Harry Rames, however, told her who it was the next morning as they sat at breakfast. He had come down late and Cynthia looked at him with anxious eyes.
"You were kept late in your study?" she said, thinking of the critical week which lay in front of him.
"Yes."
Harry Rames laid down his Sunday newspaper.
"Walter Hemming was here."
"Hemming?"
To Cynthia the name was quite unfamiliar. There had been no Walter Hemming at Bramling.
"He was one of my officers on thePerhaps. He has got together some money, has bought the old ship and is off to the South."
"He takes up your work?"
"Yes. I never saw a man so enthusiastic. Suppose he reaches the Pole, what then?" Harry Rames laughed contemptuously.
"Aren't there discoveries to be made, maps to be drawn of that continent and something to be learned from the soundings?" asked Cynthia, recollecting Harry Rames's own book upon his voyage. He shook his head.
"That's all trimmings, Cynthia. You have got to surround your expedition with a scientific halo. It gets you money, and official support, and the countenance of the learned societies. But the man who goes south into the Antarctic goes with just one reason--to reach the Pole. Why? You can't give a rational answer to that Cynthia. No one can. Such men are just driven on by a torment of their souls."
No stranger watching Harry Rames as he speculated with an indulgent smile upon the aimlessness of Walter Hemming's long itinerary could have imagined that he had once himself led just such an expedition. Even Cynthia found the fact difficult of belief. By so complete a dissociation of spirit he was cut off from the race of the wanderers.
"Let a man become insane in the East," he continued, "and he's looked upon as a holy man, touched by the finger of God. The fellows who go South and North are our holy men of the West." He turned back again to his newspaper, and then uttered an exclamation:
"They have offered that Under Secretaryship to Edgington!"
"Of course he'll refuse it," said Cynthia.
"He has taken it. There's the first defection."
"A traitor. I never liked him. He was thinking of himself all the while," said Cynthia, with a heat which made Harry look toward her curiously. She had not been wont to side so heartily with him and his plans in the days of the contest at Ludsey. He became suddenly aware of the remarkable change which had come over her character since that date. She who had blamed him with all the enthusiasm of a romantic girl because he would not take the high road, now walked the low road herself with her eyes concentrated, even more closely than his, upon the pathway at her feet. A pang of remorse made him wince.
"I shouldn't wonder," he answered drily, "if Devenish says the same of me."
But his comment fell upon inattentive ears. Cynthia's eyes had been caught by the blank, cheerless look of the street outside. It was a morning of black frost. There was no fog, but there was no glint of sunlight, either. London lay unburnished, like an ill-kept yacht, and the emptiness of Sunday made it dreary beyond all words. The chill of that day and the fevers of the week to come caused Cynthia's heart to sink. A vision rose before her eyes with unexpected vividness of another place where life ran occupied with smoother matters. Not in Warwickshire, but over far seas. She thought with a sudden poignancy of longing of the Daventry estancia where to-day the golden leagues of corn would be rippling to the sun and the cattle searching for the rare blades of green in the burnt pastures. Remorse came to her as it had come to her husband. So seldom had she thought of that spacious and wide place which had lain so close to her adopted father's heart. He had prayed her to go thither from time to time. Greatly she wished that she were there now.
"It's a pity Mr. Hemming stayed so late," she said.
"Oh, that's all right," replied Harry. "My amendment can't come on before Wednesday. It may not be chosen at all. And there's always the possibility that the Land Bill may not be mentioned in the King's speech. However, that's not likely. We shall know to-morrow."
The Land Bill was mentioned as one of the principal measures of the session, and Harry handed in at the clerk's table his humble prayer to His Majesty that no solution of the land question would be found lasting or real which did not provide opportunities for the acquisition of small farms as freehold properties. Thursday was set aside for the discussion of Rames's amendment, and the fact that it was deemed of sufficient importance to take precedence of a host of other amendments was in itself regarded as a triumph by his adherents.
"Go your own way over it," Robert Brook advised in an agitated voice. "Don't sink your personality in a conventional speech. You must strike a special note on Thursday. The third bench below the gangway and the corner seat. That will be the best place for you. You command the House from there. And we'll be all together around you. It's a great thing to have some voices to cheer you at your elbow. Howard Fall will speak in support of you. He always gets called." Robert Brook ceased from his stage-managements to whisper with a lengthened face, "By the way, have you heard?"
"What?" asked Harry.
"That Challoner's weakening. Yes, it's true. The whips have been getting at him, I expect. At all events he came to me pleading that the amendment need not be pressed to a division if we get anything like a friendly reply."
Harry Rames smiled.
"We shan't get that. I'll take care not to get it. So you can agree with Challoner. We can't afford to let any one break away now. I'll speak to him myself."
The colonel strenuously disavowed any faintness of heart. "You must go to a division, Rames, unless you get a satisfactory reply. That's understood. We've got to stick to our guns. I think we all know that. Edgington's example isn't one any of us would care to follow. No. All my idea was that perhaps the government might be willing to take our view, but unable at this moment to say so publicly. However, don't you worry about us. Think of your speech, Rames. We look to you to do something unusual on Thursday."
