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.
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.
"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.
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 theTimeswhich 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 yourTimesto-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 theTimesgave 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 theTimestakes 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.