"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.
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 manœuvres, 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.
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."