day had the briefest reports of the debate. Cynthia
+herself, who had come to the House to listen to a fierce and tingling
+discussion, was disappointed at the gentle apathy which overlay the
+proceedings of that afternoon.
+
+But Harry said: "Wait a little, Cynthia"; and Mr. Brook, who from that
+time began to drop in frequently at their house in Curzon Street,
+chuckled like a man with secret knowledge.
+
+"Eight men on our side," Harry explained, "had met several times in
+one of the committee rooms before Friday, to decide what course they
+should take to resist this bill. I did not know of their meetings at
+the time, and they agreed to do nothing until they were sure of the
+line the government was going to take. Had they suspected that I was
+going to move the rejection of the bill, they would have attended and
+voted with me."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXV
+
+                      COLONEL CHALLONER'S REVOLT
+
+
+"We will have to make a great stand next year, Rames," said Robert
+Brook. "We must organize. We have time, thank goodness. There are ten
+of us now. A lot more will join us."
+
+"But will they vote? That's the point," returned Rames. "Will they
+vote against the government's bill on its second reading?"
+
+"Oh, yes," Mr. Brook replied enthusiastically. "There are a lot of
+discontented people in our majority. We'll have voters--Challoner, for
+instance. Besides, you have friends."
+
+Rames laughed.
+
+"Yes, I know the kind of friends--fellows who come to you in your seat
+after you have spoken, pat you on the back, whisper that they are with
+you, and then troop like tame mice into the government lobby against
+you. I've watched them."
+
+Brook, however, was not to be damped. He threw himself for the rest of
+that session into the work of organization. A halting speaker and an
+ineffectual personage, he had sat for twenty years in the House of
+Commons and was not tired of it. He was without distinction, he was
+the confidant of no minister, he was never caricatured, he was never
+the chairman of a committee, he rarely spoke. The recruits of each new
+Parliament took almost its duration before they assigned individuality
+to his features or honored him with a name. He was mediocrity's last
+word. But he had charming manners and won to a kind of friendly pity
+those whose acquaintance he gently made. He was born for private life,
+but the House of Commons had caught him as in a net. He had no other
+interests, he had no wife, he did not any longer even aspire to
+office. To be busy in the House of Commons--that was lifeblood to him
+and a renewal of youth. His chance had come now. He hurried from man
+to man, discreet and furtive. He arranged private meetings. He hooked
+his little wagon to Rames's star. He approached Colonel Challoner.
+
+Challoner, the party hack, was instinctively outraged. Was the list of
+ministers closed forever? No! But as he was about to repel Robert
+Brook's advances, the very holder of the office which he coveted stung
+him into revolt.
+
+It was quite toward the end of the session. Colonel Challoner was
+walking through the division lobby late at night when he saw the Under
+Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Charles Bradley, in front of him.
+There was some stir at the time because certain Indian emigrants had
+suffered in one of the disturbances of southern Persia. Colonel
+Challoner hurried officiously to Mr. Bradley's side.
+
+"Bradley," he said, "don't you think it would be good policy to
+repatriate those Indians at our expense. What?"
+
+Mr. Bradley, a florid gentleman, youthfully middle-aged, with a sweet
+voice, a pompous manner, and perhaps a bare sufficiency of brains,
+turned to the colonel with condescending kindness.
+
+"As a member of the government," he said importantly, "I can no longer
+speak freely. Ah, my dear Challoner, I tell you I regret day after day
+that corner seat on the front bench below the gangway, and the
+opportunity of supplementary questions. But that happy time has gone.
+You might, if you like, raise the question on the adjournment or the
+Appropriation Bill next week. I could then reply to you."
+
+Mr. Bradley smiled benignantly upon Colonel Challoner as from heights
+of sunrise, and passed on. He had grown very lordly since his
+elevation to office. Still, a few paces further on it seemed worth his
+while to stop until Challoner rejoined him. He did not notice that the
+colonel had grown rather red in the face.
+
+"If you do raise the question, Colonel Challoner, could you introduce
+into your speech 'Civis Romanus sum'? I should like to hang my speech
+upon that. Thank you."
+
+Even a party hack will turn if he be sufficiently trodden upon by
+minor ministers, and Colonel Challoner did now.
+
+"Mr. Bradley," he asked with a most elaborate politeness, "have you
+ever calculated how many Under Secretaries of State, past and present,
+there are alive to-day? Or how many of them have names which are even
+faintly familiar to the public?"
+
+Mr. Bradley gasped and stared. This was Challoner--old
+Challoner--talking! Bradley was quite unprepared to cope with so
+unparalleled an outrage. The colonel actually went on, and in accents
+of raillery:
+
+"'Civis Romanus sum.' Now, why quote a phrase so banal. Surely, Mr.
+Bradley, it has had its day. We can do better than that if we put our
+heads together. Civis Romanus sum! God bless my soul! But I am willing
+to help you with a tag of Latin. I will introduce another sentence.
+Balbus shall build a wall--upon my word he shall--and you can hang
+your speech onto that, and be damned to you."
+
+Mr. Bradley, however, had suffered enough of this unseemliness. He
+hurried forward and passed between the clerks who recorded the votes
+with a heightened color. Colonel Challoner followed him. But he waited
+at the door for Robert Brook to emerge, and then drew him by the arm
+into the outer lobby.
+
+"I have been thinking over what you proposed, Brook," he said.
+"Certainly, certainly we must make a stand against Fanshawe's bill. We
+have a duty to our constituents. We must show the government we are
+not to be trifled with."
+
+Robert Brook responded with warmth.
+
+"I thought that upon reflection you would look upon it that way. You
+will be a pillar of strength to us, Challoner."
+
+"That's very good of you," said Challoner. After all, there were some,
+it seemed, who knew his worth. "We must meet in the autumn--just those
+on whom we can depend--and arrange a plan of campaign."
+
+"Yes," said Brook. "But where? We want, don't you think, to mask our
+batteries until the time comes for opening fire. We might meet at
+Rames's house--but it is known that he is opposed to the measure." He
+looked invitingly at his new ally.
+
+"Yes, I see, I see," said Colonel Challoner a little doubtfully. There
+was a proposal in his mind--he was not quite sure whether he would
+make it. It was a bold one--it was the burning of his boats.
+
+"Well, why not?" he suddenly said. "Why not meet at my house in
+Dorsetshire? I have some partridges. They will provide the excuse. Let
+us meet in October. Let me have the names and I'll quietly ask the men
+before the session ends."
+
+Mr. Brook was delighted. He called mysteriously upon Harry Rames.
+
+"We have got Challoner," he said. Rames shook his head.
+
+"He'll back out."
+
+"I don't see how he can. He is asking us all to meet at Bramling in
+the autumn."
+
+Harry Rames sat back in his chair.
+
+"How in the world did you manage that, Brook? We must go, of course."
+
+Challoner spoke to Rames that evening. "It's to be quite an informal
+little party," he said with a wink, and took Rames and Brook each by
+the arm. Now that he had tasted the delights of revolt, Colonel
+Challoner, too, was a different man. He lost his dreariness. No longer
+he moulted; no longer he dripped melancholy on all who stood near to
+him. He passed ministers with a high head and an arrogant smile.
+"We'll show 'em," he said. "Yes, sir, we'll show 'em." And as he saw
+Bradley approaching him, "Here's Civis Romanus," he cried in tones
+loud enough to carry to the Under Secretary's ears. The Under
+Secretary flushed and hurried on. Colonel Challoner had told his story
+freely, and Civis Romanus Mr. Bradley remained for the rest of that
+Parliament. Colonel Challoner resumed: "We'll meet on the eighth of
+October. A little partridge shoot, eh? Just a few of us, jolly fellows
+all. You'll bring your wife, Rames, won't you? The others will."
+
+That was a precaution which had been suggested by Brook.
+
+"Some one is sure to let out that we are meeting at Bramling," he
+said. "If the men go without their wives, the gathering will have the
+look of a conspiracy. With them it will just be an ordinary autumn
+shooting party."
+
+"Quite so," said Rames.
+
+The House rose at eleven o'clock that night, and when Harry went home,
+he found his wife just returned from a dinner party. She came with him
+into his study and while they sat and talked he told her that she,
+too, was to be included in the visit to Bramling. Cynthia's face
+clouded.
+
+"I would rather not go," she said. "I don't think there is any need
+that I should."
+
+"The other men will bring their wives."
+
+"There will be enough then. It won't matter if one wife doesn't go."
+
+She was looking at Harry Rames directly, but with a great disquiet in
+her eyes. Harry, however, persisted.
+
+"I think you are wanted, Cynthia. We have a difficult job to keep
+these men together and agree upon a line of concerted action. Some
+women could be very useful at a juncture like this. You are one of
+them."
+
+Cynthia rose with a quick movement to her feet. She stood before him,
+her broad forehead troubled, her lips mutinous, and by her attitude
+she made all the more plain his need of her. The room was Rames's own
+study which had been lined with mahogany, and against the bright dark
+panelling, in her white dress, she gleamed slim and fair and beautiful
+as silver. Harry Rames looked her over with a smile. She was, as he
+put it to himself, exquisitely turned out. She had the grace and
+delicacy natural to a family nursed in good manners through a century,
+and with all her beauty she had simplicity and a desire to please.
+
+"Yes, I want you, Cynthia," he said, and the blood rushed hot to her
+face and throat. She turned from him swiftly and went out of the open
+window onto a balcony which overhung their tiny square of garden.
+Rames's eyes followed her curiously. Something had gone wrong; that
+was clear. He could see her leaning over the rail in the darkness, her
+face between her hands.
+
+Rames's survey of her had brought back to her recollection that
+distant morning by the wheat-field in South America when her father
+had looked her over horribly from head to foot and had valued her for
+a market. There had been just a touch of appraisement in her husband's
+look now. Almost she traced a resemblance in the two men's thoughts,
+the two men's examinations.
+
+Harry left her to herself for a few minutes. Then he followed her:
+
+"I think I understand, Cynthia," he said gently. "Of course it isn't a
+very high and lofty business we're engaged on. That's right enough.
+And when you consider the sort of people our party's going to be
+composed of--the dissatisfied, the ambitious, the timid, and just a
+few who believe Fanshawe's bill a bad thing--the man[oe]uvre doesn't
+look very pretty. So if you don't want to go, don't."
+
+But Cynthia had changed her mind.
+
+"No. I'll come, Harry," she said. "It's too late to be half-hearted
+now. I'll certainly come."
+
+She turned back into the room, and picking up her gloves from a table
+went upstairs. Harry Rames had no doubt that he had hit upon the
+reason of her disinclination to go to Bramling. But as Cynthia ran up
+the stairs she kept saying to herself nervously like one who would
+frighten fear away with words:
+
+"Perhaps no one will notice it. Very likely no one will notice it. And
+if they do, they will think it an accident."
+
+She had not been considering at all the worthiness of these autumn
+man[oe]uvres. She had been thinking of a picture by Romney which hung
+in the dining-room of Bramling, a picture which she had never seen,
+but which yet she knew to be a portrait of herself. She had, however,
+promised to help in the making of the great career and this was one of
+its critical moments. It was, as she had said to Harry, too late to be
+half-hearted. If she failed him now, she failed him altogether. She
+must take the risk that others would notice the resemblance--and
+amongst the others, perhaps even her grandfather Colonel Challoner
+himself. To one determination, however, she clung. She would admit no
+kinship with the Challoners. Nothing should persuade her, neither the
+old man's loneliness nor his disappointed hopes. She held the name and
+the family in horror, though the name and the family were her own.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXVI
+
+                       THE PICTURE AT BRAMLING
+
+
+Bramling is the very house for a conspiracy. It lies in Dorsetshire,
+hidden away at the back of the grass-walled town of Wareham on the
+road to no where. A stream runs past its door down to Poole Harbor,
+and its windows look across grass meadows to where the sea-cliffs lift
+against the sky. Hither through one October day came in old-fashioned
+flies and private motor-cars the inhabitants of the Cave--Cynthia
+amongst the last of them with a foot which hesitated to cross the
+threshold. There were thirty in all assembled in the drawing-room when
+the dinner-gong sounded, eighteen men and twelve women. Colonel
+Challoner, to Cynthia's satisfaction, had to give his arm to Lady
+Lorme, the wife of an ex-Under Secretary of the home office who had
+quarreled with his chief and resigned. She herself was taken in by
+Robert Brook. Reluctance and curiosity struggled for mastery within
+her as she entered the dining-room, and took her seat. She would not
+look up at the walls, yet she could hardly but look up, and she sought
+furtively around the dinner-table whether any noticed the picture and
+her resemblance to it. But no one was looking at any picture at all.
+Not a remark was made or a glance thrown to show her where it hung.
+She looked more boldly at her companions, and coming to a greater ease
+began with enjoyment to laugh at herself. Not one person at the table
+was devoting a thought to her at all. They were all very busy,
+drinking their soup and talking rapidly like uncomfortable people who
+fear that if once their speech flags they will never find anything
+more to say. They were in truth an uncongenial company, held together
+by a single link, their eagerness to harass their own government. Even
+Robert Brook, who knew Cynthia well, was talking to her with
+incoherence in his agitation lest the gathering at Bramling should
+fail. She heard Sir Faraday Lorme, a big red-faced man of sixty with a
+bull-neck, say across the table to Charles Payne, one of the eight who
+genuinely thought Fanshawe's bill a bad experiment:
+
+"Of course, as a rule, you know I don't act with you, but--" and the
+rest of the sentence was lost to her ears, but it seemed to her that
+fully half of those present might have said as much to their
+neighbors. Further along the table she caught sight of Mr. Andrew
+Fallon, a dark white-faced man who had only joined them because his
+wife had been signally and publicly snubbed by the wife of a Cabinet
+Minister. Cynthia could see the wife on the opposite side of the
+table, a portly over-dressed woman with an overbearing voice; and on
+behalf of all her sex she felt grateful to the Cabinet Minister's
+wife.
+
+A singularly gentle voice drew her attention. She turned away from
+Robert Brook, to find at her other side Mr. Howard Fall.
+
+"We have spoken in the lobby, Mrs. Rames," said Howard Fall timidly.
+"Captain Rames was kind enough to introduce me."
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Cynthia. "Oh, I am glad that you are here."
+
+To her Howard Fall was, with the exception of her husband, the
+most interesting man in the room. She welcomed his presence
+whole-heartedly. He was intellect, he was modesty. Even now at her
+implied compliment he was blushing like a young girl and his eyes
+shone with dog-like gratitude. Howard Fall was then about fifty years
+of age; and though he was but a contemporary of Harry Rames in the
+House of Commons, he had already acquired there a special place of
+high distinction. Of too acute and logical a mind to be a good
+party-man, he harried with a pleasant voice and most destructive
+criticism, now his own party, now his opponents. He had one great
+quality in common with Cynthia, he was quite without affectation. He
+would make a brilliant speech with extraordinary diffidence. But he
+made it, and a genuine word of praise or thanks delighted him, as a
+schoolboy is delighted with a sovereign. With the mild manners of a
+curate he combined the courage of a soldier. If he had ideas to
+express--and he generally had--no thought of prudence could hinder him
+from expressing them. Indeed, he drew a gentle contentment from the
+knowledge that as a rule they were troublesome to those whom he
+nominally supported. Cynthia had heard him more than once from the
+ladies' gallery, and had admired his honesty and his courage. For the
+moment she was enheartened by his presence. It put confidence into
+her. With him to help, Harry might indeed put up a fight against Mr.
+Devenish.
+
+"I didn't know," said Howard Fall, "that Captain Rames was going to
+speak against Fanshawe's bill. Otherwise, of course, I should have
+been in the House to support him;" and the "of course" struck all
+Cynthia's comfort from her. It was so significant of the man. He was
+born predestined always to revolt. Any party of two had him for a
+third. Cynthia glanced disconsolately to where her husband sat at the
+end of the table. But he showed no sign of misgiving. He was talking
+energetically to the four people nearest to him, and he only paused
+when her eyes rested upon his face. She turned away again and there
+above the head of Colonel Challoner, who was sitting exactly opposite
+to her, she saw at last the portrait glowing upon the wall.
+
+For the moment she had forgotten it. Now it caught away her breath.
+She sat and stared at it. It was the portrait of a girl of seventeen,
+dressed in white from the big straw hat with its flapping brim to the
+shoes upon her feet. There was but one touch of color, a broad shining
+ribbon of bright blue looped about the crown of the hat, and thus
+dressed, the girl stood in a field of sunlight and corn, looking
+straight out from the picture, with a great curiosity and eagerness in
+her dark-blue eyes. She seemed to be looking upon the gates of a world
+of wonder--gates which with a most tantalizing tardiness were slowly
+opening to let her through.
+
+Was she herself indeed like that? The question rushed into Cynthia's
+mind. As pretty as that? It was impossible. Yet she had been
+recognized because of it. Just so then she must have looked that
+morning when, after sending her neglected telegram to Captain Rames,
+she had stood at the edge of the wheat on the Daventry estancia. Yet
+nobody recognized her now. She had the features of the girl in the
+portrait, the broad forehead, the straight, delicate nose, the fair
+hair, the big dark-blue eyes. Yet nobody recognized her. Perhaps,
+however, she had gone off. She was getting old. A gentle melancholy
+descended upon Cynthia. The fear lest her likeness to the girl in the
+picture should be remarked had quite gone since she had seen the
+picture. She was now rather hurt and indignant that no one had noticed
+it.
+
+Lady Lorme gave the signal a little while afterward, and the ladies
+rose and left the men to their cigars and their discussion. Colonel
+Challoner opened the proceedings with a pompous, unnecessary little
+speech. He welcomed his guests, and he reminded them at considerable
+length of the object of the gathering. He concluded with a question as
+to whether any honorable member present had any views as to the best
+procedure to be adopted.
+
+"Yes," said Harry Rames, "if I may make a suggestion. There are
+eighteen of us here. I propose that we now go carefully through the
+list of members and consider how many more we can get to join us, upon
+whom we can count. I have Vacher's list here;" and he drew out from
+his pocket the familiar little paper-covered book with the names and
+addresses of the members.
+
+"I think that's the first thing to be done," a man agreed from the
+other end of the table. He was a Mr. Edgington, a little, square, bald
+man with short side-whiskers, who seemed a cross between an attorney
+and a stable-boy. He was one of the many men in the House who have a
+subject. He had mastered the Housing question; he really knew the
+facts, he had the figures at his fingers' ends, and he had counted
+upon his knowledge to take him straight through the doors of the Local
+Government Board. But the doors had remained closed, and he had turned
+gadfly in consequence--a gadfly that trumpeted but had no sting. "To
+be sure about the men who will stand out against the pressure of the
+Whips, who will not be frightened into line by their local
+associations, who retain, in a word, some self-respect and some
+veneration for the independence of the House of Commons--that is our
+first requisite," he said floridly.
+
+The company then went carefully through the list and marked off twenty
+fresh names as the names of men who might be inclined to join the
+revolt. It was arranged that discreet letters should be written to
+them on the following day, and Robert Brook was appointed secretary by
+an unanimous vote.
+
+"Of course we shan't get them all," said Lorme.
+
+"And of those we do get, some will shirk when the division bell
+rings," added Howard Fall.
+
+"No doubt," said Rames. "But if we can carry thirty men into the
+opposition lobby on the second reading, we shall have made a
+demonstration which will go far to kill the bill. It will mean sixty
+on a division. It will leave the government with a comfortable
+majority. We all want that of course,"--a chorus of approval, more or
+less sincere, greeted the remark--"But it will also mean that the
+government will hardly be able to force the bill through its committee
+stages by a drastic use of the closure."
+
+"Exactly," said a tall, bearded man with a strong Scotch accent, who
+up to this moment had held his tongue. He represented a northern town
+of Scotland, and was one of the eight who were opposed to the measure
+first and last because they believed it harmful to the country.
+"Exactly. The demonstration is very well, but if the bill is to be
+killed, we will have to kill it in committee. And to prepare for that
+must be our chief work here, Colonel Challoner."
+
+"Yes," said Rames. "Mr. Monro is right. We must go word by word
+through those clauses of Fanshawe's bill, which we are fairly certain
+Devenish will incorporate in his measure. We must formulate
+amendments, and we ought, I think, to agree, to some extent, upon the
+speakers to move them. It will, of course, have to be a provisional
+arrangement--" and he was interrupted by a strident voice which
+belonged to a sandy-haired hunting-man with a broad red face who would
+have seemed totally out of place in any conspiracy.
+
+"Yes. Devenish may sell us a pup. He's a deuce of a clever fellow is
+Devenish. Let him get wind of your partridges, Challoner, and he'll
+sell us a pup for a sure thing."
+
+"All the more reason we should keep our gathering quiet," said
+Challoner. He looked round the table with an impatience which had been
+growing upon him during the last half-hour. "I think that's all we can
+do to-night."
+
+"About all," said Monro. "There is just this suggestion I would like
+to make. I know a man whose business is land, and he is most
+experienced in it; and I thought that if you would like, I would send
+him a telegram to-morrow, and we could employ him to help us in
+framing these amendments. He is a partner in Beevis and Beevis, the
+land-agents in Piccadilly."
+
+"By all means, do," said Challoner. "We all agree to that, don't we?
+And now let us join the ladies."
+
+He sprang up and opened the door like a man in a great hurry. When he
+entered the drawing-room, he crossed it at once to Cynthia's side.
+
+"I was sorry, Mrs. Rames, that I couldn't take you in to dinner
+to-night. I would have liked very much that on your first evening at
+Bramling you should have come in with me. For, as you know, I somehow
+associate you with this house."
+
+He looked at her with a very direct inquiry in his eyes. But Cynthia
+would not respond to it; and he sat at her side with a wistfulness in
+his voice and his words against which she had a little trouble to
+protect her heart. But she did, for she was alarmed. When she had met
+him before he had spoken rather as though he wished that they were
+related. To-night he spoke as if he suspected that they were.
+
+Mr. Beevis arrived the next afternoon, and for the rest of the week,
+while the morning was given to the partridges and the amusements of
+the country, the afternoon and the evening found the Cave busy upon
+the bill. Amendments were formulated and shared out amongst them,
+whilst it was by general consent left to Rames to raise the question,
+first of all, on the Address at the beginning of the session and then
+to move the rejection of the bill later on when it came before the
+House upon its second reading. Good progress, in a word, was made,
+and, to the delight of all, no whisper of this conspiracy crept into
+any of the daily papers. They were examined anxiously every day upon
+their arrival at eleven, and laid down with relief. Cynthia could not
+but laugh.
+
+"I never would have believed that you could have found so many members
+of Parliament reluctant to see their names in the papers," she said to
+her husband.
+
+"Yes, it's astonishing what modesty they can develop," he replied.
+
+But though Cynthia laughed, the work, the concealments, the sort of
+restrained excitement which was diffused through the house, began to
+have their effect upon her. She was getting color into her life at
+last, she assured herself, even if it was only a dingy color.
+Moreover, she had the opportunity to compare her husband with his
+rivals in the career. Indeed, he had but one real rival in that House,
+Howard Fall. And though he lacked the subtlety of his intellect, he
+had a swifter initiative, a more telling vigor of phrase. As for the
+rest he stood head and shoulders above them all, and they knew it and
+looked to him to lead them. If he did not share the strong convictions
+of the honest men, he overtopped them by sheer ability, and as to the
+others he knew nothing either of their malice or their fear. Thus they
+all came hopefully to the last day of their visit; and then at one
+o'clock in the day the thunderbolt fell.
+
+It was a Sunday and the whole party had just settled down to luncheon
+when the whir of a motor-car floated into the room. It was followed by
+the sound of a door opening and shutting, a pleasant and familiar
+voice was heard to inquire for Colonel Challoner, and the next moment,
+ushered in by the butler, Mr. Devenish entered the room. Consternation
+ran round that luncheon table like a wind across a field of corn.
+Colonel Challoner sprang up hastily with every sign of discomfort.
+
+"My dear Devenish, I am delighted to see you, I am sure. You are just
+in time for luncheon." He called to the butler to lay another place at
+his side. "I didn't know you were in the neighborhood. You should have
+let me know."
+
+"I didn't mean to do that," said Devenish dryly. He ran his eye from
+face to face with a twinkling glance. Cynthia herself could hardly
+restrain a laugh. The independent members of the nation's Parliament
+looked so singularly like a set of school-boys' caught by a master in
+the planning of a rebellion.
+
+"Quite a large party, eh, Challoner?" he said with a smile.
+
+"Yes, yes," replied the colonel. "The partridges, you know."
+
+"Ah, the partridges, to be sure. But I didn't know that Howard Fall
+shot at anything but ministers. And even they only get winged, eh,
+Fall?"
+
+Mr. Devenish strolled round the table and shook hands with Fall. Fall,
+however, was one of the few who was quite undisturbed.
+
+"Yes, but I am looking to practice to improve my shooting," he said.
+
+A place was now laid for Devenish. Colonel Challoner called to him.
+
+"Will you come and sit here, Devenish?"
+
+"Certainly," replied the smiling minister. "But I should first of all
+like to shake hands with all my friends;" and quite slowly he walked
+round the table and shook hands with each of the men present and those
+of the ladies whom he knew. He was in the best of tempers, and he had
+a cordial word for every one except for Captain Ramos. To him he
+merely said:
+
+"Ah!" and the accent of his voice had in it no note of surprise. It
+was the ejaculation of a man establishing something which he had
+suspected. Then he walked to his place and sat down.
+
+"There are eighteen members of Parliament, Challoner," he said
+pleasantly. "I hope that I have forgotten no one. Let me see!" Again
+his eye ranged round the table, obviously registering in his memory
+the identity of Challoner's guests. "No, eighteen members of
+Parliament. Have you got a partridge left?"
+
+Rames leaned forward and met smile with smile.
+
+"We have just left one for next year," he said, "and we have been
+making a careful note of the piece of land on which we think we shall
+get him."
+
+Howard Fall was delighted. For he loved courage. But the others of
+that company were more than ever confused and disconcerted.
+
+"He's giving us away," said one of the weak-kneed in an indignant
+whisper to Andrew Fallon. Fallon's white face was twisted in a grin.
+
+"He's cutting down the bridge behind you, my friend. And I don't think
+he's a bad judge."
+
+Meanwhile Devenish returned the direct gaze of Captain Rames. There
+was no pretence between these two. Their eyes met; they challenged
+each other, Rames with perfect good-humor, Devenish with a certain
+grimness in his smile. He nodded his head toward Rames and tightened
+his lips. There was not a man at that table who could not construe the
+gesture into words.
+
+"You are the leader here, Rames. Very well, we'll see."
+
+Mr. Devenish turned to his neighbor. It was Cynthia, and even to her
+he talked for a little while with reserve. Rames had been correct in
+his diagnosis of the man. A good-humored fighter as a rule, he lost
+his good-humor when the attack was made upon his flank. He had begun
+his own political career with side-shots at his leaders from the
+front-bench below the gangway; but he did not rejoice when the same
+disposition of battle was planned against himself. However, luncheon
+and the proximity of a beautiful woman appeased him as they should. He
+began to talk freely; his smile lost its grimness, his natural
+geniality flashed bright.
+
+"Tell me one thing," he said suddenly.
+
+"It depends--" said Cynthia warily.
+
+"Very well then. Tell me another thing. Why does your portrait hang in
+this house?"
+
+Cynthia's cheeks flamed. She looked swiftly across Devenish at Colonel
+Challoner. But he was giving no heed to them.
+
+"Do you think it's like me?" she asked.
+
+"It _is_ you," he replied.
+
+"No one else has noticed the resemblance all this week," said Cynthia.
+
+Mr. Devenish glanced along the table.
+
+"Well, look at 'em," he said contemptuously, and they both laughed.
+Lady Lorme rose at that moment from the table, and Mr. Devenish,
+pleading the distance he had to travel, took his departure.
+
+"I have enjoyed myself very much, Challoner," he said as the colonel
+came out with him to-the doorway. "I can't tell you how glad I am that
+I thought of dropping in upon you for luncheon. I am going back to
+London now. Good-by."
+
+He mounted into his car and drove gaily off. In the dining-room behind
+him, the sandy-haired man was saying over and over again to the
+dismayed conspirators--
+
+"He'll sell us a pup. He'll sell us a pup. I'll bet you a monkey,
+he'll sell us a pup."
+
+
+That night, when the men went upstairs, Rames passing from his
+dressing-room into his wife's bedroom found her still up and sitting
+by her fire.
+
+"We go back to-morrow, Cynthia. It has been a long week. I hope you
+haven't been bored."
+
+"No," she said. "I haven't."
+
+"What do you think of them? Will they run away when the fight comes?"
+
+"Not all," said Cynthia. "But even of those who stay with you, there's
+not one who is a match for Mr. Devenish."
+
+She spoke with some warmth in her voice.
+
+"You like him?" said Harry Rames.
+
+"I think he's a big man," she replied.
+
+Rames, who was standing looking into her mirror, suddenly swung round.
+
+"Shall I tell you why you say that, Cynthia?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Because he's the only man except myself who has noticed your likeness
+to that very pretty girl on the wall of the dining-room. I heard him
+mention it to you at luncheon."
+
+He burst out into a laugh as he spoke; and in a moment or two Cynthia
+joined in the laugh. So Harry Rames too had noticed the resemblance.
+She laughed and her eyes laughed with her lips.
+
+"After all," said Harry Rames, "we get some fun out of it, don't we,
+Cynthia?"
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia and her laughter died away. "We get some fun out
+of it, Harry. That's just what we do get"; and her eyes turned away
+from him to the fire.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXVII
+
+                           DEVENISH REPLIES
+
+
+Captain Rames had arranged to travel by a train which ran directly
+into Warwickshire through the outskirts of London. It left Wareham at
+mid-day, some two hours later than the fast London trains, and though
+Cynthia had wished to escape in all the hurry of the general
+departure, she had found no sufficient reason. She and her husband
+were thus the last of that company at Bramling, and when all but they
+had gone, Colonel Challoner turned from the front door whence he had
+been speeding his guests, and invited her to walk with him in the
+garden. Cynthia in a flurry began to search for excuses, and before
+she found one realized that the moment for excuses had already gone.
+She turned and walked with Colonel Challoner into the red-walled
+garden where his fruit and flowers grew. The half-hour which ever
+since the first evening at Bramling she had intended to avoid was,
+after all, upon her.
+
+"There is not very much to see now, Mrs. Rames," said the colonel, and
+without any change of voice he added, "I learnt just before the
+session ended that you had come from South America."
+
+"From the Argentine," said Cynthia.
+
+"But you are English-born, of course?"
+
+"Oh, yes, of course," said Cynthia. "But I never came to England until
+five years ago. I was brought up partly in Buenos Ayres and partly on
+the Daventry estancia two hundred miles to the south-west of Buenos
+Ayres. My name was Cynthia Daventry."
+
+Cynthia rattled off her story to spare herself his questions, and for
+a few minutes he walked by her side in silence. But he was not
+altogether to be deterred.
+
+"I had a son in South America," he continued. "He went out
+under--rather unhappy circumstances. He took a young wife with him.
+She ran away to join him. They went to Chile. There a daughter was
+born--my granddaughter."
+
+"On the other side of the Andes," said Cynthia.
+
+"Yes," said Colonel Challoner. "You were never in Chile, I suppose?"
+
+Cynthia answered without any hesitation and in a voice schooled
+perfectly to indifference.
+
+"Oh, yes, once. I have seen Valparaiso."
+
+Colonel Challoner was deceived by her indifference. To him, with the
+particular intention of his question filling his mind, it was as
+though she had said she had never been in Valparaiso at all.
+
+"I knew nothing of what my boy was doing, Mrs. Rames," he continued,
+"nor that he had a daughter. He left England under a cloud. I gave him
+what money I could afford and--I had done with him. Perhaps I was
+harsh--I did not think that I was. But--well, it's not so easy to have
+done with people when they are your own flesh and blood, and after a
+time I began to make inquiries. I heard of the daughter then."
+
+"Yes?" said Cynthia. She looked up into his face inquiringly. She had
+dreaded this half-hour of acting lest the changes of color in her
+face, and the unevenness of her voice, should betray her. Yet now that
+the half-hour was here she played her part with ease.
+
+"I heard that Jim and his wife and his child had all perished in one
+of the earthquakes, eighteen years ago. And there was I, you see,
+alone again, but alone for life now."
+
+"I am sorry," said Cynthia.
+
+"But the news was wrong," the old man continued with a sudden
+violence. "My son--died," and he plainly substituted that verb for
+another, "only five years ago. I received a cutting from a newspaper.
+I sent out again at once to South America a man whom I could trust;
+and I discovered that Jim was not killed by the earthquake, nor was
+his daughter. He carried her up the valley toward the Andes--tramped
+away, since Valparaiso was ruined, with his daughter in his arms. He
+wouldn't leave her behind. No, he must have carried her across the
+Continent. There was good in Jim, after all, you see--only I, his
+father hadn't the sense to see it."
+
+Colonel Challoner was not aware that it was just the weight of the
+little daughter in Jim's arms which had made his journey across the
+Andes possible and profitable. Cynthia left him all the comfort of his
+delusion, and all its remorse, since the remorse was so completely
+outweighed by the comfort.
+
+"That's the last I have been able to find out," Colonel Challoner
+resumed. "They disappeared up into the mountains together, and years
+after Jim--died--in the Argentine. As for the daughter, I have come
+upon no trace of her. She may have lived. She may have died. Had she
+lived she would have been just about your age, Mrs. Rames."
+
+"Indeed?"
+
+"I suppose that you never heard of her?"
+
+"What was her name?"
+
+"Even that I can't tell you. There was a daughter. That's all I know."
+
+Colonel Challoner waited with his eyes upon Cynthia's face. He longed,
+yet he hardly dared to hope for an answer. It would be such a
+wonderful thing for him if the girl facing him in his trim
+brick-walled garden had when a child eighteen years ago been carried
+in Jim's arms over the stupendous passes of the Andes. Surely if it
+were so, she must admit it now out of gratitude for Jim's devotion.
+But Cynthia made no reply and he moved slowly to the door of the
+garden and held it open for her to pass out. She went from Bramling
+with her secret still her own, though some remorse was now her penalty
+for keeping it. She could not quite get rid of the picture of the old
+man at the open door in the high red-brick wall waiting wistfully for
+an answer to a question which he could only suggest. But she had made
+her plan and with a certain stubbornness--almost a hardness which
+marked this phase of her life--she had abided by it. If Colonel
+Challoner had said clearly and formally that he made no claim upon
+her, that he did not ask her to take her place in the family of
+Challoners, then she would have acknowledged what he plainly
+suspected. But he had imposed upon himself no such condition. On the
+contrary she had been led to believe that he would claim her; and that
+was intolerable to her thoughts. She did not argue or reason; she
+recollected. And what she recollected was a night of horror when her
+father had claimed her for the ruin of her body and her soul. When she
+stepped into the train she made a silent vow that she would never come
+to Bramling again.
+
+"It's a strange thing," said Harry Rames as they were travelling
+across the country, "that two strangers to Bramling, Devenish and
+myself, noticed your extraordinary likeness to that picture on the
+wall, and Challoner who has sat beneath it most nights of the week for
+years didn't. It had become so familiar to him, I suppose, that it had
+ceased to have definite features."
+
+"That's how things happen," said Cynthia, and this time she uttered
+the phrase with relief. "When you know people very well, you cease to
+notice the changes, you lose count of how they look. But when we first
+met at Ludsey he did claim to recognize me, though he could not fix
+upon the place or time. I have no doubt it was because of that
+picture."
+
+Harry Rames agreed. None of Colonel Challoner's suspicions had even
+occurred to him. He drifted off to the great subject.
+
+"Devenish won't be idle, Cynthia," he said.
+
+"No," answered Cynthia. "He gives me the impression that even on his
+death-bed he would be quick about it."
+
+And on the Tuesday morning, the very day after they had reached home,
+the _Times_ brought Harry Rames news which sent him out of his study
+in search of his wife.
+
+"Look, Cynthia," he said and he handed to her the paper. Cynthia read
+the paragraph at which he pointed.
+
+"Mr. Devenish returned to London on Sunday evening and putting off two
+deputations which had been arranged for Tuesday left London hurriedly
+on Monday afternoon to join the Prime-Minister in Scotland."
+
+Cynthia laid down the paper with a genuine sense of consternation. She
+was astonished to realize how much she now longed for the success of
+Harry's rather dingy plot. Fear was written upon her face.
+
+"That means--?" she said.
+
+"That we must look out," replied Rames. He laughed a little as a man
+will when the joy of battle is upon him. "Lucky Devenish can't get at
+my constituency. I don't know that he would try to in any case. But he
+can't.
+
+"You have Arthur Pynes with you."
+
+"Yes. And I pledged myself before I was elected to resign at once if
+any responsible number of my supporters objected to any action I
+thought it my duty to take in the House. Do you see, Cynthia?" and he
+laughed again. "That pledge is my safeguard. I thought it would be
+when I made it. If any one tries to put pressure upon me, I can always
+point to that pledge. I can always ask whether they would like me to
+resign."
+
+"Suppose they said yes," cried Cynthia in alarm.
+
+Harry Rames grinned.
+
+"I'd get in again if they did. I'd keep nine-tenths of my own people
+and get a good lot of the other fellow's because of my independence.
+But they won't! No one wants a by-election at Ludsey. Ludsey is too
+busy."
+
+"I suppose that's true," said Cynthia with a smile of relief. Once
+more she had occasion to recognize the accuracy of her husband's
+foresight. But there was a little change. The recognition was no
+longer accompanied with regret that the foresight was not being used
+in a higher cause. She was simply relieved that on this side at all
+events the great career was not open to attack.
+
+Rames took a turn across the room and stopped at the window.
+
+"But I wonder what his next move will be," he said.
+
+In a month he knew. The movement was swift and dramatic. Rames was
+summoned to London by a letter from the Prime-Minister. He travelled
+up from Ludsey in the morning; he reached home again in time for
+dinner.
+
+"They are raising Lamson to the peerage," he said to Cynthia. "That
+means the Under Secretaryship of the Local Government Board will be
+vacant. It was offered to me."
+
+Cynthia was radiant.
+
+"That's splendid," she cried.
+
+"I refused it," said Harry Rames.
+
+Cynthia stared at him. Here was a definite step onward, a step
+refused.
+
+"Why?" she asked in her perplexity.
+
+"It would have meant the end of me, had I accepted it. It was offered
+to me to make an end of me, to break up the opposition to Devenish's
+bill, to show me a traitor to my friends, and an enemy who could be
+silenced by a bribe. If I had taken it, not merely the government, but
+the House, the whole House, would have despised me. I should have been
+done for. I should be an Under Secretary for a year, two years, three
+years--after that nothing and never anything so long as I lived. I
+refused it, Cynthia;" and he bent over the table toward her.
+
+"You mustn't blame me. I am not failing you. I was thinking of you, my
+dear, when I refused office. An Under Secretaryship? You remember
+Challoner's question to Bradley? I should have failed you had I taken
+it."
+
+Cynthia was almost conscious of disappointment. She liked definite
+things and here was a tangible sign of Harry Rames's advancement. But
+she received confirmation very soon that he had been right in refusing
+it.
+
+It was at the reception at the Foreign Office in January which marked
+the beginning of the session. Mr. Devenish himself came up to her with
+a smile. For a moment Cynthia felt an awkwardness at meeting him, but
+he was quick to put her at her ease.
+
+"Captain Rames did well to refuse office," he said. "I congratulate
+you, for I suppose that you had some share in the decision."
+
+"No," she replied honestly. "To tell you the truth I was a trifle
+disappointed."
+
+Mr. Devenish shook his head.
+
+"His whole reputation was at stake. It's character which counts in the
+House of Commons. If he had taken that Under Secretaryship, he would
+have been pigeon-holed. We should have had the measure of him. We
+should not have troubled our heads about him again. For once, Mrs.
+Rames, you were wrong; he was right."
+
+Cynthia looked at him, her great eyes full of a gentle reproach.
+
+"Wasn't it a little unkind of you to offer it then. You are a friend
+of mine, aren't you, Mr. Devenish?"
+
+There was no anger in her voice, only a wondering melancholy, a kind
+of piteous despair that she was living in so graceless a world. Mr.
+Devenish stared, then he smiled, and he looked at Cynthia with
+enjoyment.
+
+"It wants a woman to use that argument, Mrs. Rames. No man alive would
+have the nerve. You are out for a fight with me. Yes, but I am a
+friend of yours, so I mustn't defend myself." He shook his head. "The
+House of Commons isn't a nursery, Mrs. Rames. You have got to stand by
+yourself if you're going to stand, neither being kind nor expecting
+kindness. Captain Rames stands--and he stands to fight me. Very
+well--but you can't expect me to prop him up."
+
+"I quite understand," said Cynthia in her iciest manner. "I am not at
+all hurt or offended. You mustn't think that, Mr. Devenish," she bowed
+to him distantly and sailed off with great dignity. But she had humor
+enough to appreciate her discomfiture, and, even as she turned her
+back, her lips were twitching into a smile which she did not mean him
+to see. But ten minutes later in another of the rooms she came face to
+face with him again. He looked at her whimsically, and with a blush
+and a laugh she made friends with him again.
+
+"Tell me," he said. "Your husband refused the post with decision after
+the merest pause for thought, though the offer surprised him. I know
+that. Was he troubled about his decision afterward?"
+
+"Not at all," said Cynthia. "He slept perfectly; he ate his dinner
+with absolute contentment."
+
+"Now I am afraid of him," said Mr. Devenish gravely, and he added a
+shrewd saying to explain his fear. "Here's the great difference which
+makes art and politics incompatible. The men who succeed in politics
+are the men who don't worry. The men who succeed in art are the men
+who do. Yes, I am afraid of him now, and if I hit hard, Mrs. Rames,
+bear me no grudge. I shall hit hard because I must."
+
+Cynthia's heart warmed to him. She laughed joyously.
+
+"I'll bear no grudge, Mr. Devenish."
+
+"By the way, why isn't he here to-night? He ought to be."
+
+"He was here," Cynthia replied. "But a telephone message was brought
+to him. Some one had called at our house who was urgent to see him. So
+he went home."
+
+Mr. Devenish saw Cynthia into her carriage and she drove back to
+Curzon Street. The visitor was still with Harry Rames in his study
+when she reached home. As she went up to her room she heard his voice
+through the door, and once she waked up from her sleep and in the
+small hours she again heard his voice. He was in the hall taking his
+leave of Harry Rames. Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her
+watch. It was three o'clock in the morning. Drowsily she asked herself
+who this visitor could be, but she was asleep again almost before the
+question was formulated in her mind.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+                               WIRELESS
+
+
+Harry Rames, however, told her who it was the next morning as they sat
+at breakfast. He had come down late and Cynthia looked at him with
+anxious eyes.
+
+"You were kept late in your study?" she said, thinking of the critical
+week which lay in front of him.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Harry Rames laid down his Sunday newspaper.
+
+"Walter Hemming was here."
+
+"Hemming?"
+
+To Cynthia the name was quite unfamiliar. There had been no Walter
+Hemming at Bramling.
+
+"He was one of my officers on the _Perhaps_. He has got together some
+money, has bought the old ship and is off to the South."
+
+"He takes up your work?"
+
+"Yes. I never saw a man so enthusiastic. Suppose he reaches the Pole,
+what then?" Harry Rames laughed contemptuously.
+
+"Aren't there discoveries to be made, maps to be drawn of that
+continent and something to be learned from the soundings?" asked
+Cynthia, recollecting Harry Rames's own book upon his voyage. He shook
+his head.
+
+"That's all trimmings, Cynthia. You have got to surround your
+expedition with a scientific halo. It gets you money, and official
+support, and the countenance of the learned societies. But the man who
+goes south into the Antarctic goes with just one reason--to reach the
+Pole. Why? You can't give a rational answer to that Cynthia. No one
+can. Such men are just driven on by a torment of their souls."
+
+No stranger watching Harry Rames as he speculated with an indulgent
+smile upon the aimlessness of Walter Hemming's long itinerary could
+have imagined that he had once himself led just such an expedition.
+Even Cynthia found the fact difficult of belief. By so complete a
+dissociation of spirit he was cut off from the race of the wanderers.
+
+"Let a man become insane in the East," he continued, "and he's looked
+upon as a holy man, touched by the finger of God. The fellows who go
+South and North are our holy men of the West." He turned back again to
+his newspaper, and then uttered an exclamation:
+
+"They have offered that Under Secretaryship to Edgington!"
+
+"Of course he'll refuse it," said Cynthia.
+
+"He has taken it. There's the first defection."
+
+"A traitor. I never liked him. He was thinking of himself all the
+while," said Cynthia, with a heat which made Harry look toward her
+curiously. She had not been wont to side so heartily with him and his
+plans in the days of the contest at Ludsey. He became suddenly aware
+of the remarkable change which had come over her character since that
+date. She who had blamed him with all the enthusiasm of a romantic
+girl because he would not take the high road, now walked the low road
+herself with her eyes concentrated, even more closely than his, upon
+the pathway at her feet. A pang of remorse made him wince.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder," he answered drily, "if Devenish says the same of
+me."
+
+But his comment fell upon inattentive ears. Cynthia's eyes had been
+caught by the blank, cheerless look of the street outside. It was a
+morning of black frost. There was no fog, but there was no glint of
+sunlight, either. London lay unburnished, like an ill-kept yacht, and
+the emptiness of Sunday made it dreary beyond all words. The chill of
+that day and the fevers of the week to come caused Cynthia's heart to
+sink. A vision rose before her eyes with unexpected vividness of
+another place where life ran occupied with smoother matters. Not in
+Warwickshire, but over far seas. She thought with a sudden poignancy
+of longing of the Daventry estancia where to-day the golden leagues of
+corn would be rippling to the sun and the cattle searching for the
+rare blades of green in the burnt pastures. Remorse came to her as it
+had come to her husband. So seldom had she thought of that spacious
+and wide place which had lain so close to her adopted father's heart.
+He had prayed her to go thither from time to time. Greatly she wished
+that she were there now.
+
+"It's a pity Mr. Hemming stayed so late," she said.
+
+"Oh, that's all right," replied Harry. "My amendment can't come on
+before Wednesday. It may not be chosen at all. And there's always the
+possibility that the Land Bill may not be mentioned in the King's
+speech. However, that's not likely. We shall know to-morrow."
+
+The Land Bill was mentioned as one of the principal measures of the
+session, and Harry handed in at the clerk's table his humble prayer to
+His Majesty that no solution of the land question would be found
+lasting or real which did not provide opportunities for the
+acquisition of small farms as freehold properties. Thursday was set
+aside for the discussion of Rames's amendment, and the fact that it
+was deemed of sufficient importance to take precedence of a host of
+other amendments was in itself regarded as a triumph by his adherents.
+
+"Go your own way over it," Robert Brook advised in an agitated voice.
+"Don't sink your personality in a conventional speech. You must strike
+a special note on Thursday. The third bench below the gangway and the
+corner seat. That will be the best place for you. You command the
+House from there. And we'll be all together around you. It's a great
+thing to have some voices to cheer you at your elbow. Howard Fall will
+speak in support of you. He always gets called." Robert Brook ceased
+from his stage-managements to whisper with a lengthened face, "By the
+way, have you heard?"
+
+"What?" asked Harry.
+
+"That Challoner's weakening. Yes, it's true. The whips have been
+getting at him, I expect. At all events he came to me pleading that
+the amendment need not be pressed to a division if we get anything
+like a friendly reply."
+
+Harry Rames smiled.
+
+"We shan't get that. I'll take care not to get it. So you can agree
+with Challoner. We can't afford to let any one break away now. I'll
+speak to him myself."
+
+The colonel strenuously disavowed any faintness of heart. "You must go
+to a division, Rames, unless you get a satisfactory reply. That's
+understood. We've got to stick to our guns. I think we all know that.
+Edgington's example isn't one any of us would care to follow. No. All
+my idea was that perhaps the government might be willing to take our
+view, but unable at this moment to say so publicly. However, don't you
+worry about us. Think of your speech, Rames. We look to you to do
+something unusual on Thursday."
+
+Harry went away to his study and from his documents and blue books
+labored to hammer out some spark of his own which should set fire to
+the Thames or to that portion of it at all events which flows under
+Westminster Bridge. He woke at five o'clock on the Thursday morning,
+and lying in bed repeated his speech word by word to himself. Then he
+dismissed it into the chamber of his memory to wait until it was
+needed. But the knowledge that the day was to be one of supreme
+importance to his career hung over him all that forenoon. The labor
+was over and therefore the strain upon him was the heavier. His nerves
+had free play and he wandered restlessly from room to room, calm
+outwardly except for some spasmodic movements which people
+unacquainted with him would never have remarked, but inwardly a
+creature in torment. He had pitted himself against his own government.
+The enormity of his presumption grew with every lagging hour. Failure
+to-day would cover him with ridicule. He saw himself as one of those
+bubbles ripe for pricking with which the House of Commons is
+perpetually iridescent. Before twelve o'clock he was already looking
+at his watch lest he should be too late to fix before prayers the card
+in the slot at the back of his seat which would reserve his place for
+him during the day.
+
+Cynthia, with a covert fear, watched his fever, but said never a word,
+either of comfort or inquiry. It was her part to notice nothing of his
+agitation. She had claimed, when he had asked her to marry him, her
+share in the troubles and the terrors which went before the public
+success. But married life had taught her that much of her share must
+come to her by guesswork, by intuition, by observation, by any means
+except those of question and answer. So she said little and left Harry
+Rames mostly to himself, only coming upon him now and again on some
+indifferent errand, when they would speak for a moment or two, he
+chiefly at random and upon any chance subject which came uppermost in
+his mind. Thus once he said abruptly:
+
+"There was a stamp struck. Did you ever see it, Cynthia?"
+
+"No," she answered; "you must show it to me."
+
+"I will; I have a specimen somewhere. I'll look it out."
+
+"Do," said Cynthia in a voice which conveyed that it would be a
+particular joy to her to see that stamp.
+
+But she was quite in the dark about it. She had no notion at all that
+he was speaking of that great territory which he had discovered far to
+the south, beyond the ice-floes, beyond the open blue water. It had no
+inhabitants but the penguins; yet since Rames had spent a winter of
+darkness on its inhospitable shores and had annexed it for Great
+Britain, a penny stamp had been struck and postage duly established.
+The recollection passed in and out of Harry Rames's head, with a
+hundred trivial thoughts and memories. And it was the mark and
+consequence of his agitation that his mind acquired an extraordinary
+and unnatural lucidity so that his thoughts became swift visions of
+things with a small but surprisingly clear definition, as though he
+saw them through a diminishing glass.
+
+In this supersensitive spirit he walked down Parliament Street at
+half-past one in the afternoon on the eastern side of the road; and
+when he had come opposite to the Horse-Guards, he suddenly stopped.
+Behind the Horse-Guards' Arch and a little to the north rose the great
+red building of the Admiralty where Cynthia and he had been made
+acquainted with one another. But it was not of the first meeting nor
+of the quarrel which ended it that Harry Rames was thinking. He was
+not looking at the main mass of the Admiralty Building, but only at
+the three grayish-blue domes which surmounted it. From these domes
+rose three tall spars at the points of a triangle, each of them rigged
+and dressed with wires to which were attached curious little hoops and
+contrivances of cane like Catherine wheels set for a night of
+fireworks. He was gazing at the mechanism of wireless telegraphy.
+
+He had passed those poles either just here or on the other side of the
+Horse-Guards' Parade in St. James's Park on every day when Parliament
+was in session; and no doubt he had often enough lifted his head and
+seen them with the blind eyes of a man for the landmarks he habitually
+walks by. But this morning his imagination was made acute by a night
+of wakefulness and the tension of his nerves, and he was sensitive to
+all the suggestion of that aerial toyshop of contrivances. He stopped.
+He almost fancied that he heard--so keen was the lucidity of his
+senses--the messages of distant ships, here tumbling on seas of storm
+there upright on seas of sunshine, whizzing homeward to the dim
+smoke-wreathed city, crowding the air. He almost fancied that he saw
+them, the myriad bright spokes of an illimitable wheel which hung
+poised roof-high over all the world. His thoughts were swept quite
+away from England, and the roar of Whitehall died from his ears. He
+saw the big roadsteads of the East and West Indies and anchored
+vessels mirrored in waveless seas. He saw the meetings of ships in the
+narrows of the great trade-routes, barkentine and schooner, tramp and
+liner, and in and out amongst them like the gray shadows of sharks
+seen beneath the water, the long cruisers of the fleet.
+
+He walked on like a man in a dream. He left the busy harbors and the
+great trade-routes behind him. The stately procession of vessels
+receded and now he saw only one--a little, full-rigged, black-hulled
+ship quite alone on a silent sea, the _Perhaps_, reeling down with all
+her canvas drawing, from her sky-sail to her spanker, reeling down
+with the water breaking from her broad stern bows into the mists of
+the south. The picture was so vivid in his mind that he could see the
+brightness of the binnacle and the wheel spinning in the helmsman's
+hands. He paused again to consider why, and paused with a curious
+sense of comfort. Once before, on the occasion of his maiden speech,
+the vision of a ship had risen before his eyes. But then it was fear
+which had evoked the picture. He had longed to be safely upon its
+bridge doing the thing he knew how to do. Now he had no such fear. He
+was nervous, but he had no desire to run away, he had no terror that
+the necessary words would fail him, he had no longing to stand upon
+the deck of the _Perhaps_. He was strung up for the contest of the
+afternoon. He walked slowly on and turned in at the gate of Palace
+Yard, and still the _Perhaps_ fled southward before his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXIX
+
+                        IN THE LADIES' GALLERY
+
+
+An hour later Cynthia drove down to the House of Commons, anxious and
+yet expectant of triumph. For on this afternoon Harry Rames should
+particularly excel; the occasion was so confederate with his gifts. In
+debate he was as yet too inexperienced to shine with any brilliancy.
+His success had been made with prepared speeches. He had not as yet
+the art to handle words with such precision that he could express
+vividly in an argument across the floor just what he meant, and no
+more and no less. He was not at ease with his vocabulary when a sudden
+call was made upon it, and his lack of ease became manifest and
+spread, as it always does, discomfort. He was in a word on the way to
+becoming a polished debater but as yet he was at school. This
+afternoon, however, he had not to reply, not to intervene in the
+middle of a discussion; his business was to make the set speech which
+set the debate going. And here he was on his own good ground. He could
+prepare the vivid phrase and, a quality perhaps still more important,
+he could speak it. He had an invaluable gift which had stood him in
+good stead when he had delivered his maiden speech. He was able so to
+deliver a carefully concocted speech as to give the impression that he
+was thinking aloud. He gained his effect by an apt breaking off of
+sentences and a recommencement, by a sudden drop to the homeliest of
+colloquialisms, by a seeming deliberation in the choice of his words,
+so that the picturesque and living sentence, which had been so
+carefully thought out, appeared to leap new-minted from a furnace of
+conviction. He had been shrewd enough to recognize with his own
+unflattering estimation of his powers that an amendment to the address
+provided him especially with a rare opportunity.
+
+When Cynthia reached the ladies' gallery she had some trouble to find
+a place whence she could command the House. The gallery was full,
+since it was the beginning of the session. For the same reason the
+House itself was not. Even though questions were being asked of the
+ministers, a time when the House is seldom less than crowded, there
+were to-day vacant spaces on the benches. The real business of
+Parliament would not begin until the debate on the Address was
+concluded. Members still lingered in the country or the south of
+France. Rames's amendment was considered rather as a dress-parade than
+an engagement. It was not expected that he would press his views to a
+division. At the last moment suave words from a Cabinet Minister would
+no doubt dissuade the recalcitrant as they had done a thousand times
+before.
+
+But his supporters were there clustered close below the gangway on the
+three back benches; Howard Fall two seats away from Harry Rames,
+chirruping gently and rubbing his hands together with delight; beyond
+him the sandy-haired man from the Shires with an eye on Devenish upon
+the treasury bench, and prepared at any moment for the production of
+that threatened pup which the Minister for Agriculture was sure to
+sell them; beyond him again Colonel Challoner and the timid spirits
+all trying to look unconscious and most of them pretending that they
+only occupied these particular seats by the merest accident. But they
+were in full view. Robert Brook had seen to that. They were labelled
+plainly and legibly, and if some of them shirked at the last moment,
+they would still get the credit of having shared in the revolt. In
+front of all were the earnest men who believed the policy of Devenish
+to be dangerous. Behind all under the shadow of the gallery were the
+young bloods, all as convinced as their graver seniors in the front,
+but still youths spoiling for a row and totally unawed by the
+frockcoats of the treasury bench. Their business was to cheer and to
+ejaculate, not to speak. Thus had Robert Brook disposed his forces for
+the battle. He himself sat between Harry Rames and Howard Fall, and,
+looking about him, was proud of the array.
+
+Before questions had come to an end Cynthia had squeezed herself into
+a place on the first row of seats behind the stone grille. She had now
+from her aerie the whole group within her view, or rather, the tops of
+all its particular heads. She waited impatiently. Every now and then a
+sudden fluttering like the waving of little flags ran with a crackle
+of sound along the benches below and showed that another page of the
+question paper had been turned. Questions must now be coming to an end
+surely, she thought in her ignorance. Her mistake was colossal. The
+Speaker had only this moment come to the questions of the Irish
+members, and there was a postmaster in Ballymena who had last week
+committed the hideous crime of refusing a registered letter at two
+minutes to eight by the church-clock. Upon this important matter, by
+question and supplementary question, the Imperial Parliament was
+forced to concentrate its attention till the hands of the clock above
+the door pointed to a quarter to four. Then the Speaker rose, a buzz
+of talk mounted to Cynthia's ears, a few members called upon by name
+came forward from behind the Speaker's chair to the clerk's table with
+private bills, others drifted out into the lobby and the tea-room and
+the smoking-rooms. Then once more the Speaker rose. His canopied chair
+was just beneath Cynthia. She could not see him but she heard his
+voice quite clearly.
+
+"Captain Rames."
+
+Rames rose amidst vociferous applause from his own group and some
+cheers from the opposition. The personal question flashed into
+Cynthia's mind.
+
+"Will he look up toward the gallery in which I am sitting?"
+
+He threw his head back. It seemed that he did look up. Cynthia leaned
+forward as though across that distance her eyes could answer and
+sustain him. She forgot that the only light in the gallery was fixed
+against the wall behind her, and that nothing more individual of her
+was visible upon the floor of the chamber than the wide sphere of her
+hat.
+
+He was not so nervous, she realized at once, as he usually was.
+Nervousness gave to his voice a peculiar vibration which was not
+without its effect in arresting attention. Cynthia missed it now. But
+the sentences which she already knew by heart followed one behind the
+other spaced and regular as the waves of a calm sea. She forgot that
+little significant omission of manner. She followed the argument as
+she knew it, and it was developed step by step as it had been
+prepared. Harry Rames had spoken for five minutes when a lady on
+Cynthia's left whispered in an audible voice to her neighbor on the
+right:
+
+"I thought you told me that Captain Rames was a brilliant speaker."
+
+"Not I, dear," came the reply. "These men of action are seldom
+effective in their speeches. I shouldn't expect him to do better than
+he is doing."
+
+
+Cynthia moved indignantly. The poor woman must be off her head. But if
+she did not know what good speaking was, she might at all events hold
+her tongue. She looked down again into the well of the House and
+became perplexed. The benches were actually emptying. The double doors
+opposite to her which led from the chamber to the lobby were swinging
+silently backward and forward with a perpetual motion as the members
+passed out, and the space just in front of those doors where members
+may stand and where she had seen them stand packed on other days while
+Harry spoke, was almost empty. There were just one or two standing
+there, but they were obtaining orders for the galleries from the
+sergeant-at-arms. Then the voice at her elbow spoke again in an accent
+of resignation.
+
+"He is very, very dull."
+
+Cynthia clenched her hands. She would have dearly liked to have boxed
+her neighbor's ears. Was he dull she asked? And the dreadful
+continuous buzz of voices, which always rises when a speaker has lost
+the attention of the House, rose from the benches below to answer her.
+With a sob only half suppressed Cynthia was forced to admit the truth.
+The incredible thing was happening. Harry Rames at the crisis of his
+fortunes was signally failing.
+
+"If he fails it's partly my fault," she thought. "I helped in the
+preparation of the speech."
+
+For it was word for word the prepared speech which he was delivering,
+the very phrases chosen for their simplicity and their force were
+uttered in their due place. Yet the effect was dreary beyond measure.
+Even the ardent spirits beneath the gallery had ceased to applaud;
+they sat back in the shadow, all their enthusiasm quenched. A still
+worse sign, Mr. Devenish had laid his writing pad and his fountain-pen
+on the table in front of him; he took no more notes, he leaned back
+with his arms folded and his eyes closed, a typical picture of a
+Cabinet Minister, a man inured to patience and the bed-fellow of
+boredom.
+
+"Why is Harry failing?" Cynthia asked of herself despairingly. And the
+answer came from her neighbor.
+
+"You know, my dear, I don't believe that what he's saying is nonsense
+if one only had the necessary concentration to follow it. But his
+delivery's so bad that he makes attention impossible."
+
+Again Cynthia was constrained to admit the criticism. The chosen
+sentences were uttered, but no conviction winged them. Harry's gifts
+of speech were that afternoon quite hidden. He was as one delivering a
+recitation which by constant repetition had become at once meaningless
+and automatic. His voice trailed away into lassitude. There was no
+spirit behind any word.
+
+The buzz of conversation increased, a protesting voice called "Order,
+order," and then Harry faltered and stopped, stopped quite noticeably.
+A general cheer rose to encourage him--for the House of Commons can be
+generous, especially to those who are dropping out of the race--and
+twisting his hands together suddenly, almost with the air of a man
+waking from a dream, Harry Rames staggered on again. Cynthia's heart
+went out to him in a rush of pity. What he must be suffering! He had
+staked so much upon this afternoon. So much had been expected of him.
+Cynthia's thoughts went back to the week at Bramling. With what high
+hopes that company had counted upon his leadership!
+
+"If he would only finish!" she prayed. She looked upon him as a man in
+torment. She leaned her elbows on the rail in front of her, closed her
+ears with her thumbs and shut her eyes. She took at once with the
+exaggeration of her years the blackest view.
+
+"He has attacked his own government and frightened no one. His career
+will be affected, perhaps ruined. A really bad mistake may take a man
+years to overcome in the House of Commons. Who was it said that? Mr.
+Smale. This is a really bad mistake. The debate itself may collapse.
+That would mean ruin."
+
+So she reasoned until in a clap the truth of the mistake came upon
+her, its cause, its meaning.
+
+"I ought to have foreseen his failure," she murmured. "It was bound to
+come. Sooner or later it was bound to come. For his heart is never in
+the theme but always in the career."
+
+She might indeed have looked upon it as a retribution, a just
+retribution.
+
+"And a year ago I should so have looked upon it," she reflected, and
+sat back in her seat amazed at the change which two years had wrought
+in her. The magnitude of it was now for the first time revealed to
+her. Success following success, each in its anticipated sequence, had
+sealed up from her the knowledge of herself. It had needed the failure
+to reveal it.
+
+She leaned back in a confusion of her emotions. She heard no longer
+any word of the debate. For a little while the House of Commons
+vanished and was not. She glanced swiftly backward across the months
+of her married life and detected one by one the indications of the
+change. Gradually she had ceased to clamor for ideas, she had come to
+look only at the man and she had desired him to tower above his
+fellows, because that was his desire. And the reason for the change?
+She jumped to it with her heart on fire. She loved him.
+
+But while she thus began to make her account with herself a
+perfunctory cheer and the Speaker's distinct pronouncement of another
+name broke in upon her reckoning. The voice of her neighbor brought
+her back to earth.
+
+"Mr. Howard Fall. I hear he's quite a favorite speaker."
+
+The turn of the words recalled irrelevantly to Cynthia Harry's
+indignant story of the elector who had told him that he was well
+patronized in Ludsey. The recollection brought a smile to her face.
+But the smile faded as her anxieties came home to her. Would the
+debate collapse?
+
+Howard Fall was already upon his legs seconding the amendment; and in
+a little while she saw members enter through the doors, stand for a
+moment at the bar and then as though here was matter worthy of their
+attention, slip into places upon the seats. Cynthia's first feeling
+was one of relief. Yes, the House was undoubtedly filling up. Then, as
+a burst of laughter followed upon one of Fall's sallies against
+Devenish, a sharp pang of jealousy pierced her. The lady at her elbow
+incensed her by a laugh of approval--a ridiculous snigger Cynthia
+termed it.
+
+"Yes, now _he's_ really brilliant," she said, and Cynthia had to hold
+herself in, so impelled was she to explain to the lady exactly what
+she thought of her judgment and her manners and her family and of
+everything which appertained to her. But she did not. She remained
+outwardly calm, though inwardly she seethed.
+
+"Mrs. Rames," a quiet voice called to her from behind. She turned and
+saw Robert Brook. She left her seat and went to him.
+
+"What's the matter?" she asked anxiously, her heart leaping with a
+fear of calamity.
+
+"Nothing," Brook reassured her. "Your husband asked me to look after
+you. He can't well leave the House." Another burst of laughter
+intermingled with applause rose up to them. Devenish had petulantly
+interrupted Howard Fall, and interruptions Howard Fall thrived upon.
+"Isn't he in splendid form?" cried Brook with enthusiasm.
+
+"No doubt," said Cynthia, eyeing him coldly.
+
+Brook looked at her quickly.
+
+"Perhaps you would like some tea Mrs. Rames. Shall we go? The debate
+will tail off for a bit after Fall has finished."
+
+He led the way to the lift. Cynthia hurried after him.
+
+"Why?" she cried. "And what do you mean by tailing off?" There was an
+impatience in her voice with which Brook was unfamiliar. "Do you mean
+that the debate will collapse?"
+
+"Oh, no," he replied. "But the big-wigs won't speak until later. The
+subject is much too important to drop for want of argument. Indeed,
+there are enough men eager to speak to carry the debate well over
+to-morrow, if that were possible."
+
+They came out from the lift and walked down the long corridor toward
+the lobby between the rows of books protected by their frames of gilt
+wire. Robert Brook continued cheerfully:
+
+"Rames, to be sure, wasn't at his best in opening the debate. But no
+man is always at his best. There's not a soul in the House who doesn't
+know that."
+
+"Then this afternoon won't put him back?"
+
+"Why should it? It was he who had the shrewdness to recognize the
+opportunity which this question affords, and to select this particular
+line of attack. He engineered the whole movement. That's known. And if
+he carries his own people into the division lobby with him, and the
+opposition into the bargain, he will have established a fine
+reputation for Parliamentary capacity. That counts, Mrs. Rames, take
+the word-of an old hand. That counts here more than speech-making."
+
+"Does it?" cried Cynthia, smiles breaking through the tragic gloom of
+her countenance. But the smiles vanished. She shook her head
+wistfully. "You are merely saying this because you see that I am
+troubled."
+
+"But it's none the less true. This House has a corporate life which is
+rather difficult for those who are not members of it to understand."
+
+Robert Brook certainly seemed very well contented. Cynthia, however,
+was not satisfied.
+
+"But will he carry his people with him into the division lobby--now?"
+she asked. "Won't they a little have lost faith?"
+
+"Not a bit. You see Howard Fall has quite saved the situation," Brook
+replied cheerily, and Cynthia suddenly stepped on ahead. The name of
+Howard Fall was beginning to exasperate her. She stopped, however, as
+they came into the round hall of the lobby.
+
+"On the whole," she said, with the loftiest impartiality, "I liked my
+husband's speech a good deal better than I did Mr. Howard Fall's.
+Perhaps on a second thought you will too, Mr. Brook."
+
+She surveyed him steadily with a pair of cold blue eyes, and then her
+face suddenly dimpled to a smile of appeal.
+
+"You really mean that I can't see him?"
+
+"The man who starts a discussion must hear it out. That's a sound old
+rule, and if it's not so religiously kept as it used to be, the House
+of Commons is the worse."
+
+"I can send him a little note at all events."
+
+"Certainly. Write it and I'll give it to a messenger."
+
+"A messenger!" said Cynthia doubtfully. "Will it be sure to reach him?
+It's rather important."
+
+Brook smiled.
+
+"Very well. I'll take it in myself, Mrs. Rames."
+
+Cynthia took a little diary from the bag she carried, tore out a leaf,
+scribbled hastily:
+
+"You did splendidly. Everybody thinks so. Cynthia;" and having calmly
+perpetrated that obvious untruth, she twisted up her message and
+handed it to Brook. The sandy-haired man from the Shires was drifting
+about the lobby. Brook called to him. "Look after Mrs. Rames for a
+moment, will you?" he said, and hurried off through the swing-doors.
+
+It seemed a very short time to Cynthia before he came back, though in
+that short time she had not so much as addressed a word to her
+companion. She looked at Robert Brook's hands. They were empty and a
+shadow passed over her face.
+
+"Did you give it him?" she asked.
+
+"I passed it along the bench and saw that it reached him. I didn't
+wait for him to open it."
+
+The shadow passed from Cynthia. She was disappointed now, but not
+hurt; and in a second the disappointment passed too. This was not the
+day on which small things should be allowed to sting.
+
+"Now you'll have some tea," said Brook.
+
+"No, I don't think I will stay any longer to-day, Mr. Brook," she
+replied. Now that her fears were dispersed she was in a hurry to get
+away and be alone with her new secret. "I am keeping you from the
+House, and you are our Whip, aren't you?"
+
+The flattery did not compensate Mr. Brook for his loss. The privilege
+of parading a pretty and well-dressed woman before the envious eyes of
+less fortunate colleagues is one which no member of Parliament, not
+even its sedatest representative of non-conformity, would forego
+without regret; and in a remote philandering way, Robert Brook was a
+kind of lady's man. Cynthia was wearing a trim coat and skirt of dark
+velvet, and from a coil of fur about her throat her face rose like a
+summer flower, and was framed in the wide border of her blue hat.
+
+"My duties are light just now," he protested, but Cynthia lifted up
+her hands in her great muff appealingly and coaxed him.
+
+"You will let me go now, Mr. Brook, won't you?" Her eyes besought his
+permission as though without it she could not go, and Mr. Brook was
+duly reduced to subservience.
+
+"Good-by," said Cynthia, and she swung off, the long ends of her stole
+swinging about her hips, and her step indescribably light. Robert
+Brook watched her pass down the corridor to the rails where the
+visitors waited, and sighed in a melancholy fashion. It seemed to him
+for the moment contemptible to be a bachelor. For there was something
+strangely appealing about Cynthia, to-day--a winsomeness, a warmth.
+She seemed all a-quiver with youth. A swift variety of moods swept
+across her face in lights and shadows, and gave to her vitality. Her
+feet moved with a dancing buoyancy. All that Robert Brook felt the
+sandy-haired man from the Shires summarized in one reflective
+sentence:
+
+"I should like to kiss that girl," he said. "It would do me a great
+deal of good."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXX
+
+                              THE LETTER
+
+
+Cynthia ran down the broad flight of steps into Westminster Hall, and
+skimmed across the historic flags of the ancient building without a
+pause. What at this moment was Charles the First to her, or even Mr.
+Gladstone? She came out into Palace Yard and drove home through the
+dusk just as the lamps in the shop-windows were beginning to bring
+some gleams of cheerfulness into the black February streets. She sat
+back in the corner of her car with her muff tightly held against her
+breast as though to cherish close some knowledge treasured there. When
+she reached her house she let herself in with her key and walked with
+secret steps into Harry's study. Once there she locked the door and
+with the firelight dancing upon the walls to keep her company, she sat
+down to make her reckoning with herself. But in truth the reckoning
+was already made.
+
+The great bargain, on her side at all events, was a bargain no more,
+could never again be a bargain. A veritable revolution had taken place
+in her that afternoon. She knew it from the depth of her sympathy with
+Harry in his failure--above all from the surprising sharpness of her
+disappointment when Robert Brook had returned with no answer to her
+scribbled message.
+
+For the failure as a factor in their fortunes she cared not a straw.
+Indeed, she welcomed it, since it was that which had wakened her. She
+had believed herself to be defective in the quality of passion, and
+her sense of the defect had hurt her like a bitter humiliation; she
+had envied wistfully the other women who possessed passion, even the
+wantons who flaunted it. Now the humiliation was gone. She rejoiced.
+She leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed and sailed over
+magical seas which were joyous and golden. She loved. She was like
+some lady of old Italy lit to swift flame by the first kiss from her
+lover's lips. Only it was a trivial irony in closer keeping with our
+modern days that what had kindled her who had demanded ideas, was a
+failure due to nothing but the lack of them.
+
+Cynthia rejoiced; for she loved. That pain and disappointment were in
+store for her she did not doubt. But she ran forward to meet the pain.
+She was young. Sooner all the pain in the world than the placidity of
+years without fire or inspiration. She recognized frankly that though
+upon her side the bargain was no longer any bargain at all, it still
+was just a bargain to her husband. A sign had been given to her that
+afternoon, a little sign, yet great in its significance. She had
+pleaded to herself as she sat in the ladies' gallery that when Harry
+rose, and just before he began to speak, he had looked up to where she
+sat, as though he were conscious of her presence, as though he drew
+strength from it. But he had not looked up. Even at the time she had
+known that he had not.
+
+"I merely pretended to myself that he had," she frankly admitted now.
+"His movement was nothing more than the natural muscular action of a
+man bracing himself for an effort." She herself, Cynthia, had not
+been, she felt sure, at that moment, in the remotest of his thoughts.
+
+"If Harry had changed toward me as I have toward him," she argued, "he
+would have looked up, not only because he wanted to, but because he
+would have remembered what I had said to him on that very point the
+afternoon when he asked me to marry him."
+
+But in spite of her conviction she rejoiced. Some kinship she could
+claim with Juliet. For all her longing was to give and to give, and
+still to give. She had sought desperately for color in her life.
+She had welcomed politics in the hunt for it. She had it now and to
+spare--enough to daub the world. The handle of the door was tried and
+through the panels her astonished maid told her the hour. Cynthia
+sprang up and unlocked it.
+
+"I shall dine at home to-night," she said. "The cook must get me some
+dinner, anything."
+
+The maid reminded Cynthia that she had arranged to dine with some
+friends and visit a theatre. "I know," said Cynthia. She had made the
+plan so that she might not spend in loneliness the anxious hours of
+this evening. But since she had made the plan the world had changed
+its hues.
+
+"You must telephone and say that I can't come," said Cynthia,
+remorselessly, as she ran upstairs.
+
+Whilst she dressed she considered what she should do with this
+wonderful evening. She meant to spend it alone--yes, but that did not
+quite content her. Somehow it should be made memorable. Something she
+must do which, but for this day of days, she never would have done.
+Something which must not merely mark it as a harbor boom marks a turn
+of the channel, but must be the definite consequence of it. Cynthia,
+in a word, went down to her solitary dinner much more akin than she
+had ever been since to the girl who, eager for life with the glorious
+eagerness of youth, had run down the stairs on the morning of her
+seventeenth birthday into the dining-room of the Daventry estancia.
+Half-way through dinner the thing to do, in order fitly to commemorate
+the day, came to her in a burst of light.
+
+She went back to Harry's study and sitting at his writing-table,
+composed with great care a letter of many pages. The hours passed as
+she wrote and rewrote, and glancing at the clock before the end was
+reached, she saw that it was already past eleven. Then she hurried.
+The division at this moment was being taken. Within the hour Harry
+would have returned; and indeed she had only just folded her letter in
+its envelope when his step sounded in the hall.
+
+She heard the door open and shut. He was in the room. But she kept her
+head bowed over her letter lest her face should betray her over much.
+Nor for a moment did she speak, since she did not quite trust her
+voice. It was Harry who spoke first.
+
+"You have come back? I did not expect you so soon."
+
+"I never went. I stayed at home."
+
+"Oh! You are not ill, Cynthia?"
+
+"No. But I felt that I had been rather hard and cruel----"
+
+"You?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I can be." Cynthia was stamping down her envelope with an
+elaboration of care which almost suggested that it was never meant to
+be opened. "I was in this case. So I stayed at home and wrote a letter
+to make amends. I should very much like it to be posted to-night,
+Harry. The servants have all gone to bed. I wonder if you----"
+
+"Of course. You are afraid that you might change your mind about it in
+the morning."
+
+"Not at all," replied Cynthia with a laugh. Harry Rames walked over to
+the table.
+
+"Give it to me, Cynthia," he said; and at last Cynthia raised her head
+and rather shyly her eyes sought his face. At his first glance she
+stood up quickly and she did not give him her letter. Harry Rames was
+standing, his face white and drawn and harassed. He had been answering
+her vaguely, as though the words came from him by reflex action rather
+than through a comprehension of what she said. For a moment Cynthia
+was afraid to speak. The beating of her heart was painful. Then she
+laid her hand upon his arm.
+
+"Something has happened, Harry?" she faltered.
+
+"Something terrible," he replied, and walking to the fire he warmed
+his hands at the blaze like one smitten with a chill.
+
+"The debate collapsed? Your people didn't follow you into the lobby?
+Oh, Harry!"
+
+She went to his side.
+
+"No. That's not the trouble. We did better in the division than I had
+anticipated. Of course we had the labor party solid against us. But
+that we had reckoned on. On the other hand, some of the Irish members
+came along with us, and it had been expected that they would all
+abstain. No, we ran the government majority down to thirty-one.
+Devenish is shaken, I can tell you. He passed me after the division
+was over, without a word and white with passion. No, Cynthia, we did
+very well." He moved away from the fire and sat down in the chair at
+his writing-table. "I took all my people into the Division Lobby with
+me--except one."
+
+Cynthia put out a hand and steadied herself against the mantel-piece.
+
+"Except one?" She turned toward him, her face troubled, her eyes most
+wistful. "One failed you--one alone. Oh, Harry, it wasn't Colonel
+Challoner?"
+
+But though she asked the question, she did not need the answer. Her
+foreboding made her sure of it.
+
+"It was," replied Harry, and Cynthia turned again to the fire. A
+little sob, half-checked, burst from her. Then she tore the letter
+which she had been at such great pains to write, across and again
+across, and dropped the fragments into the fire.
+
+"The Challoners are no good," she said, in a voice curiously distinct
+and hard.
+
+"Don't say that, Cynthia," Harry Rames answered gently.
+
+"I do say it. I ought to know."
+
+The words were uttered, and only then she realized what she had said.
+She looked quickly toward her husband, but he gave to her cry no
+particular significance. His brain seemed to register her words, not
+to comprehend them. Cynthia was conscious of a great relief. Loud at
+her heart rose a hope, a prayer that in all things, all qualities,
+even to tricks of manner, she was her mother's child, and had nothing
+of her father. Never would she acknowledge her relationship with that
+family. Never would she admit her name. Her first resolve and instinct
+had been right. The Challoners were no good.
+
+"No, I should not say that, Cynthia," Raines repeated. "He's dead."
+
+Cynthia turned swiftly upon the word. Her dress rustled as she turned,
+and when that sound ceased there was absolute silence in the room.
+Cynthia stood by the mantel-shelf still as stone. Her face was white,
+and a look of awe overspread it. With her lips parted and her eyes
+troubled and wondering she watched her husband. Harry Rames sat with a
+large silver paper-knife in his hands, looking absently straight in
+front of him. And in a little while he broke the silence by absently
+tapping with the blade of the paper-knife upon his blotting-pad. The
+sound roused Cynthia. She moved to a low chair close to the
+writing-table.
+
+"Dead? Harry, I don't quite understand."
+
+The tapping ceased.
+
+"His heart was wrong. He died in the Division Lobby--actually while
+the division was being taken."
+
+"In the Division Lobby? But you said you didn't take him with you."
+
+"I didn't. He was in the Government Lobby."
+
+Cynthia's face contracted with pain. A low moan burst from her. "He
+was actually voting against you!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Harry added reluctantly:
+
+"Our revolt killed him." Cynthia sat down in the chair.
+
+"Tell me everything, will you, Harry?" she entreated, and thus the
+story was told her.
+
+"The Whips got at Challoner. You know Hamlin, don't you? But you don't
+know his methods, Cynthia. He doesn't bully you if you revolt. He
+doesn't threaten. He takes you affectionately by the arm and makes you
+feel a beast. His round brown eyes survey you with a gentle and
+wistful regret. You leave him, convinced that he personally will be
+dreadfully hurt if you vote against the government. You are glad to be
+rid of him as you are glad to be rid of a man whom you have injured;
+and within the hour he is at your elbow again, pursuing the same
+insidious, amicable strategy. That's how he worked on Challoner, and
+Challoner was not the man either to withstand him, or to tell us
+boldly that he was going to--"--"rat" was on the tip of his tongue,
+but Rames caught the word back and substituted "change his mind." "So,
+do you see, he stayed with us to the last minute. It was arranged that
+the division should be taken at eleven. As soon as the Speaker rose to
+put the question, Challoner, who had been standing at the bar of the
+House slipped out through the lobby and down the stairs to a little
+smoking-room on the opposite side of the passage to the big strangers'
+smoking-room. That room is very often quite deserted. Few people,
+indeed, use it at any time. In a corner of that room he sat behind a
+newspaper all of the ten minutes during which the division bells were
+ringing."
+
+"To avoid meeting any of you?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"Yes, I suppose so."
+
+"But how do you know he was there?"
+
+"He was seen by one or two of the Irish members who did not intend to
+vote at all. They went into the room while the bells were ringing and
+saw him."
+
+"I understand."
+
+"As soon as the bells stopped, as soon, in a word, as he was quite
+certain that we should be all in our lobby, he started up quickly.
+There is just a little time between the moment when the bells cease
+ringing and the moment when the lobby doors are locked. But it is only
+a little time. If you want to vote you have to hurry. Challoner was a
+good distance away, and he had a flight of stairs to ascend. He
+hurried, he ran; I expect, too, that he was agitated. His courage had
+failed him. He must prove his loyalty to his official leaders at all
+costs. He reached the lobby in plenty of time. Monro, you remember
+him, the Scotchman? He was at Bramling."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia.
+
+"He saw Challoner. He was standing by the entrance door of our lobby.
+We were in the 'No' Lobby, for the question we had to vote upon was
+that the original words of the Address 'stand part,' and to enter the
+'Aye' Lobby a man must pass our entrance door and traverse the House.
+Monro saw Challoner hurry past the door, and thinking that he had
+mistaken our lobby and was under the impression that the question he
+had to vote upon was that the amendment be substituted--in which case,
+of course, we should all have been in the 'Aye' Lobby--he called to
+the Colonel. Challoner didn't hear, or wouldn't hear. He hurried on,
+and once inside the Government Lobby, collapsed onto the bench which
+runs along the sides. He died within a couple of minutes."
+
+Harry Rames ceased. The shock of this swift calamity had driven from
+Cynthia's thoughts all her indignation against the Challoners. She
+pictured to herself that old, unhappy, disappointed man, dropping at
+last between the shafts, the pack-horse of politics. Not even the
+insignificance of an Under Secretaryship had come to requite him for
+his tedious years of service. And it never could have fallen to him.
+That she recognized. Again the silence was broken by the tap-tap of
+the paper-knife upon the blotting-pad.
+
+"It's a Juggernaut, that House, isn't it? You said that once,
+Cynthia," said Rames.
+
+"I did? I don't remember."
+
+Cynthia was perplexed by his distress. Sensibility was not to be
+counted amongst his qualities. Yet he sat there with trouble heavy
+upon him, and every now and then a shiver of the shoulders, a shiver
+of repugnance.
+
+"This has shocked you terribly, Harry," she said.
+
+"Yes. I have known death before now, but never death without any
+dignity. That's what I find terrible." He paused for a moment and then
+said in a low and distinct voice:
+
+"I am to blame for it, Cynthia."
+
+"You?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes. I ought to have left him alone. I ought never to have taken
+advantage of his disappointments. I dragged him into the revolt to
+serve myself--yes, that's the truth, Cynthia. We both know it. I
+dragged him in without giving him and his character a thought. He was
+the real party hack. To him the men upon the treasury bench were as
+gods walking the earth. A nod from one of them in a passage, a
+hand-shake in a drawing-room, a little private conversation with a
+Cabinet Minister in the Division Lobby--that was the kind of food
+which sustained him through how many years! And he was a good cavalry
+officer once, I am told." Harry Rames suddenly swung round toward his
+wife. "That's strange, isn't it? Very strange. He must have come into
+the House of Commons twenty years ago a very different man. But I
+suppose the walls closed round him and crushed the vitality out of
+him. You had a phrase about such men--the prisoners of the House of
+Commons. He was one of them. I did a cruel thing when I enlisted him.
+For I might have known that he must desert. I am to blame for his
+death."
+
+"No," Cynthia protested.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Even if you might have known that he must desert, you couldn't have
+foreseen that he would hide from you till the last moment."
+
+"That's just what he would do."
+
+"Even so, you didn't know, Harry, that he had heart disease."
+
+"Would it have made any difference to me if I had?" And that question
+silenced Cynthia.
+
+Harry Rames fell again to tapping with his paper-knife upon the
+blotting-pad. He tapped aimlessly, the silver handle flashing in the
+light, the ivory blade striking and resounding. But gradually an
+intention seemed to become audible in his tapping. The taps came
+quickly, three or four together, then were spaced, then streamed
+swiftly again like sparks from an anvil. The noise began to jar on
+Cynthia's nerves.
+
+"Don't do that, Harry, please," she said.
+
+"I won't," said he, throwing down the paper-knife.
+
+"You might have been sending a telegram."
+
+"By wireless, eh?" he said with a smile, and then a curious look came
+into his face. "I was," he said slowly. Cynthia drew back in her chair
+with a queer feeling of uneasiness.
+
+"Not to--?" she began, and stopped short of the name. She glanced
+furtively around the room. She was suddenly chilled.
+
+"To Challoner? No," he answered. He had hardly been aware of what he
+was doing, and he wondered now why the idea to do it had thus
+irrelevantly entered his head. No doubt an instinctive desire to get
+relief from the obsession of the sordid tragedy of Challoner's death
+had prompted him. But, whatever the cause, he had been tapping out,
+in accordance with the Morse code, a message to the little, black,
+full-rigged ship far away upon Southern seas.
+
+He sprang up from his chair.
+
+"There's a letter you wanted me to post, Cynthia. I had forgotten it.
+Give it to me."
+
+"It dropped into the fire," said Cynthia.
+
+Harry looked into the fire; a torn fragment or two had fallen into the
+grate.
+
+"I dropped it into the fire," said Cynthia. "For I had already changed
+my mind about it."
+
+The long letter which she had torn up at the first news of Colonel
+Challoner's defection, the letter which was to commemorate that
+evening, had been written to Colonel Challoner, and admitted that she
+was the daughter of his son.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXXI
+
+                           M. POIZAT AGAIN
+
+
+"There is a man at the door, madam. He says that he is a Ludsey man,
+and that he worked for Captain Rames during the election."
+
+It was midday. Cynthia had her hat on and was at the moment buttoning
+her gloves.
+
+"Tell him that Captain Rames is at the House of Commons now, and that
+he will be back at home by five," she said.
+
+"The man asked for you," said the footman.
+
+"For me? Did he give a name?"
+
+"No. But he said that you would know him."
+
+Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Very well, Howard. Show him in."
+
+Visitors who would not give their names but claimed to be citizens of
+Ludsey were not infrequent while Parliament was in session. They
+usually came with the same request--the loan of their fare home, where
+they had relations to look after them; and they were usually
+impostors, who had not so much as seen the spire of St. Anne's Church.
+But, on the other hand, there was always a possibility that the case
+might be genuine, and Cynthia made it a rule to see them. She had
+already got her purse out of her bag when the door was opened. But she
+dropped it when she saw her visitor.
+
+"M. Poizat," she cried, and she held out her hand to him.
+
+M. Poizat, however, did not take it.
+
+"You have been kept waiting. You should have sent in your name."
+
+M. Poizat shook his head.
+
+"Would you have received me if I had, Mrs. Rames?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"You are very kind."
+
+Cynthia looked at him with a closer scrutiny. Certainly the M. Poizat
+who confronted her was the merest shadow of the sprightly inventor of
+Lungatine. The elasticity had gone from his wonderful legs. No longer
+he danced when he walked. His arms hung loose at his side, and the
+potency of his elixir had quite failed him. He was now a really old,
+small man. Indeed, he seemed to have diminished in stature and to have
+shrivelled in breadth; and his eyes were red, as though he had lately
+wept. Thus much had been taken from him. Yet something had been added,
+the dignity of a man whom calamity has overtaken.
+
+"Why am I very kind to receive you?" Cynthia asked gently.
+
+M. Poizat stared at her incredulously.
+
+"Then you do not know what has happened to me?"
+
+"No! Sit down and tell me."
+
+But M. Poizat remained standing.
+
+"I have no longer a friend in the world. I have no longer a house. I
+have no longer a wife. All is gone."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Ah, I know. Ladies do not read their newspapers very carefully. If
+the men, too, were like you! But all the same you will have heard of a
+case which a few days ago was making a great stir in Paris--the Jobert
+case."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"But you have not followed it in detail."
+
+"No."
+
+The intricacies of that gigantic case of fraud were indeed difficult
+to follow even for those who gave to it their attention. Nor did
+Poizat do more than give to Cynthia a necessary outline. Monsieur and
+Madame Jobert, the latter being the protagonist of the conspiracy, had
+borrowed over a course of years immense sums of money on the strength
+of securities which were supposed to exist in a sealed safe. The case
+could not be opened since a fictitious action by claimants, whom
+Madame Jobert had invented, was perpetually being deferred in the
+courts of law. At the last, however, the creditors of the Joberts had
+obtained authority to break the seals, and a safe which was absolutely
+empty was exposed. The Joberts alleged a theft, but they were arrested
+and prosecuted.
+
+"You see, Mrs. Rames, the one hope of the Joberts upon their trial was
+to establish the existence of a great sum of money which the
+securities supposed to be stolen could represent. What was this money?
+How was it come by? And when? Who bequeathed it? Madame Jobert was
+examined upon these questions by the juge d'instruction week after
+week, during a whole year. Lie after lie she told. Each explanation
+she put forward was sifted and proved a lie. At last she cried:
+
+"'It is true. I have lied. I do not wish France to remember what she
+should forget. I have not told my secret. But, if I must, I will. The
+great fortune exists. I will tell its origin when I am on my trial;
+but I warn you, Monsieur le Juge, the revelation will convulse France
+from the Mediterranean to the Channel.' That is what she said. No one
+believed her. In Paris, indeed, they had already begun to laugh.
+Almost they loved her. She was a criminal but magnificent in her
+crime.
+
+"'La Grande Clothilde,' they named her. What _blague_ would she have
+ready for the Cour d'Assizes? No one was alarmed, least of all I, a
+little restaurant-keeper in a city of the Midlands. Yet this last lie
+of hers ruined me."
+
+"Ruined you?" cried Cynthia.
+
+"Yes; it is strange, is it not? A great trial like that in Paris, a
+woman in the dock snatching at any defence or delay; she tells a story
+so ridiculous in its application that it sets all Paris in a delighted
+roar of laughter; and that story which could not save her, drags into
+the light a little man of no importance, who has been hiding his head
+in a foreign country for thirty years."
+
+"Yes, but if the story is a lie?" cried Cynthia.
+
+"Its application was the lie. It did not explain that fictitious
+fortune of the Joberts. But the story itself was true," said M.
+Poizat. He sat down in a chair in a queer, huddled attitude, with his
+knees and his feet together, his hands joined upon his knees and his
+chin sunk upon his breast. He seemed to have composed himself to be
+hit at. "I am amazed," he said. "It seems that one has never quite
+finished with anything one has done until one is dead. Here is a part
+of my life which I had buried. Then come thirty years, each one adding
+its layer of oblivion. Then comes La Grande Clothilde, who has never
+seen me, nor been seen by me. Look! I was laughing with everybody
+else. We take in the _Petit Parisien_. I read the trial in the
+evening, day by day, to my wife. We both amused ourselves by wondering
+what will be the great secret which La Grande Clothilde has to reveal.
+Then comes the day of the revelation, and in Ludsey my newspaper falls
+from my hands and my wife, who has been my wife for twenty years,
+looks upon me as a stranger."
+
+Cynthia's face changed. The gentleness and the pity vanished. She drew
+in her breath sharply as though alarm knocked at her heart.
+
+"Something out of your past life has come alive, quite unexpectedly
+after all these years, and has snatched you back," she said slowly, as
+if she were comparing the words with others she had once heard spoken.
+"Quick! Tell me!"
+
+She bent forward with her eyes intent upon M. Poizat's face, and fear
+growing in them more and more visibly.
+
+"You remember, Mrs. Rames, the night before the election at Ludsey.
+You were all having supper in the hotel after the meeting. I came in
+and was asked by Captain Rames to join you. There was a man who
+claimed to know me."
+
+"Yes, yes, Colonel Challoner," cried Cynthia, with a rising
+excitement. She remembered that supper-room at Ludsey, and the queer
+moment of sensation when Colonel Challoner, gaunt and menacing, had
+recollected, and M. Poizat, in a panic, had denied the recollection.
+Some vague notion, too, of the defence which Clothilde Jobert had made
+a week ago returned to her. She began dimly to understand the disaster
+which had overtaken her little visitor.
+
+"He remembered that he had seen you--Wait! Now I have it-- In a long
+corridor, in Metz, in '71."
+
+M. Poizat nodded.
+
+"The corridor of the Arsenal. Colonel Challoner--it's so you call
+him?--he was right. More than once I went along that corridor. I went
+to see the Marshal Bazaine."
+
+"Yes," replied Cynthia. "And Madame Jobert accounted for the origin of
+this great sum of money which the prosecution declared to have no
+existence, by stating that it was the price paid to Bazaine by the
+Germans for the betrayal of Metz."
+
+"That is so. No such sum of money came that way into Clothilde
+Jobert's hands. But details of her story were true."
+
+"For instance?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"That a small farmer, a Frenchman on the outskirts of Metz, called
+Henri Poizat, was the go-between in the negotiations between the
+Germans and Bazaine."
+
+"That was true?"
+
+"Yes. I am Henri Poizat. With the money I was paid I came to Ludsey
+and opened my little restaurant. I did well. I returned to France and
+married, and brought my wife back. Then suddenly this news! My wife is
+of Lorraine. Her father was of those sturdy ones who would not live
+under the German rule, but left their homes in Lorraine and began anew
+in France. Conceive to yourself how she looked at me when she read
+that statement in the paper, and I could not deny it. She has gone
+back to her own people. I have had a letter from her brother. I am not
+to come near them. In Ludsey I was pointed at in the streets as the
+man who sold his country. My restaurant suffered. My trade began to
+vanish. I sold it, goodwill and all, two days ago. As I say, I have no
+longer any house."
+
+He buried his face in his hands. Cynthia watched him uncomfortably.
+She could not blame the wife. Rather she applauded her. She could find
+no sincere words of comfort for M. Poizat.
+
+"I think you had better come back at five," she said, "and tell my
+husband your story."
+
+"But of course he knows it already," cried M. Poizat.
+
+Cynthia shook her head.
+
+"He would have spoken of it to me if he had."
+
+M. Poizat, however, was equally positive.
+
+"But it is in the Ludsey newspapers. Captain Rames takes them in, and
+reads them of course."
+
+"Of course," said Cynthia.
+
+"Then he must know. Such news is not tucked away in the corner of a
+local paper. No, indeed. It was printed on the first page."
+
+"Still you had better see him," said Cynthia. She rose as she spoke,
+and she spoke a trifle absently, as though her thoughts had been
+suddenly diverted from the consideration of M. Poizat's calamity.
+"Come back at five. He will advise you."
+
+She rang the bell. She was in a hurry now to get rid of the little
+Frenchman. Something much more important to her had occurred than
+the revelations of La Grande Clothilde. Doubts had flashed into her
+mind--doubts which she was in torture to resolve. As soon as Poizat's
+back was turned she went quickly into her husband's study. Upon a
+side-table, carelessly heaped, with their wrappers still gummed about
+them, she counted a dozen of the local papers of Ludsey. They took two
+a week, one of each political complexion. It was six weeks then since
+Harry Rames had taken the trouble to glance at a newspaper from his
+own constituency.
+
+She stripped off the wrappers to make sure. Then she turned to the
+calendar upon the top of his writing-table. Six weeks just took her
+back to the date when Harry Rames had emptied the House with a speech,
+and had brought home the tragic news of Colonel Challoner's death.
+
+Harry's omission on the surface was trivial enough. But to Cynthia it
+was significant and disquieting. For it was not in accordance with the
+deliberate prudence which used to mark the conduct of his political
+career. To nurse the constituency, to be familiar with its events and
+its needs, to respond to it, this had been his first care. Now for six
+weeks he neglected even to inform himself about it. And the omission
+did not stand alone.
+
+"He will be home at five," Cynthia argued, "he who made it a rule to
+sit in the House however dull the course of public business."
+
+Often of late he had left the House as soon as questions were over and
+the usual vote taken upon the suspension of the eleven-o'clock rule,
+and had only returned thither upon the stroke of eleven on the chance
+of coming in for a division. Cynthia remembered, too, how indifferent
+he had been, on the day after he had made his failure, to the
+criticisms which the failure had evoked. Mr. Devenish had put in some
+biting and effective work in his reply, which should have been gall
+and wormwood to the ambitious Harry Rames. But he had not seemed to
+mind. The newspapers which supported the Government too had not spared
+him. Conceit and presumption were the least of his failings. The
+_Piccadilly News_ had published a cartoon of him as Humpty Dumpty. Yet
+he had remained unmoved, though Cynthia had cried her eyes red over
+the castigation.
+
+Certainly some change had come over him, she reflected, and once more
+she was conscious of fear and a sinking heart. For the story which she
+had heard this morning from M. Poizat linked itself up in her mind
+with the warning of Mr. Benoliel. Poizat's history was not quite an
+illustration of the warning. That she recognized. Mr. Benoliel had
+bidden her beware of latent tendencies of character, latent cravings
+and ambitions, taking their origin from the years in which she had had
+no share. It was a definite act which had sprung into being in the
+case of M. Poizat. Still Poizat's disaster was a proof of the clutch
+of finished things, and of the continuity of life; was an instance
+that to turn over the new page and begin to write afresh as she and
+Harry Rames had proposed to do, is beyond man's reach. Two lines of
+verse, gathered she knew not whence, rang in her brain and would not
+be silenced:
+
+
+             "Our past deeds follow us from afar
+              And what we have been makes us what we are."
+
+
+After a year's respite Cynthia was again afraid. Mr. Benoliel was
+magnified by her fears into the semblance of a prophet of old.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXXII
+
+                               THE CALL
+
+
+Cynthia went that night alone to a dinner party in Seamore Place. But
+she was ill at ease and as soon as she could get away she hurried
+home. She had not seen her husband that day. He had returned at five
+o'clock, had been closeted for a long while with M. Poizat and had
+then departed, leaving a message that a series of divisions would
+compel him to dine at the House of Commons. The couple, however, had
+made it a habit to reserve for themselves, whenever the House was not
+sitting late, an hour or so at the close of even the busiest day, and
+Cynthia was fairly sure that she would not have to wait long before
+Harry Rames came home. As a fact, he was already in his study. The
+door was ajar and through the opening the light streamed out into the
+hall.
+
+Cynthia pushed the door open. Harry was sitting at his writing-table
+on the opposite side of the room and studying with a complete
+absorption a scroll which he held down unrolled beneath his eyes.
+Cynthia stood in the doorway for a moment or two watching him with a
+tender smile upon her face, and speculating idly upon the document
+which so riveted his attention. For the moment her trouble was quite
+driven from her thoughts. He was here, after all, in the house with
+her: he, the loved one: and with a sort of fierceness she was content.
+Then he looked up and saw her standing in the doorway. His face
+changed; he had the aspect clearly of a man at bay. He swept a pile of
+letters and printed papers over his scroll, spreading them out. He
+rose and stood between her and the writing-table, hiding it from her
+view.
+
+"You are home early," he said.
+
+"Earlier than you expected! Yet I am later than you."
+
+"Oh, I paired at ten o'clock."
+
+"I see."
+
+The furtive movement of her husband increased her fears and at the
+same time wounded her pride. They were to be frank with one another.
+That was the pledge which each had given to the other. And here was
+the pledge broken, for Harry was definitely practising concealments.
+Cynthia, however, did not belong to the tribe of the clamorous. She
+stepped within the room and left him to continue the conversation.
+Rames spoke hastily to engage her attention.
+
+"Poizat came to see me this afternoon."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"He was desperate. We talked over his position. I recommended him to
+go to Tangier and settle there. He has a little money. He will find
+compatriots, and I should think it's the place where people will be
+least likely to trouble about him. I fancy that he will go there. But
+it's a bad business to have to start life all over again at seventy."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia.
+
+She watched him as he walked up and down the room, making up her mind
+that on her side at all events the pledge should not be broken.
+
+"M. Poizat said something to me which I think is true. That nothing
+one has ever done is ever quite done with."
+
+Harry Rames stopped in his walk. He stood quite still for a few
+moments.
+
+"Oh, surely that's not true," he said carelessly and resumed his
+pacing. But Cynthia was aware of a change in him. Before he had been
+thinking of Poizat and his destiny; now he was alert and waiting upon
+her words.
+
+"I believe that it's more true than he knew. For even if nothing
+actual comes of the thing done, it's still there, recorded in the
+character. Harry, we are in the clutch of finished things."
+
+Her voice rose in a low cry and brought Harry swiftly round upon his
+heel. Her words hit him shrewdly, but her aspect more shrewdly still.
+She was still standing close by the door. She was dressed in a gown of
+pale blue and gold with a bright ribbon of blue in her hair. Her cloak
+had slipped from her shoulders to her feet, her gloves were twisted in
+her hands, her eyes wide and dark with trouble looked out from a face
+which was piteously wistful. She made unconsciously a poignant appeal
+to him. The delicate loveliness of her youth and the gay panoply of
+her attire contrasted so strikingly with the quivering misery of her
+face.
+
+"What makes you believe that, Cynthia?" He crossed the room to her
+side and shook her arm with a friendly gesture familiar to her.
+"Poizat's case is not enough to build a world of theory on."
+
+"Nor do I," replied Cynthia. "I was adding to that case another."
+Harry Rames flinched.
+
+"What other?" he asked with an effort.
+
+"Years ago in Argentina I once listened at a door," she began, and in
+Harry's eyes shone a great relief. "What I heard frightened me. I lay
+awake in terror all that night. I have lived in fear ever since. I
+could not shake fear off even after I knew there was no longer any
+cause for fear. I can find causes anywhere. Fear's the truth of me.
+Most of the things which I have done have been done from fear."
+
+"I never understood that, Cynthia."
+
+"I never spoke of it before."
+
+"Fear even prompted your marriage?"
+
+Cynthia looked him frankly in the face.
+
+"Yes. You were so frank, so honest about yourself. I felt safe with
+you. And after we were married--I escaped from fear. I was reprieved."
+
+"Thank you," said Harry with a quiet sincerity. Then he moved away
+from her to the fireplace and turned again.
+
+"Why do you tell me this for the first time tonight?"
+
+"Because fear's awake in me again to-night," she answered simply. "I
+have had another visitor today besides M. Poizat."
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Howard Fall."
+
+Harry Rames's voice hardened.
+
+"He came to complain of me, I suppose."
+
+"It wasn't complaint; it was regret. He thought it would be such a
+loss if you ceased to be interested in Parliament. He was afraid that
+Colonel Challoner's death had been a shock to you."
+
+Harry Rames looked curiously at his wife.
+
+"And what did you say?"
+
+"That I knew you well enough to be sure that wasn't the case. He said
+you had not spoken once since the debate on the Address and that the
+organization against the land bill was tumbling to pieces."
+
+Harry's face cleared.
+
+"There's a very good reason for that. The government programme is
+overloaded and Devenish's bill won't come on this year after all. Our
+opposition shook their confidence in it besides. No, it won't come
+on."
+
+Cynthia moved swiftly forward to the fireplace.
+
+"You know that?"
+
+"Yes. Hamlin told me in confidence."
+
+"When, Harry?"
+
+"A month ago at least. We can always whip up the opposition to
+Devenish's bill when it becomes once more a practical proposition."
+
+Perhaps after all the Government's change of plan was the simple
+explanation of the change in her husband. Cynthia sank down into a
+chair. Before now, she remembered, she had tortured herself with
+unnecessary fears.
+
+"Oh, I am glad. I am glad," she cried. All her heart was in her voice
+and tuned it to a note full and low and wonderfully sweet. Harry was
+moved by the music of it. There was a joy, a tenderness, which he had
+noticed more than once of late, but which had never rung so clear as
+it did to-night. He planted himself in front of her with a wry sort of
+smile upon his face.
+
+"Cynthia."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You want me to go on--just as I am going? You are satisfied? There
+have been times when you have wanted more----"
+
+But Cynthia broke in upon him. She shut her eyes upon her ideals and
+her dreams. They were for the girl steeped to the lips in romance, not
+for the woman made real by love. Something had come between them.
+Something secret. Something which threatened even such community of
+life as they had. She was in revolt against it.
+
+"Yes, yes," she cried passionately. "I do want you to go on. I want
+you to make a great career. I want my share in it, my pride in it. I
+shall be satisfied. I shall be thankful. Oh, my dear, are you blind?"
+She rose abruptly and stood in front of him. "What I want and all that
+I want is to keep you." If she had never spoken the words, the
+eagerness of her voice and the prayer of her clasped hands would have
+uttered them for her. But she had spoken them deliberately. She knew
+very well the danger for a woman in telling a man who does not love
+her, that she loves him. But she accepted the danger. She was playing
+for a great stake that night, and great stakes are not to be won
+without great risks. She laid her reticence aside and made her appeal.
+But it seemed that her appeal failed. Harry Rames stood watching her,
+at a loss for words, with a face which concealed carefully all his
+thoughts. Cynthia stooped and gathered up her gloves which had fallen
+to the floor.
+
+"I shall go up now," she said.
+
+Yet she waited; and Harry still was silent. A moment of passion had
+caught him unprepared with any words.
+
+"What are you thinking about, Harry, so profoundly?" Cynthia asked in
+an indifferent voice. His silence was a rebuff most bitter to her. But
+she would not betray herself a second time. Her eyes and her hands
+were busy with some imaginary fault in the fit of her dress.
+
+"That you have never shown me yourself before," he said, moving toward
+her. She stood quite still as he came close. He put his arm about her
+and she asked quietly:
+
+"Wasn't I wise, Harry? It's a little disconcerting, isn't it, when a
+woman shows you something you know nothing about. Just a little
+disconcerting, isn't it?"
+
+She left him standing in the room and went upstairs. She had made her
+plea with all the frankness which had been the condition of their
+marriage. She would not ask for a like frankness in return. It was for
+him to give it. She had made it quite plain that on her side she
+wanted frankness. More she would not do. Not for anything would she
+ask what secret thing he had hidden under the papers upon his table.
+But she knew that there was a secret thing and her feet dragged as she
+mounted the stairs.
+
+She had been in bed according to her reckoning for about an hour when
+she heard a noise of the shutting of a door. And the door was the
+front-door of the house. Cynthia sprung from her bed and lifting the
+blind looked out from the window. It was a dark night, but there was
+no fog. By the light of the street lamps she saw a man crossing the
+road toward the corner of South Audley Street. He had the look of her
+husband. She flung up the window and the sound of his footsteps made
+her sure. Her eyes gazing into the tempered darkness of a London
+street might well have deceived her, her ears could not. There was no
+one else walking in Curzon Street at that moment; the sound of his
+footsteps reverberated unmistakably, diminishing as the distance
+between him and the window increased. The man who now vanished into
+South Audley Street was Harry Rames.
+
+Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her watch. It was one
+o'clock in the morning. She wrapped a dressing-gown about her and sat
+down trying to think calmly, seeking to discover, if she could, some
+other reason for his departure than the obvious one. But the obvious
+one recurred again and again in her thoughts. It explained everything,
+fitted in with everything, as no other reason did. His sudden
+indifference to his career, his furtive movement at his writing-table
+upon her appearance, his refusal to meet frankness with frankness
+could all thus be accounted for. His departure from the house was thus
+explained. He had not come up into his room next to hers; he had
+waited in his study for an hour; he had given her time to fall asleep;
+he had gone out. It was a woman then who had twisted the current of
+his life as she, Cynthia, could not, who had moved him to passion as
+she even that evening had failed to do. Cynthia raged in fury against
+herself for having so weakly betrayed herself. She sat in torture.
+Then her jealousy flamed up. _That_--no! Her pride must give way. If
+there was another woman in her story--why then the other woman must
+look to herself. Cynthia would fight. She hurried down-stairs into the
+study. She switched on the lights and tumbled hither and thither the
+papers on the writing-table for the one so swiftly hidden which should
+betray the other woman's name and her abode. But she found nothing to
+satisfy her. She looked round the room. From a drawer in a bureau
+against the wall Harry's keys had been dangling. That she had noticed;
+and the keys were gone now. She tried the drawer. It was locked. In
+that drawer then was hidden the key to his secret. So much knowledge
+at all events Cynthia was sure that she had gained. She went back to
+her room and lying in bed ran over all the names of her acquaintances,
+even of her friends. She was not in the mood to trust any of them, but
+she could not fix upon any of them either. One and all they were cats
+and treacherous. Cynthia was no longer afraid; she was simply furious;
+and her fury was not diminished when she heard the front-door open and
+shut once more, almost noiselessly--so much caution was being used.
+
+But Cynthia, though she was right in her facts, had never been so
+mistaken in her conclusions. The scroll which Harry Rames had pushed
+beneath his papers was simply a chart of the Antarctic seas; whereon
+lines distinguished one from the other by the manner of their tracing
+recorded the journeys of successive explorers and marked each one's
+"farthest South." He stood for a little while after Cynthia had left
+him on the same spot half-way between his chart and her position at
+the door. Then he turned back to his writing-table and spread out the
+map once more. The call of the unknown places was loud in his ears
+that night.
+
+"Come back! Come back!"
+
+Six weeks ago it had been the merest whisper--flashed to the wireless
+poles on the roof of the Admiralty and heard by him one afternoon, a
+message very small and clear amidst the clatter of Parliament Street.
+But the whisper had gathered volume and vehemence, until the map
+before him seemed a mouth shouting it, and the room throbbed with it
+as though the walls would burst asunder.
+
+"Come back! Come back!"
+
+It seemed to him that the command was not to be denied or must ring in
+his ears forever; and that arena of the House of Commons, where man
+fought with man, became a trivial place of meanness and intrigue
+compared with the vast battle-ground in the South, where one fought in
+a grandeur of silence with the careless, stubborn elements of a wild
+and unknown world.
+
+He bent over his map and across it, as across the table of a camera
+obscura he saw moving, in miniature and brilliantly defined, the ships
+of the men who had sailed to the South. James Cook's two vessels, the
+_Resolution_ and the _Adventure_, crossed the Antarctic circle as it
+seemed underneath his eyes--the first, of all the ships that were ever
+built, to sail upon these waters. Bellingshausen of Kronstadt came
+next and dropped his anchor under the shelter of Peter I Island and
+gave to it its name. He was followed by the whaling captains, each
+choosing his own line, great navigators inspired by a great and
+spirited firm. Weddell and Biscoe in their brigs. Balleny in his
+schooner. The later ships of the scientific expeditions under
+D'Urville of France and Wilkes of Chesapeake Bay moved southward in
+the track of the whaling captains, and close upon their heels James
+Ross from England with the _Erebus_ and the _Terror_ burst for the
+first time in the history of the world through the ice-pack into
+the open sea beyond and sailed from west to east along the great
+ice-barrier. There were other lines where the _Challenger_ had sailed,
+and the official expeditions; and there was yet another, the longest
+of all the lines upon the chart, a line stretching out to a harbor
+never visited before, and against that line in tiny letters was
+printed "Rames." He followed the course of his ship from his first
+harbor in the Antarctic continent with the wooden cross high on a hill
+above it, which marks the grave of a naturalist of a past expedition.
+He fell to speculating where the _Perhaps_ lay now. Parliament had met
+in the first days of January. It was just before the opening of
+Parliament that Hemming had started on the mail steamer to New Zealand
+to pick up his ship in Lyttelton Harbor. Allow him five weeks for his
+journey. The second week of February would have come to an end before
+the _Perhaps_ had steamed out past the headland. Hemming himself had
+recognized that he was late. The difficulty of collecting money to
+finance the expedition had detained him beyond his time. A fortnight
+out from New Zealand, where was the _Perhaps_ now? She might still be
+in the stormy seas on the outer edge of Ross's pack with the petrels
+and the albatrosses like a cloud about her yards. Or she might have
+touched at one of the northerly harbors of the continent. Perhaps
+winter was coming early on to wrap her about with snow and ice. If
+that happened, Hemming's chance was gone, for he had only money for
+one year. He must reach the Pole this next summer or not at all. He
+must therefore winter well to the South.
+
+Rames got up from his chair, trying not to hope that Hemming's
+expedition would fail. He looked up from this map to the spot where
+Cynthia had stood close to the door, and a smile came upon his face.
+
+"She was wrong," he said. "We are in the clutch of the unfinished, not
+the finished things."
+
+He carried his map over to a bureau which stood against the wall and
+opened a drawer from the lock of which his bunch of keys was dangling.
+There were other charts in the drawer, a barometer which had hung in
+his cabin in the _Perhaps_ throughout the three years during which
+that ship had been his home, a shell or two dredged up from the depths
+of the sea, and a brown paper package tied up with a piece of string.
+The charts lying there were all the charts which existed of the
+Antarctic seas, arranged in the order of their making. He added to
+them now his map, the last of them all; the printed facsimile of his
+own chart. Then reluctantly he locked the drawer. The reverberation of
+the seas seemed to fill the room and through it imperative and loud
+rang the call of the South. Yet he was aware, too, of Cynthia standing
+in her delicate blue frock, subduing her pride, revealing herself in a
+passionate appeal. He was stirred to shame at the poverty of his own
+response. She had been friend, counsellor, wife in the normal way.
+They had jogged side by side along the low road of his endeavor.
+To-night she pleaded for more, she offered more. He could never quite
+look upon her as he had been wont to. For she had stirred him to
+shame.
+
+He slipped the key off the ring and swung it round upon his finger. At
+all events he would keep his bargain.
+
+"It's a queer piece of irony," he said to himself, "that the very
+thing which I would give my soul to do, she was urging me to do two
+years ago; and now I must keep my longing hidden. Our positions are
+quite reversed."
+
+But he would keep to his bargain. Perhaps after all Hemming would
+succeed; and sooner or later no doubt the reverberation of the seas
+would die away in the porches of his ears.
+
+He went out into the hall, carrying the key in his hand, and let
+himself out at the front-door. He walked quickly up South Audley
+Street, turned to the left, and crossed Park Lane into Hyde Park. He
+walked to the stone bridge which crosses the Serpentine. The night was
+quiet and dark about him, and from afar off the never ceasing roar of
+the London traffic came to him like the roar of distant seas. He
+leaned over the parapet and stretching out his hand opened it. He
+heard a tiny splash in the water beneath the bridge.
+
+He walked back more slowly than he had come to where the glare of the
+sky indicated the houses and the streets. As he crossed Park Lane
+again two men arm-in-arm passed him and one of them stopped.
+
+"Is that you, Rames?" asked a friendly and solicitous voice.
+
+Rames recognized it at once as the voice of Hamlin the chief Whip.
+
+"You had paired for to-night," Hamlin continued, "hadn't you? You
+didn't miss much. But I want to be able to rely on you for Thursday.
+We know, of course, that you are against us over Devenish's land bill.
+That's all right. But you are with us on the rest of our policy and we
+want your help."
+
+"I shall be there on Thursday," answered Harry Rames. "It's quite true
+that I have not been so much in the House this session as I used to
+be. But you will see me in my old place to-morrow. Good-night."
+
+He walked on and Hamlin rejoined his companion.
+
+"It was Rames," he said. "We're not going to lose him. I am glad. He's
+marked out for a great position if he doesn't throw it away."
+
+But Rames through the roar of the traffic, carriages rolling home,
+wagons lumbering in to Covent Garden, heard louder than ever the boom
+of Southern seas and the wind whistling between the halyards of a
+ship.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+                         A LETTER FROM ABROAD
+
+
+The session passed, and Devenish's land bill, as Rames had foretold,
+was postponed. It figured again in the Address at the beginning of the
+following year, but as late as March no definite date had been
+assigned for its introduction. On a Saturday morning of this month
+Cynthia and her husband were breakfasting in the dining-room of the
+white house, when the morning's letters were brought in by the butler.
+Harry Rames tossed one or two aside.
+
+"Circulars, pamphlets," he said. He opened some of the others, taking
+them from the top of the pile. "Here's one from the Chamber of
+Commerce--railway rates. I'll answer that this morning. Here's
+another--the committee of a school wants a grant from the treasury.
+Here's a third--" and as he was beginning to tear open the envelope,
+his voice suddenly stopped.
+
+Cynthia looked up from her own letters and saw that while he was
+holding the third letter in his hand he was not looking at it. His
+eyes were fixed upon that one which was now uppermost on the heap. He
+sat and stared at the envelope for an appreciable time. Then dropping
+the letter which he held, he picked up this new and startling one and
+carried it swiftly over to the window. Cynthia followed his movement
+with her eyes, just curious, but nothing more. Her eyes indeed
+travelled beyond him and noticed the sunlight in the garden, the
+yellow and purple crocuses and the first of the daffodils, noticed
+them with an up-springing lightness of heart. Then the stillness of
+her husband's attitude caught her attention. She saw something in his
+face which she had never seen there before, which she had never
+thought to see there at all. He wore the look of a man quite caught
+out of himself. He was as one wrapped in visions and refined by the
+fires of great longings. It seemed to her that she saw a man whose
+eyes, brimful of light, looked upon the Holy Grail.
+
+He turned back to her. He brought her the letter still unopened and
+placed it in her hands. Cynthia received it as though written upon its
+cover she would read the revelation of his secret. Yet she saw nothing
+but a soiled envelope with a foreign stamp. She gazed up at her
+husband mystified.
+
+"Look at the stamp, Cynthia!" said Rames in a queer voice.
+
+Cynthia looked. It wore the head familiar to English people. But the
+lettering about the head was strange. She spelled it out.
+
+"Rexland."
+
+With a start she turned to him. "That is the country you discovered."
+
+"Yes. A stamp was struck to commemorate my discovery of it."
+
+"A stamp?" cried Cynthia. "Wait a minute, Harry! You once spoke of a
+stamp to me before. Yes, on the morning of the day when you were to
+deliver your speech--the speech which failed. It was this stamp of
+which you were speaking?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You remembered it on that morning, even when your thoughts were full
+of the speech you were going to deliver."
+
+"I remembered it by accident," he said sharply. "I can't think why. It
+had been out of my thoughts for so long. Yet it was that stamp." His
+voice softened. "It is issued by the post-office--for a penny. Just
+think of it! A penny stamp brings a letter from the Antarctic seas to
+us here in Warwickshire."
+
+"Mr. Hemming sent it?"
+
+"Without a doubt. When he came to see me in London fifteen months ago,
+he told me that if I intended to go out again he would not use my
+harbor."
+
+Harry was standing just behind his wife. Cynthia was not looking at
+him any longer. But she was listening with a curious intentness as
+though the words which he spoke were of less importance to her than
+the accent with which he spoke them. She put questions to him to make
+yet more sure of it.
+
+"And you gave him permission!"
+
+"Of course. I had not the right to refuse it. I was never going
+South again. Nothing was further from my thoughts. I told him to
+use not only my harbor, but the depots of food I had made along my
+sledge-route from the harbor toward the Pole."
+
+"You think that he reached the harbor?"
+
+"I am sure of it. Otherwise he would not have used this stamp. He must
+have wintered there. I did not think that he would reach it before
+winter closed in upon him. The summer last year must have been very
+late."
+
+Cynthia nodded her head.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Her attention was relaxed. Harry Rames had been striving to keep from
+his voice any note of regret, to speak in the ordinary level tone
+suitable to a matter of only ordinary interest. But in spite of his
+efforts he was not sure that he had succeeded. Cynthia handed to him
+the letter. He took it and turned it over in his hand.
+
+"He has had time since he wintered in that harbor. One summer would be
+enough. He may have done it--if his dogs lived. There's always that
+condition. If his dogs lived! Mine didn't. Perhaps--perhaps--" He
+broke off abruptly and thrust the letter back into Cynthia's hand.
+
+"You open it! You can tell me what he says."
+
+Harry Rames walked again to the window and stood with his back to the
+room. Cynthia's eyes followed him and travelled past him once more to
+the garden. She was sure that she would never forget those daffodils
+and the purple crocuses waving in the sunlight for one day as long as
+she lived. A minute ago she had noticed them; now she noticed them
+again; and within that minute had been revealed to her the great
+secret Harry Rames had been at so much pains to hide. She knew her
+rival now, and was appalled. "Such men are driven by a torment of
+their souls." It was Harry himself who had said that. The wish came to
+her, "If only this man has succeeded." She tore open the envelope.
+
+Harry Rames stood at the window waiting for the letter to be read to
+him; and it seemed to him that he waited for an eternity. He had heard
+the tearing of the envelope. The letter was open in Cynthia's hands.
+Yet she did not speak a word. Rames's heart sank.
+
+"Then he has reached the Pole?" he asked with a studied carelessness.
+
+"I don't know," Cynthia replied in perplexity.
+
+"Read it."
+
+"There is nothing to read."
+
+Rames turned round and came swiftly toward her.
+
+"He must have forgotten to enclose his letter. There is nothing
+but this," said Cynthia. She was holding a single blank sheet of
+note-paper in her hand. She turned it over. "No, there's not a word
+written anywhere. Do you understand it?"
+
+"Yes. He has failed."
+
+There was no doubt left to her of her husband's joy. The cry which
+broke from his lips was not to be denied. It was a real cry of
+exultation. Cynthia turned pale as she heard it. But she would not
+acknowledge that she understood it, nor would she look into Harry's
+face lest she should see the same exultation blazoned there.
+
+"Poor Hemming," said Rames. "That's bad luck. The disappointment must
+have hit him hard."
+
+"You can understand that," said Cynthia steadily.
+
+"Yes. He would have written, you see, if he had taken it more lightly.
+He has nothing to say. That is what his blank sheet of paper means.
+That is what it must mean. Well, I must go and write to the Chamber of
+Commerce, Cynthia;" and gathering up his letters he went out of the
+room.
+
+As for Cynthia, she remembered that the North Warwickshire met that
+morning at eleven o'clock four miles from the house. She rode to the
+meet and followed the hounds over a good grass country flying her
+hedges on a big horse which old Mr. Daventry had given to her on the
+very first day when she had hunted over six years ago. It had always
+been her experience that when troubles and fears overburdened her, a
+hard day's hunting was her best medicine. It smoothed out the creases
+of her mind, whipped up the blood in her veins, set her pulses dancing
+with the joy of living and unrolled her courage like a banner. The
+sunlight, the swift rush through the air, the rhythm of movement, the
+keenness of the animal beneath her, the flight over hedge and ditch,
+had never failed her up till now. It always seemed to her that by some
+process, of which she was quite unconscious, the direct and simple
+thing to do emerged from the confusion of her thoughts and shone out
+unmistakably. And it shone out to-day. But she could not bring herself
+to accept it. As she rode homeward through the lanes she was at her
+arguments again.
+
+"No! With time contentment will come to him. He will be subdued to the
+matter he works in. And I cannot let him go."
+
+Mr. Benoliel's warning obstinately confronted her.
+
+"One party doesn't keep the bargain or keeps it half-heartedly as an
+irksome thing and day by day the separation grows more complete until
+you are living with your enemy or living quite alone."
+
+But she would not be convinced; she battled against it. "There was a
+saving clause. 'Unless on both sides there is love.' In that case a
+way could be found. And on both sides there may be love."
+
+She had treasured up little acts of thoughtfulness on Harry Rames's
+part, the merest small things which women are quick to notice and to
+build upon; such as having a cloak ready for her shoulders almost
+before she was aware that she was cold. She ran these trifles over in
+her mind, clutching at them for proof that the longed for change was
+coming--nay, perhaps had come. There had been a constant watchfulness,
+a constant care for her shown by her husband during this last year. It
+might be of course that a certain remorse was stirring in him--remorse
+that he was only keeping his side of the bargain in the letter and not
+the spirit.
+
+"But I cannot let him go," she insisted. The perils, the hardships,
+the dangers of snow-storms and cold and shipwreck and famine which had
+all seemed so trivial to her in her days of romance now loomed up
+before her terrible and dark. It was no use to argue that other men
+had gone that road and had come back. This one might not. She reached
+her home with her distress as heavy upon her as when she had set out;
+and was told that Mr. Benoliel was waiting to see her.
+
+She went at once into the drawing-room and gave Mr. Benoliel some tea.
+
+"Will you tell Mr. Rames," she said to her butler, "that Mr. Benoliel
+is here."
+
+"He's not in the house," said Benoliel. "He's in Ludsey. I asked for
+him when I heard that you were out. I am glad. For I should like to
+tell you my news first."
+
+The butler left the room and Mr. Benoliel became at once mysterious
+and omniscient.
+
+"Sir George Carberley is going to resign," he said.
+
+Cynthia looked at him in surprise.
+
+"The member for our division?"
+
+The white house was not within the borough limits of Ludsey. It stood
+in the Hickleton Division of the county of Warwickshire and Sir George
+Carberley, an important unit of the opposition, was Harry Rames's
+representative in the House of Commons.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Benoliel. "He has sat for the division for forty years
+now and he is tired. He intends to resign when this session is over."
+
+"Are you sure?" asked Cynthia. "How do you know this?"
+
+"Ah!" said Benoliel with a smile. "You mustn't ask me that, Cynthia.
+Indeed I am not quite sure that I ought to have told you the news at
+all. But I thought that it was so important for you to know it at once
+that I stretched a point of confidence."
+
+"Thank you," said Cynthia. "But what I don't understand is why it is
+so important for us to have the news before the others?"
+
+"Captain Rames is on the executive of your association, isn't he?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then he will have a voice in the selection of the candidate who will
+fight the seat from your political point of view."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Very well," said Mr. Benoliel. "If he has a candidate ready when the
+news of the approaching resignation is published, and if that man is
+willing to follow not simply the Government's policy, but also your
+husband's policy as regards Devenish's land bill, don't you see what a
+chance he gets? If Rames can secure the selection of his man as
+candidate and then can win over the seat, he strengthens his position
+with the Government enormously. He has put his views about Devenish's
+bill to the test of an election, and he has won."
+
+"Yes, I see that," said Cynthia doubtfully. She was considering the
+prospect Mr. Benoliel held out to her from a quite different point of
+view. If Harry succeeded in this plan, his victory would be one more
+link in the chain of obligation which bound him to his present life.
+If he failed, his failure would be another disappointment weakening
+it.
+
+"But can we win?" she cried. "The seat's supposed to be impregnable."
+
+"That's one of your advantages. More seats are lost by over-confidence
+than by bad candidates. Besides, the mere fact that one man has held a
+seat for forty years is against the probability of another man of the
+same color succeeding. There are lots of people who will be ready to
+say 'It's time we gave the other fellows a look-in.' Your husband has
+only got to throw himself heart and soul into the fight and he will
+stand a very good chance. No doubt of that."
+
+Cynthia reflected. "Why did you wish to tell me this news before you
+told it to Harry?" she asked, bending her brows upon Mr. Benoliel in a
+steady frown which had before now warned him to walk with
+circumspection.
+
+"I wasn't quite sure," he explained, "that you would wish him now to
+undertake a further obligation of political service."
+
+"Indeed!" said Cynthia icily. "And why shouldn't I wish it now, Mr.
+Benoliel?"
+
+Mr. Benoliel had no intention to allow himself to be browbeaten by a
+slip of a girl for whose happiness he was in a measure responsible.
+
+"Because, my dear Cynthia," he answered, "it has seemed to me on the
+last few occasions when I have met your husband that he was feeling
+the strain of a Parliamentary life. He has looked worn and tired. I
+could almost fancy that he was disheartened."
+
+Cynthia's thoughts did Mr. Benoliel some injustice at this moment.
+Certainly he was suggesting to her that his neglected warning had been
+justified, that Harry's Parliamentary ambition had been a mere phase
+in his life, which was now passing or had already passed. But she went
+further and assumed in him a kind of triumph at the accuracy of his
+diagnosis. Right underneath his sympathetic words she seemed to hear
+the whisper of a question:
+
+"Am I not a clever man?"
+
+The whirr of a motor-car grew loud and ceased. Harry had returned from
+Ludsey. Mr. Benoliel sat patiently in front of her, awaiting her
+decision. Was he to break his news to Harry Rames or was he not?
+Cynthia felt that Harry's destiny and hers were in her hands. She must
+make her choice and by that choice it seemed to her they would be both
+inextricably bound, their happiness or their misery allotted to them
+for the whole span of their lives.
+
+She sat with her chin propped in the palm of her hand and her eyes
+brooding darkly on Mr. Benoliel. A door was shut somewhere in the
+house. She rose and pressed the bell.
+
+"Howard," she said to her butler, "was that Mr. Rames?"
+
+"Yes ma'am."
+
+"He is in his study I think?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Will you show Mr. Benoliel in to him?" And as Benoliel rose, she said
+to him, "Will you come back after you have told your news? You will
+have an opportunity of reconsidering your judgment. I should like to
+hear whether you still think him disheartened."
+
+Cynthia was in her most aggrieved and stately mood. She usually was
+when she knew herself to be in the wrong. She would not admit Mr.
+Benoliel's sympathy or affection for her. She had an epithet for him
+very near to the tip of her tongue at this moment. Mr. Benoliel was
+officious. With a distant bow she dismissed him.
+
+She had the satisfaction half an hour later of hearing Mr. Benoliel's
+complete recantation.
+
+"I was quite wrong, Cynthia. He was in the best of spirits. He was
+elated. The look of strain had gone if it was ever there. I have been
+mistaken. I am happy to admit it."
+
+Cynthia relaxed from her frigidity. But her satisfaction was a poor
+one and had little life in it. She had merely tricked Mr. Benoliel
+into the belief that his insight had been at fault. For in truth, as
+she knew very well, it had never been more shrewd. What had led Mr.
+Benoliel into error was his ignorance of the letter with the "Rexland"
+stamp which had arrived at the white house by the morning's post.
+Hemming's failure was a kind of reprieve for Harry Rames. In a sudden
+revulsion he had been lifted out of his discouragement. His exultation
+had remained with him all that day. Cynthia had counted upon it when
+she had sent Benoliel to his study.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+                        THE CONVICT AT THE OAR
+
+
+A long account of Hemming's expedition, sent by a New Zealand
+correspondent, appeared in one of the morning papers the next day.
+Hemming had travelled a couple of hundred miles further south than
+Harry Rames. Then he had been compelled to return. But it was Harry
+Rames who had made it possible for him to get so far. For he used
+Rames's depots of provisions and was able to save his own for the
+stretch of new ice-covered country.
+
+Harry lighted upon the account unexpectedly when he opened his
+newspaper at the breakfast table, but the moment he saw the head-line
+he folded the sheets quickly again and pushed the paper away from him.
+He shrank from reading it, hardly daring to trust himself, and he
+began to talk over with Cynthia the names of suitable candidates for
+the Hickleton Division.
+
+"The Whips, of course, will have a man ready who will be pledged to
+swallow the whole of the Government policy, land bill and all. We must
+be beforehand with them. What do you say to young Burrell, Cynthia?"
+
+"Sir James Burrell's son?"
+
+"Yes. His father is anxious that he should do something," said Harry
+with a laugh.
+
+"But isn't he rather young and rather insignificant?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"Youth's a good quality in the House of Commons. The older men become
+suspicious of change and want life stereotyped as it is. And young
+Burrell isn't without brains. I don't say that he's a flyer, but then,
+like the Government, I prefer docility to brains in my followers. I
+think that I will run round to Sir James when we go back to town on
+Monday."
+
+But though Harry Rames neglected his newspaper at the breakfast table,
+he came back for it at eleven in the morning. He could keep the drawer
+in his bureau locked upon his charts, but he could not quench his
+fever to read the details of Hemming's expedition. For an hour he
+tried to occupy himself with the business of Cynthia's estate, and
+then he gave up the attempt. When and how Hemming failed, how far he
+had travelled with his sledges, what new lessons were to be learnt
+from his experience--here were questions which he could not silence.
+He got the paper and read the account through. "The dogs gave out," he
+said to Cynthia. "The dogs are the trouble. You can't carry enough
+food for them and for the sledging-party as well. Of course, it's bad
+luck on Hemming. But I doubt if he followed the highest traditions of
+British exploration."
+
+"Why?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"He should have chosen a different base, converged upon the Pole from
+a different angle, and covered ground altogether new. Then, whether he
+failed or not, he would have brought back a hundred new facts of
+interest to the scientist and the geographer. As it is he adds very
+little I should think to our knowledge."
+
+Cynthia was silent for awhile after he had finished. Then she said in
+a low voice, bending over some embroidery at which she was working:
+
+"And if you were to go back, Harry, where would you make your base?"
+
+"I?"
+
+Harry Rames sprang eagerly up.
+
+"Oh, I should search for a harbor a long way to the east of my old
+one. At least," and he caught himself up, "I think that is what I
+should do. I am speaking at random, of course. But I should at all
+events have considered that possibility carefully, if I had been going
+out again."
+
+Again a spell of silence followed upon his words and Cynthia did not
+raise her eyes from her work. She was wearing a hat with a wide brim
+and Harry Rames could see nothing of her face.
+
+"Won't you get your charts out and show me?" she asked. She had
+mastered her voice so that there was no sound of effort in it.
+
+"I haven't got them here," said Harry, with a fine indifference. "They
+are in London I believe, somewhere or other."
+
+Cynthia's needle stopped.
+
+"In London," she said. An idea had occurred to her. "Locked up?"
+
+"Very likely. I may have locked them up. I have done with them
+altogether, you see."
+
+"Of course," said Cynthia.
+
+This time it was Harry who did not at once reply. The finality of that
+"of course" brought a flush of anger into his face. He almost blamed
+her for her blindness, though all his efforts aimed at keeping her
+blind.
+
+"I will ride into Hickleton this afternoon," he said, "and make sure
+that the chairman of our association has no pet candidate of his own."
+
+"That will be a good plan," said Cynthia; and with a glance at the
+crown of that broad hat and a surprise at the obtuseness of the head
+which it so effectually concealed, he went out of the room. Not until
+the door was closed did Cynthia lift her face from her work. Her eyes
+were brimming with tears and she let her hands lie idle on her lap
+while the tears overflowed and ran down her cheeks. She was not much
+given to tears, but to-day they had their way with her. She was
+wretched. Their marriage had been a mistake. From first to last Mr.
+Benoliel had been right, but she would not listen to him and be
+warned. Even this afternoon he had accused her--for so she now looked
+upon his words--with his pitiless truths. It was true that Harry was
+discouraged, that his face had grown thin and worn, that despite the
+brave show which he was making, he was utterly unhappy. Harry's words,
+"The men who go South are driven on by a torment of their souls,"
+lived with her night and day. They were written in fire upon every
+wall of her house. In that torment Harry Rames was now tossing and
+must toss, enduring the anguish of his longing silently--just as
+silently as she herself was weeping in the empty room.
+
+She was afraid of herself and dissatisfied with herself. Afraid,
+because she had been perilously near to one wild outcry, "Since your
+heart is set on it, go!" Dissatisfied, because she had stifled the
+words before they were spoken, because she could not bring herself to
+speak them, and never would.
+
+From that day a change came over her. She flung herself with a
+veritable fever of energy upon those opportunities which enable a
+woman to identify herself with politics. The work she had undertaken
+in Ludsey, she undertook in London on a wider scale, and with
+infinitely greater effort. She was elected upon the central committees
+of the various women's associations connected with her husband's
+party; she travelled far and wide throughout the country on the
+business of organizations; she made speeches; she sought the presence
+of Cabinet Ministers at her dinner-table; she lost her color, her
+buoyancy. What she did was done doggedly. To go to bed each night
+tired out, that was her ambition.
+
+"If Harry wears himself out, why should not I?" she said when any of
+her friends remonstrated with her, but not one of them was allowed to
+guess that the secret of all her energy was remorse. She was seeking
+her rest in fatigue. For her remorse grew. Night after night Harry sat
+faithfully, as he had promised to Hamlin, in his seat on the front
+bench below the gangway. He took his part in the debates, he recovered
+the ground which he had lost. He was once more a man marked for high
+office. But it was all labor now, and unloved labor. And the strain of
+it was visible. He went out and in without that happy mien of
+confidence which once Cynthia had been wont to resent, but for which
+she vainly hungered now.
+
+There was one Friday evening toward the end of June when she was
+impelled to approach the dangerous subject of her own accord. She and
+Harry had been dining with the Prime-Minister in Downing Street. All
+that week the House had been sitting into the small hours. The
+Prime-Minister himself had taken her aside and given her a warning.
+They returned home soon after eleven, and as they sat over a final
+cigarette in Harry's study, Cynthia could not shut her eyes to his
+restlessness, the nervous flickering of his fingers, the unsteady
+intonations of his voice.
+
+"Aren't you doing too much, Harry?" she asked.
+
+"Not more than you, Cynthia," he replied as he poured himself out a
+whiskey and soda.
+
+"Much more. And women who are doing what they want to do can stand a
+great deal more than men who are not."
+
+Harry looked across at her quickly.
+
+"But, of course, I am doing just what I have always planned to do,
+just what you are helping me to do--just what I sought your help to
+enable me to do."
+
+"Sure?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+Cynthia had crossed the room to his side and was standing with a hand
+upon his shoulder. She was in a mood of indecision and the touch of
+her hand revealed her mood to Rames. A change came over him. She felt
+a tremor of his body, a sudden quickening of the muscles beneath her
+hand. He became intensely expectant. She could read the question in
+his mind. Was she by some wonderful inspiration going to release him
+from the torment of his soul? But the mere sensation of his movement
+was enough for Cynthia. She withdrew her hand. She repeated
+unconsciously words which he had once used to her.
+
+"After all we get some fun out of it, don't we, Harry?" she said; and
+Harry rose quickly from his chair.
+
+"We get much more out of it, Cynthia," he said with a face which had
+suddenly grown very grave and tender; and the next moment she was in
+his arms, held there tightly, clasped against him. Cynthia was carried
+out of herself. She was swept away unexpectedly upon a swirl of
+passion.
+
+"Harry! Oh, Harry!" she whispered in a low voice of happiness. His
+right hand touched and stroked her hair. Then he tilted her chin
+backward and he looked into her eyes and a smile transfigured his
+face.
+
+"Oh, much more, Cynthia," he cried, and he bent his head and kissed
+her. He put her away from him and looked her over from her delicate
+feet to the fair crown of her hair. She wore a satin gown of white
+with her diamonds in her hair, and a rope of pearls about her neck.
+
+"There! That's that!" he said, and Cynthia with a laugh and the blush
+of a girl answered, "Thank you." Harry Rames lit a cigarette and
+Cynthia's eyes followed each movement and followed it with
+incredulity. The change so ardently longed for by her had come then?
+He loved--he actually loved!
+
+"Since when?" she asked gently.
+
+"Do you remember one evening when you stood there by the door, very
+wistful, and told me something about yourself which I did not know?"
+
+"Yes, I remember. I was unwise."
+
+"You were not. For it began then."
+
+"Really?"
+
+She went up to him, and he caught her hand in his and held it tightly
+clasped.
+
+"I looked at you to-night as we sat at dinner. There was no one but
+you at the dinner-table. How on earth you could have brought yourself
+to marry me, I can't think."
+
+"I told you," said Cynthia, "I was afraid," and there was a note of
+exultation in the confession as though now at last she was freed from
+fear. Harry Rames lifted her suddenly from the ground and held her
+close to him. She hung inert in his arms.
+
+"That's over," he said.
+
+"Quite."
+
+"I love you, Cynthia."
+
+Cynthia threw her head back and closed her eyes, giving to him her
+face, her throat.
+
+"I wanted to hear you say that," she whispered. He carried her over to
+the sofa and laid her down.
+
+For a week or two after that evening Cynthia walked in a dream. The
+great trouble which had weighed upon her thoughts incessantly was
+altogether gone. Mr. Benoliel had been right in his conjectures. He
+must still be right, she reasoned. He had foreseen the trouble
+accurately. "You will be living with your enemy or living quite
+alone." But he had added a saving clause. If on both sides there was
+love, then salvation would be found. Cynthia did not enquire very
+deeply into Mr. Benoliel's meaning. The salvation would come
+automatically, following upon love. She was content to think that and
+she walked in a world of roses as in the days of her girlhood in the
+estancia before James Challoner had come to claim her.
+
+But after a fortnight she waked from her dream. Life was different: it
+was intensified. There was a little more sunlight on a sunny day, a
+little more sparkle in the summer, one walked to music. But the
+trouble was not gone, in spite of the fact that on both sides there
+was love. For with love, contentment had not come to Harry Rames. He
+watched himself, but she watched him closer and she knew. His sleep
+grew disturbed. The torment of his soul was not appeased. Daily he
+became more and more the convict at the oar. There grew up between
+them a loving enmity.
+
+A morning came in the middle of July when to Cynthia the strain became
+intolerable. She was riding under the trees in the Row. It was not yet
+half-past nine and the air was still fresh with the dews of the night.
+A light haze hung near to the ground, the sunlight touched the green
+alleys of trees to gold, and far off across the Park soldiers were
+marching to the drums and fifes. She had reached the cross-road which
+leads to the Albert Gate when an impulse seized her. Mr. Brook was
+riding at her side, dilating enthusiastically on the importance of
+their group in the House of Commons, while Cynthia from time to time
+said mechanically "yes," and again "yes," and wished with her whole
+heart that all the bores in London would not take their exercise at
+half-past nine in the morning. Mr. Brook was in full swing when
+Cynthia abruptly reined in her horse.
+
+"Good-by," she said, "I am afraid I have something I must do," and to
+Mr. Brook's astonishment she turned and cantered quickly back to Hyde
+Park Corner. Thence she rode to Grosvenor Square, gave her horse to
+her groom, and burst into Mr. Benoliel's dining-room where he sat
+breakfasting delicately amidst his silver and flowers. She waved the
+butler from the room and sat down at the table at right-angles to Mr.
+Benoliel.
+
+"I am very unhappy," she said. "I was riding in the Park. It seemed
+ridiculous to be unhappy on a day like this. Yet I am. So I put my
+pride in my pocket."
+
+She spoke with a kind of petulance, like one aggrieved and surprised
+at the contrariness of things. But Mr. Benoliel recognized that her
+distress was very real. His face clouded over; he laid his hand upon
+her arm.
+
+"Have some breakfast, Cynthia."
+
+"Food!" cried Cynthia in contempt. Then she changed her tone. "Well, I
+haven't had any breakfast. Perhaps--yes."
+
+She was a girl with a healthy appetite and very unhappily she ate a
+big breakfast.
+
+"Now light a cigarette and tell me about it."
+
+He pushed over a silver box lined with cedar wood from which Cynthia
+took a cigarette. She tapped the end upon the table and lighted it.
+Mr. Benoliel's cigarettes were famous for their freshness and the
+delicacy of their aroma. Cynthia inhaled the tobacco and was a little
+comforted.
+
+"No," she said. "I can't tell you all about it. I just want to ask you
+a question."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"You remember the warning you gave me at Culver when you didn't know
+that I was married?"
+
+"Quite well," said Mr. Benoliel regretfully. "It came too late."
+
+"I am glad that it came too late," Cynthia observed quietly. "For I
+might have taken it."
+
+Mr. Benoliel looked perplexed.
+
+"Yet you are unhappy, Cynthia?"
+
+"Very. None the less I wouldn't go back. But I don't want you to ask
+me questions. I will tell you at once that you were right--quite right
+up to a point. And the happiness both of Harry and myself depends upon
+your being right all through."
+
+Mr. Benoliel's eyes flashed into life.
+
+"There is a chance then?"
+
+"Oh yes! If you are right."
+
+"Let me hear!"
+
+Cynthia put her question.
+
+"What did you exactly mean when you said that even if the change you
+feared should come and some latent ambition should spring to life and
+snatch him back, separation need not follow, provided that on both
+sides there was love?"
+
+A gravity overspread Benoliel's face.
+
+"I meant, my dear, that sooner or later," he said gently, "after much
+tribulation, much revolt, one of the two will make the necessary
+sacrifice, and will make it whole-heartedly."
+
+Cynthia was silent for a little while.
+
+"Yes," she said at last in a low voice. "Of late I have begun to think
+that that is what you meant."
+
+She dropped her cigarette upon a plate and rose. "Thank you, Mr.
+Benoliel," she said, and she walked with a trailing step to the door.
+At the door she paused.
+
+"And is it always the woman who must make the sacrifice?" she asked;
+and Mr. Benoliel lost in a moment all that second-hand aspect of the
+dilettante which habitually cloaked him.
+
+"Always," he said, with a ringing gravity of voice. "That is the law
+of the world, and neither man nor woman shall change it."
+
+Cynthia opened the door and went out.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXXV
+
+                         THE LITTLE BIT EXTRA
+
+
+Yet that August when Parliament had risen, Harry Rames and Cynthia
+were cruising in the Solent and no word had been spoken by her to
+remedy their trouble. It was Cynthia who had proposed this holiday and
+Harry had fallen in with her plan eagerly. They had chartered a small
+steam yacht of a hundred tons. Rames navigated the boat himself and
+slipping their moorings one afternoon, they left Cowes behind them and
+steamed away through the north channel of the Shingles to Poole.
+Cynthia had ceased to wrestle with herself. She was content to lie in
+her deck chair and put into and out of the harbors of the West.
+
+"This shall be the perfect holiday," she had said. "Whatever the
+future may hold for us, we will have this month together without
+visitors, without any shadows."
+
+They were tossed in Portland race; they steamed across the West Bay
+over a sea smooth and bright as a steel mirror. They dropped their
+anchor at Dartmouth. They rounded the Start on the next day and
+crossed the Bar of Salcombe harbor under the shadow of Bolt Head on
+just such an evening of sunset as that which the poet fixed in a few
+lines of deathless verse. Cynthia stood with her arm through Harry's,
+as very slowly with the lead going in the bows he set the boat over
+the shallows.
+
+"Sunset and evening star," Cynthia quoted.
+
+"And one clear call for me," Harry Rames continued and abruptly broke
+off like a guilty person who has spoken without thought. Cynthia
+walked to the end of the bridge. After all, this cruise had made a
+difference to Harry. She consoled herself by the reflection. He had
+recovered something of his buoyancy of spirits since he had trodden
+the planks of this little yacht and looked down from its flimsy bridge
+onto its narrow deck and tapering bow. He was interested in the boat,
+quick to induce her to give him of her best, and her brass shone like
+a woman's ornaments. They put out from Salcombe the next day, and
+keeping clear of Plymouth and Polperro and Fowey, heard the bell upon
+the Manacles in the afternoon and dropped anchor between the woods of
+Helford River. They stayed there for a day and made a passage thence
+to Guernsey on a night of moonlight. Cynthia sat late upon the bridge
+while Rames in his great-coat kept the boat upon her course. Toward
+morning he came to her side and stooped over her.
+
+"I thought you were asleep."
+
+"No."
+
+"Aren't you tired?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You were lying so still."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia. "I am storing this night up."
+
+The swish and sparkle of the water along the boat's sides, the rattle
+of the chain as the helmsman spun the wheel, the quiet orders of her
+husband, the infinite peace of sky and sea, and the yacht like a jewel
+hung between them, were indeed to dwell long in Cynthia's memories.
+For their holiday was at an end. A sailor was sent ashore at Guernsey
+for the ship's letters and he brought them on board whilst Harry and
+Cynthia were at breakfast in the deck cabin. There was one for Rames
+with the Hickleton postmark stamped upon the envelope. Harry tore it
+open reluctantly.
+
+"Carberley has resigned," he said. "There will be a meeting of the
+executive on Friday night to adopt young Burrell."
+
+Cynthia looked out across the harbor.
+
+"We ought to go back, oughtn't we?" she said slowly.
+
+Harry glanced at his letter.
+
+"It is not expected that the election will take place for five weeks,"
+he answered.
+
+Cynthia shook her head.
+
+"We shall want all that time, Harry." Then she cried with a sudden
+vehemence. "You have got to win this fight, Harry. So much hangs on it
+for you and me."
+
+"I know, Cynthia," he answered.
+
+"More than you know."
+
+Harry rose from his chair.
+
+"I'll give orders. We will steam back to Southampton at once. But it's
+a pity, isn't it? Old Carberley might have waited for another month. I
+am sorry."
+
+"So am I," said Cynthia. Her eyes had wandered from him and were once
+more fixed upon the shipping in the harbor. Her face had grown white.
+"More sorry than you can know."
+
+A little white dinghy, gay with a sailor in a white jersey and a red
+cap, was just leaving the side of a big yacht moored across the water.
+The picture of that little boat was fixed for life in Cynthia's
+recollections. It had nothing to do with her, she never knew who
+sailed in the yacht, or on what business the boat put off to shore.
+But the picture of it was vivid to her long after important memories
+had grown altogether dim.
+
+
+The fight for the Hickleton Division was memorable in the political
+history of that year. From first to last it was Rames's fight. The
+candidate was young, and a halting speaker, and unknown to the
+constituency. But he lived in Rames's house and when he appeared upon
+a platform he appeared with Rames at his side. When he spoke he
+uttered the words which Rames had prepared, and when he had finished
+Rames was on his legs to fill up the deficiencies and whip the
+assembly to a fire of enthusiasm. From the great guns of his own party
+no assistance came. Indeed, most of them would have been well pleased
+had the seat not been won. For in the forefront of his programme Mr.
+William Burrell put hostility to the land bill. The two men left the
+white house early in the morning to return there late at night. For
+five weeks the lights of Rames's motor flashed on the hedges of the
+country roads in Warwickshire, and the constituency was won. The
+result was declared at noon, and half an hour later Mr. William
+Burrell, M.P., a slim, fair young gentleman with a small gift of
+flippancy, made his one memorable speech in the big room of the club.
+
+"Gentlemen," he said, "the British public, as a whole, is indifferent
+to politics. It wakes up to be sure at the time of an election. But if
+I were asked to define politics in relation to the British public I
+should define it as a spasm of pain recurring once in every four or
+five years. What, then, is it which arouses the enthusiasm of which I
+am a witness? What is it which achieves these triumphs? Need I say? It
+is personality. Character--that's what you want in public life--and
+now, gentlemen, you have got it."
+
+The speech was received with a very tornado of laughter. Rames turned
+to his wife who sat by him on the little raised platform at the end of
+the room.
+
+"I told you he wasn't a fool," he said, and Mr. Arnall, who had come
+over from Ludsey, cried out with a chuckle of delight that he had now
+a companion speech to match the famous one of Taylor the democrat.
+
+"You won't go back to London until to-morrow, will you?" said Rames to
+young Burrell. "It's best not to hurry away the moment you've won the
+seat."
+
+They returned accordingly to the white house, and when the two men
+were left by Cynthia to their wine after dinner, Rames turned
+inquisitively to his guest.
+
+"I have noticed a change in you, Burrell, during these five weeks. You
+came into the contest as though it was a joke, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes, I did," said Burrell, blushing.
+
+"And though you laughed at it again to-day, as a matter of fact it
+ceased to be a joke very quickly."
+
+Burrell agreed. "Very quickly."
+
+Rames fetched a box of cigars from the sideboard.
+
+"Now light a cigar," he said, "and tell me just as clearly as you can
+what brought about the change, and what this election really means to
+you."
+
+Mr. William Burrell, M.P., shied at the proposal.
+
+"Oh, I say, Rames," he began, but Rames cut him short.
+
+"I really want to hear," he said earnestly. "I ask for a particular
+reason."
+
+Burrell lit his cigar. The contest had impressed him deeply. But like
+most men he was shy of revealing any strength of feeling. The eager
+eyes of Rames, however, kept him to his task. He looked back over the
+five weeks, gathering up his little sheaf of recollections.