Harry went away to his study and from his documents and blue books labored to hammer out some spark of his own which should set fire to the Thames or to that portion of it at all events which flows under Westminster Bridge. He woke at five o'clock on the Thursday morning, and lying in bed repeated his speech word by word to himself. Then he dismissed it into the chamber of his memory to wait until it was needed. But the knowledge that the day was to be one of supreme importance to his career hung over him all that forenoon. The labor was over and therefore the strain upon him was the heavier. His nerves had free play and he wandered restlessly from room to room, calm outwardly except for some spasmodic movements which people unacquainted with him would never have remarked, but inwardly a creature in torment. He had pitted himself against his own government. The enormity of his presumption grew with every lagging hour. Failure to-day would cover him with ridicule. He saw himself as one of those bubbles ripe for pricking with which the House of Commons is perpetually iridescent. Before twelve o'clock he was already looking at his watch lest he should be too late to fix before prayers the card in the slot at the back of his seat which would reserve his place for him during the day.
Cynthia, with a covert fear, watched his fever, but said never a word, either of comfort or inquiry. It was her part to notice nothing of his agitation. She had claimed, when he had asked her to marry him, her share in the troubles and the terrors which went before the public success. But married life had taught her that much of her share must come to her by guesswork, by intuition, by observation, by any means except those of question and answer. So she said little and left Harry Rames mostly to himself, only coming upon him now and again on some indifferent errand, when they would speak for a moment or two, he chiefly at random and upon any chance subject which came uppermost in his mind. Thus once he said abruptly:
"There was a stamp struck. Did you ever see it, Cynthia?"
"No," she answered; "you must show it to me."
"I will; I have a specimen somewhere. I'll look it out."
"Do," said Cynthia in a voice which conveyed that it would be a particular joy to her to see that stamp.
But she was quite in the dark about it. She had no notion at all that he was speaking of that great territory which he had discovered far to the south, beyond the ice-floes, beyond the open blue water. It had no inhabitants but the penguins; yet since Rames had spent a winter of darkness on its inhospitable shores and had annexed it for Great Britain, a penny stamp had been struck and postage duly established. The recollection passed in and out of Harry Rames's head, with a hundred trivial thoughts and memories. And it was the mark and consequence of his agitation that his mind acquired an extraordinary and unnatural lucidity so that his thoughts became swift visions of things with a small but surprisingly clear definition, as though he saw them through a diminishing glass.
In this supersensitive spirit he walked down Parliament Street at half-past one in the afternoon on the eastern side of the road; and when he had come opposite to the Horse-Guards, he suddenly stopped. Behind the Horse-Guards' Arch and a little to the north rose the great red building of the Admiralty where Cynthia and he had been made acquainted with one another. But it was not of the first meeting nor of the quarrel which ended it that Harry Rames was thinking. He was not looking at the main mass of the Admiralty Building, but only at the three grayish-blue domes which surmounted it. From these domes rose three tall spars at the points of a triangle, each of them rigged and dressed with wires to which were attached curious little hoops and contrivances of cane like Catherine wheels set for a night of fireworks. He was gazing at the mechanism of wireless telegraphy.
He had passed those poles either just here or on the other side of the Horse-Guards' Parade in St. James's Park on every day when Parliament was in session; and no doubt he had often enough lifted his head and seen them with the blind eyes of a man for the landmarks he habitually walks by. But this morning his imagination was made acute by a night of wakefulness and the tension of his nerves, and he was sensitive to all the suggestion of that aerial toyshop of contrivances. He stopped. He almost fancied that he heard--so keen was the lucidity of his senses--the messages of distant ships, here tumbling on seas of storm there upright on seas of sunshine, whizzing homeward to the dim smoke-wreathed city, crowding the air. He almost fancied that he saw them, the myriad bright spokes of an illimitable wheel which hung poised roof-high over all the world. His thoughts were swept quite away from England, and the roar of Whitehall died from his ears. He saw the big roadsteads of the East and West Indies and anchored vessels mirrored in waveless seas. He saw the meetings of ships in the narrows of the great trade-routes, barkentine and schooner, tramp and liner, and in and out amongst them like the gray shadows of sharks seen beneath the water, the long cruisers of the fleet.
He walked on like a man in a dream. He left the busy harbors and the great trade-routes behind him. The stately procession of vessels receded and now he saw only one--a little, full-rigged, black-hulled ship quite alone on a silent sea, thePerhaps, reeling down with all her canvas drawing, from her sky-sail to her spanker, reeling down with the water breaking from her broad stern bows into the mists of the south. The picture was so vivid in his mind that he could see the brightness of the binnacle and the wheel spinning in the helmsman's hands. He paused again to consider why, and paused with a curious sense of comfort. Once before, on the occasion of his maiden speech, the vision of a ship had risen before his eyes. But then it was fear which had evoked the picture. He had longed to be safely upon its bridge doing the thing he knew how to do. Now he had no such fear. He was nervous, but he had no desire to run away, he had no terror that the necessary words would fail him, he had no longing to stand upon the deck of thePerhaps. He was strung up for the contest of the afternoon. He walked slowly on and turned in at the gate of Palace Yard, and still thePerhapsfled southward before his eyes.