+
+"What remains in my mind," he said with hesitation, "is not the
+excitement, nor the applause, is not the difficulty of making speeches
+about subjects with which one is not half acquainted, nor the fear
+of being asked questions for which one has no reply ready, but
+something quite different. It is the memory of little bare raftered
+school-rooms, hot with gas-light, crowded with white faces, faces so
+hopeful, so--intolerably hopeful--the faces of people who look
+confidently to candidates and Parliaments for so much more than it
+seems to me Parliaments and candidates can ever do."
+
+"Ah!" said Rames curiously. "You felt that too. I remember that I
+did."
+
+Burrell leaned forward.
+
+"Did you too, though you shouted yourself hoarse with the rest, feel a
+little ashamed?"
+
+Rames reflected. "No," he said; "never." Then he added with a smile,
+"but I think I should now."
+
+"I did," said Burrell. "There were times when I wanted to stop my
+speech in the middle and cry out, 'Don't look at me with such high
+hopes. It's no use! It's no use!' But I held my tongue. For there's
+always the little that governments can do. That's the consolation,
+isn't it?" Burrell was finding it easier to speak out his thoughts
+now. The false shame with which he had begun had quite left him. His
+words tumbled out hot from his soul. The strangely curious, almost
+envious, look with which Harry Rames, his tutor and leader, waited
+upon him encouraged and urged him on.
+
+"The fight, the excitement, the victory--oh yes, they are worth
+having, even though one owes them to another, just as I owe them,
+Captain Rames, to you. But now, after the victory, there's still the
+little which can be done; and there's still the memory of the raftered
+school-rooms, the hot gas-light, and the rows of eager, hopeful,
+pallid faces to help one on to do it."
+
+He stopped and leaned back in his chair. The shame of a young man who
+has let his tongue wag before his elders and masters seized hold upon
+him.
+
+"But why did you lead me on to talk this sort of blatter to you?" he
+asked in an aggrieved voice. "All that I have just learnt you knew
+long since."
+
+Harry Rames shook his head.
+
+"Your opposition to Devenish's land bill shows it," Burrell insisted.
+"Oh, we'll have a real policy of land reform, not an act of revenge."
+
+Harry Rames leaned across the corner of the table toward young
+Burrell. To the youth's eyes he looked at this moment extraordinarily
+haggard and old.
+
+"I'll tell you, Burrell, why I asked my question. I wanted to
+recapture from you if I could something of a man's enthusiasm at his
+first political victory."
+
+Burrell looked at his leader with astonishment. Of the man of fire who
+had blazed through the constituency from corner to corner with clear
+ringing phrases and an inexhaustible good-humor there was now nothing
+left. He was burnt out. He sat with brooding eyes and a white face all
+fallen into despair. The tale of his years was suddenly written large
+upon him. Burrell had wit enough to understand that fatigue did not
+explain the change. A mask was withdrawn; he saw misery like a cancer.
+Rames sat and betrayed himself like a man in his cups.
+
+"You tell me you felt ashamed in the school-rooms. I never knew
+anything of such shame. To win, to win, to win! That was all I thought
+about. That was all the desire I felt. That was what I hoped you would
+help me to recapture to-night. But you haven't helped."
+
+Rames's eyes dwelt angrily upon his colleague.
+
+"No. You have made me feel ashamed too." Then his face relaxed and he
+added in a friendlier voice: "I believe that I have helped you--really
+helped you. Oh, not to win a seat in the House of Commons. That's
+nothing to be so proud about. But to find your vocation."
+
+"Where you have found yours," said Burrell firmly.
+
+"Not a bit of it," said Rames, and then he woke from his moodiness to
+a savage outburst of contempt. "Oh, I am going on with it. Don't be
+alarmed, Burrell. I'll lead you. We'll put up a fight. We'll make the
+fur fly. Very possibly we'll pull the whole Government down with a
+run. But--" and drawing his chair nearer to the youth he changed his
+tone. "I'll tell you the truth about the House of Commons. It's the
+place where the second-rate gets the finest show in the world. In no
+walk of life does second-rate intellect reap so high a reward or meet
+with such great esteem. But it won't lift you to the very top. Nor
+will first-rate intellect either. Remember that!"
+
+"What will then?" asked Burrell in perplexity, and Harry Rames
+shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"The little bit extra. Character, perseverance! I don't know.
+Something anyway. It's the same everywhere now. There are too many
+clever people about. Faith in a cause, I think will do it. That's why
+the sentimentalists do so much harm in public affairs. They get their
+way, because they believe. They are not playing the political game.
+Cleverness is twelve for a penny nowadays. To get up to the top you
+must have the little bit extra. Now in the sphere of politics I
+haven't got it. I don't say office is out of my reach. It isn't. I
+have been offered it. I have refused it. But I haven't got the little
+bit extra. Outside politics--in quite another sphere--I believe I
+have. But that's all done with. I was warned when I went into
+politics--warned by a shrewd, wise man. But I wouldn't listen, and so
+some day amongst the second-rate Right Honorables half a dozen lines
+will announce my death in the _Times_."
+
+Young Burrell had no great experience of the intenser emotions, and
+the bitterness with which Rames spoke appalled him. He saw a man in
+torture, and he listened to a cry of pain grown intolerable. Then in a
+second all was changed again. Rames was on his feet replacing the
+stoppers in the decanters, taking the shades from off the candles,
+performing the little conventional acts of a host in his dining-room.
+The chasm in the ordinary level surface of things which had yawned for
+a moment and given Burrell a glimpse of the pit where misery gnawed
+had closed up.
+
+"We will join my wife," said Rames. He stopped at the door.
+
+"Were you ever at Toulon?"
+
+"No."
+
+"There's a statue on the quay there, at the water's edge, overlooking
+the harbor. A great bronze figure, extraordinarily alert, with a light
+upon its forehead, the Genius of the Sea. And on the open pages of a
+bronze book in the front of the pedestal, the names of the great
+sailors are engraved. Cook and the rest of them. The list ends with
+D'Urville, I remember. I only saw the statue once. My father showed it
+to me when I was a boy. I don't suppose that I have ever thought of it
+until to-day." He repeated softly as though speaking to himself:
+
+"Yes the list ends with D'Urville." Then he roused himself. "Bring
+your cigar in. Cynthia doesn't mind. By the way," and a smile of
+tenderness transfigured his face, "not a word of this to her. She
+thinks I am going to be a great man. She's wrong, but I don't want her
+to know before she needs must." Burrell consented at once. He followed
+Rames from the room with all joy in his victory quite overcast. He
+looked beyond the surprising revelations of his host and obtained a
+glimpse into a new side of life. He was the spectator of one of
+the grim comedies of marriage. Here was the wife--so it seemed to
+him--believing joyfully in the great destiny of her husband; and the
+husband laboring in torment to sustain her belief, while all the while
+he knew that his destiny was thwarted and that the true current of his
+life ran through other fields.
+
+They went along the passage into the drawing-room. It was a warm night
+of September and the windows stood open upon the garden. Cynthia was
+not in the room. Harry stepped out onto the lawn. The night was dark
+and he could see no one. But the light in the drawing-room had
+revealed him as he stepped out, and whilst he was standing peering
+into the darkness Cynthia came softly over the grass to his side.
+
+"You'll catch cold," he said. "The dew's heavy."
+
+Cynthia took his arm. "Hush," she said. "Listen!" and through the
+still air the chimes of the great clock in Ludsey steeple floated with
+a silvery and melodious sound to their ears. A tune was struck out by
+the bells, then another.
+
+"I heard that," said Cynthia in a whisper, "on the night my father
+died. I was sitting alone with him in the darkness while his life
+drifted away. It was winter."
+
+Harry put his arm about her and pressed her to his side.
+
+"I heard them again," she continued, "one night when I was waiting for
+you to telephone to me, Harry. Do you remember?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I waited a long time for you that night, Harry," and there was a
+catch in her voice. "Ludsey chimes have meant very much to us. Let us
+hear them out!"
+
+They stood together in the darkness until the last distant note had
+died away. It seemed to Rames that Cynthia listened as though she were
+taking a farewell of them.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+                             THE TELEGRAM
+
+
+Harry Rames and Cynthia travelled up to London the next day. Cynthia
+was restless and excited.
+
+"Let us dine at a restaurant and go to a theatre, Harry," she said. "I
+can't sit still and stay at home to-night."
+
+"Very well. What shall we go and see?"
+
+"Oh, something with bright colors and movement and music."
+
+But there ran through the piece she chose a melody of a haunting
+wistfulness and Harry Rames, happening to glance at his wife in the
+darkness of the auditorium, saw that the tears were raining silently
+down her cheeks.
+
+"What's the matter, Cynthia?" he asked in a whisper.
+
+Cynthia smiled at him through her tears and laid a hand upon his arm.
+
+"Hush!" she answered. "It's all right, Harry."
+
+As the curtain descended at the end of the act she said, "Let us go
+now quickly, do you mind? Before the lights are turned up."
+
+They were, fortunately, near to the end of their row of stalls, and
+they were able to slip out while the curtain was still ascending and
+descending upon the lighted stage, and the auditorium still dark.
+Rames left Cynthia in the lobby while he went in search of his
+carriage. When he returned he found her standing with her face
+carefully turned to the wall in front of a commonplace engraving,
+which seemed to be demanding from her the most meticulous study.
+
+"Have you found it?" she asked, and she hurried with him across the
+pavement. "Let us go home, Harry. It was nothing except nerves. I was
+stupid. We have been doing a good deal lately, haven't we?"
+
+"That's all right, Cynthia. You poor little girl," said Rames as he
+crossed her cloak over her throat. He knew her too well to make the
+mistake of plying her with questions, and they drove to their home in
+silence.
+
+"You had better go to bed, Cynthia," he said. "I'll send your maid to
+you."
+
+"No. I am all right now," she answered. "I have something to say,
+Harry."
+
+She went forward to his study--that room with the mahogany panels
+where both had faced the hardest crises of their lives, had known the
+worst of their sorrows, the sweetest of their joys. Harry followed
+her, turned on the lights, and closed the door. Cynthia was already
+standing by the fireplace with a foot upon the fender; and she
+shivered as though she were cold.
+
+"Yes, it's chilly," said Rames. "Ill light the fire."
+
+He struck a match and set light to the paper. The wood crackled, the
+flames spurted up. Cynthia threw off her cloak and, crouching before
+the fire, warmed herself. Harry Rames drew up an arm-chair for her.
+
+"Won't you sit here, Cynthia, and be comfortable?" he asked, and his
+voice seemed to rouse her from a gloomy contemplation. She stood up
+and walked over to his bureau.
+
+Harry's eyes followed her movements closely. With a growing
+consternation he saw her grasp the handles of a locked drawer and try
+to open it.
+
+"What do you keep in here, Harry?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, some old forgotten things."
+
+"Your charts?"
+
+"My word, yes. I believe they are there," he said with an air of
+surprise.
+
+"Will you show them to me?" Cynthia asked. "I should like to see
+them."
+
+"I don't know where the key is. It's lost."
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"For all the chance I have of finding it, dear, it might just as well
+be at the bottom of the Serpentine."
+
+Harry had not moved away from the fireplace. Cynthia, her back toward
+him, had been playing with the brass handles of the locked drawer. Now
+she swung round suddenly. Often she had wondered what errand had taken
+him from the house at one o'clock of the morning after she had
+revealed her heart to him in this very room. Now she guessed the
+truth. It was on that night that he had begun to build up his dykes
+against the encroachments of his longings. She faced him; her eyes
+burned steadily upon his face, thoughtful, but betraying nothing of
+her thoughts.
+
+"Yes," she said, "I suppose it might as well be in the Serpentine."
+She turned again to the drawer.
+
+"A knife will open it easily, Harry."
+
+Harry Rames moved uncomfortably.
+
+"It had better be left alone, Cynthia," he said. But she insisted and,
+opening a blade of his knife, he went reluctantly across the room to
+her side.
+
+"It is your wish, Cynthia. You will remember that?" he said gravely.
+"For myself I would much rather that it should never be unlocked until
+both of us are dead."
+
+Cynthia showed no surprise at the gravity of his voice. But now she
+too paused. "There is still time," she was saying to herself in
+feverish trouble of mind, though her face was calm. "There is still
+time. He is giving me my chance--my last chance." Her eyelids were
+lowered over her eyes and she glanced at him under the thick lashes.
+
+"You are afraid to open it, Harry?"
+
+"Yes, I am afraid."
+
+It was not merely the outrush of old and overwhelming memories which
+he dreaded. But that locked drawer had become to him a symbol of his
+own self-mastery. So long as it remained locked, and no longer, he
+would dominate his torments and be the captain of his soul. For so
+long he would keep locked a frail door against his yearnings. Cynthia,
+in a voice so faltering and low that it was hardly audible, said:
+
+"Still I should like it opened."
+
+"Very well."
+
+She stood with her fingers clenched upon her palms whilst Harry
+inserted the blade of his knife in the chink of the drawer, ran it
+along until it touched the lock, and then forced apart the fastenings.
+There was a crack as of splintering wood. Harry Rames replaced his
+knife in his pocket, pulled out the drawer, and carried it over to his
+writing-table.
+
+"There it is," he said, moving away from it to the fireplace. Cynthia
+bent over the drawer and turned on the light of a reading lamp which
+stood upon the table.
+
+"This is your own chart upon the top, Harry?"
+
+"Yes. It is the last one, you see. Hemming may be bringing back
+another."
+
+"Will you show me exactly the point you reached?"
+
+It seemed to Harry as if she was bent on trying him to the last point
+of endurance.
+
+"It is marked there quite plainly, Cynthia," he said.
+
+Cynthia leaned over the drawer--for a long time. Harry Rames was quite
+surprised at the closeness of her scrutiny. It was so long since she
+had shown any interest in his journey or indeed in anything except his
+political career. As a matter of fact, Cynthia saw of that map nothing
+but a blur: for her eyes were dim with tears, and she bent so low over
+its configurations simply because in that attitude her face was
+hidden.
+
+She moved.
+
+"What is this?"
+
+She took up a brown package, tied up with string, which lay in a
+corner of the drawer.
+
+"I don't know," said Rames with a puzzled face. "I have forgotten."
+
+"May I open it?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+Cynthia cut the string and, one after another, perhaps a score of
+brown telegraph envelopes slipped out in a cascade and fell upon the
+table in front of her.
+
+"Telegrams," she said curiously. "Unopened, too! Oh, Harry!" this with
+a mocking laugh of reproach. Then she looked at the address of one of
+the telegrams. It ran:
+
+
+                            Rames,
+                               S. S. Perhaps,
+                                  Tilbury Docks.
+
+
+As she read her face changed. There came a look of introspection in
+her dark, wide-open eyes. She swept back in her thoughts over the
+course of years and took note of the irony of things and of the
+surprising changes in a life like hers which, to all the world, was
+uneventful and prescribed.
+
+"I remember," she said. "These are the good wishes sent to you when
+you started. You once told me that you never opened them."
+
+"I hadn't the time. We had to catch the tide out of London. We were
+late getting away. I had forgotten that I had kept them all."
+
+"I am going to open them."
+
+"It is too late to answer them."
+
+"I wonder."
+
+Cynthia opened the telegrams until she came upon one about half
+through the number which arrested her attention. This she spread out
+before her and smiled at its phrasing.
+
+"Harry!" she said.
+
+Rames turned about.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Come and read this."
+
+He stood behind Cynthia's chair and read aloud the message still
+legible upon the form.
+
+"Every heart-felt wish for a triumphant journey from an unknown friend
+in--;" and then he stopped with an intake of his breath. "In South
+America," he resumed, and so stood quite still for the space of a few
+seconds. Then he leaned forward and looked at the name of the
+telegraph office from which the message had been sent.
+
+"Daventry," he cried.
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia with a little laugh upon which her voice broke.
+"We had a telegraph office on the estancia. We were very proud of it,
+I can tell you"; and then the amusement died away from her voice, and
+"oh!" she whispered in a long sigh, as she felt his arm about her.
+
+"You sent that! You! Cynthia! Before I knew you, before we met."
+
+"Yes, dear, I sent it."
+
+"Just think," he cried. "It reached me at Tilbury. It travelled out
+with me to the South. It was in the desk in my cabin for three long
+dark winters. It came back with me to England. By chance I met
+you----"
+
+"No, not by chance, Harry," Cynthia interrupted. "I sent Mr. Benoliel
+to fetch you."
+
+"Yes, you did," he agreed, with a laugh. "We met, and we married, and
+through all these changes it has lain here unopened. Why didn't I open
+it? That was conceit, Cynthia. I was haughty. I was going out to
+discover the South Pole. I didn't open my telegrams."
+
+"But if you had opened it, Harry, you would only have laughed. For
+it's just the message of a schoolgirl, isn't it? You were one of my
+heroes--oh, not the only one but the latest one--I had just let you in
+past the turnstile to my enchanted garden. I was seventeen on the very
+day I sent it. I drove down to the office--oh in such a condition of
+importance. I pictured to myself you, the unknown you, sitting in your
+cabin and wondering and wondering and wondering who your little friend
+was in South America. Then I drove back and"--she stopped and went on
+again slowly--"yes, other things happened to me that day." She looked
+down again at the telegram. "Yes, the message of a foolish and
+romantic school-girl."
+
+"I should like to be able to think, Cynthia," said her husband, "that
+I had opened it when it came."
+
+"But you didn't," said Cynthia, "and so--" she broke off her sentence.
+She took the telegram form, folded it, and replaced it in its
+envelope. She took a brush from a little bottle of gum which stood
+ready upon the table by the inkstand and, smearing the inner border of
+the envelope, stuck it down again. Then she stood up and turned to her
+husband. "And so," she continued, "you must take it, Harry, as though
+it were despatched to you by me only to-day for the first time and
+delivered to you here now at midnight."
+
+She held out to him the telegram and he took it, gazing at her with a
+look of wonder. And then hope flamed in his eyes. Cynthia turned away
+abruptly. To her that swift flame of hope, of life, was almost
+intolerable.
+
+"Then you knew," he cried.
+
+Cynthia nodded her head, but she kept her face averted.
+
+"I have known a long time," she answered in a low voice. "Ever since
+the letter came to you with the Rexland stamp."
+
+The sound of her voice and her attitude pierced to Rames's heart. His
+exultation gave way to concern.
+
+"I am very sorry, Cynthia," he said gently. "I tried to hide it."
+
+"Oh, my dear, I know you did. With all your strength you tried to hide
+it. You watched yourself each minute. But," and she turned to him with
+a little smile of tenderness, "I watched you closer still, and the
+longing grew too big to be hidden."
+
+Harry Rames made no pretence to deny the truth of her words, knowing
+full well that all denial would be vain. The screen was down between
+them.
+
+"Yes," he said; "but Cynthia, I keep my bargain."
+
+"My dear, there is no longer any bargain between us," she answered,
+"for on both sides there is love. Of that I am very sure."
+
+She held out her hands to him and he caught them and held her against
+his breast.
+
+"You said you had rather that drawer was not unlocked until both of us
+were dead," she whispered. "My dear, if that drawer was not to be
+unlocked, we might both of us be dead at once for all the value our
+lives were going to be. So you will go, you must, unless we are to be
+wrecked altogether. We have been most unhappy, both of us. I, because
+I thought of the dangers," and she suddenly caught him close as though
+even now she dared not let him go, "and could not bring myself to make
+the sacrifice and let you run the risk--you, because the call was
+always in your ears. It couldn't go on. That's the truth, Harry.
+Especially now that you know that your secret's no longer a secret to
+me. We should grow estranged, embittered, each one thinking the other
+horribly selfish. Perhaps, even hatred might come."
+
+"No," protested Harry.
+
+"Oh, yes, yes. It has come from smaller causes often enough. It might
+come, Harry, and that would be terrible. I have thought it out, my
+dear. All the time we were cruising down in the West I was thinking
+our position over and over and over. And it seemed to me that you must
+win this Hickleton election first--and then I would tell you that I
+understood your great trouble and let you go. But you had to win
+first. I couldn't let you go while people might be able to say that
+you had gone because you had been beaten in your political ambitions.
+I was too proud of you, my dear, to allow that. You must lay down your
+career at a moment of success, leaving behind you a good name amongst
+your colleagues and perhaps a great many regrets. But you have won the
+election now, you have made good, as they say, and so, for both our
+sakes, you must go."
+
+She drew herself out of his arms and moved away to the fire.
+
+"Of course it's just what I wanted when I first met you, isn't it?"
+she said with a wavering effort of a laugh. "I urged you to go back
+and finish your work the first time I met you--one night at the
+Admiralty. Only things have changed a good deal since then, haven't
+they?"
+
+Her voice, which had been steady up till now, broke, and with a sob
+she suddenly hid her face in her hands. "Oh, Harry," she cried as
+though her heart was breaking, and he hurried to her, exclaiming:
+
+"Cynthia, I am a brute. I can't leave you here for three years alone."
+
+She held him off with her arm outstretched, dreading lest she should
+weaken and take her advantage of his remorse and so have to go through
+all this heart-rending renunciation again at some future time.
+
+"You won't, Harry," she said, drying her eyes with her handkerchief.
+"I have thought it all out. My father asked me on his death-bed not to
+desert the Daventry estancia altogether. He loved it so himself that
+he did not wish to think that he would die and that no one of his own
+people would ever see it again and make sure that all was going well
+with it. And here's the opportunity. While you go down to the
+Antarctic I will go back to the Daventry estancia. I couldn't live
+here day after day with you away amidst the storms and the snow. There
+I shall be able to. I will have the estancia to look after. When will
+you go?"
+
+"Not so very soon, Cynthia, after all," he said. "It will take me a
+year before the preparations are complete. Besides, there's the money
+to be raised."
+
+Cynthia raised her shoulders in a gesture of reproach.
+
+"Oh, Harry! There's no trouble about the money, of course."
+
+Rames stared at her. "Cynthia," he cried. "You'll help?"
+
+"More than help, Harry," she answered. "You see I let you go--yes. I
+even bid you go--yes. But I mean to have my share, my dear, in
+whatever you do. I mean that you shall carry something of me,
+something more than a telegram this time, to your farthest South."
+
+Rames sat down in a chair by the side of the fire close to where she
+stood. He gazed into the flames in silence. With all gentleness and
+love she was heaping coals of fire upon his head. Every look, every
+word she spoke, confessed the deep pain which he was causing her. She
+was brave, but through the curtain of her bravery her fear and anguish
+shone. He spoke as a man will who is smitten by his conscience.
+
+"I am very sorry, Cynthia. When I asked you to marry me I had no
+suspicion that any longing could get so strong a hold on me. I once
+told you carelessly that men were driven out upon these expeditions by
+the torment of their souls. I said that knowing it only by hearsay and
+by the plain proof of it which they show in what they have written.
+Now I know it--here," and he struck his breast above his heart. "Yes,
+I have got to go if I am ever to have peace. But I am sorry, Cynthia."
+
+His voice trailed off into silence and Cynthia laid a hand upon his
+head and stroked his hair. "I know," she said, "I know."
+
+"All that I thought so fine, so well worth having--the fight with
+other men for mastery, the conquest with what conquest would
+bring--power and rule and governing--it's extraordinary how completely
+all desire for it has vanished out of me!" he continued. "Do you
+remember the account I gave you of my maiden speech?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Cynthia's hand had gone to her breast, but her voice was steady.
+
+"There was a fragment of time when the world went blank, when I lost
+the thread of my speech, and stood dumb. A fragment of time so short
+that it wasn't noticeable to any one in the House except myself."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, these three years of politics seem to me just such an
+unnoticeable interruption of my real life. The fight which I revelled
+in appears to me now a squabble made ignoble with intrigues, bitter
+with mean disappointments, the victory not worth the fight. No doubt I
+am wrong. I went into the House of Commons, you see, without ideas,"
+and Cynthia started at the word so familiar to her fancies. "Now I
+have one, a big one, and it has mastered me."
+
+And so Harry Rames passed at last through the turnstile into Cynthia's
+private garden. But it was in accordance with the irony of their lives
+that she wished with every drop of her blood that he had remained
+outside.
+
+"I long for simple things, not shifts and intrigues and bitterness;
+the gray mists on glaciers; the day's journey over the snow, with its
+wind ridges and its storms; the hard, lean life of it all; the fight,
+not with men, but with enormous things of nature, some dangerous, some
+serene, but, whether dangerous or serene, wholly indifferent." He
+gazed for a little while into the fire, seeking in the analysis of his
+emotions his apologia.
+
+"I think, Cynthia," he continued, "that once a man has gone far into
+the empty spaces of the earth, he has the mark of them upon him.
+Voices call from them over all the leagues of all the seas and need no
+receivers at the end."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia, and once more her memories travelled back to the
+death-bed of old Daventry in the dark room of the white house. He had
+given her reasons for his great love of his estancia on the wide
+plains of Argentina. But there had been another reason, she
+remembered, which his failing wits had not allowed his tongue to
+formulate. Cynthia had often wondered what that reason was. She had no
+doubt that her husband had explained it now. "Yes, my father also
+heard those voices."
+
+After a short silence Harry Rames reached out his hand and took hers.
+
+"I think, my dear," he said gently, "that things would have been
+different, that I should not have wanted to go, had we been fortunate
+enough to have children--" and with a cry Cynthia turned to him
+fiercely.
+
+"No, no!" she exclaimed. "During this hour, for the first time, I have
+been thanking God we had no children. For if we had, you would still
+have wanted to go just as much as you do now, and that I could not
+have borne."
+
+Harry had no answer for her outburst. In his heart he knew that what
+she had said was true. He sat in silence, his eyes upon the fire and
+her hand in his; and a moment or two later she dropped upon her knees
+at his side.
+
+"But oh, Harry, come back to me!" she cried. "You must go I know.
+That's the way things happen. But oh, come back to me."
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+                               THE LAST
+
+
+At nine o'clock on a morning of July during the next year an auxiliary
+barquentine of four hundred and fifty tons steamed westward with the
+tide past the Isle of Wight. Besides the helmsman, Cynthia and Harry
+Rames were upon the bridge. They stood side by side, Cynthia gripping
+the rail in front of her with both of her hands. They did not speak.
+The ship glided past Cowes gay with its white yachts and crowded
+esplanade and rounded Gurnard Point into Newtown Bay. Cynthia looked
+ahead through a blur of tears, watching for and yet dreading to see a
+low square church tower stand out against the sky close to the water
+in a dip of the coast-line hills. Opposite to that church the ship was
+stopped and a boat was lowered. Cynthia, with Robert Brook to look
+after her, was put ashore on Yarmouth pier; and the barquentine dipped
+her flag and steamed on to the Needles and the open sea on its three
+years' voyage.
+
+Robert Brook escorted Cynthia across the water to Southampton, and the
+next day witnessed her departure from the docks on a steamer of the
+Royal Mail for Buenos Ayres. He returned to London that afternoon,
+took a solitary dinner at his club, and walked afterward to Curzon
+Street. The Rames's house was all lit up, and from the open windows
+music drifted out upon the summer night. Harry and Cynthia had let
+their house a week before, and to-night the new residents were giving
+a party. Robert Brook had an invitation and went in. He listened for
+half an hour to a party of coons and then could endure no more. The
+comic songs and the laughter seemed to him that night in this house a
+desecration. For in the characters of Harry Rames and his wife he
+chose to see something of greatness, in their lives something of
+achievement. He looked about the walls. Some dark and terrible hours
+must needs have been passed by both Harry and Cynthia within them
+before the great resolution had been taken which had condemned her to
+three years of loneliness on an estancia in South America and had
+stripped him of a sure career in politics.
+
+Robert Brook fell into a black mood and an utter weariness with his
+own life. For him season was to follow season and to find him still a
+guest at the parties and the entertainments until he became old and a
+bore. He envied Harry his expedition, Cynthia her sorrow. He went out
+wretched and walked by instinct down Whitehall. On his way to his club
+he passed the windows of the Board of Trade. These, too, were
+brilliantly lit; for within the building a Cabinet Minister was
+endeavoring to compose an acute struggle between artisans and their
+employers. Robert Brook watched those windows; and his disgust with
+his own life increased. Here again was achievement for others, not for
+himself. There would never be room for him within that building, nor
+within any other where the nation's administration was being done. And
+his life was going; indeed, the best part of it was done. He walked on
+to his own small house and let himself in with his key. The passage
+was dark and the house quite silent. He stood for a while alone in the
+darkness and the silence. He thought of Cynthia and Harry, of Devenish
+and his colleagues, of others without eminence, but, at all events,
+with wives and children. He had given up his life to the House of
+Commons and the House of Commons repaid him by barely knowing his
+name. There was probably no man in London more wretched that night
+than Robert Brook.
+
+
+
+                               The End
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Turnstile, by
+A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TURNSTILE ***
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+<head>
+<title>The Turnstile</title>
+<meta name="Author" content="A. E. W. Mason">
+
+<meta name="Publisher" content="Charles Scribner's Sons.">
+<meta name="Date" content="1912">
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Turnstile, by A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Turnstile
+
+Author: A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
+
+Release Date: January 27, 2012 [EBook #38689]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TURNSTILE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p class="hang1">Transcriber's Notes:<br>
+
+1. Page scan source:<br>
+http://www.archive.org/details/turnstile00masogoog</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE TURNSTILE</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>BOOKS BY A. E. W. MASON</h3>
+
+<h4><span class="sc">Published By</span> CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h4>
+<hr class="W20">
+<div style="margin-left:35%; font-weight:bold">
+<p class="continue">The Broken Road.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;$1.50</p>
+<p class="continue">At the Villa Rose. Illustrated. $1.50</p>
+<p class="continue">The Turnstile. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>net</i> $1.30</p>
+</div>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>THE TURNSTILE</h1>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h5>BY</h5>
+
+<h2>A. E. W. MASON</h2>
+
+<h5>AUTHOR OF &quot;FOUR FEATHERS,&quot; &quot;RUNNING WATER,&quot;<br>
+&quot;THE BROKEN ROAD,&quot; ETC.</h5>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br>
+NEW YORK &nbsp;::&nbsp;::&nbsp;::&nbsp; 1912</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3><span class="sc2">Copyright, 1911, 1912, by</span><br>
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h3>
+<hr class="W10" style="margin-top:0pt; margin-bottom:0pt">
+<h4>Published June, 1912</h4>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<table cellpadding="10" style="width:90%; margin-left:5%; font-weight:bold">
+<colgroup><col style="width:10%; text-align:right; vertical-align:top"><col style="width:90%"></colgroup>
+<tr>
+<td><span class="sc2">Chapter</span></td>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>I.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_01" href="#div1_01">The Swinging of a Chandelier.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>II.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_02" href="#div1_02">Of an Earthquake and James Challoner.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>III.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_03" href="#div1_03">Challoner's Pilgrimage.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>IV.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_04" href="#div1_04">Cynthia's Birthday.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>V.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_05" href="#div1_05">The Reaper.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>VI.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_06" href="#div1_06">A Visitor at the Estancia.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>VII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_07" href="#div1_07">Both Sides of the Door.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>VIII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_08" href="#div1_08">The Flight.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>IX.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_09" href="#div1_09">Robert Daventry Explains.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>X.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_10" href="#div1_10">Mr. Benoliel.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XI.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_11" href="#div1_11">A Man on the Make.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_12" href="#div1_12">Lungatine.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XIII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_13" href="#div1_13">The Night Before the Poll.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XIV.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_14" href="#div1_14">Colonel Challoner's Memory.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XV.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_15" href="#div1_15">The Mayor and the Man.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XVI.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_16" href="#div1_16">Words Over the Telephone.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XVII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_17" href="#div1_17">A Refusal.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XVIII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_18" href="#div1_18">A Maiden Speech.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XIX.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_19" href="#div1_19">And a Proposal.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XX.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_20" href="#div1_20">At Culver.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXI.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_21" href="#div1_21">Mr. Benoliel's Warning.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_22" href="#div1_22">And an Instance to Enforce It.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXIII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_23" href="#div1_23">Cynthia on the House.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXIV.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_24" href="#div1_24">The Man Who Had Walked in the Road.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXV.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_25" href="#div1_25">Colonel Challoner's Revolt.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXVI.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_26" href="#div1_26">The Picture at Bramling.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXVII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_27" href="#div1_27">Devenish Replies.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXVIII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_28" href="#div1_28">Wireless.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXIX.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_29" href="#div1_29">In the Ladies' Gallery.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXX.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_30" href="#div1_30">The Letter.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXXI.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_31" href="#div1_31">M. Poizat Again.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXXII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_32" href="#div1_32">The Call.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXXIII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_33" href="#div1_33">A Letter from Abroad.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXXIV.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_34" href="#div1_34">The Convict at the Oar.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXXV.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_35" href="#div1_35">A Little Bit Extra.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXXVI.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_36" href="#div1_36">The Telegram.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td>XXXVII.</td>
+<td><p class="hang1"><span class="sc"><a name="div1Ref_37" href="#div1_37">The Last.</a></span></p></td>
+</tr></table>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>THE TURNSTILE</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>THE TURNSTILE</h1>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_01" href="#div1Ref_01">THE SWINGING OF A CHANDELIER</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">At the first glance it looked as if the midnight chimes of a clock in
+an old city of the Midlands might most fitly ring in this history. But
+we live in a very small island, and its inhabitants have for so long
+been wanderers upon the face of the earth that one can hardly search
+amongst them for the beginnings of either people or events without
+slipping unexpectedly over the edge of England. So it is in this
+instance. For, although it was in England that Captain Rames, Mr.
+Benoliel, Cynthia, the little naturalized Frenchman, and the rest of
+them met and struggled more or less inefficiently to express
+themselves; although, too, Ludsey, the old city, was during a period
+the pivot of their lives; for the beginnings of their relationship one
+with another, it is necessary to go further afield, and back by some
+few years. One must turn toward a lonely estancia in the south-west of
+Argentina, where, on a hot, still night of summer, a heavy chandelier
+touched by no human hand swung gently to and fro.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This queer thing happened in the dining-room of the house, and between
+half-past ten and eleven o'clock. It was half-way through January, and
+Mr. and Mrs. Daventry were still seated at the table over a late
+supper. For Robert Daventry had on that day begun the harvesting of
+his eight leagues of wheat, and there had been little rest for any one
+upon the estancia since daybreak. He sat now taking his ease opposite
+his wife, with a cup of black coffee in front of him and a cigar
+between his lips, a big, broad, sunburnt man with a beard growing gray
+and a thick crop of brown hair upon his head; loose-limbed still, and
+still getting, when he stood up, the value of every inch of his six
+feet two. As he lounged at the table he debated with his wife in a
+curious gentle voice a question which, played with once, had begun of
+late years to insist upon an answer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We are both over fifty, Joan,&quot; he said. &quot;And we have made our money.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We have also made our friends, Robert,&quot; replied his wife. She was a
+short, stoutish woman, quick with her hands, practical in her speech.
+Capacity was written broad upon her like a label, and, for all her
+husband's bulk, she was the better man of the two, even at the first
+casual glance. There was a noticeable suggestion of softness and
+amiability in Robert Daventry. It was hardly, perhaps, to be localized
+in any feature. Rather he diffused it about him like an atmosphere.
+One would have wondered how it came about that in a country so stern
+as Argentina he had prospered so exceedingly had his wife not been
+present to explain his prosperity. It was so evident that she drove
+the cart and that he ran between the shafts--evident, that is, to
+others than Robert Daventry. She had been clever enough and fond
+enough to conceal from him their exact relationship. So now it was
+with an air of pleading that she replied to him:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We have not only made our friends, Robert. We have made them here. If
+we go, we lose them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; he answered. &quot;But it wouldn't be as if we had to start quite
+fresh again. I have old ties with Warwickshire. Thirty years won't
+have broken them all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan Daventry answered slowly:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thirty years. That's a long time, Robert.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And yet,&quot; said Robert Daventry with a wistfulness in his voice which
+almost weakened her into a consent against which her judgment no less
+than her inclinations fought. &quot;And yet there's a house on the London
+road which I might have passed yesterday--it's so vivid to me now. A
+white house set back from the highway behind a great wall of old red
+brick. Above the coping of the wall you can see the rows of level
+windows and the roof of a wing a story lower than the rest of the
+house. And if the gates are open you catch a glimpse of great cedar
+trees on a wide lawn--a lawn of fine grass like emeralds.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His eyes turned back upon his boyhood, and the thought of his county
+set his heart aching. Long white roads, rising and dipping between
+high elms, with a yard or two of turf on either side for a horse to
+canter on; cottages, real cottages, not shapeless buildings of
+corrugated iron standing gauntly up against the sky-line at the edge
+of a round of burnt, bare plain, but cottages rich with phlox and deep
+in trees--the pictures were flung before his eyes by the lantern of
+his memories as if upon a white sheet. But, above all, it was the
+thought of the greenery of Warwickshire which caught at his throat;
+the woods flecked with sunlight, the lawns like emeralds.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He glanced at a thermometer which hung against the wall. Here, even at
+eleven o'clock of the night, it marked this January ninety-seven
+degrees of heat. The mosquitoes trumpeted and drummed against the
+gauze curtains which covered the open windows; and outside the windows
+the night was black and hot like velvet.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Daventry drew his handkerchief across his forehead and with his
+elbow on the table leaned his face upon his hand. His wife looked at
+him quickly and with solicitude.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are tired to-night, Robert,&quot; she said gently. &quot;That's why you
+want to give the estancia up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Daventry shook his head and corrected her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, Joan. But I am more tired to-night and very likely that's the
+explanation.&quot; Then he laughed at a recollection. &quot;Do you remember when
+the squadron came to Montevideo two years ago? There was a dinner at
+the legation at Buenos Ayres. I sat next to the commodore, and he
+asked me how old I was. When I told him that I was just fifty, he
+replied: 'Ah, now you will begin to find life very interesting. For
+you will notice every year that you are able to do a little less than
+you did the year before.' Well, I am beginning, my dear, to find life
+interesting from the commodore's point of view.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan did not answer him at once, and the couple sat for awhile in
+silence, with their thoughts estranged.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For Joan Daventry shrank, with all her soul, from that coveted white
+house on the London road. Old ties could be resumed, was Robert's
+thought. He was forgetful that the ties were his, and his alone. She
+had no share in them and she had come to a time of life when the
+making of new friends is a weariness and a labor. With infinite toil
+and self-denial they had carved out their niche here in the Argentine
+Republic. They spent the winter in their house in Buenos Ayres, the
+summer upon the Daventry estancia. Their life was an ordered,
+comfortable progression of the months. For both of them, to her
+thinking, the time for new adventures had long gone by. They had had
+their full proportion of them in their youth. And so while Robert
+Daventry dreamed of a green future Joan was busily remembering.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;When we first came here to settle,&quot; she said slowly, as she counted
+up all that had been done in these twenty-seven years, &quot;we drove for
+two days. If the house on the London road is vivid to you, that drive
+is as clear to me. Our heaviest luggage was our hopes;&quot; and Robert
+Daventry smiled across the table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have not forgotten that either,&quot; he said; and there was a whole
+world of love in his voice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;When we reached here we found a tin house with three rooms and
+nothing else, not a tree, hardly a track. Now there's an avenue half a
+mile long, there are plantations, there's a real brick house for the
+plantations to shelter. There are wells, there's a garden, there's a
+village at the end of the avenue, there's even a railway station
+to-day. These things are our doing, Robert;&quot; and her voice was lifted
+up with pride.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I know,&quot; replied her husband. &quot;But I ask myself whether the time has
+not come to hand them on.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Once more the look of solicitude shone in his wife's eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I could leave the estancia,&quot; she said doubtfully, &quot;though it would
+almost break my heart to do it. But suppose we did. What would become
+of you in England? I have a fear,&quot; and she leaned forward across the
+table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why a fear?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Because I think that people who have lived hard, like you and me, run
+a great risk if they retire just when they feel that they are
+beginning to grow old. A real risk of life, I mean. I think such as
+you and I would be killed off by inactivity rather than by any
+disease.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She did not deny that something was wrong in their present situation.
+But she had a different conception of what that something was; and she
+had a different remedy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We should find life too dull?&quot; he exclaimed. &quot;Too lonely, Joan?&quot; and
+he struck the table with his hand; &quot;I find it lonely here;&quot; and at
+that she uttered a low cry:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, my dear, and what of me?&quot; and the wistfulness of her voice struck
+him to silence, a remorseful silence. After all, his days were full.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There's our other plan,&quot; she suggested gently.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. To be sure! There's our other plan,&quot; he said. He leaned back in
+his chair, his face upturned toward the ceiling, and a thoughtful look
+in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We have talked it over, haven't we? But we have played with it all
+the time. It would be so big an experiment.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He ended the sentence abruptly. The look of thought passed from his
+face. It became curious, perplexed. Then he cried with a start of
+dismay:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You see, Joan, even my eyes are beginning to play tricks with me. I
+could swear that the chandelier is swinging to and fro above our
+heads.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan looked anxiously at her husband, and then up toward the ceiling.
+At once surprise drove the anxiety from her face and thoughts.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But it <i>is</i>
+swinging,&quot; she exclaimed. Both of them stared at the
+chandelier. There was not a doubt about the phenomenon possible. Not a
+breath of wind stirred in the garden, not a sound was audible
+overhead. Yet very gently the chandelier, with its lighted globes,
+oscillated above their heads. Robert Daventry rose to his feet and
+touched it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, it is swinging,&quot; he said. He stopped it, and held it quite
+still. Then he resumed his seat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well, Joan,&quot; he said with a new briskness in his voice, &quot;we will
+make the experiment. Come! When we go to Buenos Ayres in the winter!
+We will try the other plan. Even if it fails it will be worth making.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan's face lighted up.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If it fails, then we'll go home,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">No doubt the relief which Robert Daventry felt in the proof that his
+eyes were not failing him led him thus briskly to fall in with the
+scheme which both approached with timidity; and so the swinging of the
+chandelier had its share in bringing them to their decision. But the
+chandelier had not done with them. For hardly had Robert Daventry
+ceased to speak when it began again to swing backward and forward
+before their eyes. So it swung for exactly five minutes and then of
+its own accord it stopped.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's very strange,&quot; said Robert Daventry. He looked at the clock
+upon the mantel-shelf. It was five minutes past eleven.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's unaccountable,&quot; he continued. But he was able to account for it
+the next day. For a local paper brought to them the news that at ten
+minutes to eleven o'clock on the evening before, seven hundred miles
+away on the other side of the great barrier of the Andes, an
+earthquake had set the shores of the Pacific heaving like a sea, and
+Valparaiso, that city of earthquakes, had tumbled into ruins.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_02" href="#div1Ref_02">OF AN EARTHQUAKE AND JAMES CHALLONER</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The experiences of James Challoner on that day of ruin at Valparaiso
+were various, but none of them were pleasant. It was his twenty-eighth
+birthday and up to two o'clock in the afternoon he was, as for the
+last six weeks he had been, a clerk in the great house of R. C. Royle
+&amp; Sons. There was no sort of business in Chile which R. C. Royle &amp;
+Sons were not prepared to undertake and carry through with efficiency,
+from a colossal deal in nitrates to the homeward freight of your
+portmanteau. It was, to be sure, upon the latter class of work that
+James Challoner was asked to concentrate his abilities. But
+advancement was a principle of the house, and in the vast
+ramifications of its business, opportunities of advancement came
+quickly. James Challoner, who for the best part of five years had been
+drifting unsuccessfully up and down the Pacific Coast, between Callao
+and Concepcion, was consequently accounted a lucky man to have secured
+employment in that house at all.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If he can only keep it!&quot; said his friends, shrugging their shoulders,
+and his young wife, in the little house up the hill, bent over her
+child and whispered the same words. But in her mouth they were a
+prayer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At two o'clock, then, upon his birthday, James Challoner returned from
+his luncheon to the office, but as he took his seat he was summoned to
+the manager's room. He walked down the long room between the tables on
+which samples of produce were exhibited, then past the cashier's
+brass-fenced desks where the banking business was done, to a little
+compartment partitioned off in a corner. There Wallace Bourdon, a
+young partner in control of this branch of the firm, sat in a tilted
+chair, with his knees against a table, awaiting him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mr. Challoner, it is within your knowledge, I suppose, that we are
+negotiating with the Government at Santiago for the construction of a
+new railway in the north.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's not in my department, sir,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Quite true,&quot; said Wallace Bourdon. He opened a drawer of the table
+and threw half a dozen letters down on the top of it under Challoner's
+eyes. &quot;These letters are copies of our proposals. There are two firms
+competing with us to which these copies would be valuable. They were
+found in your desk while you were out at luncheon. What were they
+doing there?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">James Challoner stared at the letters and pulled at his moustache.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I can't think, sir. They must have been put there,&quot; he said, and then
+with a cry of indignation: &quot;I must have an enemy in the office.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, that's hard,&quot; said Wallace Bourdon sympathetically. &quot;For he
+seems to have got back on you good and strong. You can draw your money
+from the cashier, Mr. Challoner, and clear out of this house just as
+soon as you can find it convenient;&quot; and Wallace Bourdon dropped the
+legs of his chair onto the floor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">James Challoner took his money and went out into the town. He sat
+moodily on a high stool at a bar for an hour or so. Then some men of
+his acquaintance joined him, and from moody he became blusterful and
+boisterous. But both the moodiness and the bluster were phases of the
+one deep-seated feeling--a reluctance to go up the hill and meet his
+wife. It was seven o'clock before he had gained the necessary courage,
+and when he did face his wife he followed the usual practice of his
+kind and blurted out aggressively the news of his dismissal.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I was lowering myself by going into the office at all as a clerk,&quot; he
+cried. &quot;I told you so when you urged me to do it. Upon my word it
+almost serves me right, Doris. I have never known any good come from a
+man's lowering himself. He is bound to make enemies amongst his new
+associates. Jealousy is a despicable thing, but there's a deal of it
+floating about in the world, and one's a fool to shut one's eyes to
+it. However, we can't let the business rest there. My honor's
+impugned. That's the truth of it, Doris. I lie under a dishonorable
+charge. There's a stigma on our child's name, and it must be removed.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He drew a chair briskly up to the table, pulled a piece of note-paper
+toward him, and dipped his pen in the ink.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Let me see, now! Who can my enemy be? Who is it that hates me? Can't
+you think of some one?&quot; and in an instant he pushed the blotting pad
+from him. &quot;You might say something, Doris. You just stand and look and
+never open your mouth.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">That was James Challoner's trouble, and the cause of his uneasiness.
+His wife neither buoyed him up with high-sounding phrases, nor
+afforded him the opportunity by any reproach to work himself into a
+fine heat of indignation. She had given him one dreadful look, her
+whole countenance a quivering cry of dismay made visible, and
+thereafter she had just stood with no word on her lips, her great eyes
+disconcertingly fixed upon his face and her mind quite hidden. She
+went out from the room and left him sitting in great discomfort. He
+detested her habit of silence, but he feared still more the thought of
+him which it might conceal, and he dared not break it with acrimonies.
+When she returned again into the room it was to say:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Dinner is ready.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, we must dine,&quot; said Challoner.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is fortunate that after all I didn't hire that servant at once,&quot;
+said Doris.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, that was lucky. We can't afford a servant now,&quot; said James
+Challoner.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Fear lest his wife should &quot;lower herself&quot; did not trouble him at all.
+During dinner he talked in self-defence, flurriedly, about his enemy,
+pointing vaguely to this man or to that, and watching keenly for some
+droop of disdain about Doris's lips. But she gave no sign, and at the
+back of all his thought was the wounding question:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What does she think of me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He smoked his pipe outside the door after dinner, with the lighted
+streets of the town spread out below him. The house stood apart, high
+up on the great amphitheatre of hills above Valparaiso; and on the
+opposite side of the road the ground fell steeply. The great bay lay
+open beneath his eyes to the distant tip of its northern horn; no
+inland pool could have slept more quietly than did the Pacific on that
+summer night; still water and mirrored stars, it widened out in the
+warm dusk to the sky's rim. A huge black steamer lay out beyond the
+edge of the jetty, with the great lights blazing from its saloon
+windows and the little lights steady on its masts. From the
+close-built streets at the water's edge there rose a pleasant murmur
+of many voices. No warnings were being given. Valparaiso, like any
+other tropical city, was taking its ease in the cool of the evening.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At ten o'clock James Challoner, having nothing better to do and no
+money to spend, went indoors. He locked the front door and with a
+definite relief found that his wife had already gone to bed. He stood
+in the empty, barely furnished sitting-room, and his thoughts were
+swept back to the morning at Southampton, five years ago, when Doris
+had crept on board the steamer which was to take them to South
+America. He remembered bitterly the buoyant hopes with which that
+runaway marriage had begun and Doris's fears that her flight had been
+already discovered and that an attempt at the last moment might be
+made to stop her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It has been a bad mistake for me,&quot; he said, as all the wonderful
+things which he might have done, had he not been hampered with a wife,
+glittered in his mind. The truth, however, was not to be grasped by
+him unless he would face truthfully the history of his marriage, and
+that he was not constituted to do. It was a story common enough: A
+young man with no will and caressing manners, who was hastily packed
+off to South America, with a few hundred pounds in his pocket, to
+avoid exposure in his own country, and a young girl too staunch to her
+beliefs--these were the characters, and, given them, the story tells
+itself. &quot;Yes, it has all been a very bad mistake for me,&quot; thought
+James Challoner, and switching off the lights he betook himself to
+bed. A door in the inner wall of his bedroom opened into the room
+where his wife and child slept. He listened for a moment with his ear
+against the panel. All was silent in that room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;She can sleep,&quot; he grumbled, finding even a grievance here. But he
+did not sleep for long. For, just at the moment when the chandelier
+began to swing in Mr. Daventry's dining-room, he was shaken out of his
+slumber. He lay for a few seconds in the vague and pleasant space
+between wakefulness and dreams, playing with the fancy that he was in
+a cabin on a ship at sea. But the fancy passed, and he was beset by a
+stranger illusion. He happened to be lying upon his side, with his
+face turned toward the outer wall of his bedroom; and as he lay he saw
+quite distinctly the wall gently and noiselessly split open. It split
+open high up and near to the ceiling, and it let through the stars and
+a strip of sky. Then the wall closed neatly together again, brick
+fitting with brick, so that not a chink was left. The room once more
+was black, the stars shut out.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner was still pondering upon this remarkable phenomenon when a
+third sensation shook him altogether out of his lethargy. He was
+violently jolted. This could be no illusion. It was as if some one,
+crouching beneath the bed, had suddenly risen on hands and knees and
+struck the mattress with his shoulders. Challoner sprang out of bed,
+tottered, and clung to the bedpost for support. The room was rocking
+like a tree in a gale and underneath his feet the boards strained and
+heaved. It was his first experience of an earthquake, but he had no
+doubt that he was undergoing it, and fear made his hands grip the iron
+post of the bed so that his palms were bruised. His chief terror was
+the floor. The feel of it moving unstably beneath his feet, the sound
+of its boards cracking loosened his knees. At any moment it might
+burst upward and explode. At some moment and very soon it must. He had
+no fear that it would collapse and gape open; it would surely burst
+like a shell; and in his fear of that explosion the rocking of the
+walls was of no account.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He tried to think, and instinct reminded him of civilized man's chief
+necessities.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My shoes, my money.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He groped along the bed for the switch of the light, but light did not
+answer to the summons. In the darkness he stooped, found his shoes,
+and slipped them on. His few dollars, drawn that afternoon from the
+cashier of R. C. Royle &amp; Sons, were in the drawer of a night-table by
+his bed. He found them. There was a cupboard in the inner wall. He
+lurched across to it, and, tearing a long overcoat from a hook,
+slipped it on and dropped the money in his pocket. Close by the
+cupboard was the door of his wife's bedroom. He remembered her now,
+and flung the door open.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Doris,&quot; he cried, and no answer was returned to him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Doris,&quot; he cried again, and this time the wail of his child answered
+him from her cot.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He crossed to the bed. He leaned over it and put out his hand to shake
+his wife by the shoulder out of her deep sleep. And with a shock he
+became aware that she was leaning upon her elbow in the darkness. She
+was wide-awake all the time.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Quick!&quot; he cried, in a sudden exasperation. &quot;There is an earthquake.
+The house is falling.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She replied in a strange, quiet voice:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She made no beginning of a movement. She was awake, had been, perhaps,
+longer awake than he himself; she knew the swift peril which had
+befallen them; yet she remained propped on her elbow in the darkness,
+passively expectant. Or was she dazed? Even at that moment the
+question flashed through Challoner's mind and brought him a queer
+relief. But it was answered in a moment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I called to you twice,&quot; he said; and his wife answered:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I heard;&quot; and there was again no hint of bewilderment in her voice.
+It was the voice of a woman who had all her wits about her; not of one
+who was stunned.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Meanwhile the earth rumbled beneath them and the room shook. Challoner
+felt for a candle by the bedside, struck a match, and lighted it. His
+wife watched him quietly. Her dark eyes shone in the candle-light,
+inscrutably veiling her thoughts.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Quick!&quot; he cried. &quot;Get up. There's no time to lose.&quot; He lifted the
+child out of the cot, still wrapped in her bedclothes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Come.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His wife rose, as it seemed to him, with incredible slowness. He could
+have screamed in his terror. As he stumbled across the floor to the
+door, she opened a wardrobe and, taking out a cloak, drew it about her
+shoulders. In the door-way he turned and saw her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Good God!&quot; he cried, and the question in his mind leaped to his lips
+and was uttered. &quot;Do you want to kill us all?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I had to find a cloak.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A cloak!&quot; he cried contemptuously. He himself had tarried to slip on
+his overcoat, but, no doubt, that was different. Certainly his wife
+made no rejoinder. &quot;To be buried under this house for the sake of a
+cloak,&quot; he cried, his lips so chattering with terror that he could
+hardly pronounce the words.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Go first,&quot; she said; and he ran out of the doorway. She followed him,
+leaving the door open behind her, and the candle burning in the room.
+They were still in the passage when an appalling roar deafened their
+ears. The lighted candle shot up into the air and was extinguished,
+and in the darkness the splitting of timber, the overthrow and the
+wreckage of furniture, rent the air and ceased. Of a sudden the
+throats of the fugitives were choked with dust. The fear which had so
+terrified him was justified. The floor had exploded, like artillery,
+in the room he had this moment quitted. His terror became a panic. He
+would have killed his wife had she stood in his way. He rushed
+downstairs, inarticulately crying. He fumbled in the darkness for the
+bolt of the front door, sobbing and cursing. He found it, flung the
+door open, and leaped out into the open air. He ran across the road,
+and as he ran a great stone fell with a crash, from the archway of the
+door, and the walls of the passage clashed together behind him. With a
+loud clatter of thunder the whole house crumbled down into a smoking
+heap of bricks. Challoner turned. He was quite alone with the child in
+his arms. And for a little while he stood very still.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But he was no longer in darkness. About many of the villas on the
+hillside the flames were creeping, and their inhabitants were racing
+upward to the open heights, or searching desperately among the ruins
+for those whom the earthquake had entrapped. While lower down by the
+water's edge the city was ablaze and over all the bay the sky was red.
+The ground still shook beneath Challoner's feet, and the child in his
+arms began to cry. He laid it down against the low wall of the path
+and crept cautiously back to the ruins of his house.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Doris,&quot; he called, and again, &quot;Doris.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His voice was low, but there was more of awe than grief audible in the
+cry. &quot;Doris,&quot; he called a third time, but in a louder and more urgent
+tone. A few bricks, hanging to a fragment of wall dislodged themselves
+and clattered down upon the heap of ruin. But no other answer came. He
+stooped suddenly where the archway of the entrance door had been. The
+great stone had fallen with so much force that one end had sunk into
+the ground; the other, however, rested upon a fragment of the stone
+pillar of the door; and so the stone lay under a pile of bricks titled
+at an angle. Through the space left by the angle a woman's hand and
+arm protruded. It was not pinned down by the stone. It pointed with
+limp fingers toward Challoner, and beside it a trickle of blood ran
+out. Challoner knelt and touched the hand.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Doris,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Her voice had not answered to his, and now there was no response in
+her fingers to his touch. The arm moved quite easily. The walls of the
+passage had borne her down and crushed her. Challoner remembered with
+a shiver the crash and clatter of them as they had knocked together
+just behind his heels. His wife had been killed in that downfall. She
+could not have survived.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner rose again to his feet.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;She was awake,&quot; he said, and he talked aloud to himself. &quot;She should
+have hurried. She could have escaped had she hurried;&quot; and the picture
+of her leaning upon her elbow in her bed in the dark troubled his
+soul. There is no terror like the terror which comes from the shaking
+of the earth and the overthrow of its houses. Yet she, a woman--so ran
+his thoughts--had endured it. Her hand pointing, from beneath the
+stones, accused him for all the limpness of its fingers. She had
+welcomed it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The child wailed from the other side of the road. Challoner crossed to
+it. He stood and looked at it doubtfully. Still in doubt, he looked
+away. From the blazing town rose a babel of cries, a roar of flames, a
+crash of buildings falling in, and every now and then, quite distinct
+from the confusion, a shrill, clear scream would leap into the air
+like a thin fountain of water. But the sea was calm; the great ship,
+with every cord of its rigging strung black against the glowing sky,
+lay without a movement. Boats were plying between it and the shore.
+Challoner could see the tiny specks of them on the red water.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There's no tidal wave,&quot; he said in a dull voice. &quot;That's
+extraordinary;&quot; and then he picked up his daughter in his arms, and
+climbed higher up the hill to await the dawn.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_03" href="#div1Ref_03">CHALLONER'S PILGRIMAGE</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">There were two more shocks that night, the first at five minutes past
+one, the second half an hour before sunrise. James Challoner sat in
+the centre of the most open space he could find, his overcoat drawn
+close about him and his daughter clasped tightly to his breast. But it
+was almost unconsciously that he held her so. His brain was dazed, and
+the only image at all clear in his mind was that of his dead wife's
+hand protruding beneath the great stone and directing against him its
+mute accusation. But, even so, it was the limp look of the fingers
+which chiefly troubled him, and that only troubled him from time to
+time. For the greater part of the interval before daybreak he sat
+watching the roofs of the buildings below him burst in tongues of fire
+and topple down with a clatter of slates in bright showers of sparks,
+much as a child sits open-mouthed at the fireworks. Now he huddled his
+coat close about him, now some spire of flame towering skyward more
+terribly beautiful than the rest, drew a cry from his lips; and now
+again, looking out over the quiet pond of the bay, he asked dully,
+&quot;Why is there no tidal wave?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Morning came at last over the hill behind him, gray and
+extraordinarily cold. All about him he saw people, huddled like
+himself upon the slopes, men, women, and children, shivering in their
+night-attire and their bare feet bloody from the stones. All at once
+Challoner was aware that he was hungry. His little daughter reached
+out her arms and wailed. Hunger, too, as the sun rose, mastered the
+fears of the refugees upon the hill-side. One by one, group by group,
+they rose stiffly and straggled down to the ruined ways by the
+water-side. Challoner went with the rest; and half-way down they all
+began to hurry, beset by the same fear. There would not be food enough
+for all. The thought seemed to sweep like a wind across the face of
+the hill, and the hurry became savage.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Along the open esplanade families were squatting side by side. A few
+of the more fortunate had somehow secured and erected tents; and
+others were crowded into storage sheds. But the most of them were
+sitting in the open waiting desolately for they knew not what. And
+already in that town, though the earthquake was barely six hours old,
+catastrophe had made its sharp division between the sheep and the
+goats. For whereas upon the esplanade men and women, and amongst them
+many unexpected figures, were already organizing succor for the
+outcasts, amongst the smoking ruins the marauders were already at
+work, robbing, murdering. There was no longer any law in Valparaiso.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner made his way to the esplanade. A man whom he knew, the agent
+of a steamship company, hurried past him. Challoner stopped him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Where can I get food?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner was a strongly built, tall man, and the agent answered
+roughly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You? You will have to wait. You are able to;&quot; and then he caught
+sight of the child in Challoner's arms, still wrapped about with her
+bedclothes. His voice changed to friendliness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yours?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner nodded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Where's its mother?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner answered simply:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Dead.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The agent took out a piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket.
+&quot;Sorry,&quot; he said. &quot;Of course, that alters the case.&quot; He wrote a line
+upon the paper and gave it to Challoner. Then he pointed to a tin
+shed, around which a crowd was already collecting.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We are distributing a little food there. You'll be given your share,
+for you have a child to look after. But I should advise you to look
+slippy;&quot; and the agent hurried off.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner did look slippy. Because of his child he got food for
+himself as well as for his child; and as he sat on the ground, in the
+shadow of a low wall, after his meal, that fact set him thinking.
+There is much loving kindness for children in South America. From east
+to west it runs across the continent, just as from east to west human
+life is cheap, provided that it is grown up. You might, anywhere in
+those days, and, in some places you may still, slay your neighbor and
+avoid anything like excessive inconvenience as a result of your
+slaying. But if you kick a boy into the gutter because he refuses to
+desist from whistling, to your distraction, outside your office
+window, you are liable to be fined heavily, and you may be sent to
+prison. For you have hurt the <i>dignidad del hombre</i>. Challoner was
+aware generally of the consideration for children which prevailed. But
+now it was brought very practically home to him in the particular. His
+little daughter Doris was a definite asset to him. He looked down upon
+her with new eyes as she slept on the ground at his side, with a
+chubby hand thrown across his knee. She was no longer a nuisance. She
+was as good as money--better, indeed, since money could not buy food
+to-day in Valparaiso. And there had been a moment when he had stood,
+up there before the ruins of his house, doubting whether he should
+leave her behind or no. James Challoner was quite chilled by the
+thought of the mistake he had almost made, and the fool he had almost
+been.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Doris moved her head in her sleep.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Precious one,&quot; he said affectionately; and he proceeded in his turn
+to sleep.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He woke up in time to see two great Chilian cruisers sweep round the
+point into the bay, and a stoutly built, square captain, whom he could
+have mistaken for an Englishman, come ashore with his sailors, to take
+command of the town. He obtained shelter in a hut for that night, and
+during the hours of darkness he thought out his own immediate problem.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Valparaiso was not, and for some months would not be. Even when it
+should be rebuilt there would be no work for him, since--in his
+thoughts he clung to euphemisms--his enemies had ruined his good name.
+Therefore he must get away and he had his daughter at his hand to
+assist him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He obtained, through his good Samaritan, the agent, a rough suit for
+himself and some clothing for his child and a parcel of food. He slung
+the parcel over his shoulders, lifted his child in his arms, and
+walked out that afternoon from Valparaiso up the great post-road
+toward the Andes. He was strong and his girl inherited of his
+strength. It was summer, a summer of no rain. He tramped along the
+valleys of Chile, and his daughter was his passport and franked his
+way. He secured a night's shelter at a farm-house here, food and a
+trifle of money there, a ride for Doris upon a mule one day, a lift
+for both of them in a cart the next. The valley narrowed, the green
+floor of it became stones, the trees thinned, the great barrier of the
+cordilleras closed in about James Challoner and towered higher and
+higher above his head. The road wound sharply upward, now backward,
+and forward in a desolate, wild country of gray rock splashed with
+orange and yellow and deep red. He started early one morning and stood
+on the top of the Cumbre Pass, thirteen thousand feet above the sea,
+by mid-day. On the very summit he was overtaken by the post and driven
+down at a gallop to Las Cuevas. From Las Cuevas he walked to Punta del
+Inca. And at Punta del Inca he took his ease for a week, with the
+great snow-mass of Aconcagua showing in a gap of the hills across the
+valley.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was the season of the baths at Punta del Inca. The hotel was full
+and James Challoner prospered, as from the beginning he had thought
+that he would. He had reckoned upon Punta del Inca on that night in
+Valparaiso when he had determined upon his journey. He sat by the
+natural bridge, with his little daughter in his arms, a travel-stained
+and patient figure, and amongst those gigantic hills he told his
+moving story to such as passed and would listen. He went up to the
+hotel at night, and under the lights of the veranda he told it again.
+Amongst the many qualities which he misused was a vivid gift of
+narrative, and he possessed, at this time at all events, a gentle
+voice with an admirable note of emotion. Thus all was in his favor.
+The beauty and peace of the scenery, his manner, the prettiness of his
+child--even the story which he had to tell. But it was not quite the
+story which would have been told at Valparaiso where, to be sure, he
+had, as we know, enemies.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why did you come to South America?&quot; some curious soul would ask.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I was a younger son,&quot; he would answer; and then, with a charming
+modesty for the benefit of any English who might be present, &quot;I am of
+the Dorsetshire Challoners. These old properties.... Land isn't what
+it was.... An estate mortgaged to the hilt. How could any one take an
+allowance that must be wrung from it at the cost of the very laborers?
+No, I thought I would make my own way in the new lands.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He spoke without any arrogance of virtue, any contempt for other
+younger sons who had not his own compunction, any consciousness of
+heroism. He went on to tell the romantic story of his marriage and
+elopement.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I made my way,&quot; he continued, &quot;at least I was making it. My wife, of
+course, helped me--&quot; and perhaps here his voice would falter ever so
+slightly, he would turn his face aside and whisper to the stars, yet
+so that the whisper was audible to people nearer than the stars--&quot;My
+God, how she helped me! We had dug out our little corner in
+Valparaiso. There was just room in it for a wife and a child and
+myself. And then the earthquake came and ruined all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He made no complaint; he stated the simple facts; he was reticent
+concerning his wife's death. But by his reticence he managed to wring
+from it the last ounce of profit; he did not, for instance, describe
+how he had found her leaning upon her elbow in the darkness, with the
+walls of her room tottering about her. James Challoner had not
+forgiven her for that. She had made it so plain that she preferred for
+her child and herself an appalling death beneath the bricks than the
+slower decline into misery which awaited them. He tried to omit that
+remembrance from his mind, as he certainly did from his story.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A collection was made for him to send him on his way. He accepted it
+with dignity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I do not ask for your names,&quot; he said. &quot;It would be the merest
+pretence. I cannot promise to pay you back. I take it as from one man
+to another.&quot; And so with his pocket full he journeyed downward to the
+vineyards of Mendoza.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At Mendoza he took the train and in a night and a day came to Buenos
+Ayres. It was in the cool of the evening that he stepped out upon the
+platform. He was in no doubt what he should do. He had stopped in
+Buenos Ayres for a month on his way out from England; and he had
+thought out his plan very carefully during his last night in
+Valparaiso. He took a train for Barracas, and in the train he tied an
+old bootlace about his daughter's arm. He left the train before it
+crossed the bridge, and walked up a hill where great houses stand back
+behind walls and gardens much as one may see them in Clapham. Some way
+up the hill he stopped in front of one of these houses.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was noticeable amongst the houses, because a curious turnstile was
+let into the garden wall. The turnstile supported a small circular
+platform partitioned off with screens. James Challoner placed his
+child upon the platform, rang the bell, and turned the stile. The
+platform revolved, the child disappeared from view within the garden,
+and the screens were so arranged that those who received the child
+within could not see James Challoner outside.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">James Challoner went back into the middle of the road, yawned, and
+stretched his arms above his head. To-day you may cross the Andes from
+Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres in forty-eight hours. James Challoner had
+taken four months. He thought of his journey with a chuckle. His
+daughter had made his way easy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Nine hundred miles and I've done 'em on eiderdown,&quot; he said. &quot;That's
+the only bit of comfort I've ever got out of my marriage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had left his child in a foundling hospital kept by some wealthy old
+ladies. He had tied a bootlace round her arm, rather because it was
+the conventional thing to do, than with any intention of reclaiming
+her. He was now a free man. He lit his pipe and stuck his hands in his
+pockets. With a pleasant sense of lightness, he strolled down to
+exploit his freedom in the bright streets of Buenos Ayres.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_04" href="#div1Ref_04">CYNTHIA'S BIRTHDAY</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia woke on the eighth of January to the knowledge that a
+thrilling day for her had just begun. She looked out beneath the sun
+blinds across the Daventry estancia. Not a hand-breadth of cloud was
+visible. The brown earth baked under a blinding sun and the sky fitted
+down-upon it like a cap of brass. Inside the room, however, there was
+neither glare nor heat; and Cynthia stood with her expectations of the
+day fluttering about her like a shower of rose leaves. She was
+seventeen this morning, and the pride of it set her heart dancing.
+There would be letters downstairs from her friends, she hoped. There
+was a string of pearls, she knew. It had been bought that winter in
+Buenos Ayres with so elaborate a secrecy, and after so much furtive
+discussion as to whether it was good enough, that she could not but
+know of it. Moreover, there was a most important telegram to be
+despatched immediately after breakfast; a telegram of so much
+consequence that no hand but hers must write it out and send it off.
+So Cynthia was quick this morning. She dressed herself in a cool white
+frock, her white shoes and stockings, and ran lightly down the stairs
+into that room where years before a chandelier had of its own accord
+swung to and fro.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Valparaiso had long since been rebuilt, but Robert and Joan Daventry
+still kept house in Buenos Ayres through the winter, and made the
+estancia their summer home. The years, however, had brought their
+changes. Robert and Joan were frankly an old couple nowadays; a young
+Englishman was sitting at the breakfast table; he undertook the whole
+burden of management; and, finally, there was Cynthia. The &quot;other
+plan,&quot; so often debated and so often shelved, had been adopted, after
+all; the experiment from which Robert Daventry had so shrunk had been
+risked; and Cynthia was the triumphant flower of it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She greeted the old couple tenderly, shook hands with Richard Walton,
+the young manager, and received his good wishes with a pretty
+assumption of great dignity. But her eyes strayed to the table, where
+her place was piled high with parcels and letters, and her dignity
+vanished in her delight.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have many friends,&quot; she cried, with a sort of wonder in her voice
+very taking to those who looked on her while she spoke. For she could
+not but have friends, it seemed. So frank a wish to please and so
+sweet a modesty were linked to so much beauty. It was not the beauty
+of Argentina, though a rhapsodist might have maintained that some of
+its sunlight was held prisoner in the heavy ripples of her hair. But
+the hair was light brown in color, where the gold did not shine, and
+the rose was in her cheeks. A broad forehead, eyebrows thick and
+brown, curving across a fair skin above great eyes of a deep blue set
+rather wide apart, gave to her face a curious distinction. And her
+eyes looked out from so dark a wealth of lashes that they seemed
+unfathomable with mysteries--until she spoke. Then kindliness and a
+fresh joy in life lit them with soft fires. For the rest, she was
+neither short nor remarkable for height, the nose and the nostrils
+delicate, the chin small, but a definite chin. As for her mouth, it
+was not a rosebud, nor again was it a letter-box. It suited her and
+she could afford to smile. One granted her, at a glance, health and a
+look of race.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She began to open her letters and her presents. &quot;Yes, I have many
+friends,&quot; she repeated.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It may be surprising,&quot; said Robert Daventry. &quot;But it seems to be
+true. In fact, I am not quite sure that I have not some small token
+about me that Joan and I don't dislike you altogether.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He fumbled first in one pocket, then in another.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Really?&quot; cried Cynthia. She leaned toward him, all eagerness and
+curiosity. Her lips were parted in a smile. She followed the movements
+of his hands with an air of suspense. She knew very well that half the
+pleasure of the givers would be spoilt if she betrayed any knowledge
+of the gift.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What can it be?&quot; Her whole attitude asked, while Robert Daventry
+slapped himself and looked under the table in a great fluster lest he
+should have mislaid the present. His concern was sheer farce; she,
+with a subtle skill of comedy, played her little part of happy
+impatience.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah!&quot; cried Robert Daventry at last. &quot;It is not lost;&quot; and he took out
+from his breast pocket a narrow case of green leather and from the
+white satin lining of the case the expected string of pearls. She
+stood up while Robert Daventry clasped it about her throat, and, as
+she took her seat again, she said in a low voice:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are both extraordinarily kind to me. I often wonder what would
+have become of me but for you--where I should be now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For a moment both of the old people looked startled. Then Robert
+Daventry hastened to protest.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My dear,&quot; he cried in a flurry, &quot;you are, after all, of my flesh and
+blood. And flesh and blood has its claims.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan's quiet voice came to his help:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Besides, the debt is not all on one side, Cynthia. We were not very
+contented until you came to us, were we Robert?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, we weren't,&quot; he replied with relief, like a man floundering who
+finds solid ground under his feet. &quot;We had lived hard and had done a
+great deal of work, and we were beginning to ask ourselves why. The
+heat and the ardor were over, you see. Our lives were cooling down. We
+had come to a time when one is apt to sit at night over the fire and
+wonder regretfully, now that no change is possible, whether we hadn't
+aimed at the wrong things and got less than we might have got out of
+our lives. We had piled up, and were still piling up, a great deal
+more money than we had any use for. We had made Daventry out of a
+plain as bare as the palm of my hand, and we had no one very dear to
+us to whom we could leave it. There didn't seem to be much use in
+things. Next week was going to be like this week, and the week after
+like next week, and life altogether nothing more than a succession of
+dull things. We were very nearly abandoning the estancia and retiring
+to England when my brother died.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And left me to you,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Daventry nodded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And then our discontent vanished,&quot; said he.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia shook her head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't remember very much of those days, but I remember enough to be
+sure that I gave you a good deal of trouble.&quot; She spoke lightly to
+hide the emotion which the kindness of these friends had stirred in
+her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan Daventry smiled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, you gave us trouble, Cynthia,&quot; she said. &quot;We are frightened by
+it still, at times. We are growing old and there is no other young
+spirit in the house, and it is possible that you might find your life
+rather dull, just as we did before you came to us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Dull?&quot; cried Cynthia. &quot;With you two dear people?&quot; She held a hand
+lovingly to each, and now was hiding nothing of what she felt.
+&quot;Besides, I have my friends. I meet them in Buenos Ayres. They come
+here to visit me. You gave them to me, as you have given me
+everything. Look at the number of them!&quot; and she proudly pointed to
+her letters. She read them through and she breakfasted, and at the end
+of the meal gathered them in her hands.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I must send some telegrams,&quot; she said. &quot;I will drive to the railway
+station.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Now?&quot; Joan Daventry asked anxiously. &quot;Can't they be sent later, in
+the afternoon, Cynthia?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, mother,&quot; Cynthia replied. &quot;Some might wait, but there's one which
+must go off now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan Daventry looked at Richard Walton. The blinds were down and the
+window closed; so that the room was dark and cool. But a glance at her
+manager's face told her sufficiently what the heat was like outside.
+He had been abroad since daybreak and he was the color of a ripe
+mulberry. Joan Daventry looked to him for assistance. But, though his
+eyes were fixed with a momentary intentness upon Cynthia, he did not
+give it. He spoke on another subject.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If you go, Miss Cynthia, I hope you will leave at home the pearls you
+are wearing round your throat. We are cutting the corn to-day and
+there are a good many men about of whom I know nothing at all. More
+hands came in last night than we had use for. It's all right, of
+course, but I shouldn't wear those pearls.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course not,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;I will put them away.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And you will take a man with you,&quot; said Robert Daventry. Neither he
+nor Joan had been brought up in cotton-wool; nor did they ever think
+to cloister Cynthia. She was left her liberty; and so half an hour
+afterward, with a big straw hat shading her face from the sun, she
+drove in her cart along the avenue to the railway station. She sent
+off the messages of thanks and then wrote out the important telegram
+which was to mark the day for her. She wrote it out without an
+alteration. For her thoughts had run fastidiously on the wording of it
+all through breakfast-time. She addressed it to:</p>
+<br>
+
+<p style="text-indent:35%"><span class="sc"><b>Captain Rames, R. N.</b></span>,</p>
+<p style="text-indent:40%"><i>S.S. Perhaps</i>,</p>
+<p style="text-indent:45%">Tilbury Docks,</p>
+<p style="text-indent:55%">London.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="continue">And she handed it to the operator with a certain trepidation like one
+who does some daring and irrevocable deed. The operator, however, was
+quite unmoved. The important message to which so much consideration
+had been given, wore to him quite a commonplace look. It amounted,
+indeed, to no more than this:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Every heart-felt wish for a triumphant journey, from an unknown
+friend in South America.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus, the very words were conventional and the sentiment no great
+matter to make a fuss about. But this was not Cynthia's point of view.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She had spoken the truth at the breakfast table when she had told Joan
+and Robert Daventry that she did not find her life dull. But they were
+old people, and, in spite of her many friends, she was, to be sure,
+much alone with them. She was reticent of her feelings in their
+presence, not through any habit of concealment, but from modesty and
+the disparity of years. On the other side it was Joan's theory that
+youth should be trusted rather than pried upon. Cynthia was thus
+thrown back a good deal upon herself, and if she did not find life
+dull, it was, perhaps, because with life she had very little to do.
+She was seventeen, a girl of clear eyes and health and silver
+thoughts; and romance had its way with her. All that loving care could
+imagine for the clean and delicate training of mind and body had been
+lavished on her; and little by little she had fashioned for herself a
+wonderland of dreams and beautiful things. The only ugly thing about
+it was the iron turnstile in the wall by which you gained admittance.
+But that could not be helped. Its ugliness was recognized. The
+turnstile had been there from the beginning--why, Cynthia could not
+have told you. It was indeed itself the beginning. It was there in her
+dreams and her fancies, offering admission to somewhere, before the
+somewhere was explored, and found to be the wonderland.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In this world, then, she moved amidst a very goodly company. She was
+careful about her company, choosing it from the world at large. She
+claimed the best of all the nations for her friends, yet with a pretty
+shyness which often enough set her blushing and laughing at her own
+pretension. She had a test. Unless you answered to it, there was no
+admission, the turnstile did not revolve. Coronets went for nothing,
+even brave deeds did not suffice. He who entered--and, by the way, it
+must regretfully be admitted that &quot;he&quot; does accurately represent the
+sex of those who were allowed to enter. For it had never occurred to
+Cynthia at all to let another woman into her world. She was modest,
+but her modesty had its limits. He who entered, then, must have given
+proofs that he was possessed with a definite idea, that his life moved
+to the tune of it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The population of Cynthia's private enclosure was consequently
+strictly limited; and, since she only knew her heroes through the
+newspaper and books, some even of those who were admitted came in
+under false pretences, and had summarily to be ejected. She was thus
+on the lookout for recruits. Captain Rames was the latest of them, and
+Cynthia knew less of him even than of the others. She had seen a
+blurred portrait of him in a daily paper; she knew that he was an
+officer in the navy, aged thirty-four, and it seemed to her that he
+had passed her test. For, this very afternoon, in command of a Dundee
+whaler, he was off southward into seas where no ship yet had sailed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The clerk stamped her telegram and took it behind the partition into
+his office. Cynthia climbed back into her cart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will drive back across the farm,&quot; she said. &quot;I want to see the
+reaping.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At the end of the short, wide street of one-storied huts and houses
+she turned through a gate in a wire fence onto a wide plain of brown
+grass. A mile across the plain, separated by no fence or hedge, the
+glistening acres of wheat began, and at the edge Cynthia could see
+little men seated on reaping-machines drawn by little horses like
+toys. She drove toward them thinking of the telegram, and, with a
+blush under her straw hat, of its reception. As a matter of fact,
+Captain Rames was rather busy that day, and anonymous telegrams did
+not receive from him the attention which was no doubt their due. In
+three hours' time, she thought, Captain Rames might be wondering what
+his unknown friend was like, with a heart full of gratitude for her
+unknown friendship. Meanwhile, she was driving nearer and nearer to
+the little toys at the edge of the wheat-field. The little toys were
+growing larger and larger. Cynthia came out of her rose-mist.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There are some new machines,&quot; she said, with interest, to the man who
+was with her. He was an old half-breed who had long been on the
+estate.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, Senorita,&quot; he answered. He pointed to one longer than the rest
+and drawn by six horses. &quot;It does everything. It cuts, it ties in
+sheaves.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The whirring of the machinery came louder and louder to their ears.
+The young horse which she was driving cocked its ears and became
+restive. She gave the reins to the servant.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will walk forward,&quot; she said. &quot;You can wait here.&quot; She descended to
+the ground. She walked forward toward the edge of the wheat. There
+realities awaited her.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_05" href="#div1Ref_05">THE REAPER</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The great reaping-machine came swaying over the uneven ground toward
+her, along the edge of those glistening acres. A huge arm of iron rose
+and fell, catching up the swathes of wheat and flinging them into the
+machine, whence they rolled out tied. Six horses harnessed behind
+pushed it and a man, perched upon a tiny saddle, steered and
+controlled it. The machine was about twenty paces from her when it
+came suddenly to a stop. The driver leaped down from his seat. It
+seemed to Cynthia that the mechanism must have gone wrong. She
+expected to see him bend over a joint or a spring. But he did not
+stoop. The moment his feet touched the ground, he ran straight toward
+her and very swiftly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He ran with his head down, and his shoulders bent. It was a heavy rush
+rather than a run. Cynthia recoiled. The words of Richard Walton
+sprang into her mind, and her hand rose instinctively to her throat.
+Could she have forgotten after all to remove the string of pearls? But
+she had removed it. And still the man was running toward her. The fear
+that she wore the pearls, and the proof that she did not, had followed
+so immediately upon his rush that he had as yet covered only half the
+ground between them. It was herself he aimed at then. She cast a rapid
+glance toward her cart. The Gaucho was leaning down over the opposite
+side, and talking to some one who stood by the wheel. A cry would not
+bring him to her side in time. She turned, with half a mind to run.
+But, though her white skirt reached only to her ankles, it would still
+impede her. She turned back and with a beating heart faced him. And a
+few feet from her he stopped.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He looked at her, drew a great breath, and cried &quot;Ah!&quot; like a man who
+has reached his goal.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What do you want?&quot; asked Cynthia, and in spite of her efforts her
+voice shook.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A South American harvest finds no use for the weak. The man who stood
+opposite to her was broad and powerful, with a heavy, coarse face,
+burnt to the color of brick by the sun. The sweat streaked it, and the
+dirt of many a day clung to it, and it was seamed by exposure. He was
+of the men who move from estancia to estancia while the harvest lasts,
+working from sunrise to dark, living upon <i>mate</i>
+tea and roasted
+sheep, and earning a pound a day, and thereafter lying soddened in
+some den until the last centavo has been squandered. A battered black
+hat was pressed low upon his clotted hair; a month's growth of beard
+straggled over his chin and cheeks. And his eyes were evil. That, more
+than any other quality of the man, Cynthia noticed. Their quick glance
+held her. She was terrified.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What do you want?&quot; she asked a second time, and her voice wavered
+still more audibly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She stood in front of him, her lovely brows, under the big brim of her
+straw hat, troubled, and her great eyes wide and alert with fear. She
+was in the poise for flight like a startled deer, yet did not dare to
+turn to fly. And in the man, as he looked at her, there came a change.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He did not answer her question. But very slowly he smiled, and the
+smile was spiteful. He nodded his head at her; a malicious contentment
+overspread his face; and from head to heel his eyes inspected her.
+They approved her beauty and the simple daintiness of her clothes;
+they took note of her slenderness of hand and foot; they remarked the
+lines and supple youth of her figure; and through her white frock they
+seemed to make sure of the roundness of her limbs. Cynthia grew
+suddenly hot with shame. This man was appraising her--nothing less.
+Appraising her as if for a market! Her fear dropped from her. She
+cried a third time, but with spirit:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What do you want of me?&quot; and if her voice shook now, it was with a
+quiver of indignation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She heard the thud of a horse's hoofs behind her. The reaper heard it,
+too. Without a word, and without any hurry, he turned away from her
+and slouched back to his machine. Cynthia's cart the next moment was
+driven up to her side. She climbed into it and took the reins. The
+encounter had shaken her more than she had thought. She was trembling,
+and she drove over the ground quickly, until she saw the slate roof of
+the house, flashing like silver, from a clump of dark trees quite
+near.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then she reined in her horse and turned round. Far away at the edge of
+the wheat, the man and the machine and the six horses stood out black
+like a little toy. The clank and rattle of the iron came to her ears
+through the still air, faintly, like the mechanism of a toy. But
+Cynthia shivered as she looked back.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Who is he?&quot; she asked of the old Gaucho. He shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I do not know him, Señorita. I do not think he was here last year.
+They come in herds and go in herds when the corn is stacked.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Up and down, along the glistening line, the man drove his horses and
+manipulated his machine. He stopped no more. With each journey a wide
+band of wheat went down. Thus he had been working, balanced in his
+saddle, since daybreak. So, with but a two hours' rest, he would go
+under the burning afternoon sun until darkness came and bade him stop.
+To the Gaucho he was one of a herd of men who did the like; for a few
+weeks here; then for another few weeks on another estancia further
+down the line. But for Cynthia this man stood strangely out from the
+herd. He had stopped her, and she did not know why. She sat and
+watched his slow, obstinate progression. The persistence, the physical
+strength of the man daunted her. There was something of nature's own
+relentlessness in his capacity to endure and work. She magnified him,
+and was, at the same time, interested and alarmed. For of this she was
+sure. He had not stopped her merely because she was a girl, and alone.
+He had stopped her because she was herself. She remembered his smile,
+his nods of the head, his malice. He had a personal feeling, a
+personal animosity. She could not understand it, yet she was sure.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How long will he stay?&quot; she asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A month,&quot; said the Gaucho.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He was not here last year?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I do not recognize him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why, then--&quot; she began and did not finish the question. It was in her
+mind to ask, &quot;Why does he hate me?&quot; But she was aware at once that the
+Gaucho could not answer it. &quot;And he will stay a month?&quot; she asked
+again, uneasily.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, unless the Señorita wishes him to go. It will be, of course, as
+the Señorita wishes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia nodded her head. There was a way out of the trouble, to be
+sure. But, on the other hand, she would have to say why she wished the
+man to go. At the recital of her story Mr. and Mrs. Daventry would be
+excited and alarmed. She herself would henceforth be surrounded with
+precautions. She determined to say nothing at all about her adventure.
+She would be careful during this month where she roamed. The man would
+be at work and it would be easy to avoid him. She gathered the reins
+again in her hands and drove to the house.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_06" href="#div1Ref_06">A VISITOR AT THE ESTANCIA</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia accordingly held her tongue. Nevertheless, that evening
+Richard Walton said to her across the dinner table:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So you were, after all, molested by one of the hands, Miss Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Molested!&quot; cried Robert Daventry indignantly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's face flamed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Who told you?&quot; she asked of Richard Walton.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Pedro.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia had not thought of the Gaucho. He had seemed so entirely
+uninterested, so utterly unalarmed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;'Molested' is too strong a word,&quot; she said hastily. She now meant to
+make as light of the encounter as she possibly could. &quot;It was very
+likely my fault. I got out of the trap and walked toward the wheat. It
+may be that the man fancied I wished to speak to him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What did he do?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The question came from Joan Daventry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He sprang from his seat, ran to me, and stopped in front of me. That
+was all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Quite all?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia nodded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He just stood and stared at me until Pedro drove up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Did he say nothing?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not a word.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In spite of her resolve to treat the adventure lightly, Cynthia's
+voice grew troubled as she answered the questions. For she answered
+them with her eyes upon Joan Daventry's face, and she saw the
+perplexity there deepen into disquietude and misgiving. She turned
+toward Robert Daventry. Upon his face uneasiness was still more
+evident. He was plainly agitated. He sat listening in suspense. His
+indignation had gone.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's fear revived under the stimulation of their anxiety. She
+continued slowly:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But although he did me no harm, although he threatened none, there
+was something strange. He saw me at once. He ran so very quickly to me
+the moment I was within reach. He seemed almost to be looking out for
+me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan sank back into her chair with a gesture of helplessness, which
+was all the more alarming because it was so singularly out of keeping
+with her character. Her eyes sought her husband's and sought them in
+dismay. Cynthia noticed both the gesture and the look. They kindled a
+vague terror in the girl. The wide brown plain was as a picture before
+her. She saw the great wheat-field glistening in the heat, a
+wind-wheel in a corner above a well, and this man with the evil eyes
+and the face of malice looking her over from head to foot.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; she said. &quot;He seemed to be expecting me, and there was
+something else. He seemed to hate me;&quot; and Robert Daventry with a cry
+sprang sharply to his feet.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan raised a quick warning hand. But the cry had been uttered; and
+with a sob Cynthia buried her face in her hands.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am frightened now,&quot; she said. &quot;You frighten me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Daventry stood over her, clumsily remorseful, and laid his
+great hand on her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There's nothing to fear, Cynthia,&quot; he began. &quot;Joan and I--&quot; he broke
+off abruptly at a second warning from his wife. &quot;We will pack that man
+off about his business to-morrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Mrs. Daventry. She had mastered her agitation, and now
+affected carelessness. &quot;We can't really have Cynthia's birthday spoilt
+in this way.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, of course not,&quot; cried Robert Daventry, seizing upon this
+explanation of his distress. But he could not leave it in its
+simplicity. &quot;It's abominable that Cynthia should have her birthday
+spoilt. She has only one a year, poor girl. That's what's troubling
+us, Cynthia. Nothing else. But it's enough to upset us, isn't it? To
+think that you should actually have your birthday spoilt--by one of my
+men, too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So he went on, like a commentator on an ancient text, expanding the
+explanation, underlining it, and forcing upon Cynthia's intelligence
+its complete improbability. Even in the midst of her fears she could
+not but look with amusement toward Joan; and the two women exchanged
+the smile of their sex at the perennial clumsiness of man.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He shall go first thing to-morrow morning,&quot; cried Mr. Daventry; and
+Richard Walton quietly rejoined:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He has gone already. I paid him off this morning.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Daventry ceased abruptly from his vociferations.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you, Walton,&quot; he said. &quot;Then that's ended,&quot; and he sat down.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But he had hardly taken his seat when the door opened and the
+parlor-maid brought to him upon a salver a folded slip of dirty paper.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A man came with this to the door, sir. He is waiting for an answer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Daventry unfolded the slip and read the message written within
+it. He did not lift his eyes when he had read. He sat staring at the
+paper like a statue. And he sat amidst a deep silence. The cloud which
+had but now been lifted, had gathered once more above the heads of
+that small company. Though Robert Daventry did not speak, his long
+silence spoke for him; and though he schooled his face to composure,
+it was plain that he schooled it. A vague disquiet held the others at
+the table. Not one of them but had a conviction that this dirty,
+insignificant, scrap of writing announced a catastrophe.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan was the first to move. She walked round the table and stood
+behind her husband. He did not hear the rustle of her gown; and he was
+not aware that she leaned over him to read the message until the
+pressure of her hand upon his shoulder reminded him that she was his
+ally.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You had better see the man, Robert,&quot; she said. &quot;He calls late, but
+probably he needs help.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus she sought to pass the message off.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well, I will,&quot; said Robert. He turned to the parlor-maid. &quot;Bring
+him to my study when I ring the bell.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will come with you,&quot; said Joan, as the servant went out from the
+room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Richard Walton rose from his chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Perhaps you would like me, too?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, I don't think that's necessary,&quot; replied Joan Daventry. &quot;But
+perhaps you would stay within sound of the bell. We don't know who
+this man is or what he wants. If we ring again, you would know that we
+needed your advice.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Certainly, I will be upon the lookout,&quot; said Walton, and he went from
+the room and crossed to the servants' quarters. There he would hear
+the bell at once should it ring for him. Joan meanwhile turned with a
+smile to Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We will leave you here for a few minutes,&quot; she said, and the
+composure of her voice almost reassured the girl; would, indeed, have
+quite reassured her but for Robert Daventry. She saw that his hands
+trembled so that the paper shook in them, even as her hands had
+trembled this morning when she climbed up by the edge of the wheat
+into her cart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, wait here, Cynthia,&quot; said Robert Daventry, as he got to his
+feet; and Cynthia noticed that while he spoke to her he altogether
+avoided the glance of her eyes. The old couple went out of the room
+together, leaving her alone, and carefully latched the door behind
+them. In the hall for a moment they stood resting from their pretence.
+A broken word or two burst from Robert Daventry:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What shall we do, Joan? This is what we have dreaded always.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan raised her finger to her lips.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Hush! Speak lower. What I said was true. We don't know who he is, or
+what he wants. He may not be the man who stopped her in the field at
+all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Daventry shook his head. It was rather his nature to run to
+meet misfortune if he saw its shadow in his way.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What shall we do?&quot; he repeated. &quot;Money will send him away,&quot; said
+Joan.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And bring him back again,&quot; replied Robert hopelessly. &quot;Sooner or
+later Cynthia will know;&quot; and Joan threw up her head at his words.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; she said vigorously. &quot;No.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At her left hand a door stood open upon a dark room. This was the
+smoking-room. She entered the room and crossed it to the opposite
+wall. Then she opened a second door, and advancing into this inner
+room, felt for the switch in the darkness and turned on the light.
+Bookcases, filled for the most part with books on agriculture, lined
+the room, a round table, littered with papers, occupied the centre, in
+the recess of a window stood a writing-desk. This was Robert
+Daventry's study. Her husband followed her, and saw that her finger
+was already on the bell.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Let us decide what we are to do,&quot; he said, &quot;before you ring.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan shook her head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We can't. We must be guided by what the man knows, and by what he
+wants. Only we admit nothing,&quot; she declared resolutely; and she
+pressed the bell. It rang in the passage by the kitchen, but Cynthia,
+left alone in the dining-room, heard it too.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The moment she heard it, Cynthia rose from her chair, and ran silently
+to the door. She unlatched it without a sound, and drew it toward her
+until it was just wide enough open for her to see out. There she stood
+grasping the door-knob, and in a moment a heavy foot sounded in the
+hall. Cynthia set her eyes to the chink. She saw first a maid-servant
+cross the hall, and pass into the smoking-room, and after the maid a
+man. The man was the reaper who had leapt from his machine and rushed
+toward her that morning. The maid-servant came back alone and crossed
+the hall again to the servants' quarters. A door was shut loudly--the
+door of Robert Daventry's study--and then another door opened
+noiselessly, and opened wide--the door of the dining-room. Cynthia
+came out into the hall. All the color had gone from her face, her eyes
+were wide with terror. The man meant her harm--not a doubt of it. He
+had some power to inflict the harm--that was sure. Otherwise why was
+he admitted, why were her friends in such concern?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was quite alone in the hall now. Voices sounded faintly from
+the kitchen and in the room behind her a clock ticked. But there were
+no other sounds. She crossed to the threshold of the smoking-room and
+looked in. At the other end a bright bar of light on the floor held
+her eyes. The light came from the study. Cynthia watched it for a
+moment irresolute. But the temptation grew. She was sure that beyond
+that bright bar of light, behind that closed door, here in this
+far-away corner of Argentina, good and evil were at grips for her. A
+sense of loneliness suddenly possessed her, she longed for the
+neighborly noises of a city. And while she stood she heard her own name
+pronounced by Robert Daventry, and at once a harsh, strange voice rose
+in a laugh, loud and arrogant. She looked about her in a panic. She
+must fly, or she must know the truth, the whole of it, the worst of
+it. She stole swiftly and noiselessly into the room. Close by that bar
+of light a big, low chair stood against the wall. Cynthia crouched in
+the chair, her frock a blur of misty white in the darkness. There she
+remained, very still and quiet; and every word spoken in the study
+came clearly to her ears.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_07" href="#div1Ref_07">BOTH SIDES OF THE DOOR</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Within the room the three people were standing, the reaper upon one
+side of the table, Joan and Robert Daventry close together upon the
+other. The reaper was still laughing.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Cynthia!&quot; he cried, repeating contemptuously the name which Robert
+Daventry had used. &quot;There's no Cynthia. There's a very pretty little
+girl I saw this morning in the corn. But her pretty little name is
+Doris Challoner. And, taking all in all, it's the better name of the
+two.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He spoke with an easy and most disquieting assurance, but Joan had
+enough of that quality to meet with him in the gate. She had always
+been a good fighter; she had stood by her husband often enough in the
+early days of the estancia, when his nerve would have failed him but
+for her; and she was for putting up to-night the best fight of her
+whole long, active life. Money, to her thinking, they could make
+again, old as they were, if the need came. But they could not open
+their hearts to a second Cynthia, even if they could find one.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Nonsense,&quot; she answered boldly. &quot;Her name is Cynthia Daventry.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Where was she born, then?&quot; asked the reaper.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;In Patagonia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Never in this world,&quot; cried the man. &quot;She was born in Concepcion, and
+that's her farthest south.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan shrugged her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We ought to know. She is my husband's niece.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A grin overspread the reaper's face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And is that so?&quot; he asked, in a mock surprise. &quot;I wasn't aware of
+it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, you are now,&quot; said Joan.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, and the news alters our relations altogether, doesn't it?&quot; he
+said pleasantly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He tossed his battered hat upon the table, pulled out a chair, and sat
+down in it at his ease, his legs stretched out, his hands deep in his
+pockets. He nodded familiarly to Joan.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How do you do, sis?&quot; He turned his face toward Mr. Daventry, &quot;You
+have got a nice little place, brother Robert. Shows what honest work
+can do if persevered with day after day for a great number of
+consecutive years. Quite a nice little place. You haven't, by any
+chance, got a nice little cigar, too, have you, Robert, for your
+long-lost brother?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Daventry's face grew red, and the veins swelled upon his
+forehead. He was a man quickly moved to passion, and quick, too, the
+passion exhausted, to swing back into doubts and hesitations. He blew
+either hot or cold, and, sooner or later, he was sure to blow cold.
+Now, however, his temper was up, and he brought his great fist down
+with violence upon the table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What do you mean by your insolence?&quot; he shouted &quot;Stand up!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan laid a hand upon the old man's arm to restrain him. The reaper,
+for his part, never budged from his attitude.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have got a nerve,&quot; he said. &quot;You tell me a pack of lies--that's
+all right, you've got money. But when I take you at your word, it's
+'insolence' and 'stand up.' How's that, if you please?&quot; He sat and
+laughed for a little in contemptuous jerks. &quot;Your niece, indeed! The
+girl's my daughter.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Neither Joan nor Robert believed him for a moment. They thought of
+Cynthia, and compared that image at their hearts with the actual man
+who sprawled on the chair in front of them. Robert counted him up, his
+heavy features, his grime-engrained, spoilt hands, the whole degraded,
+unkempt look of him. Cynthia's father! The claim was preposterous.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Her father!&quot; cried Robert Daventry, leaning across the table. &quot;Look
+at yourself in the glass!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The sneer stung the reaper to a fury. He sprang to his feet, and from
+habit his hand slipped to the knife at the back of his waistband. But
+he mastered himself in a second or two. He was there for other ends
+than violence, and he withdrew his hand.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I sha'n't forget that,&quot; he said, in a perfectly quiet voice, which
+contrasted in the strangest way with the convulsion of his face. &quot;You
+got home there. Right home;&quot; and he sat down again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan interposed before her husband could say another word, and used
+soft words. The man was not Cynthia's father to be sure, but he knew
+something of the girl's history. That was certain--and he knew more
+than either Joan or Robert knew themselves. If she was to fight her
+battle with success, she must know what he knew.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You could not expect us to accept your mere statement,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, that's reasonable,&quot; said the reaper, and he began his story. But
+the insult rankled in his breast and as he spoke he kept turning a
+murderous eye on the man who had inflicted it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He told the story of the earthquake at Valparaiso, and the flight of
+James Challoner across the Andes. It was a story told with a wealth of
+detail, and difficult altogether to discredit. Neither Joan nor Robert
+did altogether discredit it. It might be true or it might not. This
+man might have obtained it from James Challoner, or might somehow have
+come across it by himself. But they were still convinced he could not
+be James Challoner himself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We shall want more proof than that,&quot; said Joan calmly, and Robert
+nodded his head. Neither of them had felt more confidence than at this
+moment since the crumpled slip of paper had been brought into the
+dining-room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But outside the door Cynthia huddled in the great chair with her ear
+to the door, listened with a growing terror. She had never doubted
+until this hour that she was the daughter of Robert Daventry's
+brother. She had been secure in that belief. Now the security was
+going. She clutched the arms of her chair, feeling the whole world
+slipping from beneath her feet--even as it had slipped at Valparaiso.
+For certain memories, quite clear in her mind, were being explained to
+her. An open hill-side at night, a strange red light upon the world,
+the crash of houses, little flames creeping, and ships quietly at
+anchor on the smoothest of seas--that was one picture in her memories
+which had often puzzled her, which would puzzle her no longer if she
+believed the story which was being told on the other side of the door.
+She remembered, too, a long journey amongst mountains, and a bridge
+over a deep and narrow torrent, and many people with kind faces who
+spoke to her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course, it isn't certain,&quot; she pleaded to herself desperately; and
+the husky voice behind the door began again:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I travelled down to Buenos Ayres by train. I had little money, and no
+prospects, and a child on my hands. I couldn't make a home for her. So
+I went straight to the foundling hospital. It stands back in a garden,
+and is kept by some wealthy sisters. There's a turnstile in the brick
+wall of the garden, a little iron turnstile--but you know it well,
+both of you;&quot; and he broke off with a laugh.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Inside the study Joan and Robert Daventry, still remained unconvinced.
+Outside Cynthia was persuaded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's true then,&quot; she whispered to herself. &quot;It's quite true;&quot; and she
+wrung her hands in the darkness, and her voice broke in a sob. She had
+no longer any shadow of doubt. The turnstile in the brick wall was for
+her the overwhelming proof.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Examined in a court of law by the rules of evidence, it might seem
+flimsy enough. To Cynthia, it was complete corroboration of the
+testimony of her memories. The turnstile in the brick wall--the one
+ugly thing in her imagined wonderland of heroes--the turnstile which
+had always been there before the land was--how had it come there, she
+asked herself? And she was in no doubt as to the answer. The turnstile
+was a memory too. It was the turnstile of a foundling hospital, where
+her father had left her and gone his way. No wonder, she reflected
+bitterly, it was the one ugly thing in her world of fancies.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She leaned back, shivering, with her hands covering her face. She was
+humiliated, but she was still more terrified. Shame cut deep, but fear
+touched the very nerves of her heart. The man who had this morning
+rushed at her was her father, and she remembered the malice of his
+smile, and the evil, covetous look of him as he appraised her. She
+grew hot, now, as she thought upon it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What harm does he mean?&quot; she asked; and suddenly she sat forward on
+the edge of her chair, quivering from head to foot like a spring some
+touch had released. For her father's voice rose again:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I tied a bootlace round the child's arm. I can't say that I ever
+thought to come back for her. But there's a convention in these
+things, isn't there?&quot; he added with a grin. &quot;I have been a
+conservative all my life, and now I have found the advantage of it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How?&quot; asked Joan. &quot;Even if your story were true, your daughter
+wouldn't be wearing a bootlace or even the mark of it round her arm
+now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, from the look of her she'd be more likely to be wearing a diamond
+bangle, bless her! But all the same the bootlace helps.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Again the implacable question was uttered by Joan. She must know all
+that this man had upon his side by way of argument. That was her first
+necessity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How does the bootlace help?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It helps because the child wearing that bootlace was received by the
+same old ladies who allowed you a few months afterward to adopt
+her--that's how. Don't you leave those old ladies out of your
+reckoning, Mrs. Daventry, or you will run up against a snag. I went
+back to the foundling a year ago and claimed my daughter.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You did?&quot; cried Joan. She was startled. For a moment, too, she was
+disconcerted. She knew nothing of any such visit. But the statement
+was so easily capable of proof that the reaper would hardly have made
+it, had it not been true. And she was quick to see how strong a
+presumption such a visit would create, that he was the girl's father.
+Then she sprang to the weak point in the statement.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If it were true that Cynthia was your daughter, and that you claimed
+her a year ago, how is it that you wait until a chance meeting in a
+field brings you face to face?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There's no chance about it, believe me,&quot; James Challoner returned.
+For it was he. The delicate manners had been rubbed off him, the
+gentle voice, which had charmed so many dollars from reluctant pockets
+long ago at Punta del Inca, had thickened and grown husky, the
+well-knit figure had spread to heaviness. But this was James
+Challoner, after fourteen years had told their tale. &quot;The old ladies
+lied to me. Yes, actually lied to me,&quot; and he spread out his hands in
+indignation. &quot;Lied to a father about his daughter! They were religious
+people too!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If they did lie,&quot; Robert Daventry burst in, &quot;they did the best thing
+they ever did in all their good lives.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">James Challoner waved Robert Daventry and his outburst aside. He kept
+his eyes fixed upon Joan's face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, they lied to me,&quot; he said. &quot;I gave them the day and the month
+and the year, when I placed Doris on the turnstile. They pretended to
+make inquiries, and they lied to me. They told me she was dead. Ah!&quot;
+and he suddenly leaned forward and pointed an accusing finger at Joan,
+&quot;You are glad to hear that. Yes, I thought you would be.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Try as she did, Joan had not been able to keep a flash of joy out of
+her face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's a matter of indifference to me,&quot; she replied, &quot;since Cynthia is
+not your child.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She still clung obstinately to that belief. He might have heard the
+story from James Challoner, and James Challoner might be dead. Any
+hypothesis was possible in her eyes, except the one which was true.
+She would not have it that this man was Cynthia's father.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, it is a matter of indifference to you!&quot; said Challoner
+ironically. &quot;I will tell you something that won't be. Those old ladies
+lied just as clumsily as I have ever seen it done. Poor old souls,
+they were rattled out of their senses at the thought of the sin they
+were committing. A child could have seen they were lying--as I did who
+am no child. And I began to cast about for a reason for the lie. It
+wasn't very difficult to find it. Some one had adopted her, some one
+they didn't want me to discover, some one rich, then, I reckoned, who
+could give the girl a position.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">At the word &quot;rich&quot; Robert and Joan exchanged a glance. So much were
+they disconcerted by Challoner's knowledge and assurance that now they
+hoped rather than feared that blackmail was the end he had in view.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So I began to make inquiries,&quot; continued Challoner. &quot;I found out who
+were the patrons, who took most interest in the institution, and
+amongst them who had adopted a child. I came upon you in the end.&quot; And
+again he began to laugh. &quot;Those poor innocent old women had actually
+given me the date when you took Doris away as the date of the child's
+death. It took me a little time to find out all about you; and when I
+had found out I had no money. So I had to work my way along until I
+reached you. But I have reached you,&quot; he exclaimed, lolling back in
+his chair, &quot;and, by George, the very first day I am at work here, out
+the girl comes to meet me. Why, I recognized her in a second;&quot; and
+Joan slipped in, as she thought, under his guard. With a thrill of
+delight she believed that he had made a mistake, and a mistake which
+would discredit every word of his story.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Recognized her!&quot; she repeated scornfully. &quot;And the last time, when,
+on your own showing, you saw her she was three years old!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner, however, merely smiled at her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If you had a family at your back, old lady, you wouldn't be so high,&quot;
+he said; and once more Robert Daventry interposed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Speak respectfully to my wife,&quot; he cried.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What, are you butting in again?&quot; asked Challoner, with a look of
+surprise. &quot;You didn't do any good, you know, the last time you
+interfered.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Once more Joan was called upon to restrain her husband. She saw the
+man convicted of a lie, and she did not mean to lose the advantage of
+that conviction.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How did you recognize her?&quot; she asked, smiling in her turn. &quot;How did
+you recognize in the girl of seventeen the child of three?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I'll tell you,&quot; said Challoner confidently. &quot;And, by the way, she's
+not seventeen to-day. It might interest you to know that. She's
+seventeen and a half. She was born on the seventeenth of July.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Keep to the point,&quot; said Joan.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Certainly, I will,&quot; replied Challoner, &quot;though it's by no means
+necessary to substantiate my authority--yes,&quot; and his voice suddenly
+rang out loud upon the word, so that Cynthia in the darkness on the
+other side of the door shivered as if she had been struck, &quot;yes, my
+authority. I don't say that she's like what she was when she was
+three. I don't even say she's like her mother. She isn't. She's a
+Challoner--and in the Challoner's home, by Wareham in Dorsetshire,
+there are some pictures worth looking at. I sat opposite one of them
+at the dinner table all through my boyhood, and whenever I was at
+home afterward--until I came out here. It was the portrait of my
+great-great-grandmother, painted by Romney, when she was a girl; and I
+tell you the girl who came stepping so prettily across the field this
+morning, in her white frock and big straw hat, might have stepped
+right out of that picture frame. That's how I recognized her.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He ended on a note of triumph, and for the first time Joan's
+confidence failed her altogether. Again, it was not, of course, a
+conclusive piece of evidence, gauged by any laws of reasoning, but
+just as Challoner's description of the turnstile had convinced Cynthia
+outside the door because of the particular illumination it lent to an
+obscure fancy, so this detail of the picture did more to convince Joan
+Daventry than the rest of the story. Some portions of that story she
+knew to be true: the bootlace, the abandonment of the child. But what
+she had obstinately been combating was the contention that it was true
+of this man who sat before her. He might have learnt it all from the
+real father; he might now be seeking to make his profit out of the
+knowledge. That had been her hope. But it failed her now. For the
+particular detail of the girl's resemblance, now that she was
+seventeen, to the Romney portrait in the Challoners' dining-room he
+could not have learned from another. It did suggest that the man in
+front of her was the Challoner he claimed to be. Of course the detail
+might have been invented. But it did not sound to her invented; and,
+so far as her knowledge could test it, the rest of his story was true.
+She looked him over again with new eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But you can't prove that,&quot; she said. &quot;Even if it were true, you
+couldn't prove it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Should I need to?&quot; asked Challoner. &quot;After I had put those old ladies
+from the Foundling into the witness-box, should I need to, Mrs.
+Daventry? Would they stick to their lie? Any tenth-rate attorney could
+turn 'em inside out as easy as an old glove, if they tried to. But
+they wouldn't try--and you know it as well as I do.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner had put his finger on the danger-spot of the Daventrys'
+position. Those two old ladies would have suffered much
+heart-searching before they told their lie, and not a little remorse
+afterward. Questioned upon their oaths they would speak the truth, and
+the whole truth. Of that Joan felt sure.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There are men, too, in Buenos Ayres who knew me when I was in Chile,&quot;
+Challoner continued; and then once more Robert Daventry interposed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But you wouldn't be mad enough to go to law with us,&quot; he cried, and
+Challoner laughed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes, I would, and I would put you into the witness-box, too. A
+pretty figure you would cut, with your Patagonian brother, eh? I
+wouldn't bring my action here, of course, in this district. You've got
+your local syndic in your pocket, I grant you. But the law runs in
+Buenos Ayres nowadays, and don't you forget it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Daventry turned aside to hide his discomfiture, and walked once
+or twice across the room. He had no doubt that this man was James
+Challoner and Cynthia's father. His story was too circumstantial to be
+disputed. Moreover, neither he nor Joan could publicly dispute it.
+There had been no brother in Patagonia. He turned abruptly to
+Challoner: &quot;How much do you want?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan moved quickly to his side with a cry of protest. Money it might
+be necessary to pay, but it must be asked for, not offered. To offer
+it was to admit the claim.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What are you saying, Robert?&quot; she cried.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert turned to her quietly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It must come to that in the end. Why not now and have done with it?
+How much?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A smile of triumph broadened over Challoner's face. Outside the door
+Cynthia leaned forward, her hands clasped over her heart in an agony
+of suspense. Why didn't he answer? Why was he so long?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The answer came at length:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I want my daughter, nothing else. She is not of age. I have a right
+to her; I'll take her away with me to-night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia crouched back in her chair, clasping its arms tightly with her
+hands, and making herself very small. To Joan and Robert Daventry the
+demand was incredible, even though their ears had heard it. Challoner
+could not mean it. It was an expedient to raise the price. But Cynthia
+had caught a note of malice in his voice which brought back before her
+eyes the malice of his looks as he had stood before her in the field.
+He meant to take her away, and that night. She glanced toward the
+door. To leave her home, to be swallowed up in the darkness with this
+stranger for her companion! She clung to the chair in a panic of
+terror. Then she heard Robert Daventry repeating the words in a daze:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You want to take her away? Cynthia?&quot; And as though the meaning of
+Challoner's demand for the first time broke in on him, &quot;Never!&quot; he
+cried violently.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I want to take her away to-night;&quot; and now the malice in Challoner's
+voice was audible to Joan too. She stared at him over the table. He
+sat nodding his head at her with little quick movements, his eyes very
+bright, and a horrid smile about his mouth. She remembered what
+Cynthia herself had said: &quot;He seemed to hate me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You grudge her her happiness, her life with us!&quot; she exclaimed; and
+Challoner beat his fist upon the table in a sudden anger.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Is it strange?&quot; he cried. &quot;All these years here she has been sitting
+soft and walking daintily. What have I been doing? 'Look at yourself
+in a glass'--That's what you said,&quot; and he turned to Robert Daventry.
+&quot;I told you I'd remember it, and I do. A fine life I have had of it
+for fourteen years. Mate tea and enough work a day to throw a
+trades-unionist into hysterics! No wonder I've lost my looks.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">All the bitterness of his fourteen years of degradation seemed to be
+concentrated in his words. The easy good-humor with which he had begun
+had vanished. He was a man venomous with grievances. He was still the
+old James Challoner in this; he had enemies, only now the enemies were
+not a few to be searched for through a list, but all who had a
+sixpence in their pockets. Joan herself was frightened. She realized
+the mistake which she and her husband had made in their eagerness to
+disbelieve the story of this man. She understood now that when she had
+thought of Cynthia and compared her with the reaper, she had been
+thinking only of the flower and had omitted her own assiduous
+cultivation of the plant. She recognized now that the look of race
+which fourteen years of luxury had refined in the girl, fourteen years
+of degradation might well have obliterated in the man.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have had enough of it,&quot; cried James Challoner. &quot;It's now her turn.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But we offer you freedom from that life,&quot; said Joan, and her voice
+began to plead.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I want my daughter,&quot; Challoner retorted implacably.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But you can't make a home for her,&quot; said Robert Daventry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner chuckled and his voice lost its violence.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You must take me for a softy,&quot; he said with a drawl of amusement. &quot;I
+mean her to make a home for me, where I can do a bit of sitting soft
+and recover my good looks.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But she can't make a home for you,&quot; said Joan.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes she can.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia outside the door waited in a despairing bewilderment. The
+changed tones of those whom she had looked upon as her parents assured
+her that the reaper had authority and rights, could claim her, could
+take her away. But how, she asked herself, was she to make a home for
+him? She had learned no profession, practised no art. The tears rose
+to her eyes and flowed down her cheeks; and the answer came.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;She's a rare one for looks,&quot; said Challoner. His eyes narrowed to
+slits and his face became mean and despicable to look upon. &quot;You'll
+not find her equal strolling under the lamps of Buenos Ayres.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan flinched and uttered a cry. The movement was that of one who has
+been slapped in the face. Cynthia felt her heart stand still within
+her breast. She had lived in Buenos Ayres, where knowledge comes
+quickly to women. She was neither ignorant nor a fool. She understood,
+and once more her eyes went to the door. It was all quiet in the hall.
+A few quick steps and she would be out of the house. She rose from her
+chair. For the dark night, which a minute before had so appalled her,
+now appealed to her as a friend and refuge. But as she turned, she
+heard Robert Daventry say in a choking voice:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Go! or I'll have you thrown out;&quot; and the bell rang violently.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, is that the game?&quot; replied Challoner.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Daventry strode round the room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not a word! Go! I loathe you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And the door was wrenched violently open. Cynthia had just time to
+drop into her chair. She heard her father's voice close to her, and no
+longer through the panels of a door. She cowered down, covering her
+face with her hands, and drawing in her feet.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;All right, I'll go,&quot; said Challoner. &quot;I can afford to go. For I have
+the law on my side.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The law! Try it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner was standing in the doorway now. He was looking back into
+the study. But he had only to turn his head to see that blur of misty
+white in the chair, only to bend down and draw the trembling hands
+from the girl's face to find his daughter in his grasp. Cynthia lay
+holding her breath, ready at a touch of him to swoon.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;She's my daughter. All your money won't get over that. Just wait
+and see. I'll come back with the law at my side, and take her
+away--yes--if I have to tie her hand and foot to take her.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He flung out across the smoking-room, looking neither to the right nor
+to the left. Joan and Robert Daventry followed quickly behind him,
+afraid lest he should force his way into the dining-room where they
+had left Cynthia. Not one of them saw the girl huddled in the great
+chair in the dark room. Richard Walton came into the hall.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I'll see you off the premises,&quot; he said to Challoner, and a moment
+afterward the front door slammed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With the slamming of that door Cynthia seemed to swim back into life;
+and all at once there came upon her a great longing for comfort and
+kind words. She was hurt and humiliated as she had never thought to
+be. It seemed to her that she was tainted, and she was terribly
+afraid. She took a swift step toward the door, and there Joan's voice
+speaking in a whisper arrested her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan was standing with her husband by the dining-room, and seeking to
+compose her agitation before she entered it. Her voice was still
+shaking from her encounter.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not a word to Cynthia,&quot; she said. &quot;We sha'n't let her go, Robert,&quot;
+and her voice was very wistful, and appealed for confirmation of her
+words. &quot;So there's no need to trouble her--as this story would trouble
+her.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, we'll not say a word to her,&quot; replied Robert. He made an effort
+to be hearty, but it quite failed to hide his distress. &quot;We shall find
+a way out somehow when we think it all over. No, we'll not breathe a
+word, my dear. Cynthia's birthday mustn't be spoilt,&quot; and, thoroughly
+miserable, the old couple went into the dining-room and closed the
+door behind them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia made up her mind. Since they wished her not to know, since it
+would add so much to their distress if they learned that she did know,
+she would keep her knowledge to herself. It seemed to her then a small
+return to make to them for their devotion, but it was to cost her much
+more than she imagined. She would wait, schooling herself to patience,
+hiding her fears. But she could not face her friends to-night and keep
+her secret. For that she had not the strength. She ran swiftly and
+silently up to her room and flung herself upon her bed and buried her
+face in the pillows. There she lay trembling until the thought came to
+her that Joan would not retire without coming to ask why she had gone
+upstairs so early. She undressed and was hardly in bed before Joan
+knocked on the door.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I had a headache,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;It is the heat, no doubt. I shall
+be myself in the morning.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are sure? You wouldn't like the doctor?&quot; Joan asked anxiously.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, no!&quot; exclaimed Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Joan put her hand to the switch of the light, and Cynthia started up
+in bed with a wild gesture.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Don't turn the light out, please, mother,&quot; she cried; and the next
+moment feared that Joan would have heard the terror underneath her
+words. But Joan herself was occupied. She kissed Cynthia and left her
+alone with the light burning in her room.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_08" href="#div1Ref_08">THE FLIGHT</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">But though the light burned in her room, Cynthia did not sleep till
+daybreak. For the first few hours there was a strange bustle about the
+passages of the house, for which she did not seek at all to find a
+cause. She welcomed it for its companionship. Familiar voices informed
+her that her friends were awake about her, and she was comforted. She
+tried to fall asleep before the noise should cease, but gradually the
+estancia sank into silence, and she was still awake. Then began her
+hours of terror. Her window was open, and every flutter of the night
+air which shook the curtains was her father's coarse, strong hand upon
+the sill. If she closed her eyes for a moment, his dark and evil face
+was already bending over her, as she lay helpless in her bed. If she
+heard a wardrobe crack it was he stepping clumsily about the room.
+Half the night she spent crouching up in her bed, her eyes wild with
+fear, her heart racing and stopping, while she listened for the sound
+of his footsteps outside the house. And she heard them; did a twig
+snap on a tree in the garden, she heard them. There was he, prowling
+about the walls, watching, perhaps, for just her light to be put out
+before he slipped in through a window to take her away. If she heard
+no sounds, then he was already in the house, creeping along the
+corridor toward her door. From the moment when this particular fear
+seized hold upon her, her eyes were fixed in an agony of suspense upon
+the long mirror in her room. The door was at her right hand, set in
+the wall against which the head of her bed was placed. A high screen
+stood by the side of the bed and hid it from her altogether. But
+across the room the long mirror faced her, and by looking at its
+bright surface she could see whether the door opened or not. It was a
+white door, with a round brass handle, and, continually, she was very
+sure that she saw the handle turn. In her frantic imaginings her
+father's very semblance changed. Gross though he was, still more she
+distorted him, making his likeness fit with the knowledge which she
+had of him. He meant to drag her away, and batten on what she had of
+youth and freshness and good looks; and this, out of malice almost as
+much as for profit, and to punish her for the happiness of her life.
+He swelled into some grotesque and corpulent thing of evil with a fat,
+loathsome face and gripping hands.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The night was a night of disillusionment for Cynthia. Romance was
+stunned in her. All her pretty dreams, wherein she shyly walked with
+the bright ones of the earth, were rent and blown to space like
+gossamer. She seemed separated from them by a generation of years. She
+looked back upon them with derision. A fine heroine she was to be if
+that door opened. She was to walk--yes--but under the gas-lamps, and
+not shyly, and with any who would. That was the plan deliberately
+conceived for her and conceived by her own father. The mere thought of
+it seemed to sully her, to make her unworthy. She remembered that only
+that morning she had sent a telegram to Captain Rames, with a thrill
+of excitement, as though she were doing a remarkable thing. She had
+actually dared. She sat up, and in the bitterness of her heart laughed
+at the great significance she had set upon herself. Her father had a
+different view of her importance, and from head to foot she ached with
+the pain of her humiliation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus through the long hours she swung between terror and abasement,
+each one mastering her in turn. Once she started up with a despairing
+cry as she imagined her father driving her out into the street with
+blows.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Could she make her living honestly if she ran away from him, she
+wondered miserably, bethinking that at the worst she must kill
+herself? At another moment she would recall with a pang of contempt
+her enchanted garden and scorch its flowers with her ridicule. She
+would walk in that garden no more. It was closed. She had been an
+impostor in it always. It was a place of falsities. There was but one
+true, real thing in it all--the turnstile in the wall which gave
+admission to its precincts. Yes, that was true, and the turnstile,
+with all it meant of shame and indifference, became to her a new
+epitome of life.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gradually the night wore through. A finger of gray light slipped
+through the curtains, and was laid upon the ceiling of the room. Birds
+began to sing in the garden. Cynthia turned out her light and fell
+asleep at last. She slept late and woke to just such another day of
+heat as yesterday. She lay for a moment, happily convinced that all
+which had occurred last night had occurred only in a dream. But she
+looked into the mirror across the room and saw the door, and the truth
+was made known to her. These things had happened.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Certainly the door was still closed, the night had passed. But other
+nights would follow, and through the closed door, not her father, but
+fear and shame had passed to bear her company. She came down to
+breakfast pale and heavy-eyed, and found Joan and Robert Daventry
+already at the table. She was afraid lest they should remark the
+alteration in her looks, and she set herself to counterfeit an air of
+gaiety. It was not very successful, but Joan and Robert Daventry were
+making precisely the same pretence, with still poorer results. They
+could not meet her eyes any more than she theirs; and they were trying
+for the sake of her happiness to hide from her a catastrophe, her
+knowledge of which for the sake of their happiness she was trying to
+hide from them. Thus they all talked with great speed about things of
+no importance, and laughed noisily whether laughter was appropriate or
+not, until Robert Daventry suddenly turned to Cynthia and blurted out
+with an affected blitheness:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I hope, my dear, that you haven't made many absolutely unalterable
+arrangements for the summer.&quot; And Cynthia turned as white as the
+table-cloth and looked suddenly down to hide the terror in her eyes.
+They were going to give her up, then! That was her first despairing
+thought. No doubt it could not be helped. They were compelled to.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; she answered faintly. &quot;No arrangements that cannot be altered. I
+was going to stay for a week with--&quot; and as she compared the summer
+which she had planned with that which awaited her, she stopped, lest
+the choking of her voice should betray her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's well,&quot; continued Robert, &quot;for you have a journey to make,
+Cynthia. I have had a telegram this morning from England. I bought
+some property in Warwickshire a few years ago. We thought you would
+not, perhaps, want to live all your life in the Argentine after we had
+gone. So we bought it for you. But it appears there's some sort of
+lawyer's trouble over the title.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We have known there was some trouble,&quot; Joan hastened to explain, &quot;for
+quite a long time. But until this telegram arrived we did not think it
+very serious.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Now we know what it is,&quot; continued Robert, &quot;and I am afraid that we
+must go to England and attend to it. Luckily, we have Walton now to
+look after the estancia.&quot; And since Cynthia made no reply, but still
+looked upon the cloth, he continued in some perplexity: &quot;I hope, my
+dear, you won't be disappointed. Joan and I, indeed, were inclined to
+be confident that you would enjoy the trip.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And, of course, I shall,&quot; cried Cynthia; and now she raised her head
+and gazed at her friends with shining eyes. She had not dared to yield
+her face to their scrutiny in the first revulsion of her feelings.
+Even now the room whirled about her. &quot;I shall be delighted to go with
+you. When shall we start?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, that's the point,&quot; said Mr. Daventry, uncomfortably. &quot;The
+telegram is very urgent, and there's a boat sailing from Buenos Ayres
+to-morrow. I am afraid, Cynthia, that we must catch it. There's
+certain to be no difficulty about cabins just at this time of the
+year, and, in fact, I have already telegraphed to retain them. So you
+see we must leave Daventry by the night train. Can you be ready?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The color came back again into her pale cheeks and made them rosy, and
+the smile returned to her lips. No telegram had come. The bustle in
+the corridors during the early hours of the evening was explained to
+her. Over night, Robert and Joan had made up their minds to an instant
+flight, and had set about their preparations. Cynthia drew her breath
+again. She resumed life and some part of her faith in life. The world
+was not peopled with James Challoners, as, in the shock of her horror,
+she had almost been persuaded. Here were two who, for her sake, were
+abandoning their home and the place which their labors had made for
+them in the country of their adoption. Her great trouble during that
+day of hurried preparation was to avoid blurting out to her two
+friends her gratitude and her knowledge.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They travelled by night and, reaching Buenos Ayres in the morning,
+drove straight along the docks to their ship. Once on board, Cynthia
+noticed that Joan made this and that excuse about the arrangement of
+her cabin to keep her from the deck until the steamer had warped out
+into the basin. Then she gave a sigh of relief and sat down in a
+chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You won't mind, dear, will you?&quot; she said. &quot;We shall probably be kept
+some time in England. But you will soon make friends. Robert was
+speaking about it last night. He said it was a good hunting country,
+and that we could get you some fine horses and--&quot; and suddenly she
+felt Cynthia's arms about her neck, and the girl's tears upon her
+cheeks.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My dear, my dear, you are too kind to me!&quot; cried Cynthia. &quot;I don't
+mind about the horses, if only you'll keep me with you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course, of course,&quot; said Mrs. Daventry. &quot;What should we do without
+you ourselves.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The screw was churning up the mud of the River Plate, the flat banks
+dotted with low trees were slipping past the port-holes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Let us go out and get the steward to arrange our chairs on deck,&quot;
+said Mrs. Daventry. She put Cynthia's outburst down, not to any guess
+at the true reason of their flight, but to a young girl's moment of
+emotion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The steamer put into Montevideo, and Santos, and Rio, and glided
+northward along the woods and white sands of Brazil. It passed one
+morning into the narrows of the Cape Verde Islands, and there was
+dressed from stem to stern with flags.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia asked the reason of the first officer, who was leaning beside
+her on the rail, and for answer he pointed northward to a small black
+ship which was coming down toward them, and handed to her his
+binocular.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's the <i>Perhaps</i>, bound for the South,&quot; he said; and he saw the
+girl's face flush red.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She put the glasses to her eyes, and gazed for a long while at the
+boat. The <i>Perhaps</i>
+was a full-rigged ship, with auxiliary steam,
+broad in the beam, with strong, rounded bows. She had the trade-wind
+behind her, and came lumbering down the channel with every sail set
+upon her yards.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But she's so small,&quot; cried Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;She has to be small,&quot; replied the first officer. &quot;Length's no use for
+her work. Look at us! We should crack like a filbert in the ice-pack.
+She won't.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But she's out for three years,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There'll be a relief ship with fresh stores, no doubt. And there are
+not many of them on board, twenty-nine all told.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked again, and held the glasses to her eyes until the boats
+drew level. She could make out small figures upon the bridge and deck;
+she saw answering signals break out in answer to their own good
+wishes; and then the name in new gold letters came out upon the black
+stern beneath the counter.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you,&quot; she said as she handed back the glasses. But her eyes
+were still fixed upon that full-rigged ship lumbering heavily to the
+unknown South.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am very glad to have seen the <i>Perhaps</i>,&quot; she said slowly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The first officer looked at her curiously. There was a quiver of
+emotion in her voice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Perhaps you have friends on board,&quot; he said. &quot;If you have, I envy
+them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; she said slowly. &quot;I know no one on board. But I am glad to have
+seen the ship, for I was interested in it in a part of my life which
+is now over.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The first officer was about to smile. Here was a remarkably pretty
+girl of seventeen or so, talking about a part of her life which was
+over! But the big, dark-blue eyes swept round and rested gravely on
+his face, and he bowed to her with a fitting solemnity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia exaggerated, no doubt, taking herself seriously as young girls
+will. But the shock of that last night in the estancia had wrought a
+revolution in her thoughts. Though James Challoner no longer seemed to
+grip her hand, she walked in the chill shadow of his presence. Nor did
+that shadow quite lift even when she had landed in England.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They travelled into Warwickshire, and so came to that white house
+behind the old wall of red brick on the London road which Robert
+Daventry had once coveted for himself and had afterward bought for
+Cynthia. The Daventrys made it their home now. Though Cynthia never
+read a word about it in the papers, that disputed title took a long
+while in the settling. Robert Daventry resumed the old ties. Joan,
+with Cynthia at her side, found the making of new ones not the
+laborious business she had feared, and Cynthia had her horses and as
+many friends as she had room for in her life. But the shadow was still
+about her. James Challoner might have found the means to follow them
+to England. At any corner of a lane she might discover his gross and
+sinister figure upon the path. A few miles away, the ancient city of
+Ludsey lifted high its old steeples and its modern chimneys. She was
+always secretly upon her guard in its climbing streets. There was
+always in her life a mirror facing a closed door, and at her heart a
+great fear lest she should see the door open.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_09" href="#div1Ref_09">ROBERT DAVENTRY EXPLAINS</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus the greater part of three years passed, but toward the end of the
+third the influenza became virulent throughout that country. It was a
+winter of sharp frosts and sudden thaws. One week the lanes were deep
+in snow and the fields white squares ruled off by the hedges; the next
+the whole country-side ran water. The epidemic was at its worst in
+November, and during that month it attacked Joan Daventry. She was now
+a woman of seventy, and the activity of her life had worn out her
+heart. She died within a week of her seizure, and from that time
+Robert Daventry's strength steadily declined. It may have been that
+the loss of Joan loosened his hold on life, or, again it may have
+been, as Dr. Hill declared, that he caught a chill at the graveside
+which he could not shake off. But, whatever the cause, he ailed
+through November, and in the beginning of the following month, while
+sitting on the bench at Ludsey, he was seized with a great faintness.
+He was driven back to the white house, and took to his bed; and on the
+next day the snow fell again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Ten days after he had fallen sick, Dr. Hill came from the bedroom and
+found Cynthia waiting as ever for his news. He was an oldish man, and
+quite at home in that house. He slipped his arm through hers and said
+in a grave and gentle voice:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Your father wants you, my dear. He has something to say to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked at him anxiously.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Won't it tire him too much to talk?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He will not, I think, be tired for very long. You had better go to
+him at once, for his mind is quite clear now. I will come back
+to-morrow morning, unless you telephone to me before then that you
+want me. It is now, I am afraid, a matter of waiting.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He drove away from the door. Cynthia walked back along the passages to
+the room where the old man lay in a great four-poster bed. The
+afternoon was closing in, and the room was not yet lit. But there was
+light enough for her to appreciate all that Dr. Hill had meant. Robert
+Daventry had grown so frail, his hands and face were so very nearly
+transparent.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have a good deal to tell you, Cynthia,&quot; he said feebly, and his
+lips tried to smile. &quot;So listen to me carefully.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The nurse went out of the room. Cynthia sat down by the bed and took
+the old man's hand in hers. She made no pretence that another
+opportunity would come.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You will be very well off, my dear, I am thankful to say,&quot; he
+continued. &quot;There's the estancia, about which I will say a word to you
+later, and a little more than four hundred thousand pounds in the
+stocks. It's practically all coming to you. Of course, the profit on
+the estancia varies with the season, and may in bad years mean
+nothing; but on the average, I reckon you ought to have about
+twenty-five thousand a year. That leaves out this house and the little
+farm which goes with it. They are yours already. I have made Hill one
+of my executors--he'll be rather a figurehead, I expect--and Isaac
+Benoliel, of Culver, the other. They are both friends and neighbors of
+yours, and understanding people. I have tied up half the money on you
+and your children. If you haven't any children you will bequeath it as
+you like. But I am hoping very much that you will have them. I once
+asked a woman what she looked back upon as the happiest time of her
+life, and she said the evenings when she and her husband used to sit
+alone together before their first child was born. I think that was a
+wise saying, Cynthia. It struck me very much at the time, and has
+never since seemed to me less true than it did then. And, you know,
+everybody can't expect quite the same luck as Joan and I had in
+finding you.&quot; He pressed her hand with such strength as he had, and
+lay for a little while silent, husbanding his strength.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I was advised by my lawyer,&quot; he resumed, &quot;to tie my whole fortune up.
+But I talked it over with Joan and we were afraid that it might
+perhaps occur to you afterward that we didn't completely trust you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, father, I should never have thought that,&quot; Cynthia protested
+gently.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The old man shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;One can never be quite certain that queer, stinging ideas won't
+come,&quot; he said. &quot;And we both were anxious that you should be sure
+always that we had no fear of the way in which you would manage your
+life. So you will be completely mistress of half your fortune,&quot; and he
+hesitated for a moment, &quot;when you come of age. But I would like you,
+when you are in doubt, to consult Isaac Benoliel. I have a great faith
+in him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I, too,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;I will consult him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A look of relief came into Robert Daventry's face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am glad of that,&quot; he said. &quot;There are people, of course, who are
+prejudiced against him. He is a Jew, and he's new, and he has that
+queer sort of indefinable position which attracts criticism. But I
+think you will find him a valuable friend.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Daventry's voice had weakened to a whisper, and he lay back upon his
+pillows with his eyes closed. Cynthia moved, but the pressure of his
+hand retained her. She sat and waited, speaking no word and holding
+back the tears which smarted in her eyes. Robert Daventry spoke again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There's some medicine,&quot; he said. &quot;Hill gave it me to keep me going.
+It's in a glass.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia lifted a glass filled with some grayish liquid, and held it to
+the old man's lips. He drank, and resumed:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have written down during the last day or two the heads of what I
+wanted to say on a paper.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia found a slip of paper on the table by the bedside.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Just read.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There were some words written one below the other on the paper in a
+straggling hand. Cynthia read them out.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Money.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have said all I have to say, I think, about that.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Diana Royle,&quot; Cynthia read next. But she read the name slowly, so
+slowly that Robert Daventry noticed her deliberation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't think you can see, Cynthia,&quot; he said. &quot;It's getting dark.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes, father, I can see quite clearly,&quot; she replied. &quot;What of Mrs.
+Royle?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You know her,&quot; said Robert. &quot;You like her, too, I think, don't you?&quot;
+Cynthia did not reply, but Daventry had not asked the question in
+the tone of one needing a reply. &quot;You will want some one to live with
+you until you get married, which, by the way, you don't seem to be
+in a hurry to do, my dear. The young fellows round here don't seem
+to have made much impression. Oh! I am not bustling you, my dear.
+Only--only--don't leave it too long, Cynthia,&quot; he said, and his hand
+sought hers again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia stirred uneasily. It was the way of men, to want to marry
+every girl off as soon as possible, she knew. It was a form of vanity.
+But she wished to give no promise.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You will probably go to London, I don't want you to mope down here
+all the time. There's no reason that you should. You can have your
+house in town. But you will want some one with you, and I thought my
+cousin, Diana Royle, would be the most suitable person.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia raised her head as if she was about to speak. But she did not,
+and Daventry said:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wrote to her about it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh,&quot; said Cynthia slowly. &quot;You have already written?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, and she consented at once. You see her husband left her badly
+off when he died. So it will be an advantage to her. And though she is
+older than you are, she is not so much older that you won't be in
+sympathy with one another.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia nodded her head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I see,&quot; she said. &quot;Yes, of course, I know her very well.&quot; But a note
+of reserve was audible, or rather would have been audible to any other
+in that room. But Robert Daventry was altogether occupied in the
+effort to master his overmastering weakness. There was more which he
+wished to say; there was something which he must say.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then that's settled,&quot; he whispered; and with his eyes he asked for
+his cordial. Cynthia once more supported him, and held the glass to
+his lips.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Now, what comes next?&quot; he asked, and Cynthia looked at the paper.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The estancia,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Daventry, and a smile suddenly illumined his face and made
+it young. &quot;The estancia! You have the right to dispose of it, Cynthia.
+For one never knows what changes may come. But I don't want you to let
+it go unless there is some great necessity. It brings in, generally, a
+good income, and now that Walton looks after it, it gives very little
+trouble. Walton is a good man. I should give him an interest in it, if
+I were you, and as time goes on increase his interest. Keep him and
+keep it. I want you very much to do that. I am proud of the Daventry
+estancia, for one thing. For another, the best part of Joan's life and
+of mine was spent there. There, too, we first brought you when you
+came to us. There's yet another reason,&quot; and he stopped, and thought.
+&quot;Yes, there's yet another reason why I care for it so much--but--&quot; and
+he shook his head and gave up the effort to interpret it: &quot;it's not
+very clear in my mind just now. I only know it's there--a strong
+reason.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was speaking with a depth of tenderness in his voice for which
+Cynthia was hardly prepared. Always he had seemed to her to look upon
+the estancia as a business proposition rather than as the soil in
+which his heart was rooted. Always, too, he had seemed so contented to
+live in England, and he had taken his part with so much zest in the
+local administration of the county. She was as puzzled now by this
+note of yearning--for it was no less than yearning--as by the reason
+which he could not interpret. It was all made plain to her in after
+years, but by another than Robert Daventry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I want you very much to keep the estancia, Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course I will keep it,&quot; she said, and again she made no pretence
+that the day was distant when it would be hers to keep. Her heart was
+heavy with grief, it went out in love to this dear friend of hers; she
+was young and the cry was loud in her bosom, &quot;What will I do without
+you?&quot; but her lips did not utter it. He would be quite sure of her
+love without her protests. There was comprehension enough, and to
+spare, between them to make her certain of that. And, since he wanted
+her to listen, she put aside her distress and the thought of the
+loneliness which awaited her and obeyed him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I would even be glad&quot;--and the old man hesitated with the timidity of
+one asking a heavy favor.--&quot;Yes, I would be glad if you would go back
+there--oh, not often--but just once or twice to see that all was going
+on well.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's hand trembled for a moment. She looked at him with a sudden
+terror in her eyes. But he was lying now upon his side with his face
+to the window, and seeing things not to be seen through its panes. It
+cost Cynthia a great deal to make the promise he sought from her. She
+shrank from a return to the estancia with every fibre of her body. But
+she made it. He besought her in so wistful a voice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I will go back, father.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you,&quot; he said gently.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Outside the window the snow lay white and deep upon the slate roofs of
+the outbuildings, and was piled upon the black branches of the trees.
+Overhead was a gray sky of winter. But for the glimmer of the snow it
+would almost have been dark. A smile shone again on the old man's
+face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Perhaps Walton's cutting the corn to-day! Think of it!&quot; he said, with
+a great longing, and before Cynthia's eyes there rose immediately
+the vision of a great glistening field of standing wheat and a
+reaping-machine like a black toy outlined against it. They remained
+thus in silence for a little while. Cynthia was thinking.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;After all, he may not be in the Argentine.... I may not meet
+him.... He will have no power over me.... There is no reason why I
+should be afraid.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And then, as though in answer to these arguments, Robert Daventry
+said:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You can go back now, Cynthia, without fear.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The girl looked at him with startled eyes. Had she spoken aloud, she
+asked herself? Had she betrayed her secret just at this last moment?
+But her eyes fell upon the slip of paper in her hand, and there she
+saw written plainly under the word &quot;estancia&quot; the name &quot;James
+Challoner.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Daventry looked toward a bureau which stood by the window.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The little drawer on the left. No, the one above that. There's a
+cutting from a newspaper.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia found in the drawer half a column of a Spanish newspaper. The
+name was on the top of the column. It was a paper published in Buenos
+Ayres. She brought the cutting back to the bed and placed it between
+his fingers.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, that's it,&quot; he said, and he lay back upon his pillows, and
+gathered his strength. &quot;I have got to tell you now something which we
+have always kept a secret from you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There is no need to tell it,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Daventry stared at her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If you do know it,&quot; he said slowly, &quot;we have made the cruellest
+mistake we could possibly have made. You can't know it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's about James Challoner--my father?&quot; asked Cynthia, and Robert
+Daventry shut his eyes with a look of great distress upon his face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How long have you known?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;From the night when he came to the estancia,&quot; she answered. And she
+told how she had slipped into the smoking-room and how, huddled in the
+great chair, she had heard all that James Challoner proposed for her.
+The shadow deepened upon Daventry's face as he listened, and when she
+had ended he asked with deep regret:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why didn't you tell us this, Cynthia?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Because, just outside the smoking-room door in the hall, you both
+decided not to tell me--not to breathe a word of--of my father's
+visit. You thought the knowledge would trouble and frighten me. You
+thought it would hurt. Well, I was as certain that you would be
+greatly distressed to know that already I had the knowledge. So I held
+my tongue.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And it did trouble you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A great deal?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; Cynthia admitted. &quot;I was frightened. I did not know what power
+he might have. I knew you had fled from him for my sake.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And since you have been here--during these three years--you have
+still been troubled, still frightened lest he should come and claim
+you with the law at his side?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Though the old man could hardly speak above a whisper, he was
+strangely insistent in his questioning. The words came unevenly, with
+breaks between, and now and then a weak gasp for breath. Cynthia
+replied quite simply:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, here, too, I have thought that he might come. I used to be
+frightened at night. I used to hear him in the house.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And with every word she spoke the compunction and distress deepened in
+Daventry's mind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What a pity!&quot; he said. &quot;Neither of us guessed, not even Joan, who was
+quicker than I to notice things. And we thought we knew all about you,
+Cynthia!&quot; A faint smile lit up his face. &quot;How little, after all, we
+did know! For we could have spared you all this trouble. Read.&quot; And
+opening his hand he let her take from it the newspaper slip. She
+uttered a cry as she read the first lines.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's true,&quot; said Daventry, from the bed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia carried the cutting over to the window and read by the fading
+light. It gave the account of an inquest held at a small town
+twenty-five miles up the line from the Daventry estancia on the body
+of an Englishman who had been stabbed to the heart by a Gaucho in a
+drunken quarrel at a tavern. There was a witness who had worked with
+the Englishman, and could identify him. He called himself James
+Challoner, and, when he was drunk, he would boast of his family.
+Cynthia looked at the date of the paper. It was almost three years
+old. James Challoner had been killed within a week of his dismissal by
+Robert Daventry. Cynthia let the slip of paper fall from her fingers,
+and stood by the window until Robert Daventry called her to his side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You held your tongue so as not to distress us,&quot; he whispered. &quot;We
+held ours so as not to frighten you. And so because we were careful of
+your happiness, and you of ours, you have gone through years of
+anxiety and terror. Needless anxiety! Terror without a cause! I am so
+sorry. It seems so pitiful. It seems rather grim to me, Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia answered quietly:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's the way things happen.&quot; And when she had spoken, Robert
+Daventry, with an effort, raised himself upon his elbow and peered
+into her face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You oughtn't to be able to say that, Cynthia,&quot; he said remorsefully.
+&quot;You oughtn't to be able to think it. It's not the proper philosophy
+for twenty. I am afraid, my dear, that trouble has gone deep.&quot; He fell
+back and in a moment a little whimsical smile flickered upon his face.
+&quot;I don't think I'll tell Joan about this,&quot; he said. &quot;She wouldn't like
+it. She wouldn't forgive herself for not having noticed that you were
+troubled.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;After all, it was my fault,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;For I hid in the room.
+However, it's all over now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But Daventry was not prepared to accept her word. Some flash of
+insight forbade him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It has left its mark, my dear,&quot; he insisted, and in broken sentences
+he dwelt upon his theme. His mind began to wander after a little, but
+through his wanderings there ran the thread of this idea:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Joan was always so careful.... Even when you were quite a little girl
+... we were never to laugh at you.... 'Children and dogs' she used to
+say, 'you must never laugh at them. Little things warp children for
+life.' ... Do you remember when you used to write plays and perform
+them to us at Christmas, in a toy theatre, with small figures in tin
+slides?... Joan was always careful that we should take them seriously,
+and not laugh at the wrong place. I never did want to laugh at the
+wrong place. I thought you wrote very good plays, Cynthia. I used to
+say you were a genius. But Joan wouldn't have it. 'No!' she said, 'All
+children are born dramatists, but they forget the trick of it
+afterward.' ... I suppose she knew. She was a very clever woman--&quot; and
+so he drifted off gradually into sleep. Cynthia stayed by his side
+while the twilight faded and the darkness came; and the light of the
+fire danced ever more brightly upon the ceiling of the room. The wind
+set from the west, and as the hours passed the chimes from the great
+clock in Ludsey Church tower came softly and faintly into the room.
+But they did not disturb the old man's rest. He went floating out on a
+calm tide of sleep to his death, and Cynthia sat by his side wondering
+in the intervals of her grief at the strange arrangement of life which
+ordained that the efforts of people to secure the happiness of others
+should only cause needless terrors and vain miseries.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_10" href="#div1Ref_10">MR. BENOLIEL</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There are no ladies,&quot; Captain Rames said indignantly, as he took his
+seat in Mr. Benoliel's dining-room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His neighbor, a florid and handsome man, a little past the prime of
+life, glanced at the name on the visiting-card which marked Captain
+Rames's place, and smiled sympathetically.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I can quite understand,&quot; he returned with a pleasant pomposity, &quot;that
+to a sailor who has been three years in the Antarctic the deficiency
+is a very lamentable business. But there are some elements of
+consolation. Amongst the twelve men seated at this round table of
+mahogany, you will hardly see one who has not made some stir in the
+world. Upon your right, for instance, you will see Mr. Winthrop, that
+long and sallow person. He is a political resident in one of the
+native States of Rajputana, and his work, in six volumes, on the
+Indian bangle, is, I believe, supposed to be the last word upon the
+subject. A little nearer to you you will see a youth, though he is not
+so young as he looks. He is M. Poileaux, and the only aviator who has
+not yet fallen into the sea. When he does, he will come here no more.
+I myself am a surgeon whose name, I believe, is not unknown.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And with a large white hand the famous Sir James Burrell discreetly
+pointed out others of note to his companion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames glanced indifferently round the table. A few of the
+twelve were in black coats, and amongst those few was Mr. Benoliel. It
+was the night of a court ball, and most of the guests were in some
+uniform or another, or shone in the gold of the privy councillor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;They are, no doubt, men of vast importance,&quot; replied Captain Rames
+bluntly. &quot;But leaving you out of account, Sir James, I could dispense
+with the lot of them. When I dine in Grosvenor Square, in June, I do
+ask that there should be a petticoat on one side of me, at all
+events.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The surgeon laughed good-humoredly. He studied his neighbor with a
+quick observing eye. Captain Rames was of the middle height with a
+squareness of build, which his gold epaulets exaggerated at this
+moment, and he was square, too, of face. His hair was thick and curved
+over from the side, parting in a dark turbulent comb, his forehead was
+broad, his eyes keen and very steady. Vigor rather than refinement was
+the mark of him; he had more character than intellect, more capacity
+than knowledge; thus Sir James Burrell defined him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have played the comforter,&quot; he said, &quot;at so many bedsides that I
+should feel my vanity touched if I failed to console you,&quot; he
+returned. &quot;Let me bring to your attention the menu. I am confident
+that it will appeal to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, that's all right,&quot; Rames admitted, as he leaned forward and
+glanced at the card. &quot;But why should it particularly appeal to me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Sir James Burrell shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My profession brings me into touch with interesting people. I take my
+pleasure in observing them. And I have always noticed that the men who
+cheerfully endure the greatest hardships are also the first to demand
+the best of the luxuries, when they are within reach.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, it's true,&quot; said Captain Rames. &quot;I can make a shift with
+pemmican, but I honestly like a good dinner. It's the contrast, I
+suppose.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Sir James shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It goes deeper than that,&quot; said he. &quot;Your pale saints are no doubt
+profitable to the painters of glass windows, but I doubt if the world
+owes so very much to them. The great things are really done by the
+people who have a good deal of the animal in them; and animals like
+good dinners.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames was mollified, and his face took on a jovial look.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am animal enough,&quot; he said, &quot;to purr when my back is scratched.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But Sir James Burrell was mounted on a hobby and hardly heeded the
+interruption.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I could quote historical instances, but I need go no further than
+this room. Do you see the man sitting next to our host, and upon his
+right?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames saw a small thin man in the dress of a privy councillor,
+a man with a peaked, fleshless face, in which a pair of small eyes
+twinkled alertly. A scanty crop of gray hair covered the back of his
+skull, and left markedly visible the height and the narrowness of his
+forehead. Captain Rames leaned forward with a new interest.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, and I recognize his face,&quot; he said. &quot;Surely that is Henry
+Smale.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Exactly,&quot; returned Sir James. &quot;He is in the cabinet, and, quite apart
+from politics, he is, upon scientific grounds, a man of great
+distinction.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But, surely, he disproves your theory. He looks an ascetic.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And is nothing of the kind,&quot; interrupted Sir James. &quot;I admit that his
+look of asceticism has been a great asset to him in his career. But
+the public has quite misjudged him. He is a voluptuary, with the face
+of a monk--the most useful combination for public life in this country
+which you could possibly imagine. If he dines alone at his club, he
+will not dine under a guinea; and he has the animal weaknesses up to
+the brim of him. For instance, he is as jealous as a dog. Filch from
+him the smallest of his prerogatives, and he will turn upon you
+bitterly. Yet he has done great things, and initiated bold policies.
+Why? Because he has enough of the animal in him to do great things.&quot;
+And upon that Sir James broke off.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The butler was standing at the elbow of Captain Rames, with a jug of
+champagne in one hand and a decanter of red wine in the other. He bent
+down and offered Captain Rames his choice. Sir James Burrell
+intervened.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;By the way,&quot; he said, &quot;have you any wish to stand particularly well
+with your host?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am now beginning to think that I have,&quot; replied Captain Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then I should choose his Burgundy. He has his fancies, like the rest
+of us, and to prefer his Nuits-St.-George to champagne is one way to
+his esteem.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames took the hint, and, as he raised his glass to his lips,
+Mr. Benoliel smiled to him across the table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will ask your opinion upon that wine, Captain Rames,&quot; he said, and
+so turned again to Henry Smale.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You see, he noticed at once,&quot; said Sir James.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames had noticed something too. At the mention of his name,
+Henry Smale had looked up with interest. He was even now obviously
+asking a question of Mr. Benoliel about him. Rames began to take more
+careful stock of his host. Mr. Benoliel was a tall, high-shouldered
+man, with a dark thin face in which delicacy seemed to predominate
+over strength. His hair was black, and a little black moustache drew a
+pencil line along his upper lip. His fingers were long and
+extraordinarily restless. It was difficult to make a guess at his age.
+A first glance would put him in the forties. But when Mr. Benoliel
+showed his eyes--which was not always, for he had a trick of looking
+out between lids half-closed--it seemed that he must have lived for
+centuries; so much of fatigue and so much of patience were suddenly
+revealed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wonder why he asked me to dine here,&quot; said Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You were certain to dine here,&quot; replied Sir James.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I met him but the once by the purest accident.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You were certain to meet him,&quot; said Sir James. &quot;All famous people
+meet him. All famous people dine here once. But he is not really a
+snob. For, quite a number of them are never invited twice.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He can be a good friend?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of that I cannot speak,&quot; said Sir James.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The courses followed one after the other, and Harry Rames found his
+eyes continually wandering back across the silver and bright flowers
+to the exotic figure of his host. He took his share in the
+conversation about him, but a movement of Mr. Benoliel would check him
+in his speech or cause him to listen with an absent ear. He watched
+the play of his delicate fingers upon the table-cloth, the continual
+restlessness of his body. Mr. Benoliel was of his race; there was in
+his aspect a queer mixture of the financier and the dilettante, the
+shrewd business man and the sensuous apprecitator of art. There was a
+touch, too, of the feminine in him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I told you that you would not be bored,&quot; said Sir James Burrell
+toward the end of the dinner. &quot;You are not the first man who has
+fallen under the spell of Mr. Benoliel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames laughed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am under no spell, I assure you,&quot; he said frankly. &quot;I was wondering
+whether he was likely to be of use to me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is very likely,&quot; returned Sir James. &quot;He has been of use to many.
+He plays at omniscience. To anticipate a wish before it is expressed,
+to serve an ambition before it has been revealed--that is one of our
+host's little vanities. He may have asked you here with no other
+object than to gratify it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames glanced quickly at his companion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Is that so?&quot; he asked eagerly. Then his face fell. &quot;But I am not even
+a friend of his.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I do not think that matters,&quot; said the surgeon. &quot;He likes to pose as
+Providence, and the posture will be more dramatic if it is assumed
+toward an acquaintance rather than a friend.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He is a sham, then,&quot; said Rames bluntly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;By no means,&quot; Sir James replied suavely. &quot;Let us say, rather, that he
+is an artist.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames turned with a furrowed brow to his companion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am no great hand at subtleties,&quot; he said. &quot;Will you tell me what
+you know of Mr. Benoliel? I am a beginner in the world, and he may be
+of importance to me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Sir James Burrell smiled. He was in his element. To supply a character
+much as some author of the seventeenth century might have done, was a
+foible which continually tempted him. He was not always successful.
+Paradox allured him into difficulties, cheap epigrams at times blazed
+before him, and would not be quiet until he had uttered them. But
+often he managed to hit off, with some happiness, at all events, the
+externals of the person whom he described. He drank his wine now
+slowly and set down his glass. Then, twisting the delicate stem with
+the finger-tips of his large and handsome hand, he began:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He is a Jew, of course, and an Oriental. But from what quarter of the
+Orient, who shall say? You may give him any birthplace, from the
+Levant to Casa Blanca, and no one will contradict you. Some hold him
+to be a charlatan, as you are inclined to do. But he is an accepted
+personage, not blown into notice and out of it by the favor of a
+season, but a permanency. How he became so, I cannot tell you. He is
+very busy all day, although when the darkness comes it would be
+difficult to point to any one thing which he has done. He is always at
+the top table at public dinners, and very near to the chairman. But he
+never proposes a toast or responds to one. If he writes a letter to
+the <i>Times</i>, it appears in leaded type. If you want secret information
+on any subject, he can get it for you. If you want help, he will find
+the man who can give it. He is a power in the city. He is a power in
+politics, and the motor-cars of prime-ministers stand at his door at
+ten o'clock in the morning. Yet he was never in the House, and has
+never made a speech on any platform. It is believed by many that he
+might achieve greatness if he chose. But he never chooses. He has the
+air at a discussion of being able to say the last word on any subject,
+but he does not say it. He seems, indeed, to stand high in the world
+on a pedestal which has no legs to it. That is how I describe him. For
+the rest, he is rich, and I have never heard him utter an opinion
+which was not derived from others or altogether banal. But, listen! He
+is going to speak to us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;However, I can recommend the old brandy,&quot; was all that Mr. Benoliel
+had at that moment to say.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There, what did I tell you!&quot; said Sir James, triumphant at the
+success of his diagnosis.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, if his talk is banal his brandy isn't, God bless him,&quot; said
+Captain Rames. &quot;But I interrupted you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He has been guilty of one weakness,&quot; Sir James resumed. &quot;He married
+into an old family of great poverty and the marriage lasted for six
+months. His wife lives handsomely in Eton Square--But I see that I am
+going to lose you, for our host is beckoning to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames obeyed the summons with alacrity and walked round the
+table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I see that you are going on to Buckingham Palace,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel.
+&quot;So I thought that I would interrupt your conversation with Sir James
+Burrell. For I want to introduce you to Mr. Smale.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Smale held out his hand. At a sign from Benoliel, the butler
+brought up a chair and placed it between Smale and his host.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Sit down,&quot; said Benoliel, and Captain Rames obeyed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Benoliel tells me,&quot; said Smale, &quot;that you are thinking of
+Parliament.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames was startled. He could not remember that in his one
+brief conversation with his host he had even mentioned his ambition.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I inferred it from a casual word or two you let drop,&quot; said Benoliel
+with a smile.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, it's true,&quot; said Rames. &quot;I should like to stand on your side
+very much, Mr. Smale, if I could find a seat to contest.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Henry Smale nodded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That, no doubt, could be arranged. You would be a strong candidate.
+You bring a reputation and some breath of romance to favor you.
+But--&quot; and he pursed up his lips as if in doubt and looked at Captain
+Rames with a searching eye. Rames was disconcerted. He had been back
+in England for some six months, and during those six months he had
+been much sought after. At this period of his life, doubts of him had
+been rarely expressed behind his back, and never to his face. Young
+ladies whom he did not know had clamored for his autograph, young
+ladies whom he did know had approached him with a winning humility;
+established beauty had smiled at him; established fame had welcomed
+him as an equal. The calm scrutiny of Henry Smale was a displeasing
+splash of cold water.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course,&quot; he said, with a diffidence which he did not feel, &quot;I
+might be a failure.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And Henry Smale replied promptly:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's just it. You might be a failure. Meanwhile you are a great
+success, and have the chance of standing quite alone in your career.
+For what you set out to do is not yet done. You leave the laurel for
+another to snatch.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That is quite true, Mr. Smale,&quot; Harry Rames replied. &quot;But I have
+considered it. I am not yielding to an impulse. I have counted the
+risk!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He spoke with a nice adjustment of firmness and modesty. Henry Smale
+rose from his chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well,&quot; he said. &quot;Will you come down to the House at four o'clock
+to-morrow afternoon? I will introduce you to Hanley, the chief whip.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames flushed with pleasure.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you, I shall be delighted,&quot; he cried, rising in his turn; and
+as the two men shook hands, Mr. Benoliel said gently:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I was thinking of Ludsey. It has no candidate on your side, Smale.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_11" href="#div1Ref_11">A MAN ON THE MAKE</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">A week later, and much about the same hour, Captain Rames was driven
+along the Mall in St. James's Park. Friday had come round again, and
+the light did not burn in the clock-tower at Westminster. But the
+windows of the admiralty blazed upon the horse-guards' parade, and its
+great doors stood open for a glittering company. It was the night of
+official dinners and receptions in honor of the king's birthday.
+Soldiers in scarlet, sailors in blue, ministers and privy councillors
+in gold, and ladies in their shimmering gowns thronged with the
+smaller fry in black coats up the shallow steps into a hall decorated
+with Union Jacks. There was a thrill of expectancy in the air that
+evening. Rumors were rife that the government was inclined to advise a
+dissolution. Members' wives were speculating whether they must go back
+to the constituencies and tread the ways of deference; their husbands
+how soon the time would come when they must exchange the erect dignity
+of the member for the supple curves of the candidate; and curious eyes
+dwelt, as if in hope of answer upon a sturdy white-haired man with a
+blunt, good-humored face, who, wearing a uniform with epaulets, left
+you in doubt whether he was a fireman or an admiral. He was, however,
+the Prime-Minister, and he stood in the hall amongst his friends,
+bearing the world lightly according to his wont. He stepped forward
+and shook hands with Rames as he passed, and so turned again to his
+friends. He was heard to say, &quot;I have to-day achieved the ambition of
+my life;&quot; and curious ears eager to glean a hint were inclined toward
+him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;To-day?&quot; one of the group exclaimed. &quot;You have been Prime-Minister
+for three years.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Prime-Minister laughed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's nothing,&quot; he said. &quot;To become Prime-Minister was merely to
+take a step on the way. But to-night I wear for the first time the
+uniform of an Elder Brother of the Trinity, and that means that I need
+never wear knee-breeches again as long as I live.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The curious ears were disappointed; Harry Rames shook hands with the
+First Lord of the Admiralty, passed on, and in the second room was
+touched on the elbow by Isaac Benoliel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have been asked by a young friend of mine to bring you to her, and
+I beg you to come at once, for she is in her most imperious mood,&quot;
+said Mr. Benoliel in a voice of whimsical entreaty.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We will go to her as fast as we can,&quot; said Captain Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had now been three months in England, and the shy warmth of many
+welcomes had made him thoroughly aware that he was a momentous
+personage to young ladies. He was human enough to enjoy his
+importance, and he followed Mr. Benoliel with alacrity toward a side
+of the room where Cynthia Daventry sat talking to a young man in the
+office of the Board of Trade. Rames noticed the clear and delicate
+profile of her face and the distinction which set her apart; he
+noticed, too, that, although she did not once look his way, the young
+gentleman in the Civil Service uniform was summarily dismissed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Cynthia, this is Captain Rames,&quot; said Isaac Benoliel, and however
+imperious a mood Cynthia might have shown to him, she had reserved
+none of it for Captain Rames. Her eyes swept over him swiftly with the
+shy and eager look to which he had grown accustomed: she gave him her
+hand.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am very glad to meet you,&quot; she said impulsively, &quot;because--&quot; and
+she halted suddenly upon the word, with the color like a rose in her
+cheeks, &quot;I suppose that you are tired of congratulations.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames expanded: he laughed genially, a fastidious critic might
+have said too noisily.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;By no means,&quot; he exclaimed. &quot;Indeed, Miss Daventry, you may lay it on
+with a trowel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am not prepared to do that,&quot; answered Cynthia, and though she spoke
+lightly, her voice was guarded, and even in the eager eyes there was a
+constant watchfulness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Eight months had passed since Cynthia had sat by the bedside of Robert
+Daventry and listened to his instructions. She had taken Diana Royle
+to live with her as he had bidden, though she had taken her
+reluctantly. She had spent nearly all that time at the white house
+upon the London road, in spite of Mrs. Royle's repeated suggestion
+that Beaulieu, or preferably Cap D'Ail in the south of France would be
+more satisfactory places for wintering. Diana Royle was glad to be
+relieved from her genteel penury in Sussex Gardens, Kensington, but
+she had no liking for the country. Cynthia, however, was deaf to her
+hints. She lived for a while in solitude, broken only by the
+companionship of the few neighbors with whom she was most intimate.
+The swift deaths of the two old people who had so long lived for her
+and in her, left her desolate and inclined ever regretfully to search
+back across her life for occasions in which she had failed of kindness
+toward them, or hurt them by forgetfulness. She was young, however,
+and with no taint of morbidness. The sense of desolation passed, and
+Diana Royle began to urge a new plan.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You ought to take a house in town for the season, Cynthia. I know of
+one in an excellent position, which would just suit you. It's in
+Curzon Street, and the right end of the street, one of those nice,
+flat-fronted houses, old outside and tiled bath-rooms inside. I
+happened, I think, to see an advertisement of it to-day.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mrs. Royle handed the newspaper to Cynthia, looked it over.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We might think of it,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am sure neither Mr. nor Mrs. Daventry would have wished you to bury
+yourself always in the country.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's true,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;My father looked forward to my taking a
+house in town.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't think you could do better than this, dear,&quot; said Diana Royle.
+&quot;I know the house quite well by sight.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, we'll think of it,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mrs. Royle suppressed a shrug of irritation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You will find the house will be snapped up, dear, if you take too
+long thinking of it,&quot; she said with asperity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked at her with innocent eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I expect there will be other houses in London, won't there?&quot; she
+asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She had no wish to be churlish, she understood how deeply her
+companion longed for the paved roadways and the streets. And in her
+own heart, too, she was beginning to turn to the unknown world of
+London with an expectancy of adventure, which drew her and thrilled
+her, even while she hesitated.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't understand you, Cynthia,&quot; Diana Royle cried in exasperation.
+&quot;Are you afraid?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The question was intended merely as a gibe, but Cynthia turned to her
+with startled eyes, and Mrs. Royle knew that she had chanced upon a
+truth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of what are you afraid?&quot; she asked curiously, and Cynthia answered
+while she looked into the fire:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I once lay all night staring into a great bright mirror which
+revealed to me a shut door. I was in terror lest the door should open.
+I dreaded what might come through. I seem still to be looking into the
+great mirror, and with the same kind of fear. Only now the door opens
+upon the world, and not on the passage of a house.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Diana Royle gathered up her embroidery and her book.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If you are going to talk that sort of nonsense, Cynthia, I shall go
+to bed,&quot; she remarked sternly, and left Cynthia still gazing into the
+fire.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia had not been speaking with affectation. The terror with which
+her father had for so long inspired her had left its mark deep, as
+Robert Daventry upon his death-bed had understood. He was dead--yes,
+but she could not rid her thoughts of the dreadful destiny which he
+had proposed for her. By so little she had escaped it. She would look
+round the room with its books and its dainty appointments, and feel
+the arms of her chair to make sure that all was real.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If he had carried me away!&quot; she would cry. &quot;If he had come back with
+the law at his side and had carried me away!&quot; And the streets of
+Buenos Ayres would pass before her eyes in a procession of blazing
+thoroughfares and dimly lighted lanes. And because she had escaped by
+so little, she looked out upon all unknown things with apprehension.
+Moreover, Daventry's disclosure to her upon his death-bed had, in a
+strange way, added to her apprehension. There were three people--thus
+her thoughts ran; two of them seeking to hide from her knowledge which
+they thought would cause her pain; and she the third, seeking to hide
+from them, just for the same reason, that the knowledge was hers
+already. The years of terror had been needless, yet they had been
+endured, and it was love itself which had inflicted them. Kindness
+then could do just the same harm as the deliberate will to hurt. She
+took that thought into her heart of hearts, and because of it dreaded
+what might come through when the door opened upon the world.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With the coming of the spring, however, there came a stir in her
+blood. It was a spring of sunlit days and warm, soft nights. The great
+garden bursting into leaf and blossom, the annual miracle of tender
+green, the return of the birds, and the renewal of melody quickened
+the girl's pulses, gave to her a lightness of spirit, and made her
+dreamily expectant of wonders. She walked of an evening under her
+great cedar trees, with the flowers and the paths glimmering pale in
+the warm dusk, and the earth whispered to her of things as yet beyond
+her knowledge; throbbing moments of life, dreams minted in events. She
+woke eagerly to the clear, early mornings and the blackbirds calling
+on the lawn; she lingered on that lawn when the windows in the house
+were alight and the nightingales sang in the copses, and from some
+distant wood the clear, double note of a cuckoo was borne to her
+across the darkness. There came an evening in the middle of May when
+she burst her sheath like any bud on the bole of one of her chestnut
+trees. She stood a creature of emotion. The soft wind brought to her
+ears the chimes of the clock in the great church tower at Ludsey.
+Desire for the adventure overswept her fears. Her feet danced, and her
+youth had its way with her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She could see through the long open window Diana Royle in the
+drawing-room. She ran across the grass.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Di!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Some new sound in her voice, a leap, a thrill, made Diana look up. She
+saw a look in the girl's face, a light in her eyes, a soft color in
+her cheeks which quite transfigured her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have been rather a brute, Di,&quot; cried Cynthia. &quot;We will go to
+London.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;When?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;As soon as we can pack.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A telegram was sent off to Mr. Benoliel, who was now in Grosvenor
+Square. He was bidden to work his quickest and his best. The furnished
+house in Curzon Street was still unlet. It was secured, and by the
+beginning of June Cynthia had come to town. There she was of course
+unknown. But she had made many friends in Warwickshire. Mr. Benoliel
+set his shoulder to the wheel; and she had a handsome balance at the
+bank. Add to these advantages her looks, and it will be seen that it
+was fairly smooth sailing for Cynthia during her first season. She
+danced, she dined, she lunched at Hurlingham, she went to plays and to
+the opera, she rode under the trees of the Row in the morning, she
+went up in a balloon; she came with both hands outstretched for new
+experiences. Yet she grasped them with a certain wariness. Eager she
+was, but her eagerness was guarded. For dim in the shadows at the back
+of her mind there was still the image of the mirror and the door. She
+had been in London less than a month when Harry Rames was brought to
+her side by Mr. Benoliel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They talked for a moment upon immaterial topics, and then Mr. Benoliel
+turned to Harry Rames:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So it is all settled, I hear.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Practically,&quot; replied Rames. &quot;I have still to be formally adopted as
+prospective candidate by the Three Hundred, but that will be done at a
+meeting on Monday night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then there is no longer any reason why we should keep the matter
+secret, especially from Miss Daventry, who lives not five miles from
+your constituency. Cynthia,&quot; and both men turned toward her, &quot;Captain
+Rames is going to stand for Ludsey at the next election.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames smiled modestly, expecting congratulations. He liked
+congratulations, especially from pretty girls, but he was
+disappointed. He saw only a wrinkle of perplexity upon Cynthia's
+forehead and a shadow in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why?&quot; she asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You disapprove?&quot; said Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia drew back.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have no right to disapprove,&quot; she said coldly, and Harry Rames
+planted himself sturdily on both his feet in front of her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Nevertheless you do,&quot; he insisted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In spite of herself, a faint smile of amusement played about Cynthia's
+lips as she watched him. She felt constrained to accept his challenge.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I should have thought--&quot; she said with a trifle of hesitation; &quot;it's
+not my business, of course--you may think it an impertinence--but
+since you challenge me, I should have thought that you would have done
+better to have gone back to the Antarctic again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's just what Smale said,&quot; remarked Mr. Benoliel, and he moved
+away.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's just what Smale said, what every one will say. But it's all
+wrong,&quot; Rames exclaimed emphatically. &quot;I was very glad to go South. I
+am very glad now that I went; but once is enough.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A little wrinkle of disdain showed about Cynthia's mouth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No doubt there were many hardships.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames was nettled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, there were, Miss Daventry, a great many, and singularly
+unpleasant ones. I have been twenty-four hours in a sleeping-bag with
+two other men. The sleeping-bag was sewn up on the inside, it was
+within a tent, we were so close together that we could only turn round
+one at a time, and we smoked in the bag, and still we were deadly
+cold. And I hate being cold. Yes, there were hardships, and though
+it's easy enough to remember them lightly here in the Admiralty, they
+were not delightful when they happened. But I should face them once
+more if I wanted to go back. Only I don't. I never want to see an
+ice-pack again as long as I live.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The bluff confidence with which he spoke convinced Cynthia that it was
+not a fear of the hardships which had affected him. There she had been
+wrong, and she made amends.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have no doubt the hardships wouldn't deter you if you wanted to
+go,&quot; she admitted. &quot;But what I don't understand is why you don't want
+to.&quot; And a greater emphasis crept into her voice than she had meant to
+use, and gave to her words the wistfulness of an appeal. &quot;I should
+have thought,&quot; she cried, &quot;that you could never have rested until you
+had finished what you had begun.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's true to the letter,&quot; he replied. &quot;That's why I am standing for
+Ludsey.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked up at him in surprise.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't think that I understand,&quot; she said quietly, and she made room
+upon the couch at her side. Harry Rames took the place. The appeal in
+her voice was a flattery which he quite failed to understand. Though
+Cynthia was young, and though she walked no longer in her enchanted
+garden, something of that spirit of romance, which had guided her
+there, had revived in her of late. Captain Rames was one of the chosen
+men for whom the turnstile had revolved; now that she met him in the
+flesh she could not forget it. He was of her dreams, he had marched in
+the procession of heroes, and though disillusionment had come to her
+he still wore a look of the heroic in her thoughts. All the more
+because disillusionment had come to her she wished him to retain the
+look. Her appeal was a prayer that he should stamp it upon his image
+for good and all.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;May I explain it all to you?&quot; he asked. He sat down beside her, and
+in answer to that gentle appeal of hers to make the best of himself,
+he drew for her clearly and succinctly and proudly the picture of a
+man on the make. &quot;I went South, first and last, to get on in the
+world,&quot; he began. &quot;As I say, I was very glad to go. The journey was a
+great experience. Yes, three years of my life were very well spent
+upon it; but they were very well spent, not because the journey was a
+great experience, but because it is now the great help to me in
+getting on, which I always thought it was going to be.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He took no notice of the disappointment gathering upon Cynthia's face.
+He was not aware of it. Here was a girl of remarkable loveliness,
+wistfully appealing to him to explain the inner workings of his mind,
+and he was delighted to gratify her wish.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I can hardly remember the time when I was not diligently looking for
+a chance to get on. I was poor, you see. I am so still, indeed. I had
+none of those opportunities which money commands. I had somehow to
+create or find them. There's a motto in gold letters above the clock
+in the great hall at Osborne, the first of all mottoes in its superb
+confidence:</p>
+
+
+<p class="center">&quot;'There is nothing the navy cannot do.'&quot;</p>
+
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia turned to him with eagerness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; she said with a smile. &quot;For a boy to have that plain and simple
+statement before his eyes each day, that's splendid. I suppose a boy
+would never speak of it, but it would be to him a perpetual
+inspiration.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Rames, &quot;if all he thought of was the navy; if his
+ambitions were bound up with the navy. But mine weren't, you see, and
+I used to worry over that sentence even then. 'There is nothing the
+navy cannot do.' Very well. But that didn't mean that this little
+particular, insignificant cog-wheel in the navy machine was going to
+do anything special, or, indeed, anything at all. And I wanted to do
+things--I myself, not the navy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;To do things?&quot; Cynthia asked quietly, and her lips drooped a little
+at the corners, &quot;Or to become a personage?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames laughed good-humoredly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I can meet you there, Miss Daventry. There's no contradiction in the
+phrases. To become a personage is to secure the opportunity of doing
+things, and when you are a personage you soon find things which want
+doing. After all, how many of the great statesmen started out to be
+big men first. They had ideas, I grant you, but they had to make
+themselves big men by hook or by crook before they could carry them
+out. Look at Disraeli. I have been reading up these fellows. He did a
+lot of things. He got the Suez Canal shares. He is the author and
+begetter of the Imperial Idea. That's what you remember and admire him
+for. Yes; but don't forget his velvet trousers, and his habit of
+reciting his epic poems in the drawing-room after dinner. He set out
+first of all to be a personage. So do I in my small way. He chose
+velvet trousers and epic poems. I went down toward the South Pole. We
+each chose the path of least resistance.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was silenced, but not convinced. There must be hundreds of
+instances to confute him, only for the moment she could not remember
+any of them. And one quality in Captain Rames impressed her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You speak as if you had thought all these things out,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have had to,&quot; he replied.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wonder that you went into the navy at all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My father put me there,&quot; he answered.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked him over again, noting the strong, square face, the
+direct, the practical, common-sense, uninspired look of him. He would
+get on without a doubt. There was a great deal of force to push him
+on, and no great delicacy of character to hold him back. Scruples
+would not trouble him, and he would not fail of friends. He was of the
+type which makes friends easily. Even she herself was attracted. He
+would get on probably by trampling upon others, but he would do it
+good-humoredly, and with no desire to cause unnecessary pain. There
+are men, after all, who put nails in their boots to do the trampling.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wonder, with your views,&quot; she said, upon an impulse, &quot;that you
+didn't leave the navy long ago and go into the city.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames looked at her quickly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's rather curious that you should have said that; for, a few years
+ago, I was actually thinking of the city, and wondering whether I
+could make a fortune quickly there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia laughed suddenly. Her suggestion had been uttered in sarcasm.
+Youth is disinclined to rate the making of money high in its standard
+of careers. Captain Ramos would never have passed the turnstile had
+she spoken with him when the turnstile was.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What held me back,&quot; he continued, quite unconscious that he was
+toppling off a hero's perch,--and indeed he would have been totally
+indifferent had he known,--&quot;what held me back was the knowledge that I
+should be beginning too old. One has so very little time,&quot; he
+exclaimed with a touch of passion in his voice. &quot;I would like to go on
+living and living and living for a century. As it is, one begins at
+twenty at the earliest, and then with luck one may have fifty-five
+years--that's all,&quot; and the prospect of the disintegration of his
+powers at the early age of seventy-five affected him with so much
+melancholy that Cynthia laughed again, but this time with a clear and
+joyous ring of amusement.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Never mind, Captain Rames, I am sure you will live every day of your
+fifty-five years, and that is more than all can say.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;They are only thirty-five now,&quot; he grumbled. &quot;However,&quot;--he was
+not to be diverted from the pleasant business of unfolding his
+character,--&quot;I might still have gone into the city, when one morning
+in June, as I was walking round the corner of Buckingham Palace to
+Constitution Hill, I saw on the other side of the road the president
+of the Geographical Society. I knew him slightly. I had read of the
+expedition; I was aware that he was organizing it. It came upon me in
+a flash, 'By George, here's my chance at last,' and I ran across the
+road and applied for the command.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia nodded her head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So that's how you became connected with the expedition--a pure piece
+of chance,&quot; she said slowly. &quot;If you hadn't turned round that corner
+to Constitution Hill----&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, I should have dropped across something else, no doubt,&quot; said
+Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And now you are going into Parliament.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was endeavoring to readjust her forecasts with the facts.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If I get elected,&quot; said Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, you will get elected,&quot; replied Cynthia confidently, but there was
+no admiration in her confidence. It was almost disdainful. &quot;They will
+call you 'Breezy Harry Rames,' and they will elect you by an immense
+majority.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am very glad you think that,&quot; Rames returned imperturbably; and he
+leaned forward with his elbow on his knees and spoke to her upon an
+altogether different note; so that the disdain died out of her face.
+He told her how in answer to Henry Smale's invitation he had gone down
+to Westminster in the afternoon, had sent in his card, had waited by
+the rails in the great round of St. George's Hall. Smale had come out
+from the House, and had fetched him down the stone passage into the
+lobby. A great man was speaking, and the lobby was nearly empty. But
+he finished his speech in a few moments, and the doors burst open and
+there was an eruption of members from the Chamber. Some stood in
+groups talking eagerly, others hurried to the libraries and the
+smoking-room, and barristers walked up and down in pairs, talking over
+their cases for the morrow. There was not a thing in that lobby, from
+the round clock above the doors of the House to the post-office and
+the whip's rooms which had not impressed itself vividly upon Rames's
+mind. Every now and then the doors would swing open as a member passed
+into the Chamber, and just for a moment Rames had a glimpse of the
+green benches, saw the great mace gleam upon the table, the books and
+the three clerks gowned and wigged behind it, and behind the clerks
+the dim figure of the Speaker under the canopy of his chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Of what he saw on that afternoon Rames spoke with an enthusiasm and a
+modesty which quite took Cynthia by surprise. He saw dignity in every
+detail, was prepared to magnify with great meanings the simplest
+ceremony and form. He could not but impress her with his picture, so
+greatly impressed was he himself, so keenly had he longed to walk
+unchallenged down that forbidden way between the rails and to pass
+through the swing doors over the matting to his place on the green
+benches. People in the streets might sneer, or go about their business
+unconcerned. The cynics might talk of the Ins and Outs, and speak of
+Parliament as the most expensive game in which a race of players of
+games indulges, but there in that small room, with the soft light
+pouring down from the roof, and very often the morning light streaming
+in through the clerestory windows, the great decisions were ratified
+which might hamper or advance the future of forty millions.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Henry Smale had paced the lobby for half an hour with Rames, setting
+before him clearly the risks which he would run.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't want to advise you one way or the other,&quot; said Smale, &quot;but it
+is not as if you had no career, and you should come to your decision
+with your eyes open. I speak to you as to one of the ambitious. If you
+go in, I take it, you go in with an eye on the Treasury bench. Well, I
+can tell you this: the House of Commons makes a few, but it breaks a
+few, and if it advances some, it mars a good many. Poverty is a
+serious hindrance, for it means that you cannot give the time to the
+House of Commons which it now claims.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There are the barristers,&quot; objected Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The House of Commons is in their line of business,&quot; returned Henry
+Smale. &quot;The highest offices of the law are reached through the House
+of Commons. Moreover, the questions which arise for debate here have
+often been the subject already of suits in the law courts. They have
+acquired, too, the knack of extracting rapidly the essential things
+out of a paper or a bill. Thus, the barristers come especially
+equipped. Yet, even so, very often they do not make their mark. And
+here is a point for you, Captain Rames.&quot; Henry Smale turned with a
+warning finger upraised and stopped in his walk. &quot;The most
+distinguished men enter this House and never get the ear of it. The
+House of Commons is not ungenerous, but for eight hours a day through
+a long portion of the year people are talking in that Chamber there,
+and it will not provide an audience unless, first, the speaker has
+something of his own to contribute, and, secondly, can express his
+contribution. It does not, on the one hand, ask for oratory; it is
+not, on the other, content even with exhaustive knowledge; it demands
+character, personality, the power of coining out of your knowledge
+some judgments of your own, the power of explaining your judgment in
+clear and intelligible phrases sufficiently vivid to arrest its
+attention. I admit at once that if you succeed, success here is
+sweeter than anywhere else; its recognition is so immediate. But, on
+the other hand, here disappointment is more bitter. To come in with
+ambition, and to be left behind in the race--there is no destiny more
+galling.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Rames quietly, &quot;I have thought over these things. There is
+that risk. I am prepared to take it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well,&quot; returned Smale, and once more he turned on the stone
+pavement, and with Rames at his side retraced his steps. &quot;Let us
+suppose that you have got the ear of the House, that the benches fill
+up when you rise, and men stand at the bar to listen to you. Well,
+even so, you may lose your seat, and you may not yet have established
+yourself firmly enough to make your party find you another. There you
+are--out, your dreams dissolved, your ambitions stopped, yourself
+miserable, and your presence in this lobby an insignificance. Where
+you walked by right, you come as a guest; you have been, and you are
+not; you must turn to something else, while your thoughts are here,
+and very likely you are already too old to turn to something else.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You put the worst side of it all in front of me, Mr. Smale.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; replied Mr. Smale. &quot;Visit the political clubs a couple of months
+after a general election, talk to the defeated candidates who two
+months back were members, you will know I am talking the truth. The
+place enmeshes you. And mind, not because of the sensations. The
+sensations happily are rare. It is a humdrum assembly. I remember once
+taking a foreigner into the strangers' gallery at the time of a
+European crisis. An indiscreet letter had been sent. The foreigner was
+elated. He said to me, 'This will be very interesting. The Commons
+will discuss the letter which has so convulsed Europe.' But it was
+doing nothing of the kind. It was discussing whether the Tyne, Durham,
+and Hartlepool Railway paid its employees sufficiently well to justify
+Parliament in allowing it to build a bridge across a stream of which
+you have never heard.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames smiled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I see a good many men in this lobby,&quot; he rejoined. &quot;I do not notice
+that any of them are bored. Indeed, for the most part, they seem very
+busy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That is one of the tragedies of the House of Commons,&quot; Smale replied.
+&quot;There are so many men in who during the whole of each session are
+extremely busy doing nothing; they haven't a moment to spare, they do
+nothing with so much energy and persistence. One moment they are in
+the library writing to a constituent who wants to know why the medal
+which his father earned in the Crimea has not yet arrived; the next
+moment they rush into the House because the famous Irishman with the
+witty tongue is up; they are off again to the outer lobby to tell a
+visitor that he can't see the Prime-Minister--'Industry without work,
+idleness without rest,' that is how this House was once described,
+and, believe me, the description is not inapt.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus said Henry Smale, but Harry Rames was not to be turned aside.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will take all these risks very willingly, Mr. Smale,&quot; he cried, &quot;I
+want to be in here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Henry Smale smiled, ceased from his arguments, and clapped Rames in a
+kindly fashion on the shoulder. &quot;I have done my duty,&quot; he said.
+&quot;Come!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He led Rames through a little doorway at the side of which sat three
+or four messengers, and at the end of a narrow passage tapped upon a
+door.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Come in,&quot; said a voice, and as Smale ushered in Harry Rames a man of
+pleasant address and an exquisite suit of clothes arose and welcomed
+them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Hamlin,&quot; said Henry Smale, &quot;this is Captain Rames.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Hamlin shook hands cordially with Rames and invited him to a
+chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We shall be very glad to have you in the House,&quot; he said. He beamed.
+He seemed to have been waiting for Captain Rames to complete his
+happiness. &quot;I think Ludsey was suggested.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Benoliel suggested it,&quot; said Smale. &quot;He's a good judge too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There is no candidate arranged yet. I will write to Ludsey at once.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Smale and Rames left the room together.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I should think you might consider that settled,&quot; said Smale.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames thanked him and referred to Hamlin's charm of manner. Smale's
+small eyes twinkled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's why he sits in that room. He's the chief Whip.&quot; And shaking
+hands with Rames Mr. Smale abruptly returned to the House.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The gist of the conversation with Smale Rames told to Cynthia in the
+reception-room at the Admiralty, and she listened with a growing
+interest. Then once more his note changed. He spoke with a boyish
+enthusiasm of his aims. To force an entrance into that arena; the
+entrance gained, to fight himself into the station of a great man;
+ultimately to govern and exercise authority--the note of personal
+ambition rose to a pitch of exultation in his voice. Of principles he
+obviously had no care, theories of politics were to him of no account.
+He was the political adventurer pure and simple. Cynthia sat with her
+eyes of dark blue clouded, and a real disappointment at her heart. She
+raised her face to his, and a little smile trembled upon her lips, and
+even her voice shook ever so slightly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have been very honest to me about it all,&quot; she said. &quot;I thank you
+for that.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames was a trifle bewildered. He could not see that he had
+anything to conceal.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Good-night,&quot; she said as she rose, &quot;I see my friend Mrs. Royle
+waiting for me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She gave him her hand and moved away for a few steps and then stopped.
+Harry Rames was at her side before she had stopped. She turned to him
+timidly with the blood mounting very prettily into her cheeks.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I suppose,&quot; she said, &quot;that your journey to the South really counts
+now for very little in your thoughts. Yet you must have had a great
+many wishes for your success sent to you from all parts of the world
+before you started. I wonder you can forget them all, and leave that
+work unfinished.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It seemed to Captain Rames that she had hit upon a rather far-fetched
+argument to persuade him to a second journey to the South.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, I am getting a good many wishes for my success now, and I hear
+them spoken,&quot; he said with a smile. &quot;It is true that I got all sorts
+of messages and telegrams before I sailed to the South. But to tell
+you the truth I was rather too busy to read them. I have got them all
+tied up somewhere in a brown-paper parcel.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia seemed actually to flinch. She turned away abruptly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wanted to ask of you a favor,&quot; said Rames. &quot;Mr. Benoliel said that
+you lived near Ludsey. You could do a great deal if you would help me.
+Will you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia turned back to him, her eyes shone angrily, the blood came
+into her cheeks in a rush.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; she said decisively, and without another word she walked away.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I might have struck her,&quot; thought Captain Rames. He knew nothing
+of a telegram from the Daventry estancia which lay forgotten in that
+brown-paper parcel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">None the less he walked home across the Mall treading upon air. Great
+people had moved out of their way to make his acquaintance; Cabinet
+ministers had promised to speak for him; important ladies had smiled
+their friendliest. He looked back upon the days of his insignificance,
+and his heart was buoyant within him. Certainly one girl with
+dark-blue eyes and a face like a rose-leaf had presumed to disapprove
+of him. But there! Girls! You never knew what odd notions nested in
+their pretty heads. If a man on the make steered his course by a
+girl's favor, he would soon shipwreck on a snag. However, this girl
+must be soothed down. Harry Rames could not afford to have an enemy at
+Ludsey. But he had no doubt that he could soothe her down. He walked
+home, softly whistling under his breath.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia for her part went home in a different mood. She had lost
+another illusion to-night.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_12" href="#div1Ref_12">LUNGATINE</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The threatened dissolution was, after all, postponed, and through the
+autumn months Captain Rames went busily up and down between London and
+Ludsey. He made his head-quarters at an hotel on a climbing street in
+the thick of the town, and spent his days in the public view and his
+nights at meetings and at local festivities.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia Daventry, five miles away, heard stories of his indefatigable
+energy and once or twice she met him in the streets; and once or twice
+he snatched an afternoon and swept over in a motor-car to see her. She
+welcomed him with a pleasure which she rather resented, and not for
+worlds would she have asked him how his campaign was faring. She did
+not, however, have to ask. For either Diana Royle was present and
+eagerly questioned him, or if Cynthia were alone he plunged into the
+subject himself. Captain Rames was at some pains to amuse her and he
+succeeded. Little incidents of the campaign, whether they told against
+himself or not; sketches of queer characters whom he came across; an
+anecdote now and then, drawn from the ancient history of the City--he
+poured them out to her, making it quite clear with an apparently
+ingenuous frankness that he had deliberately stored them in his memory
+purely for her amusement. He was engaged in the work of soothing her
+down. Diana Royle would rhapsodize after he had whirled away in a
+cloud of dust.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What a wonderful man! How energetic! How clever!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And how complacent!&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What high principle!&quot; Diana gushed lyrically. &quot;What character!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And what cunning!&quot; added Cynthia, with a droop of her lips.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Diana tapped the floor with an irritable foot.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well, darling. Look for an angel, by all means. You will be very
+glad of a man later on.&quot; Then she laughed pleasantly. &quot;But I am not
+deceived. You talk lightly of him when he is gone, but when he is here
+you fix your big eyes on him, and, though you say nothing, every
+movement of you asks for more.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was startled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, perhaps I do,&quot; she admitted. &quot;I suppose that I have a kind of
+hope that I will hear, not more, but something different from what I
+am hearing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's so like you, my dear,&quot; Diana rejoined; she was all sugar and
+vinegar. &quot;If Julius Cæsar came back to earth, you would want him
+different. But that's the way with romantic people. They look for
+heroes all day and never see them when they knock at the front door.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia laughed good-humoredly. There was this much of truth in Diana
+Royle's attack. She had been searching through the words of Harry
+Rames all the while when he was uttering them for a glimpse of some
+other being beside the man on the make. Certain qualities she
+recognized. Enthusiasm, for instance. But it was enthusiasm for the
+arena, not for any cause to be won there. A shrewd foresight again was
+evident. But it was foresight to pluck the personal advantage. Here,
+it seemed to her, was the conscience of the country stirring on all
+sides to the recognition of great and unnecessary evils in its midst,
+and Harry Rames was alone unaffected. Yet in a measure she was
+impressed. He had so closely laid his plans. He gave her yet more
+evidence when he came again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have got a rule or two,&quot; he said. &quot;All demands for pledges from
+leagues and associations go into the waste-paper basket. I'll answer
+questions if they are asked me by a man in my constituency. I won't
+put my name to a general proposition and post it to London. Many a
+good man has been let down that way. Then I won't canvass. I won't
+solicit a vote. I don't believe in it. There's one only point of view
+for a candidate: that the electors are doing themselves a service by
+electing him, and not doing him one. You have got to persuade them of
+that.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Don't you find it difficult?&quot; asked Cynthia, innocently.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames laughed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I do,&quot; he said. &quot;The electors have their point of view, too. But
+I won't canvass, I am there at my hotel if any one wants to see me. I
+am at public meetings, and I go to social functions. That's a good
+move,&quot; and Captain Rames nodded his head. &quot;You meet the fellows on the
+other side and if you can get them friendly, you stop them coming out
+hot against you. Makes a lot of difference, that. Then there's wisdom
+in taking a firm stand upon a point or so. Your own people, treat them
+properly, will always give you a bit of latitude, and a reputation for
+courage is a fine asset in politics as in anything else.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But you mustn't overdo it, I suppose,&quot; said Cynthia ironically.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, no, you must be careful about that,&quot; replied Rames seriously.
+&quot;What you want to produce is an impression that you are not pliable,
+that industries will be safe under your watch--that's for the business
+men--and that social advancement will not be neglected--that's for the
+artisans. You know the election is coming now,&quot; he suddenly exclaimed.
+&quot;Do come to one of my meetings!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked doubtful.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't think,&quot; she said, &quot;that I believe very much in any work
+which--I don't express what I mean very well--which hasn't a great
+dream at the heart of it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames looked up into her face quickly and grew suddenly serious. He
+made no comment upon her words, however.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;After all that's no reason why you shouldn't come to one of my
+meetings.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia smiled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will come to the last one on the night before the poll,&quot; she
+replied reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I shall hold you to it,&quot; said Harry Rames, and he went away well
+pleased with his visit. Cynthia was popular in Ludsey. So Cynthia
+should sit on that momentous evening in the front row upon the
+platform. Also he would make for her benefit an unusually effective
+speech. Cynthia from the window watched his motor-car spin away in a
+whirl of dust. He was going to preside that evening at a meeting of
+the Salvation Army.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The dissolution took place on the fifteenth of January. But the real
+contest had begun a fortnight before in Ludsey. Harry Rames rushed
+into it as if it had been a foot-ball rally. He spoke all day, in
+factories and outside factories, in halls and schoolrooms and from
+club-room windows. He ransacked the morning papers for new pegs on
+which to hang his arguments; he kicked off at foot-ball matches and
+the aim of the kick was entirely political; and at the end of three
+weeks even he was very tired and inclined to recognize an element of
+humiliation in the conduct of a successful campaign.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was eleven o'clock at night. There was to be but one more day of
+it, but one more meeting to-morrow night, the big, final rally on the
+eve of the poll. Harry Rames lay outstretched upon his sofa with his
+pipe between his lips cradled pleasantly upon that reflection, when
+the door of his room opened and a waiter brought in a card. Rames
+waved it aside.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I can see no one.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The gentleman said that his business was important.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames grumbled and took the card from the salver.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;M. Poizat,&quot; he read. &quot;A Frenchman. Certainly not. I won't see him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The waiter, an old English servant, a rare being nowadays, even in a
+country hotel, stood his ground.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He's lived in Ludsey a long time, sir.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, has he!&quot; said Rames. &quot;Tell him I am out.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The waiter shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He has already told me that you are in, sir. Come, you had better see
+him, sir. Perhaps he's the ha'porth of tar.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, very well,&quot; said Rames. &quot;But I tell you, William, that I am in
+the mood to assert my rights as a man.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mustn't do that, sir, until the day after to-morrow. You are only a
+candidate till then.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">William retired. Rames fell back upon his sofa. He meant to lie there
+prone upon his back, even if his visitor held all the votes of Ludsey
+in the hollow of his hand. Then the door opened and was shut again. A
+little, puckish old man stood in the room, danced lightly on his feet,
+skipped in the air, twirled before Captain Rames's astonished eyes and
+finally struck an inviting attitude, both arms extended and one foot
+advanced, like the pictures of the quack doctors in the newspaper
+advertisements.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, he's out of a lunatic asylum,&quot; Captain Rames almost groaned
+aloud. &quot;He won't even have a vote.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The little man skimmed forward with agility, fixing a bright and
+twinkling pair of eyes upon the prostrate candidate.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How old do you think I am?&quot; he asked, and he whirled his arms.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are the youngest thing I have ever seen,&quot; replied Rames with
+conviction. &quot;I didn't know that people were even born as young as you
+are.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am seventy-three,&quot; exclaimed the little man with a chuckle. He
+squared up at an imaginary antagonist and delivered a deadly blow in
+the air.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Do you mind not doing that!&quot; said Rames mildly. &quot;My nerves are not
+what they should be, and if you do it again I shall probably cry. I
+suppose that you are M. Poizat----&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am, sir,&quot; said the little man. He changed his tactics. He no longer
+whirled his arms in the air. He advanced to the sofa and suddenly put
+up his foot on the edge.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Feel my calf!&quot; he said abruptly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames meekly obeyed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You ought to have a medal,&quot; he said languidly. &quot;You really ought. At
+seventy-three, too! For myself I am like butter, and rather inferior
+butter, on a very hot day.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">M. Poizat nodded his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I know. That's why I am here!&quot; He looked about the room and with the
+importance of a conspirator he drew out of his pocket a medicine
+bottle filled with a brown liquid. &quot;Why am I so young?&quot; he asked. &quot;Why
+is my leg of iron? Listen to my voice. Why is it so clear?--It's all
+'Lungatine,'&quot; and with immense pride he reverently placed the bottle
+on the mantel-shelf. He turned again to Captain Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I heard you to-night. I suffered with you. What a voice! How harsh!
+How terrible! And yet what good words if only one could have heard
+them! I said to myself: 'That poor man. I can cure him. He does not
+know of Lungatine. He makes us all uncomfortable because he does not
+know of Lungatine.' So I ran home and brought a bottle.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's very good of you, I am sure,&quot; said Rames, &quot;But look!&quot; He pointed
+to a table. Throat sprays, tonics, lozenges, encumbered it. &quot;The
+paraphernalia of a candidate,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">M. Poizat smiled contemptuously. He drew from his breast pocket a
+sheaf of letters.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;See how many in Ludsey owe their health to me!&quot; he cried, and he gave
+the letters to Rames, who read them over with an 'oh' and an 'ah' of
+intense admiration when any particularly startling cure was gratefully
+recorded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are a chemist here I suppose--naturalized, of course?&quot; asked
+Captain Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have a restaurant,&quot; M. Poizat corrected him. &quot;Lungatine is merely
+one of my discoveries.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He sat down complacently. Captain Rames started up in dismay upon his
+elbow.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have a great deal to do to-morrow,&quot; he said piteously. The plea was
+of no avail. Captain Rames was in the grip of that most terrible of
+all constituents, the amateur inventor. M. Poizat drew his chair to
+the side of the sofa and went through the tale of his inventions. It
+was the usual inevitable list--an automatic lift which would work with
+absolute safety in any mine, a torpedo which would destroy any navy, a
+steel process which would resist any torpedo, and a railway-coupling.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I'll bring you the models,&quot; he cried.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, no,&quot; cried Rames, springing from his sofa in dismay. Then he laid
+his hand on the inventor's shoulder and smiled wisely:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Royal commissions for you,&quot; he said. &quot;They're the fellows for models.
+I'll see about some. Royal commissions for you. Thank you for your
+Lungatine. Good-night, my friend, good-night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Gently, but firmly, he raised the inventor from his chair, while he
+shook hands with him, and conducted him toward the door.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have your hat? Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A tablespoonful six times a day in a wineglass of water.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. The instructions, I see, are on the bottle.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames opened the door with his pleasantest smile.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;To-morrow at your great meeting,&quot; said M. Poizat, &quot;I shall be there.
+I shall hear what you say. Your voice will ring like a trumpet. And
+perhaps at the end of your speech, you will say that it is all due to
+Lungatine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A frosty silence followed upon the words. Captain Rames said
+indifferently:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have been in England a long time. You are naturalized, of
+course?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">M. Poizat did not reply to the question.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Perhaps you will say that it is all due to Lungatine,&quot; he repeated
+softly. &quot;Perhaps you will say that. Who knows?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames looked up at the ceiling.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah, who knows?&quot; he said enigmatically.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">M. Poizat shook hands for a second time and went down the stairs.
+Captain Rames closed the door, took the cork from the bottle, wetted
+the tips of his finger, and tasted the brown liquid. It was a simple
+solution of paregoric.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't believe the fellow's naturalized,&quot; cried Rames, and he raised
+the bottle in the air above the coal-scuttle. But he did not let it
+drop.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Perhaps he is though,&quot; he thought. He poured away a portion of the
+liquid amongst the coal, replaced the cork, and set the bottle
+prominently upon the mantel-shelf so that if M. Poizat took it into
+his head to call again he would see it there. Then he betook himself
+to bed; and M. Poizat figured in his dreams, a grotesque, little,
+capering creature, a figure of fun, as indeed he was, to the eyes of
+wakefulness. There are people upon whose faces nature writes plainly
+hints of tragic destinies, and M. Poizat had certainly no relationship
+with these. But then nature is apt to be freakish.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_13" href="#div1Ref_13">THE NIGHT BEFORE THE POLL</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The walls of the great Corn Exchange were draped with banners and hung
+with gigantic mottoes. Cynthia sat in the front row of chairs upon the
+platform with Isaac Benoliel upon one side of her, and beyond him
+Diana Royle. It was the first public meeting at which she had ever
+been present, and now that the shy uneasiness at the prominence of her
+position which had troubled her when she took her seat was passing
+away, she gazed about her, eagerness in her eyes and a throb of
+excitement at her heart. In front of her a rostrum had been built out
+from the edge of the platform so that the speakers might stand upon
+the exact spot whence the voice carried with the greatest sonority.
+The rostrum was railed and hung with red cloth; the chairman's table,
+with the inevitable water-bottle, occupied it; and the small, square
+space was the only empty space in all that cavern of a hall. A few
+rows of chairs for members of the association were ranged at the front
+upon the floor; behind the chairs the people stood packed and massed
+to the doors, most of them men. The one gallery was crowded to its
+furthest nook; behind Cynthia the platform was thronged. Wherever her
+eyes turned she saw faces, faces, faces, all set in one direction, all
+white under the glare of light, all inclined toward the empty rostrum.
+It was the eve of the poll. There was a tingle of excitement in the
+air, a hushed expectancy. Only when Cynthia raised her eyes did she
+lose the vague feeling of suspense. Overhead a skylight in the roof
+was covered with a horizontal blind. One tattered corner hung down and
+as she looked up from the indistinguishable throng of faces, it
+arrested her attention as something especially individual and definite
+and single.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Suddenly came a buzz and a stir. The chairman was seen to rise from a
+flight of steps at the side of the platform. He was followed by a
+tall, gaunt, loose-limbed man with a bony face, a white moustache, and
+a high, bald head. He had the look of a soldier. Cynthia took no heed
+of him. He stalked before her and sank unnoticed in his place. Behind
+him came Harry Rames, and as he passed along the narrow gangway
+between the crowded chairs, those who had seats sprang to their feet;
+and three thousand people broke like a wave into a flutter of
+handkerchiefs and a shattering thunder of applause. Above the applause
+a chant gradually swelled, two lines of a tune rather like a chime.
+Cynthia could not hear the words, but the sound, with its rise and
+fall, surged backward and forward against the walls of the Exchange
+for a full minute.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel leaned toward Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;They have given him their foot-ball song. In a city of artisans, keen
+on foot-ball, that's a good sign.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia nodded. But she hardly heard, she could not have answered.
+Here was something quite new to her, and overwhelmingly new. The
+thunderous outburst had taken her by the throat; for a second she felt
+choked; she had no part in politics, yet emotion woke in her and the
+tears sprang into her eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What's the matter, Cynthia?&quot; asked Diana Royle.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia replied with a break in her voice between a laugh and a sob.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't know. It's just the crowd, I think.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And the enthusiasm of the crowd,&quot; added Mr. Benoliel. &quot;You make me
+feel very old, Cynthia. I can listen to it quite unmoved now. But
+there was a time when I couldn't without a choking in my throat. It's
+the splendid faith of the crowd.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia, arrested by the phrase, looked quickly at Benoliel. Greatly
+as she liked him she was never quite sure of him. Kind as he had been
+to her she always suspected some touch of the charlatan. He had the
+look of a man quite in earnest.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wonder,&quot; she said, &quot;whether mere magnetism is enough to arouse it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel did not answer; for the chairman rose at his table; and
+while he spoke the harmless necessary words, Cynthia took stock of
+Harry Rames, who was seated in the rostrum at the side of the table in
+front of her and a little to her left. The last weeks of exertion had
+left their marks; the flesh had worn thin upon his face; there were
+dark hollows beneath his eyes; he had gained a look of spirituality
+which did not belong to him. He was nervous; his hands, with the long
+fingers which never seemed to accord with the rest of him, moved
+uneasily and restlessly from the buttons of his coat to the slip of
+notes which he had placed upon the table. Cynthia was deceived by the
+look of him as she had been deceived by the fervor of the gathering.
+The outburst was not entirely, was not even chiefly, a tribute to the
+candidate. Ludsey was a political city, and by three weeks of speeches
+and agitation political feeling had been whipped to a climax of
+excitement. It sought and found its outlet to-night at this final
+rally before the poll.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The cheers broke out again when Harry Rames rose and leaned his
+hand upon the rail of the rostrum. When they died down he began to
+speak--first a faltering word or two of thanks. Then his voice
+suddenly strengthened and rang firm. His fingers ceased to twitch, and
+he turned over in his mind the consecutions of his thoughts as though
+he were turning over the pages of a book. All that he had planned to
+say came clearly to him in its due order, and brought the comforting
+assurance that the rest would follow. He was master of himself, and
+being master of himself set his audience at ease to listen, Cynthia
+among the rest. Anxious as he himself, she knew now that the speech
+would go right on to its considered end. She leaned forward, all ears
+to catch the words, and all eagerness to read into them, if she could,
+the something more which was not there.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But she could not; yet it was a night of triumph for Harry Rames,
+&quot;Breezy Harry Rames.&quot; She recalled her own phrase with a disappointed
+droop of the lips more than once during the next hour. He was going to
+win. She had no doubt of it. Confidence swept from his audience to him
+and back again in waves. And he savored the joys of the orator as he
+never had before. He had the arts of the platform, and more than the
+arts, a power to bend his audience to sympathy. He knew that night the
+supreme reward, the hush of a mass of people constraining themselves
+to silence and even to immobility while a voice, low as a whisper,
+sounded audibly in every nook. He played with the suspense, prolonging
+it to the last moment of endurance, and then, by a sudden swoop to a
+sharp, clever phrase, drawing the audience to its feet and coining the
+silence in a stormy tumult of applause.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had the gift of speech; Cynthia gladly conceded it. An aptness of
+homely words, an absence of all extravagance, and a voice resonant and
+pleasant as a clear-toned, bell impressed her more than she had
+expected to be impressed. A day's rest had restored his voice for the
+time, even though M. Poizat's Lungatine had not contributed to the
+restoration.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She was surprised, too, by a certain shrewdness in the matter of the
+speech. It was not so much of the platform as his manner. There was
+very little reference to the navy. &quot;I don't mean to be considered a
+'service member,'&quot; he had said to her once. &quot;No one pays attention to
+the service member in the House of Commons.&quot; But here and there came
+views which struck her as new and worth consideration.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If you could teach the wives of the artisans to cook and to take an
+interest in cooking, you would have done a great deal more to solve
+the question of intemperance in this country than if you closed half
+the public-houses,&quot; he cried once and developed his theme with humor
+and some courage. He drew a picture of a wife putting her husband's
+supper on the fire, ready against the time when he should come home
+from his factory, and then running out into the street to talk to a
+neighbor and leaving the meat to grill to the toughness and dryness of
+leather.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The man comes home, sits down to it, and rises from it unsatisfied.
+What does he do? He goes out and strolls round to the public-house.
+Put a good meal, well-cooked, inside of him, and he'll not be so
+disposed to move. He'll be inclined to smoke his pipe by the fire in
+his kitchen.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He passed on to other topics. The whole speech was clever and was
+uttered on a lift of enthusiasm. But again Cynthia argued, it was the
+enthusiasm for the arena, not for a cause. It was ambition without
+ideals, power without high motive.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Diana Royle inclined toward her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Aren't you satisfied now?&quot; she asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, he will get on,&quot; said Cynthia; and then she suddenly sat upright
+in her chair, with her lips parted and the blood bright in her cheeks.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But, after all,&quot; Rames was saying; his voice was beginning to grow
+hoarse and he raised his hand in an appeal for silence, &quot;here are we
+discussing the work to be done, and leaving out in our discussion the
+great necessity. I don't know what you think, but to my notion there
+is no greatness in any work unless it has a dream at the heart of it.
+The world's work is done by the great dreamers. Well, here is my last
+word before the poll, perhaps the last word I shall speak in this
+constituency.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was interrupted as he had meant to be by loud repudiations of such
+a possibility.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, no!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You're a member already.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We'll put you in.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Such phrases broke in upon the words and then a cheery voice, louder
+than the rest, shouted from the back of the hall:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Never fear! You're well patronized in Ludsey, Captain.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A burst of laughter followed upon the words, and a flush of annoyance
+darkened Rames's face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will remind my friend that I am not a public entertainer,&quot; he said.
+&quot;And it's really against the spirit represented in that sentence that
+I wish to direct my first words. I have my dream too--a dream. I speak
+openly to you--at my very heart. Let me tell it you. It involves a
+confession. When I first came to Ludsey six months ago, when for the
+first time I saw from the windows of my railway carriage across the
+summer fields the tall chimneys and high, long roofs of its factories,
+the delicate steeples of its churches, it was to me just a town like
+another. I will be frank, it was just a polling-booth. But as I got to
+know your city that error passed out of my thoughts.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia leaned forward. He had used her own words. She could not but
+be flattered by his use of them. They had been acclaimed, too, by this
+great gathering, and she was proud of that. Not for anything would she
+have had their authorship revealed, but she was proud to hear them
+used, proud, too, because they seemed to have led, if she dared
+believe her ears, Harry Rames out of his detested breeziness into a
+contemplation of something other than the personal gain. She could
+hardly doubt him now; he spoke with so simple a sincerity. She had a
+sudden glimpse once more of her enchanted garden wherein she had
+walked with and helped the great ones of the earth. To help, herself
+unknown except by those she helped!--that had been the dream when she
+had encouraged dreams; and it sprang once more into life now as she
+listened.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is a city,&quot; Rames continued, &quot;where a few steps will take you out
+of the thronged streets into some old garden, quiet with the peace of
+ancient memories; some old close of plaster and black beams; some old
+room with windows deep-set in four-foot walls and wide hearths of
+centuries ago. And round about these old places stands a ring of
+factories where in good times the lights blaze until the morning and
+the whir of its machines never ceases from your ears. It is a city
+whose continuous life is written for all to see upon its buildings.
+Here kings and queens have tarried on their journeys; there chambers
+of commerce hold their meetings. From small and ancient beginnings it
+has been made by the activity of generations of men into a modern
+industrial city. Well, I have my dream. It is to be one little link in
+the continuity of its life and to do my share of service in the
+forwarding of its prosperity.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A shout answered his words. He had his audience in hand. He stilled it
+with a swift gesture and his voice rang out with a laugh which had all
+the exultation of battle.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, we shall know to-morrow night. We are in the ice-pack now, but
+we are coming to the outer rim of it. We can see the blue water
+already. We shall be sailing smoothly upon it this time to-morrow
+night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had been chary of references to the voyage which had made his
+reputation; all the more, therefore, this one struck home. He sat down
+tempestuously acclaimed, and turning in his chair held out his hand to
+Cynthia Daventry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am glad that you came,&quot; he said. &quot;I have achieved two triumphs
+to-night. I have brought you and Mr. Benoliel to your first political
+meeting and both of you are on my platform.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He shook hands with Isaac Benoliel and with Diana Royle. Cynthia
+leaned a little forward.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I, too, am glad that I came,&quot; she returned with a smile. Because of
+those last words of his, friendship was warm in her toward Harry
+Rames. She added, &quot;You knew then that I was here--just behind you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames nodded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, but I was too nervous to turn to you before I had made my
+speech. The flesh wears a little thin after three weeks of this. One
+gets jumpy. Even the tattered corner of blind hanging down there from
+the skylight seemed to-night charged with some important message.&quot; He
+spoke, ridiculing the fancy, and Cynthia, with a smile and a quick
+lift of her eyebrows, cried:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I noticed that too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then for the first time,&quot; said Rames, &quot;we have something in common.
+You and I are probably the only people in the hall who noticed it. We
+have a bond of union.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A strip of tattered blind!&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, there was nothing at all before,&quot; said Captain Rames, and he
+suddenly turned back to his seat. For the tall, gaunt man was on his
+legs.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia neither heard his name nor followed his speech with any
+particular attention. It was indeed difficult to follow. He was an old
+hack of the platform with all the sounding phrases at the tip of his
+tongue. Rolling sentences, of the copybook, flowed out of him;
+declamations too vague to be understood were delivered with the vigor
+of a prophet. But he interspersed them with the familiar clichés of
+the day and each one received its salvo of applause. To Cynthia he was
+a man not so much stupid as out of place. She could imagine him at the
+head of a cavalry squadron. Here he seemed simply grotesque.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On the other hand, Captain Rames did not; and the contrast between the
+two men bent her to consider whether, after all, she had not been
+wrong in her condemnation of his new career. She was in the mood to
+admit it; and when the meeting broke up and the crowd was pouring
+through the doors into the street, and those upon the platform were
+descending its steps, she found herself alone for a second on the
+rostrum with Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Perhaps I was wrong,&quot; she said. &quot;I remember what you told me of Mr.
+Smale. A vivid gift of phrase--he thought that necessary. You have
+it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;On the platform--yes. But the platform's not the House,&quot; said Rames.
+&quot;Smale told me that too. I have yet to see whether I shall carry the
+House.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yet those last words,&quot; said Cynthia--&quot;about the city and the
+continuity of its life and your pride to have a little share in it.
+Oh, that was finely done.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And upon Rames's face there came a grin.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I thought that would fetch 'em,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia stepped back. Once again it occurred to Rames, as it had done
+on the night of their first meeting at the Admiralty, that just so
+would she look if he struck her a blow.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then--then--the city is still a polling-booth,&quot; she stammered.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The hero newly perched upon his pediment tumbled off again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You used what I said to you because you just thought it would go
+down.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames did not deny it. He remained silent.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I remember,&quot; she continued, &quot;it was no doubt a foolish thing I said.
+But even when I said it, you were thinking this is the sort of thing
+that will take.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">That she was humiliated, her voice and her face clearly proved. Yet
+again Rames did not contradict her. Again he was silent. For there was
+nothing to be said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You do not allow me many illusions about you,&quot; Cynthia said gently,
+and she began to turn away.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But now he arrested her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't mean to,&quot; he said quickly; and by the reply he undid some
+portion of the harm he had done himself in her eyes.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_14" href="#div1Ref_14">COLONEL CHALLONER'S MEMORY</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">It had been arranged that Mr. Benoliel's small party should take
+supper with Harry Rames at his hotel. As they stood waiting at the
+foot of the platform the agent came to them from the outer doors.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The way's clear now,&quot; he said. &quot;I think you can go.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They passed through the empty hall, Cynthia first at Harry Rames's
+side, and in that order they came out upon the steps. A fine rain was
+falling, but the crowd had not dispersed. The great light over the
+door showed the climbing street thronged. Coat collars were turned up,
+hats were pressed down; and so as Rames and Cynthia came out they saw
+in the glare beneath the rain just a mass of swaying, jostling black
+things, round black things moving indecisively this way and that like
+some close-packed herd of blind animals. Just for a moment the
+illusion lasted. Then Rames was seen and of a sudden the heads were
+thrown back, the hats shaken high, and all those black round things
+became the white faces of living men, their eyes shining in the light,
+their voices shouting in acclamation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames took a step back.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Did you see?&quot; he cried to Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. They are not animals to draw your chariot,&quot; she replied. &quot;They
+are men.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, men--men to govern,&quot; he answered. His was the spirit of the old
+Whig families. Though he was not of them, he meant to force his way
+among them. To govern the people, not to admit it to government, to go
+far in appeasing it, but not to give it the reins, that was his
+instinct. He wished to retain the old governing class, but he meant to
+be one of it. His ambitions soared to-night, and reached out beyond
+this hilly, narrow street. He led these men now who stood acclaiming
+him in the rain. His thoughts shot forward to other days when every
+town in England might at his coming pour out its masses to endorse his
+words.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He waved his hand toward his companions and the crowd made a lane for
+them across the street to the hotel. Rames himself was carried
+shoulder-high, and set down within the doors. He led the way up the
+stairs to a big room upon the first floor overlooking the street,
+where supper was laid. A great shout went up from the street as they
+entered the room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;They want you,&quot; said Mrs. Royle.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; replied Rames. He opened a door into a smaller room in which no
+lights were lit and pulled up the blinds. Across the street under a
+great clock was a newspaper office and in the windows the election
+returns of the night were being, displayed. All along the line
+victories were gained for Rames's party. Arthur Pynes, a young
+manufacturer, and the chairman of the association, to whose energy the
+organization was due; an ex-Mayor, a Mr. Charlesworth, and one or two
+hard fighters of the old school joined the group in the dark room. One
+of them, a rosy-faced contractor with a high laugh, who had presided
+over the association in its darker days, leaned against the window by
+Cynthia Daventry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He'll have to appear on this balcony to-morrow night, as soon as he
+can after the result's declared,&quot; he said. &quot;You see, the windows are
+all boarded up on the ground floors opposite.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He'll speak from here?&quot; asked Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He'll speak, but they won't listen,&quot; replied Mr. Arnall. &quot;I remember
+Sir William Harris, the last time he was elected before he was made a
+judge--&quot; and he ran off into stories of the old days until the windows
+of the newspaper office were darkened and the crowd at last dispersed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Let us go in to supper,&quot; said Rames, and they all passed into the
+next room. &quot;Will you sit here, Mrs. Royle, and you here, Miss
+Daventry?&quot; He placed Diana Royle upon his right hand and Cynthia upon
+his left. &quot;Pynes, will you take the chair next to Mrs. Royle, and
+Colonel,&quot; he addressed the tall, gaunt man whose flowing platitudes
+had left nothing in Cynthia's mind but a recollection of sonority, a
+booming as of waves in a hollow cave, &quot;will you sit next to Miss
+Daventry?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The colonel bowed and prepared to take his seat. But he was a
+punctilious old gentleman and stood upon the ceremonies.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have not introduced me, Rames,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I beg your pardon. Miss Daventry, this is Colonel Challoner. He
+has made his own seat a safe one--a county division which polls
+a week later than we do, and he lives in it. So when I applied at
+head-quarters for help at our last meeting Colonel Challoner was kind
+enough to volunteer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia shot a startled glance at her neighbor. Her own name was
+Challoner too; and all that was terrible in her recollections was
+linked with it. Of course, it did not follow that this Challoner was
+any relation of hers. There must be many families of that name.
+Nevertheless, the sudden sound of it caused her a shock. The blood
+rushed into her face. She made a movement. Almost she shrank away.
+Challoner, however, was taking his seat. He noticed the quick
+movement; he did not appreciate the instinct of fear which had caused
+it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah, it is true then, Miss Daventry,&quot; he said. &quot;We have already met.
+You remember it, too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was startled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, Colonel Challoner,&quot; she replied quickly. &quot;I don't think that we
+have. Indeed, I am sure we have not. I should surely have remembered
+if we had.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That is a pretty thing for a young lady to say to an old man,&quot; the
+colonel answered with a smile. &quot;But my memory is a good one. I never
+forget a face.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had the particular pride of all men with good memories, and
+ambition had intensified it into an obstinacy. For he had his
+ambition, and successive disappointments had only strengthened its
+hold upon his heart. He aimed to be Under Secretary of State for
+Foreign Affairs. He had been military attaché at so many Embassies,
+the post, to his thinking, was marked out for him. At each new
+promotion to the Cabinet, at each general election, he was sure that
+he could no longer be overlooked. He ran from platform to platform to
+increase his claim upon the office should his party be returned. A
+telegram from the chief whip had brought him to Ludsey, would send him
+to-morrow into Yorkshire. Now, surely, his turn must come! He had one
+persistent fear, lest he should be thought too old. And he clung with
+an almost piteous reiteration to the accuracy of his recollections as
+a vindication of the alertness of his powers.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;When I saw you upon the platform I was quite sure that it was not for
+the first time, Miss Daventry,&quot; he insisted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;During the season, perhaps,&quot; Cynthia replied. &quot;At some reception or
+ball. Did you hear that, Colonel Challoner?&quot; and she turned quickly
+toward Mr. Arnall, who was telling an old story of the days and the
+hustings when broken heads were common about the doors of the
+polling-booths.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia laughed eagerly with the rest in her anxiety to keep Colonel
+Challoner from plying her with questions. She was ready with her
+answers, but greatly she feared, lest by probing into his memories he
+should understand of a sudden where he had seen her before. And for a
+time she was successful. The confidence which had run from man to
+man in the great Corn Exchange an hour before was present at this
+supper-table and kindled them all to cheeriness. The ex-Mayor said
+with a pleasant drawl, which was his habit:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Do you remember Taylor the Democrat, Arnall? He fought two elections
+here within three months and then went bankrupt. He was an adventurer
+and the most eloquent man I ever heard. But he was a caution.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; cried Mr. Arnall, with a clicking laugh at the back of his
+throat. &quot;Do you remember his meeting down by the club? 'Gag that
+calf,'&quot; and Mr. Arnall spluttered with delight.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's it,&quot; said the ex-Mayor. &quot;You must know that Taylor stood as a
+Democrat, Captain Rames. That's where the fun comes in. He wore a blue
+swallow-tail-coat with brass buttons and his hair down to his
+shoulders. 'Your father was a miller,' one fellow shouted from the
+crowd. 'Gag that calf,' cried Taylor and he held up his arms in the
+air. 'Look at these fair hands. No work has ever sullied them.' That
+did him all right.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A quiet, elderly man leaned over the table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Did you notice the flag upon the chairman's table, Captain Rames?&quot; he
+asked. &quot;It was woven out of Ludsey silk fifty years ago. It's the true
+Ludsey blue. My father wove it for Sir William Harris's first
+election, and the other fellows swore they would have it on the
+polling-day. But we carried it about the streets from morning to
+evening, with twelve big fellows to protect it. It was nearly down
+once, I remember. I was a lad at the time--at the corner of Stapley's
+Lane. But we saved it and it was your table-cloth to-night, Captain
+Rames. It brought us victory then. It will again to-morrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The stories were continued. They were often not very pointed; often
+enough the humor was far to seek; but they were alive. They were told
+with infinite enjoyment, and the smallest details were remembered over
+decades. Cynthia began now to listen to them for their own sake; she
+was learning with surprise the value of politics to the lives of men
+in a busy city of the provinces. But the colonel at her elbow was not
+longer to be diverted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think it must have been in Dorsetshire that we met,&quot; he said. &quot;I
+live near to Wareham.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked at him quite steadily.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have never been in Dorsetshire in my life, Colonel Challoner.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yet I associate you with that county,&quot; he persisted. &quot;Now, why should
+I do that, Miss Daventry? You have not been to my house, I know. For
+since my wife died and my son went away, I have not had so many young
+people to stay with me as I should have liked.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">From the moment when Colonel Challoner had claimed her recognition,
+Cynthia had not doubted that she was sitting next to a relation. And
+Colonel Challoner's location of his home in Dorsetshire, near to
+Wareham, had confirmed her belief. She knew quite well how it came
+about that he had seemed to recognize her, that he associated her with
+his own parish. She knew because upon one unforgettable night she had
+crouched in a great chair in a dark room and through the panels of a
+door had heard her father claim her as his daughter. He, too, had
+recognized her as Colonel Challoner now did, and just by the same
+means. For there was a Romney hanging upon the dining-room wall in
+that house near Wareham which might have been a portrait of herself.
+But until this moment she had not guessed what degree of relationship
+bound her to the old man at her side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Now, however, she knew that too. The hesitation, the gentle
+wistfulness with which he had spoken of his son struck home at her.
+She was this man's granddaughter. She was moved by what he had said. A
+big house empty of young people must be a place of melancholy and
+hollow as a shell. Yet she would not reveal herself. She had it fixed
+now as an instinct of her nature that she would never wear the name of
+Challoner, nor admit a link with any of that name.... But she turned
+toward her grandfather with a greater sympathy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have given up your whole life to politics now?&quot; she asked, and a
+wave of pity swept through her. It could not be possible that he
+should win any success in that sphere, and she was young and could
+hardly conceive of life at all without success.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. I left the army twenty-five years ago. Sometimes I think that I
+may have made a mistake,&quot; he answered. &quot;But it is too late for me to
+go back upon a mistake, even were I sure that I had made one. Politics
+is all I have now. I have no longer any family. And I have politics in
+my bones. I do not know what I should do if I lost my seat. I should
+probably die.&quot; He spoke with absolute simplicity, absolute sincerity:
+Cynthia was greatly moved. An old futile man without wife or family in
+a big, empty house, feeding himself from day to day with the
+disappointments of a hopeless ambition--it made for her a dismal
+picture. She contrasted it with the other one before her eyes--Harry
+Rames at the head of the table, confident, comfortable, young as
+politicians go, with the world a smooth sea for his conquering sails;
+and once again an unaccountable resentment against Harry Rames flared
+up within her. Almost she wished that for once he might fail. Almost
+she revealed herself then to Colonel Challoner. But she did not. She
+had painfully learned a great gift--silence.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She knew very well with what relief she would wake on the morrow to
+the recollection that she was still Cynthia Daventry and not Cynthia
+Challoner.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I expect that what I say will sound extravagant to you, Miss
+Daventry,&quot; Colonel Challoner continued. &quot;You at your age could hardly
+understand it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The spell which was upon Cynthia was broken. She looked thoughtfully
+about the table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I should not have understood it an hour ago. I was inclined to think
+it really didn't matter very much in the long run who was in and who
+was out, that the things which wanted doing and which legislation
+could do, would get themselves done sooner or later by one side or the
+other and perhaps by both; and that for the rest the nation went on
+its way, leaving the talk and the honors to the politicians because it
+had no time for either and doing the work itself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Colonel Challoner laughed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's a definite point of view, at all events.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I expect that I was drawing my ideas from another--&quot; she was about to
+say &quot;country,&quot; but checked herself lest she should be asked what
+country and so put Colonel Challoner on the track of her relationship
+to him. She went on hastily: &quot;But since I have been sitting here, I
+have learned how much of color politics can bring into the lives of
+men.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And Colonel Challoner looked at her and cried:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's it, Miss Daventry. Color! That's the great need. That's why
+the quack religions flourish in the back streets. We all need it--all
+except the man there at the head of the table,&quot; and Colonel Challoner
+looked a trifle enviously at Harry Rames. &quot;He has it and to spare.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The door opened by a few inches at this moment and a wrinkled pippin
+of a head was pushed in. A pair of little bright eyes surveyed the
+company and then the door was thrust wide open and M. Poizat stepped
+lightly in.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames rose and shook hands with the little Frenchman. Colonel
+Challoner stroked his white moustache.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You were present to-night?&quot; said Rames. &quot;What a difference, eh?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I was proud,&quot; M. Poizat returned. &quot;But always I waited for some
+little word--some little word which did not come.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;One always forgets an important point and generally the most
+important. It is the experience of all speakers,&quot; said Rames. He
+turned to the table. &quot;I must introduce to you M. Poizat, and if ever
+your voices are hoarse in Ludsey, please ask for Lungatine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames drew a chair to the table, pressed M. Poizat into it, and filled
+for him a glass of champagne. The little man was delighted. He drank
+Captain Rames's health, he bowed to the company; and his hand was
+arrested in mid-air, holding the wine-glass by its stem. Colonel
+Challoner was gazing fixedly across the table at him. A look of
+trouble took all the merriment out of M. Poizat's face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have seen you before, M. Poizat,&quot; said Colonel Challoner.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia began to think that the colonel had a mania for recognizing
+people.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am <i>Mr</i>. Poizat, an Englishman,&quot; the little confectioner answered
+hurriedly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Naturalized,&quot; said the colonel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is true,&quot; said M. Poizat reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If you had only said that last night,&quot; thought Harry Rames. &quot;You
+would have got your advertisement, my friend.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But he said not a word aloud, and M. Poizat continued:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But it was a long time ago. And all the years since I have spent in
+Ludsey.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Colonel Challoner shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It was not in Ludsey that I saw you. For I was never here in my life
+before.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">M. Poizat shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We have sat opposite to one another in a train perhaps. We have run
+against one another in the traffic of a London street.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, it was on some occasion more important. I do not forget a face.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Nor I,&quot; said M. Poizat. &quot;And I have never seen yours, sir, until this
+moment;&quot; and though he spoke with spirit his uneasiness was apparent
+to every one at that table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Colonel Challoner sat back in his chair and let the subject drop. But
+he was not satisfied. He was even annoyed at his failure to identify
+the Frenchman, and he sat relentlessly revolving in his mind the
+changing scenes of his life. Meanwhile the talk drifted back to
+by-gone elections and this or that great night when some famous
+statesman was brought into the town and never allowed to speak one
+audible word. Mr. Arnall mentioned one whose name resounded through
+England.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Next night in Warrington he said that he had been struggling with the
+beasts at Ephesus,&quot; said Mr. Arnall with a chirrup of delight. The old
+Adam was strong in him at this moment and his own solemn exhortations
+to hear all sides clean forgotten. Suddenly Colonel Challoner broke in
+upon him. He leaned across the table and with a smile of triumph
+stared between the candles at M. Poizat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It was in a corridor,&quot; he said, &quot;a vast bare corridor--somewhere--a
+long time ago. You were coming out of a room--wait!--wait!--No, I
+cannot name the place,&quot; and he sank back again disappointed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But M. Poizat's face wore now a sickly pallor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;In no corridor--nowhere,&quot; he stammered and his eyes, urgent with
+appeal, turned toward Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames did his first service for an elector of Ludsey. He glanced
+toward Mr. Benoliel, who rose.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is getting late,&quot; said Benoliel, &quot;and Rames has a busy day in
+front of him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will order your motor-car round to the door,&quot; said Rames. He rang
+the bell and the rest of the company left the table. Diana Royle and
+Cynthia sought their cloaks in the adjoining sitting-room. Harry Rames
+took M. Poizat by the arm and led him to the door.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am very grateful to you,&quot; he said. &quot;Good-night.&quot; And even as M.
+Poizat's foot was over the threshold the voice of Colonel Challoner
+brought him to a halt:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;One moment. I remember now. You come from Alsace, M. Poizat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I come from Provence,&quot; cried the little man, facing about swiftly
+with a passionate, white face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames had begun to think Colonel Challoner rather a bore with
+his incomplete reminiscences. That thought passed from him altogether.
+He had but to look at the two men to know that some queer and
+unexpected moment of drama had sprung from their chance meeting at
+this hotel at Ludsey. They stood facing one another, the little
+Frenchman in the doorway with fear and rage contending in his face,
+his mouth twisted into a snarl, his lips drawn back from his gums like
+an animal, his teeth gleaming; the colonel erect above the table with
+the candle-light shining upward upon a triumphant and menacing face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You were in Metz in '71,&quot; cried Challoner. &quot;So was I. I was a lad at
+the time. I was aide to our attaché. That's where I saw you, M.
+Poizat--in the long corridor of the Arsenal. Yes, you were in Metz in
+'71.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And behind M. Poizat appeared the waiter announcing that Mr.
+Benoliel's motor-car was at the door.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_15" href="#div1Ref_15">THE MAYOR AND THE MAN</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">St. Anne's Hall stands tucked away in a narrow street of Ludsey by the
+spacious square; and from its ancient windows you look out between the
+lozenges of stained glass upon the great church of St. Anne with its
+soaring spire and its wide graveyard. Into this hall the ballot-boxes
+were brought from the polling-booths on the next evening, and at long
+tables in the Council Chamber the voting papers were sorted and
+counted. Harry Rames walked from table to table. He seemed to see
+nothing but crosses against his opponent's name. He did not dare to
+put a question to any of the scrutineers standing behind the sorters.
+The very swiftness with which the votes were counted impressed him
+with a sense of disaster. For the first time he began to ask himself
+how he was to shape his life if to-night he were defeated. Thus an
+hour passed and then the chief constable drew him aside to a bench
+under the musician's gallery at one end of the room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I've been watching the tables, Captain Rames,&quot; he said, &quot;and I think
+you are going to be elected.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You do?&quot; said Rames eagerly. &quot;Yes, and I shall be very glad if you
+are.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you,&quot; exclaimed Rames. He could have wrung off the chief
+constable's hand in the fervor of his gratitude.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, I am not speaking as a politician,&quot; the chief constable returned
+with a smile. &quot;I have the order of my city to look after. That's all I
+am thinking about. If you weren't by any chance to get in, I am afraid
+there would be trouble to-night in Ludsey. And I want you if you are
+returned to get back to your hotel at once. It's important from my
+point of view that you should show up on your balcony as soon as
+possible after the result is declared.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I see,&quot; said Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will take you out the back way through the police station,&quot; the
+chief constable continued, &quot;and there's a lane opposite which will
+lead you straight to your back door. You had better run, I think. For
+your own friends would tear you to pieces to-night without noticing
+they were doing you any harm.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The chief constable suddenly changed his tone. One of the scrutineers
+on the side of Rames's opponent had drawn close to them. The chief
+constable had no intention to allow a suspicion that he favored one
+side more than the other. He raised his voice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have noticed our tapestry, perhaps. It is quite invaluable, I
+believe. We lent it two years ago to the South Kensington Museum.
+There was an American millionaire here the other day who wished to buy
+it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Raines looked across the room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Isn't there some portion of it missing?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. That disappeared in the Commonwealth times. Let us go and look
+at it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames walked at the chief constable's side up the floor of the room
+toward the dais where Mr. Redling the Mayor, with his chain of office
+about his shoulders, sat in his big chair in the centre of the long
+council table. His mace lay upon the table in front of him, and he
+surveyed the busy scene over which he presided with an imperturbable
+gravity. But Mr. Redling was a genial soul with a twinkling eye and a
+red, round face like a crumpled cherub's; and as Harry Rames advanced
+toward the dais, Mr. Redling beckoned to him with a discreet twist of
+the finger of a hand lying idle upon the table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames took a seat beside the Mayor at the long table and again
+words of comfort were poured into his ears in a gentle undertone.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think you are going to do it,&quot; said Mr. Redling, repeating almost
+word for word the utterance of his chief constable. &quot;Of course, I
+couldn't take any part. But you know what I should have been doing if
+I hadn't been Mayor, don't you? But I have asked quietly here and
+there about your chance and I fancy it's all right.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He winked, and his face broke into triumphant smiles. He was a man.
+Then he remembered again that he was a Mayor, and he sat a pillar of
+municipal propriety.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's good of you to say that,&quot; cried Harry Rames in a low voice. &quot;I
+needed to hear it, I can tell you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Redling looked at his face. The three weeks had taken a heavy toll
+of him. He had thinned and sharpened; his eyes were heavy and very
+tired; for the moment his buoyancy had gone.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Mr. Redling. &quot;An election takes a good deal out of one.
+And these two hours are the worst of it when the fight's all over and
+there's nothing to do but wait. Gives you a kind of glimpse into what
+women have to put up with all their lives, eh?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames glanced at the Mayor with interest.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why, I suppose that's true.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Redling nodded his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. It teaches you that sitting with your hands in your lap isn't
+the same as sitting soft, after all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames felt comfort steal in upon him from the neighborhood of
+the little Mayor. Mr. Redling was that rare bird, a strong politician
+without a fad, and, therefore, a veritable haven of refuge to a
+candidate in the cudgelling of an election. On the few afternoons when
+Harry Rames had been able to snatch a half hour of leisure he had been
+wont to run round to the Mayor's house and spend a restful interval
+with one of the Mayor's cigars. Mr. Redling laid his Mayoralty aside
+with the silk hat he invariably wore, and when he took off his chain
+of office he usually took off his coat too. He had had his ups and
+downs, and as he discoursed upon his city in his shirt-sleeves, Harry
+Rames never failed to draw comfort from his talk, so strong a spirit
+of human friendship breathed from him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;They like you here,&quot; continued Mr. Redling; &quot;both sides. Take us for
+all in all we are not violent people. Give us the right sort of man,
+and we'll be sure he won't do us harm, whatever his politics,&quot; and
+then as Mr. Benoliel, who was acting as one of Rames's scrutineers,
+came to him with a doubtful voting paper, he switched off to another
+topic; and it happened quite naturally that he chose the very same
+subject as the chief constable had done.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Have you noticed our tapestry?&quot; he asked. &quot;We are proud of it. An
+American gentleman, a Mr. Cronin, came over here last week with Mr.
+Benoliel to see it. And after he had seen it, he wanted to buy it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, did he?&quot; said Benoliel as he handed the voting paper to the
+Mayor. &quot;But I might have guessed that he would. I brought him over
+from Culver, and we met Mrs. Royle just outside here. She came in with
+us. Mrs. Royle seemed as interested in the tapestry as Cronin
+himself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">While Mr. Redling examined the voting paper, Harry Rames cast an eye
+over the tapestry. The æsthetic qualities formed a quite insignificant
+element in his nature. Of art he thought nothing at all. It noted in
+his mind long hair and an absence of baths--such was his ignorance.
+The only picture-gallery into which he had ever entered was the Royal
+Academy; and the only occasion upon which he had ventured over that
+threshold was the Academy dinner to which he had been invited after
+his return from his Antarctic expedition. He had a primitive
+appreciation of scarlet as a color and he recognized that women upon
+canvas could look beautiful. There for him art ended. So he gazed at
+the tapestry with a lack-lustre eye. There was no vividness of color,
+and the human forms worked upon it had an angularity and a thickness
+of joint which pleased him not at all.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I suppose it's very beautiful,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's unique,&quot; replied Mr. Benoliel; &quot;that's why Cronin wanted it. Let
+a thing be unique, he'll not trouble his head so much about its
+beauty, and I am told he will ask no questions how it comes to be
+offered to him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, he offered us a hundred thousand pounds,&quot; Mr. Redling remarked
+with half a sigh. Ludsey was growing at a pace which made it difficult
+for the borough council to keep up with it. Mr. Redling thought of
+baths and schools and houses. &quot;A hundred thousand pounds--a good deal
+of money for a municipality to refuse. But of course, we did. We
+couldn't let that tapestry go.&quot; He returned to the voting paper and
+gave his decision upon it. Harry Rames drifted down again into the
+body of the hall. He troubled no more about the priceless tapestry
+swinging under the high carved roof in this ancient place. He was a
+man of his own day, absorbed in its doings, and wondering always in a
+great labor of thought how he might make his name familiar in all
+men's mouths before nightfall swept him into the darkness. His
+anxieties were now diminished, his heart beat high. For here were two
+men, both experienced in elections and both convinced that he would
+surely win. So the first small victory, it seemed, was won. He crossed
+to the row of windows and looked down through a lozenge of white in
+the painted pattern into the street below. And having once looked he
+could not again withdraw his eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was a night of January, dreary and loud with a roar of falling
+rain. A light wind carried the rain at a slant so that it shot down
+past the street lamps like slender javelins of steel. And exposed to
+that pitiless assault a silent crowd of men stood packed together in
+the narrow street between St. Anne's Hall and the railings of the
+church. A few, a very few, carried umbrellas over their heads, the
+rest stood with their coat collars turned up about their throats and
+their hands deep in their pockets. No one moved, for there was no room
+to move; and all the faces were uplifted under the brims of their
+soaking hats to the great window beyond the hall whence the result
+should be declared. The patience of the throng, its acquiescence in
+discomfort, as though discomfort were the ordinary condition of its
+life, suddenly caught hold of Harry Rames. He took a step, nay, a
+stride forward. Last night when he had come out of the Exchange and
+the herd of animals had been transfigured into the uplifted faces of
+men, his thought had been:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;This is for me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But now his thoughts changed. The men of Ludsey did not wait in vain
+that night. For Harry Rames the glamour faded off the arena. At the
+very moment when the bars were being withdrawn for him to enter it the
+exultation of battle died out of his heart. He woke to something
+new--the claim of the constituency. The longer he looked, the stronger
+the claim grew, the more loudly the silence of that throng proclaimed
+and shouted it. They stood under the javelins of the rain, the men who
+had voted for him. They emphasized their claim by their extraordinary
+quietude. Almost they menaced.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A queer sight,&quot; said a voice at his elbow.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames turned. It was Mr. Arnall who had interrupted him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I shall not easily forget it,&quot; said Rames, drawing a breath, and then
+with an irritable outburst he said: &quot;They look to Parliament for more
+than parliaments can do, to candidates for more than members can
+achieve. Each election is to open paradise for them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And whose fault is that?&quot; asked Mr. Arnall dryly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames nodded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ours, I suppose,&quot; he said; and behind him in the room there was a
+bustle and a grating of chairs upon the floor. The votes had been
+sorted. The candidates and their friends gathered about the long table
+on the raised dais.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;They are taking yours first,&quot; said Mr. Arnall to Harry. &quot;That's a
+good sign.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The papers cast for Harry Rames were brought to the table in sets of
+fifty. They were placed crosswise, one set on the top of the first,
+and the third on the second, until five hundred had been counted.
+Against that pile of five hundred votes a second rose. Gradually the
+orderly heaps of paper extended along the table's edge in front of the
+Mayor. There were half a dozen now. Rames's agent stood by them like a
+bull-dog on the chain. The half-dozen became ten, eleven, twelve. And
+as the twelfth heap was completed a quick movement ran among all of
+Rames's friends. He had polled now half the electorate of the city.
+One more set of papers and he was in.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was laid next to the others at that moment, and Rames's hands were
+silently grasped and shaken. But the heaping up of the votes went on.
+There were three more piles to be added before the end was reached.
+Eighty-four per cent of the electorate had recorded their votes. Harry
+Rames had won by a majority well on to two thousand. He stood there in
+a buzz of congratulations, with a sudden vacancy of mind and thought.
+He remembered the extraordinary agility with which Mr. Redling whipped
+out of the room, trying to say unconcernedly:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I'll just announce the result at once.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He heard the storm of cheers in the street below. That patient silence
+was broken now in a hurricane of enthusiasm and even through it he
+could distinguish the words of the exultant cry:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Rames is our man!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He saw the Mayor return, much out of breath. He proposed the vote of
+thanks to the returning officers, with the usual eulogy of his
+opponents and depreciation of himself. But even at that moment the
+claim of the constituency would importunately obtrude and find
+acknowledgment in his words.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You look to me very likely for more than I can do,&quot; he said simply.
+&quot;At all events you shall have what I can.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But the most memorable achievement that night was the reply of Mr.
+Redling.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As he rose to his feet to acknowledge the vote of thanks, the man ran
+forward and got a fair start of the Mayor. He cried out, all one
+bubble of delight:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I need hardly say, gentlemen, how utterly I rejoice at--&quot; and then
+the Mayor put on a spurt and caught up the man--&quot;at the admirable
+manner in which this contest has been conducted by both sides.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But the correction deceived no one. Mr. Redling's politics were known,
+and so, in a general splutter of good-humored laughter, the Ludsey
+election came to an end.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Mayor turned from the table wiping his forehead.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I nearly made a bad break there,&quot; he said in a whisper. &quot;They won't
+come at you again, I think. I reckon you have got Ludsey, Captain
+Rames,&quot; and then Rames felt the hand of the chief constable laid upon
+his arm. He was rushed across the Mayor's parlor, down the stairs
+through the police station, where the police at their supper rose and
+gave him a loud cheer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Silence!&quot; cried the chief constable savagely. He opened the street
+door and peeped out.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;All's clear. Run--down that alley opposite. Say something from your
+balcony, never mind what--they won't hear more than two words.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's just all that I want them to hear,&quot; cried Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had foreseen that moment. He ran with one or two of his friends to
+the back door of his hotel. A path was made for them through the
+crowded hall. He came out upon the balcony, and up and down the hill
+as far as his eyes could see the street was thronged. He stretched out
+his hand. He had a second of absolute silence, and in that second his
+voice rang out:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My constituents----&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The roar which answered him showed him that once more his foresight
+had served him well. No other word of his was heard. But any other
+words would have spoiled the two which he had uttered.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_16" href="#div1Ref_16">WORDS OVER THE TELEPHONE</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The next two hours were for Rames of the tissue whence nightmares are
+woven. Rames was conscious that he made speeches and still more
+speeches and yet others on the top of those, until speech-making
+became a pain in the head for which there was no anodyne. He made them
+from windows--one at that very window where Taylor, the lily fingered
+democrat, had by a single sentence won immortality and certain
+defeat--he made them from tables in club-rooms which he no longer
+recognized; where men, packed tight as herrings, screamed
+incoherencies in a blaze of light and the atmosphere of a Turkish
+bath, or standing upon chairs beat him, as he passed beneath them, on
+the top of the head with their hats in the frenzy of their delight.
+For two hours Ludsey went stark mad and Harry Rames had reached
+exhaustion before a gigantic captain of the fire brigade lifted him
+panting and dishevelled out of the throng, and drawing him into a
+small committee-room locked the door against his votaries.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Better wait for a little while here, sir,&quot; he said; and it was one
+o'clock in the morning before he ventured to return to his hotel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">By that time the madness was already past. There was still noise in
+the blazing rooms of the clubs. But the streets were empty and up the
+climbing hill the city was quiet as a house of mutes. A placard in the
+window of the newspaper office recorded the figures of the election,
+and the boarding which protected the shops opposite to his hotel shone
+white in the light of the lamps. But for those two signs, even Rames
+might have found it difficult of belief that so lately this very
+hill had rung with cheers and seethed with a tumultuous populace.
+To-morrow, however, the sirens of the factories would shrill across
+the house-tops at six and the work of a strenuous industrial town
+begin. Ludsey had no time to dally with victories won and triumphs
+which had passed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Nor indeed had Harry Rames. He rang the bell at the door and entered
+the hall quickly. There was something which he should have done before
+now, though only now he remembered it. With a word to the porter, he
+went into the office and switched on the electric light. He crossed to
+the corner where the telephone was fixed and called up the White
+House. A woman's voice, very small and clear, came back to him over
+the lines. He recognized it with a thrill of satisfaction. It was
+Cynthia Daventry's.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, it's you yourself,&quot; he cried eagerly, and he heard Cynthia, at
+the other end of the telephone, laugh with pleasure at his eagerness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; she answered. &quot;I thought perhaps you might ring me up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So she had waited--just that they might talk together for a few
+moments. Harry Rames, however, did not answer her. It seemed to him
+from the intonation of her voice that she had more to say if she would
+only make up her mind to say it. He stood and waited with the receiver
+at his ear, and after a little while Cynthia spoke again upon a lower
+note.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am glad that you did. I should have been disappointed if you
+hadn't.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you,&quot; said Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He spoke very gently. There was no smile of triumph upon his face. It
+had become of vast importance to him within the last two hours to know
+how her thoughts dealt with him; and he was not sure. There was
+friendship between them--yes. But how far on her side did it reach? He
+had no answer to that question.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have heard the result?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. Mr. Benoliel telephoned to me at once from the Mayor's parlor.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I ought to have done that,&quot; said Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, no. You were making speeches,&quot; replied Cynthia with a laugh. She
+was at all events not offended by his omission.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And you are glad that I have won?&quot; he asked. And again she waited a
+while before she answered; and when she did speak it was with that
+little spirit of resentment which Rames had heard before in her voice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well,--since your heart was so much set on winning,--yes, there you
+have your triumph--I am glad that you won.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia meant what she said, but she was reluctant to mean it. She
+spoke, too, under a constraint to speak. She had a picture before her
+eyes of the man at the other end of the line quietly waiting upon her,
+certain perhaps of what she would say. And the picture and the sense
+of compulsion were both an offence to her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Good-night,&quot; she added curtly and with a sharp, quick movement she
+hung up the receiver. The little clang of metal travelled along the
+line to Harry Rames and emphasized her resentment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But he was not disturbed by that. On the whole he looked upon it as a
+favorable sign. So definite a resentment implied that she was
+interested and set a value on their friendship. Rames went upstairs to
+bed, but he was too tired to sleep and his thoughts raced ahead and
+scouted in the future. He had leaped the first obstacle in the race,
+but that once leaped and looked back upon became a tiny thing compared
+with those which lay ahead.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Will she? Will she not?&quot; he asked. All hung upon the answers to those
+questions. He was poor. He must marry. He must marry money and even
+money was not enough. Other qualities were needed to help him to the
+great career. But they were all there, a few miles away, possessed by
+the young mistress of the White House. She had looks and manners and a
+distinction of her own. You could not be in a room with her, however
+crowded, and be long unaware that she was present too. Only--would
+she?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had very little to offer her--beyond this earnest of future success
+which he had won to-night. And six hundred and seventy others would
+have won just the same opportunity before the year was a fortnight
+older. Moreover, Cynthia was romantic and he was not. For all her
+friendliness he was a bitter disappointment to her. He recognized it
+all and began to regret that he had not donned the glittering cloak of
+romance which so often she had held out to him. But his foresight came
+to console him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I could never have lived up to it,&quot; he reflected. &quot;She would have
+found me out. I have been honest with her and she likes honesty.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Certainly there were points in his favor. Rames took heart. She had
+run the gauntlet of the drawing-rooms through a London season. Men had
+gone down before her satin slippers, men ancient and modern. Mothers
+of daughters had frowned upon her, mothers of sons had smiled. Young
+Lord Helmsdale, adored of the ladies, had pursued her, and it was his
+habit to be pursued. Yet she had come out of the throng to
+Warwickshire heart-free. Of that he was sure.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Besides, she had waited up to speak to him. That was something,--not
+very much, perhaps,--but surely something. Also, since he had wished
+to win, she was glad that he had won. Rames's memories took him back
+to the night when they first met at the Admiralty. Not thus had she
+spoken then. She had moved toward him since that night--reluctantly,
+slowly. Yet she had moved.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was still casting up this ledger of his chances when a lonely
+booming sound broke upon the stillness of the night and penetrated
+through the open window like some melancholy siren of the sea. It was
+repeated and repeated, growing louder with each repetition yet hardly
+more articulate, and without any change of intonation. And every now
+and then it was interrupted for a few seconds by a dull crash. Rames
+tried to thrust it from his notice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Will she? Will she not?&quot; he asked himself. But the booming sound
+would not be denied. It was as the wail of some utterly friendless man
+who cared not whether his fellows slept or waked. It was thoroughly
+pitiless. Nearer it came to the hotel, and now wavering, heavy feet
+could be heard to beat an irregular accompaniment. The occasional thud
+was explained. A very drunken man was staggering up the hill and from
+time to time he fell upon the pavement, unconscious that he fell,
+barely aware only that his long-drawn cry had ceased. Rames thought of
+him as a malignant creature determined to inflict torture--until the
+sound at last sifted itself into definite words. &quot;Vote for Harry
+Rames!&quot; the nightfarer cried aloud to a city which had already done
+so; and at times he dropped the Harry and inserted an epithet of color
+common no doubt in his vocabulary. He passed beneath the windows and
+with many a tumble faded into distance, invoking the unresponsive gas
+lamps.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames turned over on his side with relief.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My dear,&quot; he whispered, &quot;take his advice and vote for Harry Rames! I
+shall owe you much, but I'll make it up to you. I'll not ask you till
+I am sure I can. I must risk Helmsdale carrying you off.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">He fell asleep and even the tune the clock chimes in Ludsey church
+played at four o'clock in the morning did not make him stir. But at
+the White House just at that hour Cynthia waked. It was not the clock
+which waked her. It seemed to her that she had heard a step in the
+corridor. She sat up in her bed and in a few seconds was sure of it.
+Some one was moving very stealthily about the house. For a moment her
+old horror gripped her. Here was her father come at last with
+authority to claim her. She sat staring wide-eyed into the darkness,
+flung back to the days when she was a child. Then her reason
+reasserted itself. Her father was dead. The blood flowed again to her
+heart. But the stealthy sound continued. She heard a door gently
+latched. She sprang out of bed, opened her own door, and switched on
+the light. The corridor was empty to the edge of the shadows. She
+peered into them. She saw nothing, and no sound reached her now.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Who is it?&quot; she asked in a loud voice, and no answer came to her. She
+waited in her doorway with a hand to her breast. The plank of a stair
+cracked loudly, close to her; but no footsteps made it crack. She went
+back into her room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Yet she had not been mistaken. Any one in the road that night might
+have seen a light ascending past the windows of the staircase and then
+moving through the upper rooms, until at last in one it remained for a
+long time. The light was carried by Diana Royle. She passed up the
+staircase to an unfurnished room used for the storage of old boxes and
+discarded things. From the corner of this room she rolled out a great
+bale, dusty with years, and tied up like a carpet with an old piece of
+rope. She cut the rope and spread it out upon the floor, cautiously
+and silently. Then lowering her candle she examined it. With a smile
+upon her lips she stood up again. She fastened the bale and dragged it
+back into its corner. The smile did not leave her lips. Chance had led
+her up here some weeks ago. She had discovered the bale and had
+wondered what it was. An old carpet? A disused curtain? Now she knew.
+In an attic of this old house she had discovered the lost strip of the
+Ludsey tapestry.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_17" href="#div1Ref_17">A REFUSAL</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So you have refused young Helmsdale.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Three months had passed since the Ludsey election. The air was warm
+and golden and already the world whispered of summer, yet not too loud
+lest it should seem to boast and so be balked of its desire.
+Parliament had met, London was full, and in the country the foxes and
+the pheasants had leisure to attend to their own affairs. And with the
+rest Cynthia had come to town. She rode on this morning out of the
+park, where the buds were running along the branches of the trees like
+delicate green flames, about eleven o'clock, and turning out of South
+Audley Street into Curzon Street, she saw Mr. Benoliel waiting upon
+the pavement in front of her new house. As she stopped her horse
+before the door he reprimanded her:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Cynthia, you have refused him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia blushed. Then she exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But how in the world could you know! It isn't half an hour since I
+refused him.&quot; Then she bent down over her saddle and gazed at him in
+the fulness of admiration. &quot;But you know everything. It wouldn't be of
+much use trying to keep things from you, would it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel smiled grimly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, that's the way, Cynthia, and no doubt a neater style of doing it
+will come in time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia sat upright, swift as a spring, and remained so, with her nose
+in the air, haughty for five complete seconds. Then curiosity restored
+her to her sex and she swooped again over her saddle.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How did you know?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He borrowed a horse from me this morning,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel--&quot;a good
+horse. He was very particular that it should be a valuable horse. So I
+gathered that he wanted to make on this morning of all mornings a
+specially favorable impression.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's lips twitched.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You lent him a very good horse,&quot; she said. &quot;But the horse didn't tell
+you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's where you are wrong, Cynthia. The horse did,&quot; said Mr.
+Benoliel. &quot;Ten minutes ago, as I was turning out of Grosvenor Square,
+I met my very valuable horse being led by a ragged beggarman whom I
+had never seen in my life before. I asked him what the dickens he was
+doing with it and he explained that as he was standing by the rails in
+Hyde Park a young man rode up to him in a violent rage, dismounted,
+tossed him the reins and a shilling and told him to lead the rotten
+beast back to Grosvenor Square. Just fancy that! My horse! I might
+have lost him altogether.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia tried her best to look indignant at so treacherous a return to
+Mr. Benoliel's generosity, but she could not and she rippled suddenly
+into laughter.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He was horribly angry,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel turned his wrath again upon Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And no wonder!&quot; he said. &quot;Helmsdale's not used to being refused. He
+is young. He is good-looking. He has a social position----&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And he has a profile,&quot; added Cynthia. &quot;Please don't forget that. But
+you can't if you know him, or even if you don't, can you? Have you
+ever fixed your eyes steadily upon him, Mr. Benoliel? Do the next time
+you see him, and within twenty seconds he will show you his profile.
+He will turn his head quite slowly and show it you, just like a man at
+the music-halls disclosing the newest sensation. I couldn't marry a
+profile, even though it was mounted on your horse.&quot; Then she bent down
+to him again coaxing him: &quot;You didn't really want me to marry him, did
+you? You see, I don't love him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel seemed to think this answer insufficient.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Love would come,&quot; he answered.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's what he said,&quot; exclaimed Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And you?&quot; asked Benoliel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia bent her eyes steadily upon him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I answered, 'Lovers would come.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel looked up at her with a wry face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You know too much, my dear,&quot; he said, and Cynthia threw back her
+head, with her face suddenly clouded and sullen.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes,&quot; she cried bitterly. &quot;I have eaten of the tree--and
+lately--very lately.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And at the sight of her distress all Mr. Benoliel's indignation
+vanished.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I know,&quot; he said gently. &quot;That's why I wanted you to marry, Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Is that the remedy?&quot; she asked. And she shook her head slowly. &quot;I am
+frightened of it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She called to her groom, dismounted from her horse and taking Mr.
+Benoliel by the arm cried:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Come in. You haven't seen my house since I bought it. You shall tell
+me what you think of it, now that it's finished.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She ran up the steps and turned to him at the top with a look of
+compunction in her face:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I talk to you of my troubles,&quot; she said. &quot;I have no right to--no,
+neither to you nor to any one. I am ashamed of myself. I have food to
+eat, clothes to wear, money to spend, and friends. Yes, I am very
+fortunate,&quot; and her mind winged back to a dark night on the estancia
+when she had crouched in a big chair, listening to horrors set ready
+for her. &quot;I ought to be grateful,&quot; she cried with a shudder at her
+memories. &quot;Come in!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She led him through the rooms and claimed his enthusiasm for this or
+that rare piece of satin-wood or mahogany. It had been a great joy to
+her in the early days of the year to ransack the dealers' shops and
+grow learned of Hepplewhite and Chippendale. She told Mr. Benoliel
+stories of her researches, seeking to recapture some savor of that
+past pleasure. But her sprightliness became an effort and in her own
+sitting-room she turned abruptly to him:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I have a distaste for it all now,&quot; she said and sat down in a
+chair. &quot;I have no longer any pride in the house at all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel stood over her and nodded his head in sympathy. She was
+distressed. She had a look of discomfort.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I understand that, Cynthia,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She took off her hard hat. It pressed upon her temples and made her
+head throb.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How much do you know?&quot; she asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That Mrs. Royle is leaving you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia moodily. &quot;We have agreed to separate. Do you know
+anything more?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. The missing panel of tapestry hangs again in Ludsey Town Hall.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. It was lying in a lumber-room under the roof of my house in
+Warwickshire. How long it had been lying there, or how it came there,
+I can't discover. Diana ran across it by accident. It was tied up in a
+bale like an old carpet. She didn't think it of any value--until she
+went one morning to the Town Hall with an American millionaire who was
+anxious to see the tapestry and buy it if he could.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. I took Cronin there myself. He was staying with me and I drove
+him into Ludsey and met Mrs. Royle in the street. That was the day
+before the election. We all three went into the Town Hall together. I
+remember Mrs. Royle saying that she had never been in the building
+before. I pointed out the tapestry and explained that a wide strip of
+it was missing. I think I suggested that it would one day be turned
+out of some old cupboard.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia nodded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That no doubt helped her to the truth. Anyway, she tried to persuade
+me to sell it. She merely told me that it was valuable and that I
+could get two thousand pounds for it. I didn't connect it with the
+Ludsey tapestry. I thought that it might be worth while to bring it up
+to this house; and I refused to sell. Diana urged me again, however,
+and but that I don't like selling things, I would have let her sell
+it, just because she was getting tiresome about it. Then Hartmann, the
+Bond Street dealer, called on me a month ago and told me what the
+strip was.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why did he call?&quot; asked Benoliel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He was in the deal with another man. Both apparently were selling to
+Mr. Cronin, and they quarrelled over the division of the profits. So
+Hartmann came to me in revenge. He told me that Diana was to get eight
+thousand pounds if she could persuade me to sell and that they meant
+to sell the tapestry afterward to Mr. Cronin for twenty-five thousand
+pounds. It's not a pretty story, is it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; said Benoliel. &quot;So you gave it back to Ludsey?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Does Mrs. Royle know that you are aware of her share in the
+transaction?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. We haven't ever talked of it, but she knows and proposed of her
+own accord that we should separate. We couldn't go on living together,
+could we? It would be too uncomfortable. I couldn't trust her.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;When does she go?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;In a week or two, now,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;She has taken a little house
+on the north side of the park. Of course, for my father's sake&quot;--thus
+she always spoke of Mr. Daventry--&quot;I am looking after her;&quot; and she
+suddenly struck her hands together. &quot;Oh, but it's all rather sordid,
+isn't it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel. He was troubled and perplexed. &quot;And what are
+you going to do?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I must engage a companion.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That doesn't sound very satisfactory.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What else can I do?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Marry!&quot; said Mr. Benoliel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia rose petulantly to her feet.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; she cried. &quot;That I won't do.&quot; She turned away and looked out
+into the street, a storm of rebellion at her heart. Why should every
+one want to marry her off? Even her friend, her adviser, who should
+have stood by her, had turned, it seemed, against her. She came back
+to Mr. Benoliel, but he stood with so distressful a countenance that
+her indignation died away, and with a pretty compunction she made her
+apology:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I know that you are thinking of me. I am sorry if I seemed to forget
+it. Forgive me! But you can't really want me to marry just so that I
+may not be alone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My dear,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel gently, &quot;It's a very good reason.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia shook her head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;For a girl?--I am little more. No. I may come to that belief in the
+end when I am older. But not yet. I must have a better reason now.
+There are too many years ahead of me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel smiled, with a little wistfulness in the smile.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Dreams, Cynthia, dreams,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am losing them,&quot; she returned, and with a smile too, the smile of
+humor, not of amusement. &quot;I am making haste to lose them against my
+will. But this one I'll keep for still a little while. I'll still
+dream that while I am young I must have a better reason for marriage
+than the fear of being alone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well, Cynthia,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel disconsolately. &quot;I'll hope you
+are right.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He left the house and Cynthia sat down for a long time in her room.
+She had run to the extreme of melancholy with the determination of
+youth to make the very worst or best of life's daily provision. She
+had never felt so keenly the vanity of her illusions. She had seldom
+felt so lonely, she was sure. Even Harry Rames nowadays left her
+severely to herself. Why didn't he come to see her? She asked the
+question with indignation. She had never seen him since the
+supper-party at his hotel in Ludsey on the night before the poll. She
+had never heard his voice since he had spoken to her over the
+telephone just after his election. Very likely he had grown tired of
+her appeals to him to be different from what he was. No doubt she was
+a bore. Sadly Cynthia admitted it. Yes, she was a bore, and Diana
+Royle was treacherous, and Harry Rames never came to see her, and,
+take it all in all, it was a gray and dismal world.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_18" href="#div1Ref_18">A MAIDEN SPEECH</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Yet to her astonishment Harry Rames came that very week on the Friday
+afternoon. Cynthia received him with an elaborate dignity. There was
+no acidity in her welcome, neither was there any joy. She seemed
+intensely unaware that she had not seen him for three months. Her nose
+was perhaps a trifle too high in the air, but she was not conscious of
+it. On the whole she was greatly pleased with her demeanor. She was
+behaving as a woman of the world to whom one acquaintance, more or
+less, is a matter of complete indifference. She offered him tea, and
+seating herself upon a sofa in front of the table poured it out. Harry
+Rames took his cup with humility. Cynthia was quick to notice it, no
+less quick to be gratified by his exhibition of a quality which
+hitherto he had lacked. He was abashed. He was ashamed. He was uneasy.
+No doubt he had come expecting the flattery of questions. Her
+unconsciousness of the length of his absence put him at a loss. When
+he spoke, it was with difficulty. And then, suddenly, Cynthia saw his
+lips twitching at the corners. He was not abashed at all. He was
+simply trying not to laugh. Cynthia grew hot. Alas! her great dignity
+had barely sustained her in contentment for five minutes! The old
+indignation shone in her eyes. The indifferent great lady vanished.
+Almost before she was aware of it she was talking in broken, resentful
+sentences--as any other ordinary girl might have done who had been
+wounded and whose wound had betrayed her into speech.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;People who insist on making friends with other people who didn't at
+the beginning want to be friends at all, haven't the right afterward
+to drop being friends calmly, without a word of explanation. Of
+course, if people are bored--but even then they should have guessed
+they were going to be bored before they perhaps made other people
+count a little--oh, not so much, of course, but just a little--on
+their friendship. No, I object to that. It's hateful--and then you
+saunter in as if--No.&quot; Cynthia, oppressed with a sense of utter
+isolation in a most neglectful world, which probably hated her when it
+stopped to think of her at all, was perilously near to tears. She took
+refuge in sarcasm of a crude kind:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You probably wouldn't understand that suddenly to stay away after you
+have been friendly is rather humiliating to a girl. But you will take
+it from me, won't you, that it is so?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She spoke as one giving a kindly lesson in tact to a boorish person.
+But her lips shook. Harry Rames rose from his chair and crossing the
+room took up the <i>Times</i>
+which lay still neatly folded in its original
+square upon a table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have not opened your paper to-day,&quot; he said; and once more he saw
+Cynthia flinch as though he had struck her a blow--flinch and sit
+dumb, with her great eyes full of pain.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, please don't make any mistake,&quot; he said quickly, and with the
+newspaper in his hand he came back to her side. &quot;I wasn't taking what
+you said carelessly. But if you had read your <i>Times</i>
+to-day you would
+have understood, I think, why I have stayed away till now. You might,
+perhaps, have guessed why I have come this afternoon.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia took the newspaper from him and unfolded it, with her eyes
+resting in doubt upon his. Then comprehension came to her. She turned
+the pages quickly and stopped at one particular sheet of closely
+printed columns. &quot;Oh,&quot; she cried, &quot;you have made your maiden speech.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, last night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In a second her resentment was forgotten. She was all smiles. She
+reached out an eager hand to him. &quot;It was successful? But why do I
+ask? I have watched the newspapers ever since the House met. I thought
+you were never going to speak.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I always meant to hold back at the beginning,&quot; said the wise Harry
+Rames. &quot;There were new men tumbling over one another to speak on the
+address; I let them get that start of me without any fear. I wanted to
+learn the way of speaking which carries you home in the House of
+Commons.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia laughed and made room for him on the sofa at her side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, there I recognize you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Besides,&quot; Rames continued, &quot;the address fights the election over
+again, sums it up, and parades its consequences--consequences already
+known to all. It's very difficult to make any real mark in the debate
+on the address. So while the other men talked I sat quiet. Night after
+night through the address, through the two months which followed it, I
+sat in the House, listening and watching. And I learned my lesson.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes?&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I learned that the House scoffs at oratory and has no use for
+perorations; that it won't listen to leading articles; that it won't
+tolerate conceit, except in the biggest men, and hates it in them;
+that it is conscious of dignity and requires the same consciousness in
+the members who address it. It requires too that the man who
+intervenes in a debate should contribute something out of himself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Does it always get that?&quot; asked Cynthia in bewilderment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, indeed. But, on the other hand, it goes out into the lobby, or it
+talks. Smale's a wise man. He told me once that hardly ever did a
+Parliament produce more than three new men. Just think of it! For five
+or six years, for six or eight or ten months in each of those years,
+there's one perpetual flow of talk during eight hours of the day in
+that Chamber; and yet out of all that sludge of talk only three men
+emerge of any account. I want to be one of the three men in this
+Parliament. Otherwise you are right and I am wrong. I have mischosen
+my career. So I sat quiet and learned my lesson.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Until last night,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, my opportunity came.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;With a subject on which you could contribute?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, on which I thought I could,&quot; said Rames; and once again Cynthia
+wondered at the patience with which he had sat night after night
+awaiting his moment, and yet counting calmly as among the
+possibilities of failure his own incompetence. &quot;It was Asiatic
+immigration.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia made a grimace.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Sounds dull?&quot; asked Rames. &quot;Very likely. But it's an important
+question for us and one that's going to be still more important in the
+future. You see, as a power, we are in a queer position. We are at
+once the white people resisting the Asiatic immigrant, and the Asiatic
+immigrant wanting the outlet of immigration--but I won't make my
+speech over again to you. I raised the question myself on the colonial
+vote, and here is what I said,&quot;--he took the newspaper from her hands,
+folded it, and gave it back to her. Then he sat quietly by her side
+while she read the speech through. She appreciated the labor and
+thought which had gone to its making; the half column which the <i>Times</i>
+gave to reporting it enabled her to realize that it had been
+delivered with a vivid economy of phrase which gave his meaning aptly
+and never frittered it away. If only the trouble had been taken and
+the speech delivered for the sake of the question! The question was a
+big one. Cynthia understood that through the spectacles of Harry
+Rames's speech.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You made a great success?&quot; she asked turning toward him. She noticed
+that he was sitting very still beside her, as though he set great
+store upon her judgment. And in a voice of greater warmth she said:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But of course you did.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Again Rames took the newspaper and again he folded it. He pointed to
+the first leader, from which his name stood out in bigger type than
+the rest of the text.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It doesn't so very often happen that the <i>Times</i>
+takes the subject of
+its chief leading article from a man's first speech in the House of
+Commons.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then he folded the paper again at the parliamentary report and pointed
+to a paragraph here and there. &quot;That's what the leader of the
+opposition said. Here's the reference the colonial minister made when
+he wound up the debate. You see, both dealt with my speech.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There was a note of quiet elation in Harry Rames's voice. He had taken
+another step along the chosen path. He had passed through another of
+the ordeals.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia did not answer. She sat with the newspaper on her knees,
+gazing forward with perplexed eyes. She looked almost disheartened.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames noticed the look and smiled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I know what's troubling you, Miss Daventry. You are wondering whether
+it isn't, after all, the horrible truth that a desire to get on and
+excel can achieve quite as much, and be quite as useful to the world,
+as enthusiasm for a cause, the pure, genuine enthusiasm to make the
+world better.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia turned to him with a start.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I was wondering just in that way.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, I'll answer you,&quot; said Rames firmly. &quot;The desire to get on
+achieves more and better things than enthusiasm for an idea.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I can't believe it,&quot; cried Cynthia in revolt.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Think it over,&quot; continued Rames. &quot;Enthusiasm for cause blinds you to
+the harm, the injustice which you may do in furthering your cause. The
+desire to get on makes you appreciate the cause, and weigh it, yes,
+but it makes you weigh also the methods of advance.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, no,&quot; cried Cynthia. &quot;You push a garden roller over all my frail
+illusions. Some day, I think, you'll pay;&quot; and she turned suddenly
+toward him. &quot;Yes, I'm afraid you'll pay.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She glanced down at the paper and suddenly swept it off her knees. His
+were ignoble views; she was sure of it. But none the less he was her
+friend, and she took refuge from his views, as was her wont, in her
+friendship. After all, he had come hot from his little triumph to tell
+her of it. She recognized that she was making him an ungenerous
+return.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Tell me what you felt when you got up to speak! Were you nervous?&quot;
+she asked, and Rames relaxed from his attitude of vigilance and leaned
+back with a laugh.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I should have run away if I could,&quot; he said. &quot;But I couldn't. I had
+taken the trouble to make flight impossible. The House goes into
+Committee over the estimates. I had asked Smale to speak to the
+Chairman of Committees. He had done so. An opportunity had been made
+for me. I had to make the best of it I could.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Tell me,&quot; Cynthia insisted; and as more than once he had done before,
+having lost ground in her thoughts, he marched forward and
+unconsciously regained it. For he drew her with humor and a vivid
+truth the picture of a man in one of the ordeals of his life. He
+neither posed as the triumphant hero for whom there are no
+difficulties, nor did he exaggerate his terrors or apprehensions so
+that his ultimate success might glow the brighter. He was true to
+himself, as he had always striven to be with Cynthia. The labor of
+forethought, the stress of fear, the strain upon the nerves, and the
+tiny victory won as the consequence were set before her in their due
+proportions. He ceased to be a thing of cold calculations and
+inevitable triumphs. He became a man, stiffening his knees against
+tremors and alarms.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had walked down to the House early on that Thursday. For his speech
+had been thought out, and there was nothing more for him to do, and
+now he must keep moving. He went down onto the broad terrace over the
+Thames, and there, during the hour of questions which precedes debate,
+in a cold wind he wandered miserable. One tall and burly policeman was
+the calm guardian of that deserted place. Harry Rames walked from the
+Speaker's house to the House of Lords and back again, trying to repeat
+over to himself the argument of his speech. But the policeman loomed
+too large between him and it. Rames detected something supercilious in
+his imperturbability. No doubt he knew that Rames that day was going
+to make his maiden speech. He must have seen so many pace this terrace
+during the hour of questions with the same apprehensions. The signs
+would be visible.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames turned his back upon the policeman and leaned on the parapet.
+But the speech would not come. He had left the opening sentences to
+the moment when he should be upon his legs. For he must link what he
+had to say onto what already had been said, lest he should lose
+altogether the effect of spontaneity. The rest he had prepared and
+rehearsed, and rehearsed again, with the intention to know it so well
+that he should be free to twist into its scheme the speeches made
+immediately before. But now that he tried to say it over on the
+terrace it lost altogether its continuity. The argument halted; the
+chosen words failed him; he stumbled from unconnected epigram to
+inappropriate metaphor; he clung to half-remembered phrases, and with
+a sinking heart repeated them, and repeated them--and repeated them.
+He shut his eyes. The great effort was going to be just a failure of
+fine talk--the mere scrap-heap of a speech.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He looked down at the brown water, followed it eastward below the
+bridge; and then his eyes were caught by a small torpedo-boat lying
+opposite at a mooring in front of St. Thomas's Hospital. And the
+aspect of this familiar thing smote him down to the depths of
+abasement. But for presumption he might now be in command of a great
+battle-ship doing the things he had been trained to do, and doing them
+with confidence. And his thoughts swept him away to Spithead; and the
+vision of a great, dark battle-ship, sitting steadily in a tumbled sea
+between Southsea and the Isle of Wight, clear of the Solent fairway,
+and west of the checkered forts, rose up and drew him for a moment as
+with chains. He hated his ambitions; he thought of this dreadful hour
+to which they had lured him. He saw the day pass and the evening come
+up out of the sea and the lights begin to glow upon the foreshore, a
+cluster at Southsea pier, a little chain running up the hill of Union
+Street, at Ryde, and close down by the water's edge tiny lights in
+cottages and houses like glow-worms in a forest.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Then another step sounded on the pavement and he turned away from his
+vision. After all he might be laughing at all these fears in an hour's
+time, he took the courage to reflect; and he went up the stairs and
+across the lobby into the Chamber itself. He looked for a seat on the
+second bench below the gangway, but the House was full.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Colonel Challoner, again passed over in the choice of
+under-secretaries, looked up at him from the corner seat, and noticed
+the blue-book and a volume of Hansard under his arm.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Are you going to speak?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If I can get called,&quot; said Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner made room for him at his side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I mean to say a word or two myself,&quot; he said, &quot;but we shall probably
+neither of us get a chance. Those front-bench men think it beneath
+their dignity to take less than an hour.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Certainly, so far as the first speech was concerned, Colonel Challoner
+was right. It was delivered from the opposition bench by an
+ex-minister, William Kenway, a man of a kindly and generous
+disposition who yet managed by some perversity of tact to rasp the
+temper of the House from wall to wall. For a full hour he stood there
+now, saying the wrong thing with determination, giving little lessons
+with the air of a school-master, irritating by a certain priggishness
+his friends behind him as well as his opponents in front.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames sat and listened. He realized that the very opportunity which he
+wanted was being given to him. Kenway, with a white paper in his hand,
+came to the problem of Asiatic immigration. Rames was no longer trying
+to remember the consecution of his speech. He sat waiting for the long
+speech to end, making a note or two, grasping at a beginning for his
+speech, and clinging firmly to it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When Kenway sat down, he found himself standing upon his legs. He was
+aware at once that some one was standing beside him, Colonel
+Challoner. Both men had risen. Almost he resumed his seat, and then he
+heard his name called by the chairman, and from a very long way off an
+encouraging cheer reached his ears.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was conscious of the lack of a table in front of him or the barrier
+of a platform--something on which he could rest a hand. He felt
+strangely defenceless without it. He faltered through his opening
+sentences in a voice which sounded to his ears weak and thin as a
+ghost's. He saw a member take off his hat on the opposite benches,
+rise, and make his way out; and at once he was certain that he was
+making a dismal failure. Suddenly he remembered one member who had
+risen to speak, had been called upon and had sunk back in his seat
+without uttering more than a few unintelligible words. Was his to be
+the same fate, he asked himself? And asking himself he lost the thread
+of what he was saying and with a gasp retrieved it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It seemed to me,&quot; he said in describing the scene to Cynthia, &quot;that I
+stood there dumb and helpless for twenty seconds. As a matter of fact,
+the interval was so short that not even my neighbors noticed it. I
+suppose that I only paused for the fraction of a second, really.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia, and the trifle remained in her mind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was speaking, too, with a haze before his eyes and his hands
+clutching at the edges of his coat. But he went on, and then quite
+suddenly the haze thinned so that he saw the House and he heard his
+voice ringing out clear and firm, not loud nor arrogant, filling the
+Chamber and with just that note of deference which he had planned to
+strike and had struck because the deference was sincere. He turned in
+his place. He was no longer conscious of the need of a table in front
+of him; he looked down the House toward the clock above the entrance
+door, and he saw that the bar was thronged with members. Curiosity, no
+doubt, had brought them in from the library and the smoking-room and
+the lobby when his name went up on the tape--he had, after all, a
+reputation. He, the least romantic of men, had some aura of romance
+about him in that assembly; enough at all events to invite a momentary
+interest. But they stayed, and as he spoke in a voice that went
+steadily forward with the rhythm of marching men, he saw now one, now
+another come out from the throng at the bar and slip into a seat. With
+a throb of joy he realized that he was not failing, that now he was
+not going to fail. The House had filled since he had risen and on all
+the benches there was a great quiet. He turned toward the Speaker's
+chair. The space at the sides of it was crowded too. He saw more than
+one cabinet-minister standing. Above, behind the grille, he saw the
+big hats and shadowy forms of the ladies in the gallery, and here and
+there the gleam of an ermine stole against the light behind them. That
+happened to him again which had happened in the Corn Exchange at
+Ludsey. He turned over the consecutions of his argument like the pages
+of a printed book. He was master of himself. He worked in his
+predecessor's points and replied to them with force and without
+offence because they were just the points he had foreseen. He provoked
+interruptions from his opponents; he had foreseen them and was ready,
+and the cheers broke out from the benches about him and behind him. He
+spoke for just twenty minutes. The applause, generous and friendly,
+came from both sides of the House when he resumed his seat. The
+Prime-Minister leaned across the gangway and shook him by the hand.
+And as for the great battle-ship at Spithead, anybody could have it as
+a gift.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. So the third step
+of the great career had been taken. He had been chosen candidate, he
+had been elected member, he had made something of a small triumph out
+of his maiden speech. Now he would wait without any hurry. He would
+make one speech more later on in the session, perhaps two--not more
+than two, certainly. And next session he would plunge boldly and take
+up his part in the impromptu debating on the Committee stages of
+Bills. In that work lay the real test of parliamentary capacity.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus he planned, and content with his plan he opened his eyes again.
+At once he was made uneasy. He met the eyes of a small, white-haired
+man with a deeply lined, brown face who was watching him fixedly from
+the benches opposite. This was Albert Coulter, a man of many
+expeditions in untravelled countries, when there were countries still
+untravelled, whose name had become a signal for dark whispers. A
+callous selfishness, when selfishness might mean the life or health of
+his companions, and a relentless severity with his natives, was
+rightly or wrongly imputed. The survivors of his expeditions came back
+with queer stories. But he had never failed until the moment, when at
+the age of fifty and with the looks of seventy, he had entered the
+House of Commons. There, an interesting yet ineffective figure, he sat
+day after day, solitary, disliked, with brooding eyes under a bristle
+of gray eyebrows which seemed to be haunted with sinister memories of
+deep tropical forests and days long past. His eyes rested upon Harry
+Rames now, not enviously, not encouragingly, but without expression,
+almost indeed like the eyes of a dead man. Their fixed gaze chilled
+the blood of Harry Rames and all his satisfaction was marred. He had
+to move from his place and beyond the reach of those brooding eyes
+before he shook the impression off. And even now so distinct was it in
+his memories that he omitted it altogether and deliberately from the
+story he told that afternoon to Cynthia Daventry. He related in its
+place another incident which had happened later in the evening.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We had a division,&quot; he said. &quot;I was walking through the lobby and
+just at the turnstiles where the clerks tick off our names, I found
+Henry Smale in front of me. The R's and the S's go through the same
+turnstile. He turned round as I passed through behind him, and said to
+me in a low voice, 'You have the ear of the House now. Keep your eye
+on the treasury bench.' That from Smale, who was dissuading me to
+enter Parliament, means a good deal.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames turned and looked at Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There was a smile upon her face rather wistful, rather ironic.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So you have turnstiles in your House of Commons,&quot; she said slowly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No. Did I say turnstiles?&quot; he asked. &quot;There's no actual barrier which
+revolves. But there's only room for one at a time to pass between the
+desks. The clerks stand at the desks and register your votes for
+publication. Otherwise where would party government be?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You mean if the votes weren't published men would vote according to
+their convictions?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames nodded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But it's a superficial view,&quot; he said. &quot;You have got to take the sum
+of your policy. As a whole, is it better than the other fellow's?
+That's what you have to ask yourself when you are going to register a
+vote upon some particular point which may help to turn your government
+out and let the other fellows in.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I see that,&quot; said Cynthia; and once more her eyes fell upon the <i>Times</i>
+and she was suddenly conscious of a queer pride. Others to-day
+were aware of the success which Harry Rames had made; probably she
+alone was aware of the thought, and the apprehension and the
+tribulation of soul which had gone to the making of the success. To
+the others he would just be one of the inevitably successful--what
+indeed she had herself been wont to think him. To-day, however, he was
+to her human as he had never been. He had shown himself to her,
+bleating with fear like an ordinary man at the approach of the fateful
+moment which was to put him to the test. He had drawn the picture with
+a sense of humor, but he had not blurred it. Would he have drawn it
+for any one else, she asked herself? She turned impulsively toward
+him:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wanted you to come to me this week,&quot; she said impulsively. &quot;And I
+thank you very much for telling me not merely that you succeeded, but
+how near you were to breaking down. But,&quot; and she hesitated for a few
+moments, &quot;I should have been still more grateful if you had come to me
+the day before you made your speech.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I almost did,&quot; said Harry Rames.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_19" href="#div1Ref_19">AND A PROPOSAL</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia smiled, but she did not believe.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think,&quot; she said, &quot;that this is the very first time you have gone
+beyond the truth to say a pleasant thing to me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is the truth,&quot; he insisted. &quot;I almost did more than come to you. I
+almost asked you to let me inflict my speech on you before I made it
+in the House.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, I wish you had!&quot; cried Cynthia. &quot;It would have made a difference
+to me this last week--a great difference.&quot; Then she turned swiftly
+toward Harry Rames with a glance of distrust. &quot;Why didn't you come
+then?&quot; she asked coldly. &quot;There was nothing to hinder you. You knew
+that you would be very welcome. I should like to have known beforehand
+what you were going to say;&quot; and once more a gentle wistfulness crept
+into her voice. &quot;I should have liked also to have heard you in the
+House. I should have liked, in a word--not to have been shut out.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You weren't shut out,&quot; Harry Rames exclaimed. &quot;You mustn't fancy
+that! It's not true. If I did not come, it was really because I had
+you in my thoughts. Yes. I stayed away deliberately because of a
+saying of Smale's which I know to be true, which I quoted to you at
+Ludsey.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The distrust grew stronger in Cynthia's mind. What had Smale to do
+with the matter? Her face hardened. Harry Rames had, till this moment,
+at all events, been honest, had always stood apart in her eyes by
+reason of his honesty. Must she strip him now of that quality even as
+she had to do of the other, the imagined ones?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What saying?&quot; she asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That many a man may cut a great figure upon the platforms who will
+never get the ear of the House of Commons. I wanted to be sure that I
+was not one of those--before I came to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A particular significance in the intonation of the words warned
+her--and then troubled her. She looked at him swiftly, and as swiftly
+looked away. The blood mounted into her face and flushed her throat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wanted to be sure that I should come not quite empty-handed,&quot; he
+continued.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia made no pretence to misunderstand him, and no answer. All was
+explained to her now: why he had stayed away, why he now returned--all
+those particulars which he had told her she might have guessed, and
+not one of which had to this moment entered her head. She had never
+stepped beyond the border-line of friendship in her thoughts of Harry
+Rames--never once. She was startled now that she was asked to. She
+needed time to adjust herself to the new point of view. He had been
+honest with her, after all. That was her first instinctive
+recollection.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So I am here now to ask you to marry me,&quot; he continued. He spoke very
+quietly and simply. He did not simulate any passion, and again in her
+heart comparing him with that other wooer in the Row, she thanked him
+for his honesty.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Still she made no answer, but calmness had returned to her. She sat
+looking out of the window, straight ahead of her, with her chin
+propped in the palm of her hand. She was quite still, and the
+stillness of her attitude was no greater than the stillness of her
+mind. There was no throb of joy at her heart. But Harry Rames had been
+honest with her, and she had been taught not to expect so very much.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think you know whom you will be marrying,&quot; he resumed. &quot;I have
+tried to make what I know about myself clear to you as well as to me.
+You once agreed that I left you no illusions about me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. On the platform at the Corn Exchange in Ludsey,&quot; Cynthia
+replied. &quot;I remember quite well. I remember your answer too: That you
+did not mean to.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Harry Rames. &quot;That was my answer.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia paused for a few seconds. Then in her turn she began to
+question him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So even then you were thinking that if you succeeded in
+Parliament--this afternoon would come?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Perhaps even before then?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, even before then.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia nodded her head. With a smile in which there was irony and a
+little of her old resentment, she remarked:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, you have always looked ahead.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry replied simply and gravely:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Always.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She thanked him because he was so perfectly honest with her. He
+admitted--for his words were no less than such an admission--that he
+had deliberately thought of her because she had money. On the other
+hand, it was true that he had stood by and left the opportunity open
+for any one to snatch until he could himself bring something into the
+partnership. That weighed with her in his favor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Will you tell me when you first began to think of me in this way?&quot;
+she asked with an earnestness which to Harry Rames appeared quite
+singular. To his direct mind the one question which needed answering
+was whether she meant to marry him or no.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Does the exact date matter?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very much.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rebellion again broke out in Cynthia. &quot;I believe it is quite a usual
+question for maidens to ask on these occasions. But no doubt I ought
+to have asked it with a deeper bashfulness.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry reflected. Here was one of the nice subtleties of the feminine
+mind which somehow he must satisfy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It was after I had driven out once or twice from Ludsey to see you.
+That is as near as I can put it. It was after I had got to know you a
+little.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;As soon, in a word, as you concluded that I would suit the place.&quot;
+Though the sentence was phrased still in the ironical form, the irony
+had suddenly gone from her voice. She was so relieved that a smile
+trembled about her lips. Her next words gave the reason of her relief.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So really and truly you want me personally--as well.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The question would have sounded vague to a stranger, but these two
+understood that it was her fortune which she omitted to name. Cynthia
+knew, as she could not but know, that her wealth had first set his
+thoughts running toward her. But it was some personal quality which in
+the end had decided him to ask for her. He must have money--yes, but
+other help than money as well. It was a satisfaction to her pride that
+he found it in her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; he returned. &quot;A wife can do so much for a man in politics if
+she is the right wife. I should be very glad if you would marry me,&quot;
+Rames resumed. &quot;I think that we should get along together very well,
+and together we might do important things.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Be important things,&quot; Cynthia corrected.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames smiled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's an old quarrel of ours, Cynthia. I mean 'do' this time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked at him quickly. She was in the mood to find in that
+hope the strongest of appeals.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You really think so?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I do. I should owe so very much to you. I should be conscious of my
+debt. I should try with all my strength to pay it back.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia gave him her face frankly now. A smile of confidence quite lit
+it up.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have no doubt of that,&quot; she said; and then the smile faded, and
+there came a look of longing.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I would rather, of course, that it were work for love of me, than
+work to repay me. There's a difference, isn't there? But I suppose one
+can't have everything, and--perhaps--I might be content to help you
+on.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She fell again to a wistful silence, pursuing the vision of a
+happiness which might have been down an avenue of bright imagined
+years. The happiness did exist. She had seen the evidences of it often
+enough. All men were not <i>tant soit peu cochons</i>, as she had once
+heard an unhappy French lady describe them, nor were all women
+neurotic. She had heard of lovers who felt that they had been waiting
+for one another since the beginning of the world. But it seemed that
+such happiness was for others, not for her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Tell me!&quot; she said. &quot;When you were making your speech, after the
+agitation had passed and when you were master of yourself, you looked
+up to the ladies' gallery, you said, and noticed the women behind the
+grille?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well--it is a little difficult to ask the question--But&quot;--she stopped
+for a moment or two, and then went on with an appealing timidity,
+while the color once more mounted into her face--&quot;but I suppose that
+then--when you knew you were making a success--it never came into your
+mind that you would have liked to have got me up there in the gallery
+while you were speaking?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The temptation to lie was strong upon Harry Rames now. The very
+timidity of her appeal moved him. It taught him that the truth would
+hurt her much more than he had ever dreamed. He hesitated. For the
+first time in her company he was at a loss.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The truth, please,&quot; she pleaded earnestly. &quot;You said that your mind
+was free, that you could stand outside yourself and look on at what
+you were doing, as artists do. It never once occurred to you that you
+wanted me up there in the ladies' gallery, too, at the moment of your
+success, to witness it--to--yes, to share it with you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The word was out at last--the word which she had been striving with
+her modesty to reach.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Be frank, please,&quot; she prayed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames was at a loss how to wrap the brutal truth up so that it
+should not hurt overmuch. He had no other intention at this moment. He
+was for once not considering what effect his answer would have upon
+his own prospects and future.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You were in my thoughts,&quot; he said. &quot;That's true. For I was thinking
+that now I could come to you. But, yes, I wanted to be sure of myself
+first.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia slowly, and with humility she analyzed the meaning
+of his words. &quot;You never thought of me as a kind of inspiration to an
+even greater success in the future if you succeeded now, or as a kind
+of consolation if you failed. It may be vanity to say so, but I think
+that is what a woman in whom you were interested, and who was
+interested in you, would have liked you to have thought. I was, after
+all, shut out, wasn't I? I was to hear of the achievement after it was
+done and over, and I was neither to share the preliminary fears, nor
+feel the revulsion when the triumph came.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, but look at it from my point of view. There are many who want to
+marry you--men with something to offer. It wouldn't have been fair if
+I didn't bring something in my basket too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Fair!&quot; cried Cynthia scornfully. &quot;Oh, I know, that's the point of
+view of the man--at least,&quot; and as she realized that she had been
+unjust, her face dimpled to smiles, &quot;of the men one rather likes.&quot; For
+it occurred to her that Lord Helmsdale would have been troubled by no
+such scruples.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; she said. &quot;You wouldn't have borrowed another man's thoroughbred
+so that you might cut a dashing figure while you proposed.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames had no idea of what she meant, and he behaved as he usually did
+when unintelligible things were said to him by women. He asked for no
+explanations and just took no notice of Cynthia's words. He sat
+quietly at her side and waited.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The clock struck the hour. He put his hand into his pocket, and at the
+movement Cynthia started.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There is no hurry,&quot; said Harry Rames. &quot;I was only getting out my
+cigarette case. May I smoke?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course,&quot; replied Cynthia; she was relieved that she need not
+answer upon the moment. She was still in a great perplexity; and while
+Harry Rames smoked his cigarette she sought this way and that for a
+light to guide her. Here was not the marriage of which she had
+dreamed. No. But he was honest. It was possible, too, that she might
+be able to help him on, as he had said. And it might be well worth
+doing. It might be true that the ambitious men are the world's best
+servants, and not the men possessed with ideas. Ideas, she remembered,
+with a bitter little smile at her folly, had once given the right of
+entrance to her enchanted garden. But she had travelled far from its
+gateway, and the flowers were all dead in it, and its pathways
+overgrown. It might be that the fixed idea meant the narrow vision.
+Harry Rames might be right; and if he were, by helping him on, she
+would make her money of real and great value. It was a gray world
+anyway--and Harry Rames was honest. She could trust him--though he
+wounded her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She turned suddenly toward him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Do you remember the supper party at Ludsey?&quot; she asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course,&quot; he replied: &quot;And the little Frenchman, Monsieur Poizat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I was not thinking of him,&quot; said Cynthia. A sentence or two spoken at
+that table by Colonel Challoner had leaped into her memory. Politics
+meant color in the lives of men. It was the craving for color which
+fired enthusiasm in the towns of the provinces. Well, she herself
+craved for bright colors in her life too. Might she not get them out
+of the paint-pot of politics just as men did?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If I were to say yes,&quot; she remarked, &quot;I would not be content to be
+merely the witness of your success. I must share the fears which go to
+make it. I could not sit quiet and twirl my thumbs, shut out from the
+hopes and apprehensions and endeavors, and just smile admiringly at
+the result. I must share everything.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course,&quot; said Harry Rames. &quot;From the moment you say 'yes,' you
+share everything. I meant that too when I said that I needed your
+help.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He spoke gravely and sincerely, and again Cynthia said, &quot;Thank you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She sat for a little while longer, hesitating upon the brink. To say
+&quot;yes&quot; would solve the question of a companion. Oh, certainly, there
+were practical advantages in the acceptance of Harry Rames's proposal.
+She would have to abandon the hope of beauty in her life. Color,
+excitement, interest, she might get. But the beautiful life would not
+be for her. Still, under no circumstances, perhaps, might it have been
+for her. No one, she reflected, and with some sadness--no one by his
+approach had ever set her heart beating to a quicker tune. Perhaps
+there was some defect in her, some want of human passion, she
+reflected, which placed her in the second rank of women. When Cynthia
+was humble there was no girl so humble as Cynthia. And, after all,
+Harry Rames was honest. To that one stable point all her questions
+brought her back.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She moved at last, and Harry Rames rose and stood before her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia dropped her hands loose at her sides and answered with a
+smile:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why not?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was in those words that she accepted him. There was no spirit in
+them, and very little of expectation. But she had come to expect not
+very much; and she had travelled a long way from the garden of her
+dreams.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;After all, there's a turnstile in this affair, too,&quot; she said, with a
+note of bitterness. &quot;A very important one too. For it leads not into a
+garden, but straight to the treasury bench.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames was bewildered. But he made no comment. Women were queer,
+and it was good to disregard their moments of excitement. Cynthia
+sprang up the next moment and laid her hand upon his arm.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes, we'll follow Mr. Smale's advice, Harry,&quot; she cried, &quot;and
+we'll keep our eyes on the treasury bench. Why not? Now go, and come
+back to-morrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She was laughing a little wildly, and Harry Rames had the sense to
+take her at her word. He went out of the room, and Cynthia flung
+herself down upon the cushions and cried for an hour by the clock.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well,&quot; she said to herself at the end, as she rose and dried her
+eyes, &quot;Mr. Benoliel will be satisfied. That's one thing.&quot; Almost she
+seemed to blame Mr. Benoliel for the fact of her engagement.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_20" href="#div1Ref_20">AT CULVER</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The odd thing in the affair, however, was that Mr. Benoliel did not
+seem satisfied. Cynthia asked him over the telephone the next day to
+come to her, and when he came she told him of her engagement.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But no one knows of it as yet except yourself,&quot; she added; &quot;and no
+one is to know, for the present. I want it kept a secret.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh!&quot; said Mr. Benoliel, looking at her curiously. &quot;And why?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There will be a certain amount of ill-natured talk,&quot; Cynthia returned
+in a confusion. &quot;And I want the time for it to be as short as
+possible. It will cease after we are married.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;People will say that Rames is an adventurer, who is marrying you for
+your money,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel bluntly, and Cynthia turned on him with
+spirit.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Lord Helmsdale's mother will, and other mothers would have said the
+same of Lord Helmsdale if I had married him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So it's to spare the feelings of Harry Rames that you are keeping
+your engagement secret,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel with an ironical wonder. &quot;I
+should never have suspected him of such delicate susceptibilities.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, I should be uncomfortable too!&quot; cried Cynthia, bending puzzled
+and indignant brows at him. &quot;I think you are quite horrid.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Benoliel sustained her indignation unabashed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Is that the only reason, Cynthia?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You wanted me married,&quot; Cynthia continued. &quot;You ought to be very,
+very pleased.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel, however, was not to be lured from his question into a
+discussion upon the propriety of his feelings. He repeated it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Is fear of gossip the only reason, Cynthia, which makes you keep your
+engagement secret?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia again showed signs of confusion. Mr. Benoliel wore his air of
+omniscience. She sat down upon a chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What do you mean, Mr. Benoliel?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;This,&quot; said he. &quot;I have noticed that the young ladies who keep their
+engagements secret are not, as a rule, very much in love with the men
+they are engaged to. They leave themselves a loop-hole of escape.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's cheeks flamed. Certainly she had intended to spare Harry
+Rames and herself some uncomfortable weeks. But would she have minded
+those weeks had she cared for him? The question came swiftly, and as
+swiftly was answered. Had she cared for him she would have wanted to
+wear him like a ribbon on her breast for all the world to see. She
+realized it with a pang. She would have run quickly forward to meet
+the gossip and do battle. But she had not run forward. It was true
+that she had left herself a pathway of retreat, and rather by instinct
+than from any deliberate plan. Her wariness had prompted her. Once
+more she had wanted to be safe. But nothing of this was she going to
+acknowledge to Mr. Benoliel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think you are extraordinarily horrid,&quot; she said again with a cold
+dignity, and hoped that her stateliness would crush her inquisitor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;When do you propose to marry, then?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Just before Whitsuntide. The House will rise for ten days, I hear, at
+the least. We shall announce the marriage just before the House
+rises;&quot; and that indeed was the plan upon which she had agreed only
+that morning with Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then there is no hurry,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel. &quot;Perhaps you and Captain
+Rames will pay me a visit in the country before Whitsuntide comes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He spoke as though he accepted the situation, and turned to other
+subjects, fearing to confirm Cynthia in obstinacy by any show of
+opposition.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Certainly,&quot; she said; &quot;we shall be pleased to come;&quot; and a month
+later she and Harry Rames came one Friday afternoon to Culver.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The house stood within hearing of the bells of Ludsey, but on that
+side of the city opposite to the White House. Benoliel had built it
+himself, and to those who knew the man but slightly it was an
+astonishing production. Captain Rames, for instance, whose taste was
+not very meticulous, never ceased to marvel at it. Even this Friday
+afternoon, as the car swung round a turn of the country road and the
+thing stood before him, he contemplated it with amazement. It was
+nothing but a monstrous new villa of red and yellow brick, a
+pretentious ghastliness of towers and flashing glass rising from the
+middle of a small bare field within twenty yards of the roadway. An
+avenue of fir-trees not yet shoulder-high wound to the front door, and
+there was no need for it to wind. Circular beds of glaring flowers
+disfigured the new lawns, and little bushes of evergreens, which would
+one distant day make an effort to be shrubberies, gave to the house a
+most desolate and suburban look. It seemed wonderful to Harry Rames
+that so nice and delicate a person as Mr. Benoliel could bear to live
+in it at all; and still more wonderful that with a dozen of the most
+beautiful houses in England bosomed in deep meadows and whispered to
+by immemorial elms, within an easy motor-ride to choose from as his
+models, he should have devised this unconscionable edifice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Sir James Burrell, the surgeon, however, who was sitting opposite to
+Harry Rames in the car, and next to Cynthia, took a different view. He
+gazed at the house with satisfaction. For it would add yet another
+subtle paragraph to his character sketch of Mr. Benoliel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How extraordinary,&quot; he cried, &quot;and yet how like the man! That's just
+the house which Benoliel would have built. Only one had not the
+insight to guess it. I love it!&quot; and he leaned his head out of the
+window and chuckled at the building's grotesqueness. &quot;Yes, I love it.
+The fitness of things appeals to me.&quot; And he turned to the astonished
+Captain Rames. &quot;You don't see the exquisite appropriateness of
+that--let us not call it a house--that detached residence to Isaac
+Benoliel?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, I don't,&quot; said Harry Rames. &quot;He always seemed to me to set up
+as a lover of beautiful things.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And the love is genuine,&quot; said Sir James, fairly off at a gallop upon
+his hobby. &quot;He doesn't set up. The love is almost a quality of his
+race. Yes, but his race doesn't always know what things are beautiful.
+There's the explanation of that building--race, which confounds logic
+and is quite untroubled by inconsistencies. There's Benoliel's race in
+every line of it. He's of the Orient. He loves flamboyancy and
+gaudiness. He may conceal it carefully from us. But every now and then
+it must break out, and it has run riot here. Does the East repair and
+mend? No, it lets its old buildings decay and builds afresh. That's
+why Mr. Benoliel passes by your stately houses all up for sale in
+their parks and builds this villa. Remember, Captain Rames, though Mr.
+Benoliel talks with you and walks with you, he doesn't think with you.
+Behind those old tired eyes of his, he thinks as the East thinks.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Thus Sir James Burrell, and the car stopped at the front door before
+he could utter another word. He was not sorry, nor indeed were the
+other occupants of the carriage. He was merely trying his new
+paragraph on the dog, so to speak. He needed time to eliminate the
+unnecessary, and make it vivid with the single word, and fix it up
+with a nice juxtaposition of paradoxes and altogether to furbish it
+for presentation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He does talk!&quot; said Harry Rames to Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, doesn't he,&quot; she replied with a laugh, and then grew serious.
+&quot;But I wonder whether he's right. I wonder whether Mr. Benoliel thinks
+and judges from principles which are true to him, but not true to us.&quot;
+Her eyes rested with a strange and thoughtful scrutiny on Harry's
+face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why should you trouble?&quot; said Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It makes a little difference to me,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;Perhaps more than
+a little.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For old Daventry's last words weighed upon her. He had bidden her in
+troubles and difficulties to seek advice from Isaac Benoliel. He had
+thought much of his wisdom. She had herself accepted it as a thing
+beyond question, and a timely help. Now, she began to ask herself, was
+his wisdom, if it was born of the East and tempered by the instincts
+of his race, fit for service in her generation and for her people? She
+pondered the question during the next two days, and leaned more and
+more to Sir James Burrell's way of thinking from a trivial reason; the
+inside of Culver agreed so completely with its exterior. Its
+flamboyancy set the eyes aching. Its wall papers were indigestibly
+rich with colored flowers, and never was there a blue so vividly blue
+as the blue of his velvet curtains and triple-pile carpets. It is true
+that there were treasures of art in Culver, glowing pictures of the
+early Flemish school, with their crowds of figures, each one a
+finished miniature, and behind the crowds the clear sky and
+translucent air; there were marvels of jade, and glorious little
+statues of silver and marble, but their delicate beauty was spoilt and
+lost in the riot of gorgeousness which framed them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">One homely place alone there was in that building. The great hall, all
+colonnades and galleries, occupied the centre of the house. But on
+each side of the wide chimney, where of an evening, even in the
+summer, a fire usually burned, a great screen was drawn; and these
+screens enclosed a space before the fire set about with comfortable
+chairs, a sofa or two, and little mahogany tables, and made of it a
+place of comfort. In this space on the Sunday night Cynthia came to
+grips with Isaac Benoliel, and understood at last his life, and
+something of his philosophy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was eleven o'clock, or a little later. The ladies were retiring for
+the night. Cynthia herself had her foot upon the lowest step of the
+stair, and was thinking that after all she was to be spared an
+argument, when Mr. Benoliel came from the corridor of the smoking-room
+where he had left the men.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Will you give me a few minutes, Cynthia?&quot; he asked, and she turned at
+once and walked to the fire. She stood with a foot upon the rail of
+the hearth and a hand upon the mantel-shelf, quiet but mutinous. Mr.
+Benoliel followed her and sat down in a straight-backed arm-chair,
+facing the fire, and a little way behind her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have not yet announced your engagement, Cynthia?&quot; he began.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yet Whitsuntide is very close. Perhaps you have thought better of
+it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel looked at her as she stood, aggressively showing him her
+back, and smiled at her, with some amusement, a great deal of
+affection, and a little pity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course,&quot; he said, &quot;I have not much right to interfere, and yet I
+should like you to hear, Cynthia, what I have to say. Otherwise I
+shall fail your father.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia turned about at once, and her manner toward him changed with
+her movement. The appeal of his voice and words had its effect upon
+her, and not that alone. Mr. Benoliel was so neat and supple, he sat
+with so upright a figure in his chair, his hair was so black and sleek
+and thick that she was seldom really conscious of his age. But at
+times, as now, when by chance she looked straight into his eyes and
+noticed their fatigue and their patience, and how the light had quite
+gone out of them, it came upon her almost as a shock that this was an
+old, old man; and because she was surprised she exaggerated his age,
+and gave to him in return for his pity the cruel pity of youth. She
+was in the mood almost to admit his right to interfere. But her gift
+of silence and the weariness which had become instinctive checked her.
+She moved forward to him with a gracious deference--that was all--and
+said, standing in front of him:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am glad of course to hear anything you have to say, Mr. Benoliel.