An hour later Cynthia drove down to the House of Commons, anxious and yet expectant of triumph. For on this afternoon Harry Rames should particularly excel; the occasion was so confederate with his gifts. In debate he was as yet too inexperienced to shine with any brilliancy. His success had been made with prepared speeches. He had not as yet the art to handle words with such precision that he could express vividly in an argument across the floor just what he meant, and no more and no less. He was not at ease with his vocabulary when a sudden call was made upon it, and his lack of ease became manifest and spread, as it always does, discomfort. He was in a word on the way to becoming a polished debater but as yet he was at school. This afternoon, however, he had not to reply, not to intervene in the middle of a discussion; his business was to make the set speech which set the debate going. And here he was on his own good ground. He could prepare the vivid phrase and, a quality perhaps still more important, he could speak it. He had an invaluable gift which had stood him in good stead when he had delivered his maiden speech. He was able so to deliver a carefully concocted speech as to give the impression that he was thinking aloud. He gained his effect by an apt breaking off of sentences and a recommencement, by a sudden drop to the homeliest of colloquialisms, by a seeming deliberation in the choice of his words, so that the picturesque and living sentence, which had been so carefully thought out, appeared to leap new-minted from a furnace of conviction. He had been shrewd enough to recognize with his own unflattering estimation of his powers that an amendment to the address provided him especially with a rare opportunity.
When Cynthia reached the ladies' gallery she had some trouble to find a place whence she could command the House. The gallery was full, since it was the beginning of the session. For the same reason the House itself was not. Even though questions were being asked of the ministers, a time when the House is seldom less than crowded, there were to-day vacant spaces on the benches. The real business of Parliament would not begin until the debate on the Address was concluded. Members still lingered in the country or the south of France. Rames's amendment was considered rather as a dress-parade than an engagement. It was not expected that he would press his views to a division. At the last moment suave words from a Cabinet Minister would no doubt dissuade the recalcitrant as they had done a thousand times before.
But his supporters were there clustered close below the gangway on the three back benches; Howard Fall two seats away from Harry Rames, chirruping gently and rubbing his hands together with delight; beyond him the sandy-haired man from the Shires with an eye on Devenish upon the treasury bench, and prepared at any moment for the production of that threatened pup which the Minister for Agriculture was sure to sell them; beyond him again Colonel Challoner and the timid spirits all trying to look unconscious and most of them pretending that they only occupied these particular seats by the merest accident. But they were in full view. Robert Brook had seen to that. They were labelled plainly and legibly, and if some of them shirked at the last moment, they would still get the credit of having shared in the revolt. In front of all were the earnest men who believed the policy of Devenish to be dangerous. Behind all under the shadow of the gallery were the young bloods, all as convinced as their graver seniors in the front, but still youths spoiling for a row and totally unawed by the frockcoats of the treasury bench. Their business was to cheer and to ejaculate, not to speak. Thus had Robert Brook disposed his forces for the battle. He himself sat between Harry Rames and Howard Fall, and, looking about him, was proud of the array.
Before questions had come to an end Cynthia had squeezed herself into a place on the first row of seats behind the stone grille. She had now from her aerie the whole group within her view, or rather, the tops of all its particular heads. She waited impatiently. Every now and then a sudden fluttering like the waving of little flags ran with a crackle of sound along the benches below and showed that another page of the question paper had been turned. Questions must now be coming to an end surely, she thought in her ignorance. Her mistake was colossal. The Speaker had only this moment come to the questions of the Irish members, and there was a postmaster in Ballymena who had last week committed the hideous crime of refusing a registered letter at two minutes to eight by the church-clock. Upon this important matter, by question and supplementary question, the Imperial Parliament was forced to concentrate its attention till the hands of the clock above the door pointed to a quarter to four. Then the Speaker rose, a buzz of talk mounted to Cynthia's ears, a few members called upon by name came forward from behind the Speaker's chair to the clerk's table with private bills, others drifted out into the lobby and the tea-room and the smoking-rooms. Then once more the Speaker rose. His canopied chair was just beneath Cynthia. She could not see him but she heard his voice quite clearly.
"Captain Rames."
Rames rose amidst vociferous applause from his own group and some cheers from the opposition. The personal question flashed into Cynthia's mind.
"Will he look up toward the gallery in which I am sitting?"
He threw his head back. It seemed that he did look up. Cynthia leaned forward as though across that distance her eyes could answer and sustain him. She forgot that the only light in the gallery was fixed against the wall behind her, and that nothing more individual of her was visible upon the floor of the chamber than the wide sphere of her hat.
He was not so nervous, she realized at once, as he usually was. Nervousness gave to his voice a peculiar vibration which was not without its effect in arresting attention. Cynthia missed it now. But the sentences which she already knew by heart followed one behind the other spaced and regular as the waves of a calm sea. She forgot that little significant omission of manner. She followed the argument as she knew it, and it was developed step by step as it had been prepared. Harry Rames had spoken for five minutes when a lady on Cynthia's left whispered in an audible voice to her neighbor on the right:
"I thought you told me that Captain Rames was a brilliant speaker."