+You disapprove of my marriage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yet you wanted me married.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;To the right person.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Lord Helmsdale,&quot; said Cynthia, with a little pout of disdain.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Youth should marry youth,&quot; returned Mr. Benoliel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He looked the girl over from head to foot. She stood in front of him
+in her delicate frock of soft white satin and lace, long-limbed and
+slender, with the gloss of youth upon the heavy curls of her fair
+hair, and the rose of youth on her cheeks, and the sheen of youth upon
+her white and pretty shoulders. She was the color of a flower, and had
+the freshness of a flower upon a morning of dew. From the tip of her
+slim satin slipper to the ribbon in her hair, she was dressed with a
+daintiness which set her beauty proudly off. To Mr. Benoliel she was
+radiant and wonderful with youth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; he repeated, &quot;youth should marry youth, Cynthia, especially
+when it is such rare youth as yours.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was pleased. She knew a compliment when she heard it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have shifted your ground, Mr. Benoliel,&quot; she said, smiling down
+at him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; he answered.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It was social position, which you wanted me to marry in Lord
+Helmsdale.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That, too. Yes. I don't make light of it. I am old enough not to blow
+a trumpet round the walls of Jericho in these days,&quot; he said. &quot;But I
+did not tell you all my thought. I am an old man, and there are
+certain things I am shy of talking about. I am like you in that,
+Cynthia, eh? We neither of us wear our hearts upon our sleeves or are
+fond of talking sentiment. But I am compelled to to-night. I think the
+most beautiful thing in the world is a couple of young lovers facing
+all the unknown future, hand in hand, high of hope and courage, and
+serious with the uplifting seriousness of love. Now you are not in
+love, Cynthia, and he's not young. So, from my point of view, on both
+sides this marriage falls short of the marriage which should be.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Captain Rames is not old,&quot; replied Cynthia. She omitted all reference
+to the point in which she herself failed according to Benoliel's
+standard. Isaac Benoliel noticed her admission, and, though he made no
+comment, he became still more determined to prevent the marriage if by
+any means he could. He had drawn his bow at a venture. With that touch
+of charlatanism which made him delight in posing as omniscient, he had
+stated as a fact what he only suspected. But she would have denied the
+suggestion, and indignantly, had it been false. He was sure now that
+she did not care for Harry Rames as a young woman should care for the
+man she is to marry. Moreover there had been a note of involuntary
+regret in Cynthia's voice as she had answered him. It seemed that she
+too agreed with him as to what should have been, and grieved that it
+was not to be.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; he conceded, &quot;Captain Rames is not old. But neither is he young.
+He is forty, or thereabouts. He has lived by eighteen years longer
+than you have. And so--I will tell you the truth, Cynthia&quot;--and he
+leaned forward with his hands upon his knees and his eyes shrewdly
+watching her face--&quot;and so I am afraid. Yes, I look forward into your
+future, and I am afraid.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He saw Cynthia wince. So often had she spoken just such words to
+herself. Ever since she had crouched by the door in the dark room at
+the estancia, fear had walked at her heels with its shadow thrown upon
+the road beyond her feet. Was it to lie in front of her all her life?
+Here was her chosen adviser thinking her thoughts. She was not to be
+comforted by Sir James Burrell's reasonings. Mr. Benoliel might be
+altogether compact of the Orient. None the less his words knocked
+shrewdly at her heart. She sank down at the end of a sofa close at Mr.
+Benoliel's side, her face all troubled and discouraged.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I accepted Harry so that I might be safe,&quot; she cried tremulously,
+&quot;so that I might no longer be afraid,&quot; and then sat with her cheeks
+afire, conscious that she had betrayed herself.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I mean--&quot; she corrected herself hastily.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Just what you said, Cynthia,&quot; rejoined Mr. Benoliel. Once more he had
+shot his arrow at a venture and reached the mark. He had now for the
+first time the key to her. Much was explained to him. But he spoke as
+though the explanation had long been known to him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, ever since I have known you, you have lived in fear, Cynthia,&quot;
+he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia did not again deny the truth. She found a better argument in
+the recollection of old Mr. Daventry's death-bed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But there was no reason for the fear,&quot; she cried. &quot;It was groundless.
+I tortured myself for nothing. It was all due to a foolish mistake.&quot;
+She hesitated, choosing her words so that they might carry some
+sort of conviction and yet reveal nothing. &quot;The mistake arose
+because--people--were silent--and they were silent because they wished
+to spare, and thought that knowledge would hurt. It was the silence
+which hurt.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;This time,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel, &quot;silence shall not do harm. Nor shall
+a thought to spare. I will be frank with you as to why I am afraid, if
+you will listen to me. I shall have to tell you a little about myself.
+I shall not spare myself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He spoke with reluctance. For he was reticent about himself. Cynthia
+realized suddenly how very little she knew of him, though she probably
+knew him more intimately than any one else, except the separated wife
+in Eaton Square. He had kept his secrets better than she had kept
+hers. Now he was going to reveal himself, and certainly to open old
+wounds for her sake.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you,&quot; she said gently. &quot;I shall know of what you are afraid, of
+something perhaps which I may now be able to avert. But I ought to
+tell you at once, that nothing which you say can change me.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_21" href="#div1Ref_21">MR. BENOLIEL'S WARNING</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel, however, persisted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I daren't be silent, Cynthia. There are just three great crises--some
+would say three great catastrophes--birth, marriage, and death. The
+first and the last happen. They are outside our control. But about the
+middle one we do ourselves have a word to say; we can direct it. And
+it's the most important of them all. For it means the beginning of
+life for others, and the making or undoing of our own. Therefore you
+can't afford to trust to luck, Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am not trusting to luck at all,&quot; said Cynthia confidently.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Aren't you?&quot; asked Mr. Benoliel. &quot;You are proposing to marry a man,
+nineteen years of whose life--whose man's life--if you understand me,
+you have had no share in, no influence upon, and have now no real
+knowledge of. I am not suggesting that the conventional other woman is
+somewhere in the background, waiting to appear at the marriage
+ceremony with a baby in her arms,&quot; he continued with a smile. &quot;But
+during those nineteen years how many things must have happened to him,
+trials and miseries and elations, to modify and mould his character?
+And since you are ignorant of the things which happened to him, how
+can you know the man?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yet I think I do know him,&quot; said Cynthia, and her confidence
+increased. She could meet Mr. Benoliel on this battle-ground. &quot;And
+without laying claim of any particular insight. For he has always been
+careful that I should know him. From the very first day of our
+acquaintanceship he has spoken and acted quite deliberately in order
+that I might have no illusions about him. He has wanted me to know him
+just as clearly as he knows himself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Does he know himself?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Better than most men,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;He has set out to use himself
+as a machine and he has studied the machine unceasingly, its limits
+and its capacities, so that he might use it to its fullest power.&quot; She
+recalled Harry Rames's foresight, the careful laying of his plans, the
+queer modesty which underlay his ambition to excel. She turned
+triumphantly to Mr. Benoliel. &quot;Oh, yes, he knows himself a good deal
+better than youth can know itself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah!&quot; said Mr. Benoliel, raising a warning finger. &quot;I was waiting for
+that. I admit that youth doesn't know itself. But then it's not so
+important that it should. There's not, after all, as yet, so very much
+to know. But take it this way. Suppose that you and Captain Rames were
+both young and of an age! Suppose that he had the nineteen years which
+separate you in front of him instead of behind him!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well?&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why, then, when he reached forty, you, the wife, would know him
+better than he would know himself. A wife always does, if she lives in
+sympathy with her husband. I am presuming that. You would know him a
+good deal better than he knows himself now. The solitary nineteen
+years, of which now I dread the consequences, you would have shared.
+That's the point. And you wouldn't be running the danger you are
+running now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What danger?&quot; asked Cynthia impatiently. &quot;Of what are you afraid?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am afraid of the latent things,&quot; Mr. Benoliel answered. &quot;I am
+afraid of the seeds which may have been sown in him during these
+nineteen years, and of which the plant has not yet shown. I am afraid
+of latent desires, fancies, ambitions, latent cravings of which he is
+not yet aware, and which may some day come to life with overwhelming
+strength. Haven't you seen men suddenly change for no apparent reason
+to the ordinary observer, drop from all their established habits,
+begin again upon another plane? I have, and that's the change I am
+afraid of now. For it's one you would be powerless to avert, since you
+would not even suspect it until it had actually begun.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He turned toward Cynthia, and with a smile upon his face summed up his
+argument.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Make no mistake, Cynthia. I am not making light of Captain Rames. In
+a way my fears are an actual tribute to the man. But I am afraid that
+out of a life so busy, and so keen as his has been, so fraught with
+incidents, so varied, something may suddenly seize him and catch him
+back and hold him; some craving, some ambition in which you will have
+no share, and which will separate you forever.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He spoke with so much earnestness that Cynthia was impressed against
+her will. She was sure that he was speaking with knowledge of a
+kindred case. Certain words he had dropped made her certain that the
+kindred case was his own.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But supposing that such a change came,&quot; she said with hesitation,
+&quot;must it separate?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel gently, &quot;not if both bring to the marriage
+love. Then I don't think it need.&quot; He glanced at her swiftly, and said
+with a sudden sharp note in his voice: &quot;But what if the marriage be
+only a bargain, Cynthia? What then?&quot; and the blood rushed into the
+girl's face as he looked at her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I'll tell you,&quot; he cried. His voice rose and a kind of sombre
+passion rang in it. &quot;One party doesn't keep the bargain, or keeps it
+half-heartedly, as an irksome thing, and day by day the separation
+grows more complete, until you are living with your enemy or living
+quite alone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His voice dropped again to a whisper on the last words. He finished
+and sat lost wistfully in his own recollections, and forgetful of
+Cynthia at his side. After a little while his lips moved, and, as an
+old man will, he spoke a word or two to himself. Cynthia's ears caught
+the words.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It was my fault, and it couldn't be helped,&quot; he said, and so again
+fell into a long silence, with his eyes upon the coals of the fire. At
+length Cynthia touched him gently upon the sleeve.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I should like--the instance,&quot; she said timidly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Isaac Benoliel roused himself with a start.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. I mean to give it you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I have no right to it,&quot; Cynthia insisted. &quot;You must remember
+that.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Benoliel shook his head and smiled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are a young girl starting out on life. You have every right to
+it, Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I mean that it cannot change me,&quot; she said. &quot;I would like to hear
+it--yes. But it is only that I may understand and be ready. And if you
+think that reason insufficient, don't tell me. I shall thank you, all
+the same, for offering to tell me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You mustn't take the warning literally,&quot; he said. &quot;I am of the East,
+you know. So is my story&quot;; and a sudden relief swept over Cynthia. He
+was not of her people, his stand-point would not be hers, his warning
+might not apply to her. She thought of Sir James Burrell's words.
+Discouragement sat more lightly upon her than it had done during the
+last hour. There were certain curious phases in Mr. Benoliel's life
+which were not understood--sudden disappearances, for instance, during
+which no one met him to bring back to London the place of his abode.
+He was recognized as a man apart. Yes, he was of the Orient, and he
+might have no message for her ears.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It was my race which caught me back,&quot; Benoliel began, and Cynthia's
+courage increased. But his story was only just begun.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_22" href="#div1Ref_22">AND AN INSTANCE TO ENFORCE IT</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You knew, I suppose, that I was married?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And that my wife lives?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel nodded and shifted in his chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have also very possibly heard a good many speculations about my
+origin?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A good many,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, here's the truth. I am a Barbary Jew. I come out of Morocco,
+the one country where you'll find the East to-day. Already in Tangier,
+the city given over to the foreigner, you will come across some traces
+of it. But ride for a few hours out of Tangier, straight to the south,
+pay your dues and cross the Red Hill, and you'll have both feet
+planted in the East, and may breathe in some of its enchantment. Go
+forward for another day or so, and you may pass perhaps some tall
+Arab, striding through the crowd outside El Ksar, carrying a stick
+stretched across his shoulder-blades. He'll speak to no one, stop for
+nothing, and all will make way for him. That's the Imperial Courier,
+on his way to the coast from Fez. He'll not sleep upon the way, and
+he'll take no food lest he should sleep. He'll be in Tangier three
+days after he has left Fez. He's the penny post. Ride on still
+further, cross the Sebou, travel over a vast plain by a track beaten
+by the feet of men and animals, yet strangely enough a track which
+never runs straight, though the plain is bare, but winds and turns,
+and winds again over the face of the country.&quot; Mr. Benoliel's eyes
+were fixed upon the fire; he spoke, lingering upon his words. He had
+grown forgetful of the purpose which drove him to reveal himself.
+Another and a strange aspect of him was presented suddenly to Cynthia.
+The dilettante and the exquisite had vanished. He spoke with a kind of
+yearning in his voice. His thoughts had drifted out through the
+doorway of his abominable villa. He was walking in the starshine over
+the wide empty plain of the Sebou, steeped in the enchantment of which
+he had spoken. Dimly she foresaw whither he was leading her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yet a day and you come to a wall of hills. Right ahead of you a cleft
+opens--that's the pass to Fez--a troublesome place, by the way, for
+Barbary Jews, since the Z'mur tribe has a way of taking toll in that
+narrow pass,&quot; Benoliel explained with a smile, and seemed to become
+once more aware of Cynthia's presence.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But a little further to the right from a break in the sky-line of the
+wall, a regular broad staircase seems to descend. It becomes a track,
+it zigzags across the face of the cliff, like a piece of string, to
+the plain. That's the road to my home,&quot; and he suddenly threw back his
+head and sat alert--&quot;the city of Mequinez--the most eastern of the
+cities of the East, where the great gateway of mosaic, built by
+Christian captives, crumbles slowly to ruin, and the Jew must not wear
+shoes in the street, must walk barefoot with a black gaberdine upon
+his body, and a black cap upon his head. I ought to resent that, eh,
+Cynthia?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He looked at her, and answered the question himself. &quot;But I was born
+there,&quot; and to him the answer was sufficient.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;In Mequinez!&quot; said Cynthia, striving to bridge the distance between
+this actual house in the green of Warwickshire and that distant city
+with the great mosaic gate in Barbary. Mr. Benoliel helped her a
+little to see it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, in the Mellah of Mequinez, Cynthia. That's where the Jews are
+crowded; an evil-smelling place you would call it, close and airless,
+with narrow alleys and houses huddling together, and a reek of rancid
+cookery. Yet it's a town of spaces; there's a good square before the
+gate. There are great silent palaces, with gardens and lakes. There's
+room in Mequinez--but not for us. We were shut up in the Mellah at six
+o'clock at night like children. And we were not all poor. The Mellah
+was gaudy with the bright handkerchiefs and dresses of the women, and
+their satin and silk scarves. There was a great deal of money in the
+Mellah of Mequinez, and a great deal more owed to it by its Moorish
+lords and masters in the city. But that didn't make any difference.
+Remember you are in the East in Mequinez, and a Moor who owed me a
+thousand pounds would make me strip off my shoes in the street, if he
+met me wearing them. A pretty picture of dignity, eh, Cynthia?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia did not answer. She was puzzled by Benoliel now, and she did
+not wish to interrupt him. He sat beside her, neat and trim and
+scrupulously clothed, with no jewellery but a pearl stud in his
+shirt-front, and pearl links at his cuffs, a person utterly modern and
+used to good manners. Yet he spoke of the Mellah in Mequinez not with
+the air of one recollecting unclean days, now, thank God, altogether
+done with, but rather with a kind of relish and contentment that such
+places should be. She had to cast an eye about that flamboyant hall
+before she could in any way reconcile Mr. Benoliel with his words.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I was not one of the rich, however,&quot; he continued. &quot;I was a poor boy.
+I lived with an aunt, for both my parents were dead, and picked up a
+few copper flouss from time to time as I could. My aunt wasn't very
+kind. I was terrified of the Moors and their dark, contemptuous faces.
+There's a wall outside Mequinez, one of many which run out into the
+country and stop--but this one runs further than the rest. It was
+built or rather begun--for, like all things in Morocco, it was never
+finished--by some old king, so that a blind man might be able to find
+his way from Mequinez to Morocco City without a guide. I was always
+fascinated by that wall, and wanted to follow it--and never to come
+back. I hated Mequinez. Finally I ran away one morning with a pedlar
+of my race who wanted a boy to help him. He and I and a donkey, which
+carried his stock in trade, slipped out early from the town, and
+climbed northward onto a great rolling plateau of grass and asphodel,
+which reached away past the white sacred city of Mulai Idris, on the
+hill of Jebel Zarhon, past the Roman ruins of Volubilis, to that gap
+in the sky-line of the cliff where the road leads down to the plain of
+the Sebou. It was spring-time, there were irises up to our knees, the
+asphodel bushes were in flower and the air on this wide upland, with
+Jebel Zarhon on our right hand, was sweet and clean. We walked,
+brushing through the bushes, our shadows shifting as the sun rose--I
+had a sense of freedom. We stopped and ate at a little stream, and
+went on again. I can remember all the details of that day, even to a
+great glowing field of mustard, which shone like yellow silk----&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel pulled himself up with a laugh.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I needn't tell you about all that,&quot; he cried. &quot;Here's the point.
+At the top of a roll in the turf, just by a miserable little tent
+village, I sat down upon the ground, while the pedlar bargained over
+his wares, and I took what I meant to be my last look at Mequinez. I
+could see the city below me far away, and very small in the sunshine,
+with its buildings all confused. I made up my mind then that I would
+be a rich man, and that never--never would I pass between the ruined
+walls up to the gateway of Mequinez again, that never--never would I
+look on it even from a spot so far away as this. We went over the brow
+of the hill, and I saw Mequinez no more. In a fortnight we came to
+Rabat upon the sea. There I learnt the great lesson.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He sat still for a few moments, with his chin sunk upon his chest. He
+seemed to be wondering whether, after all, the lesson was so great a
+lesson, and worth the learning.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes?&quot; asked Cynthia. &quot;What lesson?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We crossed the river from Sallee to Rabat, where the great plants and
+cactuses hang down the walls,&quot; he explained. &quot;It was evening. I said
+to the pedlar: 'We must hurry to the Mellah.' And he answered: 'In
+Rabat there is no Mellah.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No Jews, then,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel shook his head and laughed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's what I thought, Cynthia. But I was wrong. There were Jews in
+Rabat, but they wore European clothes, they lived in houses, in the
+best positions--for of course they had all the money, that goes
+without saying, in Morocco as in most other places--they were people
+of importance, consuls and vice-consuls; they were allowed to walk in
+the governor's orange garden. I was astounded. I asked how this could
+be. And I got my answer between cuffs from my pedlar. It was the
+influence of the Europeans. Rabat is a sea-port with European trade.
+That was the great lesson: the Europeans do not have Mellahs.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So you decided to come to Europe,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not quite at once,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel shrewdly. &quot;I was a boy and very
+ignorant. I had to find out first whether a Jew could make as much
+money in Europe as he could in Morocco.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia laughed in spite of herself; and Mr. Benoliel quite
+misunderstood the reason of her laughter.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, I didn't know anything about Europe at all,&quot; he said seriously.
+&quot;But I made inquiries. Oh, I heard stories. The Jews of Rabat talked
+of London, and of hotels in London. There was one who said--and it was
+repeated to the pedlar, who told it to me, but I would not believe
+it--'We kept it up all June, every night, till four o'clock in the
+morning, in the American Bar.' They were gay dogs in London, the Jews
+of Rabat, and they made money enough to keep it up all night till four
+o'clock in the morning, in the American Bar. So I decided to come to
+London.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">All Mr. Benoliel's humor had deserted him. He was speaking with
+intense seriousness. He was a little Barbary boy again, learning with
+amazement the extraordinary latitude which Europe allowed to its Jews.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So I ran away from the pedlar,&quot; he resumed; and now at last he
+smiled. &quot;You will never guess, Cynthia, in what capacity I came to
+England. I came with a troupe of Moorish acrobats who were going to
+appear at one of the music halls in London.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You!&quot; Cynthia exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. I found them on the beach at Rabat, with their baggage, waiting
+for the surf to go down. The Elder Dempster steamboat was lying
+outside the bar, a mile from the shore. They wanted a boy who was
+light. They took me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And you appeared at the music halls?&quot; Cynthia asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel, &quot;I appeared. I learnt some simple
+somersaults and balancings, and I looked after the baggage. That
+lasted for a year. By that time I had learnt some English and I left
+them. I am not going to bother you with the next twenty years of
+my life. I got on as others have done--office-boy to confidential
+clerk--the usual process. I meant to make money, you see--all the
+time, hour by hour, I meant to make money. I was with a great firm of
+financiers who had got themselves into a tangle over some Eastern
+business. I had mastered the subject; I was by my origin fitted to
+cope with it; and I saw a way out of the trouble. The firm came to me,
+and with the firm my opportunity. I asked for a salary of seventeen
+thousand pounds a year. The firm refused. I went on at my old two
+hundred and fifty for another month. By that time the trouble had
+grown more grave. It was a real crisis, meaning perhaps dishonor. The
+firm came to me again and accepted my terms. It took me a year to put
+matters right, and at the end of the year I was, of course, dismissed.
+But I had seventeen thousand pounds, and I knew what to do with it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You made it into a great fortune,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;By the time I was forty,&quot; replied Mr. Benoliel. &quot;And then I began to
+think about marrying.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia stirred and leaned forward. Benoliel turned swiftly toward
+her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah,&quot; he said, &quot;you are beginning to appreciate the similarity between
+my case and Rames's. But it doesn't date from the age of forty at
+which we both began to think about marrying. No! Strip our careers of
+the accidents of race and country and occupation, and you will find
+the similarity right there in our boyhood and our youth. We were both
+adventurers, both determined to get on, he to his ends, I to mine.
+Well, at forty-one I married.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel hesitated. His wife was living. He was a man of some
+sensibility, and a delicate reticence of mind made it repugnant to him
+to lay before another the manner of his marriage and its troubles. But
+he looked again at Cynthia, and the freshness and the youth of her,
+and the trouble in her big dark-blue eyes, which were fixed so
+intently upon his face, persuaded him. He might be exaggerating. His
+fears might be quite vain. But suppose that they were not? Every line
+of grief graven in the girl's young face would be a whole epistle of
+condemnation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Our marriage was a bargain, too,&quot; he said frankly. &quot;My wife brought
+social position, I money. But there was less risk in our bargain than
+there will be in yours.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why less risk?&quot; asked Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Because we who are Jews make good husbands,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel; and
+Cynthia cried out indignantly:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am not afraid that Harry will make a bad one.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't say either that he will,&quot; Mr. Benoliel returned calmly. &quot;I
+only say that as a rule the Jew makes a good husband. He believes in
+the family. Can you say as much of the Christian? No. Therefore there
+was less risk in our bargain. And still it did not turn out well.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Because I was forty-one and my wife twenty-three. Yes, that's the
+truth at the end of it all. There were eighteen years of experiences
+and struggles in my life which my wife had not shared; and out of
+those eighteen years there sprang a passion in me which I, least of
+all, expected, and which I could not combat. I became homesick for my
+country, and for that city on which I had turned my back with joy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You?&quot; cried Cynthia. For a moment she thought herself listening to a
+fairy tale. &quot;You wanted to go back to the humiliations, to the
+Mellah?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She recalled the feminine nicety of his house in Grosvenor Square, the
+bright silver--not too much of it--the elegance of its mahogany
+furniture, which was never allowed to crowd the rooms. She recollected
+those dinner-parties at which the great men of the earth were
+entertained with so much pride. It could not be that he wished to
+return to the crowded Jewish quarter, noisome with the reek of rancid
+cookery, where the gates were locked on its inhabitants at six o'clock
+of the night! But Mr. Benoliel replied with an energy and a fire which
+she had never known him manifest before.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. I wanted to go back. How and when the longing first came to me,
+I can't tell you. But it did come, and, having come, it grew. I felt
+day by day more and more of a stranger amongst a strange people. That
+road winding up the cliffs to the break in the sky-line above the
+plain of the Sebou--I began to dream of it! Then I used to lie awake
+at night and travel along it, past the pillars and arches of
+Volubilis, and the little white city of Mulai Idris, on the shoulder
+of Jebel Zarhon--right over the upland, and down through the asphodel
+to Mequinez. Finally, I had to go. I told my wife. We had got on
+together up till then, no better, no worse than other people. She
+stared at me with amazement, with suspicion, as at a stranger, and
+from that moment our relations changed. She knew quite well to what I
+was going back, to what I wanted to go back--the Mellah, the
+gaberdine, and the rest of it. And--it was natural, I think--she
+despised me. I was quite aware of her contempt, and--was indifferent
+to it. I wanted to go back. And I did.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You did?&quot; said Cynthia. And then, &quot;I see. I see.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She understood now these mysterious disappearances of Mr. Benoliel
+when he vanished from his clubs and his haunts, and no man brought
+news of him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I went, and as I went London and the years in London dropped
+away from me. I was happy. I went down with my mules into Mequinez,
+and put my European clothes away in a cupboard in the Mellah. I stayed
+in Mequinez three months.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But how?&quot; asked Cynthia. &quot;What did you do?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel smiled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Business,&quot; he said. &quot;I traded. I lent money. Then I came back to
+England--refreshed as a man comes from his bath. But my wife hated the
+whole business. At first she would not hear a word of what I had been
+doing. Then she became curious--morbidly curious. There was no end to
+her questions. What humiliations, what indignities had fallen to me
+amongst the Moors--she was never tired of hearing. And as she
+questioned and I answered, she would sit looking at me, with eyes in
+which contempt grew ever more bitter, looking at me as one looks upon
+a stranger. Quarrels followed. I went back to Mequinez, after a year
+or two, and again after another period. And every time the pull of the
+place became stronger. It was after my third visit that our marriage
+came to an end. We gave a great dinner-party, and when our guests had
+gone, she told me that our life had become intolerable to her.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel did not spare himself. It was rather a grim scene which
+he had to describe--the last one of many quarrels which had sprung
+from their estrangement. &quot;You leave me for those squalors. You return
+to me fresh from them;&quot; that was the burden of her accusation. She was
+not of his race or of his people. She had no sympathy with, or
+comprehension of, the intense craving which from time to time assailed
+him to go back to his own place, or of the utter weariness which
+overtook him of the life of London, in which he played an actor's
+part. The squalor and humiliation of his days in Mequinez got upon her
+nerves, filled her with disgust, and made his companionship repugnant.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You can understand that, Cynthia?&quot; he asked, and Cynthia, since
+frankness was demanded of her, agreed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I can understand that,&quot; she answered gently. His story was to
+her fantastic and fabulous. It belonged to the East--as he did. Only
+by keeping in mind that he, underneath the veneer of his manners, was
+of the East could she accept it as truth. She did so accept it. But
+she looked at Mr. Benoliel with curious eyes, and was conscious of a
+feeling very like aversion. Within the half-hour he had grown a
+stranger to her even as he had done to his wife. That he should leave
+the order and the cleanliness of his home, depart from the company of
+cultured people--he the dilettante--don the gaberdine, go joyfully
+back to the dirt and squalor of his Mellah, humbly take off his
+slippers and walk bare-foot at the bidding of any Moor who passed him
+by--that Cynthia could not understand. But that his wife should find
+life with him intolerable when he came back from his degradation,
+refreshed as by a bath, to resume existence at her side--that she did
+thoroughly understand.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So we separated,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;But there's no parallel between your case and
+ours. What happened to you cannot happen to us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She was not sure. There was appeal in her voice. She pleaded to him to
+agree with her. She clung desperately to her one small piece of
+knowledge. Mr. Benoliel was of the East. Harry Rames was not.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There is a parallel, and a close one,&quot; Mr. Benoliel insisted. &quot;What
+happened to us may happen to you. Out of the experiences of eighteen
+years in Captain Rames's life, experiences in which you have no share,
+some unsuspected craving may even now be fermenting which may turn the
+course of his thoughts, and snatch him back from you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He would fight against it,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Even so, it would stand between you, and it would grow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was silent for a moment. Then she said timidly:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Even then there is one condition according to you which would avert
+the risk.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, one. Love.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And again Cynthia was silent. Then she burst out, striking her hands
+together in a violence of revolt:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I know him! I know him!&quot; and with the words still in her ears,
+she doubted them. Mr. Benoliel's warning had alarmed her. But it had
+alarmed her chiefly because it had brought home to her how very little
+she might really know of those whom she met daily, and with whom she
+was most intimate. Here was Mr. Benoliel. She had thought she knew
+him, and so well that she could play with him, and twist him to her
+wishes. He had spoken for half an hour, and, lo! she had never known
+him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Do all men hide themselves?&quot; she cried. &quot;Do you all build up barriers
+about you, and lie hidden within? Oh, but Harry's honest--honest;&quot; and
+again she caught at her old argument and consolation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She rose from her seat abruptly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you very much for all you have said. I am grateful. I shall not
+forget it. Good-night;&quot; and she moved away to the foot of the stairs.
+She stopped then and turned back, as though in half a mind to say
+more. But as Mr. Benoliel rose, and she looked at him, a shadow
+darkened her eyes and she seemed to shrink from him with that slight
+sense of repulsion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Good-night,&quot; she said again, and hurriedly went up the stairs. His
+story was too new in her thoughts. What she had it in her mind to say,
+she left untold.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But Mr. Benoliel was none the less to be informed of it that night. He
+sat late in the hall after the lights had been turned out, with only
+the firelight flickering on the hearth. He had read the aversion in
+Cynthia's face which his story had provoked. He had made a sacrifice
+of her affection. But he had made it for her sake, and he did not
+regret that he had spoken. None the less he was disturbed. He might
+have done no good, and he had reopened an old wound of his own.
+He sat there knowing that if he went to bed he would not sleep; and
+in a little while he heard a noise in the corridor leading to the
+billiard-room. The door into the hall was softly opened, and the
+wavering light of a candle dimly lit up that cavernous place. The
+screen stood between Benoliel and the intruder. He could see nothing
+but the light of the candle shaking upon the walls above the screen.
+He did not move, he heard some one moving across the floor of the
+hall; he kept his eyes fixed upon the opening between the screens; and
+he saw Captain Rames pass across the opening. He sprang up with a low
+cry. Rames was coming from the corridor where his bedroom was to the
+foot of the stairs up which Cynthia had gone. At the cry Rames
+stopped, and, holding the candle above his head, peered into the
+shadows. Mr. Benoliel came quickly toward him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Where are you going, Captain Rames?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;To my wife,&quot; said Harry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel stared at Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You and Cynthia are married?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;When are you going to make your marriage public?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;On the day the Whitsunday holidays begin. We shall have it announced
+in the evening papers. We shall already have left for Fontainebleau.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So after all Mr. Benoliel had spoken in vain. He might have spared his
+breath, and retained in a fuller degree Cynthia's liking and respect.
+He knew now what she had turned back from the stairs to tell him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Give her this message,&quot; he said. &quot;Tell her to forget what I said to
+her;&quot; and he moved away.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But the message was of no use. He had said what he had to say, and
+Cynthia could not forget. She watched. She was afraid; as since her
+seventeenth birthday she had always been afraid.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_23" href="#div1Ref_23">CYNTHIA ON THE HOUSE</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">On the morning after Parliament had risen the newspapers announced the
+marriage of Cynthia Daventry to Harry Rames. The ceremony had taken
+place by special license early one morning at a little church in
+Mayfair, with a girl friend of Cynthia's, and a member of Parliament
+named Robert Brook, as witnesses. A good many people were surprised;
+still more, however, declared that they had foreseen the marriage all
+along, and that of course it couldn't last; while Lord Helmsdale's
+mother simply remarked in accents of pity: &quot;Poor thing! Double her
+age, isn't he? And she was so pretty, too, a few months ago.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">On the other hand, however, a good many honest telegrams of
+congratulations reached the couple honeymooning in the woods of
+Fontainebleau; and when Harry and Cynthia returned to London, there
+were fresher incidents than their marriage for people to discuss. They
+settled down in Curzon Street to keep their bargain loyally.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">If Cynthia's heart ached at times, as it had done amongst the trees of
+Fontainebleau, for a life struck to fire by passion, she gave no
+outward sign of her pain. She was to help forward the great career,
+and to the best of her powers she did. She threw open her house to her
+husband's party; she entertained; she attended social gatherings; she
+walked abroad in Ludsey with a good memory for faces; she spent many
+hours on the train. Harry, on his side, was assiduous at Westminster.
+He sat upon committees in the morning, and on one of the green benches
+below the gangway during the afternoon and evening, with an occasional
+rush home at a quarter to eight to take his wife out to dinner.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Be there!&quot; was one of Henry Smale's maxims which he had taken to
+heart. &quot;Sit in the House. Never mind the library or the smoking-room,
+or the lobby, or the terrace. Sit in the House! However dull the
+debate, and however inviting the sunlight streaming through the high
+windows, sit in the House. All the great Parliamentarians have done
+it. The lawyers can't do it, of course. But you haven't their excuse.
+You can. It may seem a waste of time. You'll find that it isn't.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So Harry Rames sat in the House, and Cynthia, when she had no other
+engagement to detain her, came down to Westminster, dined with him
+there, and spent an hour afterward in the ladies' gallery. She became
+acquainted with many men of different calibre, and amongst them with
+Mr. Devenish, the Secretary for Agriculture, who was just beginning to
+do a little more than make a vociferous noise in the world. Mr.
+Devenish happened to pass through the dining-room when Harry and his
+wife were finishing dinner, and catching sight of them he turned off
+toward their table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was a brisk, smallish man, and Cynthia was astonished by his
+aspect. She had seen him often enough upon the floor of the House of
+Commons, and had taken him for a person of a commanding height. But it
+was not the first time she had made this mistake. The House of
+Commons, like the theatre, magnifies men to the galleries. Mr.
+Devenish dropped his hand upon Rames's shoulder.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I want a word with you to-night, Rames,&quot; he said</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why not now?&quot; asked Rames. &quot;This is my wife, Mr. Devenish.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Devenish bowed to her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I knew that very well,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia disbelieved him. Also she had formed a dislike of him. There
+was something too acrid in his speeches. She thought of him as a man
+going about with a phial of vitriol hidden in the palm of his hand.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am not famous,&quot; she said coldly. &quot;How should you know, Mr.
+Devenish?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I saw you in the lobby, and--I asked;&quot; he smiled as he spoke, and she
+found his smile singularly disarming; it was so friendly and genuine a
+thing. Mr. Devenish turned again to Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We want you to help us. A vote on account for the navy is coming up
+on Thursday. There will be a motion for the reduction of armaments. We
+want you to speak.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I rather propose to leave those questions alone. I don't want to get
+the reputation of being a service member.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I appreciate that,&quot; said Mr. Devenish. &quot;But you are asked to speak in
+this debate by the government.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;On the general question?&quot; asked Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not so much on that. The point is the economy of the big ship. You
+can speak from practical experience. You know. You are here in
+Parliament to contribute your knowledge.&quot; Mr. Devenish turned to
+Cynthia, and again his smile illumined his face. &quot;Persuade him, Mrs.
+Rames.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It occurred to Cynthia that Mr. Devenish did not trouble to inquire
+whether Harry Rames believed the big ship to be an economical thing.
+Harry was to support the government. The rest of his argument she
+agreed with. It was Harry's duty, since he was in Parliament, to
+contribute of his knowledge.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well,&quot; said Captain Rames. &quot;Of course if the government wishes
+it, I shall be proud to take part in the debate. Won't you sit down
+and have some coffee?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, do!&quot; said Cynthia cordially, and she was not altogether engaged
+in helping her husband on when she spoke. Mr. Devenish now puzzled
+her. She had begun by disliking him. He had spoken very few words to
+her, and yet she no longer disliked him. There was a charm in his
+manner of which he seemed quite unaware. At close quarters he lost the
+narrowness, which she had thought the mark of him. He seemed broadly
+human, comprehensively sympathetic. Yet he obviously wore no mask. He
+was simple, and he gave a pleasant impression of being a good fighter.
+Mr. Devenish drew up a chair and sat down.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You come to many of our debates,&quot; he said to Cynthia. &quot;What do you
+think of us?&quot; and with an unaffected interest in the views of a pretty
+woman, he led her on to express her opinion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well,&quot; she said frankly, &quot;I think most of your debates are very
+dull.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's quite true,&quot; Mr. Devenish replied with a laugh at the little
+spurt of complaint in her voice. &quot;Nine out of ten are dull, and if you
+were in the government you would wish the tenth was too. The debate
+which sparkles and amuses you in the gallery means keen opposition on
+the floor of the House. The debate which is dull means that the
+government gets its bill. And the government is there to get its
+bills.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I suppose that's true,&quot; said Cynthia, and then Harry Rames
+intervened.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's curious,&quot; he said, &quot;but I no longer find any debate dull. I used
+to be bored, I admit it, but I can sit through anything now and find
+it interesting.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia, nodding her head; &quot;I have noticed that, Harry,
+from the gallery, and--I think it's a bad sign.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The sign of the true Parliamentarian,&quot; said Mr. Devenish.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Perhaps,&quot; said Cynthia stubbornly. &quot;Still a bad one.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Now why?&quot; asked Mr. Devenish indulgently. Cynthia was certainly a
+very pretty woman. Let her talk! Cynthia colored and replied hotly:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Because it means that the four walls of that little chamber are
+closing in on you. The game inside, with its pauses, its coups, its
+man&#339;uvres, is becoming more important than the great interests and
+issues outside which you are there to decide. It means that in your
+thoughts the country and the constituency are growing smaller, and the
+green leather benches on which you sit becoming more and more
+important. If you don't find any debates dull, you are growing aloof
+from the country. You are becoming, as you say, a Parliamentarian.
+That means Parliament first, the country a bad second.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia stopped abruptly. She had allowed herself to be betrayed into
+delivering a lecture upon politics to a past-master in the art, a man
+who, out of his forty-five years, had spent twenty in the House of
+Commons. She flushed. &quot;But you must think me a fool,&quot; she cried.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't,&quot; Mr. Devenish exclaimed. &quot;Yours is a definite point of
+view.&quot; He was not speaking seriously. For he was eager to learn so
+long as the learning came to him by word of mouth, and not from the
+printed page. &quot;Tell me some more.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was considering no longer the prettiness of the woman, the changing
+lights upon her face. He was conceding respect to her judgment.
+Cynthia was mollified. She continued:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And here's something which to me makes many of the debates tedious
+and unreal. You all behave as if your ideal of a member of the House
+of Commons were a fossil on a shelf.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Devenish laughed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why do you say that, Mrs. Rames?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Because if a man changes his opinions ever so little during a course
+of years, he at once has the reports of his old speeches flung at his
+head in scathing accents, as though he had committed the meanest of
+crimes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's a party score,&quot; said Mr. Devenish.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, but why?&quot; Cynthia insisted. &quot;You must all know that a man who is
+any use at all does change his opinions as his experience widens.
+Surely that's true. What's the use of thought at all if it leaves you
+precisely where you were?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mrs. Rames,&quot; said Mr. Devenish, &quot;I cannot dispute it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia had long been puzzled by this extraordinary childishness on
+the part of men of reputed intelligence. She was determined if she
+could to get at the truth. &quot;Then why?&quot; she asked. &quot;Why, when one of
+the opposition proves that a member of the government has changed his
+view, does all the opposition shout with derision, and why do all on
+the government side look glum? Why must the minister labor to show
+that he really hasn't changed any views? Why does he rise so quickly
+to do it? And why, when he has risen, doesn't he say: 'Of course I
+have changed my views. I am a better man than I was two years ago.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, upon my word, I can't tell you why,&quot; said Mr. Devenish
+honestly. &quot;I suppose we haven't the courage. Don't you approve of us
+at all?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes, I do,&quot; said Cynthia quickly; &quot;and much more than I expected
+to do.&quot; She was induced to give her impression of the body of members.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I had got an idea that everybody was in here to get something.&quot; She
+grew suddenly red, and in a flurry, which Mr. Devenish did not
+understand. She continued, &quot;I suppose I got the idea from newspapers.
+I made a wrong inference. They are here, of course--the rich men who
+want honors to put a crown upon their wealth, the office-hunters, the
+speculator, and the financier, who use their membership to help their
+city business--But there are others one is apt to overlook, the silent
+people, who make no mark, and don't want to make one. You see them in
+the lobby, rather disconsolately busy about nothing. They are probably
+not particularly intelligent. Some of them, no doubt, are quite
+stupid. But one rather respects them, because membership of the House
+of Commons means to them a real daily loss. They would be more
+prosperous if they devoted the time they spend here to their business.
+But they seem to be here because they believe that some things want
+doing, some definite things, and that they can help to get them done
+by their votes. There is a lot of them. Then there are the country
+gentlemen who would be happier on their estates, and would be there
+but for their conviction that the solid judgment of the country
+gentleman is absolutely necessary in the council of the nation.&quot; She
+spoke with pomposity and a friendly mimicry of the class she
+described. &quot;But I like them. I think they are of value because to
+them, too, membership here means a real loss.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, I agree,&quot; said Mr. Devenish.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You! You do?&quot; asked Cynthia in surprise. &quot;I thought that--&quot; and she
+stopped.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, what?&quot; Mr. Devenish pressed for her opinion with a laugh.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Never mind,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;There's another class, too, which
+attracts me. The failures. The ambitious men who just don't succeed,
+and fail by so very little, but fail completely.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; Mr. Devenish agreed, &quot;their lot is not attractive. They can't
+bring themselves to admit failure. They drift along here until the
+time is past for them to do anything else. The four walls, as you say,
+have closed about them. They sit here, eating out their hearts,
+jealous of the others who succeed, and making a bitter pretence of
+contentment.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;They are the prisoners of the House of Commons,&quot; said Cynthia, and
+the phrase struck pleasantly upon Mr. Devenish's ears so used to the
+slipshod metaphors of the average speaker.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; he said with a quick look of interest. &quot;Yes, that's a true
+saying. How did you think of it, Mrs. Rames?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have sympathy with failures,&quot; she replied.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah,&quot; said Mr. Devenish. &quot;But it's easy to have that when one is
+married to success,&quot; and he turned genially to Captain Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A junior whip hurried up to the table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are wanted, Mr. Devenish, in the House,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Devenish looked at his watch and sprang up. &quot;I have stayed longer than
+I ought to. We can count upon you then, Rames, for Thursday,&quot; and he
+hurried away. Cynthia followed him with her eyes. He attracted her and
+he left with her an impression of power, which made his interest in
+her, obviously expressed, a subtle flattery. She turned back to her
+husband.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I was mistaken in that man,&quot; she said, and as Harry Rames did not
+answer her, she continued: &quot;You see, Harry, I am doing my best to help
+you on.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are indeed,&quot; said Harry Rames sulkily. Cynthia stared at him. The
+sulkiness in his voice set her blood tingling. He could be jealous
+then! She laughed out loud suddenly, with a girl's joyousness, and, as
+Harry lifted inquiring eyes to her, the blood mantled into her cheeks,
+and she sat in a pretty confusion. For a moment both of them were
+embarrassed, and neither could have told why. Cynthia broke through
+the embarrassment with the first words which occurred to her:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I can't reconcile Mr. Devenish with his speeches,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yet there's a continuity,&quot; replied Harry. &quot;He is one of your
+instances of men big enough to widen out. But he's an enthusiast, and
+he has done in his day a deal of platform work so that the old phrases
+come trippingly to his tongue. He says, when he's carried away, more
+than he thinks now, but less than he used to think ten years ago. I
+fancy that's the explanation.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked toward the door through which Mr. Devenish had
+disappeared.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Tell me about him, Harry,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will, certainly,&quot; said Rames. His ill-humor had passed. He leaned
+toward his wife with a smile upon his face. It seemed to Cynthia that
+the moment of embarrassment so quickly gone had brought now as its
+consequence another moment quite as inexplicable--a moment during
+which she and Harry were nearer to one another than as yet they had
+been.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The one thing I think to remember about Devenish is this,&quot; Rames
+continued. &quot;As a boy he had always to walk in the road and he has not
+forgotten it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The division bell began to ring before he could say another word to
+elaborate his sketch of the man. He led Cynthia out through the arches
+to the door where her carriage waited, and he left her to drive home
+puzzled by his phrase.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He spoke, as he had promised to do, on the following Thursday. Cynthia
+heard the speech from the ladies' gallery, not siding with it at all,
+nor against it, but simply attentive to its effect. He rose in a full
+House, which did not diminish as he spoke, and the space behind the
+bar grew crowded. He was brief; he worked his own intimate knowledge
+of the mechanism of a modern ship of war into the scheme of his
+speech. He was nervous, Cynthia knew, but he gave no outward sign of
+nervousness; he spoke with a quiet resonance of voice, as though he
+had the measure of that assembly; and he brought into play that
+remarkable gift of counterfeiting sincerity, which always astonished,
+and sometimes frightened her. It was difficult even for her to realize
+that he had no real opinion about the value of the big ship, one way
+or the other, and that he had merely crammed his subject diligently
+with her help during the last few days. He spoke, indeed, with telling
+effect. There were friends of Cynthia in the gallery who were quick to
+congratulate her. She herself was filled with admiration, but it was
+the admiration for the fine performance of an actor; and when she went
+down in the lift to join him after the debate was over, the cry was
+loud in her heart: &quot;If only he believed one word of it!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He met her at the gate of the lift, and she caught his arm and pressed
+it against her side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you,&quot; said Harry. &quot;That's better than words.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It wasn't a congratulation,&quot; she replied. &quot;It was an appeal.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames spoke once more during that session, late at night, in a
+thin House, and to try himself in unprepared debate, rather than with
+any intention to arrest notice. But the moment was well chosen, for a
+speaker on the government side was needed; and when the House rose for
+the autumn, he took down with him to Warwickshire the reputation of a
+rising man. He had kept his bargain, Cynthia gratefully acknowledged
+it, and the fears which Isaac Benoliel had aroused in her began for a
+time to lose their substance.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_24" href="#div1Ref_24">THE MAN WHO HAD WALKED IN THE ROAD</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames and Cynthia passed the autumn at the white house, and
+hardly a day passed but one or the other was seen in the climbing
+streets of Ludsey. Harry presided at the social gatherings of the
+city, the musical clubs, the horticultural society, and the rest. He
+was busy with his town clerk over a railway bill which the
+municipality meant to oppose. He made friends with his public
+opponents. Cynthia herself was hardly less active. She threw herself
+into the work of committees and councils, not from enthusiasm, but in
+a desperate search for that color which Mr. Arnall and his fellows had
+got from politics, and her own youth demanded for herself. And with
+the work, interest in it came, if color did not. They were
+establishing Harry Rames in his seat--that was certain, and she had
+her share in it. They were winning and, being a woman, she loved to
+win. Cynthia was a success in Ludsey--she could not but know it. For
+the demands for her presence and her time grew with every morning's
+post. There came to her a sort of exultation of battle. She was doing
+her work; she was helping to make the great career, and in the
+pleasure of helping to make, she lost sight of the essential emptiness
+of the thing she was making.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Harry one night to her. &quot;You are making this seat safe for
+me, Cynthia, for the next election.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked at him with her eyes bright.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Do you think so?&quot; she asked eagerly, asking for praise, and Arthur
+Pynes, the young chairman of the association, who had been dining with
+them, corroborated her husband.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We once had a candidate whose wife would sing at the public meetings.
+We couldn't stop her, and every time she sang she cost us fifty votes.
+We have always stipulated for a bachelor since. But you have changed
+our views now, Mrs. Rames.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am very glad,&quot; said Cynthia; and the trio fell to discussing plans
+for the next session. &quot;We want to see you in office before three years
+are out,&quot; said Pynes to Harry Rames. &quot;There's no reason why we
+shouldn't.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, there is,&quot; said Harry Rames. &quot;A large majority. They want you to
+keep quiet and vote and, being strong, they would just as soon put
+into office men who have never opened their mouths in the House as
+not, and probably sooner.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then you must force 'em,&quot; said Arthur Pynes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They discussed the government programme for the next session, and what
+opportunities would arise from it. But the changes and transitions of
+Parliament are rapid. However sternly the government may cling to its
+ordered sequence of legislation, great questions will arise which have
+not been foreseen, and the ballot will give to private members their
+opportunity of discord. Thus the man who sits next to you may be in
+hot debate with you to-morrow, and those who smiled at you from the
+treasury bench yesterday may see you stroll with a fine air of
+indifference into the opposition lobby to-day. Harry Rames was well
+aware of the pull of the undercurrents, but neither he nor Cynthia,
+nor Arthur Pynes had a suspicion that night that the next session was
+to see him in definite antagonism to Devenish, the man who had been
+forced to walk in the road.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was not, indeed, until the session was more than half-way through
+that Cynthia herself learnt it. She had dined with her husband at the
+House. It was a warm night of early summer, and after dinner they took
+their coffee upon the terrace. A private bill was occupying the
+attention of a thin House, and the terrace was fairly full of members
+waiting for the resumption of public business. Amongst them was Mr.
+Devenish. He strolled up to the couple, and after shaking hands with
+Cynthia, turned to Harry Rames:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I hear you are against Fanshawe's bill.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It comes on next Friday,&quot; continued Devenish. &quot;The government will
+accept the principle, and give the bill a second reading.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It won't go further than that,&quot; said Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not this year. But next year we shall embody the principle in a
+measure of our own, and then--?&quot; He looked inquiringly at Harry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then,&quot; said Harry deliberately, &quot;I suppose we must try to get it
+amended.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A beam of light pouring from one of the windows showed Devenish's face
+clearly to Cynthia. She saw it harden and narrow. When he spoke his
+voice was sharp.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I shall be in charge,&quot; he said. &quot;I shall not accept any amendment
+which strikes at the principle.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am sorry,&quot; said Rames. He lit his cigar. He had not the air of a
+man receding from his position.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was leaning forward, her eyes travelling curiously from one to
+the other. She had noticed the quick snap in the voice of Devenish,
+the quiet indifference to it in her husband's. But she did not know on
+what point they disagreed. Harry Rames turned toward her and
+explained:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Fanshawe is bringing in a land bill on Friday afternoon. I didn't
+think that the government would take it up or I would have told you
+about it, Cynthia, and talked it over with you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Devenish looked quickly toward the girl. Since Rames consulted her,
+could he enlist her upon his side? Cynthia read the unspoken question
+in his face, and turned gratefully to her husband who had made it
+clear that she had her word in his decisions.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Fanshawe proposes that the State should buy compulsorily so much land
+at intervals of so many years, split it into small holdings and lease
+them,&quot; Rames continued.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And you disapprove?&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. I am against the small holding. I think that's waste. I am in
+favor of the small farm. But I want the farm owned, not taken on
+lease. That's my chief objection. The State's a hard landlord.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Is a bank a better one?&quot; asked Devenish.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think so,&quot; returned Rames. &quot;A bank's a business; the State's a
+machine. There's a big difference there.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, I shall be interested to hear what you have to say on Friday,&quot;
+said Devenish, as he rose from his chair. &quot;It would be a pity if we
+lost your support--a great pity.&quot; He spoke with a slow significance.
+The words were half a compliment, and the other half a menace. He
+turned at once lightly to Cynthia. &quot;You must persuade him, Mrs. Rames,
+to be sensible, you really must,&quot; he said. &quot;To create owners is a
+long, slow process, and I can't wait.&quot; A sudden violence flamed in his
+voice, and with a characteristic action he brought a clenched fist
+sharply down into the open palm of his other hand. He looked out
+across the Thames and leftward to the lights on Westminster bridge. He
+seemed to be assuring himself that he stood at last where he had
+always meant to stand, that the moment for which he had lived was
+surely coming. &quot;No, I can't wait. I want to set about the land system
+in this country. With tenancies one can begin at once.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As he walked away from them Cynthia recalled the description of him
+which Harry Rames had given to her. &quot;As a boy he had always to walk in
+the road, and he has not forgotten it.&quot; She began to understand the
+phrase now. Devenish's swift and bitter outburst had been an
+illumination.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had been forced to walk in the road. Rames had shown a shrewd
+insight into a complex character when he coined the phrase. Devenish
+was the son of a small struggling tradesman, in a little town
+surrounded by land which was carefully preserved. Therefore he was
+chased out of the woods and off the grass. The game-keeper was his
+enemy, and an enemy always at hand. To feel the turf beneath his feet
+he must use stealth like a criminal. He lived in a good grass country,
+and all the share he had of it was the dust kicked up from the road by
+the wheels of carriages. In his boyhood he had brooded over his
+exclusion, and through the hard struggles of his youth his thoughts
+had been rancorous. Now, it is true, the rancor had diminished. At the
+age of forty-five he had reached high office, and with high office,
+for the first time, a regular and sufficient income. He was freed for
+a while, at all events, from the desperate endeavor to pay his way
+outside and keep his footing inside the House of Commons. He met men
+of diverse pursuits from the far corners of the earth. The world
+broadened out before him magically.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He entered late, as it were, upon his youth; the arts swept into his
+view, a glittering procession, and enchanted him. All was new to him
+as to a child. The natural charm of the man found an outlet; he had
+good-humor now, and a pleasant friendliness. Gradually the doors of
+great houses had been opened to him--and he had looked in. It was to
+his credit that he had only looked in. He had come away unspoilt,
+uncaptured. But though he recognized that for him the world had become
+wonderfully a place of amenities, he had not forgotten that as a boy
+he had been forced to walk in the road; and the dust of it was still
+bitter in his mouth. &quot;For those who come after me,&quot; he had said to
+himself, &quot;it shall not be so,&quot; and he was in a hurry to set about the
+change. To create peasant proprietors? There was a world of obstacles
+in the way. To create tenants of the State? A single budget would
+suffice. Fanshawe's scheme should be the chief item in the government
+programme of next year, and Captain Rames must look to himself if he
+stood firm to oppose it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames, on his side, had no intention to give way. He drove
+away from the House that night with Cynthia, and in the carriage he
+said:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I shall put up as big a fight as I can, Cynthia, on this question.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Against Mr. Devenish?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was silent, and Harry Rames turned to her swiftly with a
+question upon his lips. &quot;You think it rash?&quot; he was going to ask, but
+he never did. He saw her eyes shining at him out of the darkness, and
+in a low tone she said:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You feel very strongly about it, strongly enough to risk your future.
+Oh, I am so glad!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There was a throb of joy in her voice. She was still a girl. Though
+she professed to laugh at the enchanted garden of her dreams, there
+was still some yearning for it at her heart. The men with ideas had
+peopled it. It seemed that after all her husband, since at all costs
+he meant to stand up against Mr. Devenish for an idea, must be one of
+them. But a slight, almost an uneasy gesture, which Harry made,
+stopped her on the threshold of a great happiness. She lay back,
+chilled with disappointment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">If Harry had spoken, he would have said: &quot;No, I don't feel strongly
+about it. I don't feel about it, at all. I simply recognize that it is
+my opportunity.&quot; And thus he would have spoken before their marriage,
+perhaps, too, during the first few weeks after it. But a change had
+inevitably come for both of them. The frankness which Rames had
+deliberately used, so that she might know him for what he was, no
+longer served. Always it had hurt Cynthia, even though she had
+welcomed it. More than once he had seen her flinch from it as from a
+blow. But now that they were so much together, a hint or silence had
+to take its place. Blunt honesty was all very well twice a week or so,
+but repeated every hour, it bruised too heavily. So, too, with
+Cynthia. Her business as a wife was to help, not chide. Their year of
+marriage had taught them the little diplomacies and managements which
+made life together possible for them. Frankness was to save them--so
+they had planned. What was saving them was reticence.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This time, however, Cynthia was told the truth by her husband's
+gesture. He was going to follow the old historic, dangerous road, the
+road of the third parties, the short cut to power which has lured so
+many ambitious men to disappointment, and advanced a very few before
+their time. And he had chosen William Devenish to tilt against, a man
+supple and quick in debate, sharp of tongue, with a gift of ridicule
+and a wealth of language; a speaker who hit with a nice discrimination
+just above the belt in the House, and just a little bit lower outside
+of it. To Cynthia it seemed that Harry must be gambling on his
+success; that he had cast his prudence from him like a cloak. Harry
+Rames answered some part of her thought.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's not so mad as it appears to be,&quot; he said. &quot;In the first place
+the question of tenancy against ownership is an open one. You are not
+breaking away from your party whatever view you take. You may be
+breaking away from a minister, but that's a different thing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's fears were assuaged. In her relief she turned eagerly to
+Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But your minister is Mr. Devenish,&quot; she cried.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I know,&quot; he returned. &quot;A hard fighter. All the more gain then, if I
+can stand square to him, and remain standing. Besides, Devenish has a
+peculiar weakness.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes?&quot; cried Cynthia. &quot;You can make use of it?&quot; and she stopped,
+wondering at herself. She was startled to realize that for the first
+time she herself was keeping his eyes from lifting to the high path
+above.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have noticed it,&quot; Rames continued. &quot;He can stand any amount of
+opposition from his opponents. If he gets heated, he remains master of
+his wit and tongue. But he cannot endure criticism from the benches
+behind him. It strikes some hidden string of arrogance in him. He
+loses his control. He says foolish things. He hands himself over a
+victim, if his critic has courage and skill enough to use his chance.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I see,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;And the third point?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh,&quot; said Harry carelessly. &quot;The question is an important one for the
+country. It must provoke discussion. Yes, I shall move the rejection
+of Fanshawe's bill if I get the chance.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He put down on the notice paper, with some twenty members on the
+opposition side, a motion for rejection. He rose on the Friday,
+immediately after Fanshawe had sat down, and was called upon by the
+Speaker. He was content with two objections. But either of them, if
+established, was fatal to the bill. He argued against the small
+holding, which he regarded as the pastime of the well-to-do tradesman
+in the neighboring town, rather than as a serious method of settling a
+genuine peasantry on the land; and he pleaded for the farm of sixty or
+seventy acres. It is a matter nowadays of ancient dispute, yet he
+managed to say a new thing about it, not parading his knowledge--for
+there were too many in that House who had made land the study of their
+lives--but suggesting it with a deference, which took his audience.
+The great farm, he maintained, was a modern product, due to quite
+other causes than natural development. It came from the vanity of the
+eighteenth century, its love of spaciousness and show. The monstrous
+porticoed houses and the huge farms were the symbols of its parade.
+But in the seventeenth century, when agriculture really prospered, the
+small farm of seventy acres was the rule. It was at a return to this
+condition that policy and legislation ought to aim.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He passed to his second argument. Tenancy under the State was bad. For
+the State was a hard landlord, and could be nothing else. It took no
+account of bad seasons or the shortness of money. It had to collect
+its revenues and rents within the year. Moreover, the idea was petty
+in its conception. (Here Mr. Devenish turned an outraged head toward
+the orator.) Legislation should aim at something beyond the immediate
+benefit it conferred. Otherwise let them commit the fortunes of the
+country to a parish council, and themselves go home.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There is to my mind one question by which all legislation can be
+tested,&quot; said Rames, &quot;and that question is not: 'Does it supply an
+immediate need?' but 'Does it help to strengthen the character of the
+race?'&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The bill failed according to that test. For it meant no more than the
+substitution of one landlord for another, and left the tenant pretty
+much where he was. If Mr. Fanshawe had taken a bold course and
+produced a just measure, with the object of creating owners, then the
+bill would not have failed. For the desire to possess land was the
+surest sign of a sound and healthy race. It was that desire in men
+which good legislation would try to keep alive. This bill merely
+fobbed them off with a miserable makeshift, and shut the door against
+ownership. Ownership with its obligations and its responsibility, and
+its response to the most primal and most durable of all ambitions, was
+the only policy worthy of a great Parliament.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Devenish replied later in the afternoon, and quite briefly, He did
+not, he said, propose to enter into the discussion, but simply to
+state the intention of the government. It would give the bill a second
+reading, accepting thus the two principles of small holdings and
+tenancies under the State; and next year it would introduce a measure
+of its own, based upon those principles, and press it through until it
+was placed upon the statute-book. Mr. Devenish studiously refrained
+from any reference to Captain Rames, and as soon as he sat down, the
+hands of the clock then pointing within a minute of five, Mr. Fanshawe
+moved the closure, and the Speaker accepted the motion. The closure
+was accepted without a division, and the main question was put.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In the interval, while the division bells were ringing, a slim,
+middle-aged man, with a moustache which was beginning to grow gray,
+and a handsome, ineffective face, passed into the House from the
+lobby, and took a seat on the bench by Rames's side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What are you going to do, Rames?&quot; he asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Vote as I spoke,&quot; said Harry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then I'll go with you,&quot; said his companion. &quot;I didn't hear your
+speech, or indeed anything of the debate. But I am sure Devenish is
+wrong.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames laughed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That sounds like a good working rule. Thank you, Brook. Let us go and
+vote.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The two men, alone of their party, strolled into the opposition lobby,
+and that was the beginning of the great cave. It was a Friday
+afternoon in summer, the weather was very hot, the House very thin and
+Mr. Devenish and his under-secretary the only men present on the
+treasury bench. No one paid any attention to the revolt; the
+newspapers next day had the briefest reports of the debate. Cynthia
+herself, who had come to the House to listen to a fierce and tingling
+discussion, was disappointed at the gentle apathy which overlay the
+proceedings of that afternoon.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But Harry said: &quot;Wait a little, Cynthia&quot;; and Mr. Brook, who from that
+time began to drop in frequently at their house in Curzon Street,
+chuckled like a man with secret knowledge.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Eight men on our side,&quot; Harry explained, &quot;had met several times in
+one of the committee rooms before Friday, to decide what course they
+should take to resist this bill. I did not know of their meetings at
+the time, and they agreed to do nothing until they were sure of the
+line the government was going to take. Had they suspected that I was
+going to move the rejection of the bill, they would have attended and
+voted with me.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_25" href="#div1Ref_25">COLONEL CHALLONER'S REVOLT</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We will have to make a great stand next year, Rames,&quot; said Robert
+Brook. &quot;We must organize. We have time, thank goodness. There are ten
+of us now. A lot more will join us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But will they vote? That's the point,&quot; returned Rames. &quot;Will they
+vote against the government's bill on its second reading?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes,&quot; Mr. Brook replied enthusiastically. &quot;There are a lot of
+discontented people in our majority. We'll have voters--Challoner, for
+instance. Besides, you have friends.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames laughed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I know the kind of friends--fellows who come to you in your seat
+after you have spoken, pat you on the back, whisper that they are with
+you, and then troop like tame mice into the government lobby against
+you. I've watched them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Brook, however, was not to be damped. He threw himself for the rest of
+that session into the work of organization. A halting speaker and an
+ineffectual personage, he had sat for twenty years in the House of
+Commons and was not tired of it. He was without distinction, he was
+the confidant of no minister, he was never caricatured, he was never
+the chairman of a committee, he rarely spoke. The recruits of each new
+Parliament took almost its duration before they assigned individuality
+to his features or honored him with a name. He was mediocrity's last
+word. But he had charming manners and won to a kind of friendly pity
+those whose acquaintance he gently made. He was born for private life,
+but the House of Commons had caught him as in a net. He had no other
+interests, he had no wife, he did not any longer even aspire to
+office. To be busy in the House of Commons--that was lifeblood to him
+and a renewal of youth. His chance had come now. He hurried from man
+to man, discreet and furtive. He arranged private meetings. He hooked
+his little wagon to Rames's star. He approached Colonel Challoner.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner, the party hack, was instinctively outraged. Was the list of
+ministers closed forever? No! But as he was about to repel Robert
+Brook's advances, the very holder of the office which he coveted stung
+him into revolt.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was quite toward the end of the session. Colonel Challoner was
+walking through the division lobby late at night when he saw the Under
+Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Charles Bradley, in front of him.
+There was some stir at the time because certain Indian emigrants had
+suffered in one of the disturbances of southern Persia. Colonel
+Challoner hurried officiously to Mr. Bradley's side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Bradley,&quot; he said, &quot;don't you think it would be good policy to
+repatriate those Indians at our expense. What?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Bradley, a florid gentleman, youthfully middle-aged, with a sweet
+voice, a pompous manner, and perhaps a bare sufficiency of brains,
+turned to the colonel with condescending kindness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;As a member of the government,&quot; he said importantly, &quot;I can no longer
+speak freely. Ah, my dear Challoner, I tell you I regret day after day
+that corner seat on the front bench below the gangway, and the
+opportunity of supplementary questions. But that happy time has gone.
+You might, if you like, raise the question on the adjournment or the
+Appropriation Bill next week. I could then reply to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Bradley smiled benignantly upon Colonel Challoner as from heights
+of sunrise, and passed on. He had grown very lordly since his
+elevation to office. Still, a few paces further on it seemed worth his
+while to stop until Challoner rejoined him. He did not notice that the
+colonel had grown rather red in the face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If you do raise the question, Colonel Challoner, could you introduce
+into your speech 'Civis Romanus sum'? I should like to hang my speech
+upon that. Thank you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Even a party hack will turn if he be sufficiently trodden upon by
+minor ministers, and Colonel Challoner did now.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mr. Bradley,&quot; he asked with a most elaborate politeness, &quot;have you
+ever calculated how many Under Secretaries of State, past and present,
+there are alive to-day? Or how many of them have names which are even
+faintly familiar to the public?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Bradley gasped and stared. This was Challoner--old
+Challoner--talking! Bradley was quite unprepared to cope with so
+unparalleled an outrage. The colonel actually went on, and in accents
+of raillery:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;'Civis Romanus sum.' Now, why quote a phrase so banal. Surely, Mr.
+Bradley, it has had its day. We can do better than that if we put our
+heads together. Civis Romanus sum! God bless my soul! But I am willing
+to help you with a tag of Latin. I will introduce another sentence.
+Balbus shall build a wall--upon my word he shall--and you can hang
+your speech onto that, and be damned to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Bradley, however, had suffered enough of this unseemliness. He
+hurried forward and passed between the clerks who recorded the votes
+with a heightened color. Colonel Challoner followed him. But he waited
+at the door for Robert Brook to emerge, and then drew him by the arm
+into the outer lobby.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have been thinking over what you proposed, Brook,&quot; he said.
+&quot;Certainly, certainly we must make a stand against Fanshawe's bill. We
+have a duty to our constituents. We must show the government we are
+not to be trifled with.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Brook responded with warmth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I thought that upon reflection you would look upon it that way. You
+will be a pillar of strength to us, Challoner.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's very good of you,&quot; said Challoner. After all, there were some,
+it seemed, who knew his worth. &quot;We must meet in the autumn--just those
+on whom we can depend--and arrange a plan of campaign.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Brook. &quot;But where? We want, don't you think, to mask our
+batteries until the time comes for opening fire. We might meet at
+Rames's house--but it is known that he is opposed to the measure.&quot; He
+looked invitingly at his new ally.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I see, I see,&quot; said Colonel Challoner a little doubtfully. There
+was a proposal in his mind--he was not quite sure whether he would
+make it. It was a bold one--it was the burning of his boats.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, why not?&quot; he suddenly said. &quot;Why not meet at my house in
+Dorsetshire? I have some partridges. They will provide the excuse. Let
+us meet in October. Let me have the names and I'll quietly ask the men
+before the session ends.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Brook was delighted. He called mysteriously upon Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We have got Challoner,&quot; he said. Rames shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He'll back out.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't see how he can. He is asking us all to meet at Bramling in
+the autumn.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames sat back in his chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;How in the world did you manage that, Brook? We must go, of course.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Challoner spoke to Rames that evening. &quot;It's to be quite an informal
+little party,&quot; he said with a wink, and took Rames and Brook each by
+the arm. Now that he had tasted the delights of revolt, Colonel
+Challoner, too, was a different man. He lost his dreariness. No longer
+he moulted; no longer he dripped melancholy on all who stood near to
+him. He passed ministers with a high head and an arrogant smile.
+&quot;We'll show 'em,&quot; he said. &quot;Yes, sir, we'll show 'em.&quot; And as he saw
+Bradley approaching him, &quot;Here's Civis Romanus,&quot; he cried in tones
+loud enough to carry to the Under Secretary's ears. The Under
+Secretary flushed and hurried on. Colonel Challoner had told his story
+freely, and Civis Romanus Mr. Bradley remained for the rest of that
+Parliament. Colonel Challoner resumed: &quot;We'll meet on the eighth of
+October. A little partridge shoot, eh? Just a few of us, jolly fellows
+all. You'll bring your wife, Rames, won't you? The others will.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">That was a precaution which had been suggested by Brook.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Some one is sure to let out that we are meeting at Bramling,&quot; he
+said. &quot;If the men go without their wives, the gathering will have the
+look of a conspiracy. With them it will just be an ordinary autumn
+shooting party.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Quite so,&quot; said Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The House rose at eleven o'clock that night, and when Harry went home,
+he found his wife just returned from a dinner party. She came with him
+into his study and while they sat and talked he told her that she,
+too, was to be included in the visit to Bramling. Cynthia's face
+clouded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I would rather not go,&quot; she said. &quot;I don't think there is any need
+that I should.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The other men will bring their wives.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There will be enough then. It won't matter if one wife doesn't go.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She was looking at Harry Rames directly, but with a great disquiet in
+her eyes. Harry, however, persisted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think you are wanted, Cynthia. We have a difficult job to keep
+these men together and agree upon a line of concerted action. Some
+women could be very useful at a juncture like this. You are one of
+them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia rose with a quick movement to her feet. She stood before him,
+her broad forehead troubled, her lips mutinous, and by her attitude
+she made all the more plain his need of her. The room was Rames's own
+study which had been lined with mahogany, and against the bright dark
+panelling, in her white dress, she gleamed slim and fair and beautiful
+as silver. Harry Rames looked her over with a smile. She was, as he
+put it to himself, exquisitely turned out. She had the grace and
+delicacy natural to a family nursed in good manners through a century,
+and with all her beauty she had simplicity and a desire to please.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I want you, Cynthia,&quot; he said, and the blood rushed hot to her
+face and throat. She turned from him swiftly and went out of the open
+window onto a balcony which overhung their tiny square of garden.
+Rames's eyes followed her curiously. Something had gone wrong; that
+was clear. He could see her leaning over the rail in the darkness, her
+face between her hands.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames's survey of her had brought back to her recollection that
+distant morning by the wheat-field in South America when her father
+had looked her over horribly from head to foot and had valued her for
+a market. There had been just a touch of appraisement in her husband's
+look now. Almost she traced a resemblance in the two men's thoughts,
+the two men's examinations.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry left her to herself for a few minutes. Then he followed her:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think I understand, Cynthia,&quot; he said gently. &quot;Of course it isn't a
+very high and lofty business we're engaged on. That's right enough.
+And when you consider the sort of people our party's going to be
+composed of--the dissatisfied, the ambitious, the timid, and just a
+few who believe Fanshawe's bill a bad thing--the man&#339;uvre doesn't
+look very pretty. So if you don't want to go, don't.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But Cynthia had changed her mind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No. I'll come, Harry,&quot; she said. &quot;It's too late to be half-hearted
+now. I'll certainly come.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She turned back into the room, and picking up her gloves from a table
+went upstairs. Harry Rames had no doubt that he had hit upon the
+reason of her disinclination to go to Bramling. But as Cynthia ran up
+the stairs she kept saying to herself nervously like one who would
+frighten fear away with words:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Perhaps no one will notice it. Very likely no one will notice it. And
+if they do, they will think it an accident.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She had not been considering at all the worthiness of these autumn
+man&#339;uvres. She had been thinking of a picture by Romney which hung
+in the dining-room of Bramling, a picture which she had never seen,
+but which yet she knew to be a portrait of herself. She had, however,
+promised to help in the making of the great career and this was one of
+its critical moments. It was, as she had said to Harry, too late to be
+half-hearted. If she failed him now, she failed him altogether. She
+must take the risk that others would notice the resemblance--and
+amongst the others, perhaps even her grandfather Colonel Challoner
+himself. To one determination, however, she clung. She would admit no
+kinship with the Challoners. Nothing should persuade her, neither the
+old man's loneliness nor his disappointed hopes. She held the name and
+the family in horror, though the name and the family were her own.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVI</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_26" href="#div1Ref_26">THE PICTURE AT BRAMLING</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Bramling is the very house for a conspiracy. It lies in Dorsetshire,
+hidden away at the back of the grass-walled town of Wareham on the
+road to no where. A stream runs past its door down to Poole Harbor,
+and its windows look across grass meadows to where the sea-cliffs lift
+against the sky. Hither through one October day came in old-fashioned
+flies and private motor-cars the inhabitants of the Cave--Cynthia
+amongst the last of them with a foot which hesitated to cross the
+threshold. There were thirty in all assembled in the drawing-room when
+the dinner-gong sounded, eighteen men and twelve women. Colonel
+Challoner, to Cynthia's satisfaction, had to give his arm to Lady
+Lorme, the wife of an ex-Under Secretary of the home office who had
+quarreled with his chief and resigned. She herself was taken in by
+Robert Brook. Reluctance and curiosity struggled for mastery within
+her as she entered the dining-room, and took her seat. She would not
+look up at the walls, yet she could hardly but look up, and she sought
+furtively around the dinner-table whether any noticed the picture and
+her resemblance to it. But no one was looking at any picture at all.
+Not a remark was made or a glance thrown to show her where it hung.
+She looked more boldly at her companions, and coming to a greater ease
+began with enjoyment to laugh at herself. Not one person at the table
+was devoting a thought to her at all. They were all very busy,
+drinking their soup and talking rapidly like uncomfortable people who
+fear that if once their speech flags they will never find anything
+more to say. They were in truth an uncongenial company, held together
+by a single link, their eagerness to harass their own government. Even
+Robert Brook, who knew Cynthia well, was talking to her with
+incoherence in his agitation lest the gathering at Bramling should
+fail. She heard Sir Faraday Lorme, a big red-faced man of sixty with a
+bull-neck, say across the table to Charles Payne, one of the eight who
+genuinely thought Fanshawe's bill a bad experiment:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course, as a rule, you know I don't act with you, but--&quot; and the
+rest of the sentence was lost to her ears, but it seemed to her that
+fully half of those present might have said as much to their
+neighbors. Further along the table she caught sight of Mr. Andrew
+Fallon, a dark white-faced man who had only joined them because his
+wife had been signally and publicly snubbed by the wife of a Cabinet
+Minister. Cynthia could see the wife on the opposite side of the
+table, a portly over-dressed woman with an overbearing voice; and on
+behalf of all her sex she felt grateful to the Cabinet Minister's
+wife.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A singularly gentle voice drew her attention. She turned away from
+Robert Brook, to find at her other side Mr. Howard Fall.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We have spoken in the lobby, Mrs. Rames,&quot; said Howard Fall timidly.
+&quot;Captain Rames was kind enough to introduce me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, indeed,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;Oh, I am glad that you are here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To her Howard Fall was, with the exception of her husband, the
+most interesting man in the room. She welcomed his presence
+whole-heartedly. He was intellect, he was modesty. Even now at her
+implied compliment he was blushing like a young girl and his eyes
+shone with dog-like gratitude. Howard Fall was then about fifty years
+of age; and though he was but a contemporary of Harry Rames in the
+House of Commons, he had already acquired there a special place of
+high distinction. Of too acute and logical a mind to be a good
+party-man, he harried with a pleasant voice and most destructive
+criticism, now his own party, now his opponents. He had one great
+quality in common with Cynthia, he was quite without affectation. He
+would make a brilliant speech with extraordinary diffidence. But he
+made it, and a genuine word of praise or thanks delighted him, as a
+schoolboy is delighted with a sovereign. With the mild manners of a
+curate he combined the courage of a soldier. If he had ideas to
+express--and he generally had--no thought of prudence could hinder him
+from expressing them. Indeed, he drew a gentle contentment from the
+knowledge that as a rule they were troublesome to those whom he
+nominally supported. Cynthia had heard him more than once from the
+ladies' gallery, and had admired his honesty and his courage. For the
+moment she was enheartened by his presence. It put confidence into
+her. With him to help, Harry might indeed put up a fight against Mr.
+Devenish.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I didn't know,&quot; said Howard Fall, &quot;that Captain Rames was going to
+speak against Fanshawe's bill. Otherwise, of course, I should have
+been in the House to support him;&quot; and the &quot;of course&quot; struck all
+Cynthia's comfort from her. It was so significant of the man. He was
+born predestined always to revolt. Any party of two had him for a
+third. Cynthia glanced disconsolately to where her husband sat at the
+end of the table. But he showed no sign of misgiving. He was talking
+energetically to the four people nearest to him, and he only paused
+when her eyes rested upon his face. She turned away again and there
+above the head of Colonel Challoner, who was sitting exactly opposite
+to her, she saw at last the portrait glowing upon the wall.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For the moment she had forgotten it. Now it caught away her breath.
+She sat and stared at it. It was the portrait of a girl of seventeen,
+dressed in white from the big straw hat with its flapping brim to the
+shoes upon her feet. There was but one touch of color, a broad shining
+ribbon of bright blue looped about the crown of the hat, and thus
+dressed, the girl stood in a field of sunlight and corn, looking
+straight out from the picture, with a great curiosity and eagerness in
+her dark-blue eyes. She seemed to be looking upon the gates of a world
+of wonder--gates which with a most tantalizing tardiness were slowly
+opening to let her through.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Was she herself indeed like that? The question rushed into Cynthia's
+mind. As pretty as that? It was impossible. Yet she had been
+recognized because of it. Just so then she must have looked that
+morning when, after sending her neglected telegram to Captain Rames,
+she had stood at the edge of the wheat on the Daventry estancia. Yet
+nobody recognized her now. She had the features of the girl in the
+portrait, the broad forehead, the straight, delicate nose, the fair
+hair, the big dark-blue eyes. Yet nobody recognized her. Perhaps,
+however, she had gone off. She was getting old. A gentle melancholy
+descended upon Cynthia. The fear lest her likeness to the girl in the
+picture should be remarked had quite gone since she had seen the
+picture. She was now rather hurt and indignant that no one had noticed
+it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Lady Lorme gave the signal a little while afterward, and the ladies
+rose and left the men to their cigars and their discussion. Colonel
+Challoner opened the proceedings with a pompous, unnecessary little
+speech. He welcomed his guests, and he reminded them at considerable
+length of the object of the gathering. He concluded with a question as
+to whether any honorable member present had any views as to the best
+procedure to be adopted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Harry Rames, &quot;if I may make a suggestion. There are
+eighteen of us here. I propose that we now go carefully through the
+list of members and consider how many more we can get to join us, upon
+whom we can count. I have Vacher's list here;&quot; and he drew out from
+his pocket the familiar little paper-covered book with the names and
+addresses of the members.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think that's the first thing to be done,&quot; a man agreed from the
+other end of the table. He was a Mr. Edgington, a little, square, bald
+man with short side-whiskers, who seemed a cross between an attorney
+and a stable-boy. He was one of the many men in the House who have a
+subject. He had mastered the Housing question; he really knew the
+facts, he had the figures at his fingers' ends, and he had counted
+upon his knowledge to take him straight through the doors of the Local
+Government Board. But the doors had remained closed, and he had turned
+gadfly in consequence--a gadfly that trumpeted but had no sting. &quot;To
+be sure about the men who will stand out against the pressure of the
+Whips, who will not be frightened into line by their local
+associations, who retain, in a word, some self-respect and some
+veneration for the independence of the House of Commons--that is our
+first requisite,&quot; he said floridly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The company then went carefully through the list and marked off twenty
+fresh names as the names of men who might be inclined to join the
+revolt. It was arranged that discreet letters should be written to
+them on the following day, and Robert Brook was appointed secretary by
+an unanimous vote.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course we shan't get them all,&quot; said Lorme.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And of those we do get, some will shirk when the division bell
+rings,&quot; added Howard Fall.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No doubt,&quot; said Rames. &quot;But if we can carry thirty men into the
+opposition lobby on the second reading, we shall have made a
+demonstration which will go far to kill the bill. It will mean sixty
+on a division. It will leave the government with a comfortable
+majority. We all want that of course,&quot;--a chorus of approval, more or
+less sincere, greeted the remark--&quot;But it will also mean that the
+government will hardly be able to force the bill through its committee
+stages by a drastic use of the closure.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Exactly,&quot; said a tall, bearded man with a strong Scotch accent, who
+up to this moment had held his tongue. He represented a northern town
+of Scotland, and was one of the eight who were opposed to the measure
+first and last because they believed it harmful to the country.
+&quot;Exactly. The demonstration is very well, but if the bill is to be
+killed, we will have to kill it in committee. And to prepare for that
+must be our chief work here, Colonel Challoner.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Rames. &quot;Mr. Monro is right. We must go word by word
+through those clauses of Fanshawe's bill, which we are fairly certain
+Devenish will incorporate in his measure. We must formulate
+amendments, and we ought, I think, to agree, to some extent, upon the
+speakers to move them. It will, of course, have to be a provisional
+arrangement--&quot; and he was interrupted by a strident voice which
+belonged to a sandy-haired hunting-man with a broad red face who would
+have seemed totally out of place in any conspiracy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. Devenish may sell us a pup. He's a deuce of a clever fellow is
+Devenish. Let him get wind of your partridges, Challoner, and he'll
+sell us a pup for a sure thing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;All the more reason we should keep our gathering quiet,&quot; said
+Challoner. He looked round the table with an impatience which had been
+growing upon him during the last half-hour. &quot;I think that's all we can
+do to-night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;About all,&quot; said Monro. &quot;There is just this suggestion I would like
+to make. I know a man whose business is land, and he is most
+experienced in it; and I thought that if you would like, I would send
+him a telegram to-morrow, and we could employ him to help us in
+framing these amendments. He is a partner in Beevis and Beevis, the
+land-agents in Piccadilly.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;By all means, do,&quot; said Challoner. &quot;We all agree to that, don't we?
+And now let us join the ladies.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He sprang up and opened the door like a man in a great hurry. When he
+entered the drawing-room, he crossed it at once to Cynthia's side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I was sorry, Mrs. Rames, that I couldn't take you in to dinner
+to-night. I would have liked very much that on your first evening at
+Bramling you should have come in with me. For, as you know, I somehow
+associate you with this house.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He looked at her with a very direct inquiry in his eyes. But Cynthia
+would not respond to it; and he sat at her side with a wistfulness in
+his voice and his words against which she had a little trouble to
+protect her heart. But she did, for she was alarmed. When she had met
+him before he had spoken rather as though he wished that they were
+related. To-night he spoke as if he suspected that they were.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Beevis arrived the next afternoon, and for the rest of the week,
+while the morning was given to the partridges and the amusements of
+the country, the afternoon and the evening found the Cave busy upon
+the bill. Amendments were formulated and shared out amongst them,
+whilst it was by general consent left to Rames to raise the question,
+first of all, on the Address at the beginning of the session and then
+to move the rejection of the bill later on when it came before the
+House upon its second reading. Good progress, in a word, was made,
+and, to the delight of all, no whisper of this conspiracy crept into
+any of the daily papers. They were examined anxiously every day upon
+their arrival at eleven, and laid down with relief. Cynthia could not
+but laugh.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I never would have believed that you could have found so many members
+of Parliament reluctant to see their names in the papers,&quot; she said to
+her husband.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, it's astonishing what modesty they can develop,&quot; he replied.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But though Cynthia laughed, the work, the concealments, the sort of
+restrained excitement which was diffused through the house, began to
+have their effect upon her. She was getting color into her life at
+last, she assured herself, even if it was only a dingy color.
+Moreover, she had the opportunity to compare her husband with his
+rivals in the career. Indeed, he had but one real rival in that House,
+Howard Fall. And though he lacked the subtlety of his intellect, he
+had a swifter initiative, a more telling vigor of phrase. As for the
+rest he stood head and shoulders above them all, and they knew it and
+looked to him to lead them. If he did not share the strong convictions
+of the honest men, he overtopped them by sheer ability, and as to the
+others he knew nothing either of their malice or their fear. Thus they
+all came hopefully to the last day of their visit; and then at one
+o'clock in the day the thunderbolt fell.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was a Sunday and the whole party had just settled down to luncheon
+when the whir of a motor-car floated into the room. It was followed by
+the sound of a door opening and shutting, a pleasant and familiar
+voice was heard to inquire for Colonel Challoner, and the next moment,
+ushered in by the butler, Mr. Devenish entered the room. Consternation
+ran round that luncheon table like a wind across a field of corn.
+Colonel Challoner sprang up hastily with every sign of discomfort.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My dear Devenish, I am delighted to see you, I am sure. You are just
+in time for luncheon.&quot; He called to the butler to lay another place at
+his side. &quot;I didn't know you were in the neighborhood. You should have
+let me know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I didn't mean to do that,&quot; said Devenish dryly. He ran his eye from
+face to face with a twinkling glance. Cynthia herself could hardly
+restrain a laugh. The independent members of the nation's Parliament
+looked so singularly like a set of school-boys' caught by a master in
+the planning of a rebellion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Quite a large party, eh, Challoner?&quot; he said with a smile.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, yes,&quot; replied the colonel. &quot;The partridges, you know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah, the partridges, to be sure. But I didn't know that Howard Fall
+shot at anything but ministers. And even they only get winged, eh,
+Fall?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Devenish strolled round the table and shook hands with Fall. Fall,
+however, was one of the few who was quite undisturbed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, but I am looking to practice to improve my shooting,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A place was now laid for Devenish. Colonel Challoner called to him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Will you come and sit here, Devenish?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Certainly,&quot; replied the smiling minister. &quot;But I should first of all
+like to shake hands with all my friends;&quot; and quite slowly he walked
+round the table and shook hands with each of the men present and those
+of the ladies whom he knew. He was in the best of tempers, and he had
+a cordial word for every one except for Captain Ramos. To him he
+merely said:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah!&quot; and the accent of his voice had in it no note of surprise. It
+was the ejaculation of a man establishing something which he had
+suspected. Then he walked to his place and sat down.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There are eighteen members of Parliament, Challoner,&quot; he said
+pleasantly. &quot;I hope that I have forgotten no one. Let me see!&quot; Again
+his eye ranged round the table, obviously registering in his memory
+the identity of Challoner's guests. &quot;No, eighteen members of
+Parliament. Have you got a partridge left?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames leaned forward and met smile with smile.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We have just left one for next year,&quot; he said, &quot;and we have been
+making a careful note of the piece of land on which we think we shall
+get him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Howard Fall was delighted. For he loved courage. But the others of
+that company were more than ever confused and disconcerted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He's giving us away,&quot; said one of the weak-kneed in an indignant
+whisper to Andrew Fallon. Fallon's white face was twisted in a grin.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He's cutting down the bridge behind you, my friend. And I don't think
+he's a bad judge.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Meanwhile Devenish returned the direct gaze of Captain Rames. There
+was no pretence between these two. Their eyes met; they challenged
+each other, Rames with perfect good-humor, Devenish with a certain
+grimness in his smile. He nodded his head toward Rames and tightened
+his lips. There was not a man at that table who could not construe the
+gesture into words.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are the leader here, Rames. Very well, we'll see.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Devenish turned to his neighbor. It was Cynthia, and even to her
+he talked for a little while with reserve. Rames had been correct in
+his diagnosis of the man. A good-humored fighter as a rule, he lost
+his good-humor when the attack was made upon his flank. He had begun
+his own political career with side-shots at his leaders from the
+front-bench below the gangway; but he did not rejoice when the same
+disposition of battle was planned against himself. However, luncheon
+and the proximity of a beautiful woman appeased him as they should. He
+began to talk freely; his smile lost its grimness, his natural
+geniality flashed bright.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Tell me one thing,&quot; he said suddenly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It depends--&quot; said Cynthia warily.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well then. Tell me another thing. Why does your portrait hang in
+this house?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's cheeks flamed. She looked swiftly across Devenish at Colonel
+Challoner. But he was giving no heed to them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Do you think it's like me?&quot; she asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It <i>is</i>
+you,&quot; he replied.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No one else has noticed the resemblance all this week,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Devenish glanced along the table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, look at 'em,&quot; he said contemptuously, and they both laughed.
+Lady Lorme rose at that moment from the table, and Mr. Devenish,
+pleading the distance he had to travel, took his departure.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have enjoyed myself very much, Challoner,&quot; he said as the colonel
+came out with him to-the doorway. &quot;I can't tell you how glad I am that
+I thought of dropping in upon you for luncheon. I am going back to
+London now. Good-by.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He mounted into his car and drove gaily off. In the dining-room behind
+him, the sandy-haired man was saying over and over again to the
+dismayed conspirators--</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He'll sell us a pup. He'll sell us a pup. I'll bet you a monkey,
+he'll sell us a pup.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">That night, when the men went upstairs, Rames passing from his
+dressing-room into his wife's bedroom found her still up and sitting
+by her fire.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We go back to-morrow, Cynthia. It has been a long week. I hope you
+haven't been bored.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; she said. &quot;I haven't.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What do you think of them? Will they run away when the fight comes?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not all,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;But even of those who stay with you, there's
+not one who is a match for Mr. Devenish.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She spoke with some warmth in her voice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You like him?&quot; said Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think he's a big man,&quot; she replied.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames, who was standing looking into her mirror, suddenly swung round.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Shall I tell you why you say that, Cynthia?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Because he's the only man except myself who has noticed your likeness
+to that very pretty girl on the wall of the dining-room. I heard him
+mention it to you at luncheon.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He burst out into a laugh as he spoke; and in a moment or two Cynthia
+joined in the laugh. So Harry Rames too had noticed the resemblance.
+She laughed and her eyes laughed with her lips.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;After all,&quot; said Harry Rames, &quot;we get some fun out of it, don't we,
+Cynthia?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia and her laughter died away. &quot;We get some fun out
+of it, Harry. That's just what we do get&quot;; and her eyes turned away
+from him to the fire.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_27" href="#div1Ref_27">DEVENISH REPLIES</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Captain Rames had arranged to travel by a train which ran directly
+into Warwickshire through the outskirts of London. It left Wareham at
+mid-day, some two hours later than the fast London trains, and though
+Cynthia had wished to escape in all the hurry of the general
+departure, she had found no sufficient reason. She and her husband
+were thus the last of that company at Bramling, and when all but they
+had gone, Colonel Challoner turned from the front door whence he had
+been speeding his guests, and invited her to walk with him in the
+garden. Cynthia in a flurry began to search for excuses, and before
+she found one realized that the moment for excuses had already gone.
+She turned and walked with Colonel Challoner into the red-walled
+garden where his fruit and flowers grew. The half-hour which ever
+since the first evening at Bramling she had intended to avoid was,
+after all, upon her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There is not very much to see now, Mrs. Rames,&quot; said the colonel, and
+without any change of voice he added, &quot;I learnt just before the
+session ended that you had come from South America.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;From the Argentine,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But you are English-born, of course?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes, of course,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;But I never came to England until
+five years ago. I was brought up partly in Buenos Ayres and partly on
+the Daventry estancia two hundred miles to the south-west of Buenos
+Ayres. My name was Cynthia Daventry.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia rattled off her story to spare herself his questions, and for
+a few minutes he walked by her side in silence. But he was not
+altogether to be deterred.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I had a son in South America,&quot; he continued. &quot;He went out
+under--rather unhappy circumstances. He took a young wife with him.
+She ran away to join him. They went to Chile. There a daughter was
+born--my granddaughter.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;On the other side of the Andes,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Colonel Challoner. &quot;You were never in Chile, I suppose?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia answered without any hesitation and in a voice schooled
+perfectly to indifference.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes, once. I have seen Valparaiso.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Colonel Challoner was deceived by her indifference. To him, with the
+particular intention of his question filling his mind, it was as
+though she had said she had never been in Valparaiso at all.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I knew nothing of what my boy was doing, Mrs. Rames,&quot; he continued,
+&quot;nor that he had a daughter. He left England under a cloud. I gave him
+what money I could afford and--I had done with him. Perhaps I was
+harsh--I did not think that I was. But--well, it's not so easy to have
+done with people when they are your own flesh and blood, and after a
+time I began to make inquiries. I heard of the daughter then.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes?&quot; said Cynthia. She looked up into his face inquiringly. She had
+dreaded this half-hour of acting lest the changes of color in her
+face, and the unevenness of her voice, should betray her. Yet now that
+the half-hour was here she played her part with ease.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I heard that Jim and his wife and his child had all perished in one
+of the earthquakes, eighteen years ago. And there was I, you see,
+alone again, but alone for life now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am sorry,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But the news was wrong,&quot; the old man continued with a sudden
+violence. &quot;My son--died,&quot; and he plainly substituted that verb for
+another, &quot;only five years ago. I received a cutting from a newspaper.
+I sent out again at once to South America a man whom I could trust;
+and I discovered that Jim was not killed by the earthquake, nor was
+his daughter. He carried her up the valley toward the Andes--tramped
+away, since Valparaiso was ruined, with his daughter in his arms. He
+wouldn't leave her behind. No, he must have carried her across the
+Continent. There was good in Jim, after all, you see--only I, his
+father hadn't the sense to see it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Colonel Challoner was not aware that it was just the weight of the
+little daughter in Jim's arms which had made his journey across the
+Andes possible and profitable. Cynthia left him all the comfort of his
+delusion, and all its remorse, since the remorse was so completely
+outweighed by the comfort.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's the last I have been able to find out,&quot; Colonel Challoner
+resumed. &quot;They disappeared up into the mountains together, and years
+after Jim--died--in the Argentine. As for the daughter, I have come
+upon no trace of her. She may have lived. She may have died. Had she
+lived she would have been just about your age, Mrs. Rames.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Indeed?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I suppose that you never heard of her?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What was her name?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Even that I can't tell you. There was a daughter. That's all I know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Colonel Challoner waited with his eyes upon Cynthia's face. He longed,
+yet he hardly dared to hope for an answer. It would be such a
+wonderful thing for him if the girl facing him in his trim
+brick-walled garden had when a child eighteen years ago been carried
+in Jim's arms over the stupendous passes of the Andes. Surely if it
+were so, she must admit it now out of gratitude for Jim's devotion.
+But Cynthia made no reply and he moved slowly to the door of the
+garden and held it open for her to pass out. She went from Bramling
+with her secret still her own, though some remorse was now her penalty
+for keeping it. She could not quite get rid of the picture of the old
+man at the open door in the high red-brick wall waiting wistfully for
+an answer to a question which he could only suggest. But she had made
+her plan and with a certain stubbornness--almost a hardness which
+marked this phase of her life--she had abided by it. If Colonel
+Challoner had said clearly and formally that he made no claim upon
+her, that he did not ask her to take her place in the family of
+Challoners, then she would have acknowledged what he plainly
+suspected. But he had imposed upon himself no such condition. On the
+contrary she had been led to believe that he would claim her; and that
+was intolerable to her thoughts. She did not argue or reason; she
+recollected. And what she recollected was a night of horror when her
+father had claimed her for the ruin of her body and her soul. When she
+stepped into the train she made a silent vow that she would never come
+to Bramling again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's a strange thing,&quot; said Harry Rames as they were travelling
+across the country, &quot;that two strangers to Bramling, Devenish and
+myself, noticed your extraordinary likeness to that picture on the
+wall, and Challoner who has sat beneath it most nights of the week for
+years didn't. It had become so familiar to him, I suppose, that it had
+ceased to have definite features.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's how things happen,&quot; said Cynthia, and this time she uttered
+the phrase with relief. &quot;When you know people very well, you cease to
+notice the changes, you lose count of how they look. But when we first
+met at Ludsey he did claim to recognize me, though he could not fix
+upon the place or time. I have no doubt it was because of that
+picture.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames agreed. None of Colonel Challoner's suspicions had even
+occurred to him. He drifted off to the great subject.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Devenish won't be idle, Cynthia,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; answered Cynthia. &quot;He gives me the impression that even on his
+death-bed he would be quick about it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And on the Tuesday morning, the very day after they had reached home,
+the <i>Times</i>
+brought Harry Rames news which sent him out of his study
+in search of his wife.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Look, Cynthia,&quot; he said and he handed to her the paper. Cynthia read
+the paragraph at which he pointed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mr. Devenish returned to London on Sunday evening and putting off two
+deputations which had been arranged for Tuesday left London hurriedly
+on Monday afternoon to join the Prime-Minister in Scotland.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia laid down the paper with a genuine sense of consternation. She
+was astonished to realize how much she now longed for the success of
+Harry's rather dingy plot. Fear was written upon her face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That means--?&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That we must look out,&quot; replied Rames. He laughed a little as a man
+will when the joy of battle is upon him. &quot;Lucky Devenish can't get at
+my constituency. I don't know that he would try to in any case. But he
+can't.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have Arthur Pynes with you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. And I pledged myself before I was elected to resign at once if
+any responsible number of my supporters objected to any action I
+thought it my duty to take in the House. Do you see, Cynthia?&quot; and he
+laughed again. &quot;That pledge is my safeguard. I thought it would be
+when I made it. If any one tries to put pressure upon me, I can always
+point to that pledge. I can always ask whether they would like me to
+resign.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Suppose they said yes,&quot; cried Cynthia in alarm.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames grinned.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I'd get in again if they did. I'd keep nine-tenths of my own people
+and get a good lot of the other fellow's because of my independence.
+But they won't! No one wants a by-election at Ludsey. Ludsey is too
+busy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I suppose that's true,&quot; said Cynthia with a smile of relief. Once
+more she had occasion to recognize the accuracy of her husband's
+foresight. But there was a little change. The recognition was no
+longer accompanied with regret that the foresight was not being used
+in a higher cause. She was simply relieved that on this side at all
+events the great career was not open to attack.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames took a turn across the room and stopped at the window.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I wonder what his next move will be,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In a month he knew. The movement was swift and dramatic. Rames was
+summoned to London by a letter from the Prime-Minister. He travelled
+up from Ludsey in the morning; he reached home again in time for
+dinner.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;They are raising Lamson to the peerage,&quot; he said to Cynthia. &quot;That
+means the Under Secretaryship of the Local Government Board will be
+vacant. It was offered to me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was radiant.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's splendid,&quot; she cried.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I refused it,&quot; said Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia stared at him. Here was a definite step onward, a step
+refused.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why?&quot; she asked in her perplexity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It would have meant the end of me, had I accepted it. It was offered
+to me to make an end of me, to break up the opposition to Devenish's
+bill, to show me a traitor to my friends, and an enemy who could be
+silenced by a bribe. If I had taken it, not merely the government, but
+the House, the whole House, would have despised me. I should have been
+done for. I should be an Under Secretary for a year, two years, three
+years--after that nothing and never anything so long as I lived. I
+refused it, Cynthia;&quot; and he bent over the table toward her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You mustn't blame me. I am not failing you. I was thinking of you, my
+dear, when I refused office. An Under Secretaryship? You remember
+Challoner's question to Bradley? I should have failed you had I taken
+it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was almost conscious of disappointment. She liked definite
+things and here was a tangible sign of Harry Rames's advancement. But
+she received confirmation very soon that he had been right in refusing
+it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was at the reception at the Foreign Office in January which marked
+the beginning of the session. Mr. Devenish himself came up to her with
+a smile. For a moment Cynthia felt an awkwardness at meeting him, but
+he was quick to put her at her ease.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Captain Rames did well to refuse office,&quot; he said. &quot;I congratulate
+you, for I suppose that you had some share in the decision.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; she replied honestly. &quot;To tell you the truth I was a trifle
+disappointed.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Devenish shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;His whole reputation was at stake. It's character which counts in the
+House of Commons. If he had taken that Under Secretaryship, he would
+have been pigeon-holed. We should have had the measure of him. We
+should not have troubled our heads about him again. For once, Mrs.
+Rames, you were wrong; he was right.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked at him, her great eyes full of a gentle reproach.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Wasn't it a little unkind of you to offer it then. You are a friend
+of mine, aren't you, Mr. Devenish?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There was no anger in her voice, only a wondering melancholy, a kind
+of piteous despair that she was living in so graceless a world. Mr.
+Devenish stared, then he smiled, and he looked at Cynthia with
+enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It wants a woman to use that argument, Mrs. Rames. No man alive would
+have the nerve. You are out for a fight with me. Yes, but I am a
+friend of yours, so I mustn't defend myself.&quot; He shook his head. &quot;The
+House of Commons isn't a nursery, Mrs. Rames. You have got to stand by
+yourself if you're going to stand, neither being kind nor expecting
+kindness. Captain Rames stands--and he stands to fight me. Very
+well--but you can't expect me to prop him up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I quite understand,&quot; said Cynthia in her iciest manner. &quot;I am not at
+all hurt or offended. You mustn't think that, Mr. Devenish,&quot; she bowed
+to him distantly and sailed off with great dignity. But she had humor
+enough to appreciate her discomfiture, and, even as she turned her
+back, her lips were twitching into a smile which she did not mean him
+to see. But ten minutes later in another of the rooms she came face to
+face with him again. He looked at her whimsically, and with a blush
+and a laugh she made friends with him again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Tell me,&quot; he said. &quot;Your husband refused the post with decision after
+the merest pause for thought, though the offer surprised him. I know
+that. Was he troubled about his decision afterward?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not at all,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;He slept perfectly; he ate his dinner
+with absolute contentment.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Now I am afraid of him,&quot; said Mr. Devenish gravely, and he added a
+shrewd saying to explain his fear. &quot;Here's the great difference which
+makes art and politics incompatible. The men who succeed in politics
+are the men who don't worry. The men who succeed in art are the men
+who do. Yes, I am afraid of him now, and if I hit hard, Mrs. Rames,
+bear me no grudge. I shall hit hard because I must.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's heart warmed to him. She laughed joyously.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I'll bear no grudge, Mr. Devenish.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;By the way, why isn't he here to-night? He ought to be.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He was here,&quot; Cynthia replied. &quot;But a telephone message was brought
+to him. Some one had called at our house who was urgent to see him. So
+he went home.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Devenish saw Cynthia into her carriage and she drove back to
+Curzon Street. The visitor was still with Harry Rames in his study
+when she reached home. As she went up to her room she heard his voice
+through the door, and once she waked up from her sleep and in the
+small hours she again heard his voice. He was in the hall taking his
+leave of Harry Rames. Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her
+watch. It was three o'clock in the morning. Drowsily she asked herself
+who this visitor could be, but she was asleep again almost before the
+question was formulated in her mind.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXVIII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_28" href="#div1Ref_28">WIRELESS</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames, however, told her who it was the next morning as they sat
+at breakfast. He had come down late and Cynthia looked at him with
+anxious eyes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You were kept late in your study?&quot; she said, thinking of the critical
+week which lay in front of him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames laid down his Sunday newspaper.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Walter Hemming was here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Hemming?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">To Cynthia the name was quite unfamiliar. There had been no Walter
+Hemming at Bramling.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He was one of my officers on the <i>Perhaps</i>. He has got together some
+money, has bought the old ship and is off to the South.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He takes up your work?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. I never saw a man so enthusiastic. Suppose he reaches the Pole,
+what then?&quot; Harry Rames laughed contemptuously.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Aren't there discoveries to be made, maps to be drawn of that
+continent and something to be learned from the soundings?&quot; asked
+Cynthia, recollecting Harry Rames's own book upon his voyage. He shook
+his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's all trimmings, Cynthia. You have got to surround your
+expedition with a scientific halo. It gets you money, and official
+support, and the countenance of the learned societies. But the man who
+goes south into the Antarctic goes with just one reason--to reach the
+Pole. Why? You can't give a rational answer to that Cynthia. No one
+can. Such men are just driven on by a torment of their souls.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">No stranger watching Harry Rames as he speculated with an indulgent
+smile upon the aimlessness of Walter Hemming's long itinerary could
+have imagined that he had once himself led just such an expedition.
+Even Cynthia found the fact difficult of belief. By so complete a
+dissociation of spirit he was cut off from the race of the wanderers.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Let a man become insane in the East,&quot; he continued, &quot;and he's looked
+upon as a holy man, touched by the finger of God. The fellows who go
+South and North are our holy men of the West.&quot; He turned back again to
+his newspaper, and then uttered an exclamation:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;They have offered that Under Secretaryship to Edgington!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course he'll refuse it,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He has taken it. There's the first defection.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A traitor. I never liked him. He was thinking of himself all the
+while,&quot; said Cynthia, with a heat which made Harry look toward her
+curiously. She had not been wont to side so heartily with him and his
+plans in the days of the contest at Ludsey. He became suddenly aware
+of the remarkable change which had come over her character since that
+date. She who had blamed him with all the enthusiasm of a romantic
+girl because he would not take the high road, now walked the low road
+herself with her eyes concentrated, even more closely than his, upon
+the pathway at her feet. A pang of remorse made him wince.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I shouldn't wonder,&quot; he answered drily, &quot;if Devenish says the same of
+me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But his comment fell upon inattentive ears. Cynthia's eyes had been
+caught by the blank, cheerless look of the street outside. It was a
+morning of black frost. There was no fog, but there was no glint of
+sunlight, either. London lay unburnished, like an ill-kept yacht, and
+the emptiness of Sunday made it dreary beyond all words. The chill of
+that day and the fevers of the week to come caused Cynthia's heart to
+sink. A vision rose before her eyes with unexpected vividness of
+another place where life ran occupied with smoother matters. Not in
+Warwickshire, but over far seas. She thought with a sudden poignancy
+of longing of the Daventry estancia where to-day the golden leagues of
+corn would be rippling to the sun and the cattle searching for the
+rare blades of green in the burnt pastures. Remorse came to her as it
+had come to her husband. So seldom had she thought of that spacious
+and wide place which had lain so close to her adopted father's heart.
+He had prayed her to go thither from time to time. Greatly she wished
+that she were there now.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's a pity Mr. Hemming stayed so late,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, that's all right,&quot; replied Harry. &quot;My amendment can't come on
+before Wednesday. It may not be chosen at all. And there's always the
+possibility that the Land Bill may not be mentioned in the King's
+speech. However, that's not likely. We shall know to-morrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The Land Bill was mentioned as one of the principal measures of the
+session, and Harry handed in at the clerk's table his humble prayer to
+His Majesty that no solution of the land question would be found
+lasting or real which did not provide opportunities for the
+acquisition of small farms as freehold properties. Thursday was set
+aside for the discussion of Rames's amendment, and the fact that it
+was deemed of sufficient importance to take precedence of a host of
+other amendments was in itself regarded as a triumph by his adherents.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Go your own way over it,&quot; Robert Brook advised in an agitated voice.
+&quot;Don't sink your personality in a conventional speech. You must strike
+a special note on Thursday. The third bench below the gangway and the
+corner seat. That will be the best place for you. You command the
+House from there. And we'll be all together around you. It's a great
+thing to have some voices to cheer you at your elbow. Howard Fall will
+speak in support of you. He always gets called.&quot; Robert Brook ceased
+from his stage-managements to whisper with a lengthened face, &quot;By the
+way, have you heard?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What?&quot; asked Harry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That Challoner's weakening. Yes, it's true. The whips have been
+getting at him, I expect. At all events he came to me pleading that
+the amendment need not be pressed to a division if we get anything
+like a friendly reply.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames smiled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We shan't get that. I'll take care not to get it. So you can agree
+with Challoner. We can't afford to let any one break away now. I'll
+speak to him myself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The colonel strenuously disavowed any faintness of heart. &quot;You must go
+to a division, Rames, unless you get a satisfactory reply. That's
+understood. We've got to stick to our guns. I think we all know that.
+Edgington's example isn't one any of us would care to follow. No. All
+my idea was that perhaps the government might be willing to take our
+view, but unable at this moment to say so publicly. However, don't you
+worry about us. Think of your speech, Rames. We look to you to do
+something unusual on Thursday.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry went away to his study and from his documents and blue books
+labored to hammer out some spark of his own which should set fire to
+the Thames or to that portion of it at all events which flows under
+Westminster Bridge. He woke at five o'clock on the Thursday morning,
+and lying in bed repeated his speech word by word to himself. Then he
+dismissed it into the chamber of his memory to wait until it was
+needed. But the knowledge that the day was to be one of supreme
+importance to his career hung over him all that forenoon. The labor
+was over and therefore the strain upon him was the heavier. His nerves
+had free play and he wandered restlessly from room to room, calm
+outwardly except for some spasmodic movements which people
+unacquainted with him would never have remarked, but inwardly a
+creature in torment. He had pitted himself against his own government.
+The enormity of his presumption grew with every lagging hour. Failure
+to-day would cover him with ridicule. He saw himself as one of those
+bubbles ripe for pricking with which the House of Commons is
+perpetually iridescent. Before twelve o'clock he was already looking
+at his watch lest he should be too late to fix before prayers the card
+in the slot at the back of his seat which would reserve his place for
+him during the day.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia, with a covert fear, watched his fever, but said never a word,
+either of comfort or inquiry. It was her part to notice nothing of his
+agitation. She had claimed, when he had asked her to marry him, her
+share in the troubles and the terrors which went before the public
+success. But married life had taught her that much of her share must
+come to her by guesswork, by intuition, by observation, by any means
+except those of question and answer. So she said little and left Harry
+Rames mostly to himself, only coming upon him now and again on some
+indifferent errand, when they would speak for a moment or two, he
+chiefly at random and upon any chance subject which came uppermost in
+his mind. Thus once he said abruptly:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There was a stamp struck. Did you ever see it, Cynthia?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; she answered; &quot;you must show it to me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will; I have a specimen somewhere. I'll look it out.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Do,&quot; said Cynthia in a voice which conveyed that it would be a
+particular joy to her to see that stamp.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But she was quite in the dark about it. She had no notion at all that
+he was speaking of that great territory which he had discovered far to
+the south, beyond the ice-floes, beyond the open blue water. It had no
+inhabitants but the penguins; yet since Rames had spent a winter of
+darkness on its inhospitable shores and had annexed it for Great
+Britain, a penny stamp had been struck and postage duly established.
+The recollection passed in and out of Harry Rames's head, with a
+hundred trivial thoughts and memories. And it was the mark and
+consequence of his agitation that his mind acquired an extraordinary
+and unnatural lucidity so that his thoughts became swift visions of
+things with a small but surprisingly clear definition, as though he
+saw them through a diminishing glass.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">In this supersensitive spirit he walked down Parliament Street at
+half-past one in the afternoon on the eastern side of the road; and
+when he had come opposite to the Horse-Guards, he suddenly stopped.
+Behind the Horse-Guards' Arch and a little to the north rose the great
+red building of the Admiralty where Cynthia and he had been made
+acquainted with one another. But it was not of the first meeting nor
+of the quarrel which ended it that Harry Rames was thinking. He was
+not looking at the main mass of the Admiralty Building, but only at
+the three grayish-blue domes which surmounted it. From these domes
+rose three tall spars at the points of a triangle, each of them rigged
+and dressed with wires to which were attached curious little hoops and
+contrivances of cane like Catherine wheels set for a night of
+fireworks. He was gazing at the mechanism of wireless telegraphy.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He had passed those poles either just here or on the other side of the
+Horse-Guards' Parade in St. James's Park on every day when Parliament
+was in session; and no doubt he had often enough lifted his head and
+seen them with the blind eyes of a man for the landmarks he habitually
+walks by. But this morning his imagination was made acute by a night
+of wakefulness and the tension of his nerves, and he was sensitive to
+all the suggestion of that aerial toyshop of contrivances. He stopped.
+He almost fancied that he heard--so keen was the lucidity of his
+senses--the messages of distant ships, here tumbling on seas of storm
+there upright on seas of sunshine, whizzing homeward to the dim
+smoke-wreathed city, crowding the air. He almost fancied that he saw
+them, the myriad bright spokes of an illimitable wheel which hung
+poised roof-high over all the world. His thoughts were swept quite
+away from England, and the roar of Whitehall died from his ears. He
+saw the big roadsteads of the East and West Indies and anchored
+vessels mirrored in waveless seas. He saw the meetings of ships in the
+narrows of the great trade-routes, barkentine and schooner, tramp and
+liner, and in and out amongst them like the gray shadows of sharks
+seen beneath the water, the long cruisers of the fleet.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He walked on like a man in a dream. He left the busy harbors and the
+great trade-routes behind him. The stately procession of vessels
+receded and now he saw only one--a little, full-rigged, black-hulled
+ship quite alone on a silent sea, the <i>Perhaps</i>, reeling down with all
+her canvas drawing, from her sky-sail to her spanker, reeling down
+with the water breaking from her broad stern bows into the mists of
+the south. The picture was so vivid in his mind that he could see the
+brightness of the binnacle and the wheel spinning in the helmsman's
+hands. He paused again to consider why, and paused with a curious
+sense of comfort. Once before, on the occasion of his maiden speech,
+the vision of a ship had risen before his eyes. But then it was fear
+which had evoked the picture. He had longed to be safely upon its
+bridge doing the thing he knew how to do. Now he had no such fear. He
+was nervous, but he had no desire to run away, he had no terror that
+the necessary words would fail him, he had no longing to stand upon
+the deck of the <i>Perhaps</i>. He was strung up for the contest of the
+afternoon. He walked slowly on and turned in at the gate of Palace
+Yard, and still the <i>Perhaps</i>
+fled southward before his eyes.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIX</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_29" href="#div1Ref_29">IN THE LADIES' GALLERY</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">An hour later Cynthia drove down to the House of Commons, anxious and
+yet expectant of triumph. For on this afternoon Harry Rames should
+particularly excel; the occasion was so confederate with his gifts. In
+debate he was as yet too inexperienced to shine with any brilliancy.
+His success had been made with prepared speeches. He had not as yet
+the art to handle words with such precision that he could express
+vividly in an argument across the floor just what he meant, and no
+more and no less. He was not at ease with his vocabulary when a sudden
+call was made upon it, and his lack of ease became manifest and
+spread, as it always does, discomfort. He was in a word on the way to
+becoming a polished debater but as yet he was at school. This
+afternoon, however, he had not to reply, not to intervene in the
+middle of a discussion; his business was to make the set speech which
+set the debate going. And here he was on his own good ground. He could
+prepare the vivid phrase and, a quality perhaps still more important,
+he could speak it. He had an invaluable gift which had stood him in
+good stead when he had delivered his maiden speech. He was able so to
+deliver a carefully concocted speech as to give the impression that he
+was thinking aloud. He gained his effect by an apt breaking off of
+sentences and a recommencement, by a sudden drop to the homeliest of
+colloquialisms, by a seeming deliberation in the choice of his words,
+so that the picturesque and living sentence, which had been so
+carefully thought out, appeared to leap new-minted from a furnace of
+conviction. He had been shrewd enough to recognize with his own
+unflattering estimation of his powers that an amendment to the address
+provided him especially with a rare opportunity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">When Cynthia reached the ladies' gallery she had some trouble to find
+a place whence she could command the House. The gallery was full,
+since it was the beginning of the session. For the same reason the
+House itself was not. Even though questions were being asked of the
+ministers, a time when the House is seldom less than crowded, there
+were to-day vacant spaces on the benches. The real business of
+Parliament would not begin until the debate on the Address was
+concluded. Members still lingered in the country or the south of
+France. Rames's amendment was considered rather as a dress-parade than
+an engagement. It was not expected that he would press his views to a
+division. At the last moment suave words from a Cabinet Minister would
+no doubt dissuade the recalcitrant as they had done a thousand times
+before.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But his supporters were there clustered close below the gangway on the
+three back benches; Howard Fall two seats away from Harry Rames,
+chirruping gently and rubbing his hands together with delight; beyond
+him the sandy-haired man from the Shires with an eye on Devenish upon
+the treasury bench, and prepared at any moment for the production of
+that threatened pup which the Minister for Agriculture was sure to
+sell them; beyond him again Colonel Challoner and the timid spirits
+all trying to look unconscious and most of them pretending that they
+only occupied these particular seats by the merest accident. But they
+were in full view. Robert Brook had seen to that. They were labelled
+plainly and legibly, and if some of them shirked at the last moment,
+they would still get the credit of having shared in the revolt. In
+front of all were the earnest men who believed the policy of Devenish
+to be dangerous. Behind all under the shadow of the gallery were the
+young bloods, all as convinced as their graver seniors in the front,
+but still youths spoiling for a row and totally unawed by the
+frockcoats of the treasury bench. Their business was to cheer and to
+ejaculate, not to speak. Thus had Robert Brook disposed his forces for
+the battle. He himself sat between Harry Rames and Howard Fall, and,
+looking about him, was proud of the array.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Before questions had come to an end Cynthia had squeezed herself into
+a place on the first row of seats behind the stone grille. She had now
+from her aerie the whole group within her view, or rather, the tops of
+all its particular heads. She waited impatiently. Every now and then a
+sudden fluttering like the waving of little flags ran with a crackle
+of sound along the benches below and showed that another page of the
+question paper had been turned. Questions must now be coming to an end
+surely, she thought in her ignorance. Her mistake was colossal. The
+Speaker had only this moment come to the questions of the Irish
+members, and there was a postmaster in Ballymena who had last week
+committed the hideous crime of refusing a registered letter at two
+minutes to eight by the church-clock. Upon this important matter, by
+question and supplementary question, the Imperial Parliament was
+forced to concentrate its attention till the hands of the clock above
+the door pointed to a quarter to four. Then the Speaker rose, a buzz
+of talk mounted to Cynthia's ears, a few members called upon by name
+came forward from behind the Speaker's chair to the clerk's table with
+private bills, others drifted out into the lobby and the tea-room and
+the smoking-rooms. Then once more the Speaker rose. His canopied chair
+was just beneath Cynthia. She could not see him but she heard his
+voice quite clearly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Captain Rames.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames rose amidst vociferous applause from his own group and some
+cheers from the opposition. The personal question flashed into
+Cynthia's mind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Will he look up toward the gallery in which I am sitting?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He threw his head back. It seemed that he did look up. Cynthia leaned
+forward as though across that distance her eyes could answer and
+sustain him. She forgot that the only light in the gallery was fixed
+against the wall behind her, and that nothing more individual of her
+was visible upon the floor of the chamber than the wide sphere of her
+hat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He was not so nervous, she realized at once, as he usually was.
+Nervousness gave to his voice a peculiar vibration which was not
+without its effect in arresting attention. Cynthia missed it now. But
+the sentences which she already knew by heart followed one behind the
+other spaced and regular as the waves of a calm sea. She forgot that
+little significant omission of manner. She followed the argument as
+she knew it, and it was developed step by step as it had been
+prepared. Harry Rames had spoken for five minutes when a lady on
+Cynthia's left whispered in an audible voice to her neighbor on the
+right:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I thought you told me that Captain Rames was a brilliant speaker.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not I, dear,&quot; came the reply. &quot;These men of action are seldom
+effective in their speeches. I shouldn't expect him to do better than
+he is doing.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia moved indignantly. The poor woman must be off her head. But if
+she did not know what good speaking was, she might at all events hold
+her tongue. She looked down again into the well of the House and
+became perplexed. The benches were actually emptying. The double doors
+opposite to her which led from the chamber to the lobby were swinging
+silently backward and forward with a perpetual motion as the members
+passed out, and the space just in front of those doors where members
+may stand and where she had seen them stand packed on other days while
+Harry spoke, was almost empty. There were just one or two standing
+there, but they were obtaining orders for the galleries from the
+sergeant-at-arms. Then the voice at her elbow spoke again in an accent
+of resignation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He is very, very dull.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia clenched her hands. She would have dearly liked to have boxed
+her neighbor's ears. Was he dull she asked? And the dreadful
+continuous buzz of voices, which always rises when a speaker has lost
+the attention of the House, rose from the benches below to answer her.
+With a sob only half suppressed Cynthia was forced to admit the truth.
+The incredible thing was happening. Harry Rames at the crisis of his
+fortunes was signally failing.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If he fails it's partly my fault,&quot; she thought. &quot;I helped in the
+preparation of the speech.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For it was word for word the prepared speech which he was delivering,
+the very phrases chosen for their simplicity and their force were
+uttered in their due place. Yet the effect was dreary beyond measure.
+Even the ardent spirits beneath the gallery had ceased to applaud;
+they sat back in the shadow, all their enthusiasm quenched. A still
+worse sign, Mr. Devenish had laid his writing pad and his fountain-pen
+on the table in front of him; he took no more notes, he leaned back
+with his arms folded and his eyes closed, a typical picture of a
+Cabinet Minister, a man inured to patience and the bed-fellow of
+boredom.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why is Harry failing?&quot; Cynthia asked of herself despairingly. And the
+answer came from her neighbor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You know, my dear, I don't believe that what he's saying is nonsense
+if one only had the necessary concentration to follow it. But his
+delivery's so bad that he makes attention impossible.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Again Cynthia was constrained to admit the criticism. The chosen
+sentences were uttered, but no conviction winged them. Harry's gifts
+of speech were that afternoon quite hidden. He was as one delivering a
+recitation which by constant repetition had become at once meaningless
+and automatic. His voice trailed away into lassitude. There was no
+spirit behind any word.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The buzz of conversation increased, a protesting voice called &quot;Order,
+order,&quot; and then Harry faltered and stopped, stopped quite noticeably.
+A general cheer rose to encourage him--for the House of Commons can be
+generous, especially to those who are dropping out of the race--and
+twisting his hands together suddenly, almost with the air of a man
+waking from a dream, Harry Rames staggered on again. Cynthia's heart
+went out to him in a rush of pity. What he must be suffering! He had
+staked so much upon this afternoon. So much had been expected of him.
+Cynthia's thoughts went back to the week at Bramling. With what high
+hopes that company had counted upon his leadership!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If he would only finish!&quot; she prayed. She looked upon him as a man in
+torment. She leaned her elbows on the rail in front of her, closed her
+ears with her thumbs and shut her eyes. She took at once with the
+exaggeration of her years the blackest view.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He has attacked his own government and frightened no one. His career
+will be affected, perhaps ruined. A really bad mistake may take a man
+years to overcome in the House of Commons. Who was it said that? Mr.
+Smale. This is a really bad mistake. The debate itself may collapse.
+That would mean ruin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">So she reasoned until in a clap the truth of the mistake came upon
+her, its cause, its meaning.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I ought to have foreseen his failure,&quot; she murmured. &quot;It was bound to
+come. Sooner or later it was bound to come. For his heart is never in
+the theme but always in the career.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She might indeed have looked upon it as a retribution, a just
+retribution.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And a year ago I should so have looked upon it,&quot; she reflected, and
+sat back in her seat amazed at the change which two years had wrought
+in her. The magnitude of it was now for the first time revealed to
+her. Success following success, each in its anticipated sequence, had
+sealed up from her the knowledge of herself. It had needed the failure
+to reveal it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She leaned back in a confusion of her emotions. She heard no longer
+any word of the debate. For a little while the House of Commons
+vanished and was not. She glanced swiftly backward across the months
+of her married life and detected one by one the indications of the
+change. Gradually she had ceased to clamor for ideas, she had come to
+look only at the man and she had desired him to tower above his
+fellows, because that was his desire. And the reason for the change?
+She jumped to it with her heart on fire. She loved him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But while she thus began to make her account with herself a
+perfunctory cheer and the Speaker's distinct pronouncement of another
+name broke in upon her reckoning. The voice of her neighbor brought
+her back to earth.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mr. Howard Fall. I hear he's quite a favorite speaker.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The turn of the words recalled irrelevantly to Cynthia Harry's
+indignant story of the elector who had told him that he was well
+patronized in Ludsey. The recollection brought a smile to her face.
+But the smile faded as her anxieties came home to her. Would the
+debate collapse?</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Howard Fall was already upon his legs seconding the amendment; and in
+a little while she saw members enter through the doors, stand for a
+moment at the bar and then as though here was matter worthy of their
+attention, slip into places upon the seats. Cynthia's first feeling
+was one of relief. Yes, the House was undoubtedly filling up. Then, as
+a burst of laughter followed upon one of Fall's sallies against
+Devenish, a sharp pang of jealousy pierced her. The lady at her elbow
+incensed her by a laugh of approval--a ridiculous snigger Cynthia
+termed it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, now <i>he's</i>
+really brilliant,&quot; she said, and Cynthia had to hold
+herself in, so impelled was she to explain to the lady exactly what
+she thought of her judgment and her manners and her family and of
+everything which appertained to her. But she did not. She remained
+outwardly calm, though inwardly she seethed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mrs. Rames,&quot; a quiet voice called to her from behind. She turned and
+saw Robert Brook. She left her seat and went to him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What's the matter?&quot; she asked anxiously, her heart leaping with a
+fear of calamity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Nothing,&quot; Brook reassured her. &quot;Your husband asked me to look after
+you. He can't well leave the House.&quot; Another burst of laughter
+intermingled with applause rose up to them. Devenish had petulantly
+interrupted Howard Fall, and interruptions Howard Fall thrived upon.
+&quot;Isn't he in splendid form?&quot; cried Brook with enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No doubt,&quot; said Cynthia, eyeing him coldly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Brook looked at her quickly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Perhaps you would like some tea Mrs. Rames. Shall we go? The debate
+will tail off for a bit after Fall has finished.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He led the way to the lift. Cynthia hurried after him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why?&quot; she cried. &quot;And what do you mean by tailing off?&quot; There was an
+impatience in her voice with which Brook was unfamiliar. &quot;Do you mean
+that the debate will collapse?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, no,&quot; he replied. &quot;But the big-wigs won't speak until later. The
+subject is much too important to drop for want of argument. Indeed,
+there are enough men eager to speak to carry the debate well over
+to-morrow, if that were possible.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They came out from the lift and walked down the long corridor toward
+the lobby between the rows of books protected by their frames of gilt
+wire. Robert Brook continued cheerfully:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Rames, to be sure, wasn't at his best in opening the debate. But no
+man is always at his best. There's not a soul in the House who doesn't
+know that.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then this afternoon won't put him back?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why should it? It was he who had the shrewdness to recognize the
+opportunity which this question affords, and to select this particular
+line of attack. He engineered the whole movement. That's known. And if
+he carries his own people into the division lobby with him, and the
+opposition into the bargain, he will have established a fine
+reputation for Parliamentary capacity. That counts, Mrs. Rames, take
+the word-of an old hand. That counts here more than speech-making.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Does it?&quot; cried Cynthia, smiles breaking through the tragic gloom of
+her countenance. But the smiles vanished. She shook her head
+wistfully. &quot;You are merely saying this because you see that I am
+troubled.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But it's none the less true. This House has a corporate life which is
+rather difficult for those who are not members of it to understand.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Brook certainly seemed very well contented. Cynthia, however,
+was not satisfied.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But will he carry his people with him into the division lobby--now?&quot;
+she asked. &quot;Won't they a little have lost faith?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not a bit. You see Howard Fall has quite saved the situation,&quot; Brook
+replied cheerily, and Cynthia suddenly stepped on ahead. The name of
+Howard Fall was beginning to exasperate her. She stopped, however, as
+they came into the round hall of the lobby.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;On the whole,&quot; she said, with the loftiest impartiality, &quot;I liked my
+husband's speech a good deal better than I did Mr. Howard Fall's.
+Perhaps on a second thought you will too, Mr. Brook.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She surveyed him steadily with a pair of cold blue eyes, and then her
+face suddenly dimpled to a smile of appeal.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You really mean that I can't see him?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The man who starts a discussion must hear it out. That's a sound old
+rule, and if it's not so religiously kept as it used to be, the House
+of Commons is the worse.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I can send him a little note at all events.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Certainly. Write it and I'll give it to a messenger.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A messenger!&quot; said Cynthia doubtfully. &quot;Will it be sure to reach him?
+It's rather important.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Brook smiled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well. I'll take it in myself, Mrs. Rames.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia took a little diary from the bag she carried, tore out a leaf,
+scribbled hastily:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You did splendidly. Everybody thinks so. Cynthia;&quot; and having calmly
+perpetrated that obvious untruth, she twisted up her message and
+handed it to Brook. The sandy-haired man from the Shires was drifting
+about the lobby. Brook called to him. &quot;Look after Mrs. Rames for a
+moment, will you?&quot; he said, and hurried off through the swing-doors.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It seemed a very short time to Cynthia before he came back, though in
+that short time she had not so much as addressed a word to her
+companion. She looked at Robert Brook's hands. They were empty and a
+shadow passed over her face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Did you give it him?&quot; she asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I passed it along the bench and saw that it reached him. I didn't
+wait for him to open it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The shadow passed from Cynthia. She was disappointed now, but not
+hurt; and in a second the disappointment passed too. This was not the
+day on which small things should be allowed to sting.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Now you'll have some tea,&quot; said Brook.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, I don't think I will stay any longer to-day, Mr. Brook,&quot; she
+replied. Now that her fears were dispersed she was in a hurry to get
+away and be alone with her new secret. &quot;I am keeping you from the
+House, and you are our Whip, aren't you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The flattery did not compensate Mr. Brook for his loss. The privilege
+of parading a pretty and well-dressed woman before the envious eyes of
+less fortunate colleagues is one which no member of Parliament, not
+even its sedatest representative of non-conformity, would forego
+without regret; and in a remote philandering way, Robert Brook was a
+kind of lady's man. Cynthia was wearing a trim coat and skirt of dark
+velvet, and from a coil of fur about her throat her face rose like a
+summer flower, and was framed in the wide border of her blue hat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My duties are light just now,&quot; he protested, but Cynthia lifted up
+her hands in her great muff appealingly and coaxed him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You will let me go now, Mr. Brook, won't you?&quot; Her eyes besought his
+permission as though without it she could not go, and Mr. Brook was
+duly reduced to subservience.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Good-by,&quot; said Cynthia, and she swung off, the long ends of her stole
+swinging about her hips, and her step indescribably light. Robert
+Brook watched her pass down the corridor to the rails where the
+visitors waited, and sighed in a melancholy fashion. It seemed to him
+for the moment contemptible to be a bachelor. For there was something
+strangely appealing about Cynthia, to-day--a winsomeness, a warmth.
+She seemed all a-quiver with youth. A swift variety of moods swept
+across her face in lights and shadows, and gave to her vitality. Her
+feet moved with a dancing buoyancy. All that Robert Brook felt the
+sandy-haired man from the Shires summarized in one reflective
+sentence:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I should like to kiss that girl,&quot; he said. &quot;It would do me a great
+deal of good.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXX</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_30" href="#div1Ref_30">THE LETTER</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia ran down the broad flight of steps into Westminster Hall, and
+skimmed across the historic flags of the ancient building without a
+pause. What at this moment was Charles the First to her, or even Mr.
+Gladstone? She came out into Palace Yard and drove home through the
+dusk just as the lamps in the shop-windows were beginning to bring
+some gleams of cheerfulness into the black February streets. She sat
+back in the corner of her car with her muff tightly held against her
+breast as though to cherish close some knowledge treasured there. When
+she reached her house she let herself in with her key and walked with
+secret steps into Harry's study. Once there she locked the door and
+with the firelight dancing upon the walls to keep her company, she sat
+down to make her reckoning with herself. But in truth the reckoning
+was already made.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The great bargain, on her side at all events, was a bargain no more,
+could never again be a bargain. A veritable revolution had taken place
+in her that afternoon. She knew it from the depth of her sympathy with
+Harry in his failure--above all from the surprising sharpness of her
+disappointment when Robert Brook had returned with no answer to her
+scribbled message.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For the failure as a factor in their fortunes she cared not a straw.
+Indeed, she welcomed it, since it was that which had wakened her. She
+had believed herself to be defective in the quality of passion, and
+her sense of the defect had hurt her like a bitter humiliation; she
+had envied wistfully the other women who possessed passion, even the
+wantons who flaunted it. Now the humiliation was gone. She rejoiced.
+She leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed and sailed over
+magical seas which were joyous and golden. She loved. She was like
+some lady of old Italy lit to swift flame by the first kiss from her
+lover's lips. Only it was a trivial irony in closer keeping with our
+modern days that what had kindled her who had demanded ideas, was a
+failure due to nothing but the lack of them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia rejoiced; for she loved. That pain and disappointment were in
+store for her she did not doubt. But she ran forward to meet the pain.
+She was young. Sooner all the pain in the world than the placidity of
+years without fire or inspiration. She recognized frankly that though
+upon her side the bargain was no longer any bargain at all, it still
+was just a bargain to her husband. A sign had been given to her that
+afternoon, a little sign, yet great in its significance. She had
+pleaded to herself as she sat in the ladies' gallery that when Harry
+rose, and just before he began to speak, he had looked up to where she
+sat, as though he were conscious of her presence, as though he drew
+strength from it. But he had not looked up. Even at the time she had
+known that he had not.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I merely pretended to myself that he had,&quot; she frankly admitted now.
+&quot;His movement was nothing more than the natural muscular action of a
+man bracing himself for an effort.&quot; She herself, Cynthia, had not
+been, she felt sure, at that moment, in the remotest of his thoughts.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If Harry had changed toward me as I have toward him,&quot; she argued, &quot;he
+would have looked up, not only because he wanted to, but because he
+would have remembered what I had said to him on that very point the
+afternoon when he asked me to marry him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But in spite of her conviction she rejoiced. Some kinship she could
+claim with Juliet. For all her longing was to give and to give, and
+still to give. She had sought desperately for color in her life.
+She had welcomed politics in the hunt for it. She had it now and to
+spare--enough to daub the world. The handle of the door was tried and
+through the panels her astonished maid told her the hour. Cynthia
+sprang up and unlocked it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I shall dine at home to-night,&quot; she said. &quot;The cook must get me some
+dinner, anything.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The maid reminded Cynthia that she had arranged to dine with some
+friends and visit a theatre. &quot;I know,&quot; said Cynthia. She had made the
+plan so that she might not spend in loneliness the anxious hours of
+this evening. But since she had made the plan the world had changed
+its hues.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You must telephone and say that I can't come,&quot; said Cynthia,
+remorselessly, as she ran upstairs.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Whilst she dressed she considered what she should do with this
+wonderful evening. She meant to spend it alone--yes, but that did not
+quite content her. Somehow it should be made memorable. Something she
+must do which, but for this day of days, she never would have done.
+Something which must not merely mark it as a harbor boom marks a turn
+of the channel, but must be the definite consequence of it. Cynthia,
+in a word, went down to her solitary dinner much more akin than she
+had ever been since to the girl who, eager for life with the glorious
+eagerness of youth, had run down the stairs on the morning of her
+seventeenth birthday into the dining-room of the Daventry estancia.
+Half-way through dinner the thing to do, in order fitly to commemorate
+the day, came to her in a burst of light.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She went back to Harry's study and sitting at his writing-table,
+composed with great care a letter of many pages. The hours passed as
+she wrote and rewrote, and glancing at the clock before the end was
+reached, she saw that it was already past eleven. Then she hurried.
+The division at this moment was being taken. Within the hour Harry
+would have returned; and indeed she had only just folded her letter in
+its envelope when his step sounded in the hall.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She heard the door open and shut. He was in the room. But she kept her
+head bowed over her letter lest her face should betray her over much.
+Nor for a moment did she speak, since she did not quite trust her
+voice. It was Harry who spoke first.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have come back? I did not expect you so soon.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I never went. I stayed at home.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh! You are not ill, Cynthia?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No. But I felt that I had been rather hard and cruel----&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes, I can be.&quot; Cynthia was stamping down her envelope with an
+elaboration of care which almost suggested that it was never meant to
+be opened. &quot;I was in this case. So I stayed at home and wrote a letter
+to make amends. I should very much like it to be posted to-night,
+Harry. The servants have all gone to bed. I wonder if you----&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course. You are afraid that you might change your mind about it in
+the morning.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not at all,&quot; replied Cynthia with a laugh. Harry Rames walked over to
+the table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Give it to me, Cynthia,&quot; he said; and at last Cynthia raised her head
+and rather shyly her eyes sought his face. At his first glance she
+stood up quickly and she did not give him her letter. Harry Rames was
+standing, his face white and drawn and harassed. He had been answering
+her vaguely, as though the words came from him by reflex action rather
+than through a comprehension of what she said. For a moment Cynthia
+was afraid to speak. The beating of her heart was painful. Then she
+laid her hand upon his arm.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Something has happened, Harry?&quot; she faltered.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Something terrible,&quot; he replied, and walking to the fire he warmed
+his hands at the blaze like one smitten with a chill.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The debate collapsed? Your people didn't follow you into the lobby?
+Oh, Harry!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She went to his side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No. That's not the trouble. We did better in the division than I had
+anticipated. Of course we had the labor party solid against us. But
+that we had reckoned on. On the other hand, some of the Irish members
+came along with us, and it had been expected that they would all
+abstain. No, we ran the government majority down to thirty-one.
+Devenish is shaken, I can tell you. He passed me after the division
+was over, without a word and white with passion. No, Cynthia, we did
+very well.&quot; He moved away from the fire and sat down in the chair at
+his writing-table. &quot;I took all my people into the Division Lobby with
+me--except one.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia put out a hand and steadied herself against the mantel-piece.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Except one?&quot; She turned toward him, her face troubled, her eyes most
+wistful. &quot;One failed you--one alone. Oh, Harry, it wasn't Colonel
+Challoner?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But though she asked the question, she did not need the answer. Her
+foreboding made her sure of it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It was,&quot; replied Harry, and Cynthia turned again to the fire. A
+little sob, half-checked, burst from her. Then she tore the letter
+which she had been at such great pains to write, across and again
+across, and dropped the fragments into the fire.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The Challoners are no good,&quot; she said, in a voice curiously distinct
+and hard.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Don't say that, Cynthia,&quot; Harry Rames answered gently.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I do say it. I ought to know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The words were uttered, and only then she realized what she had said.
+She looked quickly toward her husband, but he gave to her cry no
+particular significance. His brain seemed to register her words, not
+to comprehend them. Cynthia was conscious of a great relief. Loud at
+her heart rose a hope, a prayer that in all things, all qualities,
+even to tricks of manner, she was her mother's child, and had nothing
+of her father. Never would she acknowledge her relationship with that
+family. Never would she admit her name. Her first resolve and instinct
+had been right. The Challoners were no good.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, I should not say that, Cynthia,&quot; Raines repeated. &quot;He's dead.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia turned swiftly upon the word. Her dress rustled as she turned,
+and when that sound ceased there was absolute silence in the room.
+Cynthia stood by the mantel-shelf still as stone. Her face was white,
+and a look of awe overspread it. With her lips parted and her eyes
+troubled and wondering she watched her husband. Harry Rames sat with a
+large silver paper-knife in his hands, looking absently straight in
+front of him. And in a little while he broke the silence by absently
+tapping with the blade of the paper-knife upon his blotting-pad. The
+sound roused Cynthia. She moved to a low chair close to the
+writing-table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Dead? Harry, I don't quite understand.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The tapping ceased.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;His heart was wrong. He died in the Division Lobby--actually while
+the division was being taken.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;In the Division Lobby? But you said you didn't take him with you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I didn't. He was in the Government Lobby.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's face contracted with pain. A low moan burst from her. &quot;He
+was actually voting against you!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry added reluctantly:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Our revolt killed him.&quot; Cynthia sat down in the chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Tell me everything, will you, Harry?&quot; she entreated, and thus the
+story was told her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The Whips got at Challoner. You know Hamlin, don't you? But you don't
+know his methods, Cynthia. He doesn't bully you if you revolt. He
+doesn't threaten. He takes you affectionately by the arm and makes you
+feel a beast. His round brown eyes survey you with a gentle and
+wistful regret. You leave him, convinced that he personally will be
+dreadfully hurt if you vote against the government. You are glad to be
+rid of him as you are glad to be rid of a man whom you have injured;
+and within the hour he is at your elbow again, pursuing the same
+insidious, amicable strategy. That's how he worked on Challoner, and
+Challoner was not the man either to withstand him, or to tell us
+boldly that he was going to--&quot;--&quot;rat&quot; was on the tip of his tongue,
+but Rames caught the word back and substituted &quot;change his mind.&quot; &quot;So,
+do you see, he stayed with us to the last minute. It was arranged that
+the division should be taken at eleven. As soon as the Speaker rose to
+put the question, Challoner, who had been standing at the bar of the
+House slipped out through the lobby and down the stairs to a little
+smoking-room on the opposite side of the passage to the big strangers'
+smoking-room. That room is very often quite deserted. Few people,
+indeed, use it at any time. In a corner of that room he sat behind a
+newspaper all of the ten minutes during which the division bells were
+ringing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;To avoid meeting any of you?&quot; asked Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I suppose so.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But how do you know he was there?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He was seen by one or two of the Irish members who did not intend to
+vote at all. They went into the room while the bells were ringing and
+saw him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I understand.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;As soon as the bells stopped, as soon, in a word, as he was quite
+certain that we should be all in our lobby, he started up quickly.
+There is just a little time between the moment when the bells cease
+ringing and the moment when the lobby doors are locked. But it is only
+a little time. If you want to vote you have to hurry. Challoner was a
+good distance away, and he had a flight of stairs to ascend. He
+hurried, he ran; I expect, too, that he was agitated. His courage had
+failed him. He must prove his loyalty to his official leaders at all
+costs. He reached the lobby in plenty of time. Monro, you remember
+him, the Scotchman? He was at Bramling.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He saw Challoner. He was standing by the entrance door of our lobby.
+We were in the 'No' Lobby, for the question we had to vote upon was
+that the original words of the Address 'stand part,' and to enter the
+'Aye' Lobby a man must pass our entrance door and traverse the House.
+Monro saw Challoner hurry past the door, and thinking that he had
+mistaken our lobby and was under the impression that the question he
+had to vote upon was that the amendment be substituted--in which case,
+of course, we should all have been in the 'Aye' Lobby--he called to
+the Colonel. Challoner didn't hear, or wouldn't hear. He hurried on,
+and once inside the Government Lobby, collapsed onto the bench which
+runs along the sides. He died within a couple of minutes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames ceased. The shock of this swift calamity had driven from
+Cynthia's thoughts all her indignation against the Challoners. She
+pictured to herself that old, unhappy, disappointed man, dropping at
+last between the shafts, the pack-horse of politics. Not even the
+insignificance of an Under Secretaryship had come to requite him for
+his tedious years of service. And it never could have fallen to him.
+That she recognized. Again the silence was broken by the tap-tap of
+the paper-knife upon the blotting-pad.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's a Juggernaut, that House, isn't it? You said that once,
+Cynthia,&quot; said Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I did? I don't remember.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was perplexed by his distress. Sensibility was not to be
+counted amongst his qualities. Yet he sat there with trouble heavy
+upon him, and every now and then a shiver of the shoulders, a shiver
+of repugnance.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;This has shocked you terribly, Harry,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. I have known death before now, but never death without any
+dignity. That's what I find terrible.&quot; He paused for a moment and then
+said in a low and distinct voice:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am to blame for it, Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You?&quot; she exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. I ought to have left him alone. I ought never to have taken
+advantage of his disappointments. I dragged him into the revolt to
+serve myself--yes, that's the truth, Cynthia. We both know it. I
+dragged him in without giving him and his character a thought. He was
+the real party hack. To him the men upon the treasury bench were as
+gods walking the earth. A nod from one of them in a passage, a
+hand-shake in a drawing-room, a little private conversation with a
+Cabinet Minister in the Division Lobby--that was the kind of food
+which sustained him through how many years! And he was a good cavalry
+officer once, I am told.&quot; Harry Rames suddenly swung round toward his
+wife. &quot;That's strange, isn't it? Very strange. He must have come into
+the House of Commons twenty years ago a very different man. But I
+suppose the walls closed round him and crushed the vitality out of
+him. You had a phrase about such men--the prisoners of the House of
+Commons. He was one of them. I did a cruel thing when I enlisted him.
+For I might have known that he must desert. I am to blame for his
+death.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; Cynthia protested.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Even if you might have known that he must desert, you couldn't have
+foreseen that he would hide from you till the last moment.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's just what he would do.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Even so, you didn't know, Harry, that he had heart disease.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Would it have made any difference to me if I had?&quot; And that question
+silenced Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames fell again to tapping with his paper-knife upon the
+blotting-pad. He tapped aimlessly, the silver handle flashing in the
+light, the ivory blade striking and resounding. But gradually an
+intention seemed to become audible in his tapping. The taps came
+quickly, three or four together, then were spaced, then streamed
+swiftly again like sparks from an anvil. The noise began to jar on
+Cynthia's nerves.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Don't do that, Harry, please,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I won't,&quot; said he, throwing down the paper-knife.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You might have been sending a telegram.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;By wireless, eh?&quot; he said with a smile, and then a curious look came
+into his face. &quot;I was,&quot; he said slowly. Cynthia drew back in her chair
+with a queer feeling of uneasiness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not to--?&quot; she began, and stopped short of the name. She glanced
+furtively around the room. She was suddenly chilled.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;To Challoner? No,&quot; he answered. He had hardly been aware of what he
+was doing, and he wondered now why the idea to do it had thus
+irrelevantly entered his head. No doubt an instinctive desire to get
+relief from the obsession of the sordid tragedy of Challoner's death
+had prompted him. But, whatever the cause, he had been tapping out,
+in accordance with the Morse code, a message to the little, black,
+full-rigged ship far away upon Southern seas.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He sprang up from his chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There's a letter you wanted me to post, Cynthia. I had forgotten it.
+Give it to me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It dropped into the fire,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry looked into the fire; a torn fragment or two had fallen into the
+grate.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I dropped it into the fire,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;For I had already changed
+my mind about it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The long letter which she had torn up at the first news of Colonel
+Challoner's defection, the letter which was to commemorate that
+evening, had been written to Colonel Challoner, and admitted that she
+was the daughter of his son.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXI</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_31" href="#div1Ref_31">M. POIZAT AGAIN</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There is a man at the door, madam. He says that he is a Ludsey man,
+and that he worked for Captain Rames during the election.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was midday. Cynthia had her hat on and was at the moment buttoning
+her gloves.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Tell him that Captain Rames is at the House of Commons now, and that
+he will be back at home by five,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The man asked for you,&quot; said the footman.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;For me? Did he give a name?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No. But he said that you would know him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well, Howard. Show him in.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Visitors who would not give their names but claimed to be citizens of
+Ludsey were not infrequent while Parliament was in session. They
+usually came with the same request--the loan of their fare home, where
+they had relations to look after them; and they were usually
+impostors, who had not so much as seen the spire of St. Anne's Church.
+But, on the other hand, there was always a possibility that the case
+might be genuine, and Cynthia made it a rule to see them. She had
+already got her purse out of her bag when the door was opened. But she
+dropped it when she saw her visitor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;M. Poizat,&quot; she cried, and she held out her hand to him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">M. Poizat, however, did not take it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You have been kept waiting. You should have sent in your name.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">M. Poizat shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Would you have received me if I had, Mrs. Rames?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are very kind.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked at him with a closer scrutiny. Certainly the M. Poizat
+who confronted her was the merest shadow of the sprightly inventor of
+Lungatine. The elasticity had gone from his wonderful legs. No longer
+he danced when he walked. His arms hung loose at his side, and the
+potency of his elixir had quite failed him. He was now a really old,
+small man. Indeed, he seemed to have diminished in stature and to have
+shrivelled in breadth; and his eyes were red, as though he had lately
+wept. Thus much had been taken from him. Yet something had been added,
+the dignity of a man whom calamity has overtaken.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why am I very kind to receive you?&quot; Cynthia asked gently.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">M. Poizat stared at her incredulously.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then you do not know what has happened to me?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No! Sit down and tell me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But M. Poizat remained standing.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have no longer a friend in the world. I have no longer a house. I
+have no longer a wife. All is gone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't understand.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah, I know. Ladies do not read their newspapers very carefully. If
+the men, too, were like you! But all the same you will have heard of a
+case which a few days ago was making a great stir in Paris--the Jobert
+case.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But you have not followed it in detail.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The intricacies of that gigantic case of fraud were indeed difficult
+to follow even for those who gave to it their attention. Nor did
+Poizat do more than give to Cynthia a necessary outline. Monsieur and
+Madame Jobert, the latter being the protagonist of the conspiracy, had
+borrowed over a course of years immense sums of money on the strength
+of securities which were supposed to exist in a sealed safe. The case
+could not be opened since a fictitious action by claimants, whom
+Madame Jobert had invented, was perpetually being deferred in the
+courts of law. At the last, however, the creditors of the Joberts had
+obtained authority to break the seals, and a safe which was absolutely
+empty was exposed. The Joberts alleged a theft, but they were arrested
+and prosecuted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You see, Mrs. Rames, the one hope of the Joberts upon their trial was
+to establish the existence of a great sum of money which the
+securities supposed to be stolen could represent. What was this money?
+How was it come by? And when? Who bequeathed it? Madame Jobert was
+examined upon these questions by the juge d'instruction week after
+week, during a whole year. Lie after lie she told. Each explanation
+she put forward was sifted and proved a lie. At last she cried:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;'It is true. I have lied. I do not wish France to remember what she
+should forget. I have not told my secret. But, if I must, I will. The
+great fortune exists. I will tell its origin when I am on my trial;
+but I warn you, Monsieur le Juge, the revelation will convulse France
+from the Mediterranean to the Channel.' That is what she said. No one
+believed her. In Paris, indeed, they had already begun to laugh.
+Almost they loved her. She was a criminal but magnificent in her
+crime.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;'La Grande Clothilde,' they named her. What <i>blague</i>
+would she have
+ready for the Cour d'Assizes? No one was alarmed, least of all I, a
+little restaurant-keeper in a city of the Midlands. Yet this last lie
+of hers ruined me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ruined you?&quot; cried Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes; it is strange, is it not? A great trial like that in Paris, a
+woman in the dock snatching at any defence or delay; she tells a story
+so ridiculous in its application that it sets all Paris in a delighted
+roar of laughter; and that story which could not save her, drags into
+the light a little man of no importance, who has been hiding his head
+in a foreign country for thirty years.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, but if the story is a lie?&quot; cried Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Its application was the lie. It did not explain that fictitious
+fortune of the Joberts. But the story itself was true,&quot; said M.
+Poizat. He sat down in a chair in a queer, huddled attitude, with his
+knees and his feet together, his hands joined upon his knees and his
+chin sunk upon his breast. He seemed to have composed himself to be
+hit at. &quot;I am amazed,&quot; he said. &quot;It seems that one has never quite
+finished with anything one has done until one is dead. Here is a part
+of my life which I had buried. Then come thirty years, each one adding
+its layer of oblivion. Then comes La Grande Clothilde, who has never
+seen me, nor been seen by me. Look! I was laughing with everybody
+else. We take in the <i>Petit Parisien</i>. I read the trial in the
+evening, day by day, to my wife. We both amused ourselves by wondering
+what will be the great secret which La Grande Clothilde has to reveal.
+Then comes the day of the revelation, and in Ludsey my newspaper falls
+from my hands and my wife, who has been my wife for twenty years,
+looks upon me as a stranger.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's face changed. The gentleness and the pity vanished. She drew
+in her breath sharply as though alarm knocked at her heart.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Something out of your past life has come alive, quite unexpectedly
+after all these years, and has snatched you back,&quot; she said slowly, as
+if she were comparing the words with others she had once heard spoken.
+&quot;Quick! Tell me!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She bent forward with her eyes intent upon M. Poizat's face, and fear
+growing in them more and more visibly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You remember, Mrs. Rames, the night before the election at Ludsey.
+You were all having supper in the hotel after the meeting. I came in
+and was asked by Captain Rames to join you. There was a man who
+claimed to know me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, yes, Colonel Challoner,&quot; cried Cynthia, with a rising
+excitement. She remembered that supper-room at Ludsey, and the queer
+moment of sensation when Colonel Challoner, gaunt and menacing, had
+recollected, and M. Poizat, in a panic, had denied the recollection.
+Some vague notion, too, of the defence which Clothilde Jobert had made
+a week ago returned to her. She began dimly to understand the disaster
+which had overtaken her little visitor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He remembered that he had seen you--Wait! Now I have it-- In a long
+corridor, in Metz, in '71.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">M. Poizat nodded.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The corridor of the Arsenal. Colonel Challoner--it's so you call
+him?--he was right. More than once I went along that corridor. I went
+to see the Marshal Bazaine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; replied Cynthia. &quot;And Madame Jobert accounted for the origin of
+this great sum of money which the prosecution declared to have no
+existence, by stating that it was the price paid to Bazaine by the
+Germans for the betrayal of Metz.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That is so. No such sum of money came that way into Clothilde
+Jobert's hands. But details of her story were true.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;For instance?&quot; asked Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That a small farmer, a Frenchman on the outskirts of Metz, called
+Henri Poizat, was the go-between in the negotiations between the
+Germans and Bazaine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That was true?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. I am Henri Poizat. With the money I was paid I came to Ludsey
+and opened my little restaurant. I did well. I returned to France and
+married, and brought my wife back. Then suddenly this news! My wife is
+of Lorraine. Her father was of those sturdy ones who would not live
+under the German rule, but left their homes in Lorraine and began anew
+in France. Conceive to yourself how she looked at me when she read
+that statement in the paper, and I could not deny it. She has gone
+back to her own people. I have had a letter from her brother. I am not
+to come near them. In Ludsey I was pointed at in the streets as the
+man who sold his country. My restaurant suffered. My trade began to
+vanish. I sold it, goodwill and all, two days ago. As I say, I have no
+longer any house.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He buried his face in his hands. Cynthia watched him uncomfortably.
+She could not blame the wife. Rather she applauded her. She could find
+no sincere words of comfort for M. Poizat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think you had better come back at five,&quot; she said, &quot;and tell my
+husband your story.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But of course he knows it already,&quot; cried M. Poizat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia shook her head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He would have spoken of it to me if he had.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">M. Poizat, however, was equally positive.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But it is in the Ludsey newspapers. Captain Rames takes them in, and
+reads them of course.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then he must know. Such news is not tucked away in the corner of a
+local paper. No, indeed. It was printed on the first page.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Still you had better see him,&quot; said Cynthia. She rose as she spoke,
+and she spoke a trifle absently, as though her thoughts had been
+suddenly diverted from the consideration of M. Poizat's calamity.
+&quot;Come back at five. He will advise you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She rang the bell. She was in a hurry now to get rid of the little
+Frenchman. Something much more important to her had occurred than
+the revelations of La Grande Clothilde. Doubts had flashed into her
+mind--doubts which she was in torture to resolve. As soon as Poizat's
+back was turned she went quickly into her husband's study. Upon a
+side-table, carelessly heaped, with their wrappers still gummed about
+them, she counted a dozen of the local papers of Ludsey. They took two
+a week, one of each political complexion. It was six weeks then since
+Harry Rames had taken the trouble to glance at a newspaper from his
+own constituency.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She stripped off the wrappers to make sure. Then she turned to the
+calendar upon the top of his writing-table. Six weeks just took her
+back to the date when Harry Rames had emptied the House with a speech,
+and had brought home the tragic news of Colonel Challoner's death.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry's omission on the surface was trivial enough. But to Cynthia it
+was significant and disquieting. For it was not in accordance with the
+deliberate prudence which used to mark the conduct of his political
+career. To nurse the constituency, to be familiar with its events and
+its needs, to respond to it, this had been his first care. Now for six
+weeks he neglected even to inform himself about it. And the omission
+did not stand alone.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He will be home at five,&quot; Cynthia argued, &quot;he who made it a rule to
+sit in the House however dull the course of public business.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Often of late he had left the House as soon as questions were over and
+the usual vote taken upon the suspension of the eleven-o'clock rule,
+and had only returned thither upon the stroke of eleven on the chance
+of coming in for a division. Cynthia remembered, too, how indifferent
+he had been, on the day after he had made his failure, to the
+criticisms which the failure had evoked. Mr. Devenish had put in some
+biting and effective work in his reply, which should have been gall
+and wormwood to the ambitious Harry Rames. But he had not seemed to
+mind. The newspapers which supported the Government too had not spared
+him. Conceit and presumption were the least of his failings. The <i>Piccadilly
+News</i>
+had published a cartoon of him as Humpty Dumpty. Yet
+he had remained unmoved, though Cynthia had cried her eyes red over
+the castigation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Certainly some change had come over him, she reflected, and once more
+she was conscious of fear and a sinking heart. For the story which she
+had heard this morning from M. Poizat linked itself up in her mind
+with the warning of Mr. Benoliel. Poizat's history was not quite an
+illustration of the warning. That she recognized. Mr. Benoliel had
+bidden her beware of latent tendencies of character, latent cravings
+and ambitions, taking their origin from the years in which she had had
+no share. It was a definite act which had sprung into being in the
+case of M. Poizat. Still Poizat's disaster was a proof of the clutch
+of finished things, and of the continuity of life; was an instance
+that to turn over the new page and begin to write afresh as she and
+Harry Rames had proposed to do, is beyond man's reach. Two lines of
+verse, gathered she knew not whence, rang in her brain and would not
+be silenced:</p>
+<div class="poem2">
+<p class="t0" style="text-indent:-8pt">
+&quot;Our past deeds follow us from afar<br>
+And what we have been makes us what we are.&quot;</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="continue">After a year's respite Cynthia was again afraid. Mr. Benoliel was
+magnified by her fears into the semblance of a prophet of old.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_32" href="#div1Ref_32">THE CALL</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia went that night alone to a dinner party in Seamore Place. But
+she was ill at ease and as soon as she could get away she hurried
+home. She had not seen her husband that day. He had returned at five
+o'clock, had been closeted for a long while with M. Poizat and had
+then departed, leaving a message that a series of divisions would
+compel him to dine at the House of Commons. The couple, however, had
+made it a habit to reserve for themselves, whenever the House was not
+sitting late, an hour or so at the close of even the busiest day, and
+Cynthia was fairly sure that she would not have to wait long before
+Harry Rames came home. As a fact, he was already in his study. The
+door was ajar and through the opening the light streamed out into the
+hall.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia pushed the door open. Harry was sitting at his writing-table
+on the opposite side of the room and studying with a complete
+absorption a scroll which he held down unrolled beneath his eyes.
+Cynthia stood in the doorway for a moment or two watching him with a
+tender smile upon her face, and speculating idly upon the document
+which so riveted his attention. For the moment her trouble was quite
+driven from her thoughts. He was here, after all, in the house with
+her: he, the loved one: and with a sort of fierceness she was content.
+Then he looked up and saw her standing in the doorway. His face
+changed; he had the aspect clearly of a man at bay. He swept a pile of
+letters and printed papers over his scroll, spreading them out. He
+rose and stood between her and the writing-table, hiding it from her
+view.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are home early,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Earlier than you expected! Yet I am later than you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, I paired at ten o'clock.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I see.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The furtive movement of her husband increased her fears and at the
+same time wounded her pride. They were to be frank with one another.
+That was the pledge which each had given to the other. And here was
+the pledge broken, for Harry was definitely practising concealments.
+Cynthia, however, did not belong to the tribe of the clamorous. She
+stepped within the room and left him to continue the conversation.
+Rames spoke hastily to engage her attention.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Poizat came to see me this afternoon.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He was desperate. We talked over his position. I recommended him to
+go to Tangier and settle there. He has a little money. He will find
+compatriots, and I should think it's the place where people will be
+least likely to trouble about him. I fancy that he will go there. But
+it's a bad business to have to start life all over again at seventy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She watched him as he walked up and down the room, making up her mind
+that on her side at all events the pledge should not be broken.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;M. Poizat said something to me which I think is true. That nothing
+one has ever done is ever quite done with.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames stopped in his walk. He stood quite still for a few
+moments.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, surely that's not true,&quot; he said carelessly and resumed his
+pacing. But Cynthia was aware of a change in him. Before he had been
+thinking of Poizat and his destiny; now he was alert and waiting upon
+her words.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I believe that it's more true than he knew. For even if nothing
+actual comes of the thing done, it's still there, recorded in the
+character. Harry, we are in the clutch of finished things.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Her voice rose in a low cry and brought Harry swiftly round upon his
+heel. Her words hit him shrewdly, but her aspect more shrewdly still.
+She was still standing close by the door. She was dressed in a gown of
+pale blue and gold with a bright ribbon of blue in her hair. Her cloak
+had slipped from her shoulders to her feet, her gloves were twisted in
+her hands, her eyes wide and dark with trouble looked out from a face
+which was piteously wistful. She made unconsciously a poignant appeal
+to him. The delicate loveliness of her youth and the gay panoply of
+her attire contrasted so strikingly with the quivering misery of her
+face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What makes you believe that, Cynthia?&quot; He crossed the room to her
+side and shook her arm with a friendly gesture familiar to her.
+&quot;Poizat's case is not enough to build a world of theory on.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Nor do I,&quot; replied Cynthia. &quot;I was adding to that case another.&quot;
+Harry Rames flinched.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What other?&quot; he asked with an effort.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Years ago in Argentina I once listened at a door,&quot; she began, and in
+Harry's eyes shone a great relief. &quot;What I heard frightened me. I lay
+awake in terror all that night. I have lived in fear ever since. I
+could not shake fear off even after I knew there was no longer any
+cause for fear. I can find causes anywhere. Fear's the truth of me.
+Most of the things which I have done have been done from fear.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I never understood that, Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I never spoke of it before.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Fear even prompted your marriage?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked him frankly in the face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. You were so frank, so honest about yourself. I felt safe with
+you. And after we were married--I escaped from fear. I was reprieved.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you,&quot; said Harry with a quiet sincerity. Then he moved away
+from her to the fireplace and turned again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why do you tell me this for the first time tonight?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Because fear's awake in me again to-night,&quot; she answered simply. &quot;I
+have had another visitor today besides M. Poizat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Who?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Howard Fall.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames's voice hardened.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He came to complain of me, I suppose.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It wasn't complaint; it was regret. He thought it would be such a
+loss if you ceased to be interested in Parliament. He was afraid that
+Colonel Challoner's death had been a shock to you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames looked curiously at his wife.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And what did you say?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That I knew you well enough to be sure that wasn't the case. He said
+you had not spoken once since the debate on the Address and that the
+organization against the land bill was tumbling to pieces.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry's face cleared.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There's a very good reason for that. The government programme is
+overloaded and Devenish's bill won't come on this year after all. Our
+opposition shook their confidence in it besides. No, it won't come
+on.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia moved swiftly forward to the fireplace.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You know that?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. Hamlin told me in confidence.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;When, Harry?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A month ago at least. We can always whip up the opposition to
+Devenish's bill when it becomes once more a practical proposition.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Perhaps after all the Government's change of plan was the simple
+explanation of the change in her husband. Cynthia sank down into a
+chair. Before now, she remembered, she had tortured herself with
+unnecessary fears.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, I am glad. I am glad,&quot; she cried. All her heart was in her voice
+and tuned it to a note full and low and wonderfully sweet. Harry was
+moved by the music of it. There was a joy, a tenderness, which he had
+noticed more than once of late, but which had never rung so clear as
+it did to-night. He planted himself in front of her with a wry sort of
+smile upon his face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You want me to go on--just as I am going? You are satisfied? There
+have been times when you have wanted more----&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But Cynthia broke in upon him. She shut her eyes upon her ideals and
+her dreams. They were for the girl steeped to the lips in romance, not
+for the woman made real by love. Something had come between them.
+Something secret. Something which threatened even such community of
+life as they had. She was in revolt against it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, yes,&quot; she cried passionately. &quot;I do want you to go on. I want
+you to make a great career. I want my share in it, my pride in it. I
+shall be satisfied. I shall be thankful. Oh, my dear, are you blind?&quot;
+She rose abruptly and stood in front of him. &quot;What I want and all that
+I want is to keep you.&quot; If she had never spoken the words, the
+eagerness of her voice and the prayer of her clasped hands would have
+uttered them for her. But she had spoken them deliberately. She knew
+very well the danger for a woman in telling a man who does not love
+her, that she loves him. But she accepted the danger. She was playing
+for a great stake that night, and great stakes are not to be won
+without great risks. She laid her reticence aside and made her appeal.
+But it seemed that her appeal failed. Harry Rames stood watching her,
+at a loss for words, with a face which concealed carefully all his
+thoughts. Cynthia stooped and gathered up her gloves which had fallen
+to the floor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I shall go up now,&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Yet she waited; and Harry still was silent. A moment of passion had
+caught him unprepared with any words.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What are you thinking about, Harry, so profoundly?&quot; Cynthia asked in
+an indifferent voice. His silence was a rebuff most bitter to her. But
+she would not betray herself a second time. Her eyes and her hands
+were busy with some imaginary fault in the fit of her dress.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That you have never shown me yourself before,&quot; he said, moving toward
+her. She stood quite still as he came close. He put his arm about her
+and she asked quietly:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Wasn't I wise, Harry? It's a little disconcerting, isn't it, when a
+woman shows you something you know nothing about. Just a little
+disconcerting, isn't it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She left him standing in the room and went upstairs. She had made her
+plea with all the frankness which had been the condition of their
+marriage. She would not ask for a like frankness in return. It was for
+him to give it. She had made it quite plain that on her side she
+wanted frankness. More she would not do. Not for anything would she
+ask what secret thing he had hidden under the papers upon his table.
+But she knew that there was a secret thing and her feet dragged as she
+mounted the stairs.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She had been in bed according to her reckoning for about an hour when
+she heard a noise of the shutting of a door. And the door was the
+front-door of the house. Cynthia sprung from her bed and lifting the
+blind looked out from the window. It was a dark night, but there was
+no fog. By the light of the street lamps she saw a man crossing the
+road toward the corner of South Audley Street. He had the look of her
+husband. She flung up the window and the sound of his footsteps made
+her sure. Her eyes gazing into the tempered darkness of a London
+street might well have deceived her, her ears could not. There was no
+one else walking in Curzon Street at that moment; the sound of his
+footsteps reverberated unmistakably, diminishing as the distance
+between him and the window increased. The man who now vanished into
+South Audley Street was Harry Rames.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her watch. It was one
+o'clock in the morning. She wrapped a dressing-gown about her and sat
+down trying to think calmly, seeking to discover, if she could, some
+other reason for his departure than the obvious one. But the obvious
+one recurred again and again in her thoughts. It explained everything,
+fitted in with everything, as no other reason did. His sudden
+indifference to his career, his furtive movement at his writing-table
+upon her appearance, his refusal to meet frankness with frankness
+could all thus be accounted for. His departure from the house was thus
+explained. He had not come up into his room next to hers; he had
+waited in his study for an hour; he had given her time to fall asleep;
+he had gone out. It was a woman then who had twisted the current of
+his life as she, Cynthia, could not, who had moved him to passion as
+she even that evening had failed to do. Cynthia raged in fury against
+herself for having so weakly betrayed herself. She sat in torture.
+Then her jealousy flamed up. <i>That</i>--no! Her pride must give way. If
+there was another woman in her story--why then the other woman must
+look to herself. Cynthia would fight. She hurried down-stairs into the
+study. She switched on the lights and tumbled hither and thither the
+papers on the writing-table for the one so swiftly hidden which should
+betray the other woman's name and her abode. But she found nothing to
+satisfy her. She looked round the room. From a drawer in a bureau
+against the wall Harry's keys had been dangling. That she had noticed;
+and the keys were gone now. She tried the drawer. It was locked. In
+that drawer then was hidden the key to his secret. So much knowledge
+at all events Cynthia was sure that she had gained. She went back to
+her room and lying in bed ran over all the names of her acquaintances,
+even of her friends. She was not in the mood to trust any of them, but
+she could not fix upon any of them either. One and all they were cats
+and treacherous. Cynthia was no longer afraid; she was simply furious;
+and her fury was not diminished when she heard the front-door open and
+shut once more, almost noiselessly--so much caution was being used.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But Cynthia, though she was right in her facts, had never been so
+mistaken in her conclusions. The scroll which Harry Rames had pushed
+beneath his papers was simply a chart of the Antarctic seas; whereon
+lines distinguished one from the other by the manner of their tracing
+recorded the journeys of successive explorers and marked each one's
+&quot;farthest South.&quot; He stood for a little while after Cynthia had left
+him on the same spot half-way between his chart and her position at
+the door. Then he turned back to his writing-table and spread out the
+map once more. The call of the unknown places was loud in his ears
+that night.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Come back! Come back!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Six weeks ago it had been the merest whisper--flashed to the wireless
+poles on the roof of the Admiralty and heard by him one afternoon, a
+message very small and clear amidst the clatter of Parliament Street.
+But the whisper had gathered volume and vehemence, until the map
+before him seemed a mouth shouting it, and the room throbbed with it
+as though the walls would burst asunder.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Come back! Come back!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It seemed to him that the command was not to be denied or must ring in
+his ears forever; and that arena of the House of Commons, where man
+fought with man, became a trivial place of meanness and intrigue
+compared with the vast battle-ground in the South, where one fought in
+a grandeur of silence with the careless, stubborn elements of a wild
+and unknown world.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He bent over his map and across it, as across the table of a camera
+obscura he saw moving, in miniature and brilliantly defined, the ships
+of the men who had sailed to the South. James Cook's two vessels, the
+<i>Resolution</i> and the <i>Adventure</i>, crossed the Antarctic circle as it
+seemed underneath his eyes--the first, of all the ships that were ever
+built, to sail upon these waters. Bellingshausen of Kronstadt came
+next and dropped his anchor under the shelter of Peter I Island and
+gave to it its name. He was followed by the whaling captains, each
+choosing his own line, great navigators inspired by a great and
+spirited firm. Weddell and Biscoe in their brigs. Balleny in his
+schooner. The later ships of the scientific expeditions under
+D'Urville of France and Wilkes of Chesapeake Bay moved southward in
+the track of the whaling captains, and close upon their heels James
+Ross from England with the <i>Erebus</i>
+and the <i>Terror</i>
+burst for the
+first time in the history of the world through the ice-pack into
+the open sea beyond and sailed from west to east along the great
+ice-barrier. There were other lines where the <i>Challenger</i>
+had sailed,
+and the official expeditions; and there was yet another, the longest
+of all the lines upon the chart, a line stretching out to a harbor
+never visited before, and against that line in tiny letters was
+printed &quot;Rames.&quot; He followed the course of his ship from his first
+harbor in the Antarctic continent with the wooden cross high on a hill
+above it, which marks the grave of a naturalist of a past expedition.
+He fell to speculating where the <i>Perhaps</i>
+lay now. Parliament had met
+in the first days of January. It was just before the opening of
+Parliament that Hemming had started on the mail steamer to New Zealand
+to pick up his ship in Lyttelton Harbor. Allow him five weeks for his
+journey. The second week of February would have come to an end before
+the <i>Perhaps</i>
+had steamed out past the headland. Hemming himself had
+recognized that he was late. The difficulty of collecting money to
+finance the expedition had detained him beyond his time. A fortnight
+out from New Zealand, where was the <i>Perhaps</i>
+now? She might still be
+in the stormy seas on the outer edge of Ross's pack with the petrels
+and the albatrosses like a cloud about her yards. Or she might have
+touched at one of the northerly harbors of the continent. Perhaps
+winter was coming early on to wrap her about with snow and ice. If
+that happened, Hemming's chance was gone, for he had only money for
+one year. He must reach the Pole this next summer or not at all. He
+must therefore winter well to the South.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames got up from his chair, trying not to hope that Hemming's
+expedition would fail. He looked up from this map to the spot where
+Cynthia had stood close to the door, and a smile came upon his face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;She was wrong,&quot; he said. &quot;We are in the clutch of the unfinished, not
+the finished things.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He carried his map over to a bureau which stood against the wall and
+opened a drawer from the lock of which his bunch of keys was dangling.
+There were other charts in the drawer, a barometer which had hung in
+his cabin in the <i>Perhaps</i>
+throughout the three years during which
+that ship had been his home, a shell or two dredged up from the depths
+of the sea, and a brown paper package tied up with a piece of string.
+The charts lying there were all the charts which existed of the
+Antarctic seas, arranged in the order of their making. He added to
+them now his map, the last of them all; the printed facsimile of his
+own chart. Then reluctantly he locked the drawer. The reverberation of
+the seas seemed to fill the room and through it imperative and loud
+rang the call of the South. Yet he was aware, too, of Cynthia standing
+in her delicate blue frock, subduing her pride, revealing herself in a
+passionate appeal. He was stirred to shame at the poverty of his own
+response. She had been friend, counsellor, wife in the normal way.
+They had jogged side by side along the low road of his endeavor.
+To-night she pleaded for more, she offered more. He could never quite
+look upon her as he had been wont to. For she had stirred him to
+shame.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He slipped the key off the ring and swung it round upon his finger. At
+all events he would keep his bargain.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It's a queer piece of irony,&quot; he said to himself, &quot;that the very
+thing which I would give my soul to do, she was urging me to do two
+years ago; and now I must keep my longing hidden. Our positions are
+quite reversed.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But he would keep to his bargain. Perhaps after all Hemming would
+succeed; and sooner or later no doubt the reverberation of the seas
+would die away in the porches of his ears.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He went out into the hall, carrying the key in his hand, and let
+himself out at the front-door. He walked quickly up South Audley
+Street, turned to the left, and crossed Park Lane into Hyde Park. He
+walked to the stone bridge which crosses the Serpentine. The night was
+quiet and dark about him, and from afar off the never ceasing roar of
+the London traffic came to him like the roar of distant seas. He
+leaned over the parapet and stretching out his hand opened it. He
+heard a tiny splash in the water beneath the bridge.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He walked back more slowly than he had come to where the glare of the
+sky indicated the houses and the streets. As he crossed Park Lane
+again two men arm-in-arm passed him and one of them stopped.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Is that you, Rames?&quot; asked a friendly and solicitous voice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames recognized it at once as the voice of Hamlin the chief Whip.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You had paired for to-night,&quot; Hamlin continued, &quot;hadn't you? You
+didn't miss much. But I want to be able to rely on you for Thursday.
+We know, of course, that you are against us over Devenish's land bill.
+That's all right. But you are with us on the rest of our policy and we
+want your help.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I shall be there on Thursday,&quot; answered Harry Rames. &quot;It's quite true
+that I have not been so much in the House this session as I used to
+be. But you will see me in my old place to-morrow. Good-night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He walked on and Hamlin rejoined his companion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It was Rames,&quot; he said. &quot;We're not going to lose him. I am glad. He's
+marked out for a great position if he doesn't throw it away.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But Rames through the roar of the traffic, carriages rolling home,
+wagons lumbering in to Covent Garden, heard louder than ever the boom
+of Southern seas and the wind whistling between the halyards of a
+ship.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXIII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_33" href="#div1Ref_33">A LETTER FROM ABROAD</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The session passed, and Devenish's land bill, as Rames had foretold,
+was postponed. It figured again in the Address at the beginning of the
+following year, but as late as March no definite date had been
+assigned for its introduction. On a Saturday morning of this month
+Cynthia and her husband were breakfasting in the dining-room of the
+white house, when the morning's letters were brought in by the butler.
+Harry Rames tossed one or two aside.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Circulars, pamphlets,&quot; he said. He opened some of the others, taking
+them from the top of the pile. &quot;Here's one from the Chamber of
+Commerce--railway rates. I'll answer that this morning. Here's
+another--the committee of a school wants a grant from the treasury.
+Here's a third--&quot; and as he was beginning to tear open the envelope,
+his voice suddenly stopped.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked up from her own letters and saw that while he was
+holding the third letter in his hand he was not looking at it. His
+eyes were fixed upon that one which was now uppermost on the heap. He
+sat and stared at the envelope for an appreciable time. Then dropping
+the letter which he held, he picked up this new and startling one and
+carried it swiftly over to the window. Cynthia followed his movement
+with her eyes, just curious, but nothing more. Her eyes indeed
+travelled beyond him and noticed the sunlight in the garden, the
+yellow and purple crocuses and the first of the daffodils, noticed
+them with an up-springing lightness of heart. Then the stillness of
+her husband's attitude caught her attention. She saw something in his
+face which she had never seen there before, which she had never
+thought to see there at all. He wore the look of a man quite caught
+out of himself. He was as one wrapped in visions and refined by the
+fires of great longings. It seemed to her that she saw a man whose
+eyes, brimful of light, looked upon the Holy Grail.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He turned back to her. He brought her the letter still unopened and
+placed it in her hands. Cynthia received it as though written upon its
+cover she would read the revelation of his secret. Yet she saw nothing
+but a soiled envelope with a foreign stamp. She gazed up at her
+husband mystified.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Look at the stamp, Cynthia!&quot; said Rames in a queer voice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked. It wore the head familiar to English people. But the
+lettering about the head was strange. She spelled it out.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Rexland.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">With a start she turned to him. &quot;That is the country you discovered.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. A stamp was struck to commemorate my discovery of it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A stamp?&quot; cried Cynthia. &quot;Wait a minute, Harry! You once spoke of a
+stamp to me before. Yes, on the morning of the day when you were to
+deliver your speech--the speech which failed. It was this stamp of
+which you were speaking?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You remembered it on that morning, even when your thoughts were full
+of the speech you were going to deliver.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I remembered it by accident,&quot; he said sharply. &quot;I can't think why. It
+had been out of my thoughts for so long. Yet it was that stamp.&quot; His
+voice softened. &quot;It is issued by the post-office--for a penny. Just
+think of it! A penny stamp brings a letter from the Antarctic seas to
+us here in Warwickshire.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Mr. Hemming sent it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Without a doubt. When he came to see me in London fifteen months ago,
+he told me that if I intended to go out again he would not use my
+harbor.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry was standing just behind his wife. Cynthia was not looking at
+him any longer. But she was listening with a curious intentness as
+though the words which he spoke were of less importance to her than
+the accent with which he spoke them. She put questions to him to make
+yet more sure of it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And you gave him permission!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course. I had not the right to refuse it. I was never going
+South again. Nothing was further from my thoughts. I told him to
+use not only my harbor, but the depots of food I had made along my
+sledge-route from the harbor toward the Pole.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You think that he reached the harbor?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am sure of it. Otherwise he would not have used this stamp. He must
+have wintered there. I did not think that he would reach it before
+winter closed in upon him. The summer last year must have been very
+late.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia nodded her head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Her attention was relaxed. Harry Rames had been striving to keep from
+his voice any note of regret, to speak in the ordinary level tone
+suitable to a matter of only ordinary interest. But in spite of his
+efforts he was not sure that he had succeeded. Cynthia handed to him
+the letter. He took it and turned it over in his hand.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He has had time since he wintered in that harbor. One summer would be
+enough. He may have done it--if his dogs lived. There's always that
+condition. If his dogs lived! Mine didn't. Perhaps--perhaps--&quot; He
+broke off abruptly and thrust the letter back into Cynthia's hand.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You open it! You can tell me what he says.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames walked again to the window and stood with his back to the
+room. Cynthia's eyes followed him and travelled past him once more to
+the garden. She was sure that she would never forget those daffodils
+and the purple crocuses waving in the sunlight for one day as long as
+she lived. A minute ago she had noticed them; now she noticed them
+again; and within that minute had been revealed to her the great
+secret Harry Rames had been at so much pains to hide. She knew her
+rival now, and was appalled. &quot;Such men are driven by a torment of
+their souls.&quot; It was Harry himself who had said that. The wish came to
+her, &quot;If only this man has succeeded.&quot; She tore open the envelope.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames stood at the window waiting for the letter to be read to
+him; and it seemed to him that he waited for an eternity. He had heard
+the tearing of the envelope. The letter was open in Cynthia's hands.
+Yet she did not speak a word. Rames's heart sank.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then he has reached the Pole?&quot; he asked with a studied carelessness.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't know,&quot; Cynthia replied in perplexity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Read it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There is nothing to read.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames turned round and came swiftly toward her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He must have forgotten to enclose his letter. There is nothing
+but this,&quot; said Cynthia. She was holding a single blank sheet of
+note-paper in her hand. She turned it over. &quot;No, there's not a word
+written anywhere. Do you understand it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. He has failed.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There was no doubt left to her of her husband's joy. The cry which
+broke from his lips was not to be denied. It was a real cry of
+exultation. Cynthia turned pale as she heard it. But she would not
+acknowledge that she understood it, nor would she look into Harry's
+face lest she should see the same exultation blazoned there.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Poor Hemming,&quot; said Rames. &quot;That's bad luck. The disappointment must
+have hit him hard.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You can understand that,&quot; said Cynthia steadily.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. He would have written, you see, if he had taken it more lightly.
+He has nothing to say. That is what his blank sheet of paper means.
+That is what it must mean. Well, I must go and write to the Chamber of
+Commerce, Cynthia;&quot; and gathering up his letters he went out of the
+room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As for Cynthia, she remembered that the North Warwickshire met that
+morning at eleven o'clock four miles from the house. She rode to the
+meet and followed the hounds over a good grass country flying her
+hedges on a big horse which old Mr. Daventry had given to her on the
+very first day when she had hunted over six years ago. It had always
+been her experience that when troubles and fears overburdened her, a
+hard day's hunting was her best medicine. It smoothed out the creases
+of her mind, whipped up the blood in her veins, set her pulses dancing
+with the joy of living and unrolled her courage like a banner. The
+sunlight, the swift rush through the air, the rhythm of movement, the
+keenness of the animal beneath her, the flight over hedge and ditch,
+had never failed her up till now. It always seemed to her that by some
+process, of which she was quite unconscious, the direct and simple
+thing to do emerged from the confusion of her thoughts and shone out
+unmistakably. And it shone out to-day. But she could not bring herself
+to accept it. As she rode homeward through the lanes she was at her
+arguments again.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No! With time contentment will come to him. He will be subdued to the
+matter he works in. And I cannot let him go.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel's warning obstinately confronted her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;One party doesn't keep the bargain or keeps it half-heartedly as an
+irksome thing and day by day the separation grows more complete until
+you are living with your enemy or living quite alone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But she would not be convinced; she battled against it. &quot;There was a
+saving clause. 'Unless on both sides there is love.' In that case a
+way could be found. And on both sides there may be love.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She had treasured up little acts of thoughtfulness on Harry Rames's
+part, the merest small things which women are quick to notice and to
+build upon; such as having a cloak ready for her shoulders almost
+before she was aware that she was cold. She ran these trifles over in
+her mind, clutching at them for proof that the longed for change was
+coming--nay, perhaps had come. There had been a constant watchfulness,
+a constant care for her shown by her husband during this last year. It
+might be of course that a certain remorse was stirring in him--remorse
+that he was only keeping his side of the bargain in the letter and not
+the spirit.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But I cannot let him go,&quot; she insisted. The perils, the hardships,
+the dangers of snow-storms and cold and shipwreck and famine which had
+all seemed so trivial to her in her days of romance now loomed up
+before her terrible and dark. It was no use to argue that other men
+had gone that road and had come back. This one might not. She reached
+her home with her distress as heavy upon her as when she had set out;
+and was told that Mr. Benoliel was waiting to see her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She went at once into the drawing-room and gave Mr. Benoliel some tea.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Will you tell Mr. Rames,&quot; she said to her butler, &quot;that Mr. Benoliel
+is here.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He's not in the house,&quot; said Benoliel. &quot;He's in Ludsey. I asked for
+him when I heard that you were out. I am glad. For I should like to
+tell you my news first.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The butler left the room and Mr. Benoliel became at once mysterious
+and omniscient.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Sir George Carberley is going to resign,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked at him in surprise.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The member for our division?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The white house was not within the borough limits of Ludsey. It stood
+in the Hickleton Division of the county of Warwickshire and Sir George
+Carberley, an important unit of the opposition, was Harry Rames's
+representative in the House of Commons.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel. &quot;He has sat for the division for forty years
+now and he is tired. He intends to resign when this session is over.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Are you sure?&quot; asked Cynthia. &quot;How do you know this?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah!&quot; said Benoliel with a smile. &quot;You mustn't ask me that, Cynthia.
+Indeed I am not quite sure that I ought to have told you the news at
+all. But I thought that it was so important for you to know it at once
+that I stretched a point of confidence.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Thank you,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;But what I don't understand is why it is
+so important for us to have the news before the others?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Captain Rames is on the executive of your association, isn't he?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then he will have a voice in the selection of the candidate who will
+fight the seat from your political point of view.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel. &quot;If he has a candidate ready when the
+news of the approaching resignation is published, and if that man is
+willing to follow not simply the Government's policy, but also your
+husband's policy as regards Devenish's land bill, don't you see what a
+chance he gets? If Rames can secure the selection of his man as
+candidate and then can win over the seat, he strengthens his position
+with the Government enormously. He has put his views about Devenish's
+bill to the test of an election, and he has won.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I see that,&quot; said Cynthia doubtfully. She was considering the
+prospect Mr. Benoliel held out to her from a quite different point of
+view. If Harry succeeded in this plan, his victory would be one more
+link in the chain of obligation which bound him to his present life.
+If he failed, his failure would be another disappointment weakening
+it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But can we win?&quot; she cried. &quot;The seat's supposed to be impregnable.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's one of your advantages. More seats are lost by over-confidence
+than by bad candidates. Besides, the mere fact that one man has held a
+seat for forty years is against the probability of another man of the
+same color succeeding. There are lots of people who will be ready to
+say 'It's time we gave the other fellows a look-in.' Your husband has
+only got to throw himself heart and soul into the fight and he will
+stand a very good chance. No doubt of that.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia reflected. &quot;Why did you wish to tell me this news before you
+told it to Harry?&quot; she asked, bending her brows upon Mr. Benoliel in a
+steady frown which had before now warned him to walk with
+circumspection.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wasn't quite sure,&quot; he explained, &quot;that you would wish him now to
+undertake a further obligation of political service.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Indeed!&quot; said Cynthia icily. &quot;And why shouldn't I wish it now, Mr.
+Benoliel?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel had no intention to allow himself to be browbeaten by a
+slip of a girl for whose happiness he was in a measure responsible.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Because, my dear Cynthia,&quot; he answered, &quot;it has seemed to me on the
+last few occasions when I have met your husband that he was feeling
+the strain of a Parliamentary life. He has looked worn and tired. I
+could almost fancy that he was disheartened.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's thoughts did Mr. Benoliel some injustice at this moment.
+Certainly he was suggesting to her that his neglected warning had been
+justified, that Harry's Parliamentary ambition had been a mere phase
+in his life, which was now passing or had already passed. But she went
+further and assumed in him a kind of triumph at the accuracy of his
+diagnosis. Right underneath his sympathetic words she seemed to hear
+the whisper of a question:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Am I not a clever man?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The whirr of a motor-car grew loud and ceased. Harry had returned from
+Ludsey. Mr. Benoliel sat patiently in front of her, awaiting her
+decision. Was he to break his news to Harry Rames or was he not?
+Cynthia felt that Harry's destiny and hers were in her hands. She must
+make her choice and by that choice it seemed to her they would be both
+inextricably bound, their happiness or their misery allotted to them
+for the whole span of their lives.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She sat with her chin propped in the palm of her hand and her eyes
+brooding darkly on Mr. Benoliel. A door was shut somewhere in the
+house. She rose and pressed the bell.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Howard,&quot; she said to her butler, &quot;was that Mr. Rames?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes ma'am.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He is in his study I think?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Will you show Mr. Benoliel in to him?&quot; And as Benoliel rose, she said
+to him, &quot;Will you come back after you have told your news? You will
+have an opportunity of reconsidering your judgment. I should like to
+hear whether you still think him disheartened.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was in her most aggrieved and stately mood. She usually was
+when she knew herself to be in the wrong. She would not admit Mr.
+Benoliel's sympathy or affection for her. She had an epithet for him
+very near to the tip of her tongue at this moment. Mr. Benoliel was
+officious. With a distant bow she dismissed him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She had the satisfaction half an hour later of hearing Mr. Benoliel's
+complete recantation.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I was quite wrong, Cynthia. He was in the best of spirits. He was
+elated. The look of strain had gone if it was ever there. I have been
+mistaken. I am happy to admit it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia relaxed from her frigidity. But her satisfaction was a poor
+one and had little life in it. She had merely tricked Mr. Benoliel
+into the belief that his insight had been at fault. For in truth, as
+she knew very well, it had never been more shrewd. What had led Mr.
+Benoliel into error was his ignorance of the letter with the &quot;Rexland&quot;
+stamp which had arrived at the white house by the morning's post.
+Hemming's failure was a kind of reprieve for Harry Rames. In a sudden
+revulsion he had been lifted out of his discouragement. His exultation
+had remained with him all that day. Cynthia had counted upon it when
+she had sent Benoliel to his study.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXIV</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_34" href="#div1Ref_34">THE CONVICT AT THE OAR</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">A long account of Hemming's expedition, sent by a New Zealand
+correspondent, appeared in one of the morning papers the next day.
+Hemming had travelled a couple of hundred miles further south than
+Harry Rames. Then he had been compelled to return. But it was Harry
+Rames who had made it possible for him to get so far. For he used
+Rames's depots of provisions and was able to save his own for the
+stretch of new ice-covered country.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry lighted upon the account unexpectedly when he opened his
+newspaper at the breakfast table, but the moment he saw the head-line
+he folded the sheets quickly again and pushed the paper away from him.
+He shrank from reading it, hardly daring to trust himself, and he
+began to talk over with Cynthia the names of suitable candidates for
+the Hickleton Division.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The Whips, of course, will have a man ready who will be pledged to
+swallow the whole of the Government policy, land bill and all. We must
+be beforehand with them. What do you say to young Burrell, Cynthia?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Sir James Burrell's son?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. His father is anxious that he should do something,&quot; said Harry
+with a laugh.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But isn't he rather young and rather insignificant?&quot; asked Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Youth's a good quality in the House of Commons. The older men become
+suspicious of change and want life stereotyped as it is. And young
+Burrell isn't without brains. I don't say that he's a flyer, but then,
+like the Government, I prefer docility to brains in my followers. I
+think that I will run round to Sir James when we go back to town on
+Monday.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But though Harry Rames neglected his newspaper at the breakfast table,
+he came back for it at eleven in the morning. He could keep the drawer
+in his bureau locked upon his charts, but he could not quench his
+fever to read the details of Hemming's expedition. For an hour he
+tried to occupy himself with the business of Cynthia's estate, and
+then he gave up the attempt. When and how Hemming failed, how far he
+had travelled with his sledges, what new lessons were to be learnt
+from his experience--here were questions which he could not silence.
+He got the paper and read the account through. &quot;The dogs gave out,&quot; he
+said to Cynthia. &quot;The dogs are the trouble. You can't carry enough
+food for them and for the sledging-party as well. Of course, it's bad
+luck on Hemming. But I doubt if he followed the highest traditions of
+British exploration.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Why?&quot; asked Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;He should have chosen a different base, converged upon the Pole from
+a different angle, and covered ground altogether new. Then, whether he
+failed or not, he would have brought back a hundred new facts of
+interest to the scientist and the geographer. As it is he adds very
+little I should think to our knowledge.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was silent for awhile after he had finished. Then she said in
+a low voice, bending over some embroidery at which she was working:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And if you were to go back, Harry, where would you make your base?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames sprang eagerly up.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, I should search for a harbor a long way to the east of my old
+one. At least,&quot; and he caught himself up, &quot;I think that is what I
+should do. I am speaking at random, of course. But I should at all
+events have considered that possibility carefully, if I had been going
+out again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Again a spell of silence followed upon his words and Cynthia did not
+raise her eyes from her work. She was wearing a hat with a wide brim
+and Harry Rames could see nothing of her face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Won't you get your charts out and show me?&quot; she asked. She had
+mastered her voice so that there was no sound of effort in it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I haven't got them here,&quot; said Harry, with a fine indifference. &quot;They
+are in London I believe, somewhere or other.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's needle stopped.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;In London,&quot; she said. An idea had occurred to her. &quot;Locked up?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very likely. I may have locked them up. I have done with them
+altogether, you see.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course,&quot; said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">This time it was Harry who did not at once reply. The finality of that
+&quot;of course&quot; brought a flush of anger into his face. He almost blamed
+her for her blindness, though all his efforts aimed at keeping her
+blind.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I will ride into Hickleton this afternoon,&quot; he said, &quot;and make sure
+that the chairman of our association has no pet candidate of his own.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That will be a good plan,&quot; said Cynthia; and with a glance at the
+crown of that broad hat and a surprise at the obtuseness of the head
+which it so effectually concealed, he went out of the room. Not until
+the door was closed did Cynthia lift her face from her work. Her eyes
+were brimming with tears and she let her hands lie idle on her lap
+while the tears overflowed and ran down her cheeks. She was not much
+given to tears, but to-day they had their way with her. She was
+wretched. Their marriage had been a mistake. From first to last Mr.
+Benoliel had been right, but she would not listen to him and be
+warned. Even this afternoon he had accused her--for so she now looked
+upon his words--with his pitiless truths. It was true that Harry was
+discouraged, that his face had grown thin and worn, that despite the
+brave show which he was making, he was utterly unhappy. Harry's words,
+&quot;The men who go South are driven on by a torment of their souls,&quot;
+lived with her night and day. They were written in fire upon every
+wall of her house. In that torment Harry Rames was now tossing and
+must toss, enduring the anguish of his longing silently--just as
+silently as she herself was weeping in the empty room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She was afraid of herself and dissatisfied with herself. Afraid,
+because she had been perilously near to one wild outcry, &quot;Since your
+heart is set on it, go!&quot; Dissatisfied, because she had stifled the
+words before they were spoken, because she could not bring herself to
+speak them, and never would.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">From that day a change came over her. She flung herself with a
+veritable fever of energy upon those opportunities which enable a
+woman to identify herself with politics. The work she had undertaken
+in Ludsey, she undertook in London on a wider scale, and with
+infinitely greater effort. She was elected upon the central committees
+of the various women's associations connected with her husband's
+party; she travelled far and wide throughout the country on the
+business of organizations; she made speeches; she sought the presence
+of Cabinet Ministers at her dinner-table; she lost her color, her
+buoyancy. What she did was done doggedly. To go to bed each night
+tired out, that was her ambition.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;If Harry wears himself out, why should not I?&quot; she said when any of
+her friends remonstrated with her, but not one of them was allowed to
+guess that the secret of all her energy was remorse. She was seeking
+her rest in fatigue. For her remorse grew. Night after night Harry sat
+faithfully, as he had promised to Hamlin, in his seat on the front
+bench below the gangway. He took his part in the debates, he recovered
+the ground which he had lost. He was once more a man marked for high
+office. But it was all labor now, and unloved labor. And the strain of
+it was visible. He went out and in without that happy mien of
+confidence which once Cynthia had been wont to resent, but for which
+she vainly hungered now.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">There was one Friday evening toward the end of June when she was
+impelled to approach the dangerous subject of her own accord. She and
+Harry had been dining with the Prime-Minister in Downing Street. All
+that week the House had been sitting into the small hours. The
+Prime-Minister himself had taken her aside and given her a warning.
+They returned home soon after eleven, and as they sat over a final
+cigarette in Harry's study, Cynthia could not shut her eyes to his
+restlessness, the nervous flickering of his fingers, the unsteady
+intonations of his voice.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Aren't you doing too much, Harry?&quot; she asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not more than you, Cynthia,&quot; he replied as he poured himself out a
+whiskey and soda.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Much more. And women who are doing what they want to do can stand a
+great deal more than men who are not.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry looked across at her quickly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But, of course, I am doing just what I have always planned to do,
+just what you are helping me to do--just what I sought your help to
+enable me to do.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Sure?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia had crossed the room to his side and was standing with a hand
+upon his shoulder. She was in a mood of indecision and the touch of
+her hand revealed her mood to Rames. A change came over him. She felt
+a tremor of his body, a sudden quickening of the muscles beneath her
+hand. He became intensely expectant. She could read the question in
+his mind. Was she by some wonderful inspiration going to release him
+from the torment of his soul? But the mere sensation of his movement
+was enough for Cynthia. She withdrew her hand. She repeated
+unconsciously words which he had once used to her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;After all we get some fun out of it, don't we, Harry?&quot; she said; and
+Harry rose quickly from his chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We get much more out of it, Cynthia,&quot; he said with a face which had
+suddenly grown very grave and tender; and the next moment she was in
+his arms, held there tightly, clasped against him. Cynthia was carried
+out of herself. She was swept away unexpectedly upon a swirl of
+passion.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Harry! Oh, Harry!&quot; she whispered in a low voice of happiness. His
+right hand touched and stroked her hair. Then he tilted her chin
+backward and he looked into her eyes and a smile transfigured his
+face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, much more, Cynthia,&quot; he cried, and he bent his head and kissed
+her. He put her away from him and looked her over from her delicate
+feet to the fair crown of her hair. She wore a satin gown of white
+with her diamonds in her hair, and a rope of pearls about her neck.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There! That's that!&quot; he said, and Cynthia with a laugh and the blush
+of a girl answered, &quot;Thank you.&quot; Harry Rames lit a cigarette and
+Cynthia's eyes followed each movement and followed it with
+incredulity. The change so ardently longed for by her had come then?
+He loved--he actually loved!</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Since when?&quot; she asked gently.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Do you remember one evening when you stood there by the door, very
+wistful, and told me something about yourself which I did not know?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I remember. I was unwise.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You were not. For it began then.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Really?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She went up to him, and he caught her hand in his and held it tightly
+clasped.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I looked at you to-night as we sat at dinner. There was no one but
+you at the dinner-table. How on earth you could have brought yourself
+to marry me, I can't think.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I told you,&quot; said Cynthia, &quot;I was afraid,&quot; and there was a note of
+exultation in the confession as though now at last she was freed from
+fear. Harry Rames lifted her suddenly from the ground and held her
+close to him. She hung inert in his arms.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's over,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Quite.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I love you, Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia threw her head back and closed her eyes, giving to him her
+face, her throat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wanted to hear you say that,&quot; she whispered. He carried her over to
+the sofa and laid her down.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">For a week or two after that evening Cynthia walked in a dream. The
+great trouble which had weighed upon her thoughts incessantly was
+altogether gone. Mr. Benoliel had been right in his conjectures. He
+must still be right, she reasoned. He had foreseen the trouble
+accurately. &quot;You will be living with your enemy or living quite
+alone.&quot; But he had added a saving clause. If on both sides there was
+love, then salvation would be found. Cynthia did not enquire very
+deeply into Mr. Benoliel's meaning. The salvation would come
+automatically, following upon love. She was content to think that and
+she walked in a world of roses as in the days of her girlhood in the
+estancia before James Challoner had come to claim her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But after a fortnight she waked from her dream. Life was different: it
+was intensified. There was a little more sunlight on a sunny day, a
+little more sparkle in the summer, one walked to music. But the
+trouble was not gone, in spite of the fact that on both sides there
+was love. For with love, contentment had not come to Harry Rames. He
+watched himself, but she watched him closer and she knew. His sleep
+grew disturbed. The torment of his soul was not appeased. Daily he
+became more and more the convict at the oar. There grew up between
+them a loving enmity.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A morning came in the middle of July when to Cynthia the strain became
+intolerable. She was riding under the trees in the Row. It was not yet
+half-past nine and the air was still fresh with the dews of the night.
+A light haze hung near to the ground, the sunlight touched the green
+alleys of trees to gold, and far off across the Park soldiers were
+marching to the drums and fifes. She had reached the cross-road which
+leads to the Albert Gate when an impulse seized her. Mr. Brook was
+riding at her side, dilating enthusiastically on the importance of
+their group in the House of Commons, while Cynthia from time to time
+said mechanically &quot;yes,&quot; and again &quot;yes,&quot; and wished with her whole
+heart that all the bores in London would not take their exercise at
+half-past nine in the morning. Mr. Brook was in full swing when
+Cynthia abruptly reined in her horse.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Good-by,&quot; she said, &quot;I am afraid I have something I must do,&quot; and to
+Mr. Brook's astonishment she turned and cantered quickly back to Hyde
+Park Corner. Thence she rode to Grosvenor Square, gave her horse to
+her groom, and burst into Mr. Benoliel's dining-room where he sat
+breakfasting delicately amidst his silver and flowers. She waved the
+butler from the room and sat down at the table at right-angles to Mr.
+Benoliel.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am very unhappy,&quot; she said. &quot;I was riding in the Park. It seemed
+ridiculous to be unhappy on a day like this. Yet I am. So I put my
+pride in my pocket.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She spoke with a kind of petulance, like one aggrieved and surprised
+at the contrariness of things. But Mr. Benoliel recognized that her
+distress was very real. His face clouded over; he laid his hand upon
+her arm.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Have some breakfast, Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Food!&quot; cried Cynthia in contempt. Then she changed her tone. &quot;Well, I
+haven't had any breakfast. Perhaps--yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She was a girl with a healthy appetite and very unhappily she ate a
+big breakfast.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Now light a cigarette and tell me about it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He pushed over a silver box lined with cedar wood from which Cynthia
+took a cigarette. She tapped the end upon the table and lighted it.
+Mr. Benoliel's cigarettes were famous for their freshness and the
+delicacy of their aroma. Cynthia inhaled the tobacco and was a little
+comforted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; she said. &quot;I can't tell you all about it. I just want to ask you
+a question.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You remember the warning you gave me at Culver when you didn't know
+that I was married?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Quite well,&quot; said Mr. Benoliel regretfully. &quot;It came too late.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am glad that it came too late,&quot; Cynthia observed quietly. &quot;For I
+might have taken it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel looked perplexed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yet you are unhappy, Cynthia?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very. None the less I wouldn't go back. But I don't want you to ask
+me questions. I will tell you at once that you were right--quite right
+up to a point. And the happiness both of Harry and myself depends upon
+your being right all through.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. Benoliel's eyes flashed into life.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There is a chance then?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh yes! If you are right.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Let me hear!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia put her question.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What did you exactly mean when you said that even if the change you
+feared should come and some latent ambition should spring to life and
+snatch him back, separation need not follow, provided that on both
+sides there was love?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A gravity overspread Benoliel's face.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I meant, my dear, that sooner or later,&quot; he said gently, &quot;after much
+tribulation, much revolt, one of the two will make the necessary
+sacrifice, and will make it whole-heartedly.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia was silent for a little while.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; she said at last in a low voice. &quot;Of late I have begun to think
+that that is what you meant.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She dropped her cigarette upon a plate and rose. &quot;Thank you, Mr.
+Benoliel,&quot; she said, and she walked with a trailing step to the door.
+At the door she paused.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And is it always the woman who must make the sacrifice?&quot; she asked;
+and Mr. Benoliel lost in a moment all that second-hand aspect of the
+dilettante which habitually cloaked him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Always,&quot; he said, with a ringing gravity of voice. &quot;That is the law
+of the world, and neither man nor woman shall change it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia opened the door and went out.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXV</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_35" href="#div1Ref_35">THE LITTLE BIT EXTRA</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Yet that August when Parliament had risen, Harry Rames and Cynthia
+were cruising in the Solent and no word had been spoken by her to
+remedy their trouble. It was Cynthia who had proposed this holiday and
+Harry had fallen in with her plan eagerly. They had chartered a small
+steam yacht of a hundred tons. Rames navigated the boat himself and
+slipping their moorings one afternoon, they left Cowes behind them and
+steamed away through the north channel of the Shingles to Poole.
+Cynthia had ceased to wrestle with herself. She was content to lie in
+her deck chair and put into and out of the harbors of the West.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;This shall be the perfect holiday,&quot; she had said. &quot;Whatever the
+future may hold for us, we will have this month together without
+visitors, without any shadows.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They were tossed in Portland race; they steamed across the West Bay
+over a sea smooth and bright as a steel mirror. They dropped their
+anchor at Dartmouth. They rounded the Start on the next day and
+crossed the Bar of Salcombe harbor under the shadow of Bolt Head on
+just such an evening of sunset as that which the poet fixed in a few
+lines of deathless verse. Cynthia stood with her arm through Harry's,
+as very slowly with the lead going in the bows he set the boat over
+the shallows.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Sunset and evening star,&quot; Cynthia quoted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And one clear call for me,&quot; Harry Rames continued and abruptly broke
+off like a guilty person who has spoken without thought. Cynthia
+walked to the end of the bridge. After all, this cruise had made a
+difference to Harry. She consoled herself by the reflection. He had
+recovered something of his buoyancy of spirits since he had trodden
+the planks of this little yacht and looked down from its flimsy bridge
+onto its narrow deck and tapering bow. He was interested in the boat,
+quick to induce her to give him of her best, and her brass shone like
+a woman's ornaments. They put out from Salcombe the next day, and
+keeping clear of Plymouth and Polperro and Fowey, heard the bell upon
+the Manacles in the afternoon and dropped anchor between the woods of
+Helford River. They stayed there for a day and made a passage thence
+to Guernsey on a night of moonlight. Cynthia sat late upon the bridge
+while Rames in his great-coat kept the boat upon her course. Toward
+morning he came to her side and stooped over her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I thought you were asleep.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Aren't you tired?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You were lying so still.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia. &quot;I am storing this night up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The swish and sparkle of the water along the boat's sides, the rattle
+of the chain as the helmsman spun the wheel, the quiet orders of her
+husband, the infinite peace of sky and sea, and the yacht like a jewel
+hung between them, were indeed to dwell long in Cynthia's memories.
+For their holiday was at an end. A sailor was sent ashore at Guernsey
+for the ship's letters and he brought them on board whilst Harry and
+Cynthia were at breakfast in the deck cabin. There was one for Rames
+with the Hickleton postmark stamped upon the envelope. Harry tore it
+open reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Carberley has resigned,&quot; he said. &quot;There will be a meeting of the
+executive on Friday night to adopt young Burrell.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia looked out across the harbor.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We ought to go back, oughtn't we?&quot; she said slowly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry glanced at his letter.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is not expected that the election will take place for five weeks,&quot;
+he answered.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia shook her head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We shall want all that time, Harry.&quot; Then she cried with a sudden
+vehemence. &quot;You have got to win this fight, Harry. So much hangs on it
+for you and me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I know, Cynthia,&quot; he answered.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;More than you know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry rose from his chair.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I'll give orders. We will steam back to Southampton at once. But it's
+a pity, isn't it? Old Carberley might have waited for another month. I
+am sorry.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;So am I,&quot; said Cynthia. Her eyes had wandered from him and were once
+more fixed upon the shipping in the harbor. Her face had grown white.
+&quot;More sorry than you can know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">A little white dinghy, gay with a sailor in a white jersey and a red
+cap, was just leaving the side of a big yacht moored across the water.
+The picture of that little boat was fixed for life in Cynthia's
+recollections. It had nothing to do with her, she never knew who
+sailed in the yacht, or on what business the boat put off to shore.
+But the picture of it was vivid to her long after important memories
+had grown altogether dim.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">The fight for the Hickleton Division was memorable in the political
+history of that year. From first to last it was Rames's fight. The
+candidate was young, and a halting speaker, and unknown to the
+constituency. But he lived in Rames's house and when he appeared upon
+a platform he appeared with Rames at his side. When he spoke he
+uttered the words which Rames had prepared, and when he had finished
+Rames was on his legs to fill up the deficiencies and whip the
+assembly to a fire of enthusiasm. From the great guns of his own party
+no assistance came. Indeed, most of them would have been well pleased
+had the seat not been won. For in the forefront of his programme Mr.
+William Burrell put hostility to the land bill. The two men left the
+white house early in the morning to return there late at night. For
+five weeks the lights of Rames's motor flashed on the hedges of the
+country roads in Warwickshire, and the constituency was won. The
+result was declared at noon, and half an hour later Mr. William
+Burrell, M.P., a slim, fair young gentleman with a small gift of
+flippancy, made his one memorable speech in the big room of the club.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Gentlemen,&quot; he said, &quot;the British public, as a whole, is indifferent
+to politics. It wakes up to be sure at the time of an election. But if
+I were asked to define politics in relation to the British public I
+should define it as a spasm of pain recurring once in every four or
+five years. What, then, is it which arouses the enthusiasm of which I
+am a witness? What is it which achieves these triumphs? Need I say? It
+is personality. Character--that's what you want in public life--and
+now, gentlemen, you have got it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The speech was received with a very tornado of laughter. Rames turned
+to his wife who sat by him on the little raised platform at the end of
+the room.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I told you he wasn't a fool,&quot; he said, and Mr. Arnall, who had come
+over from Ludsey, cried out with a chuckle of delight that he had now
+a companion speech to match the famous one of Taylor the democrat.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You won't go back to London until to-morrow, will you?&quot; said Rames to
+young Burrell. &quot;It's best not to hurry away the moment you've won the
+seat.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They returned accordingly to the white house, and when the two men
+were left by Cynthia to their wine after dinner, Rames turned
+inquisitively to his guest.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have noticed a change in you, Burrell, during these five weeks. You
+came into the contest as though it was a joke, didn't you?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I did,&quot; said Burrell, blushing.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;And though you laughed at it again to-day, as a matter of fact it
+ceased to be a joke very quickly.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Burrell agreed. &quot;Very quickly.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames fetched a box of cigars from the sideboard.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Now light a cigar,&quot; he said, &quot;and tell me just as clearly as you can
+what brought about the change, and what this election really means to
+you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Mr. William Burrell, M.P., shied at the proposal.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, I say, Rames,&quot; he began, but Rames cut him short.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I really want to hear,&quot; he said earnestly. &quot;I ask for a particular
+reason.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Burrell lit his cigar. The contest had impressed him deeply. But like
+most men he was shy of revealing any strength of feeling. The eager
+eyes of Rames, however, kept him to his task. He looked back over the
+five weeks, gathering up his little sheaf of recollections.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What remains in my mind,&quot; he said with hesitation, &quot;is not the
+excitement, nor the applause, is not the difficulty of making speeches
+about subjects with which one is not half acquainted, nor the fear
+of being asked questions for which one has no reply ready, but
+something quite different. It is the memory of little bare raftered
+school-rooms, hot with gas-light, crowded with white faces, faces so
+hopeful, so--intolerably hopeful--the faces of people who look
+confidently to candidates and Parliaments for so much more than it
+seems to me Parliaments and candidates can ever do.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Ah!&quot; said Rames curiously. &quot;You felt that too. I remember that I
+did.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Burrell leaned forward.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Did you too, though you shouted yourself hoarse with the rest, feel a
+little ashamed?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames reflected. &quot;No,&quot; he said; &quot;never.&quot; Then he added with a smile,
+&quot;but I think I should now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I did,&quot; said Burrell. &quot;There were times when I wanted to stop my
+speech in the middle and cry out, 'Don't look at me with such high
+hopes. It's no use! It's no use!' But I held my tongue. For there's
+always the little that governments can do. That's the consolation,
+isn't it?&quot; Burrell was finding it easier to speak out his thoughts
+now. The false shame with which he had begun had quite left him. His
+words tumbled out hot from his soul. The strangely curious, almost
+envious, look with which Harry Rames, his tutor and leader, waited
+upon him encouraged and urged him on.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The fight, the excitement, the victory--oh yes, they are worth
+having, even though one owes them to another, just as I owe them,
+Captain Rames, to you. But now, after the victory, there's still the
+little which can be done; and there's still the memory of the raftered
+school-rooms, the hot gas-light, and the rows of eager, hopeful,
+pallid faces to help one on to do it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He stopped and leaned back in his chair. The shame of a young man who
+has let his tongue wag before his elders and masters seized hold upon
+him.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But why did you lead me on to talk this sort of blatter to you?&quot; he
+asked in an aggrieved voice. &quot;All that I have just learnt you knew
+long since.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames shook his head.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Your opposition to Devenish's land bill shows it,&quot; Burrell insisted.
+&quot;Oh, we'll have a real policy of land reform, not an act of revenge.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames leaned across the corner of the table toward young
+Burrell. To the youth's eyes he looked at this moment extraordinarily
+haggard and old.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I'll tell you, Burrell, why I asked my question. I wanted to
+recapture from you if I could something of a man's enthusiasm at his
+first political victory.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Burrell looked at his leader with astonishment. Of the man of fire who
+had blazed through the constituency from corner to corner with clear
+ringing phrases and an inexhaustible good-humor there was now nothing
+left. He was burnt out. He sat with brooding eyes and a white face all
+fallen into despair. The tale of his years was suddenly written large
+upon him. Burrell had wit enough to understand that fatigue did not
+explain the change. A mask was withdrawn; he saw misery like a cancer.
+Rames sat and betrayed himself like a man in his cups.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You tell me you felt ashamed in the school-rooms. I never knew
+anything of such shame. To win, to win, to win! That was all I thought
+about. That was all the desire I felt. That was what I hoped you would
+help me to recapture to-night. But you haven't helped.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames's eyes dwelt angrily upon his colleague.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No. You have made me feel ashamed too.&quot; Then his face relaxed and he
+added in a friendlier voice: &quot;I believe that I have helped you--really
+helped you. Oh, not to win a seat in the House of Commons. That's
+nothing to be so proud about. But to find your vocation.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Where you have found yours,&quot; said Burrell firmly.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not a bit of it,&quot; said Rames, and then he woke from his moodiness to
+a savage outburst of contempt. &quot;Oh, I am going on with it. Don't be
+alarmed, Burrell. I'll lead you. We'll put up a fight. We'll make the
+fur fly. Very possibly we'll pull the whole Government down with a
+run. But--&quot; and drawing his chair nearer to the youth he changed his
+tone. &quot;I'll tell you the truth about the House of Commons. It's the
+place where the second-rate gets the finest show in the world. In no
+walk of life does second-rate intellect reap so high a reward or meet
+with such great esteem. But it won't lift you to the very top. Nor
+will first-rate intellect either. Remember that!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What will then?&quot; asked Burrell in perplexity, and Harry Rames
+shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;The little bit extra. Character, perseverance! I don't know.
+Something anyway. It's the same everywhere now. There are too many
+clever people about. Faith in a cause, I think will do it. That's why
+the sentimentalists do so much harm in public affairs. They get their
+way, because they believe. They are not playing the political game.
+Cleverness is twelve for a penny nowadays. To get up to the top you
+must have the little bit extra. Now in the sphere of politics I
+haven't got it. I don't say office is out of my reach. It isn't. I
+have been offered it. I have refused it. But I haven't got the little
+bit extra. Outside politics--in quite another sphere--I believe I
+have. But that's all done with. I was warned when I went into
+politics--warned by a shrewd, wise man. But I wouldn't listen, and so
+some day amongst the second-rate Right Honorables half a dozen lines
+will announce my death in the <i>Times</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Young Burrell had no great experience of the intenser emotions, and
+the bitterness with which Rames spoke appalled him. He saw a man in
+torture, and he listened to a cry of pain grown intolerable. Then in a
+second all was changed again. Rames was on his feet replacing the
+stoppers in the decanters, taking the shades from off the candles,
+performing the little conventional acts of a host in his dining-room.
+The chasm in the ordinary level surface of things which had yawned for
+a moment and given Burrell a glimpse of the pit where misery gnawed
+had closed up.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;We will join my wife,&quot; said Rames. He stopped at the door.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Were you ever at Toulon?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There's a statue on the quay there, at the water's edge, overlooking
+the harbor. A great bronze figure, extraordinarily alert, with a light
+upon its forehead, the Genius of the Sea. And on the open pages of a
+bronze book in the front of the pedestal, the names of the great
+sailors are engraved. Cook and the rest of them. The list ends with
+D'Urville, I remember. I only saw the statue once. My father showed it
+to me when I was a boy. I don't suppose that I have ever thought of it
+until to-day.&quot; He repeated softly as though speaking to himself:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes the list ends with D'Urville.&quot; Then he roused himself. &quot;Bring
+your cigar in. Cynthia doesn't mind. By the way,&quot; and a smile of
+tenderness transfigured his face, &quot;not a word of this to her. She
+thinks I am going to be a great man. She's wrong, but I don't want her
+to know before she needs must.&quot; Burrell consented at once. He followed
+Rames from the room with all joy in his victory quite overcast. He
+looked beyond the surprising revelations of his host and obtained a
+glimpse into a new side of life. He was the spectator of one of
+the grim comedies of marriage. Here was the wife--so it seemed to
+him--believing joyfully in the great destiny of her husband; and the
+husband laboring in torment to sustain her belief, while all the while
+he knew that his destiny was thwarted and that the true current of his
+life ran through other fields.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They went along the passage into the drawing-room. It was a warm night
+of September and the windows stood open upon the garden. Cynthia was
+not in the room. Harry stepped out onto the lawn. The night was dark
+and he could see no one. But the light in the drawing-room had
+revealed him as he stepped out, and whilst he was standing peering
+into the darkness Cynthia came softly over the grass to his side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You'll catch cold,&quot; he said. &quot;The dew's heavy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia took his arm. &quot;Hush,&quot; she said. &quot;Listen!&quot; and through the
+still air the chimes of the great clock in Ludsey steeple floated with
+a silvery and melodious sound to their ears. A tune was struck out by
+the bells, then another.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I heard that,&quot; said Cynthia in a whisper, &quot;on the night my father
+died. I was sitting alone with him in the darkness while his life
+drifted away. It was winter.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry put his arm about her and pressed her to his side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I heard them again,&quot; she continued, &quot;one night when I was waiting for
+you to telephone to me, Harry. Do you remember?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I waited a long time for you that night, Harry,&quot; and there was a
+catch in her voice. &quot;Ludsey chimes have meant very much to us. Let us
+hear them out!&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They stood together in the darkness until the last distant note had
+died away. It seemed to Rames that Cynthia listened as though she were
+taking a farewell of them.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXVI</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_36" href="#div1Ref_36">THE TELEGRAM</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames and Cynthia travelled up to London the next day. Cynthia
+was restless and excited.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Let us dine at a restaurant and go to a theatre, Harry,&quot; she said. &quot;I
+can't sit still and stay at home to-night.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well. What shall we go and see?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, something with bright colors and movement and music.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">But there ran through the piece she chose a melody of a haunting
+wistfulness and Harry Rames, happening to glance at his wife in the
+darkness of the auditorium, saw that the tears were raining silently
+down her cheeks.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What's the matter, Cynthia?&quot; he asked in a whisper.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia smiled at him through her tears and laid a hand upon his arm.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Hush!&quot; she answered. &quot;It's all right, Harry.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">As the curtain descended at the end of the act she said, &quot;Let us go
+now quickly, do you mind? Before the lights are turned up.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">They were, fortunately, near to the end of their row of stalls, and
+they were able to slip out while the curtain was still ascending and
+descending upon the lighted stage, and the auditorium still dark.
+Rames left Cynthia in the lobby while he went in search of his
+carriage. When he returned he found her standing with her face
+carefully turned to the wall in front of a commonplace engraving,
+which seemed to be demanding from her the most meticulous study.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Have you found it?&quot; she asked, and she hurried with him across the
+pavement. &quot;Let us go home, Harry. It was nothing except nerves. I was
+stupid. We have been doing a good deal lately, haven't we?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;That's all right, Cynthia. You poor little girl,&quot; said Rames as he
+crossed her cloak over her throat. He knew her too well to make the
+mistake of plying her with questions, and they drove to their home in
+silence.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You had better go to bed, Cynthia,&quot; he said. &quot;I'll send your maid to
+you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No. I am all right now,&quot; she answered. &quot;I have something to say,
+Harry.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She went forward to his study--that room with the mahogany panels
+where both had faced the hardest crises of their lives, had known the
+worst of their sorrows, the sweetest of their joys. Harry followed
+her, turned on the lights, and closed the door. Cynthia was already
+standing by the fireplace with a foot upon the fender; and she
+shivered as though she were cold.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, it's chilly,&quot; said Rames. &quot;Ill light the fire.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He struck a match and set light to the paper. The wood crackled, the
+flames spurted up. Cynthia threw off her cloak and, crouching before
+the fire, warmed herself. Harry Rames drew up an arm-chair for her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Won't you sit here, Cynthia, and be comfortable?&quot; he asked, and his
+voice seemed to rouse her from a gloomy contemplation. She stood up
+and walked over to his bureau.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry's eyes followed her movements closely. With a growing
+consternation he saw her grasp the handles of a locked drawer and try
+to open it.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What do you keep in here, Harry?&quot; she asked.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, some old forgotten things.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Your charts?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My word, yes. I believe they are there,&quot; he said with an air of
+surprise.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Will you show them to me?&quot; Cynthia asked. &quot;I should like to see
+them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't know where the key is. It's lost.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Are you sure?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;For all the chance I have of finding it, dear, it might just as well
+be at the bottom of the Serpentine.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry had not moved away from the fireplace. Cynthia, her back toward
+him, had been playing with the brass handles of the locked drawer. Now
+she swung round suddenly. Often she had wondered what errand had taken
+him from the house at one o'clock of the morning after she had
+revealed her heart to him in this very room. Now she guessed the
+truth. It was on that night that he had begun to build up his dykes
+against the encroachments of his longings. She faced him; her eyes
+burned steadily upon his face, thoughtful, but betraying nothing of
+her thoughts.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; she said, &quot;I suppose it might as well be in the Serpentine.&quot;
+She turned again to the drawer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;A knife will open it easily, Harry.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames moved uncomfortably.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It had better be left alone, Cynthia,&quot; he said. But she insisted and,
+opening a blade of his knife, he went reluctantly across the room to
+her side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is your wish, Cynthia. You will remember that?&quot; he said gravely.
+&quot;For myself I would much rather that it should never be unlocked until
+both of us are dead.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia showed no surprise at the gravity of his voice. But now she
+too paused. &quot;There is still time,&quot; she was saying to herself in
+feverish trouble of mind, though her face was calm. &quot;There is still
+time. He is giving me my chance--my last chance.&quot; Her eyelids were
+lowered over her eyes and she glanced at him under the thick lashes.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You are afraid to open it, Harry?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, I am afraid.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It was not merely the outrush of old and overwhelming memories which
+he dreaded. But that locked drawer had become to him a symbol of his
+own self-mastery. So long as it remained locked, and no longer, he
+would dominate his torments and be the captain of his soul. For so
+long he would keep locked a frail door against his yearnings. Cynthia,
+in a voice so faltering and low that it was hardly audible, said:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Still I should like it opened.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Very well.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She stood with her fingers clenched upon her palms whilst Harry
+inserted the blade of his knife in the chink of the drawer, ran it
+along until it touched the lock, and then forced apart the fastenings.
+There was a crack as of splintering wood. Harry Rames replaced his
+knife in his pocket, pulled out the drawer, and carried it over to his
+writing-table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There it is,&quot; he said, moving away from it to the fireplace. Cynthia
+bent over the drawer and turned on the light of a reading lamp which
+stood upon the table.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;This is your own chart upon the top, Harry?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes. It is the last one, you see. Hemming may be bringing back
+another.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Will you show me exactly the point you reached?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">It seemed to Harry as if she was bent on trying him to the last point
+of endurance.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is marked there quite plainly, Cynthia,&quot; he said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia leaned over the drawer--for a long time. Harry Rames was quite
+surprised at the closeness of her scrutiny. It was so long since she
+had shown any interest in his journey or indeed in anything except his
+political career. As a matter of fact, Cynthia saw of that map nothing
+but a blur: for her eyes were dim with tears, and she bent so low over
+its configurations simply because in that attitude her face was
+hidden.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She moved.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;What is this?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She took up a brown package, tied up with string, which lay in a
+corner of the drawer.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I don't know,&quot; said Rames with a puzzled face. &quot;I have forgotten.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;May I open it?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia cut the string and, one after another, perhaps a score of
+brown telegraph envelopes slipped out in a cascade and fell upon the
+table in front of her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Telegrams,&quot; she said curiously. &quot;Unopened, too! Oh, Harry!&quot; this with
+a mocking laugh of reproach. Then she looked at the address of one of
+the telegrams. It ran:</p>
+<br>
+
+<p style="text-indent:40%"><span class="sc">Rames</span>,</p>
+<p style="text-indent:45%"><span class="sc">S. S. Perhaps</span>,</p>
+<p style="text-indent:50%"><span class="sc">Tilbury Docks</span>.</p>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">As she read her face changed. There came a look of introspection in
+her dark, wide-open eyes. She swept back in her thoughts over the
+course of years and took note of the irony of things and of the
+surprising changes in a life like hers which, to all the world, was
+uneventful and prescribed.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I remember,&quot; she said. &quot;These are the good wishes sent to you when
+you started. You once told me that you never opened them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I hadn't the time. We had to catch the tide out of London. We were
+late getting away. I had forgotten that I had kept them all.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am going to open them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;It is too late to answer them.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I wonder.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia opened the telegrams until she came upon one about half
+through the number which arrested her attention. This she spread out
+before her and smiled at its phrasing.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Harry!&quot; she said.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames turned about.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Come and read this.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">He stood behind Cynthia's chair and read aloud the message still
+legible upon the form.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Every heart-felt wish for a triumphant journey from an unknown friend
+in--;&quot; and then he stopped with an intake of his breath. &quot;In South
+America,&quot; he resumed, and so stood quite still for the space of a few
+seconds. Then he leaned forward and looked at the name of the
+telegraph office from which the message had been sent.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Daventry,&quot; he cried.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia with a little laugh upon which her voice broke.
+&quot;We had a telegraph office on the estancia. We were very proud of it,
+I can tell you&quot;; and then the amusement died away from her voice, and
+&quot;oh!&quot; she whispered in a long sigh, as she felt his arm about her.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You sent that! You! Cynthia! Before I knew you, before we met.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, dear, I sent it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Just think,&quot; he cried. &quot;It reached me at Tilbury. It travelled out
+with me to the South. It was in the desk in my cabin for three long
+dark winters. It came back with me to England. By chance I met
+you----&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, not by chance, Harry,&quot; Cynthia interrupted. &quot;I sent Mr. Benoliel
+to fetch you.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes, you did,&quot; he agreed, with a laugh. &quot;We met, and we married, and
+through all these changes it has lain here unopened. Why didn't I open
+it? That was conceit, Cynthia. I was haughty. I was going out to
+discover the South Pole. I didn't open my telegrams.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But if you had opened it, Harry, you would only have laughed. For
+it's just the message of a schoolgirl, isn't it? You were one of my
+heroes--oh, not the only one but the latest one--I had just let you in
+past the turnstile to my enchanted garden. I was seventeen on the very
+day I sent it. I drove down to the office--oh in such a condition of
+importance. I pictured to myself you, the unknown you, sitting in your
+cabin and wondering and wondering and wondering who your little friend
+was in South America. Then I drove back and&quot;--she stopped and went on
+again slowly--&quot;yes, other things happened to me that day.&quot; She looked
+down again at the telegram. &quot;Yes, the message of a foolish and
+romantic school-girl.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I should like to be able to think, Cynthia,&quot; said her husband, &quot;that
+I had opened it when it came.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But you didn't,&quot; said Cynthia, &quot;and so--&quot; she broke off her sentence.
+She took the telegram form, folded it, and replaced it in its
+envelope. She took a brush from a little bottle of gum which stood
+ready upon the table by the inkstand and, smearing the inner border of
+the envelope, stuck it down again. Then she stood up and turned to her
+husband. &quot;And so,&quot; she continued, &quot;you must take it, Harry, as though
+it were despatched to you by me only to-day for the first time and
+delivered to you here now at midnight.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She held out to him the telegram and he took it, gazing at her with a
+look of wonder. And then hope flamed in his eyes. Cynthia turned away
+abruptly. To her that swift flame of hope, of life, was almost
+intolerable.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Then you knew,&quot; he cried.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia nodded her head, but she kept her face averted.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I have known a long time,&quot; she answered in a low voice. &quot;Ever since
+the letter came to you with the Rexland stamp.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">The sound of her voice and her attitude pierced to Rames's heart. His
+exultation gave way to concern.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am very sorry, Cynthia,&quot; he said gently. &quot;I tried to hide it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, my dear, I know you did. With all your strength you tried to hide
+it. You watched yourself each minute. But,&quot; and she turned to him with
+a little smile of tenderness, &quot;I watched you closer still, and the
+longing grew too big to be hidden.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry Rames made no pretence to deny the truth of her words, knowing
+full well that all denial would be vain. The screen was down between
+them.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; he said; &quot;but Cynthia, I keep my bargain.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;My dear, there is no longer any bargain between us,&quot; she answered,
+&quot;for on both sides there is love. Of that I am very sure.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She held out her hands to him and he caught them and held her against
+his breast.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You said you had rather that drawer was not unlocked until both of us
+were dead,&quot; she whispered. &quot;My dear, if that drawer was not to be
+unlocked, we might both of us be dead at once for all the value our
+lives were going to be. So you will go, you must, unless we are to be
+wrecked altogether. We have been most unhappy, both of us. I, because
+I thought of the dangers,&quot; and she suddenly caught him close as though
+even now she dared not let him go, &quot;and could not bring myself to make
+the sacrifice and let you run the risk--you, because the call was
+always in your ears. It couldn't go on. That's the truth, Harry.
+Especially now that you know that your secret's no longer a secret to
+me. We should grow estranged, embittered, each one thinking the other
+horribly selfish. Perhaps, even hatred might come.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No,&quot; protested Harry.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, yes, yes. It has come from smaller causes often enough. It might
+come, Harry, and that would be terrible. I have thought it out, my
+dear. All the time we were cruising down in the West I was thinking
+our position over and over and over. And it seemed to me that you must
+win this Hickleton election first--and then I would tell you that I
+understood your great trouble and let you go. But you had to win
+first. I couldn't let you go while people might be able to say that
+you had gone because you had been beaten in your political ambitions.
+I was too proud of you, my dear, to allow that. You must lay down your
+career at a moment of success, leaving behind you a good name amongst
+your colleagues and perhaps a great many regrets. But you have won the
+election now, you have made good, as they say, and so, for both our
+sakes, you must go.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She drew herself out of his arms and moved away to the fire.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Of course it's just what I wanted when I first met you, isn't it?&quot;
+she said with a wavering effort of a laugh. &quot;I urged you to go back
+and finish your work the first time I met you--one night at the
+Admiralty. Only things have changed a good deal since then, haven't
+they?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Her voice, which had been steady up till now, broke, and with a sob
+she suddenly hid her face in her hands. &quot;Oh, Harry,&quot; she cried as
+though her heart was breaking, and he hurried to her, exclaiming:</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Cynthia, I am a brute. I can't leave you here for three years alone.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">She held him off with her arm outstretched, dreading lest she should
+weaken and take her advantage of his remorse and so have to go through
+all this heart-rending renunciation again at some future time.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;You won't, Harry,&quot; she said, drying her eyes with her handkerchief.
+&quot;I have thought it all out. My father asked me on his death-bed not to
+desert the Daventry estancia altogether. He loved it so himself that
+he did not wish to think that he would die and that no one of his own
+people would ever see it again and make sure that all was going well
+with it. And here's the opportunity. While you go down to the
+Antarctic I will go back to the Daventry estancia. I couldn't live
+here day after day with you away amidst the storms and the snow. There
+I shall be able to. I will have the estancia to look after. When will
+you go?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Not so very soon, Cynthia, after all,&quot; he said. &quot;It will take me a
+year before the preparations are complete. Besides, there's the money
+to be raised.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia raised her shoulders in a gesture of reproach.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Oh, Harry! There's no trouble about the money, of course.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames stared at her. &quot;Cynthia,&quot; he cried. &quot;You'll help?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;More than help, Harry,&quot; she answered. &quot;You see I let you go--yes. I
+even bid you go--yes. But I mean to have my share, my dear, in
+whatever you do. I mean that you shall carry something of me,
+something more than a telegram this time, to your farthest South.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Rames sat down in a chair by the side of the fire close to where she
+stood. He gazed into the flames in silence. With all gentleness and
+love she was heaping coals of fire upon his head. Every look, every
+word she spoke, confessed the deep pain which he was causing her. She
+was brave, but through the curtain of her bravery her fear and anguish
+shone. He spoke as a man will who is smitten by his conscience.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I am very sorry, Cynthia. When I asked you to marry me I had no
+suspicion that any longing could get so strong a hold on me. I once
+told you carelessly that men were driven out upon these expeditions by
+the torment of their souls. I said that knowing it only by hearsay and
+by the plain proof of it which they show in what they have written.
+Now I know it--here,&quot; and he struck his breast above his heart. &quot;Yes,
+I have got to go if I am ever to have peace. But I am sorry, Cynthia.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">His voice trailed off into silence and Cynthia laid a hand upon his
+head and stroked his hair. &quot;I know,&quot; she said, &quot;I know.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;All that I thought so fine, so well worth having--the fight with
+other men for mastery, the conquest with what conquest would
+bring--power and rule and governing--it's extraordinary how completely
+all desire for it has vanished out of me!&quot; he continued. &quot;Do you
+remember the account I gave you of my maiden speech?&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Cynthia's hand had gone to her breast, but her voice was steady.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;There was a fragment of time when the world went blank, when I lost
+the thread of my speech, and stood dumb. A fragment of time so short
+that it wasn't noticeable to any one in the House except myself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Well, these three years of politics seem to me just such an
+unnoticeable interruption of my real life. The fight which I revelled
+in appears to me now a squabble made ignoble with intrigues, bitter
+with mean disappointments, the victory not worth the fight. No doubt I
+am wrong. I went into the House of Commons, you see, without ideas,&quot;
+and Cynthia started at the word so familiar to her fancies. &quot;Now I
+have one, a big one, and it has mastered me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">And so Harry Rames passed at last through the turnstile into Cynthia's
+private garden. But it was in accordance with the irony of their lives
+that she wished with every drop of her blood that he had remained
+outside.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I long for simple things, not shifts and intrigues and bitterness;
+the gray mists on glaciers; the day's journey over the snow, with its
+wind ridges and its storms; the hard, lean life of it all; the fight,
+not with men, but with enormous things of nature, some dangerous, some
+serene, but, whether dangerous or serene, wholly indifferent.&quot; He
+gazed for a little while into the fire, seeking in the analysis of his
+emotions his apologia.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think, Cynthia,&quot; he continued, &quot;that once a man has gone far into
+the empty spaces of the earth, he has the mark of them upon him.
+Voices call from them over all the leagues of all the seas and need no
+receivers at the end.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;Yes,&quot; said Cynthia, and once more her memories travelled back to the
+death-bed of old Daventry in the dark room of the white house. He had
+given her reasons for his great love of his estancia on the wide
+plains of Argentina. But there had been another reason, she
+remembered, which his failing wits had not allowed his tongue to
+formulate. Cynthia had often wondered what that reason was. She had no
+doubt that her husband had explained it now. &quot;Yes, my father also
+heard those voices.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">After a short silence Harry Rames reached out his hand and took hers.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;I think, my dear,&quot; he said gently, &quot;that things would have been
+different, that I should not have wanted to go, had we been fortunate
+enough to have children--&quot; and with a cry Cynthia turned to him
+fiercely.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;No, no!&quot; she exclaimed. &quot;During this hour, for the first time, I have
+been thanking God we had no children. For if we had, you would still
+have wanted to go just as much as you do now, and that I could not
+have borne.&quot;</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Harry had no answer for her outburst. In his heart he knew that what
+she had said was true. He sat in silence, his eyes upon the fire and
+her hand in his; and a moment or two later she dropped upon her knees
+at his side.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">&quot;But oh, Harry, come back to me!&quot; she cried. &quot;You must go I know.
+That's the way things happen. But oh, come back to me.&quot;</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXXVII</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="sc"><a name="div1_37" href="#div1Ref_37">THE LAST</a></span></h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="normal">At nine o'clock on a morning of July during the next year an auxiliary
+barquentine of four hundred and fifty tons steamed westward with the
+tide past the Isle of Wight. Besides the helmsman, Cynthia and Harry
+Rames were upon the bridge. They stood side by side, Cynthia gripping
+the rail in front of her with both of her hands. They did not speak.
+The ship glided past Cowes gay with its white yachts and crowded
+esplanade and rounded Gurnard Point into Newtown Bay. Cynthia looked
+ahead through a blur of tears, watching for and yet dreading to see a
+low square church tower stand out against the sky close to the water
+in a dip of the coast-line hills. Opposite to that church the ship was
+stopped and a boat was lowered. Cynthia, with Robert Brook to look
+after her, was put ashore on Yarmouth pier; and the barquentine dipped
+her flag and steamed on to the Needles and the open sea on its three
+years' voyage.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Brook escorted Cynthia across the water to Southampton, and the
+next day witnessed her departure from the docks on a steamer of the
+Royal Mail for Buenos Ayres. He returned to London that afternoon,
+took a solitary dinner at his club, and walked afterward to Curzon
+Street. The Rames's house was all lit up, and from the open windows
+music drifted out upon the summer night. Harry and Cynthia had let
+their house a week before, and to-night the new residents were giving
+a party. Robert Brook had an invitation and went in. He listened for
+half an hour to a party of coons and then could endure no more. The
+comic songs and the laughter seemed to him that night in this house a
+desecration. For in the characters of Harry Rames and his wife he
+chose to see something of greatness, in their lives something of
+achievement. He looked about the walls. Some dark and terrible hours
+must needs have been passed by both Harry and Cynthia within them
+before the great resolution had been taken which had condemned her to
+three years of loneliness on an estancia in South America and had
+stripped him of a sure career in politics.</p>
+
+<p class="normal">Robert Brook fell into a black mood and an utter weariness with his
+own life. For him season was to follow season and to find him still a
+guest at the parties and the entertainments until he became old and a
+bore. He envied Harry his expedition, Cynthia her sorrow. He went out
+wretched and walked by instinct down Whitehall. On his way to his club
+he passed the windows of the Board of Trade. These, too, were
+brilliantly lit; for within the building a Cabinet Minister was
+endeavoring to compose an acute struggle between artisans and their
+employers. Robert Brook watched those windows; and his disgust with
+his own life increased. Here again was achievement for others, not for
+himself. There would never be room for him within that building, nor
+within any other where the nation's administration was being done. And
+his life was going; indeed, the best part of it was done. He walked on
+to his own small house and let himself in with his key. The passage
+was dark and the house quite silent. He stood for a while alone in the
+darkness and the silence. He thought of Cynthia and Harry, of Devenish
+and his colleagues, of others without eminence, but, at all events,
+with wives and children. He had given up his life to the House of
+Commons and the House of Commons repaid him by barely knowing his
+name. There was probably no man in London more wretched that night
+than Robert Brook.</p>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3>The End</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Turnstile, by
+A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
+
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+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's The Turnstile, by A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Turnstile
+
+Author: A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
+
+Release Date: January 27, 2012 [EBook #38689]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TURNSTILE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+   1. Page scan source:
+      http://www.archive.org/details/turnstile00masogoog
+
+   2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
+
+
+
+
+                            THE TURNSTILE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                       BOOKS BY A. E. W. MASON
+
+                 Published By CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+       The Broken Road.                          $1.50
+       At the Villa Rose. Illustrated.           $1.50
+       The Turnstile.                      _net_ $1.30
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE TURNSTILE
+
+
+
+
+                                  BY
+
+                            A. E. W. MASON
+
+             AUTHOR OF "FOUR FEATHERS," "RUNNING WATER,"
+                       "THE BROKEN ROAD," ETC.
+
+
+
+
+                       CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+                       NEW YORK  :: :: ::  1912
+
+
+
+
+
+                      Copyright, 1911, 1912, by
+                       CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+                              *   *   *
+                        Published June, 1912
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               CONTENTS
+
+
+       CHAPTER
+
+         I. The Swinging of a Chandelier.
+
+        II. Of an Earthquake and James Challoner.
+
+       III. Challoner's Pilgrimage.
+
+        IV. Cynthia's Birthday.
+
+         V. The Reaper.
+
+        VI. A Visitor at the Estancia.
+
+       VII. Both Sides of the Door.
+
+      VIII. The Flight.
+
+        IX. Robert Daventry Explains.
+
+         X. Mr. Benoliel.
+
+        XI. A Man on the Make.
+
+       XII. Lungatine.
+
+      XIII. The Night Before the Poll.
+
+       XIV. Colonel Challoner's Memory.
+
+        XV. The Mayor and the Man.
+
+       XVI. Words Over the Telephone.
+
+      XVII. A Refusal.
+
+     XVIII. A Maiden Speech.
+
+       XIX. And a Proposal.
+
+        XX. At Culver.
+
+       XXI. Mr. Benoliel's Warning.
+
+      XXII. And an Instance to Enforce It.
+
+     XXIII. Cynthia on the House.
+
+      XXIV. The Man Who Had Walked in the Road.
+
+       XXV. Colonel Challoner's Revolt.
+
+      XXVI. The Picture at Bramling.
+
+     XXVII. Devenish Replies.
+
+    XXVIII. Wireless.
+
+      XXIX. In the Ladies' Gallery.
+
+       XXX. The Letter.
+
+      XXXI. M. Poizat Again.
+
+     XXXII. The Call.
+
+    XXXIII. A Letter from Abroad.
+
+     XXXIV. The Convict at the Oar.
+
+      XXXV. A Little Bit Extra.
+
+     XXXVI. The Telegram.
+
+    XXXVII. The Last.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE TURNSTILE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            THE TURNSTILE
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I
+
+                     THE SWINGING OF A CHANDELIER
+
+
+At the first glance it looked as if the midnight chimes of a clock in
+an old city of the Midlands might most fitly ring in this history. But
+we live in a very small island, and its inhabitants have for so long
+been wanderers upon the face of the earth that one can hardly search
+amongst them for the beginnings of either people or events without
+slipping unexpectedly over the edge of England. So it is in this
+instance. For, although it was in England that Captain Rames, Mr.
+Benoliel, Cynthia, the little naturalized Frenchman, and the rest of
+them met and struggled more or less inefficiently to express
+themselves; although, too, Ludsey, the old city, was during a period
+the pivot of their lives; for the beginnings of their relationship one
+with another, it is necessary to go further afield, and back by some
+few years. One must turn toward a lonely estancia in the south-west of
+Argentina, where, on a hot, still night of summer, a heavy chandelier
+touched by no human hand swung gently to and fro.
+
+This queer thing happened in the dining-room of the house, and between
+half-past ten and eleven o'clock. It was half-way through January, and
+Mr. and Mrs. Daventry were still seated at the table over a late
+supper. For Robert Daventry had on that day begun the harvesting of
+his eight leagues of wheat, and there had been little rest for any one
+upon the estancia since daybreak. He sat now taking his ease opposite
+his wife, with a cup of black coffee in front of him and a cigar
+between his lips, a big, broad, sunburnt man with a beard growing gray
+and a thick crop of brown hair upon his head; loose-limbed still, and
+still getting, when he stood up, the value of every inch of his six
+feet two. As he lounged at the table he debated with his wife in a
+curious gentle voice a question which, played with once, had begun of
+late years to insist upon an answer.
+
+"We are both over fifty, Joan," he said. "And we have made our money."
+
+"We have also made our friends, Robert," replied his wife. She was a
+short, stoutish woman, quick with her hands, practical in her speech.
+Capacity was written broad upon her like a label, and, for all her
+husband's bulk, she was the better man of the two, even at the first
+casual glance. There was a noticeable suggestion of softness and
+amiability in Robert Daventry. It was hardly, perhaps, to be localized
+in any feature. Rather he diffused it about him like an atmosphere.
+One would have wondered how it came about that in a country so stern
+as Argentina he had prospered so exceedingly had his wife not been
+present to explain his prosperity. It was so evident that she drove
+the cart and that he ran between the shafts--evident, that is, to
+others than Robert Daventry. She had been clever enough and fond
+enough to conceal from him their exact relationship. So now it was
+with an air of pleading that she replied to him:
+
+"We have not only made our friends, Robert. We have made them here. If
+we go, we lose them."
+
+"Yes," he answered. "But it wouldn't be as if we had to start quite
+fresh again. I have old ties with Warwickshire. Thirty years won't
+have broken them all."
+
+Joan Daventry answered slowly:
+
+"Thirty years. That's a long time, Robert."
+
+"And yet," said Robert Daventry with a wistfulness in his voice which
+almost weakened her into a consent against which her judgment no less
+than her inclinations fought. "And yet there's a house on the London
+road which I might have passed yesterday--it's so vivid to me now. A
+white house set back from the highway behind a great wall of old red
+brick. Above the coping of the wall you can see the rows of level
+windows and the roof of a wing a story lower than the rest of the
+house. And if the gates are open you catch a glimpse of great cedar
+trees on a wide lawn--a lawn of fine grass like emeralds."
+
+His eyes turned back upon his boyhood, and the thought of his county
+set his heart aching. Long white roads, rising and dipping between
+high elms, with a yard or two of turf on either side for a horse to
+canter on; cottages, real cottages, not shapeless buildings of
+corrugated iron standing gauntly up against the sky-line at the edge
+of a round of burnt, bare plain, but cottages rich with phlox and deep
+in trees--the pictures were flung before his eyes by the lantern of
+his memories as if upon a white sheet. But, above all, it was the
+thought of the greenery of Warwickshire which caught at his throat;
+the woods flecked with sunlight, the lawns like emeralds.
+
+He glanced at a thermometer which hung against the wall. Here, even at
+eleven o'clock of the night, it marked this January ninety-seven
+degrees of heat. The mosquitoes trumpeted and drummed against the
+gauze curtains which covered the open windows; and outside the windows
+the night was black and hot like velvet.
+
+Robert Daventry drew his handkerchief across his forehead and with his
+elbow on the table leaned his face upon his hand. His wife looked at
+him quickly and with solicitude.
+
+"You are tired to-night, Robert," she said gently. "That's why you
+want to give the estancia up."
+
+Robert Daventry shook his head and corrected her.
+
+"No, Joan. But I am more tired to-night and very likely that's the
+explanation." Then he laughed at a recollection. "Do you remember when
+the squadron came to Montevideo two years ago? There was a dinner at
+the legation at Buenos Ayres. I sat next to the commodore, and he
+asked me how old I was. When I told him that I was just fifty, he
+replied: 'Ah, now you will begin to find life very interesting. For
+you will notice every year that you are able to do a little less than
+you did the year before.' Well, I am beginning, my dear, to find life
+interesting from the commodore's point of view."
+
+Joan did not answer him at once, and the couple sat for awhile in
+silence, with their thoughts estranged.
+
+For Joan Daventry shrank, with all her soul, from that coveted white
+house on the London road. Old ties could be resumed, was Robert's
+thought. He was forgetful that the ties were his, and his alone. She
+had no share in them and she had come to a time of life when the
+making of new friends is a weariness and a labor. With infinite toil
+and self-denial they had carved out their niche here in the Argentine
+Republic. They spent the winter in their house in Buenos Ayres, the
+summer upon the Daventry estancia. Their life was an ordered,
+comfortable progression of the months. For both of them, to her
+thinking, the time for new adventures had long gone by. They had had
+their full proportion of them in their youth. And so while Robert
+Daventry dreamed of a green future Joan was busily remembering.
+
+"When we first came here to settle," she said slowly, as she counted
+up all that had been done in these twenty-seven years, "we drove for
+two days. If the house on the London road is vivid to you, that drive
+is as clear to me. Our heaviest luggage was our hopes;" and Robert
+Daventry smiled across the table.
+
+"I have not forgotten that either," he said; and there was a whole
+world of love in his voice.
+
+"When we reached here we found a tin house with three rooms and
+nothing else, not a tree, hardly a track. Now there's an avenue half a
+mile long, there are plantations, there's a real brick house for the
+plantations to shelter. There are wells, there's a garden, there's a
+village at the end of the avenue, there's even a railway station
+to-day. These things are our doing, Robert;" and her voice was lifted
+up with pride.
+
+"I know," replied her husband. "But I ask myself whether the time has
+not come to hand them on."
+
+Once more the look of solicitude shone in his wife's eyes.
+
+"I could leave the estancia," she said doubtfully, "though it would
+almost break my heart to do it. But suppose we did. What would become
+of you in England? I have a fear," and she leaned forward across the
+table.
+
+"Why a fear?" he asked.
+
+"Because I think that people who have lived hard, like you and me, run
+a great risk if they retire just when they feel that they are
+beginning to grow old. A real risk of life, I mean. I think such as
+you and I would be killed off by inactivity rather than by any
+disease."
+
+She did not deny that something was wrong in their present situation.
+But she had a different conception of what that something was; and she
+had a different remedy.
+
+"We should find life too dull?" he exclaimed. "Too lonely, Joan?" and
+he struck the table with his hand; "I find it lonely here;" and at
+that she uttered a low cry:
+
+"Oh, my dear, and what of me?" and the wistfulness of her voice struck
+him to silence, a remorseful silence. After all, his days were full.
+
+"There's our other plan," she suggested gently.
+
+"Yes. To be sure! There's our other plan," he said. He leaned back in
+his chair, his face upturned toward the ceiling, and a thoughtful look
+in his eyes.
+
+"We have talked it over, haven't we? But we have played with it all
+the time. It would be so big an experiment."
+
+He ended the sentence abruptly. The look of thought passed from his
+face. It became curious, perplexed. Then he cried with a start of
+dismay:
+
+"You see, Joan, even my eyes are beginning to play tricks with me. I
+could swear that the chandelier is swinging to and fro above our
+heads."
+
+Joan looked anxiously at her husband, and then up toward the ceiling.
+At once surprise drove the anxiety from her face and thoughts.
+
+"But it _is_ swinging," she exclaimed. Both of them stared at the
+chandelier. There was not a doubt about the phenomenon possible. Not a
+breath of wind stirred in the garden, not a sound was audible
+overhead. Yet very gently the chandelier, with its lighted globes,
+oscillated above their heads. Robert Daventry rose to his feet and
+touched it.
+
+"Yes, it is swinging," he said. He stopped it, and held it quite
+still. Then he resumed his seat.
+
+"Very well, Joan," he said with a new briskness in his voice, "we will
+make the experiment. Come! When we go to Buenos Ayres in the winter!
+We will try the other plan. Even if it fails it will be worth making."
+
+Joan's face lighted up.
+
+"If it fails, then we'll go home," she said.
+
+No doubt the relief which Robert Daventry felt in the proof that his
+eyes were not failing him led him thus briskly to fall in with the
+scheme which both approached with timidity; and so the swinging of the
+chandelier had its share in bringing them to their decision. But the
+chandelier had not done with them. For hardly had Robert Daventry
+ceased to speak when it began again to swing backward and forward
+before their eyes. So it swung for exactly five minutes and then of
+its own accord it stopped.
+
+"That's very strange," said Robert Daventry. He looked at the clock
+upon the mantel-shelf. It was five minutes past eleven.
+
+"It's unaccountable," he continued. But he was able to account for it
+the next day. For a local paper brought to them the news that at ten
+minutes to eleven o'clock on the evening before, seven hundred miles
+away on the other side of the great barrier of the Andes, an
+earthquake had set the shores of the Pacific heaving like a sea, and
+Valparaiso, that city of earthquakes, had tumbled into ruins.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II
+
+                 OF AN EARTHQUAKE AND JAMES CHALLONER
+
+
+The experiences of James Challoner on that day of ruin at Valparaiso
+were various, but none of them were pleasant. It was his twenty-eighth
+birthday and up to two o'clock in the afternoon he was, as for the
+last six weeks he had been, a clerk in the great house of R. C. Royle
+& Sons. There was no sort of business in Chile which R. C. Royle &
+Sons were not prepared to undertake and carry through with efficiency,
+from a colossal deal in nitrates to the homeward freight of your
+portmanteau. It was, to be sure, upon the latter class of work that
+James Challoner was asked to concentrate his abilities. But
+advancement was a principle of the house, and in the vast
+ramifications of its business, opportunities of advancement came
+quickly. James Challoner, who for the best part of five years had been
+drifting unsuccessfully up and down the Pacific Coast, between Callao
+and Concepcion, was consequently accounted a lucky man to have secured
+employment in that house at all.
+
+"If he can only keep it!" said his friends, shrugging their shoulders,
+and his young wife, in the little house up the hill, bent over her
+child and whispered the same words. But in her mouth they were a
+prayer.
+
+At two o'clock, then, upon his birthday, James Challoner returned from
+his luncheon to the office, but as he took his seat he was summoned to
+the manager's room. He walked down the long room between the tables on
+which samples of produce were exhibited, then past the cashier's
+brass-fenced desks where the banking business was done, to a little
+compartment partitioned off in a corner. There Wallace Bourdon, a
+young partner in control of this branch of the firm, sat in a tilted
+chair, with his knees against a table, awaiting him.
+
+"Mr. Challoner, it is within your knowledge, I suppose, that we are
+negotiating with the Government at Santiago for the construction of a
+new railway in the north."
+
+Challoner shook his head.
+
+"That's not in my department, sir," he said.
+
+"Quite true," said Wallace Bourdon. He opened a drawer of the table
+and threw half a dozen letters down on the top of it under Challoner's
+eyes. "These letters are copies of our proposals. There are two firms
+competing with us to which these copies would be valuable. They were
+found in your desk while you were out at luncheon. What were they
+doing there?"
+
+James Challoner stared at the letters and pulled at his moustache.
+
+"I can't think, sir. They must have been put there," he said, and then
+with a cry of indignation: "I must have an enemy in the office."
+
+"Well, that's hard," said Wallace Bourdon sympathetically. "For he
+seems to have got back on you good and strong. You can draw your money
+from the cashier, Mr. Challoner, and clear out of this house just as
+soon as you can find it convenient;" and Wallace Bourdon dropped the
+legs of his chair onto the floor.
+
+James Challoner took his money and went out into the town. He sat
+moodily on a high stool at a bar for an hour or so. Then some men of
+his acquaintance joined him, and from moody he became blusterful and
+boisterous. But both the moodiness and the bluster were phases of the
+one deep-seated feeling--a reluctance to go up the hill and meet his
+wife. It was seven o'clock before he had gained the necessary courage,
+and when he did face his wife he followed the usual practice of his
+kind and blurted out aggressively the news of his dismissal.
+
+"I was lowering myself by going into the office at all as a clerk," he
+cried. "I told you so when you urged me to do it. Upon my word it
+almost serves me right, Doris. I have never known any good come from a
+man's lowering himself. He is bound to make enemies amongst his new
+associates. Jealousy is a despicable thing, but there's a deal of it
+floating about in the world, and one's a fool to shut one's eyes to
+it. However, we can't let the business rest there. My honor's
+impugned. That's the truth of it, Doris. I lie under a dishonorable
+charge. There's a stigma on our child's name, and it must be removed."
+
+He drew a chair briskly up to the table, pulled a piece of note-paper
+toward him, and dipped his pen in the ink.
+
+"Let me see, now! Who can my enemy be? Who is it that hates me? Can't
+you think of some one?" and in an instant he pushed the blotting pad
+from him. "You might say something, Doris. You just stand and look and
+never open your mouth."
+
+That was James Challoner's trouble, and the cause of his uneasiness.
+His wife neither buoyed him up with high-sounding phrases, nor
+afforded him the opportunity by any reproach to work himself into a
+fine heat of indignation. She had given him one dreadful look, her
+whole countenance a quivering cry of dismay made visible, and
+thereafter she had just stood with no word on her lips, her great eyes
+disconcertingly fixed upon his face and her mind quite hidden. She
+went out from the room and left him sitting in great discomfort. He
+detested her habit of silence, but he feared still more the thought of
+him which it might conceal, and he dared not break it with acrimonies.
+When she returned again into the room it was to say:
+
+"Dinner is ready."
+
+"Well, we must dine," said Challoner.
+
+"It is fortunate that after all I didn't hire that servant at once,"
+said Doris.
+
+"Yes, that was lucky. We can't afford a servant now," said James
+Challoner.
+
+Fear lest his wife should "lower herself" did not trouble him at all.
+During dinner he talked in self-defence, flurriedly, about his enemy,
+pointing vaguely to this man or to that, and watching keenly for some
+droop of disdain about Doris's lips. But she gave no sign, and at the
+back of all his thought was the wounding question:
+
+"What does she think of me?"
+
+He smoked his pipe outside the door after dinner, with the lighted
+streets of the town spread out below him. The house stood apart, high
+up on the great amphitheatre of hills above Valparaiso; and on the
+opposite side of the road the ground fell steeply. The great bay lay
+open beneath his eyes to the distant tip of its northern horn; no
+inland pool could have slept more quietly than did the Pacific on that
+summer night; still water and mirrored stars, it widened out in the
+warm dusk to the sky's rim. A huge black steamer lay out beyond the
+edge of the jetty, with the great lights blazing from its saloon
+windows and the little lights steady on its masts. From the
+close-built streets at the water's edge there rose a pleasant murmur
+of many voices. No warnings were being given. Valparaiso, like any
+other tropical city, was taking its ease in the cool of the evening.
+
+At ten o'clock James Challoner, having nothing better to do and no
+money to spend, went indoors. He locked the front door and with a
+definite relief found that his wife had already gone to bed. He stood
+in the empty, barely furnished sitting-room, and his thoughts were
+swept back to the morning at Southampton, five years ago, when Doris
+had crept on board the steamer which was to take them to South
+America. He remembered bitterly the buoyant hopes with which that
+runaway marriage had begun and Doris's fears that her flight had been
+already discovered and that an attempt at the last moment might be
+made to stop her.
+
+"It has been a bad mistake for me," he said, as all the wonderful
+things which he might have done, had he not been hampered with a wife,
+glittered in his mind. The truth, however, was not to be grasped by
+him unless he would face truthfully the history of his marriage, and
+that he was not constituted to do. It was a story common enough: A
+young man with no will and caressing manners, who was hastily packed
+off to South America, with a few hundred pounds in his pocket, to
+avoid exposure in his own country, and a young girl too staunch to her
+beliefs--these were the characters, and, given them, the story tells
+itself. "Yes, it has all been a very bad mistake for me," thought
+James Challoner, and switching off the lights he betook himself to
+bed. A door in the inner wall of his bedroom opened into the room
+where his wife and child slept. He listened for a moment with his ear
+against the panel. All was silent in that room.
+
+"She can sleep," he grumbled, finding even a grievance here. But he
+did not sleep for long. For, just at the moment when the chandelier
+began to swing in Mr. Daventry's dining-room, he was shaken out of his
+slumber. He lay for a few seconds in the vague and pleasant space
+between wakefulness and dreams, playing with the fancy that he was in
+a cabin on a ship at sea. But the fancy passed, and he was beset by a
+stranger illusion. He happened to be lying upon his side, with his
+face turned toward the outer wall of his bedroom; and as he lay he saw
+quite distinctly the wall gently and noiselessly split open. It split
+open high up and near to the ceiling, and it let through the stars and
+a strip of sky. Then the wall closed neatly together again, brick
+fitting with brick, so that not a chink was left. The room once more
+was black, the stars shut out.
+
+Challoner was still pondering upon this remarkable phenomenon when a
+third sensation shook him altogether out of his lethargy. He was
+violently jolted. This could be no illusion. It was as if some one,
+crouching beneath the bed, had suddenly risen on hands and knees and
+struck the mattress with his shoulders. Challoner sprang out of bed,
+tottered, and clung to the bedpost for support. The room was rocking
+like a tree in a gale and underneath his feet the boards strained and
+heaved. It was his first experience of an earthquake, but he had no
+doubt that he was undergoing it, and fear made his hands grip the iron
+post of the bed so that his palms were bruised. His chief terror was
+the floor. The feel of it moving unstably beneath his feet, the sound
+of its boards cracking loosened his knees. At any moment it might
+burst upward and explode. At some moment and very soon it must. He had
+no fear that it would collapse and gape open; it would surely burst
+like a shell; and in his fear of that explosion the rocking of the
+walls was of no account.
+
+He tried to think, and instinct reminded him of civilized man's chief
+necessities.
+
+"My shoes, my money."
+
+He groped along the bed for the switch of the light, but light did not
+answer to the summons. In the darkness he stooped, found his shoes,
+and slipped them on. His few dollars, drawn that afternoon from the
+cashier of R. C. Royle & Sons, were in the drawer of a night-table by
+his bed. He found them. There was a cupboard in the inner wall. He
+lurched across to it, and, tearing a long overcoat from a hook,
+slipped it on and dropped the money in his pocket. Close by the
+cupboard was the door of his wife's bedroom. He remembered her now,
+and flung the door open.
+
+"Doris," he cried, and no answer was returned to him.
+
+"Doris," he cried again, and this time the wail of his child answered
+him from her cot.
+
+He crossed to the bed. He leaned over it and put out his hand to shake
+his wife by the shoulder out of her deep sleep. And with a shock he
+became aware that she was leaning upon her elbow in the darkness. She
+was wide-awake all the time.
+
+"Quick!" he cried, in a sudden exasperation. "There is an earthquake.
+The house is falling."
+
+She replied in a strange, quiet voice:
+
+"I know."
+
+She made no beginning of a movement. She was awake, had been, perhaps,
+longer awake than he himself; she knew the swift peril which had
+befallen them; yet she remained propped on her elbow in the darkness,
+passively expectant. Or was she dazed? Even at that moment the
+question flashed through Challoner's mind and brought him a queer
+relief. But it was answered in a moment.
+
+"I called to you twice," he said; and his wife answered:
+
+"I heard;" and there was again no hint of bewilderment in her voice.
+It was the voice of a woman who had all her wits about her; not of one
+who was stunned.
+
+Meanwhile the earth rumbled beneath them and the room shook. Challoner
+felt for a candle by the bedside, struck a match, and lighted it. His
+wife watched him quietly. Her dark eyes shone in the candle-light,
+inscrutably veiling her thoughts.
+
+"Quick!" he cried. "Get up. There's no time to lose." He lifted the
+child out of the cot, still wrapped in her bedclothes.
+
+"Come."
+
+His wife rose, as it seemed to him, with incredible slowness. He could
+have screamed in his terror. As he stumbled across the floor to the
+door, she opened a wardrobe and, taking out a cloak, drew it about her
+shoulders. In the door-way he turned and saw her.
+
+"Good God!" he cried, and the question in his mind leaped to his lips
+and was uttered. "Do you want to kill us all?"
+
+"I had to find a cloak."
+
+"A cloak!" he cried contemptuously. He himself had tarried to slip on
+his overcoat, but, no doubt, that was different. Certainly his wife
+made no rejoinder. "To be buried under this house for the sake of a
+cloak," he cried, his lips so chattering with terror that he could
+hardly pronounce the words.
+
+"Go first," she said; and he ran out of the doorway. She followed him,
+leaving the door open behind her, and the candle burning in the room.
+They were still in the passage when an appalling roar deafened their
+ears. The lighted candle shot up into the air and was extinguished,
+and in the darkness the splitting of timber, the overthrow and the
+wreckage of furniture, rent the air and ceased. Of a sudden the
+throats of the fugitives were choked with dust. The fear which had so
+terrified him was justified. The floor had exploded, like artillery,
+in the room he had this moment quitted. His terror became a panic. He
+would have killed his wife had she stood in his way. He rushed
+downstairs, inarticulately crying. He fumbled in the darkness for the
+bolt of the front door, sobbing and cursing. He found it, flung the
+door open, and leaped out into the open air. He ran across the road,
+and as he ran a great stone fell with a crash, from the archway of the
+door, and the walls of the passage clashed together behind him. With a
+loud clatter of thunder the whole house crumbled down into a smoking
+heap of bricks. Challoner turned. He was quite alone with the child in
+his arms. And for a little while he stood very still.
+
+But he was no longer in darkness. About many of the villas on the
+hillside the flames were creeping, and their inhabitants were racing
+upward to the open heights, or searching desperately among the ruins
+for those whom the earthquake had entrapped. While lower down by the
+water's edge the city was ablaze and over all the bay the sky was red.
+The ground still shook beneath Challoner's feet, and the child in his
+arms began to cry. He laid it down against the low wall of the path
+and crept cautiously back to the ruins of his house.
+
+"Doris," he called, and again, "Doris."
+
+His voice was low, but there was more of awe than grief audible in the
+cry. "Doris," he called a third time, but in a louder and more urgent
+tone. A few bricks, hanging to a fragment of wall dislodged themselves
+and clattered down upon the heap of ruin. But no other answer came. He
+stooped suddenly where the archway of the entrance door had been. The
+great stone had fallen with so much force that one end had sunk into
+the ground; the other, however, rested upon a fragment of the stone
+pillar of the door; and so the stone lay under a pile of bricks titled
+at an angle. Through the space left by the angle a woman's hand and
+arm protruded. It was not pinned down by the stone. It pointed with
+limp fingers toward Challoner, and beside it a trickle of blood ran
+out. Challoner knelt and touched the hand.
+
+"Doris," he said.
+
+Her voice had not answered to his, and now there was no response in
+her fingers to his touch. The arm moved quite easily. The walls of the
+passage had borne her down and crushed her. Challoner remembered with
+a shiver the crash and clatter of them as they had knocked together
+just behind his heels. His wife had been killed in that downfall. She
+could not have survived.
+
+Challoner rose again to his feet.
+
+"She was awake," he said, and he talked aloud to himself. "She should
+have hurried. She could have escaped had she hurried;" and the picture
+of her leaning upon her elbow in her bed in the dark troubled his
+soul. There is no terror like the terror which comes from the shaking
+of the earth and the overthrow of its houses. Yet she, a woman--so ran
+his thoughts--had endured it. Her hand pointing, from beneath the
+stones, accused him for all the limpness of its fingers. She had
+welcomed it.
+
+The child wailed from the other side of the road. Challoner crossed to
+it. He stood and looked at it doubtfully. Still in doubt, he looked
+away. From the blazing town rose a babel of cries, a roar of flames, a
+crash of buildings falling in, and every now and then, quite distinct
+from the confusion, a shrill, clear scream would leap into the air
+like a thin fountain of water. But the sea was calm; the great ship,
+with every cord of its rigging strung black against the glowing sky,
+lay without a movement. Boats were plying between it and the shore.
+Challoner could see the tiny specks of them on the red water.
+
+"There's no tidal wave," he said in a dull voice. "That's
+extraordinary;" and then he picked up his daughter in his arms, and
+climbed higher up the hill to await the dawn.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER III
+
+                        CHALLONER'S PILGRIMAGE
+
+
+There were two more shocks that night, the first at five minutes past
+one, the second half an hour before sunrise. James Challoner sat in
+the centre of the most open space he could find, his overcoat drawn
+close about him and his daughter clasped tightly to his breast. But it
+was almost unconsciously that he held her so. His brain was dazed, and
+the only image at all clear in his mind was that of his dead wife's
+hand protruding beneath the great stone and directing against him its
+mute accusation. But, even so, it was the limp look of the fingers
+which chiefly troubled him, and that only troubled him from time to
+time. For the greater part of the interval before daybreak he sat
+watching the roofs of the buildings below him burst in tongues of fire
+and topple down with a clatter of slates in bright showers of sparks,
+much as a child sits open-mouthed at the fireworks. Now he huddled his
+coat close about him, now some spire of flame towering skyward more
+terribly beautiful than the rest, drew a cry from his lips; and now
+again, looking out over the quiet pond of the bay, he asked dully,
+"Why is there no tidal wave?"
+
+Morning came at last over the hill behind him, gray and
+extraordinarily cold. All about him he saw people, huddled like
+himself upon the slopes, men, women, and children, shivering in their
+night-attire and their bare feet bloody from the stones. All at once
+Challoner was aware that he was hungry. His little daughter reached
+out her arms and wailed. Hunger, too, as the sun rose, mastered the
+fears of the refugees upon the hill-side. One by one, group by group,
+they rose stiffly and straggled down to the ruined ways by the
+water-side. Challoner went with the rest; and half-way down they all
+began to hurry, beset by the same fear. There would not be food enough
+for all. The thought seemed to sweep like a wind across the face of
+the hill, and the hurry became savage.
+
+Along the open esplanade families were squatting side by side. A few
+of the more fortunate had somehow secured and erected tents; and
+others were crowded into storage sheds. But the most of them were
+sitting in the open waiting desolately for they knew not what. And
+already in that town, though the earthquake was barely six hours old,
+catastrophe had made its sharp division between the sheep and the
+goats. For whereas upon the esplanade men and women, and amongst them
+many unexpected figures, were already organizing succor for the
+outcasts, amongst the smoking ruins the marauders were already at
+work, robbing, murdering. There was no longer any law in Valparaiso.
+
+Challoner made his way to the esplanade. A man whom he knew, the agent
+of a steamship company, hurried past him. Challoner stopped him.
+
+"Where can I get food?" he asked.
+
+Challoner was a strongly built, tall man, and the agent answered
+roughly.
+
+"You? You will have to wait. You are able to;" and then he caught
+sight of the child in Challoner's arms, still wrapped about with her
+bedclothes. His voice changed to friendliness.
+
+"Yours?" he asked.
+
+Challoner nodded.
+
+"Where's its mother?"
+
+Challoner answered simply:
+
+"Dead."
+
+The agent took out a piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket.
+"Sorry," he said. "Of course, that alters the case." He wrote a line
+upon the paper and gave it to Challoner. Then he pointed to a tin
+shed, around which a crowd was already collecting.
+
+"We are distributing a little food there. You'll be given your share,
+for you have a child to look after. But I should advise you to look
+slippy;" and the agent hurried off.
+
+Challoner did look slippy. Because of his child he got food for
+himself as well as for his child; and as he sat on the ground, in the
+shadow of a low wall, after his meal, that fact set him thinking.
+There is much loving kindness for children in South America. From east
+to west it runs across the continent, just as from east to west human
+life is cheap, provided that it is grown up. You might, anywhere in
+those days, and, in some places you may still, slay your neighbor and
+avoid anything like excessive inconvenience as a result of your
+slaying. But if you kick a boy into the gutter because he refuses to
+desist from whistling, to your distraction, outside your office
+window, you are liable to be fined heavily, and you may be sent to
+prison. For you have hurt the _dignidad del hombre_. Challoner was
+aware generally of the consideration for children which prevailed. But
+now it was brought very practically home to him in the particular. His
+little daughter Doris was a definite asset to him. He looked down upon
+her with new eyes as she slept on the ground at his side, with a
+chubby hand thrown across his knee. She was no longer a nuisance. She
+was as good as money--better, indeed, since money could not buy food
+to-day in Valparaiso. And there had been a moment when he had stood,
+up there before the ruins of his house, doubting whether he should
+leave her behind or no. James Challoner was quite chilled by the
+thought of the mistake he had almost made, and the fool he had almost
+been.
+
+Doris moved her head in her sleep.
+
+"Precious one," he said affectionately; and he proceeded in his turn
+to sleep.
+
+He woke up in time to see two great Chilian cruisers sweep round the
+point into the bay, and a stoutly built, square captain, whom he could
+have mistaken for an Englishman, come ashore with his sailors, to take
+command of the town. He obtained shelter in a hut for that night, and
+during the hours of darkness he thought out his own immediate problem.
+
+Valparaiso was not, and for some months would not be. Even when it
+should be rebuilt there would be no work for him, since--in his
+thoughts he clung to euphemisms--his enemies had ruined his good name.
+Therefore he must get away and he had his daughter at his hand to
+assist him.
+
+He obtained, through his good Samaritan, the agent, a rough suit for
+himself and some clothing for his child and a parcel of food. He slung
+the parcel over his shoulders, lifted his child in his arms, and
+walked out that afternoon from Valparaiso up the great post-road
+toward the Andes. He was strong and his girl inherited of his
+strength. It was summer, a summer of no rain. He tramped along the
+valleys of Chile, and his daughter was his passport and franked his
+way. He secured a night's shelter at a farm-house here, food and a
+trifle of money there, a ride for Doris upon a mule one day, a lift
+for both of them in a cart the next. The valley narrowed, the green
+floor of it became stones, the trees thinned, the great barrier of the
+cordilleras closed in about James Challoner and towered higher and
+higher above his head. The road wound sharply upward, now backward,
+and forward in a desolate, wild country of gray rock splashed with
+orange and yellow and deep red. He started early one morning and stood
+on the top of the Cumbre Pass, thirteen thousand feet above the sea,
+by mid-day. On the very summit he was overtaken by the post and driven
+down at a gallop to Las Cuevas. From Las Cuevas he walked to Punta del
+Inca. And at Punta del Inca he took his ease for a week, with the
+great snow-mass of Aconcagua showing in a gap of the hills across the
+valley.
+
+It was the season of the baths at Punta del Inca. The hotel was full
+and James Challoner prospered, as from the beginning he had thought
+that he would. He had reckoned upon Punta del Inca on that night in
+Valparaiso when he had determined upon his journey. He sat by the
+natural bridge, with his little daughter in his arms, a travel-stained
+and patient figure, and amongst those gigantic hills he told his
+moving story to such as passed and would listen. He went up to the
+hotel at night, and under the lights of the veranda he told it again.
+Amongst the many qualities which he misused was a vivid gift of
+narrative, and he possessed, at this time at all events, a gentle
+voice with an admirable note of emotion. Thus all was in his favor.
+The beauty and peace of the scenery, his manner, the prettiness of his
+child--even the story which he had to tell. But it was not quite the
+story which would have been told at Valparaiso where, to be sure, he
+had, as we know, enemies.
+
+"Why did you come to South America?" some curious soul would ask.
+
+"I was a younger son," he would answer; and then, with a charming
+modesty for the benefit of any English who might be present, "I am of
+the Dorsetshire Challoners. These old properties.... Land isn't what
+it was.... An estate mortgaged to the hilt. How could any one take an
+allowance that must be wrung from it at the cost of the very laborers?
+No, I thought I would make my own way in the new lands."
+
+He spoke without any arrogance of virtue, any contempt for other
+younger sons who had not his own compunction, any consciousness of
+heroism. He went on to tell the romantic story of his marriage and
+elopement.
+
+"I made my way," he continued, "at least I was making it. My wife, of
+course, helped me--" and perhaps here his voice would falter ever so
+slightly, he would turn his face aside and whisper to the stars, yet
+so that the whisper was audible to people nearer than the stars--"My
+God, how she helped me! We had dug out our little corner in
+Valparaiso. There was just room in it for a wife and a child and
+myself. And then the earthquake came and ruined all."
+
+He made no complaint; he stated the simple facts; he was reticent
+concerning his wife's death. But by his reticence he managed to wring
+from it the last ounce of profit; he did not, for instance, describe
+how he had found her leaning upon her elbow in the darkness, with the
+walls of her room tottering about her. James Challoner had not
+forgiven her for that. She had made it so plain that she preferred for
+her child and herself an appalling death beneath the bricks than the
+slower decline into misery which awaited them. He tried to omit that
+remembrance from his mind, as he certainly did from his story.
+
+A collection was made for him to send him on his way. He accepted it
+with dignity.
+
+"I do not ask for your names," he said. "It would be the merest
+pretence. I cannot promise to pay you back. I take it as from one man
+to another." And so with his pocket full he journeyed downward to the
+vineyards of Mendoza.
+
+At Mendoza he took the train and in a night and a day came to Buenos
+Ayres. It was in the cool of the evening that he stepped out upon the
+platform. He was in no doubt what he should do. He had stopped in
+Buenos Ayres for a month on his way out from England; and he had
+thought out his plan very carefully during his last night in
+Valparaiso. He took a train for Barracas, and in the train he tied an
+old bootlace about his daughter's arm. He left the train before it
+crossed the bridge, and walked up a hill where great houses stand back
+behind walls and gardens much as one may see them in Clapham. Some way
+up the hill he stopped in front of one of these houses.
+
+It was noticeable amongst the houses, because a curious turnstile was
+let into the garden wall. The turnstile supported a small circular
+platform partitioned off with screens. James Challoner placed his
+child upon the platform, rang the bell, and turned the stile. The
+platform revolved, the child disappeared from view within the garden,
+and the screens were so arranged that those who received the child
+within could not see James Challoner outside.
+
+James Challoner went back into the middle of the road, yawned, and
+stretched his arms above his head. To-day you may cross the Andes from
+Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres in forty-eight hours. James Challoner had
+taken four months. He thought of his journey with a chuckle. His
+daughter had made his way easy.
+
+"Nine hundred miles and I've done 'em on eiderdown," he said. "That's
+the only bit of comfort I've ever got out of my marriage."
+
+He had left his child in a foundling hospital kept by some wealthy old
+ladies. He had tied a bootlace round her arm, rather because it was
+the conventional thing to do, than with any intention of reclaiming
+her. He was now a free man. He lit his pipe and stuck his hands in his
+pockets. With a pleasant sense of lightness, he strolled down to
+exploit his freedom in the bright streets of Buenos Ayres.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV
+
+                          CYNTHIA'S BIRTHDAY
+
+
+Cynthia woke on the eighth of January to the knowledge that a
+thrilling day for her had just begun. She looked out beneath the sun
+blinds across the Daventry estancia. Not a hand-breadth of cloud was
+visible. The brown earth baked under a blinding sun and the sky fitted
+down-upon it like a cap of brass. Inside the room, however, there was
+neither glare nor heat; and Cynthia stood with her expectations of the
+day fluttering about her like a shower of rose leaves. She was
+seventeen this morning, and the pride of it set her heart dancing.
+There would be letters downstairs from her friends, she hoped. There
+was a string of pearls, she knew. It had been bought that winter in
+Buenos Ayres with so elaborate a secrecy, and after so much furtive
+discussion as to whether it was good enough, that she could not but
+know of it. Moreover, there was a most important telegram to be
+despatched immediately after breakfast; a telegram of so much
+consequence that no hand but hers must write it out and send it off.
+So Cynthia was quick this morning. She dressed herself in a cool white
+frock, her white shoes and stockings, and ran lightly down the stairs
+into that room where years before a chandelier had of its own accord
+swung to and fro.
+
+Valparaiso had long since been rebuilt, but Robert and Joan Daventry
+still kept house in Buenos Ayres through the winter, and made the
+estancia their summer home. The years, however, had brought their
+changes. Robert and Joan were frankly an old couple nowadays; a young
+Englishman was sitting at the breakfast table; he undertook the whole
+burden of management; and, finally, there was Cynthia. The "other
+plan," so often debated and so often shelved, had been adopted, after
+all; the experiment from which Robert Daventry had so shrunk had been
+risked; and Cynthia was the triumphant flower of it.
+
+She greeted the old couple tenderly, shook hands with Richard Walton,
+the young manager, and received his good wishes with a pretty
+assumption of great dignity. But her eyes strayed to the table, where
+her place was piled high with parcels and letters, and her dignity
+vanished in her delight.
+
+"I have many friends," she cried, with a sort of wonder in her voice
+very taking to those who looked on her while she spoke. For she could
+not but have friends, it seemed. So frank a wish to please and so
+sweet a modesty were linked to so much beauty. It was not the beauty
+of Argentina, though a rhapsodist might have maintained that some of
+its sunlight was held prisoner in the heavy ripples of her hair. But
+the hair was light brown in color, where the gold did not shine, and
+the rose was in her cheeks. A broad forehead, eyebrows thick and
+brown, curving across a fair skin above great eyes of a deep blue set
+rather wide apart, gave to her face a curious distinction. And her
+eyes looked out from so dark a wealth of lashes that they seemed
+unfathomable with mysteries--until she spoke. Then kindliness and a
+fresh joy in life lit them with soft fires. For the rest, she was
+neither short nor remarkable for height, the nose and the nostrils
+delicate, the chin small, but a definite chin. As for her mouth, it
+was not a rosebud, nor again was it a letter-box. It suited her and
+she could afford to smile. One granted her, at a glance, health and a
+look of race.
+
+She began to open her letters and her presents. "Yes, I have many
+friends," she repeated.
+
+"It may be surprising," said Robert Daventry. "But it seems to be
+true. In fact, I am not quite sure that I have not some small token
+about me that Joan and I don't dislike you altogether."
+
+He fumbled first in one pocket, then in another.
+
+"Really?" cried Cynthia. She leaned toward him, all eagerness and
+curiosity. Her lips were parted in a smile. She followed the movements
+of his hands with an air of suspense. She knew very well that half the
+pleasure of the givers would be spoilt if she betrayed any knowledge
+of the gift.
+
+"What can it be?" Her whole attitude asked, while Robert Daventry
+slapped himself and looked under the table in a great fluster lest he
+should have mislaid the present. His concern was sheer farce; she,
+with a subtle skill of comedy, played her little part of happy
+impatience.
+
+"Ah!" cried Robert Daventry at last. "It is not lost;" and he took out
+from his breast pocket a narrow case of green leather and from the
+white satin lining of the case the expected string of pearls. She
+stood up while Robert Daventry clasped it about her throat, and, as
+she took her seat again, she said in a low voice:
+
+"You are both extraordinarily kind to me. I often wonder what would
+have become of me but for you--where I should be now."
+
+For a moment both of the old people looked startled. Then Robert
+Daventry hastened to protest.
+
+"My dear," he cried in a flurry, "you are, after all, of my flesh and
+blood. And flesh and blood has its claims."
+
+Joan's quiet voice came to his help:
+
+"Besides, the debt is not all on one side, Cynthia. We were not very
+contented until you came to us, were we Robert?"
+
+"No, we weren't," he replied with relief, like a man floundering who
+finds solid ground under his feet. "We had lived hard and had done a
+great deal of work, and we were beginning to ask ourselves why. The
+heat and the ardor were over, you see. Our lives were cooling down. We
+had come to a time when one is apt to sit at night over the fire and
+wonder regretfully, now that no change is possible, whether we hadn't
+aimed at the wrong things and got less than we might have got out of
+our lives. We had piled up, and were still piling up, a great deal
+more money than we had any use for. We had made Daventry out of a
+plain as bare as the palm of my hand, and we had no one very dear to
+us to whom we could leave it. There didn't seem to be much use in
+things. Next week was going to be like this week, and the week after
+like next week, and life altogether nothing more than a succession of
+dull things. We were very nearly abandoning the estancia and retiring
+to England when my brother died."
+
+"And left me to you," said Cynthia.
+
+Robert Daventry nodded.
+
+"And then our discontent vanished," said he.
+
+Cynthia shook her head.
+
+"I don't remember very much of those days, but I remember enough to be
+sure that I gave you a good deal of trouble." She spoke lightly to
+hide the emotion which the kindness of these friends had stirred in
+her.
+
+Joan Daventry smiled.
+
+"Yes, you gave us trouble, Cynthia," she said. "We are frightened by
+it still, at times. We are growing old and there is no other young
+spirit in the house, and it is possible that you might find your life
+rather dull, just as we did before you came to us."
+
+"Dull?" cried Cynthia. "With you two dear people?" She held a hand
+lovingly to each, and now was hiding nothing of what she felt.
+"Besides, I have my friends. I meet them in Buenos Ayres. They come
+here to visit me. You gave them to me, as you have given me
+everything. Look at the number of them!" and she proudly pointed to
+her letters. She read them through and she breakfasted, and at the end
+of the meal gathered them in her hands.
+
+"I must send some telegrams," she said. "I will drive to the railway
+station."
+
+"Now?" Joan Daventry asked anxiously. "Can't they be sent later, in
+the afternoon, Cynthia?"
+
+"No, mother," Cynthia replied. "Some might wait, but there's one which
+must go off now."
+
+Joan Daventry looked at Richard Walton. The blinds were down and the
+window closed; so that the room was dark and cool. But a glance at her
+manager's face told her sufficiently what the heat was like outside.
+He had been abroad since daybreak and he was the color of a ripe
+mulberry. Joan Daventry looked to him for assistance. But, though his
+eyes were fixed with a momentary intentness upon Cynthia, he did not
+give it. He spoke on another subject.
+
+"If you go, Miss Cynthia, I hope you will leave at home the pearls you
+are wearing round your throat. We are cutting the corn to-day and
+there are a good many men about of whom I know nothing at all. More
+hands came in last night than we had use for. It's all right, of
+course, but I shouldn't wear those pearls."
+
+"Of course not," said Cynthia. "I will put them away."
+
+"And you will take a man with you," said Robert Daventry. Neither he
+nor Joan had been brought up in cotton-wool; nor did they ever think
+to cloister Cynthia. She was left her liberty; and so half an hour
+afterward, with a big straw hat shading her face from the sun, she
+drove in her cart along the avenue to the railway station. She sent
+off the messages of thanks and then wrote out the important telegram
+which was to mark the day for her. She wrote it out without an
+alteration. For her thoughts had run fastidiously on the wording of it
+all through breakfast-time. She addressed it to:
+
+
+              Captain Rames, R. N.,
+                 _S.S. Perhaps_,
+                          Tilbury Docks,
+                                     London.
+
+
+And she handed it to the operator with a certain trepidation like one
+who does some daring and irrevocable deed. The operator, however, was
+quite unmoved. The important message to which so much consideration
+had been given, wore to him quite a commonplace look. It amounted,
+indeed, to no more than this:
+
+"Every heart-felt wish for a triumphant journey, from an unknown
+friend in South America."
+
+Thus, the very words were conventional and the sentiment no great
+matter to make a fuss about. But this was not Cynthia's point of view.
+
+She had spoken the truth at the breakfast table when she had told Joan
+and Robert Daventry that she did not find her life dull. But they were
+old people, and, in spite of her many friends, she was, to be sure,
+much alone with them. She was reticent of her feelings in their
+presence, not through any habit of concealment, but from modesty and
+the disparity of years. On the other side it was Joan's theory that
+youth should be trusted rather than pried upon. Cynthia was thus
+thrown back a good deal upon herself, and if she did not find life
+dull, it was, perhaps, because with life she had very little to do.
+She was seventeen, a girl of clear eyes and health and silver
+thoughts; and romance had its way with her. All that loving care could
+imagine for the clean and delicate training of mind and body had been
+lavished on her; and little by little she had fashioned for herself a
+wonderland of dreams and beautiful things. The only ugly thing about
+it was the iron turnstile in the wall by which you gained admittance.
+But that could not be helped. Its ugliness was recognized. The
+turnstile had been there from the beginning--why, Cynthia could not
+have told you. It was indeed itself the beginning. It was there in her
+dreams and her fancies, offering admission to somewhere, before the
+somewhere was explored, and found to be the wonderland.
+
+In this world, then, she moved amidst a very goodly company. She was
+careful about her company, choosing it from the world at large. She
+claimed the best of all the nations for her friends, yet with a pretty
+shyness which often enough set her blushing and laughing at her own
+pretension. She had a test. Unless you answered to it, there was no
+admission, the turnstile did not revolve. Coronets went for nothing,
+even brave deeds did not suffice. He who entered--and, by the way, it
+must regretfully be admitted that "he" does accurately represent the
+sex of those who were allowed to enter. For it had never occurred to
+Cynthia at all to let another woman into her world. She was modest,
+but her modesty had its limits. He who entered, then, must have given
+proofs that he was possessed with a definite idea, that his life moved
+to the tune of it.
+
+The population of Cynthia's private enclosure was consequently
+strictly limited; and, since she only knew her heroes through the
+newspaper and books, some even of those who were admitted came in
+under false pretences, and had summarily to be ejected. She was thus
+on the lookout for recruits. Captain Rames was the latest of them, and
+Cynthia knew less of him even than of the others. She had seen a
+blurred portrait of him in a daily paper; she knew that he was an
+officer in the navy, aged thirty-four, and it seemed to her that he
+had passed her test. For, this very afternoon, in command of a Dundee
+whaler, he was off southward into seas where no ship yet had sailed.
+
+The clerk stamped her telegram and took it behind the partition into
+his office. Cynthia climbed back into her cart.
+
+"I will drive back across the farm," she said. "I want to see the
+reaping."
+
+At the end of the short, wide street of one-storied huts and houses
+she turned through a gate in a wire fence onto a wide plain of brown
+grass. A mile across the plain, separated by no fence or hedge, the
+glistening acres of wheat began, and at the edge Cynthia could see
+little men seated on reaping-machines drawn by little horses like
+toys. She drove toward them thinking of the telegram, and, with a
+blush under her straw hat, of its reception. As a matter of fact,
+Captain Rames was rather busy that day, and anonymous telegrams did
+not receive from him the attention which was no doubt their due. In
+three hours' time, she thought, Captain Rames might be wondering what
+his unknown friend was like, with a heart full of gratitude for her
+unknown friendship. Meanwhile, she was driving nearer and nearer to
+the little toys at the edge of the wheat-field. The little toys were
+growing larger and larger. Cynthia came out of her rose-mist.
+
+"There are some new machines," she said, with interest, to the man who
+was with her. He was an old half-breed who had long been on the
+estate.
+
+"Yes, Senorita," he answered. He pointed to one longer than the rest
+and drawn by six horses. "It does everything. It cuts, it ties in
+sheaves."
+
+The whirring of the machinery came louder and louder to their ears.
+The young horse which she was driving cocked its ears and became
+restive. She gave the reins to the servant.
+
+"I will walk forward," she said. "You can wait here." She descended to
+the ground. She walked forward toward the edge of the wheat. There
+realities awaited her.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V
+
+                              THE REAPER
+
+
+The great reaping-machine came swaying over the uneven ground toward
+her, along the edge of those glistening acres. A huge arm of iron rose
+and fell, catching up the swathes of wheat and flinging them into the
+machine, whence they rolled out tied. Six horses harnessed behind
+pushed it and a man, perched upon a tiny saddle, steered and
+controlled it. The machine was about twenty paces from her when it
+came suddenly to a stop. The driver leaped down from his seat. It
+seemed to Cynthia that the mechanism must have gone wrong. She
+expected to see him bend over a joint or a spring. But he did not
+stoop. The moment his feet touched the ground, he ran straight toward
+her and very swiftly.
+
+He ran with his head down, and his shoulders bent. It was a heavy rush
+rather than a run. Cynthia recoiled. The words of Richard Walton
+sprang into her mind, and her hand rose instinctively to her throat.
+Could she have forgotten after all to remove the string of pearls? But
+she had removed it. And still the man was running toward her. The fear
+that she wore the pearls, and the proof that she did not, had followed
+so immediately upon his rush that he had as yet covered only half the
+ground between them. It was herself he aimed at then. She cast a rapid
+glance toward her cart. The Gaucho was leaning down over the opposite
+side, and talking to some one who stood by the wheel. A cry would not
+bring him to her side in time. She turned, with half a mind to run.
+But, though her white skirt reached only to her ankles, it would still
+impede her. She turned back and with a beating heart faced him. And a
+few feet from her he stopped.
+
+He looked at her, drew a great breath, and cried "Ah!" like a man who
+has reached his goal.
+
+"What do you want?" asked Cynthia, and in spite of her efforts her
+voice shook.
+
+A South American harvest finds no use for the weak. The man who stood
+opposite to her was broad and powerful, with a heavy, coarse face,
+burnt to the color of brick by the sun. The sweat streaked it, and the
+dirt of many a day clung to it, and it was seamed by exposure. He was
+of the men who move from estancia to estancia while the harvest lasts,
+working from sunrise to dark, living upon _mate_ tea and roasted
+sheep, and earning a pound a day, and thereafter lying soddened in
+some den until the last centavo has been squandered. A battered black
+hat was pressed low upon his clotted hair; a month's growth of beard
+straggled over his chin and cheeks. And his eyes were evil. That, more
+than any other quality of the man, Cynthia noticed. Their quick glance
+held her. She was terrified.
+
+"What do you want?" she asked a second time, and her voice wavered
+still more audibly.
+
+She stood in front of him, her lovely brows, under the big brim of her
+straw hat, troubled, and her great eyes wide and alert with fear. She
+was in the poise for flight like a startled deer, yet did not dare to
+turn to fly. And in the man, as he looked at her, there came a change.
+
+He did not answer her question. But very slowly he smiled, and the
+smile was spiteful. He nodded his head at her; a malicious contentment
+overspread his face; and from head to heel his eyes inspected her.
+They approved her beauty and the simple daintiness of her clothes;
+they took note of her slenderness of hand and foot; they remarked the
+lines and supple youth of her figure; and through her white frock they
+seemed to make sure of the roundness of her limbs. Cynthia grew
+suddenly hot with shame. This man was appraising her--nothing less.
+Appraising her as if for a market! Her fear dropped from her. She
+cried a third time, but with spirit:
+
+"What do you want of me?" and if her voice shook now, it was with a
+quiver of indignation.
+
+She heard the thud of a horse's hoofs behind her. The reaper heard it,
+too. Without a word, and without any hurry, he turned away from her
+and slouched back to his machine. Cynthia's cart the next moment was
+driven up to her side. She climbed into it and took the reins. The
+encounter had shaken her more than she had thought. She was trembling,
+and she drove over the ground quickly, until she saw the slate roof of
+the house, flashing like silver, from a clump of dark trees quite
+near.
+
+Then she reined in her horse and turned round. Far away at the edge of
+the wheat, the man and the machine and the six horses stood out black
+like a little toy. The clank and rattle of the iron came to her ears
+through the still air, faintly, like the mechanism of a toy. But
+Cynthia shivered as she looked back.
+
+"Who is he?" she asked of the old Gaucho. He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"I do not know him, Senorita. I do not think he was here last year.
+They come in herds and go in herds when the corn is stacked."
+
+Up and down, along the glistening line, the man drove his horses and
+manipulated his machine. He stopped no more. With each journey a wide
+band of wheat went down. Thus he had been working, balanced in his
+saddle, since daybreak. So, with but a two hours' rest, he would go
+under the burning afternoon sun until darkness came and bade him stop.
+To the Gaucho he was one of a herd of men who did the like; for a few
+weeks here; then for another few weeks on another estancia further
+down the line. But for Cynthia this man stood strangely out from the
+herd. He had stopped her, and she did not know why. She sat and
+watched his slow, obstinate progression. The persistence, the physical
+strength of the man daunted her. There was something of nature's own
+relentlessness in his capacity to endure and work. She magnified him,
+and was, at the same time, interested and alarmed. For of this she was
+sure. He had not stopped her merely because she was a girl, and alone.
+He had stopped her because she was herself. She remembered his smile,
+his nods of the head, his malice. He had a personal feeling, a
+personal animosity. She could not understand it, yet she was sure.
+
+"How long will he stay?" she asked.
+
+"A month," said the Gaucho.
+
+"He was not here last year?"
+
+"I do not recognize him."
+
+"Why, then--" she began and did not finish the question. It was in her
+mind to ask, "Why does he hate me?" But she was aware at once that the
+Gaucho could not answer it. "And he will stay a month?" she asked
+again, uneasily.
+
+"Yes, unless the Senorita wishes him to go. It will be, of course, as
+the Senorita wishes."
+
+Cynthia nodded her head. There was a way out of the trouble, to be
+sure. But, on the other hand, she would have to say why she wished the
+man to go. At the recital of her story Mr. and Mrs. Daventry would be
+excited and alarmed. She herself would henceforth be surrounded with
+precautions. She determined to say nothing at all about her adventure.
+She would be careful during this month where she roamed. The man would
+be at work and it would be easy to avoid him. She gathered the reins
+again in her hands and drove to the house.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VI
+
+                      A VISITOR AT THE ESTANCIA
+
+
+Cynthia accordingly held her tongue. Nevertheless, that evening
+Richard Walton said to her across the dinner table:
+
+"So you were, after all, molested by one of the hands, Miss Cynthia."
+
+"Molested!" cried Robert Daventry indignantly.
+
+Cynthia's face flamed.
+
+"Who told you?" she asked of Richard Walton.
+
+"Pedro."
+
+Cynthia had not thought of the Gaucho. He had seemed so entirely
+uninterested, so utterly unalarmed.
+
+"'Molested' is too strong a word," she said hastily. She now meant to
+make as light of the encounter as she possibly could. "It was very
+likely my fault. I got out of the trap and walked toward the wheat. It
+may be that the man fancied I wished to speak to him."
+
+"What did he do?"
+
+The question came from Joan Daventry.
+
+"He sprang from his seat, ran to me, and stopped in front of me. That
+was all."
+
+"Quite all?"
+
+Cynthia nodded.
+
+"He just stood and stared at me until Pedro drove up."
+
+"Did he say nothing?"
+
+"Not a word."
+
+In spite of her resolve to treat the adventure lightly, Cynthia's
+voice grew troubled as she answered the questions. For she answered
+them with her eyes upon Joan Daventry's face, and she saw the
+perplexity there deepen into disquietude and misgiving. She turned
+toward Robert Daventry. Upon his face uneasiness was still more
+evident. He was plainly agitated. He sat listening in suspense. His
+indignation had gone.
+
+Cynthia's fear revived under the stimulation of their anxiety. She
+continued slowly:
+
+"But although he did me no harm, although he threatened none, there
+was something strange. He saw me at once. He ran so very quickly to me
+the moment I was within reach. He seemed almost to be looking out for
+me."
+
+Joan sank back into her chair with a gesture of helplessness, which
+was all the more alarming because it was so singularly out of keeping
+with her character. Her eyes sought her husband's and sought them in
+dismay. Cynthia noticed both the gesture and the look. They kindled a
+vague terror in the girl. The wide brown plain was as a picture before
+her. She saw the great wheat-field glistening in the heat, a
+wind-wheel in a corner above a well, and this man with the evil eyes
+and the face of malice looking her over from head to foot.
+
+"Yes," she said. "He seemed to be expecting me, and there was
+something else. He seemed to hate me;" and Robert Daventry with a cry
+sprang sharply to his feet.
+
+Joan raised a quick warning hand. But the cry had been uttered; and
+with a sob Cynthia buried her face in her hands.
+
+"I am frightened now," she said. "You frighten me."
+
+Robert Daventry stood over her, clumsily remorseful, and laid his
+great hand on her shoulder.
+
+"There's nothing to fear, Cynthia," he began. "Joan and I--" he broke
+off abruptly at a second warning from his wife. "We will pack that man
+off about his business to-morrow."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Daventry. She had mastered her agitation, and now
+affected carelessness. "We can't really have Cynthia's birthday spoilt
+in this way."
+
+"No, of course not," cried Robert Daventry, seizing upon this
+explanation of his distress. But he could not leave it in its
+simplicity. "It's abominable that Cynthia should have her birthday
+spoilt. She has only one a year, poor girl. That's what's troubling
+us, Cynthia. Nothing else. But it's enough to upset us, isn't it? To
+think that you should actually have your birthday spoilt--by one of my
+men, too."
+
+So he went on, like a commentator on an ancient text, expanding the
+explanation, underlining it, and forcing upon Cynthia's intelligence
+its complete improbability. Even in the midst of her fears she could
+not but look with amusement toward Joan; and the two women exchanged
+the smile of their sex at the perennial clumsiness of man.
+
+"He shall go first thing to-morrow morning," cried Mr. Daventry; and
+Richard Walton quietly rejoined:
+
+"He has gone already. I paid him off this morning."
+
+Mr. Daventry ceased abruptly from his vociferations.
+
+"Thank you, Walton," he said. "Then that's ended," and he sat down.
+
+But he had hardly taken his seat when the door opened and the
+parlor-maid brought to him upon a salver a folded slip of dirty paper.
+
+"A man came with this to the door, sir. He is waiting for an answer."
+
+Robert Daventry unfolded the slip and read the message written within
+it. He did not lift his eyes when he had read. He sat staring at the
+paper like a statue. And he sat amidst a deep silence. The cloud which
+had but now been lifted, had gathered once more above the heads of
+that small company. Though Robert Daventry did not speak, his long
+silence spoke for him; and though he schooled his face to composure,
+it was plain that he schooled it. A vague disquiet held the others at
+the table. Not one of them but had a conviction that this dirty,
+insignificant, scrap of writing announced a catastrophe.
+
+Joan was the first to move. She walked round the table and stood
+behind her husband. He did not hear the rustle of her gown; and he was
+not aware that she leaned over him to read the message until the
+pressure of her hand upon his shoulder reminded him that she was his
+ally.
+
+"You had better see the man, Robert," she said. "He calls late, but
+probably he needs help."
+
+Thus she sought to pass the message off.
+
+"Very well, I will," said Robert. He turned to the parlor-maid. "Bring
+him to my study when I ring the bell."
+
+"I will come with you," said Joan, as the servant went out from the
+room.
+
+Richard Walton rose from his chair.
+
+"Perhaps you would like me, too?"
+
+"No, I don't think that's necessary," replied Joan Daventry. "But
+perhaps you would stay within sound of the bell. We don't know who
+this man is or what he wants. If we ring again, you would know that we
+needed your advice."
+
+"Certainly, I will be upon the lookout," said Walton, and he went from
+the room and crossed to the servants' quarters. There he would hear
+the bell at once should it ring for him. Joan meanwhile turned with a
+smile to Cynthia.
+
+"We will leave you here for a few minutes," she said, and the
+composure of her voice almost reassured the girl; would, indeed, have
+quite reassured her but for Robert Daventry. She saw that his hands
+trembled so that the paper shook in them, even as her hands had
+trembled this morning when she climbed up by the edge of the wheat
+into her cart.
+
+"Yes, wait here, Cynthia," said Robert Daventry, as he got to his
+feet; and Cynthia noticed that while he spoke to her he altogether
+avoided the glance of her eyes. The old couple went out of the room
+together, leaving her alone, and carefully latched the door behind
+them. In the hall for a moment they stood resting from their pretence.
+A broken word or two burst from Robert Daventry:
+
+"What shall we do, Joan? This is what we have dreaded always."
+
+Joan raised her finger to her lips.
+
+"Hush! Speak lower. What I said was true. We don't know who he is, or
+what he wants. He may not be the man who stopped her in the field at
+all."
+
+Robert Daventry shook his head. It was rather his nature to run to
+meet misfortune if he saw its shadow in his way.
+
+"What shall we do?" he repeated. "Money will send him away," said
+Joan.
+
+"And bring him back again," replied Robert hopelessly. "Sooner or
+later Cynthia will know;" and Joan threw up her head at his words.
+
+"No," she said vigorously. "No."
+
+At her left hand a door stood open upon a dark room. This was the
+smoking-room. She entered the room and crossed it to the opposite
+wall. Then she opened a second door, and advancing into this inner
+room, felt for the switch in the darkness and turned on the light.
+Bookcases, filled for the most part with books on agriculture, lined
+the room, a round table, littered with papers, occupied the centre, in
+the recess of a window stood a writing-desk. This was Robert
+Daventry's study. Her husband followed her, and saw that her finger
+was already on the bell.
+
+"Let us decide what we are to do," he said, "before you ring."
+
+Joan shook her head.
+
+"We can't. We must be guided by what the man knows, and by what he
+wants. Only we admit nothing," she declared resolutely; and she
+pressed the bell. It rang in the passage by the kitchen, but Cynthia,
+left alone in the dining-room, heard it too.
+
+The moment she heard it, Cynthia rose from her chair, and ran silently
+to the door. She unlatched it without a sound, and drew it toward her
+until it was just wide enough open for her to see out. There she stood
+grasping the door-knob, and in a moment a heavy foot sounded in the
+hall. Cynthia set her eyes to the chink. She saw first a maid-servant
+cross the hall, and pass into the smoking-room, and after the maid a
+man. The man was the reaper who had leapt from his machine and rushed
+toward her that morning. The maid-servant came back alone and crossed
+the hall again to the servants' quarters. A door was shut loudly--the
+door of Robert Daventry's study--and then another door opened
+noiselessly, and opened wide--the door of the dining-room. Cynthia
+came out into the hall. All the color had gone from her face, her eyes
+were wide with terror. The man meant her harm--not a doubt of it. He
+had some power to inflict the harm--that was sure. Otherwise why was
+he admitted, why were her friends in such concern?
+
+Cynthia was quite alone in the hall now. Voices sounded faintly from
+the kitchen and in the room behind her a clock ticked. But there were
+no other sounds. She crossed to the threshold of the smoking-room and
+looked in. At the other end a bright bar of light on the floor held
+her eyes. The light came from the study. Cynthia watched it for a
+moment irresolute. But the temptation grew. She was sure that beyond
+that bright bar of light, behind that closed door, here in this
+far-away corner of Argentina, good and evil were at grips for her. A
+sense of loneliness suddenly possessed her, she longed for the
+neighborly noises of a city. And while she stood she heard her own name
+pronounced by Robert Daventry, and at once a harsh, strange voice rose
+in a laugh, loud and arrogant. She looked about her in a panic. She
+must fly, or she must know the truth, the whole of it, the worst of
+it. She stole swiftly and noiselessly into the room. Close by that bar
+of light a big, low chair stood against the wall. Cynthia crouched in
+the chair, her frock a blur of misty white in the darkness. There she
+remained, very still and quiet; and every word spoken in the study
+came clearly to her ears.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VII
+
+                        BOTH SIDES OF THE DOOR
+
+
+Within the room the three people were standing, the reaper upon one
+side of the table, Joan and Robert Daventry close together upon the
+other. The reaper was still laughing.
+
+"Cynthia!" he cried, repeating contemptuously the name which Robert
+Daventry had used. "There's no Cynthia. There's a very pretty little
+girl I saw this morning in the corn. But her pretty little name is
+Doris Challoner. And, taking all in all, it's the better name of the
+two."
+
+He spoke with an easy and most disquieting assurance, but Joan had
+enough of that quality to meet with him in the gate. She had always
+been a good fighter; she had stood by her husband often enough in the
+early days of the estancia, when his nerve would have failed him but
+for her; and she was for putting up to-night the best fight of her
+whole long, active life. Money, to her thinking, they could make
+again, old as they were, if the need came. But they could not open
+their hearts to a second Cynthia, even if they could find one.
+
+"Nonsense," she answered boldly. "Her name is Cynthia Daventry."
+
+"Where was she born, then?" asked the reaper.
+
+"In Patagonia."
+
+"Never in this world," cried the man. "She was born in Concepcion, and
+that's her farthest south."
+
+Joan shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"We ought to know. She is my husband's niece."
+
+A grin overspread the reaper's face.
+
+"And is that so?" he asked, in a mock surprise. "I wasn't aware of
+it."
+
+"Well, you are now," said Joan.
+
+"Yes, and the news alters our relations altogether, doesn't it?" he
+said pleasantly.