"Not I, dear," came the reply. "These men of action are seldom effective in their speeches. I shouldn't expect him to do better than he is doing."
Cynthia moved indignantly. The poor woman must be off her head. But if she did not know what good speaking was, she might at all events hold her tongue. She looked down again into the well of the House and became perplexed. The benches were actually emptying. The double doors opposite to her which led from the chamber to the lobby were swinging silently backward and forward with a perpetual motion as the members passed out, and the space just in front of those doors where members may stand and where she had seen them stand packed on other days while Harry spoke, was almost empty. There were just one or two standing there, but they were obtaining orders for the galleries from the sergeant-at-arms. Then the voice at her elbow spoke again in an accent of resignation.
"He is very, very dull."
Cynthia clenched her hands. She would have dearly liked to have boxed her neighbor's ears. Was he dull she asked? And the dreadful continuous buzz of voices, which always rises when a speaker has lost the attention of the House, rose from the benches below to answer her. With a sob only half suppressed Cynthia was forced to admit the truth. The incredible thing was happening. Harry Rames at the crisis of his fortunes was signally failing.
"If he fails it's partly my fault," she thought. "I helped in the preparation of the speech."
For it was word for word the prepared speech which he was delivering, the very phrases chosen for their simplicity and their force were uttered in their due place. Yet the effect was dreary beyond measure. Even the ardent spirits beneath the gallery had ceased to applaud; they sat back in the shadow, all their enthusiasm quenched. A still worse sign, Mr. Devenish had laid his writing pad and his fountain-pen on the table in front of him; he took no more notes, he leaned back with his arms folded and his eyes closed, a typical picture of a Cabinet Minister, a man inured to patience and the bed-fellow of boredom.
"Why is Harry failing?" Cynthia asked of herself despairingly. And the answer came from her neighbor.
"You know, my dear, I don't believe that what he's saying is nonsense if one only had the necessary concentration to follow it. But his delivery's so bad that he makes attention impossible."
Again Cynthia was constrained to admit the criticism. The chosen sentences were uttered, but no conviction winged them. Harry's gifts of speech were that afternoon quite hidden. He was as one delivering a recitation which by constant repetition had become at once meaningless and automatic. His voice trailed away into lassitude. There was no spirit behind any word.
The buzz of conversation increased, a protesting voice called "Order, order," and then Harry faltered and stopped, stopped quite noticeably. A general cheer rose to encourage him--for the House of Commons can be generous, especially to those who are dropping out of the race--and twisting his hands together suddenly, almost with the air of a man waking from a dream, Harry Rames staggered on again. Cynthia's heart went out to him in a rush of pity. What he must be suffering! He had staked so much upon this afternoon. So much had been expected of him. Cynthia's thoughts went back to the week at Bramling. With what high hopes that company had counted upon his leadership!
"If he would only finish!" she prayed. She looked upon him as a man in torment. She leaned her elbows on the rail in front of her, closed her ears with her thumbs and shut her eyes. She took at once with the exaggeration of her years the blackest view.
"He has attacked his own government and frightened no one. His career will be affected, perhaps ruined. A really bad mistake may take a man years to overcome in the House of Commons. Who was it said that? Mr. Smale. This is a really bad mistake. The debate itself may collapse. That would mean ruin."
So she reasoned until in a clap the truth of the mistake came upon her, its cause, its meaning.
"I ought to have foreseen his failure," she murmured. "It was bound to come. Sooner or later it was bound to come. For his heart is never in the theme but always in the career."
She might indeed have looked upon it as a retribution, a just retribution.
"And a year ago I should so have looked upon it," she reflected, and sat back in her seat amazed at the change which two years had wrought in her. The magnitude of it was now for the first time revealed to her. Success following success, each in its anticipated sequence, had sealed up from her the knowledge of herself. It had needed the failure to reveal it.
She leaned back in a confusion of her emotions. She heard no longer any word of the debate. For a little while the House of Commons vanished and was not. She glanced swiftly backward across the months of her married life and detected one by one the indications of the change. Gradually she had ceased to clamor for ideas, she had come to look only at the man and she had desired him to tower above his fellows, because that was his desire. And the reason for the change? She jumped to it with her heart on fire. She loved him.
But while she thus began to make her account with herself a perfunctory cheer and the Speaker's distinct pronouncement of another name broke in upon her reckoning. The voice of her neighbor brought her back to earth.
"Mr. Howard Fall. I hear he's quite a favorite speaker."
The turn of the words recalled irrelevantly to Cynthia Harry's indignant story of the elector who had told him that he was well patronized in Ludsey. The recollection brought a smile to her face. But the smile faded as her anxieties came home to her. Would the debate collapse?
Howard Fall was already upon his legs seconding the amendment; and in a little while she saw members enter through the doors, stand for a moment at the bar and then as though here was matter worthy of their attention, slip into places upon the seats. Cynthia's first feeling was one of relief. Yes, the House was undoubtedly filling up. Then, as a burst of laughter followed upon one of Fall's sallies against Devenish, a sharp pang of jealousy pierced her. The lady at her elbow incensed her by a laugh of approval--a ridiculous snigger Cynthia termed it.
"Yes, nowhe'sreally brilliant," she said, and Cynthia had to hold herself in, so impelled was she to explain to the lady exactly what she thought of her judgment and her manners and her family and of everything which appertained to her. But she did not. She remained outwardly calm, though inwardly she seethed.
"Mrs. Rames," a quiet voice called to her from behind. She turned and saw Robert Brook. She left her seat and went to him.
"What's the matter?" she asked anxiously, her heart leaping with a fear of calamity.
"Nothing," Brook reassured her. "Your husband asked me to look after you. He can't well leave the House." Another burst of laughter intermingled with applause rose up to them. Devenish had petulantly interrupted Howard Fall, and interruptions Howard Fall thrived upon. "Isn't he in splendid form?" cried Brook with enthusiasm.
"No doubt," said Cynthia, eyeing him coldly.
Brook looked at her quickly.
"Perhaps you would like some tea Mrs. Rames. Shall we go? The debate will tail off for a bit after Fall has finished."
He led the way to the lift. Cynthia hurried after him.
"Why?" she cried. "And what do you mean by tailing off?" There was an impatience in her voice with which Brook was unfamiliar. "Do you mean that the debate will collapse?"
"Oh, no," he replied. "But the big-wigs won't speak until later. The subject is much too important to drop for want of argument. Indeed, there are enough men eager to speak to carry the debate well over to-morrow, if that were possible."
They came out from the lift and walked down the long corridor toward the lobby between the rows of books protected by their frames of gilt wire. Robert Brook continued cheerfully:
"Rames, to be sure, wasn't at his best in opening the debate. But no man is always at his best. There's not a soul in the House who doesn't know that."
"Then this afternoon won't put him back?"
"Why should it? It was he who had the shrewdness to recognize the opportunity which this question affords, and to select this particular line of attack. He engineered the whole movement. That's known. And if he carries his own people into the division lobby with him, and the opposition into the bargain, he will have established a fine reputation for Parliamentary capacity. That counts, Mrs. Rames, take the word-of an old hand. That counts here more than speech-making."
"Does it?" cried Cynthia, smiles breaking through the tragic gloom of her countenance. But the smiles vanished. She shook her head wistfully. "You are merely saying this because you see that I am troubled."
"But it's none the less true. This House has a corporate life which is rather difficult for those who are not members of it to understand."
Robert Brook certainly seemed very well contented. Cynthia, however, was not satisfied.
"But will he carry his people with him into the division lobby--now?" she asked. "Won't they a little have lost faith?"
"Not a bit. You see Howard Fall has quite saved the situation," Brook replied cheerily, and Cynthia suddenly stepped on ahead. The name of Howard Fall was beginning to exasperate her. She stopped, however, as they came into the round hall of the lobby.
"On the whole," she said, with the loftiest impartiality, "I liked my husband's speech a good deal better than I did Mr. Howard Fall's. Perhaps on a second thought you will too, Mr. Brook."
She surveyed him steadily with a pair of cold blue eyes, and then her face suddenly dimpled to a smile of appeal.
"You really mean that I can't see him?"
"The man who starts a discussion must hear it out. That's a sound old rule, and if it's not so religiously kept as it used to be, the House of Commons is the worse."
"I can send him a little note at all events."
"Certainly. Write it and I'll give it to a messenger."
"A messenger!" said Cynthia doubtfully. "Will it be sure to reach him? It's rather important."
Brook smiled.
"Very well. I'll take it in myself, Mrs. Rames."
Cynthia took a little diary from the bag she carried, tore out a leaf, scribbled hastily:
"You did splendidly. Everybody thinks so. Cynthia;" and having calmly perpetrated that obvious untruth, she twisted up her message and handed it to Brook. The sandy-haired man from the Shires was drifting about the lobby. Brook called to him. "Look after Mrs. Rames for a moment, will you?" he said, and hurried off through the swing-doors.
It seemed a very short time to Cynthia before he came back, though in that short time she had not so much as addressed a word to her companion. She looked at Robert Brook's hands. They were empty and a shadow passed over her face.
"Did you give it him?" she asked.
"I passed it along the bench and saw that it reached him. I didn't wait for him to open it."
The shadow passed from Cynthia. She was disappointed now, but not hurt; and in a second the disappointment passed too. This was not the day on which small things should be allowed to sting.
"Now you'll have some tea," said Brook.
"No, I don't think I will stay any longer to-day, Mr. Brook," she replied. Now that her fears were dispersed she was in a hurry to get away and be alone with her new secret. "I am keeping you from the House, and you are our Whip, aren't you?"