+
+He tossed his battered hat upon the table, pulled out a chair, and sat
+down in it at his ease, his legs stretched out, his hands deep in his
+pockets. He nodded familiarly to Joan.
+
+"How do you do, sis?" He turned his face toward Mr. Daventry, "You
+have got a nice little place, brother Robert. Shows what honest work
+can do if persevered with day after day for a great number of
+consecutive years. Quite a nice little place. You haven't, by any
+chance, got a nice little cigar, too, have you, Robert, for your
+long-lost brother?"
+
+Robert Daventry's face grew red, and the veins swelled upon his
+forehead. He was a man quickly moved to passion, and quick, too, the
+passion exhausted, to swing back into doubts and hesitations. He blew
+either hot or cold, and, sooner or later, he was sure to blow cold.
+Now, however, his temper was up, and he brought his great fist down
+with violence upon the table.
+
+"What do you mean by your insolence?" he shouted "Stand up!"
+
+Joan laid a hand upon the old man's arm to restrain him. The reaper,
+for his part, never budged from his attitude.
+
+"You have got a nerve," he said. "You tell me a pack of lies--that's
+all right, you've got money. But when I take you at your word, it's
+'insolence' and 'stand up.' How's that, if you please?" He sat and
+laughed for a little in contemptuous jerks. "Your niece, indeed! The
+girl's my daughter."
+
+Neither Joan nor Robert believed him for a moment. They thought of
+Cynthia, and compared that image at their hearts with the actual man
+who sprawled on the chair in front of them. Robert counted him up, his
+heavy features, his grime-engrained, spoilt hands, the whole degraded,
+unkempt look of him. Cynthia's father! The claim was preposterous.
+
+"Her father!" cried Robert Daventry, leaning across the table. "Look
+at yourself in the glass!"
+
+The sneer stung the reaper to a fury. He sprang to his feet, and from
+habit his hand slipped to the knife at the back of his waistband. But
+he mastered himself in a second or two. He was there for other ends
+than violence, and he withdrew his hand.
+
+"I sha'n't forget that," he said, in a perfectly quiet voice, which
+contrasted in the strangest way with the convulsion of his face. "You
+got home there. Right home;" and he sat down again.
+
+Joan interposed before her husband could say another word, and used
+soft words. The man was not Cynthia's father to be sure, but he knew
+something of the girl's history. That was certain--and he knew more
+than either Joan or Robert knew themselves. If she was to fight her
+battle with success, she must know what he knew.
+
+"You could not expect us to accept your mere statement," she said.
+
+"No, that's reasonable," said the reaper, and he began his story. But
+the insult rankled in his breast and as he spoke he kept turning a
+murderous eye on the man who had inflicted it.
+
+He told the story of the earthquake at Valparaiso, and the flight of
+James Challoner across the Andes. It was a story told with a wealth of
+detail, and difficult altogether to discredit. Neither Joan nor Robert
+did altogether discredit it. It might be true or it might not. This
+man might have obtained it from James Challoner, or might somehow have
+come across it by himself. But they were still convinced he could not
+be James Challoner himself.
+
+"We shall want more proof than that," said Joan calmly, and Robert
+nodded his head. Neither of them had felt more confidence than at this
+moment since the crumpled slip of paper had been brought into the
+dining-room.
+
+But outside the door Cynthia huddled in the great chair with her ear
+to the door, listened with a growing terror. She had never doubted
+until this hour that she was the daughter of Robert Daventry's
+brother. She had been secure in that belief. Now the security was
+going. She clutched the arms of her chair, feeling the whole world
+slipping from beneath her feet--even as it had slipped at Valparaiso.
+For certain memories, quite clear in her mind, were being explained to
+her. An open hill-side at night, a strange red light upon the world,
+the crash of houses, little flames creeping, and ships quietly at
+anchor on the smoothest of seas--that was one picture in her memories
+which had often puzzled her, which would puzzle her no longer if she
+believed the story which was being told on the other side of the door.
+She remembered, too, a long journey amongst mountains, and a bridge
+over a deep and narrow torrent, and many people with kind faces who
+spoke to her.
+
+"Of course, it isn't certain," she pleaded to herself desperately; and
+the husky voice behind the door began again:
+
+"I travelled down to Buenos Ayres by train. I had little money, and no
+prospects, and a child on my hands. I couldn't make a home for her. So
+I went straight to the foundling hospital. It stands back in a garden,
+and is kept by some wealthy sisters. There's a turnstile in the brick
+wall of the garden, a little iron turnstile--but you know it well,
+both of you;" and he broke off with a laugh.
+
+Inside the study Joan and Robert Daventry, still remained unconvinced.
+Outside Cynthia was persuaded.
+
+"It's true then," she whispered to herself. "It's quite true;" and she
+wrung her hands in the darkness, and her voice broke in a sob. She had
+no longer any shadow of doubt. The turnstile in the brick wall was for
+her the overwhelming proof.
+
+Examined in a court of law by the rules of evidence, it might seem
+flimsy enough. To Cynthia, it was complete corroboration of the
+testimony of her memories. The turnstile in the brick wall--the one
+ugly thing in her imagined wonderland of heroes--the turnstile which
+had always been there before the land was--how had it come there, she
+asked herself? And she was in no doubt as to the answer. The turnstile
+was a memory too. It was the turnstile of a foundling hospital, where
+her father had left her and gone his way. No wonder, she reflected
+bitterly, it was the one ugly thing in her world of fancies.
+
+She leaned back, shivering, with her hands covering her face. She was
+humiliated, but she was still more terrified. Shame cut deep, but fear
+touched the very nerves of her heart. The man who had this morning
+rushed at her was her father, and she remembered the malice of his
+smile, and the evil, covetous look of him as he appraised her. She
+grew hot, now, as she thought upon it.
+
+"What harm does he mean?" she asked; and suddenly she sat forward on
+the edge of her chair, quivering from head to foot like a spring some
+touch had released. For her father's voice rose again:
+
+"I tied a bootlace round the child's arm. I can't say that I ever
+thought to come back for her. But there's a convention in these
+things, isn't there?" he added with a grin. "I have been a
+conservative all my life, and now I have found the advantage of it."
+
+"How?" asked Joan. "Even if your story were true, your daughter
+wouldn't be wearing a bootlace or even the mark of it round her arm
+now."
+
+"No, from the look of her she'd be more likely to be wearing a diamond
+bangle, bless her! But all the same the bootlace helps."
+
+"How?"
+
+Again the implacable question was uttered by Joan. She must know all
+that this man had upon his side by way of argument. That was her first
+necessity.
+
+"How does the bootlace help?"
+
+"It helps because the child wearing that bootlace was received by the
+same old ladies who allowed you a few months afterward to adopt
+her--that's how. Don't you leave those old ladies out of your
+reckoning, Mrs. Daventry, or you will run up against a snag. I went
+back to the foundling a year ago and claimed my daughter."
+
+"You did?" cried Joan. She was startled. For a moment, too, she was
+disconcerted. She knew nothing of any such visit. But the statement
+was so easily capable of proof that the reaper would hardly have made
+it, had it not been true. And she was quick to see how strong a
+presumption such a visit would create, that he was the girl's father.
+Then she sprang to the weak point in the statement.
+
+"If it were true that Cynthia was your daughter, and that you claimed
+her a year ago, how is it that you wait until a chance meeting in a
+field brings you face to face?"
+
+"There's no chance about it, believe me," James Challoner returned.
+For it was he. The delicate manners had been rubbed off him, the
+gentle voice, which had charmed so many dollars from reluctant pockets
+long ago at Punta del Inca, had thickened and grown husky, the
+well-knit figure had spread to heaviness. But this was James
+Challoner, after fourteen years had told their tale. "The old ladies
+lied to me. Yes, actually lied to me," and he spread out his hands in
+indignation. "Lied to a father about his daughter! They were religious
+people too!"
+
+"If they did lie," Robert Daventry burst in, "they did the best thing
+they ever did in all their good lives."
+
+James Challoner waved Robert Daventry and his outburst aside. He kept
+his eyes fixed upon Joan's face.
+
+"Yes, they lied to me," he said. "I gave them the day and the month
+and the year, when I placed Doris on the turnstile. They pretended to
+make inquiries, and they lied to me. They told me she was dead. Ah!"
+and he suddenly leaned forward and pointed an accusing finger at Joan,
+"You are glad to hear that. Yes, I thought you would be."
+
+Try as she did, Joan had not been able to keep a flash of joy out of
+her face.
+
+"It's a matter of indifference to me," she replied, "since Cynthia is
+not your child."
+
+She still clung obstinately to that belief. He might have heard the
+story from James Challoner, and James Challoner might be dead. Any
+hypothesis was possible in her eyes, except the one which was true.
+She would not have it that this man was Cynthia's father.
+
+"Oh, it is a matter of indifference to you!" said Challoner
+ironically. "I will tell you something that won't be. Those old ladies
+lied just as clumsily as I have ever seen it done. Poor old souls,
+they were rattled out of their senses at the thought of the sin they
+were committing. A child could have seen they were lying--as I did who
+am no child. And I began to cast about for a reason for the lie. It
+wasn't very difficult to find it. Some one had adopted her, some one
+they didn't want me to discover, some one rich, then, I reckoned, who
+could give the girl a position."
+
+At the word "rich" Robert and Joan exchanged a glance. So much were
+they disconcerted by Challoner's knowledge and assurance that now they
+hoped rather than feared that blackmail was the end he had in view.
+
+"So I began to make inquiries," continued Challoner. "I found out who
+were the patrons, who took most interest in the institution, and
+amongst them who had adopted a child. I came upon you in the end." And
+again he began to laugh. "Those poor innocent old women had actually
+given me the date when you took Doris away as the date of the child's
+death. It took me a little time to find out all about you; and when I
+had found out I had no money. So I had to work my way along until I
+reached you. But I have reached you," he exclaimed, lolling back in
+his chair, "and, by George, the very first day I am at work here, out
+the girl comes to meet me. Why, I recognized her in a second;" and
+Joan slipped in, as she thought, under his guard. With a thrill of
+delight she believed that he had made a mistake, and a mistake which
+would discredit every word of his story.
+
+"Recognized her!" she repeated scornfully. "And the last time, when,
+on your own showing, you saw her she was three years old!"
+
+Challoner, however, merely smiled at her.
+
+"If you had a family at your back, old lady, you wouldn't be so high,"
+he said; and once more Robert Daventry interposed.
+
+"Speak respectfully to my wife," he cried.
+
+"What, are you butting in again?" asked Challoner, with a look of
+surprise. "You didn't do any good, you know, the last time you
+interfered."
+
+Once more Joan was called upon to restrain her husband. She saw the
+man convicted of a lie, and she did not mean to lose the advantage of
+that conviction.
+
+"How did you recognize her?" she asked, smiling in her turn. "How did
+you recognize in the girl of seventeen the child of three?"
+
+"I'll tell you," said Challoner confidently. "And, by the way, she's
+not seventeen to-day. It might interest you to know that. She's
+seventeen and a half. She was born on the seventeenth of July."
+
+"Keep to the point," said Joan.
+
+"Certainly, I will," replied Challoner, "though it's by no means
+necessary to substantiate my authority--yes," and his voice suddenly
+rang out loud upon the word, so that Cynthia in the darkness on the
+other side of the door shivered as if she had been struck, "yes, my
+authority. I don't say that she's like what she was when she was
+three. I don't even say she's like her mother. She isn't. She's a
+Challoner--and in the Challoner's home, by Wareham in Dorsetshire,
+there are some pictures worth looking at. I sat opposite one of them
+at the dinner table all through my boyhood, and whenever I was at
+home afterward--until I came out here. It was the portrait of my
+great-great-grandmother, painted by Romney, when she was a girl; and I
+tell you the girl who came stepping so prettily across the field this
+morning, in her white frock and big straw hat, might have stepped
+right out of that picture frame. That's how I recognized her."
+
+He ended on a note of triumph, and for the first time Joan's
+confidence failed her altogether. Again, it was not, of course, a
+conclusive piece of evidence, gauged by any laws of reasoning, but
+just as Challoner's description of the turnstile had convinced Cynthia
+outside the door because of the particular illumination it lent to an
+obscure fancy, so this detail of the picture did more to convince Joan
+Daventry than the rest of the story. Some portions of that story she
+knew to be true: the bootlace, the abandonment of the child. But what
+she had obstinately been combating was the contention that it was true
+of this man who sat before her. He might have learnt it all from the
+real father; he might now be seeking to make his profit out of the
+knowledge. That had been her hope. But it failed her now. For the
+particular detail of the girl's resemblance, now that she was
+seventeen, to the Romney portrait in the Challoners' dining-room he
+could not have learned from another. It did suggest that the man in
+front of her was the Challoner he claimed to be. Of course the detail
+might have been invented. But it did not sound to her invented; and,
+so far as her knowledge could test it, the rest of his story was true.
+She looked him over again with new eyes.
+
+"But you can't prove that," she said. "Even if it were true, you
+couldn't prove it."
+
+"Should I need to?" asked Challoner. "After I had put those old ladies
+from the Foundling into the witness-box, should I need to, Mrs.
+Daventry? Would they stick to their lie? Any tenth-rate attorney could
+turn 'em inside out as easy as an old glove, if they tried to. But
+they wouldn't try--and you know it as well as I do."
+
+Challoner had put his finger on the danger-spot of the Daventrys'
+position. Those two old ladies would have suffered much
+heart-searching before they told their lie, and not a little remorse
+afterward. Questioned upon their oaths they would speak the truth, and
+the whole truth. Of that Joan felt sure.
+
+"There are men, too, in Buenos Ayres who knew me when I was in Chile,"
+Challoner continued; and then once more Robert Daventry interposed.
+
+"But you wouldn't be mad enough to go to law with us," he cried, and
+Challoner laughed.
+
+"Oh, yes, I would, and I would put you into the witness-box, too. A
+pretty figure you would cut, with your Patagonian brother, eh? I
+wouldn't bring my action here, of course, in this district. You've got
+your local syndic in your pocket, I grant you. But the law runs in
+Buenos Ayres nowadays, and don't you forget it."
+
+Robert Daventry turned aside to hide his discomfiture, and walked once
+or twice across the room. He had no doubt that this man was James
+Challoner and Cynthia's father. His story was too circumstantial to be
+disputed. Moreover, neither he nor Joan could publicly dispute it.
+There had been no brother in Patagonia. He turned abruptly to
+Challoner: "How much do you want?"
+
+Joan moved quickly to his side with a cry of protest. Money it might
+be necessary to pay, but it must be asked for, not offered. To offer
+it was to admit the claim.
+
+"What are you saying, Robert?" she cried.
+
+Robert turned to her quietly.
+
+"It must come to that in the end. Why not now and have done with it?
+How much?"
+
+A smile of triumph broadened over Challoner's face. Outside the door
+Cynthia leaned forward, her hands clasped over her heart in an agony
+of suspense. Why didn't he answer? Why was he so long?
+
+The answer came at length:
+
+"I want my daughter, nothing else. She is not of age. I have a right
+to her; I'll take her away with me to-night."
+
+Cynthia crouched back in her chair, clasping its arms tightly with her
+hands, and making herself very small. To Joan and Robert Daventry the
+demand was incredible, even though their ears had heard it. Challoner
+could not mean it. It was an expedient to raise the price. But Cynthia
+had caught a note of malice in his voice which brought back before her
+eyes the malice of his looks as he had stood before her in the field.
+He meant to take her away, and that night. She glanced toward the
+door. To leave her home, to be swallowed up in the darkness with this
+stranger for her companion! She clung to the chair in a panic of
+terror. Then she heard Robert Daventry repeating the words in a daze:
+
+"You want to take her away? Cynthia?" And as though the meaning of
+Challoner's demand for the first time broke in on him, "Never!" he
+cried violently.
+
+"I want to take her away to-night;" and now the malice in Challoner's
+voice was audible to Joan too. She stared at him over the table. He
+sat nodding his head at her with little quick movements, his eyes very
+bright, and a horrid smile about his mouth. She remembered what
+Cynthia herself had said: "He seemed to hate me."
+
+"You grudge her her happiness, her life with us!" she exclaimed; and
+Challoner beat his fist upon the table in a sudden anger.
+
+"Is it strange?" he cried. "All these years here she has been sitting
+soft and walking daintily. What have I been doing? 'Look at yourself
+in a glass'--That's what you said," and he turned to Robert Daventry.
+"I told you I'd remember it, and I do. A fine life I have had of it
+for fourteen years. Mate tea and enough work a day to throw a
+trades-unionist into hysterics! No wonder I've lost my looks."
+
+All the bitterness of his fourteen years of degradation seemed to be
+concentrated in his words. The easy good-humor with which he had begun
+had vanished. He was a man venomous with grievances. He was still the
+old James Challoner in this; he had enemies, only now the enemies were
+not a few to be searched for through a list, but all who had a
+sixpence in their pockets. Joan herself was frightened. She realized
+the mistake which she and her husband had made in their eagerness to
+disbelieve the story of this man. She understood now that when she had
+thought of Cynthia and compared her with the reaper, she had been
+thinking only of the flower and had omitted her own assiduous
+cultivation of the plant. She recognized now that the look of race
+which fourteen years of luxury had refined in the girl, fourteen years
+of degradation might well have obliterated in the man.
+
+"I have had enough of it," cried James Challoner. "It's now her turn."
+
+"But we offer you freedom from that life," said Joan, and her voice
+began to plead.
+
+"I want my daughter," Challoner retorted implacably.
+
+"But you can't make a home for her," said Robert Daventry.
+
+Challoner chuckled and his voice lost its violence.
+
+"You must take me for a softy," he said with a drawl of amusement. "I
+mean her to make a home for me, where I can do a bit of sitting soft
+and recover my good looks."
+
+"But she can't make a home for you," said Joan.
+
+"Oh, yes she can."
+
+"How?"
+
+Cynthia outside the door waited in a despairing bewilderment. The
+changed tones of those whom she had looked upon as her parents assured
+her that the reaper had authority and rights, could claim her, could
+take her away. But how, she asked herself, was she to make a home for
+him? She had learned no profession, practised no art. The tears rose
+to her eyes and flowed down her cheeks; and the answer came.
+
+"She's a rare one for looks," said Challoner. His eyes narrowed to
+slits and his face became mean and despicable to look upon. "You'll
+not find her equal strolling under the lamps of Buenos Ayres."
+
+Joan flinched and uttered a cry. The movement was that of one who has
+been slapped in the face. Cynthia felt her heart stand still within
+her breast. She had lived in Buenos Ayres, where knowledge comes
+quickly to women. She was neither ignorant nor a fool. She understood,
+and once more her eyes went to the door. It was all quiet in the hall.
+A few quick steps and she would be out of the house. She rose from her
+chair. For the dark night, which a minute before had so appalled her,
+now appealed to her as a friend and refuge. But as she turned, she
+heard Robert Daventry say in a choking voice:
+
+"Go! or I'll have you thrown out;" and the bell rang violently.
+
+"Oh, is that the game?" replied Challoner.
+
+Daventry strode round the room.
+
+"Not a word! Go! I loathe you."
+
+And the door was wrenched violently open. Cynthia had just time to
+drop into her chair. She heard her father's voice close to her, and no
+longer through the panels of a door. She cowered down, covering her
+face with her hands, and drawing in her feet.
+
+"All right, I'll go," said Challoner. "I can afford to go. For I have
+the law on my side."
+
+"The law! Try it!"
+
+"I will."
+
+Challoner was standing in the doorway now. He was looking back into
+the study. But he had only to turn his head to see that blur of misty
+white in the chair, only to bend down and draw the trembling hands
+from the girl's face to find his daughter in his grasp. Cynthia lay
+holding her breath, ready at a touch of him to swoon.
+
+"She's my daughter. All your money won't get over that. Just wait
+and see. I'll come back with the law at my side, and take her
+away--yes--if I have to tie her hand and foot to take her."
+
+He flung out across the smoking-room, looking neither to the right nor
+to the left. Joan and Robert Daventry followed quickly behind him,
+afraid lest he should force his way into the dining-room where they
+had left Cynthia. Not one of them saw the girl huddled in the great
+chair in the dark room. Richard Walton came into the hall.
+
+"I'll see you off the premises," he said to Challoner, and a moment
+afterward the front door slammed.
+
+With the slamming of that door Cynthia seemed to swim back into life;
+and all at once there came upon her a great longing for comfort and
+kind words. She was hurt and humiliated as she had never thought to
+be. It seemed to her that she was tainted, and she was terribly
+afraid. She took a swift step toward the door, and there Joan's voice
+speaking in a whisper arrested her.
+
+Joan was standing with her husband by the dining-room, and seeking to
+compose her agitation before she entered it. Her voice was still
+shaking from her encounter.
+
+"Not a word to Cynthia," she said. "We sha'n't let her go, Robert,"
+and her voice was very wistful, and appealed for confirmation of her
+words. "So there's no need to trouble her--as this story would trouble
+her."
+
+"No, we'll not say a word to her," replied Robert. He made an effort
+to be hearty, but it quite failed to hide his distress. "We shall find
+a way out somehow when we think it all over. No, we'll not breathe a
+word, my dear. Cynthia's birthday mustn't be spoilt," and, thoroughly
+miserable, the old couple went into the dining-room and closed the
+door behind them.
+
+Cynthia made up her mind. Since they wished her not to know, since it
+would add so much to their distress if they learned that she did know,
+she would keep her knowledge to herself. It seemed to her then a small
+return to make to them for their devotion, but it was to cost her much
+more than she imagined. She would wait, schooling herself to patience,
+hiding her fears. But she could not face her friends to-night and keep
+her secret. For that she had not the strength. She ran swiftly and
+silently up to her room and flung herself upon her bed and buried her
+face in the pillows. There she lay trembling until the thought came to
+her that Joan would not retire without coming to ask why she had gone
+upstairs so early. She undressed and was hardly in bed before Joan
+knocked on the door.
+
+"I had a headache," said Cynthia. "It is the heat, no doubt. I shall
+be myself in the morning."
+
+"You are sure? You wouldn't like the doctor?" Joan asked anxiously.
+
+"Oh, no!" exclaimed Cynthia.
+
+Joan put her hand to the switch of the light, and Cynthia started up
+in bed with a wild gesture.
+
+"Don't turn the light out, please, mother," she cried; and the next
+moment feared that Joan would have heard the terror underneath her
+words. But Joan herself was occupied. She kissed Cynthia and left her
+alone with the light burning in her room.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER VIII
+
+                              THE FLIGHT
+
+
+But though the light burned in her room, Cynthia did not sleep till
+daybreak. For the first few hours there was a strange bustle about the
+passages of the house, for which she did not seek at all to find a
+cause. She welcomed it for its companionship. Familiar voices informed
+her that her friends were awake about her, and she was comforted. She
+tried to fall asleep before the noise should cease, but gradually the
+estancia sank into silence, and she was still awake. Then began her
+hours of terror. Her window was open, and every flutter of the night
+air which shook the curtains was her father's coarse, strong hand upon
+the sill. If she closed her eyes for a moment, his dark and evil face
+was already bending over her, as she lay helpless in her bed. If she
+heard a wardrobe crack it was he stepping clumsily about the room.
+Half the night she spent crouching up in her bed, her eyes wild with
+fear, her heart racing and stopping, while she listened for the sound
+of his footsteps outside the house. And she heard them; did a twig
+snap on a tree in the garden, she heard them. There was he, prowling
+about the walls, watching, perhaps, for just her light to be put out
+before he slipped in through a window to take her away. If she heard
+no sounds, then he was already in the house, creeping along the
+corridor toward her door. From the moment when this particular fear
+seized hold upon her, her eyes were fixed in an agony of suspense upon
+the long mirror in her room. The door was at her right hand, set in
+the wall against which the head of her bed was placed. A high screen
+stood by the side of the bed and hid it from her altogether. But
+across the room the long mirror faced her, and by looking at its
+bright surface she could see whether the door opened or not. It was a
+white door, with a round brass handle, and, continually, she was very
+sure that she saw the handle turn. In her frantic imaginings her
+father's very semblance changed. Gross though he was, still more she
+distorted him, making his likeness fit with the knowledge which she
+had of him. He meant to drag her away, and batten on what she had of
+youth and freshness and good looks; and this, out of malice almost as
+much as for profit, and to punish her for the happiness of her life.
+He swelled into some grotesque and corpulent thing of evil with a fat,
+loathsome face and gripping hands.
+
+The night was a night of disillusionment for Cynthia. Romance was
+stunned in her. All her pretty dreams, wherein she shyly walked with
+the bright ones of the earth, were rent and blown to space like
+gossamer. She seemed separated from them by a generation of years. She
+looked back upon them with derision. A fine heroine she was to be if
+that door opened. She was to walk--yes--but under the gas-lamps, and
+not shyly, and with any who would. That was the plan deliberately
+conceived for her and conceived by her own father. The mere thought of
+it seemed to sully her, to make her unworthy. She remembered that only
+that morning she had sent a telegram to Captain Rames, with a thrill
+of excitement, as though she were doing a remarkable thing. She had
+actually dared. She sat up, and in the bitterness of her heart laughed
+at the great significance she had set upon herself. Her father had a
+different view of her importance, and from head to foot she ached with
+the pain of her humiliation.
+
+Thus through the long hours she swung between terror and abasement,
+each one mastering her in turn. Once she started up with a despairing
+cry as she imagined her father driving her out into the street with
+blows.
+
+Could she make her living honestly if she ran away from him, she
+wondered miserably, bethinking that at the worst she must kill
+herself? At another moment she would recall with a pang of contempt
+her enchanted garden and scorch its flowers with her ridicule. She
+would walk in that garden no more. It was closed. She had been an
+impostor in it always. It was a place of falsities. There was but one
+true, real thing in it all--the turnstile in the wall which gave
+admission to its precincts. Yes, that was true, and the turnstile,
+with all it meant of shame and indifference, became to her a new
+epitome of life.
+
+Gradually the night wore through. A finger of gray light slipped
+through the curtains, and was laid upon the ceiling of the room. Birds
+began to sing in the garden. Cynthia turned out her light and fell
+asleep at last. She slept late and woke to just such another day of
+heat as yesterday. She lay for a moment, happily convinced that all
+which had occurred last night had occurred only in a dream. But she
+looked into the mirror across the room and saw the door, and the truth
+was made known to her. These things had happened.
+
+Certainly the door was still closed, the night had passed. But other
+nights would follow, and through the closed door, not her father, but
+fear and shame had passed to bear her company. She came down to
+breakfast pale and heavy-eyed, and found Joan and Robert Daventry
+already at the table. She was afraid lest they should remark the
+alteration in her looks, and she set herself to counterfeit an air of
+gaiety. It was not very successful, but Joan and Robert Daventry were
+making precisely the same pretence, with still poorer results. They
+could not meet her eyes any more than she theirs; and they were trying
+for the sake of her happiness to hide from her a catastrophe, her
+knowledge of which for the sake of their happiness she was trying to
+hide from them. Thus they all talked with great speed about things of
+no importance, and laughed noisily whether laughter was appropriate or
+not, until Robert Daventry suddenly turned to Cynthia and blurted out
+with an affected blitheness:
+
+"I hope, my dear, that you haven't made many absolutely unalterable
+arrangements for the summer." And Cynthia turned as white as the
+table-cloth and looked suddenly down to hide the terror in her eyes.
+They were going to give her up, then! That was her first despairing
+thought. No doubt it could not be helped. They were compelled to.
+
+"No," she answered faintly. "No arrangements that cannot be altered. I
+was going to stay for a week with--" and as she compared the summer
+which she had planned with that which awaited her, she stopped, lest
+the choking of her voice should betray her.
+
+"That's well," continued Robert, "for you have a journey to make,
+Cynthia. I have had a telegram this morning from England. I bought
+some property in Warwickshire a few years ago. We thought you would
+not, perhaps, want to live all your life in the Argentine after we had
+gone. So we bought it for you. But it appears there's some sort of
+lawyer's trouble over the title."
+
+"We have known there was some trouble," Joan hastened to explain, "for
+quite a long time. But until this telegram arrived we did not think it
+very serious."
+
+"Now we know what it is," continued Robert, "and I am afraid that we
+must go to England and attend to it. Luckily, we have Walton now to
+look after the estancia." And since Cynthia made no reply, but still
+looked upon the cloth, he continued in some perplexity: "I hope, my
+dear, you won't be disappointed. Joan and I, indeed, were inclined to
+be confident that you would enjoy the trip."
+
+"And, of course, I shall," cried Cynthia; and now she raised her head
+and gazed at her friends with shining eyes. She had not dared to yield
+her face to their scrutiny in the first revulsion of her feelings.
+Even now the room whirled about her. "I shall be delighted to go with
+you. When shall we start?"
+
+"Yes, that's the point," said Mr. Daventry, uncomfortably. "The
+telegram is very urgent, and there's a boat sailing from Buenos Ayres
+to-morrow. I am afraid, Cynthia, that we must catch it. There's
+certain to be no difficulty about cabins just at this time of the
+year, and, in fact, I have already telegraphed to retain them. So you
+see we must leave Daventry by the night train. Can you be ready?"
+
+"Of course," said Cynthia.
+
+The color came back again into her pale cheeks and made them rosy, and
+the smile returned to her lips. No telegram had come. The bustle in
+the corridors during the early hours of the evening was explained to
+her. Over night, Robert and Joan had made up their minds to an instant
+flight, and had set about their preparations. Cynthia drew her breath
+again. She resumed life and some part of her faith in life. The world
+was not peopled with James Challoners, as, in the shock of her horror,
+she had almost been persuaded. Here were two who, for her sake, were
+abandoning their home and the place which their labors had made for
+them in the country of their adoption. Her great trouble during that
+day of hurried preparation was to avoid blurting out to her two
+friends her gratitude and her knowledge.
+
+They travelled by night and, reaching Buenos Ayres in the morning,
+drove straight along the docks to their ship. Once on board, Cynthia
+noticed that Joan made this and that excuse about the arrangement of
+her cabin to keep her from the deck until the steamer had warped out
+into the basin. Then she gave a sigh of relief and sat down in a
+chair.
+
+"You won't mind, dear, will you?" she said. "We shall probably be kept
+some time in England. But you will soon make friends. Robert was
+speaking about it last night. He said it was a good hunting country,
+and that we could get you some fine horses and--" and suddenly she
+felt Cynthia's arms about her neck, and the girl's tears upon her
+cheeks.
+
+"My dear, my dear, you are too kind to me!" cried Cynthia. "I don't
+mind about the horses, if only you'll keep me with you."
+
+"Of course, of course," said Mrs. Daventry. "What should we do without
+you ourselves."
+
+The screw was churning up the mud of the River Plate, the flat banks
+dotted with low trees were slipping past the port-holes.
+
+"Let us go out and get the steward to arrange our chairs on deck,"
+said Mrs. Daventry. She put Cynthia's outburst down, not to any guess
+at the true reason of their flight, but to a young girl's moment of
+emotion.
+
+The steamer put into Montevideo, and Santos, and Rio, and glided
+northward along the woods and white sands of Brazil. It passed one
+morning into the narrows of the Cape Verde Islands, and there was
+dressed from stem to stern with flags.
+
+Cynthia asked the reason of the first officer, who was leaning beside
+her on the rail, and for answer he pointed northward to a small black
+ship which was coming down toward them, and handed to her his
+binocular.
+
+"That's the _Perhaps_, bound for the South," he said; and he saw the
+girl's face flush red.
+
+She put the glasses to her eyes, and gazed for a long while at the
+boat. The _Perhaps_ was a full-rigged ship, with auxiliary steam,
+broad in the beam, with strong, rounded bows. She had the trade-wind
+behind her, and came lumbering down the channel with every sail set
+upon her yards.
+
+"But she's so small," cried Cynthia.
+
+"She has to be small," replied the first officer. "Length's no use for
+her work. Look at us! We should crack like a filbert in the ice-pack.
+She won't."
+
+"But she's out for three years," said Cynthia.
+
+"There'll be a relief ship with fresh stores, no doubt. And there are
+not many of them on board, twenty-nine all told."
+
+Cynthia looked again, and held the glasses to her eyes until the boats
+drew level. She could make out small figures upon the bridge and deck;
+she saw answering signals break out in answer to their own good
+wishes; and then the name in new gold letters came out upon the black
+stern beneath the counter.
+
+"Thank you," she said as she handed back the glasses. But her eyes
+were still fixed upon that full-rigged ship lumbering heavily to the
+unknown South.
+
+"I am very glad to have seen the _Perhaps_," she said slowly.
+
+The first officer looked at her curiously. There was a quiver of
+emotion in her voice.
+
+"Perhaps you have friends on board," he said. "If you have, I envy
+them."
+
+"No," she said slowly. "I know no one on board. But I am glad to have
+seen the ship, for I was interested in it in a part of my life which
+is now over."
+
+The first officer was about to smile. Here was a remarkably pretty
+girl of seventeen or so, talking about a part of her life which was
+over! But the big, dark-blue eyes swept round and rested gravely on
+his face, and he bowed to her with a fitting solemnity.
+
+Cynthia exaggerated, no doubt, taking herself seriously as young girls
+will. But the shock of that last night in the estancia had wrought a
+revolution in her thoughts. Though James Challoner no longer seemed to
+grip her hand, she walked in the chill shadow of his presence. Nor did
+that shadow quite lift even when she had landed in England.
+
+They travelled into Warwickshire, and so came to that white house
+behind the old wall of red brick on the London road which Robert
+Daventry had once coveted for himself and had afterward bought for
+Cynthia. The Daventrys made it their home now. Though Cynthia never
+read a word about it in the papers, that disputed title took a long
+while in the settling. Robert Daventry resumed the old ties. Joan,
+with Cynthia at her side, found the making of new ones not the
+laborious business she had feared, and Cynthia had her horses and as
+many friends as she had room for in her life. But the shadow was still
+about her. James Challoner might have found the means to follow them
+to England. At any corner of a lane she might discover his gross and
+sinister figure upon the path. A few miles away, the ancient city of
+Ludsey lifted high its old steeples and its modern chimneys. She was
+always secretly upon her guard in its climbing streets. There was
+always in her life a mirror facing a closed door, and at her heart a
+great fear lest she should see the door open.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IX
+
+                       ROBERT DAVENTRY EXPLAINS
+
+
+Thus the greater part of three years passed, but toward the end of the
+third the influenza became virulent throughout that country. It was a
+winter of sharp frosts and sudden thaws. One week the lanes were deep
+in snow and the fields white squares ruled off by the hedges; the next
+the whole country-side ran water. The epidemic was at its worst in
+November, and during that month it attacked Joan Daventry. She was now
+a woman of seventy, and the activity of her life had worn out her
+heart. She died within a week of her seizure, and from that time
+Robert Daventry's strength steadily declined. It may have been that
+the loss of Joan loosened his hold on life, or, again it may have
+been, as Dr. Hill declared, that he caught a chill at the graveside
+which he could not shake off. But, whatever the cause, he ailed
+through November, and in the beginning of the following month, while
+sitting on the bench at Ludsey, he was seized with a great faintness.
+He was driven back to the white house, and took to his bed; and on the
+next day the snow fell again.
+
+Ten days after he had fallen sick, Dr. Hill came from the bedroom and
+found Cynthia waiting as ever for his news. He was an oldish man, and
+quite at home in that house. He slipped his arm through hers and said
+in a grave and gentle voice:
+
+"Your father wants you, my dear. He has something to say to you."
+
+Cynthia looked at him anxiously.
+
+"Won't it tire him too much to talk?"
+
+"He will not, I think, be tired for very long. You had better go to
+him at once, for his mind is quite clear now. I will come back
+to-morrow morning, unless you telephone to me before then that you
+want me. It is now, I am afraid, a matter of waiting."
+
+He drove away from the door. Cynthia walked back along the passages to
+the room where the old man lay in a great four-poster bed. The
+afternoon was closing in, and the room was not yet lit. But there was
+light enough for her to appreciate all that Dr. Hill had meant. Robert
+Daventry had grown so frail, his hands and face were so very nearly
+transparent.
+
+"I have a good deal to tell you, Cynthia," he said feebly, and his
+lips tried to smile. "So listen to me carefully."
+
+The nurse went out of the room. Cynthia sat down by the bed and took
+the old man's hand in hers. She made no pretence that another
+opportunity would come.
+
+"You will be very well off, my dear, I am thankful to say," he
+continued. "There's the estancia, about which I will say a word to you
+later, and a little more than four hundred thousand pounds in the
+stocks. It's practically all coming to you. Of course, the profit on
+the estancia varies with the season, and may in bad years mean
+nothing; but on the average, I reckon you ought to have about
+twenty-five thousand a year. That leaves out this house and the little
+farm which goes with it. They are yours already. I have made Hill one
+of my executors--he'll be rather a figurehead, I expect--and Isaac
+Benoliel, of Culver, the other. They are both friends and neighbors of
+yours, and understanding people. I have tied up half the money on you
+and your children. If you haven't any children you will bequeath it as
+you like. But I am hoping very much that you will have them. I once
+asked a woman what she looked back upon as the happiest time of her
+life, and she said the evenings when she and her husband used to sit
+alone together before their first child was born. I think that was a
+wise saying, Cynthia. It struck me very much at the time, and has
+never since seemed to me less true than it did then. And, you know,
+everybody can't expect quite the same luck as Joan and I had in
+finding you." He pressed her hand with such strength as he had, and
+lay for a little while silent, husbanding his strength.
+
+"I was advised by my lawyer," he resumed, "to tie my whole fortune up.
+But I talked it over with Joan and we were afraid that it might
+perhaps occur to you afterward that we didn't completely trust you."
+
+"Oh, father, I should never have thought that," Cynthia protested
+gently.
+
+The old man shook his head.
+
+"One can never be quite certain that queer, stinging ideas won't
+come," he said. "And we both were anxious that you should be sure
+always that we had no fear of the way in which you would manage your
+life. So you will be completely mistress of half your fortune," and he
+hesitated for a moment, "when you come of age. But I would like you,
+when you are in doubt, to consult Isaac Benoliel. I have a great faith
+in him."
+
+"I, too," said Cynthia. "I will consult him."
+
+A look of relief came into Robert Daventry's face.
+
+"I am glad of that," he said. "There are people, of course, who are
+prejudiced against him. He is a Jew, and he's new, and he has that
+queer sort of indefinable position which attracts criticism. But I
+think you will find him a valuable friend."
+
+Daventry's voice had weakened to a whisper, and he lay back upon his
+pillows with his eyes closed. Cynthia moved, but the pressure of his
+hand retained her. She sat and waited, speaking no word and holding
+back the tears which smarted in her eyes. Robert Daventry spoke again.
+
+"There's some medicine," he said. "Hill gave it me to keep me going.
+It's in a glass."
+
+Cynthia lifted a glass filled with some grayish liquid, and held it to
+the old man's lips. He drank, and resumed:
+
+"I have written down during the last day or two the heads of what I
+wanted to say on a paper."
+
+Cynthia found a slip of paper on the table by the bedside.
+
+"Just read."
+
+There were some words written one below the other on the paper in a
+straggling hand. Cynthia read them out.
+
+"Money."
+
+"I have said all I have to say, I think, about that."
+
+"Diana Royle," Cynthia read next. But she read the name slowly, so
+slowly that Robert Daventry noticed her deliberation.
+
+"I don't think you can see, Cynthia," he said. "It's getting dark."
+
+"Oh, yes, father, I can see quite clearly," she replied. "What of Mrs.
+Royle?"
+
+"You know her," said Robert. "You like her, too, I think, don't you?"
+Cynthia did not reply, but Daventry had not asked the question in
+the tone of one needing a reply. "You will want some one to live with
+you until you get married, which, by the way, you don't seem to be
+in a hurry to do, my dear. The young fellows round here don't seem
+to have made much impression. Oh! I am not bustling you, my dear.
+Only--only--don't leave it too long, Cynthia," he said, and his hand
+sought hers again.
+
+Cynthia stirred uneasily. It was the way of men, to want to marry
+every girl off as soon as possible, she knew. It was a form of vanity.
+But she wished to give no promise.
+
+"You will probably go to London, I don't want you to mope down here
+all the time. There's no reason that you should. You can have your
+house in town. But you will want some one with you, and I thought my
+cousin, Diana Royle, would be the most suitable person."
+
+Cynthia raised her head as if she was about to speak. But she did not,
+and Daventry said:
+
+"I wrote to her about it."
+
+"Oh," said Cynthia slowly. "You have already written?"
+
+"Yes, and she consented at once. You see her husband left her badly
+off when he died. So it will be an advantage to her. And though she is
+older than you are, she is not so much older that you won't be in
+sympathy with one another."
+
+Cynthia nodded her head.
+
+"I see," she said. "Yes, of course, I know her very well." But a note
+of reserve was audible, or rather would have been audible to any other
+in that room. But Robert Daventry was altogether occupied in the
+effort to master his overmastering weakness. There was more which he
+wished to say; there was something which he must say.
+
+"Then that's settled," he whispered; and with his eyes he asked for
+his cordial. Cynthia once more supported him, and held the glass to
+his lips.
+
+"Now, what comes next?" he asked, and Cynthia looked at the paper.
+
+"The estancia," she said.
+
+"Yes," said Daventry, and a smile suddenly illumined his face and made
+it young. "The estancia! You have the right to dispose of it, Cynthia.
+For one never knows what changes may come. But I don't want you to let
+it go unless there is some great necessity. It brings in, generally, a
+good income, and now that Walton looks after it, it gives very little
+trouble. Walton is a good man. I should give him an interest in it, if
+I were you, and as time goes on increase his interest. Keep him and
+keep it. I want you very much to do that. I am proud of the Daventry
+estancia, for one thing. For another, the best part of Joan's life and
+of mine was spent there. There, too, we first brought you when you
+came to us. There's yet another reason," and he stopped, and thought.
+"Yes, there's yet another reason why I care for it so much--but--" and
+he shook his head and gave up the effort to interpret it: "it's not
+very clear in my mind just now. I only know it's there--a strong
+reason."
+
+He was speaking with a depth of tenderness in his voice for which
+Cynthia was hardly prepared. Always he had seemed to her to look upon
+the estancia as a business proposition rather than as the soil in
+which his heart was rooted. Always, too, he had seemed so contented to
+live in England, and he had taken his part with so much zest in the
+local administration of the county. She was as puzzled now by this
+note of yearning--for it was no less than yearning--as by the reason
+which he could not interpret. It was all made plain to her in after
+years, but by another than Robert Daventry.
+
+"I want you very much to keep the estancia, Cynthia."
+
+"Of course I will keep it," she said, and again she made no pretence
+that the day was distant when it would be hers to keep. Her heart was
+heavy with grief, it went out in love to this dear friend of hers; she
+was young and the cry was loud in her bosom, "What will I do without
+you?" but her lips did not utter it. He would be quite sure of her
+love without her protests. There was comprehension enough, and to
+spare, between them to make her certain of that. And, since he wanted
+her to listen, she put aside her distress and the thought of the
+loneliness which awaited her and obeyed him.
+
+"I would even be glad"--and the old man hesitated with the timidity of
+one asking a heavy favor.--"Yes, I would be glad if you would go back
+there--oh, not often--but just once or twice to see that all was going
+on well."
+
+Cynthia's hand trembled for a moment. She looked at him with a sudden
+terror in her eyes. But he was lying now upon his side with his face
+to the window, and seeing things not to be seen through its panes. It
+cost Cynthia a great deal to make the promise he sought from her. She
+shrank from a return to the estancia with every fibre of her body. But
+she made it. He besought her in so wistful a voice.
+
+"Yes, I will go back, father."
+
+"Thank you," he said gently.
+
+Outside the window the snow lay white and deep upon the slate roofs of
+the outbuildings, and was piled upon the black branches of the trees.
+Overhead was a gray sky of winter. But for the glimmer of the snow it
+would almost have been dark. A smile shone again on the old man's
+face.
+
+"Perhaps Walton's cutting the corn to-day! Think of it!" he said, with
+a great longing, and before Cynthia's eyes there rose immediately
+the vision of a great glistening field of standing wheat and a
+reaping-machine like a black toy outlined against it. They remained
+thus in silence for a little while. Cynthia was thinking.
+
+"After all, he may not be in the Argentine.... I may not meet
+him.... He will have no power over me.... There is no reason why I
+should be afraid."
+
+And then, as though in answer to these arguments, Robert Daventry
+said:
+
+"You can go back now, Cynthia, without fear."
+
+The girl looked at him with startled eyes. Had she spoken aloud, she
+asked herself? Had she betrayed her secret just at this last moment?
+But her eyes fell upon the slip of paper in her hand, and there she
+saw written plainly under the word "estancia" the name "James
+Challoner."
+
+Robert Daventry looked toward a bureau which stood by the window.
+
+"The little drawer on the left. No, the one above that. There's a
+cutting from a newspaper."
+
+Cynthia found in the drawer half a column of a Spanish newspaper. The
+name was on the top of the column. It was a paper published in Buenos
+Ayres. She brought the cutting back to the bed and placed it between
+his fingers.
+
+"Yes, that's it," he said, and he lay back upon his pillows, and
+gathered his strength. "I have got to tell you now something which we
+have always kept a secret from you."
+
+"There is no need to tell it," said Cynthia.
+
+Robert Daventry stared at her.
+
+"If you do know it," he said slowly, "we have made the cruellest
+mistake we could possibly have made. You can't know it!"
+
+"It's about James Challoner--my father?" asked Cynthia, and Robert
+Daventry shut his eyes with a look of great distress upon his face.
+
+"How long have you known?" he asked.
+
+"From the night when he came to the estancia," she answered. And she
+told how she had slipped into the smoking-room and how, huddled in the
+great chair, she had heard all that James Challoner proposed for her.
+The shadow deepened upon Daventry's face as he listened, and when she
+had ended he asked with deep regret:
+
+"Why didn't you tell us this, Cynthia?"
+
+"Because, just outside the smoking-room door in the hall, you both
+decided not to tell me--not to breathe a word of--of my father's
+visit. You thought the knowledge would trouble and frighten me. You
+thought it would hurt. Well, I was as certain that you would be
+greatly distressed to know that already I had the knowledge. So I held
+my tongue."
+
+"And it did trouble you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"A great deal?"
+
+"Yes," Cynthia admitted. "I was frightened. I did not know what power
+he might have. I knew you had fled from him for my sake."
+
+"And since you have been here--during these three years--you have
+still been troubled, still frightened lest he should come and claim
+you with the law at his side?"
+
+Though the old man could hardly speak above a whisper, he was
+strangely insistent in his questioning. The words came unevenly, with
+breaks between, and now and then a weak gasp for breath. Cynthia
+replied quite simply:
+
+"Yes, here, too, I have thought that he might come. I used to be
+frightened at night. I used to hear him in the house."
+
+And with every word she spoke the compunction and distress deepened in
+Daventry's mind.
+
+"What a pity!" he said. "Neither of us guessed, not even Joan, who was
+quicker than I to notice things. And we thought we knew all about you,
+Cynthia!" A faint smile lit up his face. "How little, after all, we
+did know! For we could have spared you all this trouble. Read." And
+opening his hand he let her take from it the newspaper slip. She
+uttered a cry as she read the first lines.
+
+"It's true," said Daventry, from the bed.
+
+Cynthia carried the cutting over to the window and read by the fading
+light. It gave the account of an inquest held at a small town
+twenty-five miles up the line from the Daventry estancia on the body
+of an Englishman who had been stabbed to the heart by a Gaucho in a
+drunken quarrel at a tavern. There was a witness who had worked with
+the Englishman, and could identify him. He called himself James
+Challoner, and, when he was drunk, he would boast of his family.
+Cynthia looked at the date of the paper. It was almost three years
+old. James Challoner had been killed within a week of his dismissal by
+Robert Daventry. Cynthia let the slip of paper fall from her fingers,
+and stood by the window until Robert Daventry called her to his side.
+
+"You held your tongue so as not to distress us," he whispered. "We
+held ours so as not to frighten you. And so because we were careful of
+your happiness, and you of ours, you have gone through years of
+anxiety and terror. Needless anxiety! Terror without a cause! I am so
+sorry. It seems so pitiful. It seems rather grim to me, Cynthia."
+
+Cynthia answered quietly:
+
+"That's the way things happen." And when she had spoken, Robert
+Daventry, with an effort, raised himself upon his elbow and peered
+into her face.
+
+"You oughtn't to be able to say that, Cynthia," he said remorsefully.
+"You oughtn't to be able to think it. It's not the proper philosophy
+for twenty. I am afraid, my dear, that trouble has gone deep." He fell
+back and in a moment a little whimsical smile flickered upon his face.
+"I don't think I'll tell Joan about this," he said. "She wouldn't like
+it. She wouldn't forgive herself for not having noticed that you were
+troubled."
+
+"After all, it was my fault," said Cynthia. "For I hid in the room.
+However, it's all over now."
+
+But Daventry was not prepared to accept her word. Some flash of
+insight forbade him.
+
+"It has left its mark, my dear," he insisted, and in broken sentences
+he dwelt upon his theme. His mind began to wander after a little, but
+through his wanderings there ran the thread of this idea:
+
+"Joan was always so careful.... Even when you were quite a little girl
+... we were never to laugh at you.... 'Children and dogs' she used to
+say, 'you must never laugh at them. Little things warp children for
+life.' ... Do you remember when you used to write plays and perform
+them to us at Christmas, in a toy theatre, with small figures in tin
+slides?... Joan was always careful that we should take them seriously,
+and not laugh at the wrong place. I never did want to laugh at the
+wrong place. I thought you wrote very good plays, Cynthia. I used to
+say you were a genius. But Joan wouldn't have it. 'No!' she said, 'All
+children are born dramatists, but they forget the trick of it
+afterward.' ... I suppose she knew. She was a very clever woman--" and
+so he drifted off gradually into sleep. Cynthia stayed by his side
+while the twilight faded and the darkness came; and the light of the
+fire danced ever more brightly upon the ceiling of the room. The wind
+set from the west, and as the hours passed the chimes from the great
+clock in Ludsey Church tower came softly and faintly into the room.
+But they did not disturb the old man's rest. He went floating out on a
+calm tide of sleep to his death, and Cynthia sat by his side wondering
+in the intervals of her grief at the strange arrangement of life which
+ordained that the efforts of people to secure the happiness of others
+should only cause needless terrors and vain miseries.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER X
+
+                             MR. BENOLIEL
+
+
+"There are no ladies," Captain Rames said indignantly, as he took his
+seat in Mr. Benoliel's dining-room.
+
+His neighbor, a florid and handsome man, a little past the prime of
+life, glanced at the name on the visiting-card which marked Captain
+Rames's place, and smiled sympathetically.
+
+"I can quite understand," he returned with a pleasant pomposity, "that
+to a sailor who has been three years in the Antarctic the deficiency
+is a very lamentable business. But there are some elements of
+consolation. Amongst the twelve men seated at this round table of
+mahogany, you will hardly see one who has not made some stir in the
+world. Upon your right, for instance, you will see Mr. Winthrop, that
+long and sallow person. He is a political resident in one of the
+native States of Rajputana, and his work, in six volumes, on the
+Indian bangle, is, I believe, supposed to be the last word upon the
+subject. A little nearer to you you will see a youth, though he is not
+so young as he looks. He is M. Poileaux, and the only aviator who has
+not yet fallen into the sea. When he does, he will come here no more.
+I myself am a surgeon whose name, I believe, is not unknown."
+
+And with a large white hand the famous Sir James Burrell discreetly
+pointed out others of note to his companion.
+
+Captain Rames glanced indifferently round the table. A few of the
+twelve were in black coats, and amongst those few was Mr. Benoliel. It
+was the night of a court ball, and most of the guests were in some
+uniform or another, or shone in the gold of the privy councillor.
+
+"They are, no doubt, men of vast importance," replied Captain Rames
+bluntly. "But leaving you out of account, Sir James, I could dispense
+with the lot of them. When I dine in Grosvenor Square, in June, I do
+ask that there should be a petticoat on one side of me, at all
+events."
+
+The surgeon laughed good-humoredly. He studied his neighbor with a
+quick observing eye. Captain Rames was of the middle height with a
+squareness of build, which his gold epaulets exaggerated at this
+moment, and he was square, too, of face. His hair was thick and curved
+over from the side, parting in a dark turbulent comb, his forehead was
+broad, his eyes keen and very steady. Vigor rather than refinement was
+the mark of him; he had more character than intellect, more capacity
+than knowledge; thus Sir James Burrell defined him.
+
+"I have played the comforter," he said, "at so many bedsides that I
+should feel my vanity touched if I failed to console you," he
+returned. "Let me bring to your attention the menu. I am confident
+that it will appeal to you."
+
+"Yes, that's all right," Rames admitted, as he leaned forward and
+glanced at the card. "But why should it particularly appeal to me?"
+
+Sir James Burrell shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"My profession brings me into touch with interesting people. I take my
+pleasure in observing them. And I have always noticed that the men who
+cheerfully endure the greatest hardships are also the first to demand
+the best of the luxuries, when they are within reach."
+
+"Well, it's true," said Captain Rames. "I can make a shift with
+pemmican, but I honestly like a good dinner. It's the contrast, I
+suppose."
+
+Sir James shook his head.
+
+"It goes deeper than that," said he. "Your pale saints are no doubt
+profitable to the painters of glass windows, but I doubt if the world
+owes so very much to them. The great things are really done by the
+people who have a good deal of the animal in them; and animals like
+good dinners."
+
+Captain Rames was mollified, and his face took on a jovial look.
+
+"I am animal enough," he said, "to purr when my back is scratched."
+
+But Sir James Burrell was mounted on a hobby and hardly heeded the
+interruption.
+
+"I could quote historical instances, but I need go no further than
+this room. Do you see the man sitting next to our host, and upon his
+right?"
+
+Captain Rames saw a small thin man in the dress of a privy councillor,
+a man with a peaked, fleshless face, in which a pair of small eyes
+twinkled alertly. A scanty crop of gray hair covered the back of his
+skull, and left markedly visible the height and the narrowness of his
+forehead. Captain Rames leaned forward with a new interest.
+
+"Yes, and I recognize his face," he said. "Surely that is Henry
+Smale."
+
+"Exactly," returned Sir James. "He is in the cabinet, and, quite apart
+from politics, he is, upon scientific grounds, a man of great
+distinction."
+
+"But, surely, he disproves your theory. He looks an ascetic."
+
+"And is nothing of the kind," interrupted Sir James. "I admit that his
+look of asceticism has been a great asset to him in his career. But
+the public has quite misjudged him. He is a voluptuary, with the face
+of a monk--the most useful combination for public life in this country
+which you could possibly imagine. If he dines alone at his club, he
+will not dine under a guinea; and he has the animal weaknesses up to
+the brim of him. For instance, he is as jealous as a dog. Filch from
+him the smallest of his prerogatives, and he will turn upon you
+bitterly. Yet he has done great things, and initiated bold policies.
+Why? Because he has enough of the animal in him to do great things."
+And upon that Sir James broke off.
+
+The butler was standing at the elbow of Captain Rames, with a jug of
+champagne in one hand and a decanter of red wine in the other. He bent
+down and offered Captain Rames his choice. Sir James Burrell
+intervened.
+
+"By the way," he said, "have you any wish to stand particularly well
+with your host?"
+
+"I am now beginning to think that I have," replied Captain Rames.
+
+"Then I should choose his Burgundy. He has his fancies, like the rest
+of us, and to prefer his Nuits-St.-George to champagne is one way to
+his esteem."
+
+Captain Rames took the hint, and, as he raised his glass to his lips,
+Mr. Benoliel smiled to him across the table.
+
+"I will ask your opinion upon that wine, Captain Rames," he said, and
+so turned again to Henry Smale.
+
+"You see, he noticed at once," said Sir James.
+
+Captain Rames had noticed something too. At the mention of his name,
+Henry Smale had looked up with interest. He was even now obviously
+asking a question of Mr. Benoliel about him. Rames began to take more
+careful stock of his host. Mr. Benoliel was a tall, high-shouldered
+man, with a dark thin face in which delicacy seemed to predominate
+over strength. His hair was black, and a little black moustache drew a
+pencil line along his upper lip. His fingers were long and
+extraordinarily restless. It was difficult to make a guess at his age.
+A first glance would put him in the forties. But when Mr. Benoliel
+showed his eyes--which was not always, for he had a trick of looking
+out between lids half-closed--it seemed that he must have lived for
+centuries; so much of fatigue and so much of patience were suddenly
+revealed.
+
+"I wonder why he asked me to dine here," said Harry Rames.
+
+"You were certain to dine here," replied Sir James.
+
+"I met him but the once by the purest accident."
+
+"You were certain to meet him," said Sir James. "All famous people
+meet him. All famous people dine here once. But he is not really a
+snob. For, quite a number of them are never invited twice."
+
+"He can be a good friend?"
+
+"Of that I cannot speak," said Sir James.
+
+The courses followed one after the other, and Harry Rames found his
+eyes continually wandering back across the silver and bright flowers
+to the exotic figure of his host. He took his share in the
+conversation about him, but a movement of Mr. Benoliel would check him
+in his speech or cause him to listen with an absent ear. He watched
+the play of his delicate fingers upon the table-cloth, the continual
+restlessness of his body. Mr. Benoliel was of his race; there was in
+his aspect a queer mixture of the financier and the dilettante, the
+shrewd business man and the sensuous apprecitator of art. There was a
+touch, too, of the feminine in him.
+
+"I told you that you would not be bored," said Sir James Burrell
+toward the end of the dinner. "You are not the first man who has
+fallen under the spell of Mr. Benoliel."
+
+Harry Rames laughed.
+
+"I am under no spell, I assure you," he said frankly. "I was wondering
+whether he was likely to be of use to me."
+
+"It is very likely," returned Sir James. "He has been of use to many.
+He plays at omniscience. To anticipate a wish before it is expressed,
+to serve an ambition before it has been revealed--that is one of our
+host's little vanities. He may have asked you here with no other
+object than to gratify it."
+
+Harry Rames glanced quickly at his companion.
+
+"Is that so?" he asked eagerly. Then his face fell. "But I am not even
+a friend of his."
+
+"I do not think that matters," said the surgeon. "He likes to pose as
+Providence, and the posture will be more dramatic if it is assumed
+toward an acquaintance rather than a friend."
+
+"He is a sham, then," said Rames bluntly.
+
+"By no means," Sir James replied suavely. "Let us say, rather, that he
+is an artist."
+
+Captain Rames turned with a furrowed brow to his companion.
+
+"I am no great hand at subtleties," he said. "Will you tell me what
+you know of Mr. Benoliel? I am a beginner in the world, and he may be
+of importance to me."
+
+Sir James Burrell smiled. He was in his element. To supply a character
+much as some author of the seventeenth century might have done, was a
+foible which continually tempted him. He was not always successful.
+Paradox allured him into difficulties, cheap epigrams at times blazed
+before him, and would not be quiet until he had uttered them. But
+often he managed to hit off, with some happiness, at all events, the
+externals of the person whom he described. He drank his wine now
+slowly and set down his glass. Then, twisting the delicate stem with
+the finger-tips of his large and handsome hand, he began:
+
+"He is a Jew, of course, and an Oriental. But from what quarter of the
+Orient, who shall say? You may give him any birthplace, from the
+Levant to Casa Blanca, and no one will contradict you. Some hold him
+to be a charlatan, as you are inclined to do. But he is an accepted
+personage, not blown into notice and out of it by the favor of a
+season, but a permanency. How he became so, I cannot tell you. He is
+very busy all day, although when the darkness comes it would be
+difficult to point to any one thing which he has done. He is always at
+the top table at public dinners, and very near to the chairman. But he
+never proposes a toast or responds to one. If he writes a letter to
+the _Times_, it appears in leaded type. If you want secret information
+on any subject, he can get it for you. If you want help, he will find
+the man who can give it. He is a power in the city. He is a power in
+politics, and the motor-cars of prime-ministers stand at his door at
+ten o'clock in the morning. Yet he was never in the House, and has
+never made a speech on any platform. It is believed by many that he
+might achieve greatness if he chose. But he never chooses. He has the
+air at a discussion of being able to say the last word on any subject,
+but he does not say it. He seems, indeed, to stand high in the world
+on a pedestal which has no legs to it. That is how I describe him. For
+the rest, he is rich, and I have never heard him utter an opinion
+which was not derived from others or altogether banal. But, listen! He
+is going to speak to us."
+
+"However, I can recommend the old brandy," was all that Mr. Benoliel
+had at that moment to say.
+
+"There, what did I tell you!" said Sir James, triumphant at the
+success of his diagnosis.
+
+"Well, if his talk is banal his brandy isn't, God bless him," said
+Captain Rames. "But I interrupted you."
+
+"He has been guilty of one weakness," Sir James resumed. "He married
+into an old family of great poverty and the marriage lasted for six
+months. His wife lives handsomely in Eton Square--But I see that I am
+going to lose you, for our host is beckoning to you."
+
+Captain Rames obeyed the summons with alacrity and walked round the
+table.
+
+"I see that you are going on to Buckingham Palace," said Mr. Benoliel.
+"So I thought that I would interrupt your conversation with Sir James
+Burrell. For I want to introduce you to Mr. Smale."
+
+Mr. Smale held out his hand. At a sign from Benoliel, the butler
+brought up a chair and placed it between Smale and his host.
+
+"Sit down," said Benoliel, and Captain Rames obeyed.
+
+"Benoliel tells me," said Smale, "that you are thinking of
+Parliament."
+
+Captain Rames was startled. He could not remember that in his one
+brief conversation with his host he had even mentioned his ambition.
+
+"I inferred it from a casual word or two you let drop," said Benoliel
+with a smile.
+
+"Well, it's true," said Rames. "I should like to stand on your side
+very much, Mr. Smale, if I could find a seat to contest."
+
+Henry Smale nodded.
+
+"That, no doubt, could be arranged. You would be a strong candidate.
+You bring a reputation and some breath of romance to favor you.
+But--" and he pursed up his lips as if in doubt and looked at Captain
+Rames with a searching eye. Rames was disconcerted. He had been back
+in England for some six months, and during those six months he had
+been much sought after. At this period of his life, doubts of him had
+been rarely expressed behind his back, and never to his face. Young
+ladies whom he did not know had clamored for his autograph, young
+ladies whom he did know had approached him with a winning humility;
+established beauty had smiled at him; established fame had welcomed
+him as an equal. The calm scrutiny of Henry Smale was a displeasing
+splash of cold water.
+
+"Of course," he said, with a diffidence which he did not feel, "I
+might be a failure."
+
+And Henry Smale replied promptly:
+
+"That's just it. You might be a failure. Meanwhile you are a great
+success, and have the chance of standing quite alone in your career.
+For what you set out to do is not yet done. You leave the laurel for
+another to snatch."
+
+"That is quite true, Mr. Smale," Harry Rames replied. "But I have
+considered it. I am not yielding to an impulse. I have counted the
+risk!"
+
+He spoke with a nice adjustment of firmness and modesty. Henry Smale
+rose from his chair.
+
+"Very well," he said. "Will you come down to the House at four o'clock
+to-morrow afternoon? I will introduce you to Hanley, the chief whip."
+
+Captain Rames flushed with pleasure.
+
+"Thank you, I shall be delighted," he cried, rising in his turn; and
+as the two men shook hands, Mr. Benoliel said gently:
+
+"I was thinking of Ludsey. It has no candidate on your side, Smale."
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XI
+
+                          A MAN ON THE MAKE
+
+
+A week later, and much about the same hour, Captain Rames was driven
+along the Mall in St. James's Park. Friday had come round again, and
+the light did not burn in the clock-tower at Westminster. But the
+windows of the admiralty blazed upon the horse-guards' parade, and its
+great doors stood open for a glittering company. It was the night of
+official dinners and receptions in honor of the king's birthday.
+Soldiers in scarlet, sailors in blue, ministers and privy councillors
+in gold, and ladies in their shimmering gowns thronged with the
+smaller fry in black coats up the shallow steps into a hall decorated
+with Union Jacks. There was a thrill of expectancy in the air that
+evening. Rumors were rife that the government was inclined to advise a
+dissolution. Members' wives were speculating whether they must go back
+to the constituencies and tread the ways of deference; their husbands
+how soon the time would come when they must exchange the erect dignity
+of the member for the supple curves of the candidate; and curious eyes
+dwelt, as if in hope of answer upon a sturdy white-haired man with a
+blunt, good-humored face, who, wearing a uniform with epaulets, left
+you in doubt whether he was a fireman or an admiral. He was, however,
+the Prime-Minister, and he stood in the hall amongst his friends,
+bearing the world lightly according to his wont. He stepped forward
+and shook hands with Rames as he passed, and so turned again to his
+friends. He was heard to say, "I have to-day achieved the ambition of
+my life;" and curious ears eager to glean a hint were inclined toward
+him.
+
+"To-day?" one of the group exclaimed. "You have been Prime-Minister
+for three years."
+
+The Prime-Minister laughed.
+
+"That's nothing," he said. "To become Prime-Minister was merely to
+take a step on the way. But to-night I wear for the first time the
+uniform of an Elder Brother of the Trinity, and that means that I need
+never wear knee-breeches again as long as I live."
+
+The curious ears were disappointed; Harry Rames shook hands with the
+First Lord of the Admiralty, passed on, and in the second room was
+touched on the elbow by Isaac Benoliel.
+
+"I have been asked by a young friend of mine to bring you to her, and
+I beg you to come at once, for she is in her most imperious mood,"
+said Mr. Benoliel in a voice of whimsical entreaty.
+
+"We will go to her as fast as we can," said Captain Rames.
+
+He had now been three months in England, and the shy warmth of many
+welcomes had made him thoroughly aware that he was a momentous
+personage to young ladies. He was human enough to enjoy his
+importance, and he followed Mr. Benoliel with alacrity toward a side
+of the room where Cynthia Daventry sat talking to a young man in the
+office of the Board of Trade. Rames noticed the clear and delicate
+profile of her face and the distinction which set her apart; he
+noticed, too, that, although she did not once look his way, the young
+gentleman in the Civil Service uniform was summarily dismissed.
+
+"Cynthia, this is Captain Rames," said Isaac Benoliel, and however
+imperious a mood Cynthia might have shown to him, she had reserved
+none of it for Captain Rames. Her eyes swept over him swiftly with the
+shy and eager look to which he had grown accustomed: she gave him her
+hand.
+
+"I am very glad to meet you," she said impulsively, "because--" and
+she halted suddenly upon the word, with the color like a rose in her
+cheeks, "I suppose that you are tired of congratulations."
+
+Captain Rames expanded: he laughed genially, a fastidious critic might
+have said too noisily.
+
+"By no means," he exclaimed. "Indeed, Miss Daventry, you may lay it on
+with a trowel."
+
+"I am not prepared to do that," answered Cynthia, and though she spoke
+lightly, her voice was guarded, and even in the eager eyes there was a
+constant watchfulness.
+
+Eight months had passed since Cynthia had sat by the bedside of Robert
+Daventry and listened to his instructions. She had taken Diana Royle
+to live with her as he had bidden, though she had taken her
+reluctantly. She had spent nearly all that time at the white house
+upon the London road, in spite of Mrs. Royle's repeated suggestion
+that Beaulieu, or preferably Cap D'Ail in the south of France would be
+more satisfactory places for wintering. Diana Royle was glad to be
+relieved from her genteel penury in Sussex Gardens, Kensington, but
+she had no liking for the country. Cynthia, however, was deaf to her
+hints. She lived for a while in solitude, broken only by the
+companionship of the few neighbors with whom she was most intimate.
+The swift deaths of the two old people who had so long lived for her
+and in her, left her desolate and inclined ever regretfully to search
+back across her life for occasions in which she had failed of kindness
+toward them, or hurt them by forgetfulness. She was young, however,
+and with no taint of morbidness. The sense of desolation passed, and
+Diana Royle began to urge a new plan.
+
+"You ought to take a house in town for the season, Cynthia. I know of
+one in an excellent position, which would just suit you. It's in
+Curzon Street, and the right end of the street, one of those nice,
+flat-fronted houses, old outside and tiled bath-rooms inside. I
+happened, I think, to see an advertisement of it to-day."
+
+Mrs. Royle handed the newspaper to Cynthia, looked it over.
+
+"We might think of it," she said.
+
+"I am sure neither Mr. nor Mrs. Daventry would have wished you to bury
+yourself always in the country."
+
+"That's true," said Cynthia. "My father looked forward to my taking a
+house in town."
+
+"I don't think you could do better than this, dear," said Diana Royle.
+"I know the house quite well by sight."
+
+"Well, we'll think of it," said Cynthia.
+
+Mrs. Royle suppressed a shrug of irritation.
+
+"You will find the house will be snapped up, dear, if you take too
+long thinking of it," she said with asperity.
+
+Cynthia looked at her with innocent eyes.
+
+"But I expect there will be other houses in London, won't there?" she
+asked.
+
+She had no wish to be churlish, she understood how deeply her
+companion longed for the paved roadways and the streets. And in her
+own heart, too, she was beginning to turn to the unknown world of
+London with an expectancy of adventure, which drew her and thrilled
+her, even while she hesitated.
+
+"I don't understand you, Cynthia," Diana Royle cried in exasperation.
+"Are you afraid?"
+
+The question was intended merely as a gibe, but Cynthia turned to her
+with startled eyes, and Mrs. Royle knew that she had chanced upon a
+truth.
+
+"Of what are you afraid?" she asked curiously, and Cynthia answered
+while she looked into the fire:
+
+"I once lay all night staring into a great bright mirror which
+revealed to me a shut door. I was in terror lest the door should open.
+I dreaded what might come through. I seem still to be looking into the
+great mirror, and with the same kind of fear. Only now the door opens
+upon the world, and not on the passage of a house."
+
+Diana Royle gathered up her embroidery and her book.
+
+"If you are going to talk that sort of nonsense, Cynthia, I shall go
+to bed," she remarked sternly, and left Cynthia still gazing into the
+fire.
+
+Cynthia had not been speaking with affectation. The terror with which
+her father had for so long inspired her had left its mark deep, as
+Robert Daventry upon his death-bed had understood. He was dead--yes,
+but she could not rid her thoughts of the dreadful destiny which he
+had proposed for her. By so little she had escaped it. She would look
+round the room with its books and its dainty appointments, and feel
+the arms of her chair to make sure that all was real.
+
+"If he had carried me away!" she would cry. "If he had come back with
+the law at his side and had carried me away!" And the streets of
+Buenos Ayres would pass before her eyes in a procession of blazing
+thoroughfares and dimly lighted lanes. And because she had escaped by
+so little, she looked out upon all unknown things with apprehension.
+Moreover, Daventry's disclosure to her upon his death-bed had, in a
+strange way, added to her apprehension. There were three people--thus
+her thoughts ran; two of them seeking to hide from her knowledge which
+they thought would cause her pain; and she the third, seeking to hide
+from them, just for the same reason, that the knowledge was hers
+already. The years of terror had been needless, yet they had been
+endured, and it was love itself which had inflicted them. Kindness
+then could do just the same harm as the deliberate will to hurt. She
+took that thought into her heart of hearts, and because of it dreaded
+what might come through when the door opened upon the world.
+
+With the coming of the spring, however, there came a stir in her
+blood. It was a spring of sunlit days and warm, soft nights. The great
+garden bursting into leaf and blossom, the annual miracle of tender
+green, the return of the birds, and the renewal of melody quickened
+the girl's pulses, gave to her a lightness of spirit, and made her
+dreamily expectant of wonders. She walked of an evening under her
+great cedar trees, with the flowers and the paths glimmering pale in
+the warm dusk, and the earth whispered to her of things as yet beyond
+her knowledge; throbbing moments of life, dreams minted in events. She
+woke eagerly to the clear, early mornings and the blackbirds calling
+on the lawn; she lingered on that lawn when the windows in the house
+were alight and the nightingales sang in the copses, and from some
+distant wood the clear, double note of a cuckoo was borne to her
+across the darkness. There came an evening in the middle of May when
+she burst her sheath like any bud on the bole of one of her chestnut
+trees. She stood a creature of emotion. The soft wind brought to her
+ears the chimes of the clock in the great church tower at Ludsey.
+Desire for the adventure overswept her fears. Her feet danced, and her
+youth had its way with her.
+
+She could see through the long open window Diana Royle in the
+drawing-room. She ran across the grass.
+
+"Di!"
+
+Some new sound in her voice, a leap, a thrill, made Diana look up. She
+saw a look in the girl's face, a light in her eyes, a soft color in
+her cheeks which quite transfigured her.
+
+"I have been rather a brute, Di," cried Cynthia. "We will go to
+London."
+
+"When?"
+
+"As soon as we can pack."
+
+A telegram was sent off to Mr. Benoliel, who was now in Grosvenor
+Square. He was bidden to work his quickest and his best. The furnished
+house in Curzon Street was still unlet. It was secured, and by the
+beginning of June Cynthia had come to town. There she was of course
+unknown. But she had made many friends in Warwickshire. Mr. Benoliel
+set his shoulder to the wheel; and she had a handsome balance at the
+bank. Add to these advantages her looks, and it will be seen that it
+was fairly smooth sailing for Cynthia during her first season. She
+danced, she dined, she lunched at Hurlingham, she went to plays and to
+the opera, she rode under the trees of the Row in the morning, she
+went up in a balloon; she came with both hands outstretched for new
+experiences. Yet she grasped them with a certain wariness. Eager she
+was, but her eagerness was guarded. For dim in the shadows at the back
+of her mind there was still the image of the mirror and the door. She
+had been in London less than a month when Harry Rames was brought to
+her side by Mr. Benoliel.
+
+They talked for a moment upon immaterial topics, and then Mr. Benoliel
+turned to Harry Rames:
+
+"So it is all settled, I hear."
+
+"Practically," replied Rames. "I have still to be formally adopted as
+prospective candidate by the Three Hundred, but that will be done at a
+meeting on Monday night."
+
+"Then there is no longer any reason why we should keep the matter
+secret, especially from Miss Daventry, who lives not five miles from
+your constituency. Cynthia," and both men turned toward her, "Captain
+Rames is going to stand for Ludsey at the next election."
+
+Captain Rames smiled modestly, expecting congratulations. He liked
+congratulations, especially from pretty girls, but he was
+disappointed. He saw only a wrinkle of perplexity upon Cynthia's
+forehead and a shadow in her eyes.
+
+"Why?" she asked.
+
+"You disapprove?" said Rames.
+
+Cynthia drew back.
+
+"I have no right to disapprove," she said coldly, and Harry Rames
+planted himself sturdily on both his feet in front of her.
+
+"Nevertheless you do," he insisted.
+
+In spite of herself, a faint smile of amusement played about Cynthia's
+lips as she watched him. She felt constrained to accept his challenge.
+
+"I should have thought--" she said with a trifle of hesitation; "it's
+not my business, of course--you may think it an impertinence--but
+since you challenge me, I should have thought that you would have done
+better to have gone back to the Antarctic again."
+
+"That's just what Smale said," remarked Mr. Benoliel, and he moved
+away.
+
+"That's just what Smale said, what every one will say. But it's all
+wrong," Rames exclaimed emphatically. "I was very glad to go South. I
+am very glad now that I went; but once is enough."
+
+A little wrinkle of disdain showed about Cynthia's mouth.
+
+"No doubt there were many hardships."
+
+Captain Rames was nettled.
+
+"Yes, there were, Miss Daventry, a great many, and singularly
+unpleasant ones. I have been twenty-four hours in a sleeping-bag with
+two other men. The sleeping-bag was sewn up on the inside, it was
+within a tent, we were so close together that we could only turn round
+one at a time, and we smoked in the bag, and still we were deadly
+cold. And I hate being cold. Yes, there were hardships, and though
+it's easy enough to remember them lightly here in the Admiralty, they
+were not delightful when they happened. But I should face them once
+more if I wanted to go back. Only I don't. I never want to see an
+ice-pack again as long as I live."
+
+The bluff confidence with which he spoke convinced Cynthia that it was
+not a fear of the hardships which had affected him. There she had been
+wrong, and she made amends.
+
+"I have no doubt the hardships wouldn't deter you if you wanted to
+go," she admitted. "But what I don't understand is why you don't want
+to." And a greater emphasis crept into her voice than she had meant to
+use, and gave to her words the wistfulness of an appeal. "I should
+have thought," she cried, "that you could never have rested until you
+had finished what you had begun."
+
+"That's true to the letter," he replied. "That's why I am standing for
+Ludsey."
+
+Cynthia looked up at him in surprise.
+
+"I don't think that I understand," she said quietly, and she made room
+upon the couch at her side. Harry Rames took the place. The appeal in
+her voice was a flattery which he quite failed to understand. Though
+Cynthia was young, and though she walked no longer in her enchanted
+garden, something of that spirit of romance, which had guided her
+there, had revived in her of late. Captain Rames was one of the chosen
+men for whom the turnstile had revolved; now that she met him in the
+flesh she could not forget it. He was of her dreams, he had marched in
+the procession of heroes, and though disillusionment had come to her
+he still wore a look of the heroic in her thoughts. All the more
+because disillusionment had come to her she wished him to retain the
+look. Her appeal was a prayer that he should stamp it upon his image
+for good and all.
+
+"May I explain it all to you?" he asked. He sat down beside her, and
+in answer to that gentle appeal of hers to make the best of himself,
+he drew for her clearly and succinctly and proudly the picture of a
+man on the make. "I went South, first and last, to get on in the
+world," he began. "As I say, I was very glad to go. The journey was a
+great experience. Yes, three years of my life were very well spent
+upon it; but they were very well spent, not because the journey was a
+great experience, but because it is now the great help to me in
+getting on, which I always thought it was going to be."
+
+He took no notice of the disappointment gathering upon Cynthia's face.
+He was not aware of it. Here was a girl of remarkable loveliness,
+wistfully appealing to him to explain the inner workings of his mind,
+and he was delighted to gratify her wish.
+
+"I can hardly remember the time when I was not diligently looking for
+a chance to get on. I was poor, you see. I am so still, indeed. I had
+none of those opportunities which money commands. I had somehow to
+create or find them. There's a motto in gold letters above the clock
+in the great hall at Osborne, the first of all mottoes in its superb
+confidence:
+
+
+               "'There is nothing the navy cannot do.'"
+
+
+Cynthia turned to him with eagerness.
+
+"Yes," she said with a smile. "For a boy to have that plain and simple
+statement before his eyes each day, that's splendid. I suppose a boy
+would never speak of it, but it would be to him a perpetual
+inspiration."
+
+"Yes," said Rames, "if all he thought of was the navy; if his
+ambitions were bound up with the navy. But mine weren't, you see, and
+I used to worry over that sentence even then. 'There is nothing the
+navy cannot do.' Very well. But that didn't mean that this little
+particular, insignificant cog-wheel in the navy machine was going to
+do anything special, or, indeed, anything at all. And I wanted to do
+things--I myself, not the navy."
+
+"To do things?" Cynthia asked quietly, and her lips drooped a little
+at the corners, "Or to become a personage?"
+
+Captain Rames laughed good-humoredly.
+
+"I can meet you there, Miss Daventry. There's no contradiction in the
+phrases. To become a personage is to secure the opportunity of doing
+things, and when you are a personage you soon find things which want
+doing. After all, how many of the great statesmen started out to be
+big men first. They had ideas, I grant you, but they had to make
+themselves big men by hook or by crook before they could carry them
+out. Look at Disraeli. I have been reading up these fellows. He did a
+lot of things. He got the Suez Canal shares. He is the author and
+begetter of the Imperial Idea. That's what you remember and admire him
+for. Yes; but don't forget his velvet trousers, and his habit of
+reciting his epic poems in the drawing-room after dinner. He set out
+first of all to be a personage. So do I in my small way. He chose
+velvet trousers and epic poems. I went down toward the South Pole. We
+each chose the path of least resistance."
+
+Cynthia was silenced, but not convinced. There must be hundreds of
+instances to confute him, only for the moment she could not remember
+any of them. And one quality in Captain Rames impressed her.
+
+"You speak as if you had thought all these things out," she said.
+
+"I have had to," he replied.
+
+"I wonder that you went into the navy at all."
+
+"My father put me there," he answered.
+
+Cynthia looked him over again, noting the strong, square face, the
+direct, the practical, common-sense, uninspired look of him. He would
+get on without a doubt. There was a great deal of force to push him
+on, and no great delicacy of character to hold him back. Scruples
+would not trouble him, and he would not fail of friends. He was of the
+type which makes friends easily. Even she herself was attracted. He
+would get on probably by trampling upon others, but he would do it
+good-humoredly, and with no desire to cause unnecessary pain. There
+are men, after all, who put nails in their boots to do the trampling.
+
+"I wonder, with your views," she said, upon an impulse, "that you
+didn't leave the navy long ago and go into the city."
+
+Harry Rames looked at her quickly.
+
+"It's rather curious that you should have said that; for, a few years
+ago, I was actually thinking of the city, and wondering whether I
+could make a fortune quickly there."
+
+Cynthia laughed suddenly. Her suggestion had been uttered in sarcasm.
+Youth is disinclined to rate the making of money high in its standard
+of careers. Captain Ramos would never have passed the turnstile had
+she spoken with him when the turnstile was.
+
+"What held me back," he continued, quite unconscious that he was
+toppling off a hero's perch,--and indeed he would have been totally
+indifferent had he known,--"what held me back was the knowledge that I
+should be beginning too old. One has so very little time," he
+exclaimed with a touch of passion in his voice. "I would like to go on
+living and living and living for a century. As it is, one begins at
+twenty at the earliest, and then with luck one may have fifty-five
+years--that's all," and the prospect of the disintegration of his
+powers at the early age of seventy-five affected him with so much
+melancholy that Cynthia laughed again, but this time with a clear and
+joyous ring of amusement.
+
+"Never mind, Captain Rames, I am sure you will live every day of your
+fifty-five years, and that is more than all can say."
+
+"They are only thirty-five now," he grumbled. "However,"--he was
+not to be diverted from the pleasant business of unfolding his
+character,--"I might still have gone into the city, when one morning
+in June, as I was walking round the corner of Buckingham Palace to
+Constitution Hill, I saw on the other side of the road the president
+of the Geographical Society. I knew him slightly. I had read of the
+expedition; I was aware that he was organizing it. It came upon me in
+a flash, 'By George, here's my chance at last,' and I ran across the
+road and applied for the command."
+
+Cynthia nodded her head.
+
+"So that's how you became connected with the expedition--a pure piece
+of chance," she said slowly. "If you hadn't turned round that corner
+to Constitution Hill----"
+
+"Oh, I should have dropped across something else, no doubt," said
+Rames.
+
+"And now you are going into Parliament."
+
+Cynthia was endeavoring to readjust her forecasts with the facts.
+
+"If I get elected," said Rames.
+
+"Oh, you will get elected," replied Cynthia confidently, but there was
+no admiration in her confidence. It was almost disdainful. "They will
+call you 'Breezy Harry Rames,' and they will elect you by an immense
+majority."
+
+"I am very glad you think that," Rames returned imperturbably; and he
+leaned forward with his elbow on his knees and spoke to her upon an
+altogether different note; so that the disdain died out of her face.
+He told her how in answer to Henry Smale's invitation he had gone down
+to Westminster in the afternoon, had sent in his card, had waited by
+the rails in the great round of St. George's Hall. Smale had come out
+from the House, and had fetched him down the stone passage into the
+lobby. A great man was speaking, and the lobby was nearly empty. But
+he finished his speech in a few moments, and the doors burst open and
+there was an eruption of members from the Chamber. Some stood in
+groups talking eagerly, others hurried to the libraries and the
+smoking-room, and barristers walked up and down in pairs, talking over
+their cases for the morrow. There was not a thing in that lobby, from
+the round clock above the doors of the House to the post-office and
+the whip's rooms which had not impressed itself vividly upon Rames's
+mind. Every now and then the doors would swing open as a member passed
+into the Chamber, and just for a moment Rames had a glimpse of the
+green benches, saw the great mace gleam upon the table, the books and
+the three clerks gowned and wigged behind it, and behind the clerks
+the dim figure of the Speaker under the canopy of his chair.
+
+Of what he saw on that afternoon Rames spoke with an enthusiasm and a
+modesty which quite took Cynthia by surprise. He saw dignity in every
+detail, was prepared to magnify with great meanings the simplest
+ceremony and form. He could not but impress her with his picture, so
+greatly impressed was he himself, so keenly had he longed to walk
+unchallenged down that forbidden way between the rails and to pass
+through the swing doors over the matting to his place on the green
+benches. People in the streets might sneer, or go about their business
+unconcerned. The cynics might talk of the Ins and Outs, and speak of
+Parliament as the most expensive game in which a race of players of
+games indulges, but there in that small room, with the soft light
+pouring down from the roof, and very often the morning light streaming
+in through the clerestory windows, the great decisions were ratified
+which might hamper or advance the future of forty millions.
+
+Henry Smale had paced the lobby for half an hour with Rames, setting
+before him clearly the risks which he would run.
+
+"I don't want to advise you one way or the other," said Smale, "but it
+is not as if you had no career, and you should come to your decision
+with your eyes open. I speak to you as to one of the ambitious. If you
+go in, I take it, you go in with an eye on the Treasury bench. Well, I
+can tell you this: the House of Commons makes a few, but it breaks a
+few, and if it advances some, it mars a good many. Poverty is a
+serious hindrance, for it means that you cannot give the time to the
+House of Commons which it now claims."
+
+"There are the barristers," objected Rames.
+
+"The House of Commons is in their line of business," returned Henry
+Smale. "The highest offices of the law are reached through the House
+of Commons. Moreover, the questions which arise for debate here have
+often been the subject already of suits in the law courts. They have
+acquired, too, the knack of extracting rapidly the essential things
+out of a paper or a bill. Thus, the barristers come especially
+equipped. Yet, even so, very often they do not make their mark. And
+here is a point for you, Captain Rames." Henry Smale turned with a
+warning finger upraised and stopped in his walk. "The most
+distinguished men enter this House and never get the ear of it. The
+House of Commons is not ungenerous, but for eight hours a day through
+a long portion of the year people are talking in that Chamber there,
+and it will not provide an audience unless, first, the speaker has
+something of his own to contribute, and, secondly, can express his
+contribution. It does not, on the one hand, ask for oratory; it is
+not, on the other, content even with exhaustive knowledge; it demands
+character, personality, the power of coining out of your knowledge
+some judgments of your own, the power of explaining your judgment in
+clear and intelligible phrases sufficiently vivid to arrest its
+attention. I admit at once that if you succeed, success here is
+sweeter than anywhere else; its recognition is so immediate. But, on
+the other hand, here disappointment is more bitter. To come in with
+ambition, and to be left behind in the race--there is no destiny more
+galling."
+
+"Yes," said Rames quietly, "I have thought over these things. There is
+that risk. I am prepared to take it."
+
+"Very well," returned Smale, and once more he turned on the stone
+pavement, and with Rames at his side retraced his steps. "Let us
+suppose that you have got the ear of the House, that the benches fill
+up when you rise, and men stand at the bar to listen to you. Well,
+even so, you may lose your seat, and you may not yet have established
+yourself firmly enough to make your party find you another. There you
+are--out, your dreams dissolved, your ambitions stopped, yourself
+miserable, and your presence in this lobby an insignificance. Where
+you walked by right, you come as a guest; you have been, and you are
+not; you must turn to something else, while your thoughts are here,
+and very likely you are already too old to turn to something else."
+
+"You put the worst side of it all in front of me, Mr. Smale."
+
+"No," replied Mr. Smale. "Visit the political clubs a couple of months
+after a general election, talk to the defeated candidates who two
+months back were members, you will know I am talking the truth. The
+place enmeshes you. And mind, not because of the sensations. The
+sensations happily are rare. It is a humdrum assembly. I remember once
+taking a foreigner into the strangers' gallery at the time of a
+European crisis. An indiscreet letter had been sent. The foreigner was
+elated. He said to me, 'This will be very interesting. The Commons
+will discuss the letter which has so convulsed Europe.' But it was
+doing nothing of the kind. It was discussing whether the Tyne, Durham,
+and Hartlepool Railway paid its employees sufficiently well to justify
+Parliament in allowing it to build a bridge across a stream of which
+you have never heard."
+
+Captain Rames smiled.
+
+"I see a good many men in this lobby," he rejoined. "I do not notice
+that any of them are bored. Indeed, for the most part, they seem very
+busy."
+
+"That is one of the tragedies of the House of Commons," Smale replied.
+"There are so many men in who during the whole of each session are
+extremely busy doing nothing; they haven't a moment to spare, they do
+nothing with so much energy and persistence. One moment they are in
+the library writing to a constituent who wants to know why the medal
+which his father earned in the Crimea has not yet arrived; the next
+moment they rush into the House because the famous Irishman with the
+witty tongue is up; they are off again to the outer lobby to tell a
+visitor that he can't see the Prime-Minister--'Industry without work,
+idleness without rest,' that is how this House was once described,
+and, believe me, the description is not inapt."
+
+Thus said Henry Smale, but Harry Rames was not to be turned aside.
+
+"I will take all these risks very willingly, Mr. Smale," he cried, "I
+want to be in here."
+
+Henry Smale smiled, ceased from his arguments, and clapped Rames in a
+kindly fashion on the shoulder. "I have done my duty," he said.
+"Come!"
+
+He led Rames through a little doorway at the side of which sat three
+or four messengers, and at the end of a narrow passage tapped upon a
+door.
+
+"Come in," said a voice, and as Smale ushered in Harry Rames a man of
+pleasant address and an exquisite suit of clothes arose and welcomed
+them.
+
+"Hamlin," said Henry Smale, "this is Captain Rames."
+
+Mr. Hamlin shook hands cordially with Rames and invited him to a
+chair.
+
+"We shall be very glad to have you in the House," he said. He beamed.
+He seemed to have been waiting for Captain Rames to complete his
+happiness. "I think Ludsey was suggested."
+
+"Benoliel suggested it," said Smale. "He's a good judge too."
+
+"There is no candidate arranged yet. I will write to Ludsey at once."
+
+Smale and Rames left the room together.
+
+"I should think you might consider that settled," said Smale.
+
+Rames thanked him and referred to Hamlin's charm of manner. Smale's
+small eyes twinkled.
+
+"That's why he sits in that room. He's the chief Whip." And shaking
+hands with Rames Mr. Smale abruptly returned to the House.
+
+The gist of the conversation with Smale Rames told to Cynthia in the
+reception-room at the Admiralty, and she listened with a growing
+interest. Then once more his note changed. He spoke with a boyish
+enthusiasm of his aims. To force an entrance into that arena; the
+entrance gained, to fight himself into the station of a great man;
+ultimately to govern and exercise authority--the note of personal
+ambition rose to a pitch of exultation in his voice. Of principles he
+obviously had no care, theories of politics were to him of no account.
+He was the political adventurer pure and simple. Cynthia sat with her
+eyes of dark blue clouded, and a real disappointment at her heart. She
+raised her face to his, and a little smile trembled upon her lips, and
+even her voice shook ever so slightly.
+
+"You have been very honest to me about it all," she said. "I thank you
+for that."
+
+Captain Rames was a trifle bewildered. He could not see that he had
+anything to conceal.
+
+"Good-night," she said as she rose, "I see my friend Mrs. Royle
+waiting for me."
+
+She gave him her hand and moved away for a few steps and then stopped.
+Harry Rames was at her side before she had stopped. She turned to him
+timidly with the blood mounting very prettily into her cheeks.
+
+"I suppose," she said, "that your journey to the South really counts
+now for very little in your thoughts. Yet you must have had a great
+many wishes for your success sent to you from all parts of the world
+before you started. I wonder you can forget them all, and leave that
+work unfinished."
+
+It seemed to Captain Rames that she had hit upon a rather far-fetched
+argument to persuade him to a second journey to the South.
+
+"Well, I am getting a good many wishes for my success now, and I hear
+them spoken," he said with a smile. "It is true that I got all sorts
+of messages and telegrams before I sailed to the South. But to tell
+you the truth I was rather too busy to read them. I have got them all
+tied up somewhere in a brown-paper parcel."
+
+Cynthia seemed actually to flinch. She turned away abruptly.
+
+"I wanted to ask of you a favor," said Rames. "Mr. Benoliel said that
+you lived near Ludsey. You could do a great deal if you would help me.
+Will you?"
+
+Cynthia turned back to him, her eyes shone angrily, the blood came
+into her cheeks in a rush.
+
+"No," she said decisively, and without another word she walked away.
+
+"I might have struck her," thought Captain Rames. He knew nothing
+of a telegram from the Daventry estancia which lay forgotten in that
+brown-paper parcel.
+
+None the less he walked home across the Mall treading upon air. Great
+people had moved out of their way to make his acquaintance; Cabinet
+ministers had promised to speak for him; important ladies had smiled
+their friendliest. He looked back upon the days of his insignificance,
+and his heart was buoyant within him. Certainly one girl with
+dark-blue eyes and a face like a rose-leaf had presumed to disapprove
+of him. But there! Girls! You never knew what odd notions nested in
+their pretty heads. If a man on the make steered his course by a
+girl's favor, he would soon shipwreck on a snag. However, this girl
+must be soothed down. Harry Rames could not afford to have an enemy at
+Ludsey. But he had no doubt that he could soothe her down. He walked
+home, softly whistling under his breath.
+
+Cynthia for her part went home in a different mood. She had lost
+another illusion to-night.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XII
+
+                              LUNGATINE
+
+
+The threatened dissolution was, after all, postponed, and through the
+autumn months Captain Rames went busily up and down between London and
+Ludsey. He made his head-quarters at an hotel on a climbing street in
+the thick of the town, and spent his days in the public view and his
+nights at meetings and at local festivities.
+
+Cynthia Daventry, five miles away, heard stories of his indefatigable
+energy and once or twice she met him in the streets; and once or twice
+he snatched an afternoon and swept over in a motor-car to see her. She
+welcomed him with a pleasure which she rather resented, and not for
+worlds would she have asked him how his campaign was faring. She did
+not, however, have to ask. For either Diana Royle was present and
+eagerly questioned him, or if Cynthia were alone he plunged into the
+subject himself. Captain Rames was at some pains to amuse her and he
+succeeded. Little incidents of the campaign, whether they told against
+himself or not; sketches of queer characters whom he came across; an
+anecdote now and then, drawn from the ancient history of the City--he
+poured them out to her, making it quite clear with an apparently
+ingenuous frankness that he had deliberately stored them in his memory
+purely for her amusement. He was engaged in the work of soothing her
+down. Diana Royle would rhapsodize after he had whirled away in a
+cloud of dust.
+
+"What a wonderful man! How energetic! How clever!"
+
+"And how complacent!" said Cynthia.
+
+"What high principle!" Diana gushed lyrically. "What character!"
+
+"And what cunning!" added Cynthia, with a droop of her lips.
+
+Diana tapped the floor with an irritable foot.
+
+"Very well, darling. Look for an angel, by all means. You will be very
+glad of a man later on." Then she laughed pleasantly. "But I am not
+deceived. You talk lightly of him when he is gone, but when he is here
+you fix your big eyes on him, and, though you say nothing, every
+movement of you asks for more."
+
+Cynthia was startled.
+
+"Well, perhaps I do," she admitted. "I suppose that I have a kind of
+hope that I will hear, not more, but something different from what I
+am hearing."
+
+"That's so like you, my dear," Diana rejoined; she was all sugar and
+vinegar. "If Julius Caesar came back to earth, you would want him
+different. But that's the way with romantic people. They look for
+heroes all day and never see them when they knock at the front door."
+
+Cynthia laughed good-humoredly. There was this much of truth in Diana
+Royle's attack. She had been searching through the words of Harry
+Rames all the while when he was uttering them for a glimpse of some
+other being beside the man on the make. Certain qualities she
+recognized. Enthusiasm, for instance. But it was enthusiasm for the
+arena, not for any cause to be won there. A shrewd foresight again was
+evident. But it was foresight to pluck the personal advantage. Here,
+it seemed to her, was the conscience of the country stirring on all
+sides to the recognition of great and unnecessary evils in its midst,
+and Harry Rames was alone unaffected. Yet in a measure she was
+impressed. He had so closely laid his plans. He gave her yet more
+evidence when he came again.
+
+"I have got a rule or two," he said. "All demands for pledges from
+leagues and associations go into the waste-paper basket. I'll answer
+questions if they are asked me by a man in my constituency. I won't
+put my name to a general proposition and post it to London. Many a
+good man has been let down that way. Then I won't canvass. I won't
+solicit a vote. I don't believe in it. There's one only point of view
+for a candidate: that the electors are doing themselves a service by
+electing him, and not doing him one. You have got to persuade them of
+that."
+
+"Don't you find it difficult?" asked Cynthia, innocently.
+
+Rames laughed.
+
+"Yes, I do," he said. "The electors have their point of view, too. But
+I won't canvass, I am there at my hotel if any one wants to see me. I
+am at public meetings, and I go to social functions. That's a good
+move," and Captain Rames nodded his head. "You meet the fellows on the
+other side and if you can get them friendly, you stop them coming out
+hot against you. Makes a lot of difference, that. Then there's wisdom
+in taking a firm stand upon a point or so. Your own people, treat them
+properly, will always give you a bit of latitude, and a reputation for
+courage is a fine asset in politics as in anything else."
+
+"But you mustn't overdo it, I suppose," said Cynthia ironically.
+
+"Oh, no, you must be careful about that," replied Rames seriously.
+"What you want to produce is an impression that you are not pliable,
+that industries will be safe under your watch--that's for the business
+men--and that social advancement will not be neglected--that's for the
+artisans. You know the election is coming now," he suddenly exclaimed.
+"Do come to one of my meetings!"
+
+Cynthia looked doubtful.
+
+"I don't think," she said, "that I believe very much in any work
+which--I don't express what I mean very well--which hasn't a great
+dream at the heart of it."
+
+Rames looked up into her face quickly and grew suddenly serious. He
+made no comment upon her words, however.
+
+"After all that's no reason why you shouldn't come to one of my
+meetings."
+
+Cynthia smiled.
+
+"I will come to the last one on the night before the poll," she
+replied reluctantly.
+
+"I shall hold you to it," said Harry Rames, and he went away well
+pleased with his visit. Cynthia was popular in Ludsey. So Cynthia
+should sit on that momentous evening in the front row upon the
+platform. Also he would make for her benefit an unusually effective
+speech. Cynthia from the window watched his motor-car spin away in a
+whirl of dust. He was going to preside that evening at a meeting of
+the Salvation Army.
+
+The dissolution took place on the fifteenth of January. But the real
+contest had begun a fortnight before in Ludsey. Harry Rames rushed
+into it as if it had been a foot-ball rally. He spoke all day, in
+factories and outside factories, in halls and schoolrooms and from
+club-room windows. He ransacked the morning papers for new pegs on
+which to hang his arguments; he kicked off at foot-ball matches and
+the aim of the kick was entirely political; and at the end of three
+weeks even he was very tired and inclined to recognize an element of
+humiliation in the conduct of a successful campaign.
+
+It was eleven o'clock at night. There was to be but one more day of
+it, but one more meeting to-morrow night, the big, final rally on the
+eve of the poll. Harry Rames lay outstretched upon his sofa with his
+pipe between his lips cradled pleasantly upon that reflection, when
+the door of his room opened and a waiter brought in a card. Rames
+waved it aside.
+
+"I can see no one."
+
+"The gentleman said that his business was important."
+
+Rames grumbled and took the card from the salver.
+
+"M. Poizat," he read. "A Frenchman. Certainly not. I won't see him."
+
+The waiter, an old English servant, a rare being nowadays, even in a
+country hotel, stood his ground.
+
+"He's lived in Ludsey a long time, sir."
+
+"Oh, has he!" said Rames. "Tell him I am out."
+
+The waiter shook his head.
+
+"He has already told me that you are in, sir. Come, you had better see
+him, sir. Perhaps he's the ha'porth of tar."
+
+"Oh, very well," said Rames. "But I tell you, William, that I am in
+the mood to assert my rights as a man."
+
+"Mustn't do that, sir, until the day after to-morrow. You are only a
+candidate till then."
+
+William retired. Rames fell back upon his sofa. He meant to lie there
+prone upon his back, even if his visitor held all the votes of Ludsey
+in the hollow of his hand. Then the door opened and was shut again. A
+little, puckish old man stood in the room, danced lightly on his feet,
+skipped in the air, twirled before Captain Rames's astonished eyes and
+finally struck an inviting attitude, both arms extended and one foot
+advanced, like the pictures of the quack doctors in the newspaper
+advertisements.
+
+"Oh, he's out of a lunatic asylum," Captain Rames almost groaned
+aloud. "He won't even have a vote."
+
+The little man skimmed forward with agility, fixing a bright and
+twinkling pair of eyes upon the prostrate candidate.
+
+"How old do you think I am?" he asked, and he whirled his arms.
+
+"You are the youngest thing I have ever seen," replied Rames with
+conviction. "I didn't know that people were even born as young as you
+are."
+
+"I am seventy-three," exclaimed the little man with a chuckle. He
+squared up at an imaginary antagonist and delivered a deadly blow in
+the air.
+
+"Do you mind not doing that!" said Rames mildly. "My nerves are not
+what they should be, and if you do it again I shall probably cry. I
+suppose that you are M. Poizat----"
+
+"I am, sir," said the little man. He changed his tactics. He no longer
+whirled his arms in the air. He advanced to the sofa and suddenly put
+up his foot on the edge.
+
+"Feel my calf!" he said abruptly.
+
+Captain Rames meekly obeyed.
+
+"You ought to have a medal," he said languidly. "You really ought. At
+seventy-three, too! For myself I am like butter, and rather inferior
+butter, on a very hot day."
+
+M. Poizat nodded his head.
+
+"I know. That's why I am here!" He looked about the room and with the
+importance of a conspirator he drew out of his pocket a medicine
+bottle filled with a brown liquid. "Why am I so young?" he asked. "Why
+is my leg of iron? Listen to my voice. Why is it so clear?--It's all
+'Lungatine,'" and with immense pride he reverently placed the bottle
+on the mantel-shelf. He turned again to Captain Rames.
+
+"I heard you to-night. I suffered with you. What a voice! How harsh!
+How terrible! And yet what good words if only one could have heard
+them! I said to myself: 'That poor man. I can cure him. He does not
+know of Lungatine. He makes us all uncomfortable because he does not
+know of Lungatine.' So I ran home and brought a bottle."
+
+"It's very good of you, I am sure," said Rames, "But look!" He pointed
+to a table. Throat sprays, tonics, lozenges, encumbered it. "The
+paraphernalia of a candidate," he said.
+
+M. Poizat smiled contemptuously. He drew from his breast pocket a
+sheaf of letters.
+
+"See how many in Ludsey owe their health to me!" he cried, and he gave
+the letters to Rames, who read them over with an 'oh' and an 'ah' of
+intense admiration when any particularly startling cure was gratefully
+recorded.
+
+"You are a chemist here I suppose--naturalized, of course?" asked
+Captain Rames.
+
+"I have a restaurant," M. Poizat corrected him. "Lungatine is merely
+one of my discoveries."
+
+He sat down complacently. Captain Rames started up in dismay upon his
+elbow.
+
+"I have a great deal to do to-morrow," he said piteously. The plea was
+of no avail. Captain Rames was in the grip of that most terrible of
+all constituents, the amateur inventor. M. Poizat drew his chair to
+the side of the sofa and went through the tale of his inventions. It
+was the usual inevitable list--an automatic lift which would work with
+absolute safety in any mine, a torpedo which would destroy any navy, a
+steel process which would resist any torpedo, and a railway-coupling.
+
+"I'll bring you the models," he cried.
+
+"No, no," cried Rames, springing from his sofa in dismay. Then he laid
+his hand on the inventor's shoulder and smiled wisely:
+
+"Royal commissions for you," he said. "They're the fellows for models.
+I'll see about some. Royal commissions for you. Thank you for your
+Lungatine. Good-night, my friend, good-night."
+
+Gently, but firmly, he raised the inventor from his chair, while he
+shook hands with him, and conducted him toward the door.
+
+"You have your hat? Yes."
+
+"A tablespoonful six times a day in a wineglass of water."
+
+"Yes. The instructions, I see, are on the bottle."
+
+Captain Rames opened the door with his pleasantest smile.
+
+"To-morrow at your great meeting," said M. Poizat, "I shall be there.
+I shall hear what you say. Your voice will ring like a trumpet. And
+perhaps at the end of your speech, you will say that it is all due to
+Lungatine."
+
+A frosty silence followed upon the words. Captain Rames said
+indifferently:
+
+"You have been in England a long time. You are naturalized, of
+course?"
+
+M. Poizat did not reply to the question.
+
+"Perhaps you will say that it is all due to Lungatine," he repeated
+softly. "Perhaps you will say that. Who knows?"
+
+Captain Rames looked up at the ceiling.
+
+"Ah, who knows?" he said enigmatically.
+
+M. Poizat shook hands for a second time and went down the stairs.
+Captain Rames closed the door, took the cork from the bottle, wetted
+the tips of his finger, and tasted the brown liquid. It was a simple
+solution of paregoric.
+
+"I don't believe the fellow's naturalized," cried Rames, and he raised
+the bottle in the air above the coal-scuttle. But he did not let it
+drop.
+
+"Perhaps he is though," he thought. He poured away a portion of the
+liquid amongst the coal, replaced the cork, and set the bottle
+prominently upon the mantel-shelf so that if M. Poizat took it into
+his head to call again he would see it there. Then he betook himself
+to bed; and M. Poizat figured in his dreams, a grotesque, little,
+capering creature, a figure of fun, as indeed he was, to the eyes of
+wakefulness. There are people upon whose faces nature writes plainly
+hints of tragic destinies, and M. Poizat had certainly no relationship
+with these. But then nature is apt to be freakish.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIII
+
+                      THE NIGHT BEFORE THE POLL
+
+
+The walls of the great Corn Exchange were draped with banners and hung
+with gigantic mottoes. Cynthia sat in the front row of chairs upon the
+platform with Isaac Benoliel upon one side of her, and beyond him
+Diana Royle. It was the first public meeting at which she had ever
+been present, and now that the shy uneasiness at the prominence of her
+position which had troubled her when she took her seat was passing
+away, she gazed about her, eagerness in her eyes and a throb of
+excitement at her heart. In front of her a rostrum had been built out
+from the edge of the platform so that the speakers might stand upon
+the exact spot whence the voice carried with the greatest sonority.
+The rostrum was railed and hung with red cloth; the chairman's table,
+with the inevitable water-bottle, occupied it; and the small, square
+space was the only empty space in all that cavern of a hall. A few
+rows of chairs for members of the association were ranged at the front
+upon the floor; behind the chairs the people stood packed and massed
+to the doors, most of them men. The one gallery was crowded to its
+furthest nook; behind Cynthia the platform was thronged. Wherever her
+eyes turned she saw faces, faces, faces, all set in one direction, all
+white under the glare of light, all inclined toward the empty rostrum.
+It was the eve of the poll. There was a tingle of excitement in the
+air, a hushed expectancy. Only when Cynthia raised her eyes did she
+lose the vague feeling of suspense. Overhead a skylight in the roof
+was covered with a horizontal blind. One tattered corner hung down and
+as she looked up from the indistinguishable throng of faces, it
+arrested her attention as something especially individual and definite
+and single.
+
+Suddenly came a buzz and a stir. The chairman was seen to rise from a
+flight of steps at the side of the platform. He was followed by a
+tall, gaunt, loose-limbed man with a bony face, a white moustache, and
+a high, bald head. He had the look of a soldier. Cynthia took no heed
+of him. He stalked before her and sank unnoticed in his place. Behind
+him came Harry Rames, and as he passed along the narrow gangway
+between the crowded chairs, those who had seats sprang to their feet;
+and three thousand people broke like a wave into a flutter of
+handkerchiefs and a shattering thunder of applause. Above the applause
+a chant gradually swelled, two lines of a tune rather like a chime.
+Cynthia could not hear the words, but the sound, with its rise and
+fall, surged backward and forward against the walls of the Exchange
+for a full minute.
+
+Mr. Benoliel leaned toward Cynthia.
+
+"They have given him their foot-ball song. In a city of artisans, keen
+on foot-ball, that's a good sign."
+
+Cynthia nodded. But she hardly heard, she could not have answered.
+Here was something quite new to her, and overwhelmingly new. The
+thunderous outburst had taken her by the throat; for a second she felt
+choked; she had no part in politics, yet emotion woke in her and the
+tears sprang into her eyes.
+
+"What's the matter, Cynthia?" asked Diana Royle.
+
+Cynthia replied with a break in her voice between a laugh and a sob.
+
+"I don't know. It's just the crowd, I think."
+
+"And the enthusiasm of the crowd," added Mr. Benoliel. "You make me
+feel very old, Cynthia. I can listen to it quite unmoved now. But
+there was a time when I couldn't without a choking in my throat. It's
+the splendid faith of the crowd."
+
+Cynthia, arrested by the phrase, looked quickly at Benoliel. Greatly
+as she liked him she was never quite sure of him. Kind as he had been
+to her she always suspected some touch of the charlatan. He had the
+look of a man quite in earnest.
+
+"I wonder," she said, "whether mere magnetism is enough to arouse it."
+
+Mr. Benoliel did not answer; for the chairman rose at his table; and
+while he spoke the harmless necessary words, Cynthia took stock of
+Harry Rames, who was seated in the rostrum at the side of the table in
+front of her and a little to her left. The last weeks of exertion had
+left their marks; the flesh had worn thin upon his face; there were
+dark hollows beneath his eyes; he had gained a look of spirituality
+which did not belong to him. He was nervous; his hands, with the long
+fingers which never seemed to accord with the rest of him, moved
+uneasily and restlessly from the buttons of his coat to the slip of
+notes which he had placed upon the table. Cynthia was deceived by the
+look of him as she had been deceived by the fervor of the gathering.
+The outburst was not entirely, was not even chiefly, a tribute to the
+candidate. Ludsey was a political city, and by three weeks of speeches
+and agitation political feeling had been whipped to a climax of
+excitement. It sought and found its outlet to-night at this final
+rally before the poll.
+
+The cheers broke out again when Harry Rames rose and leaned his
+hand upon the rail of the rostrum. When they died down he began to
+speak--first a faltering word or two of thanks. Then his voice
+suddenly strengthened and rang firm. His fingers ceased to twitch, and
+he turned over in his mind the consecutions of his thoughts as though
+he were turning over the pages of a book. All that he had planned to
+say came clearly to him in its due order, and brought the comforting
+assurance that the rest would follow. He was master of himself, and
+being master of himself set his audience at ease to listen, Cynthia
+among the rest. Anxious as he himself, she knew now that the speech
+would go right on to its considered end. She leaned forward, all ears
+to catch the words, and all eagerness to read into them, if she could,
+the something more which was not there.
+
+But she could not; yet it was a night of triumph for Harry Rames,
+"Breezy Harry Rames." She recalled her own phrase with a disappointed
+droop of the lips more than once during the next hour. He was going to
+win. She had no doubt of it. Confidence swept from his audience to him
+and back again in waves. And he savored the joys of the orator as he
+never had before. He had the arts of the platform, and more than the
+arts, a power to bend his audience to sympathy. He knew that night the
+supreme reward, the hush of a mass of people constraining themselves
+to silence and even to immobility while a voice, low as a whisper,
+sounded audibly in every nook. He played with the suspense, prolonging
+it to the last moment of endurance, and then, by a sudden swoop to a
+sharp, clever phrase, drawing the audience to its feet and coining the
+silence in a stormy tumult of applause.
+
+He had the gift of speech; Cynthia gladly conceded it. An aptness of
+homely words, an absence of all extravagance, and a voice resonant and
+pleasant as a clear-toned, bell impressed her more than she had
+expected to be impressed. A day's rest had restored his voice for the
+time, even though M. Poizat's Lungatine had not contributed to the
+restoration.
+
+She was surprised, too, by a certain shrewdness in the matter of the
+speech. It was not so much of the platform as his manner. There was
+very little reference to the navy. "I don't mean to be considered a
+'service member,'" he had said to her once. "No one pays attention to
+the service member in the House of Commons." But here and there came
+views which struck her as new and worth consideration.
+
+"If you could teach the wives of the artisans to cook and to take an
+interest in cooking, you would have done a great deal more to solve
+the question of intemperance in this country than if you closed half
+the public-houses," he cried once and developed his theme with humor
+and some courage. He drew a picture of a wife putting her husband's
+supper on the fire, ready against the time when he should come home
+from his factory, and then running out into the street to talk to a
+neighbor and leaving the meat to grill to the toughness and dryness of
+leather.
+
+"The man comes home, sits down to it, and rises from it unsatisfied.
+What does he do? He goes out and strolls round to the public-house.
+Put a good meal, well-cooked, inside of him, and he'll not be so
+disposed to move. He'll be inclined to smoke his pipe by the fire in
+his kitchen."
+
+He passed on to other topics. The whole speech was clever and was
+uttered on a lift of enthusiasm. But again Cynthia argued, it was the
+enthusiasm for the arena, not for a cause. It was ambition without
+ideals, power without high motive.
+
+Diana Royle inclined toward her.
+
+"Aren't you satisfied now?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, he will get on," said Cynthia; and then she suddenly sat upright
+in her chair, with her lips parted and the blood bright in her cheeks.
+
+"But, after all," Rames was saying; his voice was beginning to grow
+hoarse and he raised his hand in an appeal for silence, "here are we
+discussing the work to be done, and leaving out in our discussion the
+great necessity. I don't know what you think, but to my notion there
+is no greatness in any work unless it has a dream at the heart of it.
+The world's work is done by the great dreamers. Well, here is my last
+word before the poll, perhaps the last word I shall speak in this
+constituency."
+
+He was interrupted as he had meant to be by loud repudiations of such
+a possibility.
+
+"No, no!"
+
+"You're a member already."
+
+"We'll put you in."
+
+Such phrases broke in upon the words and then a cheery voice, louder
+than the rest, shouted from the back of the hall:
+
+"Never fear! You're well patronized in Ludsey, Captain."
+
+A burst of laughter followed upon the words, and a flush of annoyance
+darkened Rames's face.
+
+"I will remind my friend that I am not a public entertainer," he said.
+"And it's really against the spirit represented in that sentence that
+I wish to direct my first words. I have my dream too--a dream. I speak
+openly to you--at my very heart. Let me tell it you. It involves a
+confession. When I first came to Ludsey six months ago, when for the
+first time I saw from the windows of my railway carriage across the
+summer fields the tall chimneys and high, long roofs of its factories,
+the delicate steeples of its churches, it was to me just a town like
+another. I will be frank, it was just a polling-booth. But as I got to
+know your city that error passed out of my thoughts."
+
+Cynthia leaned forward. He had used her own words. She could not but
+be flattered by his use of them. They had been acclaimed, too, by this
+great gathering, and she was proud of that. Not for anything would she
+have had their authorship revealed, but she was proud to hear them
+used, proud, too, because they seemed to have led, if she dared
+believe her ears, Harry Rames out of his detested breeziness into a
+contemplation of something other than the personal gain. She could
+hardly doubt him now; he spoke with so simple a sincerity. She had a
+sudden glimpse once more of her enchanted garden wherein she had
+walked with and helped the great ones of the earth. To help, herself
+unknown except by those she helped!--that had been the dream when she
+had encouraged dreams; and it sprang once more into life now as she
+listened.
+
+"It is a city," Rames continued, "where a few steps will take you out
+of the thronged streets into some old garden, quiet with the peace of
+ancient memories; some old close of plaster and black beams; some old
+room with windows deep-set in four-foot walls and wide hearths of
+centuries ago. And round about these old places stands a ring of
+factories where in good times the lights blaze until the morning and
+the whir of its machines never ceases from your ears. It is a city
+whose continuous life is written for all to see upon its buildings.
+Here kings and queens have tarried on their journeys; there chambers
+of commerce hold their meetings. From small and ancient beginnings it
+has been made by the activity of generations of men into a modern
+industrial city. Well, I have my dream. It is to be one little link in
+the continuity of its life and to do my share of service in the
+forwarding of its prosperity."
+
+A shout answered his words. He had his audience in hand. He stilled it
+with a swift gesture and his voice rang out with a laugh which had all
+the exultation of battle.
+
+"Well, we shall know to-morrow night. We are in the ice-pack now, but
+we are coming to the outer rim of it. We can see the blue water
+already. We shall be sailing smoothly upon it this time to-morrow
+night."
+
+He had been chary of references to the voyage which had made his
+reputation; all the more, therefore, this one struck home. He sat down
+tempestuously acclaimed, and turning in his chair held out his hand to
+Cynthia Daventry.
+
+"I am glad that you came," he said. "I have achieved two triumphs
+to-night. I have brought you and Mr. Benoliel to your first political
+meeting and both of you are on my platform."
+
+He shook hands with Isaac Benoliel and with Diana Royle. Cynthia
+leaned a little forward.
+
+"I, too, am glad that I came," she returned with a smile. Because of
+those last words of his, friendship was warm in her toward Harry
+Rames. She added, "You knew then that I was here--just behind you?"
+
+Rames nodded.
+
+"Yes, but I was too nervous to turn to you before I had made my
+speech. The flesh wears a little thin after three weeks of this. One
+gets jumpy. Even the tattered corner of blind hanging down there from
+the skylight seemed to-night charged with some important message." He
+spoke, ridiculing the fancy, and Cynthia, with a smile and a quick
+lift of her eyebrows, cried:
+
+"I noticed that too."
+
+"Then for the first time," said Rames, "we have something in common.
+You and I are probably the only people in the hall who noticed it. We
+have a bond of union."
+
+"A strip of tattered blind!" said Cynthia.
+
+"Well, there was nothing at all before," said Captain Rames, and he
+suddenly turned back to his seat. For the tall, gaunt man was on his
+legs.
+
+Cynthia neither heard his name nor followed his speech with any
+particular attention. It was indeed difficult to follow. He was an old
+hack of the platform with all the sounding phrases at the tip of his
+tongue. Rolling sentences, of the copybook, flowed out of him;
+declamations too vague to be understood were delivered with the vigor
+of a prophet. But he interspersed them with the familiar cliches of
+the day and each one received its salvo of applause. To Cynthia he was
+a man not so much stupid as out of place. She could imagine him at the
+head of a cavalry squadron. Here he seemed simply grotesque.
+
+On the other hand, Captain Rames did not; and the contrast between the
+two men bent her to consider whether, after all, she had not been
+wrong in her condemnation of his new career. She was in the mood to
+admit it; and when the meeting broke up and the crowd was pouring
+through the doors into the street, and those upon the platform were
+descending its steps, she found herself alone for a second on the
+rostrum with Harry Rames.
+
+"Perhaps I was wrong," she said. "I remember what you told me of Mr.
+Smale. A vivid gift of phrase--he thought that necessary. You have
+it."
+
+"On the platform--yes. But the platform's not the House," said Rames.
+"Smale told me that too. I have yet to see whether I shall carry the
+House."
+
+"Yet those last words," said Cynthia--"about the city and the
+continuity of its life and your pride to have a little share in it.
+Oh, that was finely done."
+
+And upon Rames's face there came a grin.
+
+"Yes, I thought that would fetch 'em," he said.
+
+Cynthia stepped back. Once again it occurred to Rames, as it had done
+on the night of their first meeting at the Admiralty, that just so
+would she look if he struck her a blow.
+
+"Then--then--the city is still a polling-booth," she stammered.
+
+"Yes," said Rames.
+
+The hero newly perched upon his pediment tumbled off again.
+
+"You used what I said to you because you just thought it would go
+down."
+
+Rames did not deny it. He remained silent.
+
+"I remember," she continued, "it was no doubt a foolish thing I said.
+But even when I said it, you were thinking this is the sort of thing
+that will take."
+
+That she was humiliated, her voice and her face clearly proved. Yet
+again Rames did not contradict her. Again he was silent. For there was
+nothing to be said.
+
+"You do not allow me many illusions about you," Cynthia said gently,
+and she began to turn away.
+
+But now he arrested her.
+
+"I don't mean to," he said quickly; and by the reply he undid some
+portion of the harm he had done himself in her eyes.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIV
+
+                      COLONEL CHALLONER'S MEMORY
+
+
+It had been arranged that Mr. Benoliel's small party should take
+supper with Harry Rames at his hotel. As they stood waiting at the
+foot of the platform the agent came to them from the outer doors.
+
+"The way's clear now," he said. "I think you can go."
+
+They passed through the empty hall, Cynthia first at Harry Rames's
+side, and in that order they came out upon the steps. A fine rain was
+falling, but the crowd had not dispersed. The great light over the
+door showed the climbing street thronged. Coat collars were turned up,
+hats were pressed down; and so as Rames and Cynthia came out they saw
+in the glare beneath the rain just a mass of swaying, jostling black
+things, round black things moving indecisively this way and that like
+some close-packed herd of blind animals. Just for a moment the
+illusion lasted. Then Rames was seen and of a sudden the heads were
+thrown back, the hats shaken high, and all those black round things
+became the white faces of living men, their eyes shining in the light,
+their voices shouting in acclamation.
+
+Captain Rames took a step back.
+
+"Did you see?" he cried to Cynthia.
+
+"Yes. They are not animals to draw your chariot," she replied. "They
+are men."
+
+"Yes, men--men to govern," he answered. His was the spirit of the old
+Whig families. Though he was not of them, he meant to force his way
+among them. To govern the people, not to admit it to government, to go
+far in appeasing it, but not to give it the reins, that was his
+instinct. He wished to retain the old governing class, but he meant to
+be one of it. His ambitions soared to-night, and reached out beyond
+this hilly, narrow street. He led these men now who stood acclaiming
+him in the rain. His thoughts shot forward to other days when every
+town in England might at his coming pour out its masses to endorse his
+words.
+
+He waved his hand toward his companions and the crowd made a lane for
+them across the street to the hotel. Rames himself was carried
+shoulder-high, and set down within the doors. He led the way up the
+stairs to a big room upon the first floor overlooking the street,
+where supper was laid. A great shout went up from the street as they
+entered the room.
+
+"They want you," said Mrs. Royle.
+
+"No," replied Rames. He opened a door into a smaller room in which no
+lights were lit and pulled up the blinds. Across the street under a
+great clock was a newspaper office and in the windows the election
+returns of the night were being, displayed. All along the line
+victories were gained for Rames's party. Arthur Pynes, a young
+manufacturer, and the chairman of the association, to whose energy the
+organization was due; an ex-Mayor, a Mr. Charlesworth, and one or two
+hard fighters of the old school joined the group in the dark room. One
+of them, a rosy-faced contractor with a high laugh, who had presided
+over the association in its darker days, leaned against the window by
+Cynthia Daventry.
+
+"He'll have to appear on this balcony to-morrow night, as soon as he
+can after the result's declared," he said. "You see, the windows are
+all boarded up on the ground floors opposite."
+
+"He'll speak from here?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"He'll speak, but they won't listen," replied Mr. Arnall. "I remember
+Sir William Harris, the last time he was elected before he was made a
+judge--" and he ran off into stories of the old days until the windows
+of the newspaper office were darkened and the crowd at last dispersed.
+
+"Let us go in to supper," said Rames, and they all passed into the
+next room. "Will you sit here, Mrs. Royle, and you here, Miss
+Daventry?" He placed Diana Royle upon his right hand and Cynthia upon
+his left. "Pynes, will you take the chair next to Mrs. Royle, and
+Colonel," he addressed the tall, gaunt man whose flowing platitudes
+had left nothing in Cynthia's mind but a recollection of sonority, a
+booming as of waves in a hollow cave, "will you sit next to Miss
+Daventry?"
+
+The colonel bowed and prepared to take his seat. But he was a
+punctilious old gentleman and stood upon the ceremonies.
+
+"You have not introduced me, Rames," he said.
+
+"I beg your pardon. Miss Daventry, this is Colonel Challoner. He
+has made his own seat a safe one--a county division which polls
+a week later than we do, and he lives in it. So when I applied at
+head-quarters for help at our last meeting Colonel Challoner was kind
+enough to volunteer."
+
+Cynthia shot a startled glance at her neighbor. Her own name was
+Challoner too; and all that was terrible in her recollections was
+linked with it. Of course, it did not follow that this Challoner was
+any relation of hers. There must be many families of that name.
+Nevertheless, the sudden sound of it caused her a shock. The blood
+rushed into her face. She made a movement. Almost she shrank away.
+Challoner, however, was taking his seat. He noticed the quick
+movement; he did not appreciate the instinct of fear which had caused
+it.
+
+"Ah, it is true then, Miss Daventry," he said. "We have already met.
+You remember it, too."
+
+Cynthia was startled.
+
+"No, Colonel Challoner," she replied quickly. "I don't think that we
+have. Indeed, I am sure we have not. I should surely have remembered
+if we had."
+
+"That is a pretty thing for a young lady to say to an old man," the
+colonel answered with a smile. "But my memory is a good one. I never
+forget a face."
+
+He had the particular pride of all men with good memories, and
+ambition had intensified it into an obstinacy. For he had his
+ambition, and successive disappointments had only strengthened its
+hold upon his heart. He aimed to be Under Secretary of State for
+Foreign Affairs. He had been military attache at so many Embassies,
+the post, to his thinking, was marked out for him. At each new
+promotion to the Cabinet, at each general election, he was sure that
+he could no longer be overlooked. He ran from platform to platform to
+increase his claim upon the office should his party be returned. A
+telegram from the chief whip had brought him to Ludsey, would send him
+to-morrow into Yorkshire. Now, surely, his turn must come! He had one
+persistent fear, lest he should be thought too old. And he clung with
+an almost piteous reiteration to the accuracy of his recollections as
+a vindication of the alertness of his powers.
+
+"When I saw you upon the platform I was quite sure that it was not for
+the first time, Miss Daventry," he insisted.
+
+"During the season, perhaps," Cynthia replied. "At some reception or
+ball. Did you hear that, Colonel Challoner?" and she turned quickly
+toward Mr. Arnall, who was telling an old story of the days and the
+hustings when broken heads were common about the doors of the
+polling-booths.
+
+Cynthia laughed eagerly with the rest in her anxiety to keep Colonel
+Challoner from plying her with questions. She was ready with her
+answers, but greatly she feared, lest by probing into his memories he
+should understand of a sudden where he had seen her before. And for a
+time she was successful. The confidence which had run from man to
+man in the great Corn Exchange an hour before was present at this
+supper-table and kindled them all to cheeriness. The ex-Mayor said
+with a pleasant drawl, which was his habit:
+
+"Do you remember Taylor the Democrat, Arnall? He fought two elections
+here within three months and then went bankrupt. He was an adventurer
+and the most eloquent man I ever heard. But he was a caution."
+
+"Yes," cried Mr. Arnall, with a clicking laugh at the back of his
+throat. "Do you remember his meeting down by the club? 'Gag that
+calf,'" and Mr. Arnall spluttered with delight.
+
+"That's it," said the ex-Mayor. "You must know that Taylor stood as a
+Democrat, Captain Rames. That's where the fun comes in. He wore a blue
+swallow-tail-coat with brass buttons and his hair down to his
+shoulders. 'Your father was a miller,' one fellow shouted from the
+crowd. 'Gag that calf,' cried Taylor and he held up his arms in the
+air. 'Look at these fair hands. No work has ever sullied them.' That
+did him all right."
+
+A quiet, elderly man leaned over the table.
+
+"Did you notice the flag upon the chairman's table, Captain Rames?" he
+asked. "It was woven out of Ludsey silk fifty years ago. It's the true
+Ludsey blue. My father wove it for Sir William Harris's first
+election, and the other fellows swore they would have it on the
+polling-day. But we carried it about the streets from morning to
+evening, with twelve big fellows to protect it. It was nearly down
+once, I remember. I was a lad at the time--at the corner of Stapley's
+Lane. But we saved it and it was your table-cloth to-night, Captain
+Rames. It brought us victory then. It will again to-morrow."
+
+The stories were continued. They were often not very pointed; often
+enough the humor was far to seek; but they were alive. They were told
+with infinite enjoyment, and the smallest details were remembered over
+decades. Cynthia began now to listen to them for their own sake; she
+was learning with surprise the value of politics to the lives of men
+in a busy city of the provinces. But the colonel at her elbow was not
+longer to be diverted.
+
+"I think it must have been in Dorsetshire that we met," he said. "I
+live near to Wareham."
+
+Cynthia looked at him quite steadily.
+
+"I have never been in Dorsetshire in my life, Colonel Challoner."
+
+"Yet I associate you with that county," he persisted. "Now, why should
+I do that, Miss Daventry? You have not been to my house, I know. For
+since my wife died and my son went away, I have not had so many young
+people to stay with me as I should have liked."
+
+From the moment when Colonel Challoner had claimed her recognition,
+Cynthia had not doubted that she was sitting next to a relation. And
+Colonel Challoner's location of his home in Dorsetshire, near to
+Wareham, had confirmed her belief. She knew quite well how it came
+about that he had seemed to recognize her, that he associated her with
+his own parish. She knew because upon one unforgettable night she had
+crouched in a great chair in a dark room and through the panels of a
+door had heard her father claim her as his daughter. He, too, had
+recognized her as Colonel Challoner now did, and just by the same
+means. For there was a Romney hanging upon the dining-room wall in
+that house near Wareham which might have been a portrait of herself.
+But until this moment she had not guessed what degree of relationship
+bound her to the old man at her side.
+
+Now, however, she knew that too. The hesitation, the gentle
+wistfulness with which he had spoken of his son struck home at her.
+She was this man's granddaughter. She was moved by what he had said. A
+big house empty of young people must be a place of melancholy and
+hollow as a shell. Yet she would not reveal herself. She had it fixed
+now as an instinct of her nature that she would never wear the name of
+Challoner, nor admit a link with any of that name.... But she turned
+toward her grandfather with a greater sympathy.
+
+"You have given up your whole life to politics now?" she asked, and a
+wave of pity swept through her. It could not be possible that he
+should win any success in that sphere, and she was young and could
+hardly conceive of life at all without success.
+
+"Yes. I left the army twenty-five years ago. Sometimes I think that I
+may have made a mistake," he answered. "But it is too late for me to
+go back upon a mistake, even were I sure that I had made one. Politics
+is all I have now. I have no longer any family. And I have politics in
+my bones. I do not know what I should do if I lost my seat. I should
+probably die." He spoke with absolute simplicity, absolute sincerity:
+Cynthia was greatly moved. An old futile man without wife or family in
+a big, empty house, feeding himself from day to day with the
+disappointments of a hopeless ambition--it made for her a dismal
+picture. She contrasted it with the other one before her eyes--Harry
+Rames at the head of the table, confident, comfortable, young as
+politicians go, with the world a smooth sea for his conquering sails;
+and once again an unaccountable resentment against Harry Rames flared
+up within her. Almost she wished that for once he might fail. Almost
+she revealed herself then to Colonel Challoner. But she did not. She
+had painfully learned a great gift--silence.
+
+She knew very well with what relief she would wake on the morrow to
+the recollection that she was still Cynthia Daventry and not Cynthia
+Challoner.
+
+"I expect that what I say will sound extravagant to you, Miss
+Daventry," Colonel Challoner continued. "You at your age could hardly
+understand it."
+
+The spell which was upon Cynthia was broken. She looked thoughtfully
+about the table.
+
+"I should not have understood it an hour ago. I was inclined to think
+it really didn't matter very much in the long run who was in and who
+was out, that the things which wanted doing and which legislation
+could do, would get themselves done sooner or later by one side or the
+other and perhaps by both; and that for the rest the nation went on
+its way, leaving the talk and the honors to the politicians because it
+had no time for either and doing the work itself."
+
+Colonel Challoner laughed.
+
+"That's a definite point of view, at all events."
+
+"I expect that I was drawing my ideas from another--" she was about to
+say "country," but checked herself lest she should be asked what
+country and so put Colonel Challoner on the track of her relationship
+to him. She went on hastily: "But since I have been sitting here, I
+have learned how much of color politics can bring into the lives of
+men."
+
+And Colonel Challoner looked at her and cried:
+
+"That's it, Miss Daventry. Color! That's the great need. That's why
+the quack religions flourish in the back streets. We all need it--all
+except the man there at the head of the table," and Colonel Challoner
+looked a trifle enviously at Harry Rames. "He has it and to spare."
+
+The door opened by a few inches at this moment and a wrinkled pippin
+of a head was pushed in. A pair of little bright eyes surveyed the
+company and then the door was thrust wide open and M. Poizat stepped
+lightly in.
+
+Harry Rames rose and shook hands with the little Frenchman. Colonel
+Challoner stroked his white moustache.
+
+"You were present to-night?" said Rames. "What a difference, eh?"
+
+"Yes, I was proud," M. Poizat returned. "But always I waited for some
+little word--some little word which did not come."
+
+"One always forgets an important point and generally the most
+important. It is the experience of all speakers," said Rames. He
+turned to the table. "I must introduce to you M. Poizat, and if ever
+your voices are hoarse in Ludsey, please ask for Lungatine."
+
+Rames drew a chair to the table, pressed M. Poizat into it, and filled
+for him a glass of champagne. The little man was delighted. He drank
+Captain Rames's health, he bowed to the company; and his hand was
+arrested in mid-air, holding the wine-glass by its stem. Colonel
+Challoner was gazing fixedly across the table at him. A look of
+trouble took all the merriment out of M. Poizat's face.
+
+"I have seen you before, M. Poizat," said Colonel Challoner.
+
+Cynthia began to think that the colonel had a mania for recognizing
+people.
+
+"I am _Mr_. Poizat, an Englishman," the little confectioner answered
+hurriedly.
+
+"Naturalized," said the colonel.
+
+"It is true," said M. Poizat reluctantly.
+
+"If you had only said that last night," thought Harry Rames. "You
+would have got your advertisement, my friend."
+
+But he said not a word aloud, and M. Poizat continued:
+
+"But it was a long time ago. And all the years since I have spent in
+Ludsey."
+
+Colonel Challoner shook his head.
+
+"It was not in Ludsey that I saw you. For I was never here in my life
+before."
+
+M. Poizat shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"We have sat opposite to one another in a train perhaps. We have run
+against one another in the traffic of a London street."
+
+"No, it was on some occasion more important. I do not forget a face."
+
+"Nor I," said M. Poizat. "And I have never seen yours, sir, until this
+moment;" and though he spoke with spirit his uneasiness was apparent
+to every one at that table.
+
+Colonel Challoner sat back in his chair and let the subject drop. But
+he was not satisfied. He was even annoyed at his failure to identify
+the Frenchman, and he sat relentlessly revolving in his mind the
+changing scenes of his life. Meanwhile the talk drifted back to
+by-gone elections and this or that great night when some famous
+statesman was brought into the town and never allowed to speak one
+audible word. Mr. Arnall mentioned one whose name resounded through
+England.
+
+"Next night in Warrington he said that he had been struggling with the
+beasts at Ephesus," said Mr. Arnall with a chirrup of delight. The old
+Adam was strong in him at this moment and his own solemn exhortations
+to hear all sides clean forgotten. Suddenly Colonel Challoner broke in
+upon him. He leaned across the table and with a smile of triumph
+stared between the candles at M. Poizat.
+
+"It was in a corridor," he said, "a vast bare corridor--somewhere--a
+long time ago. You were coming out of a room--wait!--wait!--No, I
+cannot name the place," and he sank back again disappointed.
+
+But M. Poizat's face wore now a sickly pallor.
+
+"In no corridor--nowhere," he stammered and his eyes, urgent with
+appeal, turned toward Harry Rames.
+
+Harry Rames did his first service for an elector of Ludsey. He glanced
+toward Mr. Benoliel, who rose.
+
+"It is getting late," said Benoliel, "and Rames has a busy day in
+front of him."
+
+"I will order your motor-car round to the door," said Rames. He rang
+the bell and the rest of the company left the table. Diana Royle and
+Cynthia sought their cloaks in the adjoining sitting-room. Harry Rames
+took M. Poizat by the arm and led him to the door.
+
+"I am very grateful to you," he said. "Good-night." And even as M.
+Poizat's foot was over the threshold the voice of Colonel Challoner
+brought him to a halt:
+
+"One moment. I remember now. You come from Alsace, M. Poizat."
+
+"I come from Provence," cried the little man, facing about swiftly
+with a passionate, white face.
+
+Harry Rames had begun to think Colonel Challoner rather a bore with
+his incomplete reminiscences. That thought passed from him altogether.
+He had but to look at the two men to know that some queer and
+unexpected moment of drama had sprung from their chance meeting at
+this hotel at Ludsey. They stood facing one another, the little
+Frenchman in the doorway with fear and rage contending in his face,
+his mouth twisted into a snarl, his lips drawn back from his gums like
+an animal, his teeth gleaming; the colonel erect above the table with
+the candle-light shining upward upon a triumphant and menacing face.
+
+"You were in Metz in '71," cried Challoner. "So was I. I was a lad at
+the time. I was aide to our attache. That's where I saw you, M.
+Poizat--in the long corridor of the Arsenal. Yes, you were in Metz in
+'71."
+
+And behind M. Poizat appeared the waiter announcing that Mr.
+Benoliel's motor-car was at the door.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XV
+
+                        THE MAYOR AND THE MAN
+
+
+St. Anne's Hall stands tucked away in a narrow street of Ludsey by the
+spacious square; and from its ancient windows you look out between the
+lozenges of stained glass upon the great church of St. Anne with its
+soaring spire and its wide graveyard. Into this hall the ballot-boxes
+were brought from the polling-booths on the next evening, and at long
+tables in the Council Chamber the voting papers were sorted and
+counted. Harry Rames walked from table to table. He seemed to see
+nothing but crosses against his opponent's name. He did not dare to
+put a question to any of the scrutineers standing behind the sorters.
+The very swiftness with which the votes were counted impressed him
+with a sense of disaster. For the first time he began to ask himself
+how he was to shape his life if to-night he were defeated. Thus an
+hour passed and then the chief constable drew him aside to a bench
+under the musician's gallery at one end of the room.
+
+"I've been watching the tables, Captain Rames," he said, "and I think
+you are going to be elected."
+
+"You do?" said Rames eagerly. "Yes, and I shall be very glad if you
+are."
+
+"Thank you," exclaimed Rames. He could have wrung off the chief
+constable's hand in the fervor of his gratitude.
+
+"Oh, I am not speaking as a politician," the chief constable returned
+with a smile. "I have the order of my city to look after. That's all I
+am thinking about. If you weren't by any chance to get in, I am afraid
+there would be trouble to-night in Ludsey. And I want you if you are
+returned to get back to your hotel at once. It's important from my
+point of view that you should show up on your balcony as soon as
+possible after the result is declared."
+
+"I see," said Rames.
+
+"I will take you out the back way through the police station," the
+chief constable continued, "and there's a lane opposite which will
+lead you straight to your back door. You had better run, I think. For
+your own friends would tear you to pieces to-night without noticing
+they were doing you any harm."
+
+The chief constable suddenly changed his tone. One of the scrutineers
+on the side of Rames's opponent had drawn close to them. The chief
+constable had no intention to allow a suspicion that he favored one
+side more than the other. He raised his voice.
+
+"You have noticed our tapestry, perhaps. It is quite invaluable, I
+believe. We lent it two years ago to the South Kensington Museum.
+There was an American millionaire here the other day who wished to buy
+it."
+
+Raines looked across the room.
+
+"Isn't there some portion of it missing?" he asked.
+
+"Yes. That disappeared in the Commonwealth times. Let us go and look
+at it."
+
+Rames walked at the chief constable's side up the floor of the room
+toward the dais where Mr. Redling the Mayor, with his chain of office
+about his shoulders, sat in his big chair in the centre of the long
+council table. His mace lay upon the table in front of him, and he
+surveyed the busy scene over which he presided with an imperturbable
+gravity. But Mr. Redling was a genial soul with a twinkling eye and a
+red, round face like a crumpled cherub's; and as Harry Rames advanced
+toward the dais, Mr. Redling beckoned to him with a discreet twist of
+the finger of a hand lying idle upon the table.
+
+Harry Rames took a seat beside the Mayor at the long table and again
+words of comfort were poured into his ears in a gentle undertone.
+
+"I think you are going to do it," said Mr. Redling, repeating almost
+word for word the utterance of his chief constable. "Of course, I
+couldn't take any part. But you know what I should have been doing if
+I hadn't been Mayor, don't you? But I have asked quietly here and
+there about your chance and I fancy it's all right."
+
+He winked, and his face broke into triumphant smiles. He was a man.
+Then he remembered again that he was a Mayor, and he sat a pillar of
+municipal propriety.
+
+"It's good of you to say that," cried Harry Rames in a low voice. "I
+needed to hear it, I can tell you."
+
+Mr. Redling looked at his face. The three weeks had taken a heavy toll
+of him. He had thinned and sharpened; his eyes were heavy and very
+tired; for the moment his buoyancy had gone.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Redling. "An election takes a good deal out of one.
+And these two hours are the worst of it when the fight's all over and
+there's nothing to do but wait. Gives you a kind of glimpse into what
+women have to put up with all their lives, eh?"
+
+Harry Rames glanced at the Mayor with interest.
+
+"Why, I suppose that's true."
+
+Mr. Redling nodded his head.
+
+"Yes. It teaches you that sitting with your hands in your lap isn't
+the same as sitting soft, after all."
+
+Harry Rames felt comfort steal in upon him from the neighborhood of
+the little Mayor. Mr. Redling was that rare bird, a strong politician
+without a fad, and, therefore, a veritable haven of refuge to a
+candidate in the cudgelling of an election. On the few afternoons when
+Harry Rames had been able to snatch a half hour of leisure he had been
+wont to run round to the Mayor's house and spend a restful interval
+with one of the Mayor's cigars. Mr. Redling laid his Mayoralty aside
+with the silk hat he invariably wore, and when he took off his chain
+of office he usually took off his coat too. He had had his ups and
+downs, and as he discoursed upon his city in his shirt-sleeves, Harry
+Rames never failed to draw comfort from his talk, so strong a spirit
+of human friendship breathed from him.
+
+"They like you here," continued Mr. Redling; "both sides. Take us for
+all in all we are not violent people. Give us the right sort of man,
+and we'll be sure he won't do us harm, whatever his politics," and
+then as Mr. Benoliel, who was acting as one of Rames's scrutineers,
+came to him with a doubtful voting paper, he switched off to another
+topic; and it happened quite naturally that he chose the very same
+subject as the chief constable had done.
+
+"Have you noticed our tapestry?" he asked. "We are proud of it. An
+American gentleman, a Mr. Cronin, came over here last week with Mr.
+Benoliel to see it. And after he had seen it, he wanted to buy it."
+
+"Oh, did he?" said Benoliel as he handed the voting paper to the
+Mayor. "But I might have guessed that he would. I brought him over
+from Culver, and we met Mrs. Royle just outside here. She came in with
+us. Mrs. Royle seemed as interested in the tapestry as Cronin
+himself."
+
+While Mr. Redling examined the voting paper, Harry Rames cast an eye
+over the tapestry. The aesthetic qualities formed a quite insignificant
+element in his nature. Of art he thought nothing at all. It noted in
+his mind long hair and an absence of baths--such was his ignorance.
+The only picture-gallery into which he had ever entered was the Royal
+Academy; and the only occasion upon which he had ventured over that
+threshold was the Academy dinner to which he had been invited after
+his return from his Antarctic expedition. He had a primitive
+appreciation of scarlet as a color and he recognized that women upon
+canvas could look beautiful. There for him art ended. So he gazed at
+the tapestry with a lack-lustre eye. There was no vividness of color,
+and the human forms worked upon it had an angularity and a thickness
+of joint which pleased him not at all.
+
+"I suppose it's very beautiful," he said.
+
+"It's unique," replied Mr. Benoliel; "that's why Cronin wanted it. Let
+a thing be unique, he'll not trouble his head so much about its
+beauty, and I am told he will ask no questions how it comes to be
+offered to him."
+
+"Well, he offered us a hundred thousand pounds," Mr. Redling remarked
+with half a sigh. Ludsey was growing at a pace which made it difficult
+for the borough council to keep up with it. Mr. Redling thought of
+baths and schools and houses. "A hundred thousand pounds--a good deal
+of money for a municipality to refuse. But of course, we did. We
+couldn't let that tapestry go." He returned to the voting paper and
+gave his decision upon it. Harry Rames drifted down again into the
+body of the hall. He troubled no more about the priceless tapestry
+swinging under the high carved roof in this ancient place. He was a
+man of his own day, absorbed in its doings, and wondering always in a
+great labor of thought how he might make his name familiar in all
+men's mouths before nightfall swept him into the darkness. His
+anxieties were now diminished, his heart beat high. For here were two
+men, both experienced in elections and both convinced that he would
+surely win. So the first small victory, it seemed, was won. He crossed
+to the row of windows and looked down through a lozenge of white in
+the painted pattern into the street below. And having once looked he
+could not again withdraw his eyes.
+
+It was a night of January, dreary and loud with a roar of falling
+rain. A light wind carried the rain at a slant so that it shot down
+past the street lamps like slender javelins of steel. And exposed to
+that pitiless assault a silent crowd of men stood packed together in
+the narrow street between St. Anne's Hall and the railings of the
+church. A few, a very few, carried umbrellas over their heads, the
+rest stood with their coat collars turned up about their throats and
+their hands deep in their pockets. No one moved, for there was no room
+to move; and all the faces were uplifted under the brims of their
+soaking hats to the great window beyond the hall whence the result
+should be declared. The patience of the throng, its acquiescence in
+discomfort, as though discomfort were the ordinary condition of its
+life, suddenly caught hold of Harry Rames. He took a step, nay, a
+stride forward. Last night when he had come out of the Exchange and
+the herd of animals had been transfigured into the uplifted faces of
+men, his thought had been:
+
+"This is for me."
+
+But now his thoughts changed. The men of Ludsey did not wait in vain
+that night. For Harry Rames the glamour faded off the arena. At the
+very moment when the bars were being withdrawn for him to enter it the
+exultation of battle died out of his heart. He woke to something
+new--the claim of the constituency. The longer he looked, the stronger
+the claim grew, the more loudly the silence of that throng proclaimed
+and shouted it. They stood under the javelins of the rain, the men who
+had voted for him. They emphasized their claim by their extraordinary
+quietude. Almost they menaced.
+
+"A queer sight," said a voice at his elbow.
+
+Harry Rames turned. It was Mr. Arnall who had interrupted him.
+
+"I shall not easily forget it," said Rames, drawing a breath, and then
+with an irritable outburst he said: "They look to Parliament for more
+than parliaments can do, to candidates for more than members can
+achieve. Each election is to open paradise for them."
+
+"And whose fault is that?" asked Mr. Arnall dryly.
+
+Rames nodded.
+
+"Ours, I suppose," he said; and behind him in the room there was a
+bustle and a grating of chairs upon the floor. The votes had been
+sorted. The candidates and their friends gathered about the long table
+on the raised dais.
+
+"They are taking yours first," said Mr. Arnall to Harry. "That's a
+good sign."
+
+The papers cast for Harry Rames were brought to the table in sets of
+fifty. They were placed crosswise, one set on the top of the first,
+and the third on the second, until five hundred had been counted.
+Against that pile of five hundred votes a second rose. Gradually the
+orderly heaps of paper extended along the table's edge in front of the
+Mayor. There were half a dozen now. Rames's agent stood by them like a
+bull-dog on the chain. The half-dozen became ten, eleven, twelve. And
+as the twelfth heap was completed a quick movement ran among all of
+Rames's friends. He had polled now half the electorate of the city.
+One more set of papers and he was in.
+
+It was laid next to the others at that moment, and Rames's hands were
+silently grasped and shaken. But the heaping up of the votes went on.
+There were three more piles to be added before the end was reached.
+Eighty-four per cent of the electorate had recorded their votes. Harry
+Rames had won by a majority well on to two thousand. He stood there in
+a buzz of congratulations, with a sudden vacancy of mind and thought.
+He remembered the extraordinary agility with which Mr. Redling whipped
+out of the room, trying to say unconcernedly:
+
+"I'll just announce the result at once."
+
+He heard the storm of cheers in the street below. That patient silence
+was broken now in a hurricane of enthusiasm and even through it he
+could distinguish the words of the exultant cry:
+
+"Rames is our man!"
+
+He saw the Mayor return, much out of breath. He proposed the vote of
+thanks to the returning officers, with the usual eulogy of his
+opponents and depreciation of himself. But even at that moment the
+claim of the constituency would importunately obtrude and find
+acknowledgment in his words.
+
+"You look to me very likely for more than I can do," he said simply.
+"At all events you shall have what I can."
+
+But the most memorable achievement that night was the reply of Mr.
+Redling.
+
+As he rose to his feet to acknowledge the vote of thanks, the man ran
+forward and got a fair start of the Mayor. He cried out, all one
+bubble of delight:
+
+"I need hardly say, gentlemen, how utterly I rejoice at--" and then
+the Mayor put on a spurt and caught up the man--"at the admirable
+manner in which this contest has been conducted by both sides."
+
+But the correction deceived no one. Mr. Redling's politics were known,
+and so, in a general splutter of good-humored laughter, the Ludsey
+election came to an end.
+
+The Mayor turned from the table wiping his forehead.
+
+"I nearly made a bad break there," he said in a whisper. "They won't
+come at you again, I think. I reckon you have got Ludsey, Captain
+Rames," and then Rames felt the hand of the chief constable laid upon
+his arm. He was rushed across the Mayor's parlor, down the stairs
+through the police station, where the police at their supper rose and
+gave him a loud cheer.
+
+"Silence!" cried the chief constable savagely. He opened the street
+door and peeped out.
+
+"All's clear. Run--down that alley opposite. Say something from your
+balcony, never mind what--they won't hear more than two words."
+
+"That's just all that I want them to hear," cried Rames.
+
+He had foreseen that moment. He ran with one or two of his friends to
+the back door of his hotel. A path was made for them through the
+crowded hall. He came out upon the balcony, and up and down the hill
+as far as his eyes could see the street was thronged. He stretched out
+his hand. He had a second of absolute silence, and in that second his
+voice rang out:
+
+"My constituents----"
+
+The roar which answered him showed him that once more his foresight
+had served him well. No other word of his was heard. But any other
+words would have spoiled the two which he had uttered.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XVI
+
+                      WORDS OVER THE TELEPHONE
+
+
+The next two hours were for Rames of the tissue whence nightmares are
+woven. Rames was conscious that he made speeches and still more
+speeches and yet others on the top of those, until speech-making
+became a pain in the head for which there was no anodyne. He made them
+from windows--one at that very window where Taylor, the lily fingered
+democrat, had by a single sentence won immortality and certain
+defeat--he made them from tables in club-rooms which he no longer
+recognized; where men, packed tight as herrings, screamed
+incoherencies in a blaze of light and the atmosphere of a Turkish
+bath, or standing upon chairs beat him, as he passed beneath them, on
+the top of the head with their hats in the frenzy of their delight.
+For two hours Ludsey went stark mad and Harry Rames had reached
+exhaustion before a gigantic captain of the fire brigade lifted him
+panting and dishevelled out of the throng, and drawing him into a
+small committee-room locked the door against his votaries.
+
+"Better wait for a little while here, sir," he said; and it was one
+o'clock in the morning before he ventured to return to his hotel.
+
+By that time the madness was already past. There was still noise in
+the blazing rooms of the clubs. But the streets were empty and up the
+climbing hill the city was quiet as a house of mutes. A placard in the
+window of the newspaper office recorded the figures of the election,
+and the boarding which protected the shops opposite to his hotel shone
+white in the light of the lamps. But for those two signs, even Rames
+might have found it difficult of belief that so lately this very
+hill had rung with cheers and seethed with a tumultuous populace.
+To-morrow, however, the sirens of the factories would shrill across
+the house-tops at six and the work of a strenuous industrial town
+begin. Ludsey had no time to dally with victories won and triumphs
+which had passed.
+
+Nor indeed had Harry Rames. He rang the bell at the door and entered
+the hall quickly. There was something which he should have done before
+now, though only now he remembered it. With a word to the porter, he
+went into the office and switched on the electric light. He crossed to
+the corner where the telephone was fixed and called up the White
+House. A woman's voice, very small and clear, came back to him over
+the lines. He recognized it with a thrill of satisfaction. It was
+Cynthia Daventry's.