The flattery did not compensate Mr. Brook for his loss. The privilege of parading a pretty and well-dressed woman before the envious eyes of less fortunate colleagues is one which no member of Parliament, not even its sedatest representative of non-conformity, would forego without regret; and in a remote philandering way, Robert Brook was a kind of lady's man. Cynthia was wearing a trim coat and skirt of dark velvet, and from a coil of fur about her throat her face rose like a summer flower, and was framed in the wide border of her blue hat.
"My duties are light just now," he protested, but Cynthia lifted up her hands in her great muff appealingly and coaxed him.
"You will let me go now, Mr. Brook, won't you?" Her eyes besought his permission as though without it she could not go, and Mr. Brook was duly reduced to subservience.
"Good-by," said Cynthia, and she swung off, the long ends of her stole swinging about her hips, and her step indescribably light. Robert Brook watched her pass down the corridor to the rails where the visitors waited, and sighed in a melancholy fashion. It seemed to him for the moment contemptible to be a bachelor. For there was something strangely appealing about Cynthia, to-day--a winsomeness, a warmth. She seemed all a-quiver with youth. A swift variety of moods swept across her face in lights and shadows, and gave to her vitality. Her feet moved with a dancing buoyancy. All that Robert Brook felt the sandy-haired man from the Shires summarized in one reflective sentence:
"I should like to kiss that girl," he said. "It would do me a great deal of good."
Cynthia ran down the broad flight of steps into Westminster Hall, and skimmed across the historic flags of the ancient building without a pause. What at this moment was Charles the First to her, or even Mr. Gladstone? She came out into Palace Yard and drove home through the dusk just as the lamps in the shop-windows were beginning to bring some gleams of cheerfulness into the black February streets. She sat back in the corner of her car with her muff tightly held against her breast as though to cherish close some knowledge treasured there. When she reached her house she let herself in with her key and walked with secret steps into Harry's study. Once there she locked the door and with the firelight dancing upon the walls to keep her company, she sat down to make her reckoning with herself. But in truth the reckoning was already made.
The great bargain, on her side at all events, was a bargain no more, could never again be a bargain. A veritable revolution had taken place in her that afternoon. She knew it from the depth of her sympathy with Harry in his failure--above all from the surprising sharpness of her disappointment when Robert Brook had returned with no answer to her scribbled message.
For the failure as a factor in their fortunes she cared not a straw. Indeed, she welcomed it, since it was that which had wakened her. She had believed herself to be defective in the quality of passion, and her sense of the defect had hurt her like a bitter humiliation; she had envied wistfully the other women who possessed passion, even the wantons who flaunted it. Now the humiliation was gone. She rejoiced. She leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed and sailed over magical seas which were joyous and golden. She loved. She was like some lady of old Italy lit to swift flame by the first kiss from her lover's lips. Only it was a trivial irony in closer keeping with our modern days that what had kindled her who had demanded ideas, was a failure due to nothing but the lack of them.
Cynthia rejoiced; for she loved. That pain and disappointment were in store for her she did not doubt. But she ran forward to meet the pain. She was young. Sooner all the pain in the world than the placidity of years without fire or inspiration. She recognized frankly that though upon her side the bargain was no longer any bargain at all, it still was just a bargain to her husband. A sign had been given to her that afternoon, a little sign, yet great in its significance. She had pleaded to herself as she sat in the ladies' gallery that when Harry rose, and just before he began to speak, he had looked up to where she sat, as though he were conscious of her presence, as though he drew strength from it. But he had not looked up. Even at the time she had known that he had not.
"I merely pretended to myself that he had," she frankly admitted now. "His movement was nothing more than the natural muscular action of a man bracing himself for an effort." She herself, Cynthia, had not been, she felt sure, at that moment, in the remotest of his thoughts.
"If Harry had changed toward me as I have toward him," she argued, "he would have looked up, not only because he wanted to, but because he would have remembered what I had said to him on that very point the afternoon when he asked me to marry him."
But in spite of her conviction she rejoiced. Some kinship she could claim with Juliet. For all her longing was to give and to give, and still to give. She had sought desperately for color in her life. She had welcomed politics in the hunt for it. She had it now and to spare--enough to daub the world. The handle of the door was tried and through the panels her astonished maid told her the hour. Cynthia sprang up and unlocked it.
"I shall dine at home to-night," she said. "The cook must get me some dinner, anything."
The maid reminded Cynthia that she had arranged to dine with some friends and visit a theatre. "I know," said Cynthia. She had made the plan so that she might not spend in loneliness the anxious hours of this evening. But since she had made the plan the world had changed its hues.
"You must telephone and say that I can't come," said Cynthia, remorselessly, as she ran upstairs.
Whilst she dressed she considered what she should do with this wonderful evening. She meant to spend it alone--yes, but that did not quite content her. Somehow it should be made memorable. Something she must do which, but for this day of days, she never would have done. Something which must not merely mark it as a harbor boom marks a turn of the channel, but must be the definite consequence of it. Cynthia, in a word, went down to her solitary dinner much more akin than she had ever been since to the girl who, eager for life with the glorious eagerness of youth, had run down the stairs on the morning of her seventeenth birthday into the dining-room of the Daventry estancia. Half-way through dinner the thing to do, in order fitly to commemorate the day, came to her in a burst of light.
She went back to Harry's study and sitting at his writing-table, composed with great care a letter of many pages. The hours passed as she wrote and rewrote, and glancing at the clock before the end was reached, she saw that it was already past eleven. Then she hurried. The division at this moment was being taken. Within the hour Harry would have returned; and indeed she had only just folded her letter in its envelope when his step sounded in the hall.
She heard the door open and shut. He was in the room. But she kept her head bowed over her letter lest her face should betray her over much. Nor for a moment did she speak, since she did not quite trust her voice. It was Harry who spoke first.
"You have come back? I did not expect you so soon."
"I never went. I stayed at home."
"Oh! You are not ill, Cynthia?"
"No. But I felt that I had been rather hard and cruel----"
"You?"
"Oh, yes, I can be." Cynthia was stamping down her envelope with an elaboration of care which almost suggested that it was never meant to be opened. "I was in this case. So I stayed at home and wrote a letter to make amends. I should very much like it to be posted to-night, Harry. The servants have all gone to bed. I wonder if you----"
"Of course. You are afraid that you might change your mind about it in the morning."
"Not at all," replied Cynthia with a laugh. Harry Rames walked over to the table.
"Give it to me, Cynthia," he said; and at last Cynthia raised her head and rather shyly her eyes sought his face. At his first glance she stood up quickly and she did not give him her letter. Harry Rames was standing, his face white and drawn and harassed. He had been answering her vaguely, as though the words came from him by reflex action rather than through a comprehension of what she said. For a moment Cynthia was afraid to speak. The beating of her heart was painful. Then she laid her hand upon his arm.
"Something has happened, Harry?" she faltered.
"Something terrible," he replied, and walking to the fire he warmed his hands at the blaze like one smitten with a chill.
"The debate collapsed? Your people didn't follow you into the lobby? Oh, Harry!"
She went to his side.
"No. That's not the trouble. We did better in the division than I had anticipated. Of course we had the labor party solid against us. But that we had reckoned on. On the other hand, some of the Irish members came along with us, and it had been expected that they would all abstain. No, we ran the government majority down to thirty-one. Devenish is shaken, I can tell you. He passed me after the division was over, without a word and white with passion. No, Cynthia, we did very well." He moved away from the fire and sat down in the chair at his writing-table. "I took all my people into the Division Lobby with me--except one."
Cynthia put out a hand and steadied herself against the mantel-piece.
"Except one?" She turned toward him, her face troubled, her eyes most wistful. "One failed you--one alone. Oh, Harry, it wasn't Colonel Challoner?"
But though she asked the question, she did not need the answer. Her foreboding made her sure of it.
"It was," replied Harry, and Cynthia turned again to the fire. A little sob, half-checked, burst from her. Then she tore the letter which she had been at such great pains to write, across and again across, and dropped the fragments into the fire.
"The Challoners are no good," she said, in a voice curiously distinct and hard.
"Don't say that, Cynthia," Harry Rames answered gently.
"I do say it. I ought to know."
The words were uttered, and only then she realized what she had said. She looked quickly toward her husband, but he gave to her cry no particular significance. His brain seemed to register her words, not to comprehend them. Cynthia was conscious of a great relief. Loud at her heart rose a hope, a prayer that in all things, all qualities, even to tricks of manner, she was her mother's child, and had nothing of her father. Never would she acknowledge her relationship with that family. Never would she admit her name. Her first resolve and instinct had been right. The Challoners were no good.
"No, I should not say that, Cynthia," Raines repeated. "He's dead."
Cynthia turned swiftly upon the word. Her dress rustled as she turned, and when that sound ceased there was absolute silence in the room. Cynthia stood by the mantel-shelf still as stone. Her face was white, and a look of awe overspread it. With her lips parted and her eyes troubled and wondering she watched her husband. Harry Rames sat with a large silver paper-knife in his hands, looking absently straight in front of him. And in a little while he broke the silence by absently tapping with the blade of the paper-knife upon his blotting-pad. The sound roused Cynthia. She moved to a low chair close to the writing-table.
"Dead? Harry, I don't quite understand."
The tapping ceased.
"His heart was wrong. He died in the Division Lobby--actually while the division was being taken."
"In the Division Lobby? But you said you didn't take him with you."
"I didn't. He was in the Government Lobby."
Cynthia's face contracted with pain. A low moan burst from her. "He was actually voting against you!"
"Yes."
Harry added reluctantly:
"Our revolt killed him." Cynthia sat down in the chair.
"Tell me everything, will you, Harry?" she entreated, and thus the story was told her.