+
+"Oh, it's you yourself," he cried eagerly, and he heard Cynthia, at
+the other end of the telephone, laugh with pleasure at his eagerness.
+
+"Yes," she answered. "I thought perhaps you might ring me up."
+
+So she had waited--just that they might talk together for a few
+moments. Harry Rames, however, did not answer her. It seemed to him
+from the intonation of her voice that she had more to say if she would
+only make up her mind to say it. He stood and waited with the receiver
+at his ear, and after a little while Cynthia spoke again upon a lower
+note.
+
+"I am glad that you did. I should have been disappointed if you
+hadn't."
+
+"Thank you," said Rames.
+
+He spoke very gently. There was no smile of triumph upon his face. It
+had become of vast importance to him within the last two hours to know
+how her thoughts dealt with him; and he was not sure. There was
+friendship between them--yes. But how far on her side did it reach? He
+had no answer to that question.
+
+"You have heard the result?" he asked.
+
+"Yes. Mr. Benoliel telephoned to me at once from the Mayor's parlor."
+
+"I ought to have done that," said Harry Rames.
+
+"Oh, no. You were making speeches," replied Cynthia with a laugh. She
+was at all events not offended by his omission.
+
+"And you are glad that I have won?" he asked. And again she waited a
+while before she answered; and when she did speak it was with that
+little spirit of resentment which Rames had heard before in her voice.
+
+"Well,--since your heart was so much set on winning,--yes, there you
+have your triumph--I am glad that you won."
+
+Cynthia meant what she said, but she was reluctant to mean it. She
+spoke, too, under a constraint to speak. She had a picture before her
+eyes of the man at the other end of the line quietly waiting upon her,
+certain perhaps of what she would say. And the picture and the sense
+of compulsion were both an offence to her.
+
+"Good-night," she added curtly and with a sharp, quick movement she
+hung up the receiver. The little clang of metal travelled along the
+line to Harry Rames and emphasized her resentment.
+
+But he was not disturbed by that. On the whole he looked upon it as a
+favorable sign. So definite a resentment implied that she was
+interested and set a value on their friendship. Rames went upstairs to
+bed, but he was too tired to sleep and his thoughts raced ahead and
+scouted in the future. He had leaped the first obstacle in the race,
+but that once leaped and looked back upon became a tiny thing compared
+with those which lay ahead.
+
+"Will she? Will she not?" he asked. All hung upon the answers to those
+questions. He was poor. He must marry. He must marry money and even
+money was not enough. Other qualities were needed to help him to the
+great career. But they were all there, a few miles away, possessed by
+the young mistress of the White House. She had looks and manners and a
+distinction of her own. You could not be in a room with her, however
+crowded, and be long unaware that she was present too. Only--would
+she?
+
+He had very little to offer her--beyond this earnest of future success
+which he had won to-night. And six hundred and seventy others would
+have won just the same opportunity before the year was a fortnight
+older. Moreover, Cynthia was romantic and he was not. For all her
+friendliness he was a bitter disappointment to her. He recognized it
+all and began to regret that he had not donned the glittering cloak of
+romance which so often she had held out to him. But his foresight came
+to console him.
+
+"I could never have lived up to it," he reflected. "She would have
+found me out. I have been honest with her and she likes honesty."
+
+Certainly there were points in his favor. Rames took heart. She had
+run the gauntlet of the drawing-rooms through a London season. Men had
+gone down before her satin slippers, men ancient and modern. Mothers
+of daughters had frowned upon her, mothers of sons had smiled. Young
+Lord Helmsdale, adored of the ladies, had pursued her, and it was his
+habit to be pursued. Yet she had come out of the throng to
+Warwickshire heart-free. Of that he was sure.
+
+Besides, she had waited up to speak to him. That was something,--not
+very much, perhaps,--but surely something. Also, since he had wished
+to win, she was glad that he had won. Rames's memories took him back
+to the night when they first met at the Admiralty. Not thus had she
+spoken then. She had moved toward him since that night--reluctantly,
+slowly. Yet she had moved.
+
+He was still casting up this ledger of his chances when a lonely
+booming sound broke upon the stillness of the night and penetrated
+through the open window like some melancholy siren of the sea. It was
+repeated and repeated, growing louder with each repetition yet hardly
+more articulate, and without any change of intonation. And every now
+and then it was interrupted for a few seconds by a dull crash. Rames
+tried to thrust it from his notice.
+
+"Will she? Will she not?" he asked himself. But the booming sound
+would not be denied. It was as the wail of some utterly friendless man
+who cared not whether his fellows slept or waked. It was thoroughly
+pitiless. Nearer it came to the hotel, and now wavering, heavy feet
+could be heard to beat an irregular accompaniment. The occasional thud
+was explained. A very drunken man was staggering up the hill and from
+time to time he fell upon the pavement, unconscious that he fell,
+barely aware only that his long-drawn cry had ceased. Rames thought of
+him as a malignant creature determined to inflict torture--until the
+sound at last sifted itself into definite words. "Vote for Harry
+Rames!" the nightfarer cried aloud to a city which had already done
+so; and at times he dropped the Harry and inserted an epithet of color
+common no doubt in his vocabulary. He passed beneath the windows and
+with many a tumble faded into distance, invoking the unresponsive gas
+lamps.
+
+Rames turned over on his side with relief.
+
+"My dear," he whispered, "take his advice and vote for Harry Rames! I
+shall owe you much, but I'll make it up to you. I'll not ask you till
+I am sure I can. I must risk Helmsdale carrying you off."
+
+
+He fell asleep and even the tune the clock chimes in Ludsey church
+played at four o'clock in the morning did not make him stir. But at
+the White House just at that hour Cynthia waked. It was not the clock
+which waked her. It seemed to her that she had heard a step in the
+corridor. She sat up in her bed and in a few seconds was sure of it.
+Some one was moving very stealthily about the house. For a moment her
+old horror gripped her. Here was her father come at last with
+authority to claim her. She sat staring wide-eyed into the darkness,
+flung back to the days when she was a child. Then her reason
+reasserted itself. Her father was dead. The blood flowed again to her
+heart. But the stealthy sound continued. She heard a door gently
+latched. She sprang out of bed, opened her own door, and switched on
+the light. The corridor was empty to the edge of the shadows. She
+peered into them. She saw nothing, and no sound reached her now.
+
+"Who is it?" she asked in a loud voice, and no answer came to her. She
+waited in her doorway with a hand to her breast. The plank of a stair
+cracked loudly, close to her; but no footsteps made it crack. She went
+back into her room.
+
+Yet she had not been mistaken. Any one in the road that night might
+have seen a light ascending past the windows of the staircase and then
+moving through the upper rooms, until at last in one it remained for a
+long time. The light was carried by Diana Royle. She passed up the
+staircase to an unfurnished room used for the storage of old boxes and
+discarded things. From the corner of this room she rolled out a great
+bale, dusty with years, and tied up like a carpet with an old piece of
+rope. She cut the rope and spread it out upon the floor, cautiously
+and silently. Then lowering her candle she examined it. With a smile
+upon her lips she stood up again. She fastened the bale and dragged it
+back into its corner. The smile did not leave her lips. Chance had led
+her up here some weeks ago. She had discovered the bale and had
+wondered what it was. An old carpet? A disused curtain? Now she knew.
+In an attic of this old house she had discovered the lost strip of the
+Ludsey tapestry.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XVII
+
+                              A REFUSAL
+
+
+"So you have refused young Helmsdale."
+
+Three months had passed since the Ludsey election. The air was warm
+and golden and already the world whispered of summer, yet not too loud
+lest it should seem to boast and so be balked of its desire.
+Parliament had met, London was full, and in the country the foxes and
+the pheasants had leisure to attend to their own affairs. And with the
+rest Cynthia had come to town. She rode on this morning out of the
+park, where the buds were running along the branches of the trees like
+delicate green flames, about eleven o'clock, and turning out of South
+Audley Street into Curzon Street, she saw Mr. Benoliel waiting upon
+the pavement in front of her new house. As she stopped her horse
+before the door he reprimanded her:
+
+"Cynthia, you have refused him."
+
+Cynthia blushed. Then she exclaimed:
+
+"But how in the world could you know! It isn't half an hour since I
+refused him." Then she bent down over her saddle and gazed at him in
+the fulness of admiration. "But you know everything. It wouldn't be of
+much use trying to keep things from you, would it?"
+
+Mr. Benoliel smiled grimly.
+
+"Yes, that's the way, Cynthia, and no doubt a neater style of doing it
+will come in time."
+
+Cynthia sat upright, swift as a spring, and remained so, with her nose
+in the air, haughty for five complete seconds. Then curiosity restored
+her to her sex and she swooped again over her saddle.
+
+"How did you know?"
+
+"He borrowed a horse from me this morning," said Mr. Benoliel--"a good
+horse. He was very particular that it should be a valuable horse. So I
+gathered that he wanted to make on this morning of all mornings a
+specially favorable impression."
+
+Cynthia's lips twitched.
+
+"You lent him a very good horse," she said. "But the horse didn't tell
+you."
+
+"That's where you are wrong, Cynthia. The horse did," said Mr.
+Benoliel. "Ten minutes ago, as I was turning out of Grosvenor Square,
+I met my very valuable horse being led by a ragged beggarman whom I
+had never seen in my life before. I asked him what the dickens he was
+doing with it and he explained that as he was standing by the rails in
+Hyde Park a young man rode up to him in a violent rage, dismounted,
+tossed him the reins and a shilling and told him to lead the rotten
+beast back to Grosvenor Square. Just fancy that! My horse! I might
+have lost him altogether."
+
+Cynthia tried her best to look indignant at so treacherous a return to
+Mr. Benoliel's generosity, but she could not and she rippled suddenly
+into laughter.
+
+"He was horribly angry," she said.
+
+Mr. Benoliel turned his wrath again upon Cynthia.
+
+"And no wonder!" he said. "Helmsdale's not used to being refused. He
+is young. He is good-looking. He has a social position----"
+
+"And he has a profile," added Cynthia. "Please don't forget that. But
+you can't if you know him, or even if you don't, can you? Have you
+ever fixed your eyes steadily upon him, Mr. Benoliel? Do the next time
+you see him, and within twenty seconds he will show you his profile.
+He will turn his head quite slowly and show it you, just like a man at
+the music-halls disclosing the newest sensation. I couldn't marry a
+profile, even though it was mounted on your horse." Then she bent down
+to him again coaxing him: "You didn't really want me to marry him, did
+you? You see, I don't love him."
+
+Mr. Benoliel seemed to think this answer insufficient.
+
+"Love would come," he answered.
+
+"That's what he said," exclaimed Cynthia.
+
+"And you?" asked Benoliel.
+
+Cynthia bent her eyes steadily upon him.
+
+"I answered, 'Lovers would come.'"
+
+Mr. Benoliel looked up at her with a wry face.
+
+"You know too much, my dear," he said, and Cynthia threw back her
+head, with her face suddenly clouded and sullen.
+
+"Oh, yes," she cried bitterly. "I have eaten of the tree--and
+lately--very lately."
+
+And at the sight of her distress all Mr. Benoliel's indignation
+vanished.
+
+"I know," he said gently. "That's why I wanted you to marry, Cynthia."
+
+"Is that the remedy?" she asked. And she shook her head slowly. "I am
+frightened of it."
+
+She called to her groom, dismounted from her horse and taking Mr.
+Benoliel by the arm cried:
+
+"Come in. You haven't seen my house since I bought it. You shall tell
+me what you think of it, now that it's finished."
+
+She ran up the steps and turned to him at the top with a look of
+compunction in her face:
+
+"I talk to you of my troubles," she said. "I have no right to--no,
+neither to you nor to any one. I am ashamed of myself. I have food to
+eat, clothes to wear, money to spend, and friends. Yes, I am very
+fortunate," and her mind winged back to a dark night on the estancia
+when she had crouched in a big chair, listening to horrors set ready
+for her. "I ought to be grateful," she cried with a shudder at her
+memories. "Come in!"
+
+She led him through the rooms and claimed his enthusiasm for this or
+that rare piece of satin-wood or mahogany. It had been a great joy to
+her in the early days of the year to ransack the dealers' shops and
+grow learned of Hepplewhite and Chippendale. She told Mr. Benoliel
+stories of her researches, seeking to recapture some savor of that
+past pleasure. But her sprightliness became an effort and in her own
+sitting-room she turned abruptly to him:
+
+"But I have a distaste for it all now," she said and sat down in a
+chair. "I have no longer any pride in the house at all."
+
+Mr. Benoliel stood over her and nodded his head in sympathy. She was
+distressed. She had a look of discomfort.
+
+"Yes, I understand that, Cynthia," he said.
+
+She took off her hard hat. It pressed upon her temples and made her
+head throb.
+
+"How much do you know?" she asked.
+
+"That Mrs. Royle is leaving you."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia moodily. "We have agreed to separate. Do you know
+anything more?"
+
+"Yes. The missing panel of tapestry hangs again in Ludsey Town Hall."
+
+"Yes. It was lying in a lumber-room under the roof of my house in
+Warwickshire. How long it had been lying there, or how it came there,
+I can't discover. Diana ran across it by accident. It was tied up in a
+bale like an old carpet. She didn't think it of any value--until she
+went one morning to the Town Hall with an American millionaire who was
+anxious to see the tapestry and buy it if he could."
+
+"Yes. I took Cronin there myself. He was staying with me and I drove
+him into Ludsey and met Mrs. Royle in the street. That was the day
+before the election. We all three went into the Town Hall together. I
+remember Mrs. Royle saying that she had never been in the building
+before. I pointed out the tapestry and explained that a wide strip of
+it was missing. I think I suggested that it would one day be turned
+out of some old cupboard."
+
+Cynthia nodded.
+
+"That no doubt helped her to the truth. Anyway, she tried to persuade
+me to sell it. She merely told me that it was valuable and that I
+could get two thousand pounds for it. I didn't connect it with the
+Ludsey tapestry. I thought that it might be worth while to bring it up
+to this house; and I refused to sell. Diana urged me again, however,
+and but that I don't like selling things, I would have let her sell
+it, just because she was getting tiresome about it. Then Hartmann, the
+Bond Street dealer, called on me a month ago and told me what the
+strip was."
+
+"Why did he call?" asked Benoliel.
+
+"He was in the deal with another man. Both apparently were selling to
+Mr. Cronin, and they quarrelled over the division of the profits. So
+Hartmann came to me in revenge. He told me that Diana was to get eight
+thousand pounds if she could persuade me to sell and that they meant
+to sell the tapestry afterward to Mr. Cronin for twenty-five thousand
+pounds. It's not a pretty story, is it?"
+
+"No," said Benoliel. "So you gave it back to Ludsey?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Does Mrs. Royle know that you are aware of her share in the
+transaction?"
+
+"Yes. We haven't ever talked of it, but she knows and proposed of her
+own accord that we should separate. We couldn't go on living together,
+could we? It would be too uncomfortable. I couldn't trust her."
+
+"When does she go?"
+
+"In a week or two, now," said Cynthia. "She has taken a little house
+on the north side of the park. Of course, for my father's sake"--thus
+she always spoke of Mr. Daventry--"I am looking after her;" and she
+suddenly struck her hands together. "Oh, but it's all rather sordid,
+isn't it?"
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Benoliel. He was troubled and perplexed. "And what are
+you going to do?" he asked.
+
+Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"I must engage a companion."
+
+"That doesn't sound very satisfactory."
+
+"What else can I do?"
+
+"Marry!" said Mr. Benoliel.
+
+Cynthia rose petulantly to her feet.
+
+"No," she cried. "That I won't do." She turned away and looked out
+into the street, a storm of rebellion at her heart. Why should every
+one want to marry her off? Even her friend, her adviser, who should
+have stood by her, had turned, it seemed, against her. She came back
+to Mr. Benoliel, but he stood with so distressful a countenance that
+her indignation died away, and with a pretty compunction she made her
+apology:
+
+"I know that you are thinking of me. I am sorry if I seemed to forget
+it. Forgive me! But you can't really want me to marry just so that I
+may not be alone."
+
+"My dear," said Mr. Benoliel gently, "It's a very good reason."
+
+Cynthia shook her head.
+
+"For a girl?--I am little more. No. I may come to that belief in the
+end when I am older. But not yet. I must have a better reason now.
+There are too many years ahead of me."
+
+Mr. Benoliel smiled, with a little wistfulness in the smile.
+
+"Dreams, Cynthia, dreams," he said.
+
+"I am losing them," she returned, and with a smile too, the smile of
+humor, not of amusement. "I am making haste to lose them against my
+will. But this one I'll keep for still a little while. I'll still
+dream that while I am young I must have a better reason for marriage
+than the fear of being alone."
+
+"Very well, Cynthia," said Mr. Benoliel disconsolately. "I'll hope you
+are right."
+
+He left the house and Cynthia sat down for a long time in her room.
+She had run to the extreme of melancholy with the determination of
+youth to make the very worst or best of life's daily provision. She
+had never felt so keenly the vanity of her illusions. She had seldom
+felt so lonely, she was sure. Even Harry Rames nowadays left her
+severely to herself. Why didn't he come to see her? She asked the
+question with indignation. She had never seen him since the
+supper-party at his hotel in Ludsey on the night before the poll. She
+had never heard his voice since he had spoken to her over the
+telephone just after his election. Very likely he had grown tired of
+her appeals to him to be different from what he was. No doubt she was
+a bore. Sadly Cynthia admitted it. Yes, she was a bore, and Diana
+Royle was treacherous, and Harry Rames never came to see her, and,
+take it all in all, it was a gray and dismal world.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XVIII
+
+                           A MAIDEN SPEECH
+
+
+Yet to her astonishment Harry Rames came that very week on the Friday
+afternoon. Cynthia received him with an elaborate dignity. There was
+no acidity in her welcome, neither was there any joy. She seemed
+intensely unaware that she had not seen him for three months. Her nose
+was perhaps a trifle too high in the air, but she was not conscious of
+it. On the whole she was greatly pleased with her demeanor. She was
+behaving as a woman of the world to whom one acquaintance, more or
+less, is a matter of complete indifference. She offered him tea, and
+seating herself upon a sofa in front of the table poured it out. Harry
+Rames took his cup with humility. Cynthia was quick to notice it, no
+less quick to be gratified by his exhibition of a quality which
+hitherto he had lacked. He was abashed. He was ashamed. He was uneasy.
+No doubt he had come expecting the flattery of questions. Her
+unconsciousness of the length of his absence put him at a loss. When
+he spoke, it was with difficulty. And then, suddenly, Cynthia saw his
+lips twitching at the corners. He was not abashed at all. He was
+simply trying not to laugh. Cynthia grew hot. Alas! her great dignity
+had barely sustained her in contentment for five minutes! The old
+indignation shone in her eyes. The indifferent great lady vanished.
+Almost before she was aware of it she was talking in broken, resentful
+sentences--as any other ordinary girl might have done who had been
+wounded and whose wound had betrayed her into speech.
+
+"People who insist on making friends with other people who didn't at
+the beginning want to be friends at all, haven't the right afterward
+to drop being friends calmly, without a word of explanation. Of
+course, if people are bored--but even then they should have guessed
+they were going to be bored before they perhaps made other people
+count a little--oh, not so much, of course, but just a little--on
+their friendship. No, I object to that. It's hateful--and then you
+saunter in as if--No." Cynthia, oppressed with a sense of utter
+isolation in a most neglectful world, which probably hated her when it
+stopped to think of her at all, was perilously near to tears. She took
+refuge in sarcasm of a crude kind:
+
+"You probably wouldn't understand that suddenly to stay away after you
+have been friendly is rather humiliating to a girl. But you will take
+it from me, won't you, that it is so?"
+
+She spoke as one giving a kindly lesson in tact to a boorish person.
+But her lips shook. Harry Rames rose from his chair and crossing the
+room took up the _Times_ which lay still neatly folded in its original
+square upon a table.
+
+"You have not opened your paper to-day," he said; and once more he saw
+Cynthia flinch as though he had struck her a blow--flinch and sit
+dumb, with her great eyes full of pain.
+
+"Oh, please don't make any mistake," he said quickly, and with the
+newspaper in his hand he came back to her side. "I wasn't taking what
+you said carelessly. But if you had read your _Times_ to-day you would
+have understood, I think, why I have stayed away till now. You might,
+perhaps, have guessed why I have come this afternoon."
+
+Cynthia took the newspaper from him and unfolded it, with her eyes
+resting in doubt upon his. Then comprehension came to her. She turned
+the pages quickly and stopped at one particular sheet of closely
+printed columns. "Oh," she cried, "you have made your maiden speech."
+
+"Yes, last night."
+
+In a second her resentment was forgotten. She was all smiles. She
+reached out an eager hand to him. "It was successful? But why do I
+ask? I have watched the newspapers ever since the House met. I thought
+you were never going to speak."
+
+"I always meant to hold back at the beginning," said the wise Harry
+Rames. "There were new men tumbling over one another to speak on the
+address; I let them get that start of me without any fear. I wanted to
+learn the way of speaking which carries you home in the House of
+Commons."
+
+Cynthia laughed and made room for him on the sofa at her side.
+
+"Yes, there I recognize you."
+
+"Besides," Rames continued, "the address fights the election over
+again, sums it up, and parades its consequences--consequences already
+known to all. It's very difficult to make any real mark in the debate
+on the address. So while the other men talked I sat quiet. Night after
+night through the address, through the two months which followed it, I
+sat in the House, listening and watching. And I learned my lesson."
+
+"Yes?" said Cynthia.
+
+"I learned that the House scoffs at oratory and has no use for
+perorations; that it won't listen to leading articles; that it won't
+tolerate conceit, except in the biggest men, and hates it in them;
+that it is conscious of dignity and requires the same consciousness in
+the members who address it. It requires too that the man who
+intervenes in a debate should contribute something out of himself."
+
+"Does it always get that?" asked Cynthia in bewilderment.
+
+"No, indeed. But, on the other hand, it goes out into the lobby, or it
+talks. Smale's a wise man. He told me once that hardly ever did a
+Parliament produce more than three new men. Just think of it! For five
+or six years, for six or eight or ten months in each of those years,
+there's one perpetual flow of talk during eight hours of the day in
+that Chamber; and yet out of all that sludge of talk only three men
+emerge of any account. I want to be one of the three men in this
+Parliament. Otherwise you are right and I am wrong. I have mischosen
+my career. So I sat quiet and learned my lesson."
+
+"Until last night," said Cynthia.
+
+"Yes, my opportunity came."
+
+"With a subject on which you could contribute?"
+
+"Well, on which I thought I could," said Rames; and once again Cynthia
+wondered at the patience with which he had sat night after night
+awaiting his moment, and yet counting calmly as among the
+possibilities of failure his own incompetence. "It was Asiatic
+immigration."
+
+Cynthia made a grimace.
+
+"Sounds dull?" asked Rames. "Very likely. But it's an important
+question for us and one that's going to be still more important in the
+future. You see, as a power, we are in a queer position. We are at
+once the white people resisting the Asiatic immigrant, and the Asiatic
+immigrant wanting the outlet of immigration--but I won't make my
+speech over again to you. I raised the question myself on the colonial
+vote, and here is what I said,"--he took the newspaper from her hands,
+folded it, and gave it back to her. Then he sat quietly by her side
+while she read the speech through. She appreciated the labor and
+thought which had gone to its making; the half column which the
+_Times_ gave to reporting it enabled her to realize that it had been
+delivered with a vivid economy of phrase which gave his meaning aptly
+and never frittered it away. If only the trouble had been taken and
+the speech delivered for the sake of the question! The question was a
+big one. Cynthia understood that through the spectacles of Harry
+Rames's speech.
+
+"You made a great success?" she asked turning toward him. She noticed
+that he was sitting very still beside her, as though he set great
+store upon her judgment. And in a voice of greater warmth she said:
+
+"But of course you did."
+
+Again Rames took the newspaper and again he folded it. He pointed to
+the first leader, from which his name stood out in bigger type than
+the rest of the text.
+
+"It doesn't so very often happen that the _Times_ takes the subject of
+its chief leading article from a man's first speech in the House of
+Commons."
+
+Then he folded the paper again at the parliamentary report and pointed
+to a paragraph here and there. "That's what the leader of the
+opposition said. Here's the reference the colonial minister made when
+he wound up the debate. You see, both dealt with my speech."
+
+There was a note of quiet elation in Harry Rames's voice. He had taken
+another step along the chosen path. He had passed through another of
+the ordeals.
+
+Cynthia did not answer. She sat with the newspaper on her knees,
+gazing forward with perplexed eyes. She looked almost disheartened.
+
+Rames noticed the look and smiled.
+
+"I know what's troubling you, Miss Daventry. You are wondering whether
+it isn't, after all, the horrible truth that a desire to get on and
+excel can achieve quite as much, and be quite as useful to the world,
+as enthusiasm for a cause, the pure, genuine enthusiasm to make the
+world better."
+
+Cynthia turned to him with a start.
+
+"Yes, I was wondering just in that way."
+
+"Well, I'll answer you," said Rames firmly. "The desire to get on
+achieves more and better things than enthusiasm for an idea."
+
+"I can't believe it," cried Cynthia in revolt.
+
+"Think it over," continued Rames. "Enthusiasm for cause blinds you to
+the harm, the injustice which you may do in furthering your cause. The
+desire to get on makes you appreciate the cause, and weigh it, yes,
+but it makes you weigh also the methods of advance."
+
+"No, no," cried Cynthia. "You push a garden roller over all my frail
+illusions. Some day, I think, you'll pay;" and she turned suddenly
+toward him. "Yes, I'm afraid you'll pay."
+
+She glanced down at the paper and suddenly swept it off her knees. His
+were ignoble views; she was sure of it. But none the less he was her
+friend, and she took refuge from his views, as was her wont, in her
+friendship. After all, he had come hot from his little triumph to tell
+her of it. She recognized that she was making him an ungenerous
+return.
+
+"Tell me what you felt when you got up to speak! Were you nervous?"
+she asked, and Rames relaxed from his attitude of vigilance and leaned
+back with a laugh.
+
+"I should have run away if I could," he said. "But I couldn't. I had
+taken the trouble to make flight impossible. The House goes into
+Committee over the estimates. I had asked Smale to speak to the
+Chairman of Committees. He had done so. An opportunity had been made
+for me. I had to make the best of it I could."
+
+"Tell me," Cynthia insisted; and as more than once he had done before,
+having lost ground in her thoughts, he marched forward and
+unconsciously regained it. For he drew her with humor and a vivid
+truth the picture of a man in one of the ordeals of his life. He
+neither posed as the triumphant hero for whom there are no
+difficulties, nor did he exaggerate his terrors or apprehensions so
+that his ultimate success might glow the brighter. He was true to
+himself, as he had always striven to be with Cynthia. The labor of
+forethought, the stress of fear, the strain upon the nerves, and the
+tiny victory won as the consequence were set before her in their due
+proportions. He ceased to be a thing of cold calculations and
+inevitable triumphs. He became a man, stiffening his knees against
+tremors and alarms.
+
+He had walked down to the House early on that Thursday. For his speech
+had been thought out, and there was nothing more for him to do, and
+now he must keep moving. He went down onto the broad terrace over the
+Thames, and there, during the hour of questions which precedes debate,
+in a cold wind he wandered miserable. One tall and burly policeman was
+the calm guardian of that deserted place. Harry Rames walked from the
+Speaker's house to the House of Lords and back again, trying to repeat
+over to himself the argument of his speech. But the policeman loomed
+too large between him and it. Rames detected something supercilious in
+his imperturbability. No doubt he knew that Rames that day was going
+to make his maiden speech. He must have seen so many pace this terrace
+during the hour of questions with the same apprehensions. The signs
+would be visible.
+
+Rames turned his back upon the policeman and leaned on the parapet.
+But the speech would not come. He had left the opening sentences to
+the moment when he should be upon his legs. For he must link what he
+had to say onto what already had been said, lest he should lose
+altogether the effect of spontaneity. The rest he had prepared and
+rehearsed, and rehearsed again, with the intention to know it so well
+that he should be free to twist into its scheme the speeches made
+immediately before. But now that he tried to say it over on the
+terrace it lost altogether its continuity. The argument halted; the
+chosen words failed him; he stumbled from unconnected epigram to
+inappropriate metaphor; he clung to half-remembered phrases, and with
+a sinking heart repeated them, and repeated them--and repeated them.
+He shut his eyes. The great effort was going to be just a failure of
+fine talk--the mere scrap-heap of a speech.
+
+He looked down at the brown water, followed it eastward below the
+bridge; and then his eyes were caught by a small torpedo-boat lying
+opposite at a mooring in front of St. Thomas's Hospital. And the
+aspect of this familiar thing smote him down to the depths of
+abasement. But for presumption he might now be in command of a great
+battle-ship doing the things he had been trained to do, and doing them
+with confidence. And his thoughts swept him away to Spithead; and the
+vision of a great, dark battle-ship, sitting steadily in a tumbled sea
+between Southsea and the Isle of Wight, clear of the Solent fairway,
+and west of the checkered forts, rose up and drew him for a moment as
+with chains. He hated his ambitions; he thought of this dreadful hour
+to which they had lured him. He saw the day pass and the evening come
+up out of the sea and the lights begin to glow upon the foreshore, a
+cluster at Southsea pier, a little chain running up the hill of Union
+Street, at Ryde, and close down by the water's edge tiny lights in
+cottages and houses like glow-worms in a forest.
+
+Then another step sounded on the pavement and he turned away from his
+vision. After all he might be laughing at all these fears in an hour's
+time, he took the courage to reflect; and he went up the stairs and
+across the lobby into the Chamber itself. He looked for a seat on the
+second bench below the gangway, but the House was full.
+
+Colonel Challoner, again passed over in the choice of
+under-secretaries, looked up at him from the corner seat, and noticed
+the blue-book and a volume of Hansard under his arm.
+
+"Are you going to speak?" he asked.
+
+"If I can get called," said Rames.
+
+Challoner made room for him at his side.
+
+"I mean to say a word or two myself," he said, "but we shall probably
+neither of us get a chance. Those front-bench men think it beneath
+their dignity to take less than an hour."
+
+Certainly, so far as the first speech was concerned, Colonel Challoner
+was right. It was delivered from the opposition bench by an
+ex-minister, William Kenway, a man of a kindly and generous
+disposition who yet managed by some perversity of tact to rasp the
+temper of the House from wall to wall. For a full hour he stood there
+now, saying the wrong thing with determination, giving little lessons
+with the air of a school-master, irritating by a certain priggishness
+his friends behind him as well as his opponents in front.
+
+Rames sat and listened. He realized that the very opportunity which he
+wanted was being given to him. Kenway, with a white paper in his hand,
+came to the problem of Asiatic immigration. Rames was no longer trying
+to remember the consecution of his speech. He sat waiting for the long
+speech to end, making a note or two, grasping at a beginning for his
+speech, and clinging firmly to it.
+
+When Kenway sat down, he found himself standing upon his legs. He was
+aware at once that some one was standing beside him, Colonel
+Challoner. Both men had risen. Almost he resumed his seat, and then he
+heard his name called by the chairman, and from a very long way off an
+encouraging cheer reached his ears.
+
+He was conscious of the lack of a table in front of him or the barrier
+of a platform--something on which he could rest a hand. He felt
+strangely defenceless without it. He faltered through his opening
+sentences in a voice which sounded to his ears weak and thin as a
+ghost's. He saw a member take off his hat on the opposite benches,
+rise, and make his way out; and at once he was certain that he was
+making a dismal failure. Suddenly he remembered one member who had
+risen to speak, had been called upon and had sunk back in his seat
+without uttering more than a few unintelligible words. Was his to be
+the same fate, he asked himself? And asking himself he lost the thread
+of what he was saying and with a gasp retrieved it.
+
+"It seemed to me," he said in describing the scene to Cynthia, "that I
+stood there dumb and helpless for twenty seconds. As a matter of fact,
+the interval was so short that not even my neighbors noticed it. I
+suppose that I only paused for the fraction of a second, really."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia, and the trifle remained in her mind.
+
+He was speaking, too, with a haze before his eyes and his hands
+clutching at the edges of his coat. But he went on, and then quite
+suddenly the haze thinned so that he saw the House and he heard his
+voice ringing out clear and firm, not loud nor arrogant, filling the
+Chamber and with just that note of deference which he had planned to
+strike and had struck because the deference was sincere. He turned in
+his place. He was no longer conscious of the need of a table in front
+of him; he looked down the House toward the clock above the entrance
+door, and he saw that the bar was thronged with members. Curiosity, no
+doubt, had brought them in from the library and the smoking-room and
+the lobby when his name went up on the tape--he had, after all, a
+reputation. He, the least romantic of men, had some aura of romance
+about him in that assembly; enough at all events to invite a momentary
+interest. But they stayed, and as he spoke in a voice that went
+steadily forward with the rhythm of marching men, he saw now one, now
+another come out from the throng at the bar and slip into a seat. With
+a throb of joy he realized that he was not failing, that now he was
+not going to fail. The House had filled since he had risen and on all
+the benches there was a great quiet. He turned toward the Speaker's
+chair. The space at the sides of it was crowded too. He saw more than
+one cabinet-minister standing. Above, behind the grille, he saw the
+big hats and shadowy forms of the ladies in the gallery, and here and
+there the gleam of an ermine stole against the light behind them. That
+happened to him again which had happened in the Corn Exchange at
+Ludsey. He turned over the consecutions of his argument like the pages
+of a printed book. He was master of himself. He worked in his
+predecessor's points and replied to them with force and without
+offence because they were just the points he had foreseen. He provoked
+interruptions from his opponents; he had foreseen them and was ready,
+and the cheers broke out from the benches about him and behind him. He
+spoke for just twenty minutes. The applause, generous and friendly,
+came from both sides of the House when he resumed his seat. The
+Prime-Minister leaned across the gangway and shook him by the hand.
+And as for the great battle-ship at Spithead, anybody could have it as
+a gift.
+
+Rames leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. So the third step
+of the great career had been taken. He had been chosen candidate, he
+had been elected member, he had made something of a small triumph out
+of his maiden speech. Now he would wait without any hurry. He would
+make one speech more later on in the session, perhaps two--not more
+than two, certainly. And next session he would plunge boldly and take
+up his part in the impromptu debating on the Committee stages of
+Bills. In that work lay the real test of parliamentary capacity.
+
+
+Thus he planned, and content with his plan he opened his eyes again.
+At once he was made uneasy. He met the eyes of a small, white-haired
+man with a deeply lined, brown face who was watching him fixedly from
+the benches opposite. This was Albert Coulter, a man of many
+expeditions in untravelled countries, when there were countries still
+untravelled, whose name had become a signal for dark whispers. A
+callous selfishness, when selfishness might mean the life or health of
+his companions, and a relentless severity with his natives, was
+rightly or wrongly imputed. The survivors of his expeditions came back
+with queer stories. But he had never failed until the moment, when at
+the age of fifty and with the looks of seventy, he had entered the
+House of Commons. There, an interesting yet ineffective figure, he sat
+day after day, solitary, disliked, with brooding eyes under a bristle
+of gray eyebrows which seemed to be haunted with sinister memories of
+deep tropical forests and days long past. His eyes rested upon Harry
+Rames now, not enviously, not encouragingly, but without expression,
+almost indeed like the eyes of a dead man. Their fixed gaze chilled
+the blood of Harry Rames and all his satisfaction was marred. He had
+to move from his place and beyond the reach of those brooding eyes
+before he shook the impression off. And even now so distinct was it in
+his memories that he omitted it altogether and deliberately from the
+story he told that afternoon to Cynthia Daventry. He related in its
+place another incident which had happened later in the evening.
+
+"We had a division," he said. "I was walking through the lobby and
+just at the turnstiles where the clerks tick off our names, I found
+Henry Smale in front of me. The R's and the S's go through the same
+turnstile. He turned round as I passed through behind him, and said to
+me in a low voice, 'You have the ear of the House now. Keep your eye
+on the treasury bench.' That from Smale, who was dissuading me to
+enter Parliament, means a good deal."
+
+Harry Rames turned and looked at Cynthia.
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia.
+
+There was a smile upon her face rather wistful, rather ironic.
+
+"So you have turnstiles in your House of Commons," she said slowly.
+
+"No. Did I say turnstiles?" he asked. "There's no actual barrier which
+revolves. But there's only room for one at a time to pass between the
+desks. The clerks stand at the desks and register your votes for
+publication. Otherwise where would party government be?"
+
+"You mean if the votes weren't published men would vote according to
+their convictions?"
+
+Rames nodded.
+
+"But it's a superficial view," he said. "You have got to take the sum
+of your policy. As a whole, is it better than the other fellow's?
+That's what you have to ask yourself when you are going to register a
+vote upon some particular point which may help to turn your government
+out and let the other fellows in."
+
+"Yes, I see that," said Cynthia; and once more her eyes fell upon the
+_Times_ and she was suddenly conscious of a queer pride. Others to-day
+were aware of the success which Harry Rames had made; probably she
+alone was aware of the thought, and the apprehension and the
+tribulation of soul which had gone to the making of the success. To
+the others he would just be one of the inevitably successful--what
+indeed she had herself been wont to think him. To-day, however, he was
+to her human as he had never been. He had shown himself to her,
+bleating with fear like an ordinary man at the approach of the fateful
+moment which was to put him to the test. He had drawn the picture with
+a sense of humor, but he had not blurred it. Would he have drawn it
+for any one else, she asked herself? She turned impulsively toward
+him:
+
+"I wanted you to come to me this week," she said impulsively. "And I
+thank you very much for telling me not merely that you succeeded, but
+how near you were to breaking down. But," and she hesitated for a few
+moments, "I should have been still more grateful if you had come to me
+the day before you made your speech."
+
+"I almost did," said Harry Rames.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XIX
+
+                            AND A PROPOSAL
+
+
+Cynthia smiled, but she did not believe.
+
+"I think," she said, "that this is the very first time you have gone
+beyond the truth to say a pleasant thing to me."
+
+"It is the truth," he insisted. "I almost did more than come to you. I
+almost asked you to let me inflict my speech on you before I made it
+in the House."
+
+"Oh, I wish you had!" cried Cynthia. "It would have made a difference
+to me this last week--a great difference." Then she turned swiftly
+toward Harry Rames with a glance of distrust. "Why didn't you come
+then?" she asked coldly. "There was nothing to hinder you. You knew
+that you would be very welcome. I should like to have known beforehand
+what you were going to say;" and once more a gentle wistfulness crept
+into her voice. "I should have liked also to have heard you in the
+House. I should have liked, in a word--not to have been shut out."
+
+"You weren't shut out," Harry Rames exclaimed. "You mustn't fancy
+that! It's not true. If I did not come, it was really because I had
+you in my thoughts. Yes. I stayed away deliberately because of a
+saying of Smale's which I know to be true, which I quoted to you at
+Ludsey."
+
+The distrust grew stronger in Cynthia's mind. What had Smale to do
+with the matter? Her face hardened. Harry Rames had, till this moment,
+at all events, been honest, had always stood apart in her eyes by
+reason of his honesty. Must she strip him now of that quality even as
+she had to do of the other, the imagined ones?
+
+"What saying?" she asked.
+
+"That many a man may cut a great figure upon the platforms who will
+never get the ear of the House of Commons. I wanted to be sure that I
+was not one of those--before I came to you."
+
+A particular significance in the intonation of the words warned
+her--and then troubled her. She looked at him swiftly, and as swiftly
+looked away. The blood mounted into her face and flushed her throat.
+
+"I wanted to be sure that I should come not quite empty-handed," he
+continued.
+
+Cynthia made no pretence to misunderstand him, and no answer. All was
+explained to her now: why he had stayed away, why he now returned--all
+those particulars which he had told her she might have guessed, and
+not one of which had to this moment entered her head. She had never
+stepped beyond the border-line of friendship in her thoughts of Harry
+Rames--never once. She was startled now that she was asked to. She
+needed time to adjust herself to the new point of view. He had been
+honest with her, after all. That was her first instinctive
+recollection.
+
+"So I am here now to ask you to marry me," he continued. He spoke very
+quietly and simply. He did not simulate any passion, and again in her
+heart comparing him with that other wooer in the Row, she thanked him
+for his honesty.
+
+Still she made no answer, but calmness had returned to her. She sat
+looking out of the window, straight ahead of her, with her chin
+propped in the palm of her hand. She was quite still, and the
+stillness of her attitude was no greater than the stillness of her
+mind. There was no throb of joy at her heart. But Harry Rames had been
+honest with her, and she had been taught not to expect so very much.
+
+"I think you know whom you will be marrying," he resumed. "I have
+tried to make what I know about myself clear to you as well as to me.
+You once agreed that I left you no illusions about me."
+
+"Yes. On the platform at the Corn Exchange in Ludsey," Cynthia
+replied. "I remember quite well. I remember your answer too: That you
+did not mean to."
+
+"Yes," said Harry Rames. "That was my answer."
+
+Cynthia paused for a few seconds. Then in her turn she began to
+question him.
+
+"So even then you were thinking that if you succeeded in
+Parliament--this afternoon would come?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Perhaps even before then?"
+
+"Yes, even before then."
+
+Cynthia nodded her head. With a smile in which there was irony and a
+little of her old resentment, she remarked:
+
+"Yes, you have always looked ahead."
+
+Harry replied simply and gravely:
+
+"Always."
+
+"Thank you," said Cynthia.
+
+She thanked him because he was so perfectly honest with her. He
+admitted--for his words were no less than such an admission--that he
+had deliberately thought of her because she had money. On the other
+hand, it was true that he had stood by and left the opportunity open
+for any one to snatch until he could himself bring something into the
+partnership. That weighed with her in his favor.
+
+"Will you tell me when you first began to think of me in this way?"
+she asked with an earnestness which to Harry Rames appeared quite
+singular. To his direct mind the one question which needed answering
+was whether she meant to marry him or no.
+
+"Does the exact date matter?"
+
+"Very much."
+
+Rebellion again broke out in Cynthia. "I believe it is quite a usual
+question for maidens to ask on these occasions. But no doubt I ought
+to have asked it with a deeper bashfulness."
+
+Harry reflected. Here was one of the nice subtleties of the feminine
+mind which somehow he must satisfy.
+
+"It was after I had driven out once or twice from Ludsey to see you.
+That is as near as I can put it. It was after I had got to know you a
+little."
+
+"As soon, in a word, as you concluded that I would suit the place."
+Though the sentence was phrased still in the ironical form, the irony
+had suddenly gone from her voice. She was so relieved that a smile
+trembled about her lips. Her next words gave the reason of her relief.
+
+"So really and truly you want me personally--as well."
+
+The question would have sounded vague to a stranger, but these two
+understood that it was her fortune which she omitted to name. Cynthia
+knew, as she could not but know, that her wealth had first set his
+thoughts running toward her. But it was some personal quality which in
+the end had decided him to ask for her. He must have money--yes, but
+other help than money as well. It was a satisfaction to her pride that
+he found it in her.
+
+"Yes," he returned. "A wife can do so much for a man in politics if
+she is the right wife. I should be very glad if you would marry me,"
+Rames resumed. "I think that we should get along together very well,
+and together we might do important things."
+
+"Be important things," Cynthia corrected.
+
+Harry Rames smiled.
+
+"That's an old quarrel of ours, Cynthia. I mean 'do' this time."
+
+Cynthia looked at him quickly. She was in the mood to find in that
+hope the strongest of appeals.
+
+"You really think so?"
+
+"I do. I should owe so very much to you. I should be conscious of my
+debt. I should try with all my strength to pay it back."
+
+Cynthia gave him her face frankly now. A smile of confidence quite lit
+it up.
+
+"I have no doubt of that," she said; and then the smile faded, and
+there came a look of longing.
+
+"But I would rather, of course, that it were work for love of me, than
+work to repay me. There's a difference, isn't there? But I suppose one
+can't have everything, and--perhaps--I might be content to help you
+on."
+
+She fell again to a wistful silence, pursuing the vision of a
+happiness which might have been down an avenue of bright imagined
+years. The happiness did exist. She had seen the evidences of it often
+enough. All men were not _tant soit peu cochons_, as she had once
+heard an unhappy French lady describe them, nor were all women
+neurotic. She had heard of lovers who felt that they had been waiting
+for one another since the beginning of the world. But it seemed that
+such happiness was for others, not for her.
+
+"Tell me!" she said. "When you were making your speech, after the
+agitation had passed and when you were master of yourself, you looked
+up to the ladies' gallery, you said, and noticed the women behind the
+grille?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well--it is a little difficult to ask the question--But"--she stopped
+for a moment or two, and then went on with an appealing timidity,
+while the color once more mounted into her face--"but I suppose that
+then--when you knew you were making a success--it never came into your
+mind that you would have liked to have got me up there in the gallery
+while you were speaking?"
+
+The temptation to lie was strong upon Harry Rames now. The very
+timidity of her appeal moved him. It taught him that the truth would
+hurt her much more than he had ever dreamed. He hesitated. For the
+first time in her company he was at a loss.
+
+"The truth, please," she pleaded earnestly. "You said that your mind
+was free, that you could stand outside yourself and look on at what
+you were doing, as artists do. It never once occurred to you that you
+wanted me up there in the ladies' gallery, too, at the moment of your
+success, to witness it--to--yes, to share it with you?"
+
+The word was out at last--the word which she had been striving with
+her modesty to reach.
+
+"Be frank, please," she prayed.
+
+Harry Rames was at a loss how to wrap the brutal truth up so that it
+should not hurt overmuch. He had no other intention at this moment. He
+was for once not considering what effect his answer would have upon
+his own prospects and future.
+
+"You were in my thoughts," he said. "That's true. For I was thinking
+that now I could come to you. But, yes, I wanted to be sure of myself
+first."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia slowly, and with humility she analyzed the meaning
+of his words. "You never thought of me as a kind of inspiration to an
+even greater success in the future if you succeeded now, or as a kind
+of consolation if you failed. It may be vanity to say so, but I think
+that is what a woman in whom you were interested, and who was
+interested in you, would have liked you to have thought. I was, after
+all, shut out, wasn't I? I was to hear of the achievement after it was
+done and over, and I was neither to share the preliminary fears, nor
+feel the revulsion when the triumph came."
+
+"Yes, but look at it from my point of view. There are many who want to
+marry you--men with something to offer. It wouldn't have been fair if
+I didn't bring something in my basket too."
+
+"Fair!" cried Cynthia scornfully. "Oh, I know, that's the point of
+view of the man--at least," and as she realized that she had been
+unjust, her face dimpled to smiles, "of the men one rather likes." For
+it occurred to her that Lord Helmsdale would have been troubled by no
+such scruples.
+
+"No," she said. "You wouldn't have borrowed another man's thoroughbred
+so that you might cut a dashing figure while you proposed."
+
+Rames had no idea of what she meant, and he behaved as he usually did
+when unintelligible things were said to him by women. He asked for no
+explanations and just took no notice of Cynthia's words. He sat
+quietly at her side and waited.
+
+The clock struck the hour. He put his hand into his pocket, and at the
+movement Cynthia started.
+
+"There is no hurry," said Harry Rames. "I was only getting out my
+cigarette case. May I smoke?"
+
+"Of course," replied Cynthia; she was relieved that she need not
+answer upon the moment. She was still in a great perplexity; and while
+Harry Rames smoked his cigarette she sought this way and that for a
+light to guide her. Here was not the marriage of which she had
+dreamed. No. But he was honest. It was possible, too, that she might
+be able to help him on, as he had said. And it might be well worth
+doing. It might be true that the ambitious men are the world's best
+servants, and not the men possessed with ideas. Ideas, she remembered,
+with a bitter little smile at her folly, had once given the right of
+entrance to her enchanted garden. But she had travelled far from its
+gateway, and the flowers were all dead in it, and its pathways
+overgrown. It might be that the fixed idea meant the narrow vision.
+Harry Rames might be right; and if he were, by helping him on, she
+would make her money of real and great value. It was a gray world
+anyway--and Harry Rames was honest. She could trust him--though he
+wounded her.
+
+She turned suddenly toward him.
+
+"Do you remember the supper party at Ludsey?" she asked.
+
+"Of course," he replied: "And the little Frenchman, Monsieur Poizat."
+
+"I was not thinking of him," said Cynthia. A sentence or two spoken at
+that table by Colonel Challoner had leaped into her memory. Politics
+meant color in the lives of men. It was the craving for color which
+fired enthusiasm in the towns of the provinces. Well, she herself
+craved for bright colors in her life too. Might she not get them out
+of the paint-pot of politics just as men did?
+
+"If I were to say yes," she remarked, "I would not be content to be
+merely the witness of your success. I must share the fears which go to
+make it. I could not sit quiet and twirl my thumbs, shut out from the
+hopes and apprehensions and endeavors, and just smile admiringly at
+the result. I must share everything."
+
+"Of course," said Harry Rames. "From the moment you say 'yes,' you
+share everything. I meant that too when I said that I needed your
+help."
+
+He spoke gravely and sincerely, and again Cynthia said, "Thank you."
+
+She sat for a little while longer, hesitating upon the brink. To say
+"yes" would solve the question of a companion. Oh, certainly, there
+were practical advantages in the acceptance of Harry Rames's proposal.
+She would have to abandon the hope of beauty in her life. Color,
+excitement, interest, she might get. But the beautiful life would not
+be for her. Still, under no circumstances, perhaps, might it have been
+for her. No one, she reflected, and with some sadness--no one by his
+approach had ever set her heart beating to a quicker tune. Perhaps
+there was some defect in her, some want of human passion, she
+reflected, which placed her in the second rank of women. When Cynthia
+was humble there was no girl so humble as Cynthia. And, after all,
+Harry Rames was honest. To that one stable point all her questions
+brought her back.
+
+She moved at last, and Harry Rames rose and stood before her.
+
+"Well?" he asked.
+
+Cynthia dropped her hands loose at her sides and answered with a
+smile:
+
+"Why not?"
+
+It was in those words that she accepted him. There was no spirit in
+them, and very little of expectation. But she had come to expect not
+very much; and she had travelled a long way from the garden of her
+dreams.
+
+"After all, there's a turnstile in this affair, too," she said, with a
+note of bitterness. "A very important one too. For it leads not into a
+garden, but straight to the treasury bench."
+
+Harry Rames was bewildered. But he made no comment. Women were queer,
+and it was good to disregard their moments of excitement. Cynthia
+sprang up the next moment and laid her hand upon his arm.
+
+"Oh, yes, we'll follow Mr. Smale's advice, Harry," she cried, "and
+we'll keep our eyes on the treasury bench. Why not? Now go, and come
+back to-morrow."
+
+She was laughing a little wildly, and Harry Rames had the sense to
+take her at her word. He went out of the room, and Cynthia flung
+herself down upon the cushions and cried for an hour by the clock.
+
+"Well," she said to herself at the end, as she rose and dried her
+eyes, "Mr. Benoliel will be satisfied. That's one thing." Almost she
+seemed to blame Mr. Benoliel for the fact of her engagement.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XX
+
+                              AT CULVER
+
+
+The odd thing in the affair, however, was that Mr. Benoliel did not
+seem satisfied. Cynthia asked him over the telephone the next day to
+come to her, and when he came she told him of her engagement.
+
+"But no one knows of it as yet except yourself," she added; "and no
+one is to know, for the present. I want it kept a secret."
+
+"Oh!" said Mr. Benoliel, looking at her curiously. "And why?"
+
+"There will be a certain amount of ill-natured talk," Cynthia returned
+in a confusion. "And I want the time for it to be as short as
+possible. It will cease after we are married."
+
+"People will say that Rames is an adventurer, who is marrying you for
+your money," said Mr. Benoliel bluntly, and Cynthia turned on him with
+spirit.
+
+"Lord Helmsdale's mother will, and other mothers would have said the
+same of Lord Helmsdale if I had married him."
+
+"So it's to spare the feelings of Harry Rames that you are keeping
+your engagement secret," said Mr. Benoliel with an ironical wonder. "I
+should never have suspected him of such delicate susceptibilities."
+
+"Well, I should be uncomfortable too!" cried Cynthia, bending puzzled
+and indignant brows at him. "I think you are quite horrid."
+
+Benoliel sustained her indignation unabashed.
+
+"Is that the only reason, Cynthia?" he asked.
+
+"You wanted me married," Cynthia continued. "You ought to be very,
+very pleased."
+
+Mr. Benoliel, however, was not to be lured from his question into a
+discussion upon the propriety of his feelings. He repeated it.
+
+"Is fear of gossip the only reason, Cynthia, which makes you keep your
+engagement secret?"
+
+Cynthia again showed signs of confusion. Mr. Benoliel wore his air of
+omniscience. She sat down upon a chair.
+
+"What do you mean, Mr. Benoliel?"
+
+"This," said he. "I have noticed that the young ladies who keep their
+engagements secret are not, as a rule, very much in love with the men
+they are engaged to. They leave themselves a loop-hole of escape."
+
+Cynthia's cheeks flamed. Certainly she had intended to spare Harry
+Rames and herself some uncomfortable weeks. But would she have minded
+those weeks had she cared for him? The question came swiftly, and as
+swiftly was answered. Had she cared for him she would have wanted to
+wear him like a ribbon on her breast for all the world to see. She
+realized it with a pang. She would have run quickly forward to meet
+the gossip and do battle. But she had not run forward. It was true
+that she had left herself a pathway of retreat, and rather by instinct
+than from any deliberate plan. Her wariness had prompted her. Once
+more she had wanted to be safe. But nothing of this was she going to
+acknowledge to Mr. Benoliel.
+
+"I think you are extraordinarily horrid," she said again with a cold
+dignity, and hoped that her stateliness would crush her inquisitor.
+
+"When do you propose to marry, then?" he asked.
+
+"Just before Whitsuntide. The House will rise for ten days, I hear, at
+the least. We shall announce the marriage just before the House
+rises;" and that indeed was the plan upon which she had agreed only
+that morning with Harry Rames.
+
+"Then there is no hurry," said Mr. Benoliel. "Perhaps you and Captain
+Rames will pay me a visit in the country before Whitsuntide comes."
+
+He spoke as though he accepted the situation, and turned to other
+subjects, fearing to confirm Cynthia in obstinacy by any show of
+opposition.
+
+"Certainly," she said; "we shall be pleased to come;" and a month
+later she and Harry Rames came one Friday afternoon to Culver.
+
+The house stood within hearing of the bells of Ludsey, but on that
+side of the city opposite to the White House. Benoliel had built it
+himself, and to those who knew the man but slightly it was an
+astonishing production. Captain Rames, for instance, whose taste was
+not very meticulous, never ceased to marvel at it. Even this Friday
+afternoon, as the car swung round a turn of the country road and the
+thing stood before him, he contemplated it with amazement. It was
+nothing but a monstrous new villa of red and yellow brick, a
+pretentious ghastliness of towers and flashing glass rising from the
+middle of a small bare field within twenty yards of the roadway. An
+avenue of fir-trees not yet shoulder-high wound to the front door, and
+there was no need for it to wind. Circular beds of glaring flowers
+disfigured the new lawns, and little bushes of evergreens, which would
+one distant day make an effort to be shrubberies, gave to the house a
+most desolate and suburban look. It seemed wonderful to Harry Rames
+that so nice and delicate a person as Mr. Benoliel could bear to live
+in it at all; and still more wonderful that with a dozen of the most
+beautiful houses in England bosomed in deep meadows and whispered to
+by immemorial elms, within an easy motor-ride to choose from as his
+models, he should have devised this unconscionable edifice.
+
+Sir James Burrell, the surgeon, however, who was sitting opposite to
+Harry Rames in the car, and next to Cynthia, took a different view. He
+gazed at the house with satisfaction. For it would add yet another
+subtle paragraph to his character sketch of Mr. Benoliel.
+
+"How extraordinary," he cried, "and yet how like the man! That's just
+the house which Benoliel would have built. Only one had not the
+insight to guess it. I love it!" and he leaned his head out of the
+window and chuckled at the building's grotesqueness. "Yes, I love it.
+The fitness of things appeals to me." And he turned to the astonished
+Captain Rames. "You don't see the exquisite appropriateness of
+that--let us not call it a house--that detached residence to Isaac
+Benoliel?"
+
+"Well, I don't," said Harry Rames. "He always seemed to me to set up
+as a lover of beautiful things."
+
+"And the love is genuine," said Sir James, fairly off at a gallop upon
+his hobby. "He doesn't set up. The love is almost a quality of his
+race. Yes, but his race doesn't always know what things are beautiful.
+There's the explanation of that building--race, which confounds logic
+and is quite untroubled by inconsistencies. There's Benoliel's race in
+every line of it. He's of the Orient. He loves flamboyancy and
+gaudiness. He may conceal it carefully from us. But every now and then
+it must break out, and it has run riot here. Does the East repair and
+mend? No, it lets its old buildings decay and builds afresh. That's
+why Mr. Benoliel passes by your stately houses all up for sale in
+their parks and builds this villa. Remember, Captain Rames, though Mr.
+Benoliel talks with you and walks with you, he doesn't think with you.
+Behind those old tired eyes of his, he thinks as the East thinks."
+
+Thus Sir James Burrell, and the car stopped at the front door before
+he could utter another word. He was not sorry, nor indeed were the
+other occupants of the carriage. He was merely trying his new
+paragraph on the dog, so to speak. He needed time to eliminate the
+unnecessary, and make it vivid with the single word, and fix it up
+with a nice juxtaposition of paradoxes and altogether to furbish it
+for presentation.
+
+"He does talk!" said Harry Rames to Cynthia.
+
+"Yes, doesn't he," she replied with a laugh, and then grew serious.
+"But I wonder whether he's right. I wonder whether Mr. Benoliel thinks
+and judges from principles which are true to him, but not true to us."
+Her eyes rested with a strange and thoughtful scrutiny on Harry's
+face.
+
+"Why should you trouble?" said Harry Rames.
+
+"It makes a little difference to me," said Cynthia. "Perhaps more than
+a little."
+
+For old Daventry's last words weighed upon her. He had bidden her in
+troubles and difficulties to seek advice from Isaac Benoliel. He had
+thought much of his wisdom. She had herself accepted it as a thing
+beyond question, and a timely help. Now, she began to ask herself, was
+his wisdom, if it was born of the East and tempered by the instincts
+of his race, fit for service in her generation and for her people? She
+pondered the question during the next two days, and leaned more and
+more to Sir James Burrell's way of thinking from a trivial reason; the
+inside of Culver agreed so completely with its exterior. Its
+flamboyancy set the eyes aching. Its wall papers were indigestibly
+rich with colored flowers, and never was there a blue so vividly blue
+as the blue of his velvet curtains and triple-pile carpets. It is true
+that there were treasures of art in Culver, glowing pictures of the
+early Flemish school, with their crowds of figures, each one a
+finished miniature, and behind the crowds the clear sky and
+translucent air; there were marvels of jade, and glorious little
+statues of silver and marble, but their delicate beauty was spoilt and
+lost in the riot of gorgeousness which framed them.
+
+One homely place alone there was in that building. The great hall, all
+colonnades and galleries, occupied the centre of the house. But on
+each side of the wide chimney, where of an evening, even in the
+summer, a fire usually burned, a great screen was drawn; and these
+screens enclosed a space before the fire set about with comfortable
+chairs, a sofa or two, and little mahogany tables, and made of it a
+place of comfort. In this space on the Sunday night Cynthia came to
+grips with Isaac Benoliel, and understood at last his life, and
+something of his philosophy.
+
+It was eleven o'clock, or a little later. The ladies were retiring for
+the night. Cynthia herself had her foot upon the lowest step of the
+stair, and was thinking that after all she was to be spared an
+argument, when Mr. Benoliel came from the corridor of the smoking-room
+where he had left the men.
+
+"Will you give me a few minutes, Cynthia?" he asked, and she turned at
+once and walked to the fire. She stood with a foot upon the rail of
+the hearth and a hand upon the mantel-shelf, quiet but mutinous. Mr.
+Benoliel followed her and sat down in a straight-backed arm-chair,
+facing the fire, and a little way behind her.
+
+"You have not yet announced your engagement, Cynthia?" he began.
+
+"No."
+
+"Yet Whitsuntide is very close. Perhaps you have thought better of
+it?"
+
+"No."
+
+Mr. Benoliel looked at her as she stood, aggressively showing him her
+back, and smiled at her, with some amusement, a great deal of
+affection, and a little pity.
+
+"Of course," he said, "I have not much right to interfere, and yet I
+should like you to hear, Cynthia, what I have to say. Otherwise I
+shall fail your father."
+
+Cynthia turned about at once, and her manner toward him changed with
+her movement. The appeal of his voice and words had its effect upon
+her, and not that alone. Mr. Benoliel was so neat and supple, he sat
+with so upright a figure in his chair, his hair was so black and sleek
+and thick that she was seldom really conscious of his age. But at
+times, as now, when by chance she looked straight into his eyes and
+noticed their fatigue and their patience, and how the light had quite
+gone out of them, it came upon her almost as a shock that this was an
+old, old man; and because she was surprised she exaggerated his age,
+and gave to him in return for his pity the cruel pity of youth. She
+was in the mood almost to admit his right to interfere. But her gift
+of silence and the weariness which had become instinctive checked her.
+She moved forward to him with a gracious deference--that was all--and
+said, standing in front of him:
+
+"I am glad of course to hear anything you have to say, Mr. Benoliel.
+You disapprove of my marriage."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Yet you wanted me married."
+
+"To the right person."
+
+"Lord Helmsdale," said Cynthia, with a little pout of disdain.
+
+"Youth should marry youth," returned Mr. Benoliel.
+
+He looked the girl over from head to foot. She stood in front of him
+in her delicate frock of soft white satin and lace, long-limbed and
+slender, with the gloss of youth upon the heavy curls of her fair
+hair, and the rose of youth on her cheeks, and the sheen of youth upon
+her white and pretty shoulders. She was the color of a flower, and had
+the freshness of a flower upon a morning of dew. From the tip of her
+slim satin slipper to the ribbon in her hair, she was dressed with a
+daintiness which set her beauty proudly off. To Mr. Benoliel she was
+radiant and wonderful with youth.
+
+"Yes," he repeated, "youth should marry youth, Cynthia, especially
+when it is such rare youth as yours."
+
+Cynthia was pleased. She knew a compliment when she heard it.
+
+"You have shifted your ground, Mr. Benoliel," she said, smiling down
+at him.
+
+"No," he answered.
+
+"It was social position, which you wanted me to marry in Lord
+Helmsdale."
+
+"That, too. Yes. I don't make light of it. I am old enough not to blow
+a trumpet round the walls of Jericho in these days," he said. "But I
+did not tell you all my thought. I am an old man, and there are
+certain things I am shy of talking about. I am like you in that,
+Cynthia, eh? We neither of us wear our hearts upon our sleeves or are
+fond of talking sentiment. But I am compelled to to-night. I think the
+most beautiful thing in the world is a couple of young lovers facing
+all the unknown future, hand in hand, high of hope and courage, and
+serious with the uplifting seriousness of love. Now you are not in
+love, Cynthia, and he's not young. So, from my point of view, on both
+sides this marriage falls short of the marriage which should be."
+
+"Captain Rames is not old," replied Cynthia. She omitted all reference
+to the point in which she herself failed according to Benoliel's
+standard. Isaac Benoliel noticed her admission, and, though he made no
+comment, he became still more determined to prevent the marriage if by
+any means he could. He had drawn his bow at a venture. With that touch
+of charlatanism which made him delight in posing as omniscient, he had
+stated as a fact what he only suspected. But she would have denied the
+suggestion, and indignantly, had it been false. He was sure now that
+she did not care for Harry Rames as a young woman should care for the
+man she is to marry. Moreover there had been a note of involuntary
+regret in Cynthia's voice as she had answered him. It seemed that she
+too agreed with him as to what should have been, and grieved that it
+was not to be.
+
+"No," he conceded, "Captain Rames is not old. But neither is he young.
+He is forty, or thereabouts. He has lived by eighteen years longer
+than you have. And so--I will tell you the truth, Cynthia"--and he
+leaned forward with his hands upon his knees and his eyes shrewdly
+watching her face--"and so I am afraid. Yes, I look forward into your
+future, and I am afraid."
+
+He saw Cynthia wince. So often had she spoken just such words to
+herself. Ever since she had crouched by the door in the dark room at
+the estancia, fear had walked at her heels with its shadow thrown upon
+the road beyond her feet. Was it to lie in front of her all her life?
+Here was her chosen adviser thinking her thoughts. She was not to be
+comforted by Sir James Burrell's reasonings. Mr. Benoliel might be
+altogether compact of the Orient. None the less his words knocked
+shrewdly at her heart. She sank down at the end of a sofa close at Mr.
+Benoliel's side, her face all troubled and discouraged.
+
+"But I accepted Harry so that I might be safe," she cried tremulously,
+"so that I might no longer be afraid," and then sat with her cheeks
+afire, conscious that she had betrayed herself.
+
+"I mean--" she corrected herself hastily.
+
+"Just what you said, Cynthia," rejoined Mr. Benoliel. Once more he had
+shot his arrow at a venture and reached the mark. He had now for the
+first time the key to her. Much was explained to him. But he spoke as
+though the explanation had long been known to him.
+
+"Yes, ever since I have known you, you have lived in fear, Cynthia,"
+he said.
+
+Cynthia did not again deny the truth. She found a better argument in
+the recollection of old Mr. Daventry's death-bed.
+
+"But there was no reason for the fear," she cried. "It was groundless.
+I tortured myself for nothing. It was all due to a foolish mistake."
+She hesitated, choosing her words so that they might carry some
+sort of conviction and yet reveal nothing. "The mistake arose
+because--people--were silent--and they were silent because they wished
+to spare, and thought that knowledge would hurt. It was the silence
+which hurt."
+
+"This time," said Mr. Benoliel, "silence shall not do harm. Nor shall
+a thought to spare. I will be frank with you as to why I am afraid, if
+you will listen to me. I shall have to tell you a little about myself.
+I shall not spare myself."
+
+He spoke with reluctance. For he was reticent about himself. Cynthia
+realized suddenly how very little she knew of him, though she probably
+knew him more intimately than any one else, except the separated wife
+in Eaton Square. He had kept his secrets better than she had kept
+hers. Now he was going to reveal himself, and certainly to open old
+wounds for her sake.
+
+"Thank you," she said gently. "I shall know of what you are afraid, of
+something perhaps which I may now be able to avert. But I ought to
+tell you at once, that nothing which you say can change me."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXI
+
+                        MR. BENOLIEL'S WARNING
+
+
+Mr. Benoliel, however, persisted.
+
+"I daren't be silent, Cynthia. There are just three great crises--some
+would say three great catastrophes--birth, marriage, and death. The
+first and the last happen. They are outside our control. But about the
+middle one we do ourselves have a word to say; we can direct it. And
+it's the most important of them all. For it means the beginning of
+life for others, and the making or undoing of our own. Therefore you
+can't afford to trust to luck, Cynthia."
+
+"I am not trusting to luck at all," said Cynthia confidently.
+
+"Aren't you?" asked Mr. Benoliel. "You are proposing to marry a man,
+nineteen years of whose life--whose man's life--if you understand me,
+you have had no share in, no influence upon, and have now no real
+knowledge of. I am not suggesting that the conventional other woman is
+somewhere in the background, waiting to appear at the marriage
+ceremony with a baby in her arms," he continued with a smile. "But
+during those nineteen years how many things must have happened to him,
+trials and miseries and elations, to modify and mould his character?
+And since you are ignorant of the things which happened to him, how
+can you know the man?"
+
+"Yet I think I do know him," said Cynthia, and her confidence
+increased. She could meet Mr. Benoliel on this battle-ground. "And
+without laying claim of any particular insight. For he has always been
+careful that I should know him. From the very first day of our
+acquaintanceship he has spoken and acted quite deliberately in order
+that I might have no illusions about him. He has wanted me to know him
+just as clearly as he knows himself."
+
+Mr. Benoliel shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Does he know himself?" he asked.
+
+"Better than most men," said Cynthia. "He has set out to use himself
+as a machine and he has studied the machine unceasingly, its limits
+and its capacities, so that he might use it to its fullest power." She
+recalled Harry Rames's foresight, the careful laying of his plans, the
+queer modesty which underlay his ambition to excel. She turned
+triumphantly to Mr. Benoliel. "Oh, yes, he knows himself a good deal
+better than youth can know itself."
+
+"Ah!" said Mr. Benoliel, raising a warning finger. "I was waiting for
+that. I admit that youth doesn't know itself. But then it's not so
+important that it should. There's not, after all, as yet, so very much
+to know. But take it this way. Suppose that you and Captain Rames were
+both young and of an age! Suppose that he had the nineteen years which
+separate you in front of him instead of behind him!"
+
+"Well?" said Cynthia.
+
+"Why, then, when he reached forty, you, the wife, would know him
+better than he would know himself. A wife always does, if she lives in
+sympathy with her husband. I am presuming that. You would know him a
+good deal better than he knows himself now. The solitary nineteen
+years, of which now I dread the consequences, you would have shared.
+That's the point. And you wouldn't be running the danger you are
+running now."
+
+"What danger?" asked Cynthia impatiently. "Of what are you afraid?"
+
+"I am afraid of the latent things," Mr. Benoliel answered. "I am
+afraid of the seeds which may have been sown in him during these
+nineteen years, and of which the plant has not yet shown. I am afraid
+of latent desires, fancies, ambitions, latent cravings of which he is
+not yet aware, and which may some day come to life with overwhelming
+strength. Haven't you seen men suddenly change for no apparent reason
+to the ordinary observer, drop from all their established habits,
+begin again upon another plane? I have, and that's the change I am
+afraid of now. For it's one you would be powerless to avert, since you
+would not even suspect it until it had actually begun."
+
+He turned toward Cynthia, and with a smile upon his face summed up his
+argument.
+
+"Make no mistake, Cynthia. I am not making light of Captain Rames. In
+a way my fears are an actual tribute to the man. But I am afraid that
+out of a life so busy, and so keen as his has been, so fraught with
+incidents, so varied, something may suddenly seize him and catch him
+back and hold him; some craving, some ambition in which you will have
+no share, and which will separate you forever."
+
+He spoke with so much earnestness that Cynthia was impressed against
+her will. She was sure that he was speaking with knowledge of a
+kindred case. Certain words he had dropped made her certain that the
+kindred case was his own.
+
+"But supposing that such a change came," she said with hesitation,
+"must it separate?"
+
+"No," said Mr. Benoliel gently, "not if both bring to the marriage
+love. Then I don't think it need." He glanced at her swiftly, and said
+with a sudden sharp note in his voice: "But what if the marriage be
+only a bargain, Cynthia? What then?" and the blood rushed into the
+girl's face as he looked at her.
+
+"I'll tell you," he cried. His voice rose and a kind of sombre
+passion rang in it. "One party doesn't keep the bargain, or keeps it
+half-heartedly, as an irksome thing, and day by day the separation
+grows more complete, until you are living with your enemy or living
+quite alone."
+
+His voice dropped again to a whisper on the last words. He finished
+and sat lost wistfully in his own recollections, and forgetful of
+Cynthia at his side. After a little while his lips moved, and, as an
+old man will, he spoke a word or two to himself. Cynthia's ears caught
+the words.
+
+"It was my fault, and it couldn't be helped," he said, and so again
+fell into a long silence, with his eyes upon the coals of the fire. At
+length Cynthia touched him gently upon the sleeve.
+
+"I should like--the instance," she said timidly.
+
+Isaac Benoliel roused himself with a start.
+
+"Yes. I mean to give it you."
+
+"But I have no right to it," Cynthia insisted. "You must remember
+that."
+
+Benoliel shook his head and smiled.
+
+"You are a young girl starting out on life. You have every right to
+it, Cynthia."
+
+"I mean that it cannot change me," she said. "I would like to hear
+it--yes. But it is only that I may understand and be ready. And if you
+think that reason insufficient, don't tell me. I shall thank you, all
+the same, for offering to tell me."
+
+"You mustn't take the warning literally," he said. "I am of the East,
+you know. So is my story"; and a sudden relief swept over Cynthia. He
+was not of her people, his stand-point would not be hers, his warning
+might not apply to her. She thought of Sir James Burrell's words.
+Discouragement sat more lightly upon her than it had done during the
+last hour. There were certain curious phases in Mr. Benoliel's life
+which were not understood--sudden disappearances, for instance, during
+which no one met him to bring back to London the place of his abode.
+He was recognized as a man apart. Yes, he was of the Orient, and he
+might have no message for her ears.
+
+"It was my race which caught me back," Benoliel began, and Cynthia's
+courage increased. But his story was only just begun.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXII
+
+                    AND AN INSTANCE TO ENFORCE IT
+
+
+"You knew, I suppose, that I was married?"
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia.
+
+"And that my wife lives?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Mr. Benoliel nodded and shifted in his chair.
+
+"You have also very possibly heard a good many speculations about my
+origin?"
+
+"A good many," said Cynthia.
+
+"Well, here's the truth. I am a Barbary Jew. I come out of Morocco,
+the one country where you'll find the East to-day. Already in Tangier,
+the city given over to the foreigner, you will come across some traces
+of it. But ride for a few hours out of Tangier, straight to the south,
+pay your dues and cross the Red Hill, and you'll have both feet
+planted in the East, and may breathe in some of its enchantment. Go
+forward for another day or so, and you may pass perhaps some tall
+Arab, striding through the crowd outside El Ksar, carrying a stick
+stretched across his shoulder-blades. He'll speak to no one, stop for
+nothing, and all will make way for him. That's the Imperial Courier,
+on his way to the coast from Fez. He'll not sleep upon the way, and
+he'll take no food lest he should sleep. He'll be in Tangier three
+days after he has left Fez. He's the penny post. Ride on still
+further, cross the Sebou, travel over a vast plain by a track beaten
+by the feet of men and animals, yet strangely enough a track which
+never runs straight, though the plain is bare, but winds and turns,
+and winds again over the face of the country." Mr. Benoliel's eyes
+were fixed upon the fire; he spoke, lingering upon his words. He had
+grown forgetful of the purpose which drove him to reveal himself.
+Another and a strange aspect of him was presented suddenly to Cynthia.
+The dilettante and the exquisite had vanished. He spoke with a kind of
+yearning in his voice. His thoughts had drifted out through the
+doorway of his abominable villa. He was walking in the starshine over
+the wide empty plain of the Sebou, steeped in the enchantment of which
+he had spoken. Dimly she foresaw whither he was leading her.
+
+"Yet a day and you come to a wall of hills. Right ahead of you a cleft
+opens--that's the pass to Fez--a troublesome place, by the way, for
+Barbary Jews, since the Z'mur tribe has a way of taking toll in that
+narrow pass," Benoliel explained with a smile, and seemed to become
+once more aware of Cynthia's presence.
+
+"But a little further to the right from a break in the sky-line of the
+wall, a regular broad staircase seems to descend. It becomes a track,
+it zigzags across the face of the cliff, like a piece of string, to
+the plain. That's the road to my home," and he suddenly threw back his
+head and sat alert--"the city of Mequinez--the most eastern of the
+cities of the East, where the great gateway of mosaic, built by
+Christian captives, crumbles slowly to ruin, and the Jew must not wear
+shoes in the street, must walk barefoot with a black gaberdine upon
+his body, and a black cap upon his head. I ought to resent that, eh,
+Cynthia?"
+
+He looked at her, and answered the question himself. "But I was born
+there," and to him the answer was sufficient.
+
+"In Mequinez!" said Cynthia, striving to bridge the distance between
+this actual house in the green of Warwickshire and that distant city
+with the great mosaic gate in Barbary. Mr. Benoliel helped her a
+little to see it.
+
+"Yes, in the Mellah of Mequinez, Cynthia. That's where the Jews are
+crowded; an evil-smelling place you would call it, close and airless,
+with narrow alleys and houses huddling together, and a reek of rancid
+cookery. Yet it's a town of spaces; there's a good square before the
+gate. There are great silent palaces, with gardens and lakes. There's
+room in Mequinez--but not for us. We were shut up in the Mellah at six
+o'clock at night like children. And we were not all poor. The Mellah
+was gaudy with the bright handkerchiefs and dresses of the women, and
+their satin and silk scarves. There was a great deal of money in the
+Mellah of Mequinez, and a great deal more owed to it by its Moorish
+lords and masters in the city. But that didn't make any difference.
+Remember you are in the East in Mequinez, and a Moor who owed me a
+thousand pounds would make me strip off my shoes in the street, if he
+met me wearing them. A pretty picture of dignity, eh, Cynthia?"
+
+Cynthia did not answer. She was puzzled by Benoliel now, and she did
+not wish to interrupt him. He sat beside her, neat and trim and
+scrupulously clothed, with no jewellery but a pearl stud in his
+shirt-front, and pearl links at his cuffs, a person utterly modern and
+used to good manners. Yet he spoke of the Mellah in Mequinez not with
+the air of one recollecting unclean days, now, thank God, altogether
+done with, but rather with a kind of relish and contentment that such
+places should be. She had to cast an eye about that flamboyant hall
+before she could in any way reconcile Mr. Benoliel with his words.
+
+"I was not one of the rich, however," he continued. "I was a poor boy.
+I lived with an aunt, for both my parents were dead, and picked up a
+few copper flouss from time to time as I could. My aunt wasn't very
+kind. I was terrified of the Moors and their dark, contemptuous faces.
+There's a wall outside Mequinez, one of many which run out into the
+country and stop--but this one runs further than the rest. It was
+built or rather begun--for, like all things in Morocco, it was never
+finished--by some old king, so that a blind man might be able to find
+his way from Mequinez to Morocco City without a guide. I was always
+fascinated by that wall, and wanted to follow it--and never to come
+back. I hated Mequinez. Finally I ran away one morning with a pedlar
+of my race who wanted a boy to help him. He and I and a donkey, which
+carried his stock in trade, slipped out early from the town, and
+climbed northward onto a great rolling plateau of grass and asphodel,
+which reached away past the white sacred city of Mulai Idris, on the
+hill of Jebel Zarhon, past the Roman ruins of Volubilis, to that gap
+in the sky-line of the cliff where the road leads down to the plain of
+the Sebou. It was spring-time, there were irises up to our knees, the
+asphodel bushes were in flower and the air on this wide upland, with
+Jebel Zarhon on our right hand, was sweet and clean. We walked,
+brushing through the bushes, our shadows shifting as the sun rose--I
+had a sense of freedom. We stopped and ate at a little stream, and
+went on again. I can remember all the details of that day, even to a
+great glowing field of mustard, which shone like yellow silk----"
+
+Mr. Benoliel pulled himself up with a laugh.
+
+"But I needn't tell you about all that," he cried. "Here's the point.
+At the top of a roll in the turf, just by a miserable little tent
+village, I sat down upon the ground, while the pedlar bargained over
+his wares, and I took what I meant to be my last look at Mequinez. I
+could see the city below me far away, and very small in the sunshine,
+with its buildings all confused. I made up my mind then that I would
+be a rich man, and that never--never would I pass between the ruined
+walls up to the gateway of Mequinez again, that never--never would I
+look on it even from a spot so far away as this. We went over the brow
+of the hill, and I saw Mequinez no more. In a fortnight we came to
+Rabat upon the sea. There I learnt the great lesson."
+
+He sat still for a few moments, with his chin sunk upon his chest. He
+seemed to be wondering whether, after all, the lesson was so great a
+lesson, and worth the learning.
+
+"Yes?" asked Cynthia. "What lesson?"
+
+"We crossed the river from Sallee to Rabat, where the great plants and
+cactuses hang down the walls," he explained. "It was evening. I said
+to the pedlar: 'We must hurry to the Mellah.' And he answered: 'In
+Rabat there is no Mellah.'"
+
+"No Jews, then," said Cynthia.
+
+Mr. Benoliel shook his head and laughed.
+
+"That's what I thought, Cynthia. But I was wrong. There were Jews in
+Rabat, but they wore European clothes, they lived in houses, in the
+best positions--for of course they had all the money, that goes
+without saying, in Morocco as in most other places--they were people
+of importance, consuls and vice-consuls; they were allowed to walk in
+the governor's orange garden. I was astounded. I asked how this could
+be. And I got my answer between cuffs from my pedlar. It was the
+influence of the Europeans. Rabat is a sea-port with European trade.
+That was the great lesson: the Europeans do not have Mellahs."
+
+"So you decided to come to Europe," said Cynthia.
+
+"Not quite at once," said Mr. Benoliel shrewdly. "I was a boy and very
+ignorant. I had to find out first whether a Jew could make as much
+money in Europe as he could in Morocco."
+
+Cynthia laughed in spite of herself; and Mr. Benoliel quite
+misunderstood the reason of her laughter.
+
+"Well, I didn't know anything about Europe at all," he said seriously.
+"But I made inquiries. Oh, I heard stories. The Jews of Rabat talked
+of London, and of hotels in London. There was one who said--and it was
+repeated to the pedlar, who told it to me, but I would not believe
+it--'We kept it up all June, every night, till four o'clock in the
+morning, in the American Bar.' They were gay dogs in London, the Jews
+of Rabat, and they made money enough to keep it up all night till four
+o'clock in the morning, in the American Bar. So I decided to come to
+London."
+
+All Mr. Benoliel's humor had deserted him. He was speaking with
+intense seriousness. He was a little Barbary boy again, learning with
+amazement the extraordinary latitude which Europe allowed to its Jews.
+
+"So I ran away from the pedlar," he resumed; and now at last he
+smiled. "You will never guess, Cynthia, in what capacity I came to
+England. I came with a troupe of Moorish acrobats who were going to
+appear at one of the music halls in London."
+
+"You!" Cynthia exclaimed.
+
+"Yes. I found them on the beach at Rabat, with their baggage, waiting
+for the surf to go down. The Elder Dempster steamboat was lying
+outside the bar, a mile from the shore. They wanted a boy who was
+light. They took me."
+
+"And you appeared at the music halls?" Cynthia asked.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Mr. Benoliel, "I appeared. I learnt some simple
+somersaults and balancings, and I looked after the baggage. That
+lasted for a year. By that time I had learnt some English and I left
+them. I am not going to bother you with the next twenty years of
+my life. I got on as others have done--office-boy to confidential
+clerk--the usual process. I meant to make money, you see--all the
+time, hour by hour, I meant to make money. I was with a great firm of
+financiers who had got themselves into a tangle over some Eastern
+business. I had mastered the subject; I was by my origin fitted to
+cope with it; and I saw a way out of the trouble. The firm came to me,
+and with the firm my opportunity. I asked for a salary of seventeen
+thousand pounds a year. The firm refused. I went on at my old two
+hundred and fifty for another month. By that time the trouble had
+grown more grave. It was a real crisis, meaning perhaps dishonor. The
+firm came to me again and accepted my terms. It took me a year to put
+matters right, and at the end of the year I was, of course, dismissed.
+But I had seventeen thousand pounds, and I knew what to do with it."
+
+"You made it into a great fortune," said Cynthia.
+
+"By the time I was forty," replied Mr. Benoliel. "And then I began to
+think about marrying."
+
+Cynthia stirred and leaned forward. Benoliel turned swiftly toward
+her.
+
+"Ah," he said, "you are beginning to appreciate the similarity between
+my case and Rames's. But it doesn't date from the age of forty at
+which we both began to think about marrying. No! Strip our careers of
+the accidents of race and country and occupation, and you will find
+the similarity right there in our boyhood and our youth. We were both
+adventurers, both determined to get on, he to his ends, I to mine.
+Well, at forty-one I married."
+
+Mr. Benoliel hesitated. His wife was living. He was a man of some
+sensibility, and a delicate reticence of mind made it repugnant to him
+to lay before another the manner of his marriage and its troubles. But
+he looked again at Cynthia, and the freshness and the youth of her,
+and the trouble in her big dark-blue eyes, which were fixed so
+intently upon his face, persuaded him. He might be exaggerating. His
+fears might be quite vain. But suppose that they were not? Every line
+of grief graven in the girl's young face would be a whole epistle of
+condemnation.
+
+"Our marriage was a bargain, too," he said frankly. "My wife brought
+social position, I money. But there was less risk in our bargain than
+there will be in yours."
+
+"Why less risk?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"Because we who are Jews make good husbands," said Mr. Benoliel; and
+Cynthia cried out indignantly:
+
+"I am not afraid that Harry will make a bad one."
+
+"I don't say either that he will," Mr. Benoliel returned calmly. "I
+only say that as a rule the Jew makes a good husband. He believes in
+the family. Can you say as much of the Christian? No. Therefore there
+was less risk in our bargain. And still it did not turn out well."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I was forty-one and my wife twenty-three. Yes, that's the
+truth at the end of it all. There were eighteen years of experiences
+and struggles in my life which my wife had not shared; and out of
+those eighteen years there sprang a passion in me which I, least of
+all, expected, and which I could not combat. I became homesick for my
+country, and for that city on which I had turned my back with joy."
+
+"You?" cried Cynthia. For a moment she thought herself listening to a
+fairy tale. "You wanted to go back to the humiliations, to the
+Mellah?"
+
+She recalled the feminine nicety of his house in Grosvenor Square, the
+bright silver--not too much of it--the elegance of its mahogany
+furniture, which was never allowed to crowd the rooms. She recollected
+those dinner-parties at which the great men of the earth were
+entertained with so much pride. It could not be that he wished to
+return to the crowded Jewish quarter, noisome with the reek of rancid
+cookery, where the gates were locked on its inhabitants at six o'clock
+of the night! But Mr. Benoliel replied with an energy and a fire which
+she had never known him manifest before.
+
+"Yes. I wanted to go back. How and when the longing first came to me,
+I can't tell you. But it did come, and, having come, it grew. I felt
+day by day more and more of a stranger amongst a strange people. That
+road winding up the cliffs to the break in the sky-line above the
+plain of the Sebou--I began to dream of it! Then I used to lie awake
+at night and travel along it, past the pillars and arches of
+Volubilis, and the little white city of Mulai Idris, on the shoulder
+of Jebel Zarhon--right over the upland, and down through the asphodel
+to Mequinez. Finally, I had to go. I told my wife. We had got on
+together up till then, no better, no worse than other people. She
+stared at me with amazement, with suspicion, as at a stranger, and
+from that moment our relations changed. She knew quite well to what I
+was going back, to what I wanted to go back--the Mellah, the
+gaberdine, and the rest of it. And--it was natural, I think--she
+despised me. I was quite aware of her contempt, and--was indifferent
+to it. I wanted to go back. And I did."
+
+"You did?" said Cynthia. And then, "I see. I see."
+
+She understood now these mysterious disappearances of Mr. Benoliel
+when he vanished from his clubs and his haunts, and no man brought
+news of him.
+
+"Yes, I went, and as I went London and the years in London dropped
+away from me. I was happy. I went down with my mules into Mequinez,
+and put my European clothes away in a cupboard in the Mellah. I stayed
+in Mequinez three months."
+
+"But how?" asked Cynthia. "What did you do?"
+
+Mr. Benoliel smiled.
+
+"Business," he said. "I traded. I lent money. Then I came back to
+England--refreshed as a man comes from his bath. But my wife hated the
+whole business. At first she would not hear a word of what I had been
+doing. Then she became curious--morbidly curious. There was no end to
+her questions. What humiliations, what indignities had fallen to me
+amongst the Moors--she was never tired of hearing. And as she
+questioned and I answered, she would sit looking at me, with eyes in
+which contempt grew ever more bitter, looking at me as one looks upon
+a stranger. Quarrels followed. I went back to Mequinez, after a year
+or two, and again after another period. And every time the pull of the
+place became stronger. It was after my third visit that our marriage
+came to an end. We gave a great dinner-party, and when our guests had
+gone, she told me that our life had become intolerable to her."
+
+Mr. Benoliel did not spare himself. It was rather a grim scene which
+he had to describe--the last one of many quarrels which had sprung
+from their estrangement. "You leave me for those squalors. You return
+to me fresh from them;" that was the burden of her accusation. She was
+not of his race or of his people. She had no sympathy with, or
+comprehension of, the intense craving which from time to time assailed
+him to go back to his own place, or of the utter weariness which
+overtook him of the life of London, in which he played an actor's
+part. The squalor and humiliation of his days in Mequinez got upon her
+nerves, filled her with disgust, and made his companionship repugnant.
+
+"You can understand that, Cynthia?" he asked, and Cynthia, since
+frankness was demanded of her, agreed.
+
+"Yes, I can understand that," she answered gently. His story was to
+her fantastic and fabulous. It belonged to the East--as he did. Only
+by keeping in mind that he, underneath the veneer of his manners, was
+of the East could she accept it as truth. She did so accept it. But
+she looked at Mr. Benoliel with curious eyes, and was conscious of a
+feeling very like aversion. Within the half-hour he had grown a
+stranger to her even as he had done to his wife. That he should leave
+the order and the cleanliness of his home, depart from the company of
+cultured people--he the dilettante--don the gaberdine, go joyfully
+back to the dirt and squalor of his Mellah, humbly take off his
+slippers and walk bare-foot at the bidding of any Moor who passed him
+by--that Cynthia could not understand. But that his wife should find
+life with him intolerable when he came back from his degradation,
+refreshed as by a bath, to resume existence at her side--that she did
+thoroughly understand.
+
+"So we separated," said Mr. Benoliel.
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia. "But there's no parallel between your case and
+ours. What happened to you cannot happen to us."
+
+She was not sure. There was appeal in her voice. She pleaded to him to
+agree with her. She clung desperately to her one small piece of
+knowledge. Mr. Benoliel was of the East. Harry Rames was not.
+
+"There is a parallel, and a close one," Mr. Benoliel insisted. "What
+happened to us may happen to you. Out of the experiences of eighteen
+years in Captain Rames's life, experiences in which you have no share,
+some unsuspected craving may even now be fermenting which may turn the
+course of his thoughts, and snatch him back from you."
+
+"He would fight against it," said Cynthia.
+
+"Even so, it would stand between you, and it would grow."
+
+Cynthia was silent for a moment. Then she said timidly:
+
+"Even then there is one condition according to you which would avert
+the risk."
+
+"Yes, one. Love."
+
+And again Cynthia was silent. Then she burst out, striking her hands
+together in a violence of revolt:
+
+"But I know him! I know him!" and with the words still in her ears,
+she doubted them. Mr. Benoliel's warning had alarmed her. But it had
+alarmed her chiefly because it had brought home to her how very little
+she might really know of those whom she met daily, and with whom she
+was most intimate. Here was Mr. Benoliel. She had thought she knew
+him, and so well that she could play with him, and twist him to her
+wishes. He had spoken for half an hour, and, lo! she had never known
+him.
+
+"Do all men hide themselves?" she cried. "Do you all build up barriers
+about you, and lie hidden within? Oh, but Harry's honest--honest;" and
+again she caught at her old argument and consolation.
+
+She rose from her seat abruptly.
+
+"Thank you very much for all you have said. I am grateful. I shall not
+forget it. Good-night;" and she moved away to the foot of the stairs.
+She stopped then and turned back, as though in half a mind to say
+more. But as Mr. Benoliel rose, and she looked at him, a shadow
+darkened her eyes and she seemed to shrink from him with that slight
+sense of repulsion.
+
+"Good-night," she said again, and hurriedly went up the stairs. His
+story was too new in her thoughts. What she had it in her mind to say,
+she left untold.
+
+But Mr. Benoliel was none the less to be informed of it that night. He
+sat late in the hall after the lights had been turned out, with only
+the firelight flickering on the hearth. He had read the aversion in
+Cynthia's face which his story had provoked. He had made a sacrifice
+of her affection. But he had made it for her sake, and he did not
+regret that he had spoken. None the less he was disturbed. He might
+have done no good, and he had reopened an old wound of his own.
+He sat there knowing that if he went to bed he would not sleep; and
+in a little while he heard a noise in the corridor leading to the
+billiard-room. The door into the hall was softly opened, and the
+wavering light of a candle dimly lit up that cavernous place. The
+screen stood between Benoliel and the intruder. He could see nothing
+but the light of the candle shaking upon the walls above the screen.
+He did not move, he heard some one moving across the floor of the
+hall; he kept his eyes fixed upon the opening between the screens; and
+he saw Captain Rames pass across the opening. He sprang up with a low
+cry. Rames was coming from the corridor where his bedroom was to the
+foot of the stairs up which Cynthia had gone. At the cry Rames
+stopped, and, holding the candle above his head, peered into the
+shadows. Mr. Benoliel came quickly toward him.
+
+"Where are you going, Captain Rames?" he asked.
+
+"To my wife," said Harry.
+
+Mr. Benoliel stared at Harry Rames.
+
+"You and Cynthia are married?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When are you going to make your marriage public?"
+
+"On the day the Whitsunday holidays begin. We shall have it announced
+in the evening papers. We shall already have left for Fontainebleau."
+
+So after all Mr. Benoliel had spoken in vain. He might have spared his
+breath, and retained in a fuller degree Cynthia's liking and respect.
+He knew now what she had turned back from the stairs to tell him.
+
+"Give her this message," he said. "Tell her to forget what I said to
+her;" and he moved away.
+
+But the message was of no use. He had said what he had to say, and
+Cynthia could not forget. She watched. She was afraid; as since her
+seventeenth birthday she had always been afraid.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXIII
+
+                         CYNTHIA ON THE HOUSE
+
+
+On the morning after Parliament had risen the newspapers announced the
+marriage of Cynthia Daventry to Harry Rames. The ceremony had taken
+place by special license early one morning at a little church in
+Mayfair, with a girl friend of Cynthia's, and a member of Parliament
+named Robert Brook, as witnesses. A good many people were surprised;
+still more, however, declared that they had foreseen the marriage all
+along, and that of course it couldn't last; while Lord Helmsdale's
+mother simply remarked in accents of pity: "Poor thing! Double her
+age, isn't he? And she was so pretty, too, a few months ago."
+
+On the other hand, however, a good many honest telegrams of
+congratulations reached the couple honeymooning in the woods of
+Fontainebleau; and when Harry and Cynthia returned to London, there
+were fresher incidents than their marriage for people to discuss. They
+settled down in Curzon Street to keep their bargain loyally.
+
+If Cynthia's heart ached at times, as it had done amongst the trees of
+Fontainebleau, for a life struck to fire by passion, she gave no
+outward sign of her pain. She was to help forward the great career,
+and to the best of her powers she did. She threw open her house to her
+husband's party; she entertained; she attended social gatherings; she
+walked abroad in Ludsey with a good memory for faces; she spent many
+hours on the train. Harry, on his side, was assiduous at Westminster.
+He sat upon committees in the morning, and on one of the green benches
+below the gangway during the afternoon and evening, with an occasional
+rush home at a quarter to eight to take his wife out to dinner.
+
+"Be there!" was one of Henry Smale's maxims which he had taken to
+heart. "Sit in the House. Never mind the library or the smoking-room,
+or the lobby, or the terrace. Sit in the House! However dull the
+debate, and however inviting the sunlight streaming through the high
+windows, sit in the House. All the great Parliamentarians have done
+it. The lawyers can't do it, of course. But you haven't their excuse.
+You can. It may seem a waste of time. You'll find that it isn't."
+
+So Harry Rames sat in the House, and Cynthia, when she had no other
+engagement to detain her, came down to Westminster, dined with him
+there, and spent an hour afterward in the ladies' gallery. She became
+acquainted with many men of different calibre, and amongst them with
+Mr. Devenish, the Secretary for Agriculture, who was just beginning to
+do a little more than make a vociferous noise in the world. Mr.
+Devenish happened to pass through the dining-room when Harry and his
+wife were finishing dinner, and catching sight of them he turned off
+toward their table.
+
+He was a brisk, smallish man, and Cynthia was astonished by his
+aspect. She had seen him often enough upon the floor of the House of
+Commons, and had taken him for a person of a commanding height. But it
+was not the first time she had made this mistake. The House of
+Commons, like the theatre, magnifies men to the galleries. Mr.
+Devenish dropped his hand upon Rames's shoulder.
+
+"I want a word with you to-night, Rames," he said
+
+"Why not now?" asked Rames. "This is my wife, Mr. Devenish."
+
+Mr. Devenish bowed to her.
+
+"I knew that very well," he said.
+
+Cynthia disbelieved him. Also she had formed a dislike of him. There
+was something too acrid in his speeches. She thought of him as a man
+going about with a phial of vitriol hidden in the palm of his hand.
+
+"I am not famous," she said coldly. "How should you know, Mr.
+Devenish?"
+
+"I saw you in the lobby, and--I asked;" he smiled as he spoke, and she
+found his smile singularly disarming; it was so friendly and genuine a
+thing. Mr. Devenish turned again to Harry Rames.
+
+"We want you to help us. A vote on account for the navy is coming up
+on Thursday. There will be a motion for the reduction of armaments. We
+want you to speak."
+
+Harry Rames shook his head.
+
+"I rather propose to leave those questions alone. I don't want to get
+the reputation of being a service member."
+
+"I appreciate that," said Mr. Devenish. "But you are asked to speak in
+this debate by the government."
+
+"On the general question?" asked Rames.
+
+"Not so much on that. The point is the economy of the big ship. You
+can speak from practical experience. You know. You are here in
+Parliament to contribute your knowledge." Mr. Devenish turned to
+Cynthia, and again his smile illumined his face. "Persuade him, Mrs.
+Rames."
+
+It occurred to Cynthia that Mr. Devenish did not trouble to inquire
+whether Harry Rames believed the big ship to be an economical thing.
+Harry was to support the government. The rest of his argument she
+agreed with. It was Harry's duty, since he was in Parliament, to
+contribute of his knowledge.
+
+"Very well," said Captain Rames. "Of course if the government wishes
+it, I shall be proud to take part in the debate. Won't you sit down
+and have some coffee?"
+
+"Yes, do!" said Cynthia cordially, and she was not altogether engaged
+in helping her husband on when she spoke. Mr. Devenish now puzzled
+her. She had begun by disliking him. He had spoken very few words to
+her, and yet she no longer disliked him. There was a charm in his
+manner of which he seemed quite unaware. At close quarters he lost the
+narrowness, which she had thought the mark of him. He seemed broadly
+human, comprehensively sympathetic. Yet he obviously wore no mask. He
+was simple, and he gave a pleasant impression of being a good fighter.
+Mr. Devenish drew up a chair and sat down.
+
+"You come to many of our debates," he said to Cynthia. "What do you
+think of us?" and with an unaffected interest in the views of a pretty
+woman, he led her on to express her opinion.
+
+"Well," she said frankly, "I think most of your debates are very
+dull."
+
+"That's quite true," Mr. Devenish replied with a laugh at the little
+spurt of complaint in her voice. "Nine out of ten are dull, and if you
+were in the government you would wish the tenth was too. The debate
+which sparkles and amuses you in the gallery means keen opposition on
+the floor of the House. The debate which is dull means that the
+government gets its bill. And the government is there to get its
+bills."
+
+"Yes, I suppose that's true," said Cynthia, and then Harry Rames
+intervened.
+
+"It's curious," he said, "but I no longer find any debate dull. I used
+to be bored, I admit it, but I can sit through anything now and find
+it interesting."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia, nodding her head; "I have noticed that, Harry,
+from the gallery, and--I think it's a bad sign."
+
+"The sign of the true Parliamentarian," said Mr. Devenish.
+
+"Perhaps," said Cynthia stubbornly. "Still a bad one."
+
+"Now why?" asked Mr. Devenish indulgently. Cynthia was certainly a
+very pretty woman. Let her talk! Cynthia colored and replied hotly:
+
+"Because it means that the four walls of that little chamber are
+closing in on you. The game inside, with its pauses, its coups, its
+man[oe]uvres, is becoming more important than the great interests and
+issues outside which you are there to decide. It means that in your
+thoughts the country and the constituency are growing smaller, and the
+green leather benches on which you sit becoming more and more
+important. If you don't find any debates dull, you are growing aloof
+from the country. You are becoming, as you say, a Parliamentarian.
+That means Parliament first, the country a bad second."
+
+Cynthia stopped abruptly. She had allowed herself to be betrayed into
+delivering a lecture upon politics to a past-master in the art, a man
+who, out of his forty-five years, had spent twenty in the House of
+Commons. She flushed. "But you must think me a fool," she cried.
+
+"I don't," Mr. Devenish exclaimed. "Yours is a definite point of
+view." He was not speaking seriously. For he was eager to learn so
+long as the learning came to him by word of mouth, and not from the
+printed page. "Tell me some more."
+
+He was considering no longer the prettiness of the woman, the changing
+lights upon her face. He was conceding respect to her judgment.
+Cynthia was mollified. She continued:
+
+"And here's something which to me makes many of the debates tedious
+and unreal. You all behave as if your ideal of a member of the House
+of Commons were a fossil on a shelf."
+
+Mr. Devenish laughed.
+
+"Why do you say that, Mrs. Rames?"
+
+"Because if a man changes his opinions ever so little during a course
+of years, he at once has the reports of his old speeches flung at his
+head in scathing accents, as though he had committed the meanest of
+crimes."
+
+"It's a party score," said Mr. Devenish.
+
+"Yes, but why?" Cynthia insisted. "You must all know that a man who is
+any use at all does change his opinions as his experience widens.
+Surely that's true. What's the use of thought at all if it leaves you
+precisely where you were?"
+
+"Mrs. Rames," said Mr. Devenish, "I cannot dispute it."
+
+Cynthia had long been puzzled by this extraordinary childishness on
+the part of men of reputed intelligence. She was determined if she
+could to get at the truth. "Then why?" she asked. "Why, when one of
+the opposition proves that a member of the government has changed his
+view, does all the opposition shout with derision, and why do all on
+the government side look glum? Why must the minister labor to show
+that he really hasn't changed any views? Why does he rise so quickly
+to do it? And why, when he has risen, doesn't he say: 'Of course I
+have changed my views. I am a better man than I was two years ago.'"
+
+"Well, upon my word, I can't tell you why," said Mr. Devenish
+honestly. "I suppose we haven't the courage. Don't you approve of us
+at all?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I do," said Cynthia quickly; "and much more than I expected
+to do." She was induced to give her impression of the body of members.
+
+"I had got an idea that everybody was in here to get something." She
+grew suddenly red, and in a flurry, which Mr. Devenish did not
+understand. She continued, "I suppose I got the idea from newspapers.
+I made a wrong inference. They are here, of course--the rich men who
+want honors to put a crown upon their wealth, the office-hunters, the
+speculator, and the financier, who use their membership to help their
+city business--But there are others one is apt to overlook, the silent
+people, who make no mark, and don't want to make one. You see them in
+the lobby, rather disconsolately busy about nothing. They are probably
+not particularly intelligent. Some of them, no doubt, are quite
+stupid. But one rather respects them, because membership of the House
+of Commons means to them a real daily loss. They would be more
+prosperous if they devoted the time they spend here to their business.
+But they seem to be here because they believe that some things want
+doing, some definite things, and that they can help to get them done
+by their votes. There is a lot of them. Then there are the country
+gentlemen who would be happier on their estates, and would be there
+but for their conviction that the solid judgment of the country
+gentleman is absolutely necessary in the council of the nation." She
+spoke with pomposity and a friendly mimicry of the class she
+described. "But I like them. I think they are of value because to
+them, too, membership here means a real loss."
+
+"Well, I agree," said Mr. Devenish.
+
+"You! You do?" asked Cynthia in surprise. "I thought that--" and she
+stopped.
+
+"Well, what?" Mr. Devenish pressed for her opinion with a laugh.
+
+"Never mind," said Cynthia. "There's another class, too, which
+attracts me. The failures. The ambitious men who just don't succeed,
+and fail by so very little, but fail completely."
+
+"Yes," Mr. Devenish agreed, "their lot is not attractive. They can't
+bring themselves to admit failure. They drift along here until the
+time is past for them to do anything else. The four walls, as you say,
+have closed about them. They sit here, eating out their hearts,
+jealous of the others who succeed, and making a bitter pretence of
+contentment."
+
+"They are the prisoners of the House of Commons," said Cynthia, and
+the phrase struck pleasantly upon Mr. Devenish's ears so used to the
+slipshod metaphors of the average speaker.
+
+"Yes," he said with a quick look of interest. "Yes, that's a true
+saying. How did you think of it, Mrs. Rames?"
+
+"I have sympathy with failures," she replied.
+
+"Ah," said Mr. Devenish. "But it's easy to have that when one is
+married to success," and he turned genially to Captain Rames.
+
+A junior whip hurried up to the table.
+
+"You are wanted, Mr. Devenish, in the House," he said.
+
+Devenish looked at his watch and sprang up. "I have stayed longer than
+I ought to. We can count upon you then, Rames, for Thursday," and he
+hurried away. Cynthia followed him with her eyes. He attracted her and
+he left with her an impression of power, which made his interest in
+her, obviously expressed, a subtle flattery. She turned back to her
+husband.
+
+"I was mistaken in that man," she said, and as Harry Rames did not
+answer her, she continued: "You see, Harry, I am doing my best to help
+you on."
+
+"You are indeed," said Harry Rames sulkily. Cynthia stared at him. The
+sulkiness in his voice set her blood tingling. He could be jealous
+then! She laughed out loud suddenly, with a girl's joyousness, and, as
+Harry lifted inquiring eyes to her, the blood mantled into her cheeks,
+and she sat in a pretty confusion. For a moment both of them were
+embarrassed, and neither could have told why. Cynthia broke through
+the embarrassment with the first words which occurred to her:
+
+"I can't reconcile Mr. Devenish with his speeches," she said.
+
+"Yet there's a continuity," replied Harry. "He is one of your
+instances of men big enough to widen out. But he's an enthusiast, and
+he has done in his day a deal of platform work so that the old phrases
+come trippingly to his tongue. He says, when he's carried away, more
+than he thinks now, but less than he used to think ten years ago. I
+fancy that's the explanation."
+
+Cynthia looked toward the door through which Mr. Devenish had
+disappeared.
+
+"Tell me about him, Harry," she said.
+
+"I will, certainly," said Rames. His ill-humor had passed. He leaned
+toward his wife with a smile upon his face. It seemed to Cynthia that
+the moment of embarrassment so quickly gone had brought now as its
+consequence another moment quite as inexplicable--a moment during
+which she and Harry were nearer to one another than as yet they had
+been.
+
+"The one thing I think to remember about Devenish is this," Rames
+continued. "As a boy he had always to walk in the road and he has not
+forgotten it."
+
+The division bell began to ring before he could say another word to
+elaborate his sketch of the man. He led Cynthia out through the arches
+to the door where her carriage waited, and he left her to drive home
+puzzled by his phrase.
+
+He spoke, as he had promised to do, on the following Thursday. Cynthia
+heard the speech from the ladies' gallery, not siding with it at all,
+nor against it, but simply attentive to its effect. He rose in a full
+House, which did not diminish as he spoke, and the space behind the
+bar grew crowded. He was brief; he worked his own intimate knowledge
+of the mechanism of a modern ship of war into the scheme of his
+speech. He was nervous, Cynthia knew, but he gave no outward sign of
+nervousness; he spoke with a quiet resonance of voice, as though he
+had the measure of that assembly; and he brought into play that
+remarkable gift of counterfeiting sincerity, which always astonished,
+and sometimes frightened her. It was difficult even for her to realize
+that he had no real opinion about the value of the big ship, one way
+or the other, and that he had merely crammed his subject diligently
+with her help during the last few days. He spoke, indeed, with telling
+effect. There were friends of Cynthia in the gallery who were quick to
+congratulate her. She herself was filled with admiration, but it was
+the admiration for the fine performance of an actor; and when she went
+down in the lift to join him after the debate was over, the cry was
+loud in her heart: "If only he believed one word of it!"
+
+He met her at the gate of the lift, and she caught his arm and pressed
+it against her side.
+
+"Thank you," said Harry. "That's better than words."
+
+"It wasn't a congratulation," she replied. "It was an appeal."
+
+Harry Rames spoke once more during that session, late at night, in a
+thin House, and to try himself in unprepared debate, rather than with
+any intention to arrest notice. But the moment was well chosen, for a
+speaker on the government side was needed; and when the House rose for
+the autumn, he took down with him to Warwickshire the reputation of a
+rising man. He had kept his bargain, Cynthia gratefully acknowledged
+it, and the fears which Isaac Benoliel had aroused in her began for a
+time to lose their substance.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXIV
+
+                  THE MAN WHO HAD WALKED IN THE ROAD
+
+
+Harry Rames and Cynthia passed the autumn at the white house, and
+hardly a day passed but one or the other was seen in the climbing
+streets of Ludsey. Harry presided at the social gatherings of the
+city, the musical clubs, the horticultural society, and the rest. He
+was busy with his town clerk over a railway bill which the
+municipality meant to oppose. He made friends with his public
+opponents. Cynthia herself was hardly less active. She threw herself
+into the work of committees and councils, not from enthusiasm, but in
+a desperate search for that color which Mr. Arnall and his fellows had
+got from politics, and her own youth demanded for herself. And with
+the work, interest in it came, if color did not. They were
+establishing Harry Rames in his seat--that was certain, and she had
+her share in it. They were winning and, being a woman, she loved to
+win. Cynthia was a success in Ludsey--she could not but know it. For
+the demands for her presence and her time grew with every morning's
+post. There came to her a sort of exultation of battle. She was doing
+her work; she was helping to make the great career, and in the
+pleasure of helping to make, she lost sight of the essential emptiness
+of the thing she was making.
+
+"Yes," said Harry one night to her. "You are making this seat safe for
+me, Cynthia, for the next election."
+
+Cynthia looked at him with her eyes bright.
+
+"Do you think so?" she asked eagerly, asking for praise, and Arthur
+Pynes, the young chairman of the association, who had been dining with
+them, corroborated her husband.
+
+"We once had a candidate whose wife would sing at the public meetings.
+We couldn't stop her, and every time she sang she cost us fifty votes.
+We have always stipulated for a bachelor since. But you have changed
+our views now, Mrs. Rames."
+
+"I am very glad," said Cynthia; and the trio fell to discussing plans
+for the next session. "We want to see you in office before three years
+are out," said Pynes to Harry Rames. "There's no reason why we
+shouldn't."
+
+"Yes, there is," said Harry Rames. "A large majority. They want you to
+keep quiet and vote and, being strong, they would just as soon put
+into office men who have never opened their mouths in the House as
+not, and probably sooner."
+
+"Then you must force 'em," said Arthur Pynes.
+
+They discussed the government programme for the next session, and what
+opportunities would arise from it. But the changes and transitions of
+Parliament are rapid. However sternly the government may cling to its
+ordered sequence of legislation, great questions will arise which have
+not been foreseen, and the ballot will give to private members their
+opportunity of discord. Thus the man who sits next to you may be in
+hot debate with you to-morrow, and those who smiled at you from the
+treasury bench yesterday may see you stroll with a fine air of
+indifference into the opposition lobby to-day. Harry Rames was well
+aware of the pull of the undercurrents, but neither he nor Cynthia,
+nor Arthur Pynes had a suspicion that night that the next session was
+to see him in definite antagonism to Devenish, the man who had been
+forced to walk in the road.
+
+It was not, indeed, until the session was more than half-way through
+that Cynthia herself learnt it. She had dined with her husband at the
+House. It was a warm night of early summer, and after dinner they took
+their coffee upon the terrace. A private bill was occupying the
+attention of a thin House, and the terrace was fairly full of members
+waiting for the resumption of public business. Amongst them was Mr.
+Devenish. He strolled up to the couple, and after shaking hands with
+Cynthia, turned to Harry Rames:
+
+"I hear you are against Fanshawe's bill."
+
+"Yes," said Harry Rames.
+
+"It comes on next Friday," continued Devenish. "The government will
+accept the principle, and give the bill a second reading."
+
+"It won't go further than that," said Harry Rames.
+
+"Not this year. But next year we shall embody the principle in a
+measure of our own, and then--?" He looked inquiringly at Harry.
+
+"Then," said Harry deliberately, "I suppose we must try to get it
+amended."
+
+A beam of light pouring from one of the windows showed Devenish's face
+clearly to Cynthia. She saw it harden and narrow. When he spoke his
+voice was sharp.
+
+"I shall be in charge," he said. "I shall not accept any amendment
+which strikes at the principle."
+
+"I am sorry," said Rames. He lit his cigar. He had not the air of a
+man receding from his position.
+
+Cynthia was leaning forward, her eyes travelling curiously from one to
+the other. She had noticed the quick snap in the voice of Devenish,
+the quiet indifference to it in her husband's. But she did not know on
+what point they disagreed. Harry Rames turned toward her and
+explained:
+
+"Fanshawe is bringing in a land bill on Friday afternoon. I didn't
+think that the government would take it up or I would have told you
+about it, Cynthia, and talked it over with you."
+
+Devenish looked quickly toward the girl. Since Rames consulted her,
+could he enlist her upon his side? Cynthia read the unspoken question
+in his face, and turned gratefully to her husband who had made it
+clear that she had her word in his decisions.
+
+"Fanshawe proposes that the State should buy compulsorily so much land
+at intervals of so many years, split it into small holdings and lease
+them," Rames continued.
+
+"And you disapprove?" said Cynthia.
+
+"Yes. I am against the small holding. I think that's waste. I am in
+favor of the small farm. But I want the farm owned, not taken on
+lease. That's my chief objection. The State's a hard landlord."
+
+"Is a bank a better one?" asked Devenish.
+
+"I think so," returned Rames. "A bank's a business; the State's a
+machine. There's a big difference there."
+
+"Well, I shall be interested to hear what you have to say on Friday,"
+said Devenish, as he rose from his chair. "It would be a pity if we
+lost your support--a great pity." He spoke with a slow significance.
+The words were half a compliment, and the other half a menace. He
+turned at once lightly to Cynthia. "You must persuade him, Mrs. Rames,
+to be sensible, you really must," he said. "To create owners is a
+long, slow process, and I can't wait." A sudden violence flamed in his
+voice, and with a characteristic action he brought a clenched fist
+sharply down into the open palm of his other hand. He looked out
+across the Thames and leftward to the lights on Westminster bridge. He
+seemed to be assuring himself that he stood at last where he had
+always meant to stand, that the moment for which he had lived was
+surely coming. "No, I can't wait. I want to set about the land system
+in this country. With tenancies one can begin at once."
+
+As he walked away from them Cynthia recalled the description of him
+which Harry Rames had given to her. "As a boy he had always to walk in
+the road, and he has not forgotten it." She began to understand the
+phrase now. Devenish's swift and bitter outburst had been an
+illumination.
+
+He had been forced to walk in the road. Rames had shown a shrewd
+insight into a complex character when he coined the phrase. Devenish
+was the son of a small struggling tradesman, in a little town
+surrounded by land which was carefully preserved. Therefore he was
+chased out of the woods and off the grass. The game-keeper was his
+enemy, and an enemy always at hand. To feel the turf beneath his feet
+he must use stealth like a criminal. He lived in a good grass country,
+and all the share he had of it was the dust kicked up from the road by
+the wheels of carriages. In his boyhood he had brooded over his
+exclusion, and through the hard struggles of his youth his thoughts
+had been rancorous. Now, it is true, the rancor had diminished. At the
+age of forty-five he had reached high office, and with high office,
+for the first time, a regular and sufficient income. He was freed for
+a while, at all events, from the desperate endeavor to pay his way
+outside and keep his footing inside the House of Commons. He met men
+of diverse pursuits from the far corners of the earth. The world
+broadened out before him magically.
+
+He entered late, as it were, upon his youth; the arts swept into his
+view, a glittering procession, and enchanted him. All was new to him
+as to a child. The natural charm of the man found an outlet; he had
+good-humor now, and a pleasant friendliness. Gradually the doors of
+great houses had been opened to him--and he had looked in. It was to
+his credit that he had only looked in. He had come away unspoilt,
+uncaptured. But though he recognized that for him the world had become
+wonderfully a place of amenities, he had not forgotten that as a boy
+he had been forced to walk in the road; and the dust of it was still
+bitter in his mouth. "For those who come after me," he had said to
+himself, "it shall not be so," and he was in a hurry to set about the
+change. To create peasant proprietors? There was a world of obstacles
+in the way. To create tenants of the State? A single budget would
+suffice. Fanshawe's scheme should be the chief item in the government
+programme of next year, and Captain Rames must look to himself if he
+stood firm to oppose it.
+
+Captain Rames, on his side, had no intention to give way. He drove
+away from the House that night with Cynthia, and in the carriage he
+said:
+
+"I shall put up as big a fight as I can, Cynthia, on this question."
+
+"Against Mr. Devenish?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Cynthia was silent, and Harry Rames turned to her swiftly with a
+question upon his lips. "You think it rash?" he was going to ask, but
+he never did. He saw her eyes shining at him out of the darkness, and
+in a low tone she said:
+
+"You feel very strongly about it, strongly enough to risk your future.
+Oh, I am so glad!"
+
+There was a throb of joy in her voice. She was still a girl. Though
+she professed to laugh at the enchanted garden of her dreams, there
+was still some yearning for it at her heart. The men with ideas had
+peopled it. It seemed that after all her husband, since at all costs
+he meant to stand up against Mr. Devenish for an idea, must be one of
+them. But a slight, almost an uneasy gesture, which Harry made,
+stopped her on the threshold of a great happiness. She lay back,
+chilled with disappointment.
+
+If Harry had spoken, he would have said: "No, I don't feel strongly
+about it. I don't feel about it, at all. I simply recognize that it is
+my opportunity." And thus he would have spoken before their marriage,
+perhaps, too, during the first few weeks after it. But a change had
+inevitably come for both of them. The frankness which Rames had
+deliberately used, so that she might know him for what he was, no
+longer served. Always it had hurt Cynthia, even though she had
+welcomed it. More than once he had seen her flinch from it as from a
+blow. But now that they were so much together, a hint or silence had
+to take its place. Blunt honesty was all very well twice a week or so,
+but repeated every hour, it bruised too heavily. So, too, with
+Cynthia. Her business as a wife was to help, not chide. Their year of
+marriage had taught them the little diplomacies and managements which
+made life together possible for them. Frankness was to save them--so
+they had planned. What was saving them was reticence.
+
+This time, however, Cynthia was told the truth by her husband's
+gesture. He was going to follow the old historic, dangerous road, the
+road of the third parties, the short cut to power which has lured so
+many ambitious men to disappointment, and advanced a very few before
+their time. And he had chosen William Devenish to tilt against, a man
+supple and quick in debate, sharp of tongue, with a gift of ridicule
+and a wealth of language; a speaker who hit with a nice discrimination
+just above the belt in the House, and just a little bit lower outside
+of it. To Cynthia it seemed that Harry must be gambling on his
+success; that he had cast his prudence from him like a cloak. Harry
+Rames answered some part of her thought.
+
+"It's not so mad as it appears to be," he said. "In the first place
+the question of tenancy against ownership is an open one. You are not
+breaking away from your party whatever view you take. You may be
+breaking away from a minister, but that's a different thing."
+
+Cynthia's fears were assuaged. In her relief she turned eagerly to
+Rames.
+
+"But your minister is Mr. Devenish," she cried.
+
+"I know," he returned. "A hard fighter. All the more gain then, if I
+can stand square to him, and remain standing. Besides, Devenish has a
+peculiar weakness."
+
+"Yes?" cried Cynthia. "You can make use of it?" and she stopped,
+wondering at herself. She was startled to realize that for the first
+time she herself was keeping his eyes from lifting to the high path
+above.
+
+"I have noticed it," Rames continued. "He can stand any amount of
+opposition from his opponents. If he gets heated, he remains master of
+his wit and tongue. But he cannot endure criticism from the benches
+behind him. It strikes some hidden string of arrogance in him. He
+loses his control. He says foolish things. He hands himself over a
+victim, if his critic has courage and skill enough to use his chance."
+
+"I see," said Cynthia. "And the third point?"
+
+"Oh," said Harry carelessly. "The question is an important one for the
+country. It must provoke discussion. Yes, I shall move the rejection
+of Fanshawe's bill if I get the chance."
+
+He put down on the notice paper, with some twenty members on the
+opposition side, a motion for rejection. He rose on the Friday,
+immediately after Fanshawe had sat down, and was called upon by the
+Speaker. He was content with two objections. But either of them, if
+established, was fatal to the bill. He argued against the small
+holding, which he regarded as the pastime of the well-to-do tradesman
+in the neighboring town, rather than as a serious method of settling a
+genuine peasantry on the land; and he pleaded for the farm of sixty or
+seventy acres. It is a matter nowadays of ancient dispute, yet he
+managed to say a new thing about it, not parading his knowledge--for
+there were too many in that House who had made land the study of their
+lives--but suggesting it with a deference, which took his audience.
+The great farm, he maintained, was a modern product, due to quite
+other causes than natural development. It came from the vanity of the
+eighteenth century, its love of spaciousness and show. The monstrous
+porticoed houses and the huge farms were the symbols of its parade.
+But in the seventeenth century, when agriculture really prospered, the
+small farm of seventy acres was the rule. It was at a return to this
+condition that policy and legislation ought to aim.
+
+He passed to his second argument. Tenancy under the State was bad. For
+the State was a hard landlord, and could be nothing else. It took no
+account of bad seasons or the shortness of money. It had to collect
+its revenues and rents within the year. Moreover, the idea was petty
+in its conception. (Here Mr. Devenish turned an outraged head toward
+the orator.) Legislation should aim at something beyond the immediate
+benefit it conferred. Otherwise let them commit the fortunes of the
+country to a parish council, and themselves go home.
+
+"There is to my mind one question by which all legislation can be
+tested," said Rames, "and that question is not: 'Does it supply an
+immediate need?' but 'Does it help to strengthen the character of the
+race?'"
+
+The bill failed according to that test. For it meant no more than the
+substitution of one landlord for another, and left the tenant pretty
+much where he was. If Mr. Fanshawe had taken a bold course and
+produced a just measure, with the object of creating owners, then the
+bill would not have failed. For the desire to possess land was the
+surest sign of a sound and healthy race. It was that desire in men
+which good legislation would try to keep alive. This bill merely
+fobbed them off with a miserable makeshift, and shut the door against
+ownership. Ownership with its obligations and its responsibility, and
+its response to the most primal and most durable of all ambitions, was
+the only policy worthy of a great Parliament.
+
+Mr. Devenish replied later in the afternoon, and quite briefly, He did
+not, he said, propose to enter into the discussion, but simply to
+state the intention of the government. It would give the bill a second
+reading, accepting thus the two principles of small holdings and
+tenancies under the State; and next year it would introduce a measure
+of its own, based upon those principles, and press it through until it
+was placed upon the statute-book. Mr. Devenish studiously refrained
+from any reference to Captain Rames, and as soon as he sat down, the
+hands of the clock then pointing within a minute of five, Mr. Fanshawe
+moved the closure, and the Speaker accepted the motion. The closure
+was accepted without a division, and the main question was put.
+
+In the interval, while the division bells were ringing, a slim,
+middle-aged man, with a moustache which was beginning to grow gray,
+and a handsome, ineffective face, passed into the House from the
+lobby, and took a seat on the bench by Rames's side.
+
+"What are you going to do, Rames?" he asked.
+
+"Vote as I spoke," said Harry.
+
+"Then I'll go with you," said his companion. "I didn't hear your
+speech, or indeed anything of the debate. But I am sure Devenish is
+wrong."
+
+Harry Rames laughed.
+
+"That sounds like a good working rule. Thank you, Brook. Let us go and
+vote."
+
+The two men, alone of their party, strolled into the opposition lobby,
+and that was the beginning of the great cave. It was a Friday
+afternoon in summer, the weather was very hot, the House very thin and
+Mr. Devenish and his under-secretary the only men present on the
+treasury bench. No one paid any attention to the revolt; the
+newspapers next day had the briefest reports of the debate. Cynthia
+herself, who had come to the House to listen to a fierce and tingling
+discussion, was disappointed at the gentle apathy which overlay the
+proceedings of that afternoon.
+
+But Harry said: "Wait a little, Cynthia"; and Mr. Brook, who from that
+time began to drop in frequently at their house in Curzon Street,
+chuckled like a man with secret knowledge.
+
+"Eight men on our side," Harry explained, "had met several times in
+one of the committee rooms before Friday, to decide what course they
+should take to resist this bill. I did not know of their meetings at
+the time, and they agreed to do nothing until they were sure of the
+line the government was going to take. Had they suspected that I was
+going to move the rejection of the bill, they would have attended and
+voted with me."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXV
+
+                      COLONEL CHALLONER'S REVOLT
+
+
+"We will have to make a great stand next year, Rames," said Robert
+Brook. "We must organize. We have time, thank goodness. There are ten
+of us now. A lot more will join us."
+
+"But will they vote? That's the point," returned Rames. "Will they
+vote against the government's bill on its second reading?"
+
+"Oh, yes," Mr. Brook replied enthusiastically. "There are a lot of
+discontented people in our majority. We'll have voters--Challoner, for
+instance. Besides, you have friends."
+
+Rames laughed.
+
+"Yes, I know the kind of friends--fellows who come to you in your seat
+after you have spoken, pat you on the back, whisper that they are with
+you, and then troop like tame mice into the government lobby against
+you. I've watched them."
+
+Brook, however, was not to be damped. He threw himself for the rest of
+that session into the work of organization. A halting speaker and an
+ineffectual personage, he had sat for twenty years in the House of
+Commons and was not tired of it. He was without distinction, he was
+the confidant of no minister, he was never caricatured, he was never
+the chairman of a committee, he rarely spoke. The recruits of each new
+Parliament took almost its duration before they assigned individuality
+to his features or honored him with a name. He was mediocrity's last
+word. But he had charming manners and won to a kind of friendly pity
+those whose acquaintance he gently made. He was born for private life,
+but the House of Commons had caught him as in a net. He had no other
+interests, he had no wife, he did not any longer even aspire to
+office. To be busy in the House of Commons--that was lifeblood to him
+and a renewal of youth. His chance had come now. He hurried from man
+to man, discreet and furtive. He arranged private meetings. He hooked
+his little wagon to Rames's star. He approached Colonel Challoner.
+
+Challoner, the party hack, was instinctively outraged. Was the list of
+ministers closed forever? No! But as he was about to repel Robert
+Brook's advances, the very holder of the office which he coveted stung
+him into revolt.
+
+It was quite toward the end of the session. Colonel Challoner was
+walking through the division lobby late at night when he saw the Under
+Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Charles Bradley, in front of him.
+There was some stir at the time because certain Indian emigrants had
+suffered in one of the disturbances of southern Persia. Colonel
+Challoner hurried officiously to Mr. Bradley's side.
+
+"Bradley," he said, "don't you think it would be good policy to
+repatriate those Indians at our expense. What?"
+
+Mr. Bradley, a florid gentleman, youthfully middle-aged, with a sweet
+voice, a pompous manner, and perhaps a bare sufficiency of brains,
+turned to the colonel with condescending kindness.
+
+"As a member of the government," he said importantly, "I can no longer
+speak freely. Ah, my dear Challoner, I tell you I regret day after day
+that corner seat on the front bench below the gangway, and the
+opportunity of supplementary questions. But that happy time has gone.
+You might, if you like, raise the question on the adjournment or the
+Appropriation Bill next week. I could then reply to you."
+
+Mr. Bradley smiled benignantly upon Colonel Challoner as from heights
+of sunrise, and passed on. He had grown very lordly since his
+elevation to office. Still, a few paces further on it seemed worth his
+while to stop until Challoner rejoined him. He did not notice that the
+colonel had grown rather red in the face.
+
+"If you do raise the question, Colonel Challoner, could you introduce
+into your speech 'Civis Romanus sum'? I should like to hang my speech
+upon that. Thank you."
+
+Even a party hack will turn if he be sufficiently trodden upon by
+minor ministers, and Colonel Challoner did now.
+
+"Mr. Bradley," he asked with a most elaborate politeness, "have you
+ever calculated how many Under Secretaries of State, past and present,
+there are alive to-day? Or how many of them have names which are even
+faintly familiar to the public?"
+
+Mr. Bradley gasped and stared. This was Challoner--old
+Challoner--talking! Bradley was quite unprepared to cope with so
+unparalleled an outrage. The colonel actually went on, and in accents
+of raillery:
+
+"'Civis Romanus sum.' Now, why quote a phrase so banal. Surely, Mr.
+Bradley, it has had its day. We can do better than that if we put our
+heads together. Civis Romanus sum! God bless my soul! But I am willing
+to help you with a tag of Latin. I will introduce another sentence.
+Balbus shall build a wall--upon my word he shall--and you can hang
+your speech onto that, and be damned to you."
+
+Mr. Bradley, however, had suffered enough of this unseemliness. He
+hurried forward and passed between the clerks who recorded the votes
+with a heightened color. Colonel Challoner followed him. But he waited
+at the door for Robert Brook to emerge, and then drew him by the arm
+into the outer lobby.
+
+"I have been thinking over what you proposed, Brook," he said.
+"Certainly, certainly we must make a stand against Fanshawe's bill. We
+have a duty to our constituents. We must show the government we are
+not to be trifled with."
+
+Robert Brook responded with warmth.
+
+"I thought that upon reflection you would look upon it that way. You
+will be a pillar of strength to us, Challoner."
+
+"That's very good of you," said Challoner. After all, there were some,
+it seemed, who knew his worth. "We must meet in the autumn--just those
+on whom we can depend--and arrange a plan of campaign."
+
+"Yes," said Brook. "But where? We want, don't you think, to mask our
+batteries until the time comes for opening fire. We might meet at
+Rames's house--but it is known that he is opposed to the measure." He
+looked invitingly at his new ally.
+
+"Yes, I see, I see," said Colonel Challoner a little doubtfully. There
+was a proposal in his mind--he was not quite sure whether he would
+make it. It was a bold one--it was the burning of his boats.
+
+"Well, why not?" he suddenly said. "Why not meet at my house in
+Dorsetshire? I have some partridges. They will provide the excuse. Let
+us meet in October. Let me have the names and I'll quietly ask the men
+before the session ends."
+
+Mr. Brook was delighted. He called mysteriously upon Harry Rames.
+
+"We have got Challoner," he said. Rames shook his head.
+
+"He'll back out."
+
+"I don't see how he can. He is asking us all to meet at Bramling in
+the autumn."
+
+Harry Rames sat back in his chair.
+
+"How in the world did you manage that, Brook? We must go, of course."
+
+Challoner spoke to Rames that evening. "It's to be quite an informal
+little party," he said with a wink, and took Rames and Brook each by
+the arm. Now that he had tasted the delights of revolt, Colonel
+Challoner, too, was a different man. He lost his dreariness. No longer
+he moulted; no longer he dripped melancholy on all who stood near to
+him. He passed ministers with a high head and an arrogant smile.
+"We'll show 'em," he said. "Yes, sir, we'll show 'em." And as he saw
+Bradley approaching him, "Here's Civis Romanus," he cried in tones
+loud enough to carry to the Under Secretary's ears. The Under
+Secretary flushed and hurried on. Colonel Challoner had told his story
+freely, and Civis Romanus Mr. Bradley remained for the rest of that
+Parliament. Colonel Challoner resumed: "We'll meet on the eighth of
+October. A little partridge shoot, eh? Just a few of us, jolly fellows
+all. You'll bring your wife, Rames, won't you? The others will."
+
+That was a precaution which had been suggested by Brook.
+
+"Some one is sure to let out that we are meeting at Bramling," he
+said. "If the men go without their wives, the gathering will have the
+look of a conspiracy. With them it will just be an ordinary autumn
+shooting party."
+
+"Quite so," said Rames.
+
+The House rose at eleven o'clock that night, and when Harry went home,
+he found his wife just returned from a dinner party. She came with him
+into his study and while they sat and talked he told her that she,
+too, was to be included in the visit to Bramling. Cynthia's face
+clouded.
+
+"I would rather not go," she said. "I don't think there is any need
+that I should."
+
+"The other men will bring their wives."
+
+"There will be enough then. It won't matter if one wife doesn't go."
+
+She was looking at Harry Rames directly, but with a great disquiet in
+her eyes. Harry, however, persisted.
+
+"I think you are wanted, Cynthia. We have a difficult job to keep
+these men together and agree upon a line of concerted action. Some
+women could be very useful at a juncture like this. You are one of
+them."
+
+Cynthia rose with a quick movement to her feet. She stood before him,
+her broad forehead troubled, her lips mutinous, and by her attitude
+she made all the more plain his need of her. The room was Rames's own
+study which had been lined with mahogany, and against the bright dark
+panelling, in her white dress, she gleamed slim and fair and beautiful
+as silver. Harry Rames looked her over with a smile. She was, as he
+put it to himself, exquisitely turned out. She had the grace and
+delicacy natural to a family nursed in good manners through a century,
+and with all her beauty she had simplicity and a desire to please.
+
+"Yes, I want you, Cynthia," he said, and the blood rushed hot to her
+face and throat. She turned from him swiftly and went out of the open
+window onto a balcony which overhung their tiny square of garden.
+Rames's eyes followed her curiously. Something had gone wrong; that
+was clear. He could see her leaning over the rail in the darkness, her
+face between her hands.
+
+Rames's survey of her had brought back to her recollection that
+distant morning by the wheat-field in South America when her father
+had looked her over horribly from head to foot and had valued her for
+a market. There had been just a touch of appraisement in her husband's
+look now. Almost she traced a resemblance in the two men's thoughts,
+the two men's examinations.
+
+Harry left her to herself for a few minutes. Then he followed her:
+
+"I think I understand, Cynthia," he said gently. "Of course it isn't a
+very high and lofty business we're engaged on. That's right enough.
+And when you consider the sort of people our party's going to be
+composed of--the dissatisfied, the ambitious, the timid, and just a
+few who believe Fanshawe's bill a bad thing--the man[oe]uvre doesn't
+look very pretty. So if you don't want to go, don't."
+
+But Cynthia had changed her mind.
+
+"No. I'll come, Harry," she said. "It's too late to be half-hearted
+now. I'll certainly come."
+
+She turned back into the room, and picking up her gloves from a table
+went upstairs. Harry Rames had no doubt that he had hit upon the
+reason of her disinclination to go to Bramling. But as Cynthia ran up
+the stairs she kept saying to herself nervously like one who would
+frighten fear away with words:
+
+"Perhaps no one will notice it. Very likely no one will notice it. And
+if they do, they will think it an accident."
+
+She had not been considering at all the worthiness of these autumn
+man[oe]uvres. She had been thinking of a picture by Romney which hung
+in the dining-room of Bramling, a picture which she had never seen,
+but which yet she knew to be a portrait of herself. She had, however,
+promised to help in the making of the great career and this was one of
+its critical moments. It was, as she had said to Harry, too late to be
+half-hearted. If she failed him now, she failed him altogether. She
+must take the risk that others would notice the resemblance--and
+amongst the others, perhaps even her grandfather Colonel Challoner
+himself. To one determination, however, she clung. She would admit no
+kinship with the Challoners. Nothing should persuade her, neither the
+old man's loneliness nor his disappointed hopes. She held the name and
+the family in horror, though the name and the family were her own.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXVI
+
+                       THE PICTURE AT BRAMLING
+
+
+Bramling is the very house for a conspiracy. It lies in Dorsetshire,
+hidden away at the back of the grass-walled town of Wareham on the
+road to no where. A stream runs past its door down to Poole Harbor,
+and its windows look across grass meadows to where the sea-cliffs lift
+against the sky. Hither through one October day came in old-fashioned
+flies and private motor-cars the inhabitants of the Cave--Cynthia
+amongst the last of them with a foot which hesitated to cross the
+threshold. There were thirty in all assembled in the drawing-room when
+the dinner-gong sounded, eighteen men and twelve women. Colonel
+Challoner, to Cynthia's satisfaction, had to give his arm to Lady
+Lorme, the wife of an ex-Under Secretary of the home office who had
+quarreled with his chief and resigned. She herself was taken in by
+Robert Brook. Reluctance and curiosity struggled for mastery within
+her as she entered the dining-room, and took her seat. She would not
+look up at the walls, yet she could hardly but look up, and she sought
+furtively around the dinner-table whether any noticed the picture and
+her resemblance to it. But no one was looking at any picture at all.
+Not a remark was made or a glance thrown to show her where it hung.
+She looked more boldly at her companions, and coming to a greater ease
+began with enjoyment to laugh at herself. Not one person at the table
+was devoting a thought to her at all. They were all very busy,
+drinking their soup and talking rapidly like uncomfortable people who
+fear that if once their speech flags they will never find anything
+more to say. They were in truth an uncongenial company, held together
+by a single link, their eagerness to harass their own government. Even
+Robert Brook, who knew Cynthia well, was talking to her with
+incoherence in his agitation lest the gathering at Bramling should
+fail. She heard Sir Faraday Lorme, a big red-faced man of sixty with a
+bull-neck, say across the table to Charles Payne, one of the eight who
+genuinely thought Fanshawe's bill a bad experiment:
+
+"Of course, as a rule, you know I don't act with you, but--" and the
+rest of the sentence was lost to her ears, but it seemed to her that
+fully half of those present might have said as much to their
+neighbors. Further along the table she caught sight of Mr. Andrew
+Fallon, a dark white-faced man who had only joined them because his
+wife had been signally and publicly snubbed by the wife of a Cabinet
+Minister. Cynthia could see the wife on the opposite side of the
+table, a portly over-dressed woman with an overbearing voice; and on
+behalf of all her sex she felt grateful to the Cabinet Minister's
+wife.
+
+A singularly gentle voice drew her attention. She turned away from
+Robert Brook, to find at her other side Mr. Howard Fall.
+
+"We have spoken in the lobby, Mrs. Rames," said Howard Fall timidly.
+"Captain Rames was kind enough to introduce me."
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Cynthia. "Oh, I am glad that you are here."
+
+To her Howard Fall was, with the exception of her husband, the
+most interesting man in the room. She welcomed his presence
+whole-heartedly. He was intellect, he was modesty. Even now at her
+implied compliment he was blushing like a young girl and his eyes
+shone with dog-like gratitude. Howard Fall was then about fifty years
+of age; and though he was but a contemporary of Harry Rames in the
+House of Commons, he had already acquired there a special place of
+high distinction. Of too acute and logical a mind to be a good
+party-man, he harried with a pleasant voice and most destructive
+criticism, now his own party, now his opponents. He had one great
+quality in common with Cynthia, he was quite without affectation. He
+would make a brilliant speech with extraordinary diffidence. But he
+made it, and a genuine word of praise or thanks delighted him, as a
+schoolboy is delighted with a sovereign. With the mild manners of a
+curate he combined the courage of a soldier. If he had ideas to
+express--and he generally had--no thought of prudence could hinder him
+from expressing them. Indeed, he drew a gentle contentment from the
+knowledge that as a rule they were troublesome to those whom he
+nominally supported. Cynthia had heard him more than once from the
+ladies' gallery, and had admired his honesty and his courage. For the
+moment she was enheartened by his presence. It put confidence into
+her. With him to help, Harry might indeed put up a fight against Mr.
+Devenish.
+
+"I didn't know," said Howard Fall, "that Captain Rames was going to
+speak against Fanshawe's bill. Otherwise, of course, I should have
+been in the House to support him;" and the "of course" struck all
+Cynthia's comfort from her. It was so significant of the man. He was
+born predestined always to revolt. Any party of two had him for a
+third. Cynthia glanced disconsolately to where her husband sat at the
+end of the table. But he showed no sign of misgiving. He was talking
+energetically to the four people nearest to him, and he only paused
+when her eyes rested upon his face. She turned away again and there
+above the head of Colonel Challoner, who was sitting exactly opposite
+to her, she saw at last the portrait glowing upon the wall.
+
+For the moment she had forgotten it. Now it caught away her breath.
+She sat and stared at it. It was the portrait of a girl of seventeen,
+dressed in white from the big straw hat with its flapping brim to the
+shoes upon her feet. There was but one touch of color, a broad shining
+ribbon of bright blue looped about the crown of the hat, and thus
+dressed, the girl stood in a field of sunlight and corn, looking
+straight out from the picture, with a great curiosity and eagerness in
+her dark-blue eyes. She seemed to be looking upon the gates of a world
+of wonder--gates which with a most tantalizing tardiness were slowly
+opening to let her through.
+
+Was she herself indeed like that? The question rushed into Cynthia's
+mind. As pretty as that? It was impossible. Yet she had been
+recognized because of it. Just so then she must have looked that
+morning when, after sending her neglected telegram to Captain Rames,
+she had stood at the edge of the wheat on the Daventry estancia. Yet
+nobody recognized her now. She had the features of the girl in the
+portrait, the broad forehead, the straight, delicate nose, the fair
+hair, the big dark-blue eyes. Yet nobody recognized her. Perhaps,
+however, she had gone off. She was getting old. A gentle melancholy
+descended upon Cynthia. The fear lest her likeness to the girl in the
+picture should be remarked had quite gone since she had seen the
+picture. She was now rather hurt and indignant that no one had noticed
+it.
+
+Lady Lorme gave the signal a little while afterward, and the ladies
+rose and left the men to their cigars and their discussion. Colonel
+Challoner opened the proceedings with a pompous, unnecessary little
+speech. He welcomed his guests, and he reminded them at considerable
+length of the object of the gathering. He concluded with a question as
+to whether any honorable member present had any views as to the best
+procedure to be adopted.
+
+"Yes," said Harry Rames, "if I may make a suggestion. There are
+eighteen of us here. I propose that we now go carefully through the
+list of members and consider how many more we can get to join us, upon
+whom we can count. I have Vacher's list here;" and he drew out from
+his pocket the familiar little paper-covered book with the names and
+addresses of the members.
+
+"I think that's the first thing to be done," a man agreed from the
+other end of the table. He was a Mr. Edgington, a little, square, bald
+man with short side-whiskers, who seemed a cross between an attorney
+and a stable-boy. He was one of the many men in the House who have a
+subject. He had mastered the Housing question; he really knew the
+facts, he had the figures at his fingers' ends, and he had counted
+upon his knowledge to take him straight through the doors of the Local
+Government Board. But the doors had remained closed, and he had turned
+gadfly in consequence--a gadfly that trumpeted but had no sting. "To
+be sure about the men who will stand out against the pressure of the
+Whips, who will not be frightened into line by their local
+associations, who retain, in a word, some self-respect and some
+veneration for the independence of the House of Commons--that is our
+first requisite," he said floridly.
+
+The company then went carefully through the list and marked off twenty
+fresh names as the names of men who might be inclined to join the
+revolt. It was arranged that discreet letters should be written to
+them on the following day, and Robert Brook was appointed secretary by
+an unanimous vote.
+
+"Of course we shan't get them all," said Lorme.
+
+"And of those we do get, some will shirk when the division bell
+rings," added Howard Fall.
+
+"No doubt," said Rames. "But if we can carry thirty men into the
+opposition lobby on the second reading, we shall have made a
+demonstration which will go far to kill the bill. It will mean sixty
+on a division. It will leave the government with a comfortable
+majority. We all want that of course,"--a chorus of approval, more or
+less sincere, greeted the remark--"But it will also mean that the
+government will hardly be able to force the bill through its committee
+stages by a drastic use of the closure."
+
+"Exactly," said a tall, bearded man with a strong Scotch accent, who
+up to this moment had held his tongue. He represented a northern town
+of Scotland, and was one of the eight who were opposed to the measure
+first and last because they believed it harmful to the country.
+"Exactly. The demonstration is very well, but if the bill is to be
+killed, we will have to kill it in committee. And to prepare for that
+must be our chief work here, Colonel Challoner."
+
+"Yes," said Rames. "Mr. Monro is right. We must go word by word
+through those clauses of Fanshawe's bill, which we are fairly certain
+Devenish will incorporate in his measure. We must formulate
+amendments, and we ought, I think, to agree, to some extent, upon the
+speakers to move them. It will, of course, have to be a provisional
+arrangement--" and he was interrupted by a strident voice which
+belonged to a sandy-haired hunting-man with a broad red face who would
+have seemed totally out of place in any conspiracy.
+
+"Yes. Devenish may sell us a pup. He's a deuce of a clever fellow is
+Devenish. Let him get wind of your partridges, Challoner, and he'll
+sell us a pup for a sure thing."
+
+"All the more reason we should keep our gathering quiet," said
+Challoner. He looked round the table with an impatience which had been
+growing upon him during the last half-hour. "I think that's all we can
+do to-night."
+
+"About all," said Monro. "There is just this suggestion I would like
+to make. I know a man whose business is land, and he is most
+experienced in it; and I thought that if you would like, I would send
+him a telegram to-morrow, and we could employ him to help us in
+framing these amendments. He is a partner in Beevis and Beevis, the
+land-agents in Piccadilly."
+
+"By all means, do," said Challoner. "We all agree to that, don't we?
+And now let us join the ladies."
+
+He sprang up and opened the door like a man in a great hurry. When he
+entered the drawing-room, he crossed it at once to Cynthia's side.
+
+"I was sorry, Mrs. Rames, that I couldn't take you in to dinner
+to-night. I would have liked very much that on your first evening at
+Bramling you should have come in with me. For, as you know, I somehow
+associate you with this house."
+
+He looked at her with a very direct inquiry in his eyes. But Cynthia
+would not respond to it; and he sat at her side with a wistfulness in
+his voice and his words against which she had a little trouble to
+protect her heart. But she did, for she was alarmed. When she had met
+him before he had spoken rather as though he wished that they were
+related. To-night he spoke as if he suspected that they were.
+
+Mr. Beevis arrived the next afternoon, and for the rest of the week,
+while the morning was given to the partridges and the amusements of
+the country, the afternoon and the evening found the Cave busy upon
+the bill. Amendments were formulated and shared out amongst them,
+whilst it was by general consent left to Rames to raise the question,
+first of all, on the Address at the beginning of the session and then
+to move the rejection of the bill later on when it came before the
+House upon its second reading. Good progress, in a word, was made,
+and, to the delight of all, no whisper of this conspiracy crept into
+any of the daily papers. They were examined anxiously every day upon
+their arrival at eleven, and laid down with relief. Cynthia could not
+but laugh.
+
+"I never would have believed that you could have found so many members
+of Parliament reluctant to see their names in the papers," she said to
+her husband.
+
+"Yes, it's astonishing what modesty they can develop," he replied.
+
+But though Cynthia laughed, the work, the concealments, the sort of
+restrained excitement which was diffused through the house, began to
+have their effect upon her. She was getting color into her life at
+last, she assured herself, even if it was only a dingy color.
+Moreover, she had the opportunity to compare her husband with his
+rivals in the career. Indeed, he had but one real rival in that House,
+Howard Fall. And though he lacked the subtlety of his intellect, he
+had a swifter initiative, a more telling vigor of phrase. As for the
+rest he stood head and shoulders above them all, and they knew it and
+looked to him to lead them. If he did not share the strong convictions
+of the honest men, he overtopped them by sheer ability, and as to the
+others he knew nothing either of their malice or their fear. Thus they
+all came hopefully to the last day of their visit; and then at one
+o'clock in the day the thunderbolt fell.
+
+It was a Sunday and the whole party had just settled down to luncheon
+when the whir of a motor-car floated into the room. It was followed by
+the sound of a door opening and shutting, a pleasant and familiar
+voice was heard to inquire for Colonel Challoner, and the next moment,
+ushered in by the butler, Mr. Devenish entered the room. Consternation
+ran round that luncheon table like a wind across a field of corn.
+Colonel Challoner sprang up hastily with every sign of discomfort.
+
+"My dear Devenish, I am delighted to see you, I am sure. You are just
+in time for luncheon." He called to the butler to lay another place at
+his side. "I didn't know you were in the neighborhood. You should have
+let me know."
+
+"I didn't mean to do that," said Devenish dryly. He ran his eye from
+face to face with a twinkling glance. Cynthia herself could hardly
+restrain a laugh. The independent members of the nation's Parliament
+looked so singularly like a set of school-boys' caught by a master in
+the planning of a rebellion.
+
+"Quite a large party, eh, Challoner?" he said with a smile.
+
+"Yes, yes," replied the colonel. "The partridges, you know."
+
+"Ah, the partridges, to be sure. But I didn't know that Howard Fall
+shot at anything but ministers. And even they only get winged, eh,
+Fall?"
+
+Mr. Devenish strolled round the table and shook hands with Fall. Fall,
+however, was one of the few who was quite undisturbed.
+
+"Yes, but I am looking to practice to improve my shooting," he said.
+
+A place was now laid for Devenish. Colonel Challoner called to him.
+
+"Will you come and sit here, Devenish?"
+
+"Certainly," replied the smiling minister. "But I should first of all
+like to shake hands with all my friends;" and quite slowly he walked
+round the table and shook hands with each of the men present and those
+of the ladies whom he knew. He was in the best of tempers, and he had
+a cordial word for every one except for Captain Ramos. To him he
+merely said:
+
+"Ah!" and the accent of his voice had in it no note of surprise. It
+was the ejaculation of a man establishing something which he had
+suspected. Then he walked to his place and sat down.
+
+"There are eighteen members of Parliament, Challoner," he said
+pleasantly. "I hope that I have forgotten no one. Let me see!" Again
+his eye ranged round the table, obviously registering in his memory
+the identity of Challoner's guests. "No, eighteen members of
+Parliament. Have you got a partridge left?"
+
+Rames leaned forward and met smile with smile.
+
+"We have just left one for next year," he said, "and we have been
+making a careful note of the piece of land on which we think we shall
+get him."
+
+Howard Fall was delighted. For he loved courage. But the others of
+that company were more than ever confused and disconcerted.
+
+"He's giving us away," said one of the weak-kneed in an indignant
+whisper to Andrew Fallon. Fallon's white face was twisted in a grin.
+
+"He's cutting down the bridge behind you, my friend. And I don't think
+he's a bad judge."
+
+Meanwhile Devenish returned the direct gaze of Captain Rames. There
+was no pretence between these two. Their eyes met; they challenged
+each other, Rames with perfect good-humor, Devenish with a certain
+grimness in his smile. He nodded his head toward Rames and tightened
+his lips. There was not a man at that table who could not construe the
+gesture into words.
+
+"You are the leader here, Rames. Very well, we'll see."
+
+Mr. Devenish turned to his neighbor. It was Cynthia, and even to her
+he talked for a little while with reserve. Rames had been correct in
+his diagnosis of the man. A good-humored fighter as a rule, he lost
+his good-humor when the attack was made upon his flank. He had begun
+his own political career with side-shots at his leaders from the
+front-bench below the gangway; but he did not rejoice when the same
+disposition of battle was planned against himself. However, luncheon
+and the proximity of a beautiful woman appeased him as they should. He
+began to talk freely; his smile lost its grimness, his natural
+geniality flashed bright.
+
+"Tell me one thing," he said suddenly.
+
+"It depends--" said Cynthia warily.
+
+"Very well then. Tell me another thing. Why does your portrait hang in
+this house?"
+
+Cynthia's cheeks flamed. She looked swiftly across Devenish at Colonel
+Challoner. But he was giving no heed to them.
+
+"Do you think it's like me?" she asked.
+
+"It _is_ you," he replied.
+
+"No one else has noticed the resemblance all this week," said Cynthia.
+
+Mr. Devenish glanced along the table.
+
+"Well, look at 'em," he said contemptuously, and they both laughed.
+Lady Lorme rose at that moment from the table, and Mr. Devenish,
+pleading the distance he had to travel, took his departure.
+
+"I have enjoyed myself very much, Challoner," he said as the colonel
+came out with him to-the doorway. "I can't tell you how glad I am that
+I thought of dropping in upon you for luncheon. I am going back to
+London now. Good-by."
+
+He mounted into his car and drove gaily off. In the dining-room behind
+him, the sandy-haired man was saying over and over again to the
+dismayed conspirators--
+
+"He'll sell us a pup. He'll sell us a pup. I'll bet you a monkey,
+he'll sell us a pup."
+
+
+That night, when the men went upstairs, Rames passing from his
+dressing-room into his wife's bedroom found her still up and sitting
+by her fire.
+
+"We go back to-morrow, Cynthia. It has been a long week. I hope you
+haven't been bored."
+
+"No," she said. "I haven't."
+
+"What do you think of them? Will they run away when the fight comes?"
+
+"Not all," said Cynthia. "But even of those who stay with you, there's
+not one who is a match for Mr. Devenish."
+
+She spoke with some warmth in her voice.
+
+"You like him?" said Harry Rames.
+
+"I think he's a big man," she replied.
+
+Rames, who was standing looking into her mirror, suddenly swung round.
+
+"Shall I tell you why you say that, Cynthia?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Because he's the only man except myself who has noticed your likeness
+to that very pretty girl on the wall of the dining-room. I heard him
+mention it to you at luncheon."
+
+He burst out into a laugh as he spoke; and in a moment or two Cynthia
+joined in the laugh. So Harry Rames too had noticed the resemblance.
+She laughed and her eyes laughed with her lips.
+
+"After all," said Harry Rames, "we get some fun out of it, don't we,
+Cynthia?"
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia and her laughter died away. "We get some fun out
+of it, Harry. That's just what we do get"; and her eyes turned away
+from him to the fire.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXVII
+
+                           DEVENISH REPLIES
+
+
+Captain Rames had arranged to travel by a train which ran directly
+into Warwickshire through the outskirts of London. It left Wareham at
+mid-day, some two hours later than the fast London trains, and though
+Cynthia had wished to escape in all the hurry of the general
+departure, she had found no sufficient reason. She and her husband
+were thus the last of that company at Bramling, and when all but they
+had gone, Colonel Challoner turned from the front door whence he had
+been speeding his guests, and invited her to walk with him in the
+garden. Cynthia in a flurry began to search for excuses, and before
+she found one realized that the moment for excuses had already gone.
+She turned and walked with Colonel Challoner into the red-walled
+garden where his fruit and flowers grew. The half-hour which ever
+since the first evening at Bramling she had intended to avoid was,
+after all, upon her.
+
+"There is not very much to see now, Mrs. Rames," said the colonel, and
+without any change of voice he added, "I learnt just before the
+session ended that you had come from South America."
+
+"From the Argentine," said Cynthia.
+
+"But you are English-born, of course?"
+
+"Oh, yes, of course," said Cynthia. "But I never came to England until
+five years ago. I was brought up partly in Buenos Ayres and partly on
+the Daventry estancia two hundred miles to the south-west of Buenos
+Ayres. My name was Cynthia Daventry."
+
+Cynthia rattled off her story to spare herself his questions, and for
+a few minutes he walked by her side in silence. But he was not
+altogether to be deterred.
+
+"I had a son in South America," he continued. "He went out
+under--rather unhappy circumstances. He took a young wife with him.
+She ran away to join him. They went to Chile. There a daughter was
+born--my granddaughter."
+
+"On the other side of the Andes," said Cynthia.
+
+"Yes," said Colonel Challoner. "You were never in Chile, I suppose?"
+
+Cynthia answered without any hesitation and in a voice schooled
+perfectly to indifference.
+
+"Oh, yes, once. I have seen Valparaiso."
+
+Colonel Challoner was deceived by her indifference. To him, with the
+particular intention of his question filling his mind, it was as
+though she had said she had never been in Valparaiso at all.
+
+"I knew nothing of what my boy was doing, Mrs. Rames," he continued,
+"nor that he had a daughter. He left England under a cloud. I gave him
+what money I could afford and--I had done with him. Perhaps I was
+harsh--I did not think that I was. But--well, it's not so easy to have
+done with people when they are your own flesh and blood, and after a
+time I began to make inquiries. I heard of the daughter then."
+
+"Yes?" said Cynthia. She looked up into his face inquiringly. She had
+dreaded this half-hour of acting lest the changes of color in her
+face, and the unevenness of her voice, should betray her. Yet now that
+the half-hour was here she played her part with ease.
+
+"I heard that Jim and his wife and his child had all perished in one
+of the earthquakes, eighteen years ago. And there was I, you see,
+alone again, but alone for life now."
+
+"I am sorry," said Cynthia.
+
+"But the news was wrong," the old man continued with a sudden
+violence. "My son--died," and he plainly substituted that verb for
+another, "only five years ago. I received a cutting from a newspaper.
+I sent out again at once to South America a man whom I could trust;
+and I discovered that Jim was not killed by the earthquake, nor was
+his daughter. He carried her up the valley toward the Andes--tramped
+away, since Valparaiso was ruined, with his daughter in his arms. He
+wouldn't leave her behind. No, he must have carried her across the
+Continent. There was good in Jim, after all, you see--only I, his
+father hadn't the sense to see it."
+
+Colonel Challoner was not aware that it was just the weight of the
+little daughter in Jim's arms which had made his journey across the
+Andes possible and profitable. Cynthia left him all the comfort of his
+delusion, and all its remorse, since the remorse was so completely
+outweighed by the comfort.
+
+"That's the last I have been able to find out," Colonel Challoner
+resumed. "They disappeared up into the mountains together, and years
+after Jim--died--in the Argentine. As for the daughter, I have come
+upon no trace of her. She may have lived. She may have died. Had she
+lived she would have been just about your age, Mrs. Rames."
+
+"Indeed?"
+
+"I suppose that you never heard of her?"
+
+"What was her name?"
+
+"Even that I can't tell you. There was a daughter. That's all I know."
+
+Colonel Challoner waited with his eyes upon Cynthia's face. He longed,
+yet he hardly dared to hope for an answer. It would be such a
+wonderful thing for him if the girl facing him in his trim
+brick-walled garden had when a child eighteen years ago been carried
+in Jim's arms over the stupendous passes of the Andes. Surely if it
+were so, she must admit it now out of gratitude for Jim's devotion.
+But Cynthia made no reply and he moved slowly to the door of the
+garden and held it open for her to pass out. She went from Bramling
+with her secret still her own, though some remorse was now her penalty
+for keeping it. She could not quite get rid of the picture of the old
+man at the open door in the high red-brick wall waiting wistfully for
+an answer to a question which he could only suggest. But she had made
+her plan and with a certain stubbornness--almost a hardness which
+marked this phase of her life--she had abided by it. If Colonel
+Challoner had said clearly and formally that he made no claim upon
+her, that he did not ask her to take her place in the family of
+Challoners, then she would have acknowledged what he plainly
+suspected. But he had imposed upon himself no such condition. On the
+contrary she had been led to believe that he would claim her; and that
+was intolerable to her thoughts. She did not argue or reason; she
+recollected. And what she recollected was a night of horror when her
+father had claimed her for the ruin of her body and her soul. When she
+stepped into the train she made a silent vow that she would never come
+to Bramling again.
+
+"It's a strange thing," said Harry Rames as they were travelling
+across the country, "that two strangers to Bramling, Devenish and
+myself, noticed your extraordinary likeness to that picture on the
+wall, and Challoner who has sat beneath it most nights of the week for
+years didn't. It had become so familiar to him, I suppose, that it had
+ceased to have definite features."
+
+"That's how things happen," said Cynthia, and this time she uttered
+the phrase with relief. "When you know people very well, you cease to
+notice the changes, you lose count of how they look. But when we first
+met at Ludsey he did claim to recognize me, though he could not fix
+upon the place or time. I have no doubt it was because of that
+picture."
+
+Harry Rames agreed. None of Colonel Challoner's suspicions had even
+occurred to him. He drifted off to the great subject.
+
+"Devenish won't be idle, Cynthia," he said.
+
+"No," answered Cynthia. "He gives me the impression that even on his
+death-bed he would be quick about it."
+
+And on the Tuesday morning, the very day after they had reached home,
+the _Times_ brought Harry Rames news which sent him out of his study
+in search of his wife.
+
+"Look, Cynthia," he said and he handed to her the paper. Cynthia read
+the paragraph at which he pointed.
+
+"Mr. Devenish returned to London on Sunday evening and putting off two
+deputations which had been arranged for Tuesday left London hurriedly
+on Monday afternoon to join the Prime-Minister in Scotland."
+
+Cynthia laid down the paper with a genuine sense of consternation. She
+was astonished to realize how much she now longed for the success of
+Harry's rather dingy plot. Fear was written upon her face.
+
+"That means--?" she said.
+
+"That we must look out," replied Rames. He laughed a little as a man
+will when the joy of battle is upon him. "Lucky Devenish can't get at
+my constituency. I don't know that he would try to in any case. But he
+can't.
+
+"You have Arthur Pynes with you."
+
+"Yes. And I pledged myself before I was elected to resign at once if
+any responsible number of my supporters objected to any action I
+thought it my duty to take in the House. Do you see, Cynthia?" and he
+laughed again. "That pledge is my safeguard. I thought it would be
+when I made it. If any one tries to put pressure upon me, I can always
+point to that pledge. I can always ask whether they would like me to
+resign."
+
+"Suppose they said yes," cried Cynthia in alarm.
+
+Harry Rames grinned.
+
+"I'd get in again if they did. I'd keep nine-tenths of my own people
+and get a good lot of the other fellow's because of my independence.
+But they won't! No one wants a by-election at Ludsey. Ludsey is too
+busy."
+
+"I suppose that's true," said Cynthia with a smile of relief. Once
+more she had occasion to recognize the accuracy of her husband's
+foresight. But there was a little change. The recognition was no
+longer accompanied with regret that the foresight was not being used
+in a higher cause. She was simply relieved that on this side at all
+events the great career was not open to attack.
+
+Rames took a turn across the room and stopped at the window.
+
+"But I wonder what his next move will be," he said.
+
+In a month he knew. The movement was swift and dramatic. Rames was
+summoned to London by a letter from the Prime-Minister. He travelled
+up from Ludsey in the morning; he reached home again in time for
+dinner.
+
+"They are raising Lamson to the peerage," he said to Cynthia. "That
+means the Under Secretaryship of the Local Government Board will be
+vacant. It was offered to me."
+
+Cynthia was radiant.
+
+"That's splendid," she cried.
+
+"I refused it," said Harry Rames.
+
+Cynthia stared at him. Here was a definite step onward, a step
+refused.
+
+"Why?" she asked in her perplexity.
+
+"It would have meant the end of me, had I accepted it. It was offered
+to me to make an end of me, to break up the opposition to Devenish's
+bill, to show me a traitor to my friends, and an enemy who could be
+silenced by a bribe. If I had taken it, not merely the government, but
+the House, the whole House, would have despised me. I should have been
+done for. I should be an Under Secretary for a year, two years, three
+years--after that nothing and never anything so long as I lived. I
+refused it, Cynthia;" and he bent over the table toward her.
+
+"You mustn't blame me. I am not failing you. I was thinking of you, my
+dear, when I refused office. An Under Secretaryship? You remember
+Challoner's question to Bradley? I should have failed you had I taken
+it."
+
+Cynthia was almost conscious of disappointment. She liked definite
+things and here was a tangible sign of Harry Rames's advancement. But
+she received confirmation very soon that he had been right in refusing
+it.
+
+It was at the reception at the Foreign Office in January which marked
+the beginning of the session. Mr. Devenish himself came up to her with
+a smile. For a moment Cynthia felt an awkwardness at meeting him, but
+he was quick to put her at her ease.
+
+"Captain Rames did well to refuse office," he said. "I congratulate
+you, for I suppose that you had some share in the decision."
+
+"No," she replied honestly. "To tell you the truth I was a trifle
+disappointed."
+
+Mr. Devenish shook his head.
+
+"His whole reputation was at stake. It's character which counts in the
+House of Commons. If he had taken that Under Secretaryship, he would
+have been pigeon-holed. We should have had the measure of him. We
+should not have troubled our heads about him again. For once, Mrs.
+Rames, you were wrong; he was right."
+
+Cynthia looked at him, her great eyes full of a gentle reproach.
+
+"Wasn't it a little unkind of you to offer it then. You are a friend
+of mine, aren't you, Mr. Devenish?"
+
+There was no anger in her voice, only a wondering melancholy, a kind
+of piteous despair that she was living in so graceless a world. Mr.
+Devenish stared, then he smiled, and he looked at Cynthia with
+enjoyment.
+
+"It wants a woman to use that argument, Mrs. Rames. No man alive would
+have the nerve. You are out for a fight with me. Yes, but I am a
+friend of yours, so I mustn't defend myself." He shook his head. "The
+House of Commons isn't a nursery, Mrs. Rames. You have got to stand by
+yourself if you're going to stand, neither being kind nor expecting
+kindness. Captain Rames stands--and he stands to fight me. Very
+well--but you can't expect me to prop him up."
+
+"I quite understand," said Cynthia in her iciest manner. "I am not at
+all hurt or offended. You mustn't think that, Mr. Devenish," she bowed
+to him distantly and sailed off with great dignity. But she had humor
+enough to appreciate her discomfiture, and, even as she turned her
+back, her lips were twitching into a smile which she did not mean him
+to see. But ten minutes later in another of the rooms she came face to
+face with him again. He looked at her whimsically, and with a blush
+and a laugh she made friends with him again.
+
+"Tell me," he said. "Your husband refused the post with decision after
+the merest pause for thought, though the offer surprised him. I know
+that. Was he troubled about his decision afterward?"
+
+"Not at all," said Cynthia. "He slept perfectly; he ate his dinner
+with absolute contentment."
+
+"Now I am afraid of him," said Mr. Devenish gravely, and he added a
+shrewd saying to explain his fear. "Here's the great difference which
+makes art and politics incompatible. The men who succeed in politics
+are the men who don't worry. The men who succeed in art are the men
+who do. Yes, I am afraid of him now, and if I hit hard, Mrs. Rames,
+bear me no grudge. I shall hit hard because I must."
+
+Cynthia's heart warmed to him. She laughed joyously.
+
+"I'll bear no grudge, Mr. Devenish."
+
+"By the way, why isn't he here to-night? He ought to be."
+
+"He was here," Cynthia replied. "But a telephone message was brought
+to him. Some one had called at our house who was urgent to see him. So
+he went home."
+
+Mr. Devenish saw Cynthia into her carriage and she drove back to
+Curzon Street. The visitor was still with Harry Rames in his study
+when she reached home. As she went up to her room she heard his voice
+through the door, and once she waked up from her sleep and in the
+small hours she again heard his voice. He was in the hall taking his
+leave of Harry Rames. Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her
+watch. It was three o'clock in the morning. Drowsily she asked herself
+who this visitor could be, but she was asleep again almost before the
+question was formulated in her mind.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+                               WIRELESS
+
+
+Harry Rames, however, told her who it was the next morning as they sat
+at breakfast. He had come down late and Cynthia looked at him with
+anxious eyes.
+
+"You were kept late in your study?" she said, thinking of the critical
+week which lay in front of him.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Harry Rames laid down his Sunday newspaper.
+
+"Walter Hemming was here."
+
+"Hemming?"
+
+To Cynthia the name was quite unfamiliar. There had been no Walter
+Hemming at Bramling.
+
+"He was one of my officers on the _Perhaps_. He has got together some
+money, has bought the old ship and is off to the South."
+
+"He takes up your work?"
+
+"Yes. I never saw a man so enthusiastic. Suppose he reaches the Pole,
+what then?" Harry Rames laughed contemptuously.
+
+"Aren't there discoveries to be made, maps to be drawn of that
+continent and something to be learned from the soundings?" asked
+Cynthia, recollecting Harry Rames's own book upon his voyage. He shook
+his head.
+
+"That's all trimmings, Cynthia. You have got to surround your
+expedition with a scientific halo. It gets you money, and official
+support, and the countenance of the learned societies. But the man who
+goes south into the Antarctic goes with just one reason--to reach the
+Pole. Why? You can't give a rational answer to that Cynthia. No one
+can. Such men are just driven on by a torment of their souls."
+
+No stranger watching Harry Rames as he speculated with an indulgent
+smile upon the aimlessness of Walter Hemming's long itinerary could
+have imagined that he had once himself led just such an expedition.
+Even Cynthia found the fact difficult of belief. By so complete a
+dissociation of spirit he was cut off from the race of the wanderers.
+
+"Let a man become insane in the East," he continued, "and he's looked
+upon as a holy man, touched by the finger of God. The fellows who go
+South and North are our holy men of the West." He turned back again to
+his newspaper, and then uttered an exclamation:
+
+"They have offered that Under Secretaryship to Edgington!"
+
+"Of course he'll refuse it," said Cynthia.
+
+"He has taken it. There's the first defection."
+
+"A traitor. I never liked him. He was thinking of himself all the
+while," said Cynthia, with a heat which made Harry look toward her
+curiously. She had not been wont to side so heartily with him and his
+plans in the days of the contest at Ludsey. He became suddenly aware
+of the remarkable change which had come over her character since that
+date. She who had blamed him with all the enthusiasm of a romantic
+girl because he would not take the high road, now walked the low road
+herself with her eyes concentrated, even more closely than his, upon
+the pathway at her feet. A pang of remorse made him wince.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder," he answered drily, "if Devenish says the same of
+me."
+
+But his comment fell upon inattentive ears. Cynthia's eyes had been
+caught by the blank, cheerless look of the street outside. It was a
+morning of black frost. There was no fog, but there was no glint of
+sunlight, either. London lay unburnished, like an ill-kept yacht, and
+the emptiness of Sunday made it dreary beyond all words. The chill of
+that day and the fevers of the week to come caused Cynthia's heart to
+sink. A vision rose before her eyes with unexpected vividness of
+another place where life ran occupied with smoother matters. Not in
+Warwickshire, but over far seas. She thought with a sudden poignancy
+of longing of the Daventry estancia where to-day the golden leagues of
+corn would be rippling to the sun and the cattle searching for the
+rare blades of green in the burnt pastures. Remorse came to her as it
+had come to her husband. So seldom had she thought of that spacious
+and wide place which had lain so close to her adopted father's heart.
+He had prayed her to go thither from time to time. Greatly she wished
+that she were there now.
+
+"It's a pity Mr. Hemming stayed so late," she said.
+
+"Oh, that's all right," replied Harry. "My amendment can't come on
+before Wednesday. It may not be chosen at all. And there's always the
+possibility that the Land Bill may not be mentioned in the King's
+speech. However, that's not likely. We shall know to-morrow."
+
+The Land Bill was mentioned as one of the principal measures of the
+session, and Harry handed in at the clerk's table his humble prayer to
+His Majesty that no solution of the land question would be found
+lasting or real which did not provide opportunities for the
+acquisition of small farms as freehold properties. Thursday was set
+aside for the discussion of Rames's amendment, and the fact that it
+was deemed of sufficient importance to take precedence of a host of
+other amendments was in itself regarded as a triumph by his adherents.
+
+"Go your own way over it," Robert Brook advised in an agitated voice.
+"Don't sink your personality in a conventional speech. You must strike
+a special note on Thursday. The third bench below the gangway and the
+corner seat. That will be the best place for you. You command the
+House from there. And we'll be all together around you. It's a great
+thing to have some voices to cheer you at your elbow. Howard Fall will
+speak in support of you. He always gets called." Robert Brook ceased
+from his stage-managements to whisper with a lengthened face, "By the
+way, have you heard?"
+
+"What?" asked Harry.
+
+"That Challoner's weakening. Yes, it's true. The whips have been
+getting at him, I expect. At all events he came to me pleading that
+the amendment need not be pressed to a division if we get anything
+like a friendly reply."
+
+Harry Rames smiled.
+
+"We shan't get that. I'll take care not to get it. So you can agree
+with Challoner. We can't afford to let any one break away now. I'll
+speak to him myself."
+
+The colonel strenuously disavowed any faintness of heart. "You must go
+to a division, Rames, unless you get a satisfactory reply. That's
+understood. We've got to stick to our guns. I think we all know that.
+Edgington's example isn't one any of us would care to follow. No. All
+my idea was that perhaps the government might be willing to take our
+view, but unable at this moment to say so publicly. However, don't you
+worry about us. Think of your speech, Rames. We look to you to do
+something unusual on Thursday."
+
+Harry went away to his study and from his documents and blue books
+labored to hammer out some spark of his own which should set fire to
+the Thames or to that portion of it at all events which flows under
+Westminster Bridge. He woke at five o'clock on the Thursday morning,
+and lying in bed repeated his speech word by word to himself. Then he
+dismissed it into the chamber of his memory to wait until it was
+needed. But the knowledge that the day was to be one of supreme
+importance to his career hung over him all that forenoon. The labor
+was over and therefore the strain upon him was the heavier. His nerves
+had free play and he wandered restlessly from room to room, calm
+outwardly except for some spasmodic movements which people
+unacquainted with him would never have remarked, but inwardly a
+creature in torment. He had pitted himself against his own government.
+The enormity of his presumption grew with every lagging hour. Failure
+to-day would cover him with ridicule. He saw himself as one of those
+bubbles ripe for pricking with which the House of Commons is
+perpetually iridescent. Before twelve o'clock he was already looking
+at his watch lest he should be too late to fix before prayers the card
+in the slot at the back of his seat which would reserve his place for
+him during the day.
+
+Cynthia, with a covert fear, watched his fever, but said never a word,
+either of comfort or inquiry. It was her part to notice nothing of his
+agitation. She had claimed, when he had asked her to marry him, her
+share in the troubles and the terrors which went before the public
+success. But married life had taught her that much of her share must
+come to her by guesswork, by intuition, by observation, by any means
+except those of question and answer. So she said little and left Harry
+Rames mostly to himself, only coming upon him now and again on some
+indifferent errand, when they would speak for a moment or two, he
+chiefly at random and upon any chance subject which came uppermost in
+his mind. Thus once he said abruptly:
+
+"There was a stamp struck. Did you ever see it, Cynthia?"
+
+"No," she answered; "you must show it to me."
+
+"I will; I have a specimen somewhere. I'll look it out."
+
+"Do," said Cynthia in a voice which conveyed that it would be a
+particular joy to her to see that stamp.
+
+But she was quite in the dark about it. She had no notion at all that
+he was speaking of that great territory which he had discovered far to
+the south, beyond the ice-floes, beyond the open blue water. It had no
+inhabitants but the penguins; yet since Rames had spent a winter of
+darkness on its inhospitable shores and had annexed it for Great
+Britain, a penny stamp had been struck and postage duly established.
+The recollection passed in and out of Harry Rames's head, with a
+hundred trivial thoughts and memories. And it was the mark and
+consequence of his agitation that his mind acquired an extraordinary
+and unnatural lucidity so that his thoughts became swift visions of
+things with a small but surprisingly clear definition, as though he
+saw them through a diminishing glass.
+
+In this supersensitive spirit he walked down Parliament Street at
+half-past one in the afternoon on the eastern side of the road; and
+when he had come opposite to the Horse-Guards, he suddenly stopped.
+Behind the Horse-Guards' Arch and a little to the north rose the great
+red building of the Admiralty where Cynthia and he had been made
+acquainted with one another. But it was not of the first meeting nor
+of the quarrel which ended it that Harry Rames was thinking. He was
+not looking at the main mass of the Admiralty Building, but only at
+the three grayish-blue domes which surmounted it. From these domes
+rose three tall spars at the points of a triangle, each of them rigged
+and dressed with wires to which were attached curious little hoops and
+contrivances of cane like Catherine wheels set for a night of
+fireworks. He was gazing at the mechanism of wireless telegraphy.
+
+He had passed those poles either just here or on the other side of the
+Horse-Guards' Parade in St. James's Park on every day when Parliament
+was in session; and no doubt he had often enough lifted his head and
+seen them with the blind eyes of a man for the landmarks he habitually
+walks by. But this morning his imagination was made acute by a night
+of wakefulness and the tension of his nerves, and he was sensitive to
+all the suggestion of that aerial toyshop of contrivances. He stopped.
+He almost fancied that he heard--so keen was the lucidity of his
+senses--the messages of distant ships, here tumbling on seas of storm
+there upright on seas of sunshine, whizzing homeward to the dim
+smoke-wreathed city, crowding the air. He almost fancied that he saw
+them, the myriad bright spokes of an illimitable wheel which hung
+poised roof-high over all the world. His thoughts were swept quite
+away from England, and the roar of Whitehall died from his ears. He
+saw the big roadsteads of the East and West Indies and anchored
+vessels mirrored in waveless seas. He saw the meetings of ships in the
+narrows of the great trade-routes, barkentine and schooner, tramp and
+liner, and in and out amongst them like the gray shadows of sharks
+seen beneath the water, the long cruisers of the fleet.
+
+He walked on like a man in a dream. He left the busy harbors and the
+great trade-routes behind him. The stately procession of vessels
+receded and now he saw only one--a little, full-rigged, black-hulled
+ship quite alone on a silent sea, the _Perhaps_, reeling down with all
+her canvas drawing, from her sky-sail to her spanker, reeling down
+with the water breaking from her broad stern bows into the mists of
+the south. The picture was so vivid in his mind that he could see the
+brightness of the binnacle and the wheel spinning in the helmsman's
+hands. He paused again to consider why, and paused with a curious
+sense of comfort. Once before, on the occasion of his maiden speech,
+the vision of a ship had risen before his eyes. But then it was fear
+which had evoked the picture. He had longed to be safely upon its
+bridge doing the thing he knew how to do. Now he had no such fear. He
+was nervous, but he had no desire to run away, he had no terror that
+the necessary words would fail him, he had no longing to stand upon
+the deck of the _Perhaps_. He was strung up for the contest of the
+afternoon. He walked slowly on and turned in at the gate of Palace
+Yard, and still the _Perhaps_ fled southward before his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXIX
+
+                        IN THE LADIES' GALLERY
+
+
+An hour later Cynthia drove down to the House of Commons, anxious and
+yet expectant of triumph. For on this afternoon Harry Rames should
+particularly excel; the occasion was so confederate with his gifts. In
+debate he was as yet too inexperienced to shine with any brilliancy.
+His success had been made with prepared speeches. He had not as yet
+the art to handle words with such precision that he could express
+vividly in an argument across the floor just what he meant, and no
+more and no less. He was not at ease with his vocabulary when a sudden
+call was made upon it, and his lack of ease became manifest and
+spread, as it always does, discomfort. He was in a word on the way to
+becoming a polished debater but as yet he was at school. This
+afternoon, however, he had not to reply, not to intervene in the
+middle of a discussion; his business was to make the set speech which
+set the debate going. And here he was on his own good ground. He could
+prepare the vivid phrase and, a quality perhaps still more important,
+he could speak it. He had an invaluable gift which had stood him in
+good stead when he had delivered his maiden speech. He was able so to
+deliver a carefully concocted speech as to give the impression that he
+was thinking aloud. He gained his effect by an apt breaking off of
+sentences and a recommencement, by a sudden drop to the homeliest of
+colloquialisms, by a seeming deliberation in the choice of his words,
+so that the picturesque and living sentence, which had been so
+carefully thought out, appeared to leap new-minted from a furnace of
+conviction. He had been shrewd enough to recognize with his own
+unflattering estimation of his powers that an amendment to the address
+provided him especially with a rare opportunity.
+
+When Cynthia reached the ladies' gallery she had some trouble to find
+a place whence she could command the House. The gallery was full,
+since it was the beginning of the session. For the same reason the
+House itself was not. Even though questions were being asked of the
+ministers, a time when the House is seldom less than crowded, there
+were to-day vacant spaces on the benches. The real business of
+Parliament would not begin until the debate on the Address was
+concluded. Members still lingered in the country or the south of
+France. Rames's amendment was considered rather as a dress-parade than
+an engagement. It was not expected that he would press his views to a
+division. At the last moment suave words from a Cabinet Minister would
+no doubt dissuade the recalcitrant as they had done a thousand times
+before.
+
+But his supporters were there clustered close below the gangway on the
+three back benches; Howard Fall two seats away from Harry Rames,
+chirruping gently and rubbing his hands together with delight; beyond
+him the sandy-haired man from the Shires with an eye on Devenish upon
+the treasury bench, and prepared at any moment for the production of
+that threatened pup which the Minister for Agriculture was sure to
+sell them; beyond him again Colonel Challoner and the timid spirits
+all trying to look unconscious and most of them pretending that they
+only occupied these particular seats by the merest accident. But they
+were in full view. Robert Brook had seen to that. They were labelled
+plainly and legibly, and if some of them shirked at the last moment,
+they would still get the credit of having shared in the revolt. In
+front of all were the earnest men who believed the policy of Devenish
+to be dangerous. Behind all under the shadow of the gallery were the
+young bloods, all as convinced as their graver seniors in the front,
+but still youths spoiling for a row and totally unawed by the
+frockcoats of the treasury bench. Their business was to cheer and to
+ejaculate, not to speak. Thus had Robert Brook disposed his forces for
+the battle. He himself sat between Harry Rames and Howard Fall, and,
+looking about him, was proud of the array.
+
+Before questions had come to an end Cynthia had squeezed herself into
+a place on the first row of seats behind the stone grille. She had now
+from her aerie the whole group within her view, or rather, the tops of
+all its particular heads. She waited impatiently. Every now and then a
+sudden fluttering like the waving of little flags ran with a crackle
+of sound along the benches below and showed that another page of the
+question paper had been turned. Questions must now be coming to an end
+surely, she thought in her ignorance. Her mistake was colossal. The
+Speaker had only this moment come to the questions of the Irish
+members, and there was a postmaster in Ballymena who had last week
+committed the hideous crime of refusing a registered letter at two
+minutes to eight by the church-clock. Upon this important matter, by
+question and supplementary question, the Imperial Parliament was
+forced to concentrate its attention till the hands of the clock above
+the door pointed to a quarter to four. Then the Speaker rose, a buzz
+of talk mounted to Cynthia's ears, a few members called upon by name
+came forward from behind the Speaker's chair to the clerk's table with
+private bills, others drifted out into the lobby and the tea-room and
+the smoking-rooms. Then once more the Speaker rose. His canopied chair
+was just beneath Cynthia. She could not see him but she heard his
+voice quite clearly.
+
+"Captain Rames."
+
+Rames rose amidst vociferous applause from his own group and some
+cheers from the opposition. The personal question flashed into
+Cynthia's mind.
+
+"Will he look up toward the gallery in which I am sitting?"
+
+He threw his head back. It seemed that he did look up. Cynthia leaned
+forward as though across that distance her eyes could answer and
+sustain him. She forgot that the only light in the gallery was fixed
+against the wall behind her, and that nothing more individual of her
+was visible upon the floor of the chamber than the wide sphere of her
+hat.
+
+He was not so nervous, she realized at once, as he usually was.
+Nervousness gave to his voice a peculiar vibration which was not
+without its effect in arresting attention. Cynthia missed it now. But
+the sentences which she already knew by heart followed one behind the
+other spaced and regular as the waves of a calm sea. She forgot that
+little significant omission of manner. She followed the argument as
+she knew it, and it was developed step by step as it had been
+prepared. Harry Rames had spoken for five minutes when a lady on
+Cynthia's left whispered in an audible voice to her neighbor on the
+right:
+
+"I thought you told me that Captain Rames was a brilliant speaker."
+
+"Not I, dear," came the reply. "These men of action are seldom
+effective in their speeches. I shouldn't expect him to do better than
+he is doing."
+
+
+Cynthia moved indignantly. The poor woman must be off her head. But if
+she did not know what good speaking was, she might at all events hold
+her tongue. She looked down again into the well of the House and
+became perplexed. The benches were actually emptying. The double doors
+opposite to her which led from the chamber to the lobby were swinging
+silently backward and forward with a perpetual motion as the members
+passed out, and the space just in front of those doors where members
+may stand and where she had seen them stand packed on other days while
+Harry spoke, was almost empty. There were just one or two standing
+there, but they were obtaining orders for the galleries from the
+sergeant-at-arms. Then the voice at her elbow spoke again in an accent
+of resignation.
+
+"He is very, very dull."
+
+Cynthia clenched her hands. She would have dearly liked to have boxed
+her neighbor's ears. Was he dull she asked? And the dreadful
+continuous buzz of voices, which always rises when a speaker has lost
+the attention of the House, rose from the benches below to answer her.
+With a sob only half suppressed Cynthia was forced to admit the truth.
+The incredible thing was happening. Harry Rames at the crisis of his
+fortunes was signally failing.
+
+"If he fails it's partly my fault," she thought. "I helped in the
+preparation of the speech."
+
+For it was word for word the prepared speech which he was delivering,
+the very phrases chosen for their simplicity and their force were
+uttered in their due place. Yet the effect was dreary beyond measure.
+Even the ardent spirits beneath the gallery had ceased to applaud;
+they sat back in the shadow, all their enthusiasm quenched. A still
+worse sign, Mr. Devenish had laid his writing pad and his fountain-pen
+on the table in front of him; he took no more notes, he leaned back
+with his arms folded and his eyes closed, a typical picture of a
+Cabinet Minister, a man inured to patience and the bed-fellow of
+boredom.
+
+"Why is Harry failing?" Cynthia asked of herself despairingly. And the
+answer came from her neighbor.
+
+"You know, my dear, I don't believe that what he's saying is nonsense
+if one only had the necessary concentration to follow it. But his
+delivery's so bad that he makes attention impossible."
+
+Again Cynthia was constrained to admit the criticism. The chosen
+sentences were uttered, but no conviction winged them. Harry's gifts
+of speech were that afternoon quite hidden. He was as one delivering a
+recitation which by constant repetition had become at once meaningless
+and automatic. His voice trailed away into lassitude. There was no
+spirit behind any word.
+
+The buzz of conversation increased, a protesting voice called "Order,
+order," and then Harry faltered and stopped, stopped quite noticeably.
+A general cheer rose to encourage him--for the House of Commons can be
+generous, especially to those who are dropping out of the race--and
+twisting his hands together suddenly, almost with the air of a man
+waking from a dream, Harry Rames staggered on again. Cynthia's heart
+went out to him in a rush of pity. What he must be suffering! He had
+staked so much upon this afternoon. So much had been expected of him.
+Cynthia's thoughts went back to the week at Bramling. With what high
+hopes that company had counted upon his leadership!
+
+"If he would only finish!" she prayed. She looked upon him as a man in
+torment. She leaned her elbows on the rail in front of her, closed her
+ears with her thumbs and shut her eyes. She took at once with the
+exaggeration of her years the blackest view.
+
+"He has attacked his own government and frightened no one. His career
+will be affected, perhaps ruined. A really bad mistake may take a man
+years to overcome in the House of Commons. Who was it said that? Mr.
+Smale. This is a really bad mistake. The debate itself may collapse.
+That would mean ruin."
+
+So she reasoned until in a clap the truth of the mistake came upon
+her, its cause, its meaning.
+
+"I ought to have foreseen his failure," she murmured. "It was bound to
+come. Sooner or later it was bound to come. For his heart is never in
+the theme but always in the career."
+
+She might indeed have looked upon it as a retribution, a just
+retribution.
+
+"And a year ago I should so have looked upon it," she reflected, and
+sat back in her seat amazed at the change which two years had wrought
+in her. The magnitude of it was now for the first time revealed to
+her. Success following success, each in its anticipated sequence, had
+sealed up from her the knowledge of herself. It had needed the failure
+to reveal it.
+
+She leaned back in a confusion of her emotions. She heard no longer
+any word of the debate. For a little while the House of Commons
+vanished and was not. She glanced swiftly backward across the months
+of her married life and detected one by one the indications of the
+change. Gradually she had ceased to clamor for ideas, she had come to
+look only at the man and she had desired him to tower above his
+fellows, because that was his desire. And the reason for the change?
+She jumped to it with her heart on fire. She loved him.
+
+But while she thus began to make her account with herself a
+perfunctory cheer and the Speaker's distinct pronouncement of another
+name broke in upon her reckoning. The voice of her neighbor brought
+her back to earth.
+
+"Mr. Howard Fall. I hear he's quite a favorite speaker."
+
+The turn of the words recalled irrelevantly to Cynthia Harry's
+indignant story of the elector who had told him that he was well
+patronized in Ludsey. The recollection brought a smile to her face.
+But the smile faded as her anxieties came home to her. Would the
+debate collapse?
+
+Howard Fall was already upon his legs seconding the amendment; and in
+a little while she saw members enter through the doors, stand for a
+moment at the bar and then as though here was matter worthy of their
+attention, slip into places upon the seats. Cynthia's first feeling
+was one of relief. Yes, the House was undoubtedly filling up. Then, as
+a burst of laughter followed upon one of Fall's sallies against
+Devenish, a sharp pang of jealousy pierced her. The lady at her elbow
+incensed her by a laugh of approval--a ridiculous snigger Cynthia
+termed it.
+
+"Yes, now _he's_ really brilliant," she said, and Cynthia had to hold
+herself in, so impelled was she to explain to the lady exactly what
+she thought of her judgment and her manners and her family and of
+everything which appertained to her. But she did not. She remained
+outwardly calm, though inwardly she seethed.
+
+"Mrs. Rames," a quiet voice called to her from behind. She turned and
+saw Robert Brook. She left her seat and went to him.
+
+"What's the matter?" she asked anxiously, her heart leaping with a
+fear of calamity.
+
+"Nothing," Brook reassured her. "Your husband asked me to look after
+you. He can't well leave the House." Another burst of laughter
+intermingled with applause rose up to them. Devenish had petulantly
+interrupted Howard Fall, and interruptions Howard Fall thrived upon.
+"Isn't he in splendid form?" cried Brook with enthusiasm.
+
+"No doubt," said Cynthia, eyeing him coldly.
+
+Brook looked at her quickly.
+
+"Perhaps you would like some tea Mrs. Rames. Shall we go? The debate
+will tail off for a bit after Fall has finished."
+
+He led the way to the lift. Cynthia hurried after him.
+
+"Why?" she cried. "And what do you mean by tailing off?" There was an
+impatience in her voice with which Brook was unfamiliar. "Do you mean
+that the debate will collapse?"
+
+"Oh, no," he replied. "But the big-wigs won't speak until later. The
+subject is much too important to drop for want of argument. Indeed,
+there are enough men eager to speak to carry the debate well over
+to-morrow, if that were possible."
+
+They came out from the lift and walked down the long corridor toward
+the lobby between the rows of books protected by their frames of gilt
+wire. Robert Brook continued cheerfully:
+
+"Rames, to be sure, wasn't at his best in opening the debate. But no
+man is always at his best. There's not a soul in the House who doesn't
+know that."
+
+"Then this afternoon won't put him back?"
+
+"Why should it? It was he who had the shrewdness to recognize the
+opportunity which this question affords, and to select this particular
+line of attack. He engineered the whole movement. That's known. And if
+he carries his own people into the division lobby with him, and the
+opposition into the bargain, he will have established a fine
+reputation for Parliamentary capacity. That counts, Mrs. Rames, take
+the word-of an old hand. That counts here more than speech-making."
+
+"Does it?" cried Cynthia, smiles breaking through the tragic gloom of
+her countenance. But the smiles vanished. She shook her head
+wistfully. "You are merely saying this because you see that I am
+troubled."
+
+"But it's none the less true. This House has a corporate life which is
+rather difficult for those who are not members of it to understand."
+
+Robert Brook certainly seemed very well contented. Cynthia, however,
+was not satisfied.
+
+"But will he carry his people with him into the division lobby--now?"
+she asked. "Won't they a little have lost faith?"
+
+"Not a bit. You see Howard Fall has quite saved the situation," Brook
+replied cheerily, and Cynthia suddenly stepped on ahead. The name of
+Howard Fall was beginning to exasperate her. She stopped, however, as
+they came into the round hall of the lobby.
+
+"On the whole," she said, with the loftiest impartiality, "I liked my
+husband's speech a good deal better than I did Mr. Howard Fall's.
+Perhaps on a second thought you will too, Mr. Brook."
+
+She surveyed him steadily with a pair of cold blue eyes, and then her
+face suddenly dimpled to a smile of appeal.
+
+"You really mean that I can't see him?"
+
+"The man who starts a discussion must hear it out. That's a sound old
+rule, and if it's not so religiously kept as it used to be, the House
+of Commons is the worse."
+
+"I can send him a little note at all events."
+
+"Certainly. Write it and I'll give it to a messenger."
+
+"A messenger!" said Cynthia doubtfully. "Will it be sure to reach him?
+It's rather important."
+
+Brook smiled.
+
+"Very well. I'll take it in myself, Mrs. Rames."
+
+Cynthia took a little diary from the bag she carried, tore out a leaf,
+scribbled hastily:
+
+"You did splendidly. Everybody thinks so. Cynthia;" and having calmly
+perpetrated that obvious untruth, she twisted up her message and
+handed it to Brook. The sandy-haired man from the Shires was drifting
+about the lobby. Brook called to him. "Look after Mrs. Rames for a
+moment, will you?" he said, and hurried off through the swing-doors.
+
+It seemed a very short time to Cynthia before he came back, though in
+that short time she had not so much as addressed a word to her
+companion. She looked at Robert Brook's hands. They were empty and a
+shadow passed over her face.
+
+"Did you give it him?" she asked.
+
+"I passed it along the bench and saw that it reached him. I didn't
+wait for him to open it."
+
+The shadow passed from Cynthia. She was disappointed now, but not
+hurt; and in a second the disappointment passed too. This was not the
+day on which small things should be allowed to sting.
+
+"Now you'll have some tea," said Brook.
+
+"No, I don't think I will stay any longer to-day, Mr. Brook," she
+replied. Now that her fears were dispersed she was in a hurry to get
+away and be alone with her new secret. "I am keeping you from the
+House, and you are our Whip, aren't you?"
+
+The flattery did not compensate Mr. Brook for his loss. The privilege
+of parading a pretty and well-dressed woman before the envious eyes of
+less fortunate colleagues is one which no member of Parliament, not
+even its sedatest representative of non-conformity, would forego
+without regret; and in a remote philandering way, Robert Brook was a
+kind of lady's man. Cynthia was wearing a trim coat and skirt of dark
+velvet, and from a coil of fur about her throat her face rose like a
+summer flower, and was framed in the wide border of her blue hat.
+
+"My duties are light just now," he protested, but Cynthia lifted up
+her hands in her great muff appealingly and coaxed him.
+
+"You will let me go now, Mr. Brook, won't you?" Her eyes besought his
+permission as though without it she could not go, and Mr. Brook was
+duly reduced to subservience.
+
+"Good-by," said Cynthia, and she swung off, the long ends of her stole
+swinging about her hips, and her step indescribably light. Robert
+Brook watched her pass down the corridor to the rails where the
+visitors waited, and sighed in a melancholy fashion. It seemed to him
+for the moment contemptible to be a bachelor. For there was something
+strangely appealing about Cynthia, to-day--a winsomeness, a warmth.
+She seemed all a-quiver with youth. A swift variety of moods swept
+across her face in lights and shadows, and gave to her vitality. Her
+feet moved with a dancing buoyancy. All that Robert Brook felt the
+sandy-haired man from the Shires summarized in one reflective
+sentence:
+
+"I should like to kiss that girl," he said. "It would do me a great
+deal of good."
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXX
+
+                              THE LETTER
+
+
+Cynthia ran down the broad flight of steps into Westminster Hall, and
+skimmed across the historic flags of the ancient building without a
+pause. What at this moment was Charles the First to her, or even Mr.
+Gladstone? She came out into Palace Yard and drove home through the
+dusk just as the lamps in the shop-windows were beginning to bring
+some gleams of cheerfulness into the black February streets. She sat
+back in the corner of her car with her muff tightly held against her
+breast as though to cherish close some knowledge treasured there. When
+she reached her house she let herself in with her key and walked with
+secret steps into Harry's study. Once there she locked the door and
+with the firelight dancing upon the walls to keep her company, she sat
+down to make her reckoning with herself. But in truth the reckoning
+was already made.
+
+The great bargain, on her side at all events, was a bargain no more,
+could never again be a bargain. A veritable revolution had taken place
+in her that afternoon. She knew it from the depth of her sympathy with
+Harry in his failure--above all from the surprising sharpness of her
+disappointment when Robert Brook had returned with no answer to her
+scribbled message.
+
+For the failure as a factor in their fortunes she cared not a straw.
+Indeed, she welcomed it, since it was that which had wakened her. She
+had believed herself to be defective in the quality of passion, and
+her sense of the defect had hurt her like a bitter humiliation; she
+had envied wistfully the other women who possessed passion, even the
+wantons who flaunted it. Now the humiliation was gone. She rejoiced.
+She leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed and sailed over
+magical seas which were joyous and golden. She loved. She was like
+some lady of old Italy lit to swift flame by the first kiss from her
+lover's lips. Only it was a trivial irony in closer keeping with our
+modern days that what had kindled her who had demanded ideas, was a
+failure due to nothing but the lack of them.
+
+Cynthia rejoiced; for she loved. That pain and disappointment were in
+store for her she did not doubt. But she ran forward to meet the pain.
+She was young. Sooner all the pain in the world than the placidity of
+years without fire or inspiration. She recognized frankly that though
+upon her side the bargain was no longer any bargain at all, it still
+was just a bargain to her husband. A sign had been given to her that
+afternoon, a little sign, yet great in its significance. She had
+pleaded to herself as she sat in the ladies' gallery that when Harry
+rose, and just before he began to speak, he had looked up to where she
+sat, as though he were conscious of her presence, as though he drew
+strength from it. But he had not looked up. Even at the time she had
+known that he had not.
+
+"I merely pretended to myself that he had," she frankly admitted now.
+"His movement was nothing more than the natural muscular action of a
+man bracing himself for an effort." She herself, Cynthia, had not
+been, she felt sure, at that moment, in the remotest of his thoughts.
+
+"If Harry had changed toward me as I have toward him," she argued, "he
+would have looked up, not only because he wanted to, but because he
+would have remembered what I had said to him on that very point the
+afternoon when he asked me to marry him."
+
+But in spite of her conviction she rejoiced. Some kinship she could
+claim with Juliet. For all her longing was to give and to give, and
+still to give. She had sought desperately for color in her life.
+She had welcomed politics in the hunt for it. She had it now and to
+spare--enough to daub the world. The handle of the door was tried and
+through the panels her astonished maid told her the hour. Cynthia
+sprang up and unlocked it.
+
+"I shall dine at home to-night," she said. "The cook must get me some
+dinner, anything."
+
+The maid reminded Cynthia that she had arranged to dine with some
+friends and visit a theatre. "I know," said Cynthia. She had made the
+plan so that she might not spend in loneliness the anxious hours of
+this evening. But since she had made the plan the world had changed
+its hues.
+
+"You must telephone and say that I can't come," said Cynthia,
+remorselessly, as she ran upstairs.
+
+Whilst she dressed she considered what she should do with this
+wonderful evening. She meant to spend it alone--yes, but that did not
+quite content her. Somehow it should be made memorable. Something she
+must do which, but for this day of days, she never would have done.
+Something which must not merely mark it as a harbor boom marks a turn
+of the channel, but must be the definite consequence of it. Cynthia,
+in a word, went down to her solitary dinner much more akin than she
+had ever been since to the girl who, eager for life with the glorious
+eagerness of youth, had run down the stairs on the morning of her
+seventeenth birthday into the dining-room of the Daventry estancia.
+Half-way through dinner the thing to do, in order fitly to commemorate
+the day, came to her in a burst of light.
+
+She went back to Harry's study and sitting at his writing-table,
+composed with great care a letter of many pages. The hours passed as
+she wrote and rewrote, and glancing at the clock before the end was
+reached, she saw that it was already past eleven. Then she hurried.
+The division at this moment was being taken. Within the hour Harry
+would have returned; and indeed she had only just folded her letter in
+its envelope when his step sounded in the hall.
+
+She heard the door open and shut. He was in the room. But she kept her
+head bowed over her letter lest her face should betray her over much.
+Nor for a moment did she speak, since she did not quite trust her
+voice. It was Harry who spoke first.
+
+"You have come back? I did not expect you so soon."
+
+"I never went. I stayed at home."
+
+"Oh! You are not ill, Cynthia?"
+
+"No. But I felt that I had been rather hard and cruel----"
+
+"You?"
+
+"Oh, yes, I can be." Cynthia was stamping down her envelope with an
+elaboration of care which almost suggested that it was never meant to
+be opened. "I was in this case. So I stayed at home and wrote a letter
+to make amends. I should very much like it to be posted to-night,
+Harry. The servants have all gone to bed. I wonder if you----"
+
+"Of course. You are afraid that you might change your mind about it in
+the morning."
+
+"Not at all," replied Cynthia with a laugh. Harry Rames walked over to
+the table.
+
+"Give it to me, Cynthia," he said; and at last Cynthia raised her head
+and rather shyly her eyes sought his face. At his first glance she
+stood up quickly and she did not give him her letter. Harry Rames was
+standing, his face white and drawn and harassed. He had been answering
+her vaguely, as though the words came from him by reflex action rather
+than through a comprehension of what she said. For a moment Cynthia
+was afraid to speak. The beating of her heart was painful. Then she
+laid her hand upon his arm.
+
+"Something has happened, Harry?" she faltered.
+
+"Something terrible," he replied, and walking to the fire he warmed
+his hands at the blaze like one smitten with a chill.
+
+"The debate collapsed? Your people didn't follow you into the lobby?
+Oh, Harry!"
+
+She went to his side.
+
+"No. That's not the trouble. We did better in the division than I had
+anticipated. Of course we had the labor party solid against us. But
+that we had reckoned on. On the other hand, some of the Irish members
+came along with us, and it had been expected that they would all
+abstain. No, we ran the government majority down to thirty-one.
+Devenish is shaken, I can tell you. He passed me after the division
+was over, without a word and white with passion. No, Cynthia, we did
+very well." He moved away from the fire and sat down in the chair at
+his writing-table. "I took all my people into the Division Lobby with
+me--except one."
+
+Cynthia put out a hand and steadied herself against the mantel-piece.
+
+"Except one?" She turned toward him, her face troubled, her eyes most
+wistful. "One failed you--one alone. Oh, Harry, it wasn't Colonel
+Challoner?"
+
+But though she asked the question, she did not need the answer. Her
+foreboding made her sure of it.
+
+"It was," replied Harry, and Cynthia turned again to the fire. A
+little sob, half-checked, burst from her. Then she tore the letter
+which she had been at such great pains to write, across and again
+across, and dropped the fragments into the fire.
+
+"The Challoners are no good," she said, in a voice curiously distinct
+and hard.
+
+"Don't say that, Cynthia," Harry Rames answered gently.
+
+"I do say it. I ought to know."
+
+The words were uttered, and only then she realized what she had said.
+She looked quickly toward her husband, but he gave to her cry no
+particular significance. His brain seemed to register her words, not
+to comprehend them. Cynthia was conscious of a great relief. Loud at
+her heart rose a hope, a prayer that in all things, all qualities,
+even to tricks of manner, she was her mother's child, and had nothing
+of her father. Never would she acknowledge her relationship with that
+family. Never would she admit her name. Her first resolve and instinct
+had been right. The Challoners were no good.
+
+"No, I should not say that, Cynthia," Raines repeated. "He's dead."
+
+Cynthia turned swiftly upon the word. Her dress rustled as she turned,
+and when that sound ceased there was absolute silence in the room.
+Cynthia stood by the mantel-shelf still as stone. Her face was white,
+and a look of awe overspread it. With her lips parted and her eyes
+troubled and wondering she watched her husband. Harry Rames sat with a
+large silver paper-knife in his hands, looking absently straight in
+front of him. And in a little while he broke the silence by absently
+tapping with the blade of the paper-knife upon his blotting-pad. The
+sound roused Cynthia. She moved to a low chair close to the
+writing-table.
+
+"Dead? Harry, I don't quite understand."
+
+The tapping ceased.
+
+"His heart was wrong. He died in the Division Lobby--actually while
+the division was being taken."
+
+"In the Division Lobby? But you said you didn't take him with you."
+
+"I didn't. He was in the Government Lobby."
+
+Cynthia's face contracted with pain. A low moan burst from her. "He
+was actually voting against you!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Harry added reluctantly:
+
+"Our revolt killed him." Cynthia sat down in the chair.
+
+"Tell me everything, will you, Harry?" she entreated, and thus the
+story was told her.
+
+"The Whips got at Challoner. You know Hamlin, don't you? But you don't
+know his methods, Cynthia. He doesn't bully you if you revolt. He
+doesn't threaten. He takes you affectionately by the arm and makes you
+feel a beast. His round brown eyes survey you with a gentle and
+wistful regret. You leave him, convinced that he personally will be
+dreadfully hurt if you vote against the government. You are glad to be
+rid of him as you are glad to be rid of a man whom you have injured;
+and within the hour he is at your elbow again, pursuing the same
+insidious, amicable strategy. That's how he worked on Challoner, and
+Challoner was not the man either to withstand him, or to tell us
+boldly that he was going to--"--"rat" was on the tip of his tongue,
+but Rames caught the word back and substituted "change his mind." "So,
+do you see, he stayed with us to the last minute. It was arranged that
+the division should be taken at eleven. As soon as the Speaker rose to
+put the question, Challoner, who had been standing at the bar of the
+House slipped out through the lobby and down the stairs to a little
+smoking-room on the opposite side of the passage to the big strangers'
+smoking-room. That room is very often quite deserted. Few people,
+indeed, use it at any time. In a corner of that room he sat behind a
+newspaper all of the ten minutes during which the division bells were
+ringing."
+
+"To avoid meeting any of you?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"Yes, I suppose so."
+
+"But how do you know he was there?"
+
+"He was seen by one or two of the Irish members who did not intend to
+vote at all. They went into the room while the bells were ringing and
+saw him."
+
+"I understand."
+
+"As soon as the bells stopped, as soon, in a word, as he was quite
+certain that we should be all in our lobby, he started up quickly.
+There is just a little time between the moment when the bells cease
+ringing and the moment when the lobby doors are locked. But it is only
+a little time. If you want to vote you have to hurry. Challoner was a
+good distance away, and he had a flight of stairs to ascend. He
+hurried, he ran; I expect, too, that he was agitated. His courage had
+failed him. He must prove his loyalty to his official leaders at all
+costs. He reached the lobby in plenty of time. Monro, you remember
+him, the Scotchman? He was at Bramling."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia.
+
+"He saw Challoner. He was standing by the entrance door of our lobby.
+We were in the 'No' Lobby, for the question we had to vote upon was
+that the original words of the Address 'stand part,' and to enter the
+'Aye' Lobby a man must pass our entrance door and traverse the House.
+Monro saw Challoner hurry past the door, and thinking that he had
+mistaken our lobby and was under the impression that the question he
+had to vote upon was that the amendment be substituted--in which case,
+of course, we should all have been in the 'Aye' Lobby--he called to
+the Colonel. Challoner didn't hear, or wouldn't hear. He hurried on,
+and once inside the Government Lobby, collapsed onto the bench which
+runs along the sides. He died within a couple of minutes."
+
+Harry Rames ceased. The shock of this swift calamity had driven from
+Cynthia's thoughts all her indignation against the Challoners. She
+pictured to herself that old, unhappy, disappointed man, dropping at
+last between the shafts, the pack-horse of politics. Not even the
+insignificance of an Under Secretaryship had come to requite him for
+his tedious years of service. And it never could have fallen to him.
+That she recognized. Again the silence was broken by the tap-tap of
+the paper-knife upon the blotting-pad.
+
+"It's a Juggernaut, that House, isn't it? You said that once,
+Cynthia," said Rames.
+
+"I did? I don't remember."
+
+Cynthia was perplexed by his distress. Sensibility was not to be
+counted amongst his qualities. Yet he sat there with trouble heavy
+upon him, and every now and then a shiver of the shoulders, a shiver
+of repugnance.
+
+"This has shocked you terribly, Harry," she said.
+
+"Yes. I have known death before now, but never death without any
+dignity. That's what I find terrible." He paused for a moment and then
+said in a low and distinct voice:
+
+"I am to blame for it, Cynthia."
+
+"You?" she exclaimed.
+
+"Yes. I ought to have left him alone. I ought never to have taken
+advantage of his disappointments. I dragged him into the revolt to
+serve myself--yes, that's the truth, Cynthia. We both know it. I
+dragged him in without giving him and his character a thought. He was
+the real party hack. To him the men upon the treasury bench were as
+gods walking the earth. A nod from one of them in a passage, a
+hand-shake in a drawing-room, a little private conversation with a
+Cabinet Minister in the Division Lobby--that was the kind of food
+which sustained him through how many years! And he was a good cavalry
+officer once, I am told." Harry Rames suddenly swung round toward his
+wife. "That's strange, isn't it? Very strange. He must have come into
+the House of Commons twenty years ago a very different man. But I
+suppose the walls closed round him and crushed the vitality out of
+him. You had a phrase about such men--the prisoners of the House of
+Commons. He was one of them. I did a cruel thing when I enlisted him.
+For I might have known that he must desert. I am to blame for his
+death."
+
+"No," Cynthia protested.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Even if you might have known that he must desert, you couldn't have
+foreseen that he would hide from you till the last moment."
+
+"That's just what he would do."
+
+"Even so, you didn't know, Harry, that he had heart disease."
+
+"Would it have made any difference to me if I had?" And that question
+silenced Cynthia.
+
+Harry Rames fell again to tapping with his paper-knife upon the
+blotting-pad. He tapped aimlessly, the silver handle flashing in the
+light, the ivory blade striking and resounding. But gradually an
+intention seemed to become audible in his tapping. The taps came
+quickly, three or four together, then were spaced, then streamed
+swiftly again like sparks from an anvil. The noise began to jar on
+Cynthia's nerves.
+
+"Don't do that, Harry, please," she said.
+
+"I won't," said he, throwing down the paper-knife.
+
+"You might have been sending a telegram."
+
+"By wireless, eh?" he said with a smile, and then a curious look came
+into his face. "I was," he said slowly. Cynthia drew back in her chair
+with a queer feeling of uneasiness.
+
+"Not to--?" she began, and stopped short of the name. She glanced
+furtively around the room. She was suddenly chilled.
+
+"To Challoner? No," he answered. He had hardly been aware of what he
+was doing, and he wondered now why the idea to do it had thus
+irrelevantly entered his head. No doubt an instinctive desire to get
+relief from the obsession of the sordid tragedy of Challoner's death
+had prompted him. But, whatever the cause, he had been tapping out,
+in accordance with the Morse code, a message to the little, black,
+full-rigged ship far away upon Southern seas.
+
+He sprang up from his chair.
+
+"There's a letter you wanted me to post, Cynthia. I had forgotten it.
+Give it to me."
+
+"It dropped into the fire," said Cynthia.
+
+Harry looked into the fire; a torn fragment or two had fallen into the
+grate.
+
+"I dropped it into the fire," said Cynthia. "For I had already changed
+my mind about it."
+
+The long letter which she had torn up at the first news of Colonel
+Challoner's defection, the letter which was to commemorate that
+evening, had been written to Colonel Challoner, and admitted that she
+was the daughter of his son.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER XXXI
+
+                           M. POIZAT AGAIN
+
+
+"There is a man at the door, madam. He says that he is a Ludsey man,
+and that he worked for Captain Rames during the election."
+
+It was midday. Cynthia had her hat on and was at the moment buttoning
+her gloves.
+
+"Tell him that Captain Rames is at the House of Commons now, and that
+he will be back at home by five," she said.
+
+"The man asked for you," said the footman.
+
+"For me? Did he give a name?"
+
+"No. But he said that you would know him."
+
+Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Very well, Howard. Show him in."
+
+Visitors who would not give their names but claimed to be citizens of
+Ludsey were not infrequent while Parliament was in session. They
+usually came with the same request--the loan of their fare home, where
+they had relations to look after them; and they were usually
+impostors, who had not so much as seen the spire of St. Anne's Church.
+But, on the other hand, there was always a possibility that the case
+might be genuine, and Cynthia made it a rule to see them. She had
+already got her purse out of her bag when the door was opened. But she
+dropped it when she saw her visitor.
+
+"M. Poizat," she cried, and she held out her hand to him.
+
+M. Poizat, however, did not take it.
+
+"You have been kept waiting. You should have sent in your name."
+
+M. Poizat shook his head.
+
+"Would you have received me if I had, Mrs. Rames?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"You are very kind."
+
+Cynthia looked at him with a closer scrutiny. Certainly the M. Poizat
+who confronted her was the merest shadow of the sprightly inventor of
+Lungatine. The elasticity had gone from his wonderful legs. No longer
+he danced when he walked. His arms hung loose at his side, and the
+potency of his elixir had quite failed him. He was now a really old,
+small man. Indeed, he seemed to have diminished in stature and to have
+shrivelled in breadth; and his eyes were red, as though he had lately
+wept. Thus much had been taken from him. Yet something had been added,
+the dignity of a man whom calamity has overtaken.
+
+"Why am I very kind to receive you?" Cynthia asked gently.
+
+M. Poizat stared at her incredulously.
+
+"Then you do not know what has happened to me?"
+
+"No! Sit down and tell me."
+
+But M. Poizat remained standing.
+
+"I have no longer a friend in the world. I have no longer a house. I
+have no longer a wife. All is gone."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Ah, I know. Ladies do not read their newspapers very carefully. If
+the men, too, were like you! But all the same you will have heard of a
+case which a few days ago was making a great stir in Paris--the Jobert
+case."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"But you have not followed it in detail."
+
+"No."
+
+The intricacies of that gigantic case of fraud were indeed difficult
+to follow even for those who gave to it their attention. Nor did
+Poizat do more than give to Cynthia a necessary outline. Monsieur and
+Madame Jobert, the latter being the protagonist of the conspiracy, had
+borrowed over a course of years immense sums of money on the strength
+of securities which were supposed to exist in a sealed safe. The case
+could not be opened since a fictitious action by claimants, whom
+Madame Jobert had invented, was perpetually being deferred in the
+courts of law. At the last, however, the creditors of the Joberts had
+obtained authority to break the seals, and a safe which was absolutely
+empty was exposed. The Joberts alleged a theft, but they were arrested
+and prosecuted.
+
+"You see, Mrs. Rames, the one hope of the Joberts upon their trial was
+to establish the existence of a great sum of money which the
+securities supposed to be stolen could represent. What was this money?
+How was it come by? And when? Who bequeathed it? Madame Jobert was
+examined upon these questions by the juge d'instruction week after
+week, during a whole year. Lie after lie she told. Each explanation
+she put forward was sifted and proved a lie. At last she cried:
+
+"'It is true. I have lied. I do not wish France to remember what she
+should forget. I have not told my secret. But, if I must, I will. The
+great fortune exists. I will tell its origin when I am on my trial;
+but I warn you, Monsieur le Juge, the revelation will convulse France
+from the Mediterranean to the Channel.' That is what she said. No one
+believed her. In Paris, indeed, they had already begun to laugh.
+Almost they loved her. She was a criminal but magnificent in her
+crime.
+
+"'La Grande Clothilde,' they named her. What _blague_ would she have
+ready for the Cour d'Assizes? No one was alarmed, least of all I, a
+little restaurant-keeper in a city of the Midlands. Yet this last lie
+of hers ruined me."
+
+"Ruined you?" cried Cynthia.
+
+"Yes; it is strange, is it not? A great trial like that in Paris, a
+woman in the dock snatching at any defence or delay; she tells a story
+so ridiculous in its application that it sets all Paris in a delighted
+roar of laughter; and that story which could not save her, drags into
+the light a little man of no importance, who has been hiding his head
+in a foreign country for thirty years."
+
+"Yes, but if the story is a lie?" cried Cynthia.
+
+"Its application was the lie. It did not explain that fictitious
+fortune of the Joberts. But the story itself was true," said M.
+Poizat. He sat down in a chair in a queer, huddled attitude, with his
+knees and his feet together, his hands joined upon his knees and his
+chin sunk upon his breast. He seemed to have composed himself to be
+hit at. "I am amazed," he said. "It seems that one has never quite
+finished with anything one has done until one is dead. Here is a part
+of my life which I had buried. Then come thirty years, each one adding
+its layer of oblivion. Then comes La Grande Clothilde, who has never
+seen me, nor been seen by me. Look! I was laughing with everybody
+else. We take in the _Petit Parisien_. I read the trial in the
+evening, day by day, to my wife. We both amused ourselves by wondering
+what will be the great secret which La Grande Clothilde has to reveal.
+Then comes the day of the revelation, and in Ludsey my newspaper falls
+from my hands and my wife, who has been my wife for twenty years,
+looks upon me as a stranger."
+
+Cynthia's face changed. The gentleness and the pity vanished. She drew
+in her breath sharply as though alarm knocked at her heart.
+
+"Something out of your past life has come alive, quite unexpectedly
+after all these years, and has snatched you back," she said slowly, as
+if she were comparing the words with others she had once heard spoken.
+"Quick! Tell me!"
+
+She bent forward with her eyes intent upon M. Poizat's face, and fear
+growing in them more and more visibly.
+
+"You remember, Mrs. Rames, the night before the election at Ludsey.
+You were all having supper in the hotel after the meeting. I came in
+and was asked by Captain Rames to join you. There was a man who
+claimed to know me."
+
+"Yes, yes, Colonel Challoner," cried Cynthia, with a rising
+excitement. She remembered that supper-room at Ludsey, and the queer
+moment of sensation when Colonel Challoner, gaunt and menacing, had
+recollected, and M. Poizat, in a panic, had denied the recollection.
+Some vague notion, too, of the defence which Clothilde Jobert had made
+a week ago returned to her. She began dimly to understand the disaster
+which had overtaken her little visitor.
+
+"He remembered that he had seen you--Wait! Now I have it-- In a long
+corridor, in Metz, in '71."
+
+M. Poizat nodded.
+
+"The corridor of the Arsenal. Colonel Challoner--it's so you call
+him?--he was right. More than once I went along that corridor. I went
+to see the Marshal Bazaine."
+
+"Yes," replied Cynthia. "And Madame Jobert accounted for the origin of
+this great sum of money which the prosecution declared to have no
+existence, by stating that it was the price paid to Bazaine by the
+Germans for the betrayal of Metz."
+
+"That is so. No such sum of money came that way into Clothilde
+Jobert's hands. But details of her story were true."
+
+"For instance?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"That a small farmer, a Frenchman on the outskirts of Metz, called
+Henri Poizat, was the go-between in the negotiations between the
+Germans and Bazaine."
+
+"That was true?"
+
+"Yes. I am Henri Poizat. With the money I was paid I came to Ludsey
+and opened my little restaurant. I did well. I returned to France and
+married, and brought my wife back. Then suddenly this news! My wife is
+of Lorraine. Her father was of those sturdy ones who would not live
+under the German rule, but left their homes in Lorraine and began anew
+in France. Conceive to yourself how she looked at me when she read
+that statement in the paper, and I could not deny it. She has gone
+back to her own people. I have had a letter from her brother. I am not
+to come near them. In Ludsey I was pointed at in the streets as the
+man who sold his country. My restaurant suffered. My trade began to
+vanish. I sold it, goodwill and all, two days ago. As I say, I have no
+longer any house."
+
+He buried his face in his hands. Cynthia watched him uncomfortably.
+She could not blame the wife. Rather she applauded her. She could find
+no sincere words of comfort for M. Poizat.
+
+"I think you had better come back at five," she said, "and tell my
+husband your story."
+
+"But of course he knows it already," cried M. Poizat.
+
+Cynthia shook her head.
+
+"He would have spoken of it to me if he had."
+
+M. Poizat, however, was equally positive.
+
+"But it is in the Ludsey newspapers. Captain Rames takes them in, and
+reads them of course."
+
+"Of course," said Cynthia.
+
+"Then he must know. Such news is not tucked away in the corner of a
+local paper. No, indeed. It was printed on the first page."
+
+"Still you had better see him," said Cynthia. She rose as she spoke,
+and she spoke a trifle absently, as though her thoughts had been
+suddenly diverted from the consideration of M. Poizat's calamity.
+"Come back at five. He will advise you."
+
+She rang the bell. She was in a hurry now to get rid of the little
+Frenchman. Something much more important to her had occurred than
+the revelations of La Grande Clothilde. Doubts had flashed into her
+mind--doubts which she was in torture to resolve. As soon as Poizat's
+back was turned she went quickly into her husband's study. Upon a
+side-table, carelessly heaped, with their wrappers still gummed about
+them, she counted a dozen of the local papers of Ludsey. They took two
+a week, one of each political complexion. It was six weeks then since
+Harry Rames had taken the trouble to glance at a newspaper from his
+own constituency.
+
+She stripped off the wrappers to make sure. Then she turned to the
+calendar upon the top of his writing-table. Six weeks just took her
+back to the date when Harry Rames had emptied the House with a speech,
+and had brought home the tragic news of Colonel Challoner's death.
+
+Harry's omission on the surface was trivial enough. But to Cynthia it
+was significant and disquieting. For it was not in accordance with the
+deliberate prudence which used to mark the conduct of his political
+career. To nurse the constituency, to be familiar with its events and
+its needs, to respond to it, this had been his first care. Now for six
+weeks he neglected even to inform himself about it. And the omission
+did not stand alone.
+
+"He will be home at five," Cynthia argued, "he who made it a rule to
+sit in the House however dull the course of public business."
+
+Often of late he had left the House as soon as questions were over and
+the usual vote taken upon the suspension of the eleven-o'clock rule,
+and had only returned thither upon the stroke of eleven on the chance
+of coming in for a division. Cynthia remembered, too, how indifferent
+he had been, on the day after he had made his failure, to the
+criticisms which the failure had evoked. Mr. Devenish had put in some
+biting and effective work in his reply, which should have been gall
+and wormwood to the ambitious Harry Rames. But he had not seemed to
+mind. The newspapers which supported the Government too had not spared
+him. Conceit and presumption were the least of his failings. The
+_Piccadilly News_ had published a cartoon of him as Humpty Dumpty. Yet
+he had remained unmoved, though Cynthia had cried her eyes red over
+the castigation.
+
+Certainly some change had come over him, she reflected, and once more
+she was conscious of fear and a sinking heart. For the story which she
+had heard this morning from M. Poizat linked itself up in her mind
+with the warning of Mr. Benoliel. Poizat's history was not quite an
+illustration of the warning. That she recognized. Mr. Benoliel had
+bidden her beware of latent tendencies of character, latent cravings
+and ambitions, taking their origin from the years in which she had had
+no share. It was a definite act which had sprung into being in the
+case of M. Poizat. Still Poizat's disaster was a proof of the clutch
+of finished things, and of the continuity of life; was an instance
+that to turn over the new page and begin to write afresh as she and
+Harry Rames had proposed to do, is beyond man's reach. Two lines of
+verse, gathered she knew not whence, rang in her brain and would not
+be silenced:
+
+
+             "Our past deeds follow us from afar
+              And what we have been makes us what we are."
+
+
+After a year's respite Cynthia was again afraid. Mr. Benoliel was
+magnified by her fears into the semblance of a prophet of old.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXXII
+
+                               THE CALL
+
+
+Cynthia went that night alone to a dinner party in Seamore Place. But
+she was ill at ease and as soon as she could get away she hurried
+home. She had not seen her husband that day. He had returned at five
+o'clock, had been closeted for a long while with M. Poizat and had
+then departed, leaving a message that a series of divisions would
+compel him to dine at the House of Commons. The couple, however, had
+made it a habit to reserve for themselves, whenever the House was not
+sitting late, an hour or so at the close of even the busiest day, and
+Cynthia was fairly sure that she would not have to wait long before
+Harry Rames came home. As a fact, he was already in his study. The
+door was ajar and through the opening the light streamed out into the
+hall.
+
+Cynthia pushed the door open. Harry was sitting at his writing-table
+on the opposite side of the room and studying with a complete
+absorption a scroll which he held down unrolled beneath his eyes.
+Cynthia stood in the doorway for a moment or two watching him with a
+tender smile upon her face, and speculating idly upon the document
+which so riveted his attention. For the moment her trouble was quite
+driven from her thoughts. He was here, after all, in the house with
+her: he, the loved one: and with a sort of fierceness she was content.
+Then he looked up and saw her standing in the doorway. His face
+changed; he had the aspect clearly of a man at bay. He swept a pile of
+letters and printed papers over his scroll, spreading them out. He
+rose and stood between her and the writing-table, hiding it from her
+view.
+
+"You are home early," he said.
+
+"Earlier than you expected! Yet I am later than you."
+
+"Oh, I paired at ten o'clock."
+
+"I see."
+
+The furtive movement of her husband increased her fears and at the
+same time wounded her pride. They were to be frank with one another.
+That was the pledge which each had given to the other. And here was
+the pledge broken, for Harry was definitely practising concealments.
+Cynthia, however, did not belong to the tribe of the clamorous. She
+stepped within the room and left him to continue the conversation.
+Rames spoke hastily to engage her attention.
+
+"Poizat came to see me this afternoon."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"He was desperate. We talked over his position. I recommended him to
+go to Tangier and settle there. He has a little money. He will find
+compatriots, and I should think it's the place where people will be
+least likely to trouble about him. I fancy that he will go there. But
+it's a bad business to have to start life all over again at seventy."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia.
+
+She watched him as he walked up and down the room, making up her mind
+that on her side at all events the pledge should not be broken.
+
+"M. Poizat said something to me which I think is true. That nothing
+one has ever done is ever quite done with."
+
+Harry Rames stopped in his walk. He stood quite still for a few
+moments.
+
+"Oh, surely that's not true," he said carelessly and resumed his
+pacing. But Cynthia was aware of a change in him. Before he had been
+thinking of Poizat and his destiny; now he was alert and waiting upon
+her words.
+
+"I believe that it's more true than he knew. For even if nothing
+actual comes of the thing done, it's still there, recorded in the
+character. Harry, we are in the clutch of finished things."
+
+Her voice rose in a low cry and brought Harry swiftly round upon his
+heel. Her words hit him shrewdly, but her aspect more shrewdly still.
+She was still standing close by the door. She was dressed in a gown of
+pale blue and gold with a bright ribbon of blue in her hair. Her cloak
+had slipped from her shoulders to her feet, her gloves were twisted in
+her hands, her eyes wide and dark with trouble looked out from a face
+which was piteously wistful. She made unconsciously a poignant appeal
+to him. The delicate loveliness of her youth and the gay panoply of
+her attire contrasted so strikingly with the quivering misery of her
+face.
+
+"What makes you believe that, Cynthia?" He crossed the room to her
+side and shook her arm with a friendly gesture familiar to her.
+"Poizat's case is not enough to build a world of theory on."
+
+"Nor do I," replied Cynthia. "I was adding to that case another."
+Harry Rames flinched.
+
+"What other?" he asked with an effort.
+
+"Years ago in Argentina I once listened at a door," she began, and in
+Harry's eyes shone a great relief. "What I heard frightened me. I lay
+awake in terror all that night. I have lived in fear ever since. I
+could not shake fear off even after I knew there was no longer any
+cause for fear. I can find causes anywhere. Fear's the truth of me.
+Most of the things which I have done have been done from fear."
+
+"I never understood that, Cynthia."
+
+"I never spoke of it before."
+
+"Fear even prompted your marriage?"
+
+Cynthia looked him frankly in the face.
+
+"Yes. You were so frank, so honest about yourself. I felt safe with
+you. And after we were married--I escaped from fear. I was reprieved."
+
+"Thank you," said Harry with a quiet sincerity. Then he moved away
+from her to the fireplace and turned again.
+
+"Why do you tell me this for the first time tonight?"
+
+"Because fear's awake in me again to-night," she answered simply. "I
+have had another visitor today besides M. Poizat."
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Howard Fall."
+
+Harry Rames's voice hardened.
+
+"He came to complain of me, I suppose."
+
+"It wasn't complaint; it was regret. He thought it would be such a
+loss if you ceased to be interested in Parliament. He was afraid that
+Colonel Challoner's death had been a shock to you."
+
+Harry Rames looked curiously at his wife.
+
+"And what did you say?"
+
+"That I knew you well enough to be sure that wasn't the case. He said
+you had not spoken once since the debate on the Address and that the
+organization against the land bill was tumbling to pieces."
+
+Harry's face cleared.
+
+"There's a very good reason for that. The government programme is
+overloaded and Devenish's bill won't come on this year after all. Our
+opposition shook their confidence in it besides. No, it won't come
+on."
+
+Cynthia moved swiftly forward to the fireplace.
+
+"You know that?"
+
+"Yes. Hamlin told me in confidence."
+
+"When, Harry?"
+
+"A month ago at least. We can always whip up the opposition to
+Devenish's bill when it becomes once more a practical proposition."
+
+Perhaps after all the Government's change of plan was the simple
+explanation of the change in her husband. Cynthia sank down into a
+chair. Before now, she remembered, she had tortured herself with
+unnecessary fears.
+
+"Oh, I am glad. I am glad," she cried. All her heart was in her voice
+and tuned it to a note full and low and wonderfully sweet. Harry was
+moved by the music of it. There was a joy, a tenderness, which he had
+noticed more than once of late, but which had never rung so clear as
+it did to-night. He planted himself in front of her with a wry sort of
+smile upon his face.
+
+"Cynthia."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You want me to go on--just as I am going? You are satisfied? There
+have been times when you have wanted more----"
+
+But Cynthia broke in upon him. She shut her eyes upon her ideals and
+her dreams. They were for the girl steeped to the lips in romance, not
+for the woman made real by love. Something had come between them.
+Something secret. Something which threatened even such community of
+life as they had. She was in revolt against it.
+
+"Yes, yes," she cried passionately. "I do want you to go on. I want
+you to make a great career. I want my share in it, my pride in it. I
+shall be satisfied. I shall be thankful. Oh, my dear, are you blind?"
+She rose abruptly and stood in front of him. "What I want and all that
+I want is to keep you." If she had never spoken the words, the
+eagerness of her voice and the prayer of her clasped hands would have
+uttered them for her. But she had spoken them deliberately. She knew
+very well the danger for a woman in telling a man who does not love
+her, that she loves him. But she accepted the danger. She was playing
+for a great stake that night, and great stakes are not to be won
+without great risks. She laid her reticence aside and made her appeal.
+But it seemed that her appeal failed. Harry Rames stood watching her,
+at a loss for words, with a face which concealed carefully all his
+thoughts. Cynthia stooped and gathered up her gloves which had fallen
+to the floor.
+
+"I shall go up now," she said.
+
+Yet she waited; and Harry still was silent. A moment of passion had
+caught him unprepared with any words.
+
+"What are you thinking about, Harry, so profoundly?" Cynthia asked in
+an indifferent voice. His silence was a rebuff most bitter to her. But
+she would not betray herself a second time. Her eyes and her hands
+were busy with some imaginary fault in the fit of her dress.
+
+"That you have never shown me yourself before," he said, moving toward
+her. She stood quite still as he came close. He put his arm about her
+and she asked quietly:
+
+"Wasn't I wise, Harry? It's a little disconcerting, isn't it, when a
+woman shows you something you know nothing about. Just a little
+disconcerting, isn't it?"
+
+She left him standing in the room and went upstairs. She had made her
+plea with all the frankness which had been the condition of their
+marriage. She would not ask for a like frankness in return. It was for
+him to give it. She had made it quite plain that on her side she
+wanted frankness. More she would not do. Not for anything would she
+ask what secret thing he had hidden under the papers upon his table.
+But she knew that there was a secret thing and her feet dragged as she
+mounted the stairs.
+
+She had been in bed according to her reckoning for about an hour when
+she heard a noise of the shutting of a door. And the door was the
+front-door of the house. Cynthia sprung from her bed and lifting the
+blind looked out from the window. It was a dark night, but there was
+no fog. By the light of the street lamps she saw a man crossing the
+road toward the corner of South Audley Street. He had the look of her
+husband. She flung up the window and the sound of his footsteps made
+her sure. Her eyes gazing into the tempered darkness of a London
+street might well have deceived her, her ears could not. There was no
+one else walking in Curzon Street at that moment; the sound of his
+footsteps reverberated unmistakably, diminishing as the distance
+between him and the window increased. The man who now vanished into
+South Audley Street was Harry Rames.
+
+Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her watch. It was one
+o'clock in the morning. She wrapped a dressing-gown about her and sat
+down trying to think calmly, seeking to discover, if she could, some
+other reason for his departure than the obvious one. But the obvious
+one recurred again and again in her thoughts. It explained everything,
+fitted in with everything, as no other reason did. His sudden
+indifference to his career, his furtive movement at his writing-table
+upon her appearance, his refusal to meet frankness with frankness
+could all thus be accounted for. His departure from the house was thus
+explained. He had not come up into his room next to hers; he had
+waited in his study for an hour; he had given her time to fall asleep;
+he had gone out. It was a woman then who had twisted the current of
+his life as she, Cynthia, could not, who had moved him to passion as
+she even that evening had failed to do. Cynthia raged in fury against
+herself for having so weakly betrayed herself. She sat in torture.
+Then her jealousy flamed up. _That_--no! Her pride must give way. If
+there was another woman in her story--why then the other woman must
+look to herself. Cynthia would fight. She hurried down-stairs into the
+study. She switched on the lights and tumbled hither and thither the
+papers on the writing-table for the one so swiftly hidden which should
+betray the other woman's name and her abode. But she found nothing to
+satisfy her. She looked round the room. From a drawer in a bureau
+against the wall Harry's keys had been dangling. That she had noticed;
+and the keys were gone now. She tried the drawer. It was locked. In
+that drawer then was hidden the key to his secret. So much knowledge
+at all events Cynthia was sure that she had gained. She went back to
+her room and lying in bed ran over all the names of her acquaintances,
+even of her friends. She was not in the mood to trust any of them, but
+she could not fix upon any of them either. One and all they were cats
+and treacherous. Cynthia was no longer afraid; she was simply furious;
+and her fury was not diminished when she heard the front-door open and
+shut once more, almost noiselessly--so much caution was being used.
+
+But Cynthia, though she was right in her facts, had never been so
+mistaken in her conclusions. The scroll which Harry Rames had pushed
+beneath his papers was simply a chart of the Antarctic seas; whereon
+lines distinguished one from the other by the manner of their tracing
+recorded the journeys of successive explorers and marked each one's
+"farthest South." He stood for a little while after Cynthia had left
+him on the same spot half-way between his chart and her position at
+the door. Then he turned back to his writing-table and spread out the
+map once more. The call of the unknown places was loud in his ears
+that night.
+
+"Come back! Come back!"
+
+Six weeks ago it had been the merest whisper--flashed to the wireless
+poles on the roof of the Admiralty and heard by him one afternoon, a
+message very small and clear amidst the clatter of Parliament Street.
+But the whisper had gathered volume and vehemence, until the map
+before him seemed a mouth shouting it, and the room throbbed with it
+as though the walls would burst asunder.
+
+"Come back! Come back!"
+
+It seemed to him that the command was not to be denied or must ring in
+his ears forever; and that arena of the House of Commons, where man
+fought with man, became a trivial place of meanness and intrigue
+compared with the vast battle-ground in the South, where one fought in
+a grandeur of silence with the careless, stubborn elements of a wild
+and unknown world.
+
+He bent over his map and across it, as across the table of a camera
+obscura he saw moving, in miniature and brilliantly defined, the ships
+of the men who had sailed to the South. James Cook's two vessels, the
+_Resolution_ and the _Adventure_, crossed the Antarctic circle as it
+seemed underneath his eyes--the first, of all the ships that were ever
+built, to sail upon these waters. Bellingshausen of Kronstadt came
+next and dropped his anchor under the shelter of Peter I Island and
+gave to it its name. He was followed by the whaling captains, each
+choosing his own line, great navigators inspired by a great and
+spirited firm. Weddell and Biscoe in their brigs. Balleny in his
+schooner. The later ships of the scientific expeditions under
+D'Urville of France and Wilkes of Chesapeake Bay moved southward in
+the track of the whaling captains, and close upon their heels James
+Ross from England with the _Erebus_ and the _Terror_ burst for the
+first time in the history of the world through the ice-pack into
+the open sea beyond and sailed from west to east along the great
+ice-barrier. There were other lines where the _Challenger_ had sailed,
+and the official expeditions; and there was yet another, the longest
+of all the lines upon the chart, a line stretching out to a harbor
+never visited before, and against that line in tiny letters was
+printed "Rames." He followed the course of his ship from his first
+harbor in the Antarctic continent with the wooden cross high on a hill
+above it, which marks the grave of a naturalist of a past expedition.
+He fell to speculating where the _Perhaps_ lay now. Parliament had met
+in the first days of January. It was just before the opening of
+Parliament that Hemming had started on the mail steamer to New Zealand
+to pick up his ship in Lyttelton Harbor. Allow him five weeks for his
+journey. The second week of February would have come to an end before
+the _Perhaps_ had steamed out past the headland. Hemming himself had
+recognized that he was late. The difficulty of collecting money to
+finance the expedition had detained him beyond his time. A fortnight
+out from New Zealand, where was the _Perhaps_ now? She might still be
+in the stormy seas on the outer edge of Ross's pack with the petrels
+and the albatrosses like a cloud about her yards. Or she might have
+touched at one of the northerly harbors of the continent. Perhaps
+winter was coming early on to wrap her about with snow and ice. If
+that happened, Hemming's chance was gone, for he had only money for
+one year. He must reach the Pole this next summer or not at all. He
+must therefore winter well to the South.
+
+Rames got up from his chair, trying not to hope that Hemming's
+expedition would fail. He looked up from this map to the spot where
+Cynthia had stood close to the door, and a smile came upon his face.
+
+"She was wrong," he said. "We are in the clutch of the unfinished, not
+the finished things."
+
+He carried his map over to a bureau which stood against the wall and
+opened a drawer from the lock of which his bunch of keys was dangling.
+There were other charts in the drawer, a barometer which had hung in
+his cabin in the _Perhaps_ throughout the three years during which
+that ship had been his home, a shell or two dredged up from the depths
+of the sea, and a brown paper package tied up with a piece of string.
+The charts lying there were all the charts which existed of the
+Antarctic seas, arranged in the order of their making. He added to
+them now his map, the last of them all; the printed facsimile of his
+own chart. Then reluctantly he locked the drawer. The reverberation of
+the seas seemed to fill the room and through it imperative and loud
+rang the call of the South. Yet he was aware, too, of Cynthia standing
+in her delicate blue frock, subduing her pride, revealing herself in a
+passionate appeal. He was stirred to shame at the poverty of his own
+response. She had been friend, counsellor, wife in the normal way.
+They had jogged side by side along the low road of his endeavor.
+To-night she pleaded for more, she offered more. He could never quite
+look upon her as he had been wont to. For she had stirred him to
+shame.
+
+He slipped the key off the ring and swung it round upon his finger. At
+all events he would keep his bargain.
+
+"It's a queer piece of irony," he said to himself, "that the very
+thing which I would give my soul to do, she was urging me to do two
+years ago; and now I must keep my longing hidden. Our positions are
+quite reversed."
+
+But he would keep to his bargain. Perhaps after all Hemming would
+succeed; and sooner or later no doubt the reverberation of the seas
+would die away in the porches of his ears.
+
+He went out into the hall, carrying the key in his hand, and let
+himself out at the front-door. He walked quickly up South Audley
+Street, turned to the left, and crossed Park Lane into Hyde Park. He
+walked to the stone bridge which crosses the Serpentine. The night was
+quiet and dark about him, and from afar off the never ceasing roar of
+the London traffic came to him like the roar of distant seas. He
+leaned over the parapet and stretching out his hand opened it. He
+heard a tiny splash in the water beneath the bridge.
+
+He walked back more slowly than he had come to where the glare of the
+sky indicated the houses and the streets. As he crossed Park Lane
+again two men arm-in-arm passed him and one of them stopped.
+
+"Is that you, Rames?" asked a friendly and solicitous voice.
+
+Rames recognized it at once as the voice of Hamlin the chief Whip.
+
+"You had paired for to-night," Hamlin continued, "hadn't you? You
+didn't miss much. But I want to be able to rely on you for Thursday.
+We know, of course, that you are against us over Devenish's land bill.
+That's all right. But you are with us on the rest of our policy and we
+want your help."
+
+"I shall be there on Thursday," answered Harry Rames. "It's quite true
+that I have not been so much in the House this session as I used to
+be. But you will see me in my old place to-morrow. Good-night."
+
+He walked on and Hamlin rejoined his companion.
+
+"It was Rames," he said. "We're not going to lose him. I am glad. He's
+marked out for a great position if he doesn't throw it away."
+
+But Rames through the roar of the traffic, carriages rolling home,
+wagons lumbering in to Covent Garden, heard louder than ever the boom
+of Southern seas and the wind whistling between the halyards of a
+ship.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+                         A LETTER FROM ABROAD
+
+
+The session passed, and Devenish's land bill, as Rames had foretold,
+was postponed. It figured again in the Address at the beginning of the
+following year, but as late as March no definite date had been
+assigned for its introduction. On a Saturday morning of this month
+Cynthia and her husband were breakfasting in the dining-room of the
+white house, when the morning's letters were brought in by the butler.
+Harry Rames tossed one or two aside.
+
+"Circulars, pamphlets," he said. He opened some of the others, taking
+them from the top of the pile. "Here's one from the Chamber of
+Commerce--railway rates. I'll answer that this morning. Here's
+another--the committee of a school wants a grant from the treasury.
+Here's a third--" and as he was beginning to tear open the envelope,
+his voice suddenly stopped.
+
+Cynthia looked up from her own letters and saw that while he was
+holding the third letter in his hand he was not looking at it. His
+eyes were fixed upon that one which was now uppermost on the heap. He
+sat and stared at the envelope for an appreciable time. Then dropping
+the letter which he held, he picked up this new and startling one and
+carried it swiftly over to the window. Cynthia followed his movement
+with her eyes, just curious, but nothing more. Her eyes indeed
+travelled beyond him and noticed the sunlight in the garden, the
+yellow and purple crocuses and the first of the daffodils, noticed
+them with an up-springing lightness of heart. Then the stillness of
+her husband's attitude caught her attention. She saw something in his
+face which she had never seen there before, which she had never
+thought to see there at all. He wore the look of a man quite caught
+out of himself. He was as one wrapped in visions and refined by the
+fires of great longings. It seemed to her that she saw a man whose
+eyes, brimful of light, looked upon the Holy Grail.
+
+He turned back to her. He brought her the letter still unopened and
+placed it in her hands. Cynthia received it as though written upon its
+cover she would read the revelation of his secret. Yet she saw nothing
+but a soiled envelope with a foreign stamp. She gazed up at her
+husband mystified.
+
+"Look at the stamp, Cynthia!" said Rames in a queer voice.
+
+Cynthia looked. It wore the head familiar to English people. But the
+lettering about the head was strange. She spelled it out.
+
+"Rexland."
+
+With a start she turned to him. "That is the country you discovered."
+
+"Yes. A stamp was struck to commemorate my discovery of it."
+
+"A stamp?" cried Cynthia. "Wait a minute, Harry! You once spoke of a
+stamp to me before. Yes, on the morning of the day when you were to
+deliver your speech--the speech which failed. It was this stamp of
+which you were speaking?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You remembered it on that morning, even when your thoughts were full
+of the speech you were going to deliver."
+
+"I remembered it by accident," he said sharply. "I can't think why. It
+had been out of my thoughts for so long. Yet it was that stamp." His
+voice softened. "It is issued by the post-office--for a penny. Just
+think of it! A penny stamp brings a letter from the Antarctic seas to
+us here in Warwickshire."
+
+"Mr. Hemming sent it?"
+
+"Without a doubt. When he came to see me in London fifteen months ago,
+he told me that if I intended to go out again he would not use my
+harbor."
+
+Harry was standing just behind his wife. Cynthia was not looking at
+him any longer. But she was listening with a curious intentness as
+though the words which he spoke were of less importance to her than
+the accent with which he spoke them. She put questions to him to make
+yet more sure of it.
+
+"And you gave him permission!"
+
+"Of course. I had not the right to refuse it. I was never going
+South again. Nothing was further from my thoughts. I told him to
+use not only my harbor, but the depots of food I had made along my
+sledge-route from the harbor toward the Pole."
+
+"You think that he reached the harbor?"
+
+"I am sure of it. Otherwise he would not have used this stamp. He must
+have wintered there. I did not think that he would reach it before
+winter closed in upon him. The summer last year must have been very
+late."
+
+Cynthia nodded her head.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Her attention was relaxed. Harry Rames had been striving to keep from
+his voice any note of regret, to speak in the ordinary level tone
+suitable to a matter of only ordinary interest. But in spite of his
+efforts he was not sure that he had succeeded. Cynthia handed to him
+the letter. He took it and turned it over in his hand.
+
+"He has had time since he wintered in that harbor. One summer would be
+enough. He may have done it--if his dogs lived. There's always that
+condition. If his dogs lived! Mine didn't. Perhaps--perhaps--" He
+broke off abruptly and thrust the letter back into Cynthia's hand.
+
+"You open it! You can tell me what he says."
+
+Harry Rames walked again to the window and stood with his back to the
+room. Cynthia's eyes followed him and travelled past him once more to
+the garden. She was sure that she would never forget those daffodils
+and the purple crocuses waving in the sunlight for one day as long as
+she lived. A minute ago she had noticed them; now she noticed them
+again; and within that minute had been revealed to her the great
+secret Harry Rames had been at so much pains to hide. She knew her
+rival now, and was appalled. "Such men are driven by a torment of
+their souls." It was Harry himself who had said that. The wish came to
+her, "If only this man has succeeded." She tore open the envelope.
+
+Harry Rames stood at the window waiting for the letter to be read to
+him; and it seemed to him that he waited for an eternity. He had heard
+the tearing of the envelope. The letter was open in Cynthia's hands.
+Yet she did not speak a word. Rames's heart sank.
+
+"Then he has reached the Pole?" he asked with a studied carelessness.
+
+"I don't know," Cynthia replied in perplexity.
+
+"Read it."
+
+"There is nothing to read."
+
+Rames turned round and came swiftly toward her.
+
+"He must have forgotten to enclose his letter. There is nothing
+but this," said Cynthia. She was holding a single blank sheet of
+note-paper in her hand. She turned it over. "No, there's not a word
+written anywhere. Do you understand it?"
+
+"Yes. He has failed."
+
+There was no doubt left to her of her husband's joy. The cry which
+broke from his lips was not to be denied. It was a real cry of
+exultation. Cynthia turned pale as she heard it. But she would not
+acknowledge that she understood it, nor would she look into Harry's
+face lest she should see the same exultation blazoned there.
+
+"Poor Hemming," said Rames. "That's bad luck. The disappointment must
+have hit him hard."
+
+"You can understand that," said Cynthia steadily.
+
+"Yes. He would have written, you see, if he had taken it more lightly.
+He has nothing to say. That is what his blank sheet of paper means.
+That is what it must mean. Well, I must go and write to the Chamber of
+Commerce, Cynthia;" and gathering up his letters he went out of the
+room.
+
+As for Cynthia, she remembered that the North Warwickshire met that
+morning at eleven o'clock four miles from the house. She rode to the
+meet and followed the hounds over a good grass country flying her
+hedges on a big horse which old Mr. Daventry had given to her on the
+very first day when she had hunted over six years ago. It had always
+been her experience that when troubles and fears overburdened her, a
+hard day's hunting was her best medicine. It smoothed out the creases
+of her mind, whipped up the blood in her veins, set her pulses dancing
+with the joy of living and unrolled her courage like a banner. The
+sunlight, the swift rush through the air, the rhythm of movement, the
+keenness of the animal beneath her, the flight over hedge and ditch,
+had never failed her up till now. It always seemed to her that by some
+process, of which she was quite unconscious, the direct and simple
+thing to do emerged from the confusion of her thoughts and shone out
+unmistakably. And it shone out to-day. But she could not bring herself
+to accept it. As she rode homeward through the lanes she was at her
+arguments again.
+
+"No! With time contentment will come to him. He will be subdued to the
+matter he works in. And I cannot let him go."
+
+Mr. Benoliel's warning obstinately confronted her.
+
+"One party doesn't keep the bargain or keeps it half-heartedly as an
+irksome thing and day by day the separation grows more complete until
+you are living with your enemy or living quite alone."
+
+But she would not be convinced; she battled against it. "There was a
+saving clause. 'Unless on both sides there is love.' In that case a
+way could be found. And on both sides there may be love."
+
+She had treasured up little acts of thoughtfulness on Harry Rames's
+part, the merest small things which women are quick to notice and to
+build upon; such as having a cloak ready for her shoulders almost
+before she was aware that she was cold. She ran these trifles over in
+her mind, clutching at them for proof that the longed for change was
+coming--nay, perhaps had come. There had been a constant watchfulness,
+a constant care for her shown by her husband during this last year. It
+might be of course that a certain remorse was stirring in him--remorse
+that he was only keeping his side of the bargain in the letter and not
+the spirit.
+
+"But I cannot let him go," she insisted. The perils, the hardships,
+the dangers of snow-storms and cold and shipwreck and famine which had
+all seemed so trivial to her in her days of romance now loomed up
+before her terrible and dark. It was no use to argue that other men
+had gone that road and had come back. This one might not. She reached
+her home with her distress as heavy upon her as when she had set out;
+and was told that Mr. Benoliel was waiting to see her.
+
+She went at once into the drawing-room and gave Mr. Benoliel some tea.
+
+"Will you tell Mr. Rames," she said to her butler, "that Mr. Benoliel
+is here."
+
+"He's not in the house," said Benoliel. "He's in Ludsey. I asked for
+him when I heard that you were out. I am glad. For I should like to
+tell you my news first."
+
+The butler left the room and Mr. Benoliel became at once mysterious
+and omniscient.
+
+"Sir George Carberley is going to resign," he said.
+
+Cynthia looked at him in surprise.
+
+"The member for our division?"
+
+The white house was not within the borough limits of Ludsey. It stood
+in the Hickleton Division of the county of Warwickshire and Sir George
+Carberley, an important unit of the opposition, was Harry Rames's
+representative in the House of Commons.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Benoliel. "He has sat for the division for forty years
+now and he is tired. He intends to resign when this session is over."
+
+"Are you sure?" asked Cynthia. "How do you know this?"
+
+"Ah!" said Benoliel with a smile. "You mustn't ask me that, Cynthia.
+Indeed I am not quite sure that I ought to have told you the news at
+all. But I thought that it was so important for you to know it at once
+that I stretched a point of confidence."
+
+"Thank you," said Cynthia. "But what I don't understand is why it is
+so important for us to have the news before the others?"
+
+"Captain Rames is on the executive of your association, isn't he?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then he will have a voice in the selection of the candidate who will
+fight the seat from your political point of view."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Very well," said Mr. Benoliel. "If he has a candidate ready when the
+news of the approaching resignation is published, and if that man is
+willing to follow not simply the Government's policy, but also your
+husband's policy as regards Devenish's land bill, don't you see what a
+chance he gets? If Rames can secure the selection of his man as
+candidate and then can win over the seat, he strengthens his position
+with the Government enormously. He has put his views about Devenish's
+bill to the test of an election, and he has won."
+
+"Yes, I see that," said Cynthia doubtfully. She was considering the
+prospect Mr. Benoliel held out to her from a quite different point of
+view. If Harry succeeded in this plan, his victory would be one more
+link in the chain of obligation which bound him to his present life.
+If he failed, his failure would be another disappointment weakening
+it.
+
+"But can we win?" she cried. "The seat's supposed to be impregnable."
+
+"That's one of your advantages. More seats are lost by over-confidence
+than by bad candidates. Besides, the mere fact that one man has held a
+seat for forty years is against the probability of another man of the
+same color succeeding. There are lots of people who will be ready to
+say 'It's time we gave the other fellows a look-in.' Your husband has
+only got to throw himself heart and soul into the fight and he will
+stand a very good chance. No doubt of that."
+
+Cynthia reflected. "Why did you wish to tell me this news before you
+told it to Harry?" she asked, bending her brows upon Mr. Benoliel in a
+steady frown which had before now warned him to walk with
+circumspection.
+
+"I wasn't quite sure," he explained, "that you would wish him now to
+undertake a further obligation of political service."
+
+"Indeed!" said Cynthia icily. "And why shouldn't I wish it now, Mr.
+Benoliel?"
+
+Mr. Benoliel had no intention to allow himself to be browbeaten by a
+slip of a girl for whose happiness he was in a measure responsible.
+
+"Because, my dear Cynthia," he answered, "it has seemed to me on the
+last few occasions when I have met your husband that he was feeling
+the strain of a Parliamentary life. He has looked worn and tired. I
+could almost fancy that he was disheartened."
+
+Cynthia's thoughts did Mr. Benoliel some injustice at this moment.
+Certainly he was suggesting to her that his neglected warning had been
+justified, that Harry's Parliamentary ambition had been a mere phase
+in his life, which was now passing or had already passed. But she went
+further and assumed in him a kind of triumph at the accuracy of his
+diagnosis. Right underneath his sympathetic words she seemed to hear
+the whisper of a question:
+
+"Am I not a clever man?"
+
+The whirr of a motor-car grew loud and ceased. Harry had returned from
+Ludsey. Mr. Benoliel sat patiently in front of her, awaiting her
+decision. Was he to break his news to Harry Rames or was he not?
+Cynthia felt that Harry's destiny and hers were in her hands. She must
+make her choice and by that choice it seemed to her they would be both
+inextricably bound, their happiness or their misery allotted to them
+for the whole span of their lives.
+
+She sat with her chin propped in the palm of her hand and her eyes
+brooding darkly on Mr. Benoliel. A door was shut somewhere in the
+house. She rose and pressed the bell.
+
+"Howard," she said to her butler, "was that Mr. Rames?"
+
+"Yes ma'am."
+
+"He is in his study I think?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Will you show Mr. Benoliel in to him?" And as Benoliel rose, she said
+to him, "Will you come back after you have told your news? You will
+have an opportunity of reconsidering your judgment. I should like to
+hear whether you still think him disheartened."
+
+Cynthia was in her most aggrieved and stately mood. She usually was
+when she knew herself to be in the wrong. She would not admit Mr.
+Benoliel's sympathy or affection for her. She had an epithet for him
+very near to the tip of her tongue at this moment. Mr. Benoliel was
+officious. With a distant bow she dismissed him.
+
+She had the satisfaction half an hour later of hearing Mr. Benoliel's
+complete recantation.
+
+"I was quite wrong, Cynthia. He was in the best of spirits. He was
+elated. The look of strain had gone if it was ever there. I have been
+mistaken. I am happy to admit it."
+
+Cynthia relaxed from her frigidity. But her satisfaction was a poor
+one and had little life in it. She had merely tricked Mr. Benoliel
+into the belief that his insight had been at fault. For in truth, as
+she knew very well, it had never been more shrewd. What had led Mr.
+Benoliel into error was his ignorance of the letter with the "Rexland"
+stamp which had arrived at the white house by the morning's post.
+Hemming's failure was a kind of reprieve for Harry Rames. In a sudden
+revulsion he had been lifted out of his discouragement. His exultation
+had remained with him all that day. Cynthia had counted upon it when
+she had sent Benoliel to his study.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+                        THE CONVICT AT THE OAR
+
+
+A long account of Hemming's expedition, sent by a New Zealand
+correspondent, appeared in one of the morning papers the next day.
+Hemming had travelled a couple of hundred miles further south than
+Harry Rames. Then he had been compelled to return. But it was Harry
+Rames who had made it possible for him to get so far. For he used
+Rames's depots of provisions and was able to save his own for the
+stretch of new ice-covered country.
+
+Harry lighted upon the account unexpectedly when he opened his
+newspaper at the breakfast table, but the moment he saw the head-line
+he folded the sheets quickly again and pushed the paper away from him.
+He shrank from reading it, hardly daring to trust himself, and he
+began to talk over with Cynthia the names of suitable candidates for
+the Hickleton Division.
+
+"The Whips, of course, will have a man ready who will be pledged to
+swallow the whole of the Government policy, land bill and all. We must
+be beforehand with them. What do you say to young Burrell, Cynthia?"
+
+"Sir James Burrell's son?"
+
+"Yes. His father is anxious that he should do something," said Harry
+with a laugh.
+
+"But isn't he rather young and rather insignificant?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"Youth's a good quality in the House of Commons. The older men become
+suspicious of change and want life stereotyped as it is. And young
+Burrell isn't without brains. I don't say that he's a flyer, but then,
+like the Government, I prefer docility to brains in my followers. I
+think that I will run round to Sir James when we go back to town on
+Monday."
+
+But though Harry Rames neglected his newspaper at the breakfast table,
+he came back for it at eleven in the morning. He could keep the drawer
+in his bureau locked upon his charts, but he could not quench his
+fever to read the details of Hemming's expedition. For an hour he
+tried to occupy himself with the business of Cynthia's estate, and
+then he gave up the attempt. When and how Hemming failed, how far he
+had travelled with his sledges, what new lessons were to be learnt
+from his experience--here were questions which he could not silence.
+He got the paper and read the account through. "The dogs gave out," he
+said to Cynthia. "The dogs are the trouble. You can't carry enough
+food for them and for the sledging-party as well. Of course, it's bad
+luck on Hemming. But I doubt if he followed the highest traditions of
+British exploration."
+
+"Why?" asked Cynthia.
+
+"He should have chosen a different base, converged upon the Pole from
+a different angle, and covered ground altogether new. Then, whether he
+failed or not, he would have brought back a hundred new facts of
+interest to the scientist and the geographer. As it is he adds very
+little I should think to our knowledge."
+
+Cynthia was silent for awhile after he had finished. Then she said in
+a low voice, bending over some embroidery at which she was working:
+
+"And if you were to go back, Harry, where would you make your base?"
+
+"I?"
+
+Harry Rames sprang eagerly up.
+
+"Oh, I should search for a harbor a long way to the east of my old
+one. At least," and he caught himself up, "I think that is what I
+should do. I am speaking at random, of course. But I should at all
+events have considered that possibility carefully, if I had been going
+out again."
+
+Again a spell of silence followed upon his words and Cynthia did not
+raise her eyes from her work. She was wearing a hat with a wide brim
+and Harry Rames could see nothing of her face.
+
+"Won't you get your charts out and show me?" she asked. She had
+mastered her voice so that there was no sound of effort in it.
+
+"I haven't got them here," said Harry, with a fine indifference. "They
+are in London I believe, somewhere or other."
+
+Cynthia's needle stopped.
+
+"In London," she said. An idea had occurred to her. "Locked up?"
+
+"Very likely. I may have locked them up. I have done with them
+altogether, you see."
+
+"Of course," said Cynthia.
+
+This time it was Harry who did not at once reply. The finality of that
+"of course" brought a flush of anger into his face. He almost blamed
+her for her blindness, though all his efforts aimed at keeping her
+blind.
+
+"I will ride into Hickleton this afternoon," he said, "and make sure
+that the chairman of our association has no pet candidate of his own."
+
+"That will be a good plan," said Cynthia; and with a glance at the
+crown of that broad hat and a surprise at the obtuseness of the head
+which it so effectually concealed, he went out of the room. Not until
+the door was closed did Cynthia lift her face from her work. Her eyes
+were brimming with tears and she let her hands lie idle on her lap
+while the tears overflowed and ran down her cheeks. She was not much
+given to tears, but to-day they had their way with her. She was
+wretched. Their marriage had been a mistake. From first to last Mr.
+Benoliel had been right, but she would not listen to him and be
+warned. Even this afternoon he had accused her--for so she now looked
+upon his words--with his pitiless truths. It was true that Harry was
+discouraged, that his face had grown thin and worn, that despite the
+brave show which he was making, he was utterly unhappy. Harry's words,
+"The men who go South are driven on by a torment of their souls,"
+lived with her night and day. They were written in fire upon every
+wall of her house. In that torment Harry Rames was now tossing and
+must toss, enduring the anguish of his longing silently--just as
+silently as she herself was weeping in the empty room.
+
+She was afraid of herself and dissatisfied with herself. Afraid,
+because she had been perilously near to one wild outcry, "Since your
+heart is set on it, go!" Dissatisfied, because she had stifled the
+words before they were spoken, because she could not bring herself to
+speak them, and never would.
+
+From that day a change came over her. She flung herself with a
+veritable fever of energy upon those opportunities which enable a
+woman to identify herself with politics. The work she had undertaken
+in Ludsey, she undertook in London on a wider scale, and with
+infinitely greater effort. She was elected upon the central committees
+of the various women's associations connected with her husband's
+party; she travelled far and wide throughout the country on the
+business of organizations; she made speeches; she sought the presence
+of Cabinet Ministers at her dinner-table; she lost her color, her
+buoyancy. What she did was done doggedly. To go to bed each night
+tired out, that was her ambition.
+
+"If Harry wears himself out, why should not I?" she said when any of
+her friends remonstrated with her, but not one of them was allowed to
+guess that the secret of all her energy was remorse. She was seeking
+her rest in fatigue. For her remorse grew. Night after night Harry sat
+faithfully, as he had promised to Hamlin, in his seat on the front
+bench below the gangway. He took his part in the debates, he recovered
+the ground which he had lost. He was once more a man marked for high
+office. But it was all labor now, and unloved labor. And the strain of
+it was visible. He went out and in without that happy mien of
+confidence which once Cynthia had been wont to resent, but for which
+she vainly hungered now.
+
+There was one Friday evening toward the end of June when she was
+impelled to approach the dangerous subject of her own accord. She and
+Harry had been dining with the Prime-Minister in Downing Street. All
+that week the House had been sitting into the small hours. The
+Prime-Minister himself had taken her aside and given her a warning.
+They returned home soon after eleven, and as they sat over a final
+cigarette in Harry's study, Cynthia could not shut her eyes to his
+restlessness, the nervous flickering of his fingers, the unsteady
+intonations of his voice.
+
+"Aren't you doing too much, Harry?" she asked.
+
+"Not more than you, Cynthia," he replied as he poured himself out a
+whiskey and soda.
+
+"Much more. And women who are doing what they want to do can stand a
+great deal more than men who are not."
+
+Harry looked across at her quickly.
+
+"But, of course, I am doing just what I have always planned to do,
+just what you are helping me to do--just what I sought your help to
+enable me to do."
+
+"Sure?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+Cynthia had crossed the room to his side and was standing with a hand
+upon his shoulder. She was in a mood of indecision and the touch of
+her hand revealed her mood to Rames. A change came over him. She felt
+a tremor of his body, a sudden quickening of the muscles beneath her
+hand. He became intensely expectant. She could read the question in
+his mind. Was she by some wonderful inspiration going to release him
+from the torment of his soul? But the mere sensation of his movement
+was enough for Cynthia. She withdrew her hand. She repeated
+unconsciously words which he had once used to her.
+
+"After all we get some fun out of it, don't we, Harry?" she said; and
+Harry rose quickly from his chair.
+
+"We get much more out of it, Cynthia," he said with a face which had
+suddenly grown very grave and tender; and the next moment she was in
+his arms, held there tightly, clasped against him. Cynthia was carried
+out of herself. She was swept away unexpectedly upon a swirl of
+passion.
+
+"Harry! Oh, Harry!" she whispered in a low voice of happiness. His
+right hand touched and stroked her hair. Then he tilted her chin
+backward and he looked into her eyes and a smile transfigured his
+face.
+
+"Oh, much more, Cynthia," he cried, and he bent his head and kissed
+her. He put her away from him and looked her over from her delicate
+feet to the fair crown of her hair. She wore a satin gown of white
+with her diamonds in her hair, and a rope of pearls about her neck.
+
+"There! That's that!" he said, and Cynthia with a laugh and the blush
+of a girl answered, "Thank you." Harry Rames lit a cigarette and
+Cynthia's eyes followed each movement and followed it with
+incredulity. The change so ardently longed for by her had come then?
+He loved--he actually loved!
+
+"Since when?" she asked gently.
+
+"Do you remember one evening when you stood there by the door, very
+wistful, and told me something about yourself which I did not know?"
+
+"Yes, I remember. I was unwise."
+
+"You were not. For it began then."
+
+"Really?"
+
+She went up to him, and he caught her hand in his and held it tightly
+clasped.
+
+"I looked at you to-night as we sat at dinner. There was no one but
+you at the dinner-table. How on earth you could have brought yourself
+to marry me, I can't think."
+
+"I told you," said Cynthia, "I was afraid," and there was a note of
+exultation in the confession as though now at last she was freed from
+fear. Harry Rames lifted her suddenly from the ground and held her
+close to him. She hung inert in his arms.
+
+"That's over," he said.
+
+"Quite."
+
+"I love you, Cynthia."
+
+Cynthia threw her head back and closed her eyes, giving to him her
+face, her throat.
+
+"I wanted to hear you say that," she whispered. He carried her over to
+the sofa and laid her down.
+
+For a week or two after that evening Cynthia walked in a dream. The
+great trouble which had weighed upon her thoughts incessantly was
+altogether gone. Mr. Benoliel had been right in his conjectures. He
+must still be right, she reasoned. He had foreseen the trouble
+accurately. "You will be living with your enemy or living quite
+alone." But he had added a saving clause. If on both sides there was
+love, then salvation would be found. Cynthia did not enquire very
+deeply into Mr. Benoliel's meaning. The salvation would come
+automatically, following upon love. She was content to think that and
+she walked in a world of roses as in the days of her girlhood in the
+estancia before James Challoner had come to claim her.
+
+But after a fortnight she waked from her dream. Life was different: it
+was intensified. There was a little more sunlight on a sunny day, a
+little more sparkle in the summer, one walked to music. But the
+trouble was not gone, in spite of the fact that on both sides there
+was love. For with love, contentment had not come to Harry Rames. He
+watched himself, but she watched him closer and she knew. His sleep
+grew disturbed. The torment of his soul was not appeased. Daily he
+became more and more the convict at the oar. There grew up between
+them a loving enmity.
+
+A morning came in the middle of July when to Cynthia the strain became
+intolerable. She was riding under the trees in the Row. It was not yet
+half-past nine and the air was still fresh with the dews of the night.
+A light haze hung near to the ground, the sunlight touched the green
+alleys of trees to gold, and far off across the Park soldiers were
+marching to the drums and fifes. She had reached the cross-road which
+leads to the Albert Gate when an impulse seized her. Mr. Brook was
+riding at her side, dilating enthusiastically on the importance of
+their group in the House of Commons, while Cynthia from time to time
+said mechanically "yes," and again "yes," and wished with her whole
+heart that all the bores in London would not take their exercise at
+half-past nine in the morning. Mr. Brook was in full swing when
+Cynthia abruptly reined in her horse.
+
+"Good-by," she said, "I am afraid I have something I must do," and to
+Mr. Brook's astonishment she turned and cantered quickly back to Hyde
+Park Corner. Thence she rode to Grosvenor Square, gave her horse to
+her groom, and burst into Mr. Benoliel's dining-room where he sat
+breakfasting delicately amidst his silver and flowers. She waved the
+butler from the room and sat down at the table at right-angles to Mr.
+Benoliel.
+
+"I am very unhappy," she said. "I was riding in the Park. It seemed
+ridiculous to be unhappy on a day like this. Yet I am. So I put my
+pride in my pocket."
+
+She spoke with a kind of petulance, like one aggrieved and surprised
+at the contrariness of things. But Mr. Benoliel recognized that her
+distress was very real. His face clouded over; he laid his hand upon
+her arm.
+
+"Have some breakfast, Cynthia."
+
+"Food!" cried Cynthia in contempt. Then she changed her tone. "Well, I
+haven't had any breakfast. Perhaps--yes."
+
+She was a girl with a healthy appetite and very unhappily she ate a
+big breakfast.
+
+"Now light a cigarette and tell me about it."
+
+He pushed over a silver box lined with cedar wood from which Cynthia
+took a cigarette. She tapped the end upon the table and lighted it.
+Mr. Benoliel's cigarettes were famous for their freshness and the
+delicacy of their aroma. Cynthia inhaled the tobacco and was a little
+comforted.
+
+"No," she said. "I can't tell you all about it. I just want to ask you
+a question."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"You remember the warning you gave me at Culver when you didn't know
+that I was married?"
+
+"Quite well," said Mr. Benoliel regretfully. "It came too late."
+
+"I am glad that it came too late," Cynthia observed quietly. "For I
+might have taken it."
+
+Mr. Benoliel looked perplexed.
+
+"Yet you are unhappy, Cynthia?"
+
+"Very. None the less I wouldn't go back. But I don't want you to ask
+me questions. I will tell you at once that you were right--quite right
+up to a point. And the happiness both of Harry and myself depends upon
+your being right all through."
+
+Mr. Benoliel's eyes flashed into life.
+
+"There is a chance then?"
+
+"Oh yes! If you are right."
+
+"Let me hear!"
+
+Cynthia put her question.
+
+"What did you exactly mean when you said that even if the change you
+feared should come and some latent ambition should spring to life and
+snatch him back, separation need not follow, provided that on both
+sides there was love?"
+
+A gravity overspread Benoliel's face.
+
+"I meant, my dear, that sooner or later," he said gently, "after much
+tribulation, much revolt, one of the two will make the necessary
+sacrifice, and will make it whole-heartedly."
+
+Cynthia was silent for a little while.
+
+"Yes," she said at last in a low voice. "Of late I have begun to think
+that that is what you meant."
+
+She dropped her cigarette upon a plate and rose. "Thank you, Mr.
+Benoliel," she said, and she walked with a trailing step to the door.
+At the door she paused.
+
+"And is it always the woman who must make the sacrifice?" she asked;
+and Mr. Benoliel lost in a moment all that second-hand aspect of the
+dilettante which habitually cloaked him.
+
+"Always," he said, with a ringing gravity of voice. "That is the law
+of the world, and neither man nor woman shall change it."
+
+Cynthia opened the door and went out.
+
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XXXV
+
+                         THE LITTLE BIT EXTRA
+
+
+Yet that August when Parliament had risen, Harry Rames and Cynthia
+were cruising in the Solent and no word had been spoken by her to
+remedy their trouble. It was Cynthia who had proposed this holiday and
+Harry had fallen in with her plan eagerly. They had chartered a small
+steam yacht of a hundred tons. Rames navigated the boat himself and
+slipping their moorings one afternoon, they left Cowes behind them and
+steamed away through the north channel of the Shingles to Poole.
+Cynthia had ceased to wrestle with herself. She was content to lie in
+her deck chair and put into and out of the harbors of the West.
+
+"This shall be the perfect holiday," she had said. "Whatever the
+future may hold for us, we will have this month together without
+visitors, without any shadows."
+
+They were tossed in Portland race; they steamed across the West Bay
+over a sea smooth and bright as a steel mirror. They dropped their
+anchor at Dartmouth. They rounded the Start on the next day and
+crossed the Bar of Salcombe harbor under the shadow of Bolt Head on
+just such an evening of sunset as that which the poet fixed in a few
+lines of deathless verse. Cynthia stood with her arm through Harry's,
+as very slowly with the lead going in the bows he set the boat over
+the shallows.
+
+"Sunset and evening star," Cynthia quoted.
+
+"And one clear call for me," Harry Rames continued and abruptly broke
+off like a guilty person who has spoken without thought. Cynthia
+walked to the end of the bridge. After all, this cruise had made a
+difference to Harry. She consoled herself by the reflection. He had
+recovered something of his buoyancy of spirits since he had trodden
+the planks of this little yacht and looked down from its flimsy bridge
+onto its narrow deck and tapering bow. He was interested in the boat,
+quick to induce her to give him of her best, and her brass shone like
+a woman's ornaments. They put out from Salcombe the next day, and
+keeping clear of Plymouth and Polperro and Fowey, heard the bell upon
+the Manacles in the afternoon and dropped anchor between the woods of
+Helford River. They stayed there for a day and made a passage thence
+to Guernsey on a night of moonlight. Cynthia sat late upon the bridge
+while Rames in his great-coat kept the boat upon her course. Toward
+morning he came to her side and stooped over her.
+
+"I thought you were asleep."
+
+"No."
+
+"Aren't you tired?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You were lying so still."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia. "I am storing this night up."
+
+The swish and sparkle of the water along the boat's sides, the rattle
+of the chain as the helmsman spun the wheel, the quiet orders of her
+husband, the infinite peace of sky and sea, and the yacht like a jewel
+hung between them, were indeed to dwell long in Cynthia's memories.
+For their holiday was at an end. A sailor was sent ashore at Guernsey
+for the ship's letters and he brought them on board whilst Harry and
+Cynthia were at breakfast in the deck cabin. There was one for Rames
+with the Hickleton postmark stamped upon the envelope. Harry tore it
+open reluctantly.
+
+"Carberley has resigned," he said. "There will be a meeting of the
+executive on Friday night to adopt young Burrell."
+
+Cynthia looked out across the harbor.
+
+"We ought to go back, oughtn't we?" she said slowly.
+
+Harry glanced at his letter.
+
+"It is not expected that the election will take place for five weeks,"
+he answered.
+
+Cynthia shook her head.
+
+"We shall want all that time, Harry." Then she cried with a sudden
+vehemence. "You have got to win this fight, Harry. So much hangs on it
+for you and me."
+
+"I know, Cynthia," he answered.
+
+"More than you know."
+
+Harry rose from his chair.
+
+"I'll give orders. We will steam back to Southampton at once. But it's
+a pity, isn't it? Old Carberley might have waited for another month. I
+am sorry."
+
+"So am I," said Cynthia. Her eyes had wandered from him and were once
+more fixed upon the shipping in the harbor. Her face had grown white.
+"More sorry than you can know."
+
+A little white dinghy, gay with a sailor in a white jersey and a red
+cap, was just leaving the side of a big yacht moored across the water.
+The picture of that little boat was fixed for life in Cynthia's
+recollections. It had nothing to do with her, she never knew who
+sailed in the yacht, or on what business the boat put off to shore.
+But the picture of it was vivid to her long after important memories
+had grown altogether dim.
+
+
+The fight for the Hickleton Division was memorable in the political
+history of that year. From first to last it was Rames's fight. The
+candidate was young, and a halting speaker, and unknown to the
+constituency. But he lived in Rames's house and when he appeared upon
+a platform he appeared with Rames at his side. When he spoke he
+uttered the words which Rames had prepared, and when he had finished
+Rames was on his legs to fill up the deficiencies and whip the
+assembly to a fire of enthusiasm. From the great guns of his own party
+no assistance came. Indeed, most of them would have been well pleased
+had the seat not been won. For in the forefront of his programme Mr.
+William Burrell put hostility to the land bill. The two men left the
+white house early in the morning to return there late at night. For
+five weeks the lights of Rames's motor flashed on the hedges of the
+country roads in Warwickshire, and the constituency was won. The
+result was declared at noon, and half an hour later Mr. William
+Burrell, M.P., a slim, fair young gentleman with a small gift of
+flippancy, made his one memorable speech in the big room of the club.
+
+"Gentlemen," he said, "the British public, as a whole, is indifferent
+to politics. It wakes up to be sure at the time of an election. But if
+I were asked to define politics in relation to the British public I
+should define it as a spasm of pain recurring once in every four or
+five years. What, then, is it which arouses the enthusiasm of which I
+am a witness? What is it which achieves these triumphs? Need I say? It
+is personality. Character--that's what you want in public life--and
+now, gentlemen, you have got it."
+
+The speech was received with a very tornado of laughter. Rames turned
+to his wife who sat by him on the little raised platform at the end of
+the room.
+
+"I told you he wasn't a fool," he said, and Mr. Arnall, who had come
+over from Ludsey, cried out with a chuckle of delight that he had now
+a companion speech to match the famous one of Taylor the democrat.
+
+"You won't go back to London until to-morrow, will you?" said Rames to
+young Burrell. "It's best not to hurry away the moment you've won the
+seat."
+
+They returned accordingly to the white house, and when the two men
+were left by Cynthia to their wine after dinner, Rames turned
+inquisitively to his guest.
+
+"I have noticed a change in you, Burrell, during these five weeks. You
+came into the contest as though it was a joke, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes, I did," said Burrell, blushing.
+
+"And though you laughed at it again to-day, as a matter of fact it
+ceased to be a joke very quickly."
+
+Burrell agreed. "Very quickly."
+
+Rames fetched a box of cigars from the sideboard.
+
+"Now light a cigar," he said, "and tell me just as clearly as you can
+what brought about the change, and what this election really means to
+you."
+
+Mr. William Burrell, M.P., shied at the proposal.
+
+"Oh, I say, Rames," he began, but Rames cut him short.
+
+"I really want to hear," he said earnestly. "I ask for a particular
+reason."
+
+Burrell lit his cigar. The contest had impressed him deeply. But like
+most men he was shy of revealing any strength of feeling. The eager
+eyes of Rames, however, kept him to his task. He looked back over the
+five weeks, gathering up his little sheaf of recollections.
+
+"What remains in my mind," he said with hesitation, "is not the
+excitement, nor the applause, is not the difficulty of making speeches
+about subjects with which one is not half acquainted, nor the fear
+of being asked questions for which one has no reply ready, but
+something quite different. It is the memory of little bare raftered
+school-rooms, hot with gas-light, crowded with white faces, faces so
+hopeful, so--intolerably hopeful--the faces of people who look
+confidently to candidates and Parliaments for so much more than it
+seems to me Parliaments and candidates can ever do."
+
+"Ah!" said Rames curiously. "You felt that too. I remember that I
+did."
+
+Burrell leaned forward.
+
+"Did you too, though you shouted yourself hoarse with the rest, feel a
+little ashamed?"
+
+Rames reflected. "No," he said; "never." Then he added with a smile,
+"but I think I should now."
+
+"I did," said Burrell. "There were times when I wanted to stop my
+speech in the middle and cry out, 'Don't look at me with such high
+hopes. It's no use! It's no use!' But I held my tongue. For there's
+always the little that governments can do. That's the consolation,
+isn't it?" Burrell was finding it easier to speak out his thoughts
+now. The false shame with which he had begun had quite left him. His
+words tumbled out hot from his soul. The strangely curious, almost
+envious, look with which Harry Rames, his tutor and leader, waited
+upon him encouraged and urged him on.
+
+"The fight, the excitement, the victory--oh yes, they are worth
+having, even though one owes them to another, just as I owe them,
+Captain Rames, to you. But now, after the victory, there's still the
+little which can be done; and there's still the memory of the raftered
+school-rooms, the hot gas-light, and the rows of eager, hopeful,
+pallid faces to help one on to do it."
+
+He stopped and leaned back in his chair. The shame of a young man who
+has let his tongue wag before his elders and masters seized hold upon
+him.
+
+"But why did you lead me on to talk this sort of blatter to you?" he
+asked in an aggrieved voice. "All that I have just learnt you knew
+long since."
+
+Harry Rames shook his head.
+
+"Your opposition to Devenish's land bill shows it," Burrell insisted.
+"Oh, we'll have a real policy of land reform, not an act of revenge."
+
+Harry Rames leaned across the corner of the table toward young
+Burrell. To the youth's eyes he looked at this moment extraordinarily
+haggard and old.
+
+"I'll tell you, Burrell, why I asked my question. I wanted to
+recapture from you if I could something of a man's enthusiasm at his
+first political victory."
+
+Burrell looked at his leader with astonishment. Of the man of fire who
+had blazed through the constituency from corner to corner with clear
+ringing phrases and an inexhaustible good-humor there was now nothing
+left. He was burnt out. He sat with brooding eyes and a white face all
+fallen into despair. The tale of his years was suddenly written large
+upon him. Burrell had wit enough to understand that fatigue did not
+explain the change. A mask was withdrawn; he saw misery like a cancer.
+Rames sat and betrayed himself like a man in his cups.
+
+"You tell me you felt ashamed in the school-rooms. I never knew
+anything of such shame. To win, to win, to win! That was all I thought
+about. That was all the desire I felt. That was what I hoped you would
+help me to recapture to-night. But you haven't helped."
+
+Rames's eyes dwelt angrily upon his colleague.
+
+"No. You have made me feel ashamed too." Then his face relaxed and he
+added in a friendlier voice: "I believe that I have helped you--really
+helped you. Oh, not to win a seat in the House of Commons. That's
+nothing to be so proud about. But to find your vocation."
+
+"Where you have found yours," said Burrell firmly.
+
+"Not a bit of it," said Rames, and then he woke from his moodiness to
+a savage outburst of contempt. "Oh, I am going on with it. Don't be
+alarmed, Burrell. I'll lead you. We'll put up a fight. We'll make the
+fur fly. Very possibly we'll pull the whole Government down with a
+run. But--" and drawing his chair nearer to the youth he changed his
+tone. "I'll tell you the truth about the House of Commons. It's the
+place where the second-rate gets the finest show in the world. In no
+walk of life does second-rate intellect reap so high a reward or meet
+with such great esteem. But it won't lift you to the very top. Nor
+will first-rate intellect either. Remember that!"
+
+"What will then?" asked Burrell in perplexity, and Harry Rames
+shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"The little bit extra. Character, perseverance! I don't know.
+Something anyway. It's the same everywhere now. There are too many
+clever people about. Faith in a cause, I think will do it. That's why
+the sentimentalists do so much harm in public affairs. They get their
+way, because they believe. They are not playing the political game.
+Cleverness is twelve for a penny nowadays. To get up to the top you
+must have the little bit extra. Now in the sphere of politics I
+haven't got it. I don't say office is out of my reach. It isn't. I
+have been offered it. I have refused it. But I haven't got the little
+bit extra. Outside politics--in quite another sphere--I believe I
+have. But that's all done with. I was warned when I went into
+politics--warned by a shrewd, wise man. But I wouldn't listen, and so
+some day amongst the second-rate Right Honorables half a dozen lines
+will announce my death in the _Times_."
+
+Young Burrell had no great experience of the intenser emotions, and
+the bitterness with which Rames spoke appalled him. He saw a man in
+torture, and he listened to a cry of pain grown intolerable. Then in a
+second all was changed again. Rames was on his feet replacing the
+stoppers in the decanters, taking the shades from off the candles,
+performing the little conventional acts of a host in his dining-room.
+The chasm in the ordinary level surface of things which had yawned for
+a moment and given Burrell a glimpse of the pit where misery gnawed
+had closed up.
+
+"We will join my wife," said Rames. He stopped at the door.
+
+"Were you ever at Toulon?"
+
+"No."
+
+"There's a statue on the quay there, at the water's edge, overlooking
+the harbor. A great bronze figure, extraordinarily alert, with a light
+upon its forehead, the Genius of the Sea. And on the open pages of a
+bronze book in the front of the pedestal, the names of the great
+sailors are engraved. Cook and the rest of them. The list ends with
+D'Urville, I remember. I only saw the statue once. My father showed it
+to me when I was a boy. I don't suppose that I have ever thought of it
+until to-day." He repeated softly as though speaking to himself:
+
+"Yes the list ends with D'Urville." Then he roused himself. "Bring
+your cigar in. Cynthia doesn't mind. By the way," and a smile of
+tenderness transfigured his face, "not a word of this to her. She
+thinks I am going to be a great man. She's wrong, but I don't want her
+to know before she needs must." Burrell consented at once. He followed
+Rames from the room with all joy in his victory quite overcast. He
+looked beyond the surprising revelations of his host and obtained a
+glimpse into a new side of life. He was the spectator of one of
+the grim comedies of marriage. Here was the wife--so it seemed to
+him--believing joyfully in the great destiny of her husband; and the
+husband laboring in torment to sustain her belief, while all the while
+he knew that his destiny was thwarted and that the true current of his
+life ran through other fields.
+
+They went along the passage into the drawing-room. It was a warm night
+of September and the windows stood open upon the garden. Cynthia was
+not in the room. Harry stepped out onto the lawn. The night was dark
+and he could see no one. But the light in the drawing-room had
+revealed him as he stepped out, and whilst he was standing peering
+into the darkness Cynthia came softly over the grass to his side.
+
+"You'll catch cold," he said. "The dew's heavy."
+
+Cynthia took his arm. "Hush," she said. "Listen!" and through the
+still air the chimes of the great clock in Ludsey steeple floated with
+a silvery and melodious sound to their ears. A tune was struck out by
+the bells, then another.
+
+"I heard that," said Cynthia in a whisper, "on the night my father
+died. I was sitting alone with him in the darkness while his life
+drifted away. It was winter."
+
+Harry put his arm about her and pressed her to his side.
+
+"I heard them again," she continued, "one night when I was waiting for
+you to telephone to me, Harry. Do you remember?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I waited a long time for you that night, Harry," and there was a
+catch in her voice. "Ludsey chimes have meant very much to us. Let us
+hear them out!"
+
+They stood together in the darkness until the last distant note had
+died away. It seemed to Rames that Cynthia listened as though she were
+taking a farewell of them.
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+                             THE TELEGRAM
+
+
+Harry Rames and Cynthia travelled up to London the next day. Cynthia
+was restless and excited.
+
+"Let us dine at a restaurant and go to a theatre, Harry," she said. "I
+can't sit still and stay at home to-night."
+
+"Very well. What shall we go and see?"
+
+"Oh, something with bright colors and movement and music."
+
+But there ran through the piece she chose a melody of a haunting
+wistfulness and Harry Rames, happening to glance at his wife in the
+darkness of the auditorium, saw that the tears were raining silently
+down her cheeks.
+
+"What's the matter, Cynthia?" he asked in a whisper.
+
+Cynthia smiled at him through her tears and laid a hand upon his arm.
+
+"Hush!" she answered. "It's all right, Harry."
+
+As the curtain descended at the end of the act she said, "Let us go
+now quickly, do you mind? Before the lights are turned up."
+
+They were, fortunately, near to the end of their row of stalls, and
+they were able to slip out while the curtain was still ascending and
+descending upon the lighted stage, and the auditorium still dark.
+Rames left Cynthia in the lobby while he went in search of his
+carriage. When he returned he found her standing with her face
+carefully turned to the wall in front of a commonplace engraving,
+which seemed to be demanding from her the most meticulous study.
+
+"Have you found it?" she asked, and she hurried with him across the
+pavement. "Let us go home, Harry. It was nothing except nerves. I was
+stupid. We have been doing a good deal lately, haven't we?"
+
+"That's all right, Cynthia. You poor little girl," said Rames as he
+crossed her cloak over her throat. He knew her too well to make the
+mistake of plying her with questions, and they drove to their home in
+silence.
+
+"You had better go to bed, Cynthia," he said. "I'll send your maid to
+you."
+
+"No. I am all right now," she answered. "I have something to say,
+Harry."
+
+She went forward to his study--that room with the mahogany panels
+where both had faced the hardest crises of their lives, had known the
+worst of their sorrows, the sweetest of their joys. Harry followed
+her, turned on the lights, and closed the door. Cynthia was already
+standing by the fireplace with a foot upon the fender; and she
+shivered as though she were cold.
+
+"Yes, it's chilly," said Rames. "Ill light the fire."
+
+He struck a match and set light to the paper. The wood crackled, the
+flames spurted up. Cynthia threw off her cloak and, crouching before
+the fire, warmed herself. Harry Rames drew up an arm-chair for her.
+
+"Won't you sit here, Cynthia, and be comfortable?" he asked, and his
+voice seemed to rouse her from a gloomy contemplation. She stood up
+and walked over to his bureau.
+
+Harry's eyes followed her movements closely. With a growing
+consternation he saw her grasp the handles of a locked drawer and try
+to open it.
+
+"What do you keep in here, Harry?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, some old forgotten things."
+
+"Your charts?"
+
+"My word, yes. I believe they are there," he said with an air of
+surprise.
+
+"Will you show them to me?" Cynthia asked. "I should like to see
+them."
+
+"I don't know where the key is. It's lost."
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"For all the chance I have of finding it, dear, it might just as well
+be at the bottom of the Serpentine."
+
+Harry had not moved away from the fireplace. Cynthia, her back toward
+him, had been playing with the brass handles of the locked drawer. Now
+she swung round suddenly. Often she had wondered what errand had taken
+him from the house at one o'clock of the morning after she had
+revealed her heart to him in this very room. Now she guessed the
+truth. It was on that night that he had begun to build up his dykes
+against the encroachments of his longings. She faced him; her eyes
+burned steadily upon his face, thoughtful, but betraying nothing of
+her thoughts.
+
+"Yes," she said, "I suppose it might as well be in the Serpentine."
+She turned again to the drawer.
+
+"A knife will open it easily, Harry."
+
+Harry Rames moved uncomfortably.
+
+"It had better be left alone, Cynthia," he said. But she insisted and,
+opening a blade of his knife, he went reluctantly across the room to
+her side.
+
+"It is your wish, Cynthia. You will remember that?" he said gravely.
+"For myself I would much rather that it should never be unlocked until
+both of us are dead."
+
+Cynthia showed no surprise at the gravity of his voice. But now she
+too paused. "There is still time," she was saying to herself in
+feverish trouble of mind, though her face was calm. "There is still
+time. He is giving me my chance--my last chance." Her eyelids were
+lowered over her eyes and she glanced at him under the thick lashes.
+
+"You are afraid to open it, Harry?"
+
+"Yes, I am afraid."
+
+It was not merely the outrush of old and overwhelming memories which
+he dreaded. But that locked drawer had become to him a symbol of his
+own self-mastery. So long as it remained locked, and no longer, he
+would dominate his torments and be the captain of his soul. For so
+long he would keep locked a frail door against his yearnings. Cynthia,
+in a voice so faltering and low that it was hardly audible, said:
+
+"Still I should like it opened."
+
+"Very well."
+
+She stood with her fingers clenched upon her palms whilst Harry
+inserted the blade of his knife in the chink of the drawer, ran it
+along until it touched the lock, and then forced apart the fastenings.
+There was a crack as of splintering wood. Harry Rames replaced his
+knife in his pocket, pulled out the drawer, and carried it over to his
+writing-table.
+
+"There it is," he said, moving away from it to the fireplace. Cynthia
+bent over the drawer and turned on the light of a reading lamp which
+stood upon the table.
+
+"This is your own chart upon the top, Harry?"
+
+"Yes. It is the last one, you see. Hemming may be bringing back
+another."
+
+"Will you show me exactly the point you reached?"
+
+It seemed to Harry as if she was bent on trying him to the last point
+of endurance.
+
+"It is marked there quite plainly, Cynthia," he said.
+
+Cynthia leaned over the drawer--for a long time. Harry Rames was quite
+surprised at the closeness of her scrutiny. It was so long since she
+had shown any interest in his journey or indeed in anything except his
+political career. As a matter of fact, Cynthia saw of that map nothing
+but a blur: for her eyes were dim with tears, and she bent so low over
+its configurations simply because in that attitude her face was
+hidden.
+
+She moved.
+
+"What is this?"
+
+She took up a brown package, tied up with string, which lay in a
+corner of the drawer.
+
+"I don't know," said Rames with a puzzled face. "I have forgotten."
+
+"May I open it?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+Cynthia cut the string and, one after another, perhaps a score of
+brown telegraph envelopes slipped out in a cascade and fell upon the
+table in front of her.
+
+"Telegrams," she said curiously. "Unopened, too! Oh, Harry!" this with
+a mocking laugh of reproach. Then she looked at the address of one of
+the telegrams. It ran:
+
+
+                            Rames,
+                               S. S. Perhaps,
+                                  Tilbury Docks.
+
+
+As she read her face changed. There came a look of introspection in
+her dark, wide-open eyes. She swept back in her thoughts over the
+course of years and took note of the irony of things and of the
+surprising changes in a life like hers which, to all the world, was
+uneventful and prescribed.
+
+"I remember," she said. "These are the good wishes sent to you when
+you started. You once told me that you never opened them."
+
+"I hadn't the time. We had to catch the tide out of London. We were
+late getting away. I had forgotten that I had kept them all."
+
+"I am going to open them."
+
+"It is too late to answer them."
+
+"I wonder."
+
+Cynthia opened the telegrams until she came upon one about half
+through the number which arrested her attention. This she spread out
+before her and smiled at its phrasing.
+
+"Harry!" she said.
+
+Rames turned about.
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Come and read this."
+
+He stood behind Cynthia's chair and read aloud the message still
+legible upon the form.
+
+"Every heart-felt wish for a triumphant journey from an unknown friend
+in--;" and then he stopped with an intake of his breath. "In South
+America," he resumed, and so stood quite still for the space of a few
+seconds. Then he leaned forward and looked at the name of the
+telegraph office from which the message had been sent.
+
+"Daventry," he cried.
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia with a little laugh upon which her voice broke.
+"We had a telegraph office on the estancia. We were very proud of it,
+I can tell you"; and then the amusement died away from her voice, and
+"oh!" she whispered in a long sigh, as she felt his arm about her.
+
+"You sent that! You! Cynthia! Before I knew you, before we met."
+
+"Yes, dear, I sent it."
+
+"Just think," he cried. "It reached me at Tilbury. It travelled out
+with me to the South. It was in the desk in my cabin for three long
+dark winters. It came back with me to England. By chance I met
+you----"
+
+"No, not by chance, Harry," Cynthia interrupted. "I sent Mr. Benoliel
+to fetch you."
+
+"Yes, you did," he agreed, with a laugh. "We met, and we married, and
+through all these changes it has lain here unopened. Why didn't I open
+it? That was conceit, Cynthia. I was haughty. I was going out to
+discover the South Pole. I didn't open my telegrams."
+
+"But if you had opened it, Harry, you would only have laughed. For
+it's just the message of a schoolgirl, isn't it? You were one of my
+heroes--oh, not the only one but the latest one--I had just let you in
+past the turnstile to my enchanted garden. I was seventeen on the very
+day I sent it. I drove down to the office--oh in such a condition of
+importance. I pictured to myself you, the unknown you, sitting in your
+cabin and wondering and wondering and wondering who your little friend
+was in South America. Then I drove back and"--she stopped and went on
+again slowly--"yes, other things happened to me that day." She looked
+down again at the telegram. "Yes, the message of a foolish and
+romantic school-girl."
+
+"I should like to be able to think, Cynthia," said her husband, "that
+I had opened it when it came."
+
+"But you didn't," said Cynthia, "and so--" she broke off her sentence.
+She took the telegram form, folded it, and replaced it in its
+envelope. She took a brush from a little bottle of gum which stood
+ready upon the table by the inkstand and, smearing the inner border of
+the envelope, stuck it down again. Then she stood up and turned to her
+husband. "And so," she continued, "you must take it, Harry, as though
+it were despatched to you by me only to-day for the first time and
+delivered to you here now at midnight."
+
+She held out to him the telegram and he took it, gazing at her with a
+look of wonder. And then hope flamed in his eyes. Cynthia turned away
+abruptly. To her that swift flame of hope, of life, was almost
+intolerable.
+
+"Then you knew," he cried.
+
+Cynthia nodded her head, but she kept her face averted.
+
+"I have known a long time," she answered in a low voice. "Ever since
+the letter came to you with the Rexland stamp."
+
+The sound of her voice and her attitude pierced to Rames's heart. His
+exultation gave way to concern.
+
+"I am very sorry, Cynthia," he said gently. "I tried to hide it."
+
+"Oh, my dear, I know you did. With all your strength you tried to hide
+it. You watched yourself each minute. But," and she turned to him with
+a little smile of tenderness, "I watched you closer still, and the
+longing grew too big to be hidden."
+
+Harry Rames made no pretence to deny the truth of her words, knowing
+full well that all denial would be vain. The screen was down between
+them.
+
+"Yes," he said; "but Cynthia, I keep my bargain."
+
+"My dear, there is no longer any bargain between us," she answered,
+"for on both sides there is love. Of that I am very sure."
+
+She held out her hands to him and he caught them and held her against
+his breast.
+
+"You said you had rather that drawer was not unlocked until both of us
+were dead," she whispered. "My dear, if that drawer was not to be
+unlocked, we might both of us be dead at once for all the value our
+lives were going to be. So you will go, you must, unless we are to be
+wrecked altogether. We have been most unhappy, both of us. I, because
+I thought of the dangers," and she suddenly caught him close as though
+even now she dared not let him go, "and could not bring myself to make
+the sacrifice and let you run the risk--you, because the call was
+always in your ears. It couldn't go on. That's the truth, Harry.
+Especially now that you know that your secret's no longer a secret to
+me. We should grow estranged, embittered, each one thinking the other
+horribly selfish. Perhaps, even hatred might come."
+
+"No," protested Harry.
+
+"Oh, yes, yes. It has come from smaller causes often enough. It might
+come, Harry, and that would be terrible. I have thought it out, my
+dear. All the time we were cruising down in the West I was thinking
+our position over and over and over. And it seemed to me that you must
+win this Hickleton election first--and then I would tell you that I
+understood your great trouble and let you go. But you had to win
+first. I couldn't let you go while people might be able to say that
+you had gone because you had been beaten in your political ambitions.
+I was too proud of you, my dear, to allow that. You must lay down your
+career at a moment of success, leaving behind you a good name amongst
+your colleagues and perhaps a great many regrets. But you have won the
+election now, you have made good, as they say, and so, for both our
+sakes, you must go."
+
+She drew herself out of his arms and moved away to the fire.
+
+"Of course it's just what I wanted when I first met you, isn't it?"
+she said with a wavering effort of a laugh. "I urged you to go back
+and finish your work the first time I met you--one night at the
+Admiralty. Only things have changed a good deal since then, haven't
+they?"
+
+Her voice, which had been steady up till now, broke, and with a sob
+she suddenly hid her face in her hands. "Oh, Harry," she cried as
+though her heart was breaking, and he hurried to her, exclaiming:
+
+"Cynthia, I am a brute. I can't leave you here for three years alone."
+
+She held him off with her arm outstretched, dreading lest she should
+weaken and take her advantage of his remorse and so have to go through
+all this heart-rending renunciation again at some future time.
+
+"You won't, Harry," she said, drying her eyes with her handkerchief.
+"I have thought it all out. My father asked me on his death-bed not to
+desert the Daventry estancia altogether. He loved it so himself that
+he did not wish to think that he would die and that no one of his own
+people would ever see it again and make sure that all was going well
+with it. And here's the opportunity. While you go down to the
+Antarctic I will go back to the Daventry estancia. I couldn't live
+here day after day with you away amidst the storms and the snow. There
+I shall be able to. I will have the estancia to look after. When will
+you go?"
+
+"Not so very soon, Cynthia, after all," he said. "It will take me a
+year before the preparations are complete. Besides, there's the money
+to be raised."
+
+Cynthia raised her shoulders in a gesture of reproach.
+
+"Oh, Harry! There's no trouble about the money, of course."
+
+Rames stared at her. "Cynthia," he cried. "You'll help?"
+
+"More than help, Harry," she answered. "You see I let you go--yes. I
+even bid you go--yes. But I mean to have my share, my dear, in
+whatever you do. I mean that you shall carry something of me,
+something more than a telegram this time, to your farthest South."
+
+Rames sat down in a chair by the side of the fire close to where she
+stood. He gazed into the flames in silence. With all gentleness and
+love she was heaping coals of fire upon his head. Every look, every
+word she spoke, confessed the deep pain which he was causing her. She
+was brave, but through the curtain of her bravery her fear and anguish
+shone. He spoke as a man will who is smitten by his conscience.
+
+"I am very sorry, Cynthia. When I asked you to marry me I had no
+suspicion that any longing could get so strong a hold on me. I once
+told you carelessly that men were driven out upon these expeditions by
+the torment of their souls. I said that knowing it only by hearsay and
+by the plain proof of it which they show in what they have written.
+Now I know it--here," and he struck his breast above his heart. "Yes,
+I have got to go if I am ever to have peace. But I am sorry, Cynthia."
+
+His voice trailed off into silence and Cynthia laid a hand upon his
+head and stroked his hair. "I know," she said, "I know."
+
+"All that I thought so fine, so well worth having--the fight with
+other men for mastery, the conquest with what conquest would
+bring--power and rule and governing--it's extraordinary how completely
+all desire for it has vanished out of me!" he continued. "Do you
+remember the account I gave you of my maiden speech?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Cynthia's hand had gone to her breast, but her voice was steady.
+
+"There was a fragment of time when the world went blank, when I lost
+the thread of my speech, and stood dumb. A fragment of time so short
+that it wasn't noticeable to any one in the House except myself."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, these three years of politics seem to me just such an
+unnoticeable interruption of my real life. The fight which I revelled
+in appears to me now a squabble made ignoble with intrigues, bitter
+with mean disappointments, the victory not worth the fight. No doubt I
+am wrong. I went into the House of Commons, you see, without ideas,"
+and Cynthia started at the word so familiar to her fancies. "Now I
+have one, a big one, and it has mastered me."
+
+And so Harry Rames passed at last through the turnstile into Cynthia's
+private garden. But it was in accordance with the irony of their lives
+that she wished with every drop of her blood that he had remained
+outside.
+
+"I long for simple things, not shifts and intrigues and bitterness;
+the gray mists on glaciers; the day's journey over the snow, with its
+wind ridges and its storms; the hard, lean life of it all; the fight,
+not with men, but with enormous things of nature, some dangerous, some
+serene, but, whether dangerous or serene, wholly indifferent." He
+gazed for a little while into the fire, seeking in the analysis of his
+emotions his apologia.
+
+"I think, Cynthia," he continued, "that once a man has gone far into
+the empty spaces of the earth, he has the mark of them upon him.
+Voices call from them over all the leagues of all the seas and need no
+receivers at the end."
+
+"Yes," said Cynthia, and once more her memories travelled back to the
+death-bed of old Daventry in the dark room of the white house. He had
+given her reasons for his great love of his estancia on the wide
+plains of Argentina. But there had been another reason, she
+remembered, which his failing wits had not allowed his tongue to
+formulate. Cynthia had often wondered what that reason was. She had no
+doubt that her husband had explained it now. "Yes, my father also
+heard those voices."
+
+After a short silence Harry Rames reached out his hand and took hers.
+
+"I think, my dear," he said gently, "that things would have been
+different, that I should not have wanted to go, had we been fortunate
+enough to have children--" and with a cry Cynthia turned to him
+fiercely.
+
+"No, no!" she exclaimed. "During this hour, for the first time, I have
+been thanking God we had no children. For if we had, you would still
+have wanted to go just as much as you do now, and that I could not
+have borne."
+
+Harry had no answer for her outburst. In his heart he knew that what
+she had said was true. He sat in silence, his eyes upon the fire and
+her hand in his; and a moment or two later she dropped upon her knees
+at his side.
+
+"But oh, Harry, come back to me!" she cried. "You must go I know.
+That's the way things happen. But oh, come back to me."
+
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+                               THE LAST
+
+
+At nine o'clock on a morning of July during the next year an auxiliary
+barquentine of four hundred and fifty tons steamed westward with the
+tide past the Isle of Wight. Besides the helmsman, Cynthia and Harry
+Rames were upon the bridge. They stood side by side, Cynthia gripping
+the rail in front of her with both of her hands. They did not speak.
+The ship glided past Cowes gay with its white yachts and crowded
+esplanade and rounded Gurnard Point into Newtown Bay. Cynthia looked
+ahead through a blur of tears, watching for and yet dreading to see a
+low square church tower stand out against the sky close to the water
+in a dip of the coast-line hills. Opposite to that church the ship was
+stopped and a boat was lowered. Cynthia, with Robert Brook to look
+after her, was put ashore on Yarmouth pier; and the barquentine dipped
+her flag and steamed on to the Needles and the open sea on its three
+years' voyage.
+
+Robert Brook escorted Cynthia across the water to Southampton, and the
+next day witnessed her departure from the docks on a steamer of the
+Royal Mail for Buenos Ayres. He returned to London that afternoon,
+took a solitary dinner at his club, and walked afterward to Curzon
+Street. The Rames's house was all lit up, and from the open windows
+music drifted out upon the summer night. Harry and Cynthia had let
+their house a week before, and to-night the new residents were giving
+a party. Robert Brook had an invitation and went in. He listened for
+half an hour to a party of coons and then could endure no more. The
+comic songs and the laughter seemed to him that night in this house a
+desecration. For in the characters of Harry Rames and his wife he
+chose to see something of greatness, in their lives something of
+achievement. He looked about the walls. Some dark and terrible hours
+must needs have been passed by both Harry and Cynthia within them
+before the great resolution had been taken which had condemned her to
+three years of loneliness on an estancia in South America and had
+stripped him of a sure career in politics.
+
+Robert Brook fell into a black mood and an utter weariness with his
+own life. For him season was to follow season and to find him still a
+guest at the parties and the entertainments until he became old and a
+bore. He envied Harry his expedition, Cynthia her sorrow. He went out
+wretched and walked by instinct down Whitehall. On his way to his club
+he passed the windows of the Board of Trade. These, too, were
+brilliantly lit; for within the building a Cabinet Minister was
+endeavoring to compose an acute struggle between artisans and their
+employers. Robert Brook watched those windows; and his disgust with
+his own life increased. Here again was achievement for others, not for
+himself. There would never be room for him within that building, nor
+within any other where the nation's administration was being done. And
+his life was going; indeed, the best part of it was done. He walked on
+to his own small house and let himself in with his key. The passage
+was dark and the house quite silent. He stood for a while alone in the
+darkness and the silence. He thought of Cynthia and Harry, of Devenish
+and his colleagues, of others without eminence, but, at all events,
+with wives and children. He had given up his life to the House of
+Commons and the House of Commons repaid him by barely knowing his
+name. There was probably no man in London more wretched that night
+than Robert Brook.
+
+
+
+                               The End
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Turnstile, by
+A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
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