"The Whips got at Challoner. You know Hamlin, don't you? But you don't know his methods, Cynthia. He doesn't bully you if you revolt. He doesn't threaten. He takes you affectionately by the arm and makes you feel a beast. His round brown eyes survey you with a gentle and wistful regret. You leave him, convinced that he personally will be dreadfully hurt if you vote against the government. You are glad to be rid of him as you are glad to be rid of a man whom you have injured; and within the hour he is at your elbow again, pursuing the same insidious, amicable strategy. That's how he worked on Challoner, and Challoner was not the man either to withstand him, or to tell us boldly that he was going to--"--"rat" was on the tip of his tongue, but Rames caught the word back and substituted "change his mind." "So, do you see, he stayed with us to the last minute. It was arranged that the division should be taken at eleven. As soon as the Speaker rose to put the question, Challoner, who had been standing at the bar of the House slipped out through the lobby and down the stairs to a little smoking-room on the opposite side of the passage to the big strangers' smoking-room. That room is very often quite deserted. Few people, indeed, use it at any time. In a corner of that room he sat behind a newspaper all of the ten minutes during which the division bells were ringing."
"To avoid meeting any of you?" asked Cynthia.
"Yes, I suppose so."
"But how do you know he was there?"
"He was seen by one or two of the Irish members who did not intend to vote at all. They went into the room while the bells were ringing and saw him."
"I understand."
"As soon as the bells stopped, as soon, in a word, as he was quite certain that we should be all in our lobby, he started up quickly. There is just a little time between the moment when the bells cease ringing and the moment when the lobby doors are locked. But it is only a little time. If you want to vote you have to hurry. Challoner was a good distance away, and he had a flight of stairs to ascend. He hurried, he ran; I expect, too, that he was agitated. His courage had failed him. He must prove his loyalty to his official leaders at all costs. He reached the lobby in plenty of time. Monro, you remember him, the Scotchman? He was at Bramling."
"Yes," said Cynthia.
"He saw Challoner. He was standing by the entrance door of our lobby. We were in the 'No' Lobby, for the question we had to vote upon was that the original words of the Address 'stand part,' and to enter the 'Aye' Lobby a man must pass our entrance door and traverse the House. Monro saw Challoner hurry past the door, and thinking that he had mistaken our lobby and was under the impression that the question he had to vote upon was that the amendment be substituted--in which case, of course, we should all have been in the 'Aye' Lobby--he called to the Colonel. Challoner didn't hear, or wouldn't hear. He hurried on, and once inside the Government Lobby, collapsed onto the bench which runs along the sides. He died within a couple of minutes."
Harry Rames ceased. The shock of this swift calamity had driven from Cynthia's thoughts all her indignation against the Challoners. She pictured to herself that old, unhappy, disappointed man, dropping at last between the shafts, the pack-horse of politics. Not even the insignificance of an Under Secretaryship had come to requite him for his tedious years of service. And it never could have fallen to him. That she recognized. Again the silence was broken by the tap-tap of the paper-knife upon the blotting-pad.
"It's a Juggernaut, that House, isn't it? You said that once, Cynthia," said Rames.
"I did? I don't remember."
Cynthia was perplexed by his distress. Sensibility was not to be counted amongst his qualities. Yet he sat there with trouble heavy upon him, and every now and then a shiver of the shoulders, a shiver of repugnance.
"This has shocked you terribly, Harry," she said.
"Yes. I have known death before now, but never death without any dignity. That's what I find terrible." He paused for a moment and then said in a low and distinct voice:
"I am to blame for it, Cynthia."
"You?" she exclaimed.
"Yes. I ought to have left him alone. I ought never to have taken advantage of his disappointments. I dragged him into the revolt to serve myself--yes, that's the truth, Cynthia. We both know it. I dragged him in without giving him and his character a thought. He was the real party hack. To him the men upon the treasury bench were as gods walking the earth. A nod from one of them in a passage, a hand-shake in a drawing-room, a little private conversation with a Cabinet Minister in the Division Lobby--that was the kind of food which sustained him through how many years! And he was a good cavalry officer once, I am told." Harry Rames suddenly swung round toward his wife. "That's strange, isn't it? Very strange. He must have come into the House of Commons twenty years ago a very different man. But I suppose the walls closed round him and crushed the vitality out of him. You had a phrase about such men--the prisoners of the House of Commons. He was one of them. I did a cruel thing when I enlisted him. For I might have known that he must desert. I am to blame for his death."
"No," Cynthia protested.
"Yes."
"Even if you might have known that he must desert, you couldn't have foreseen that he would hide from you till the last moment."
"That's just what he would do."
"Even so, you didn't know, Harry, that he had heart disease."
"Would it have made any difference to me if I had?" And that question silenced Cynthia.
Harry Rames fell again to tapping with his paper-knife upon the blotting-pad. He tapped aimlessly, the silver handle flashing in the light, the ivory blade striking and resounding. But gradually an intention seemed to become audible in his tapping. The taps came quickly, three or four together, then were spaced, then streamed swiftly again like sparks from an anvil. The noise began to jar on Cynthia's nerves.
"Don't do that, Harry, please," she said.
"I won't," said he, throwing down the paper-knife.
"You might have been sending a telegram."
"By wireless, eh?" he said with a smile, and then a curious look came into his face. "I was," he said slowly. Cynthia drew back in her chair with a queer feeling of uneasiness.
"Not to--?" she began, and stopped short of the name. She glanced furtively around the room. She was suddenly chilled.
"To Challoner? No," he answered. He had hardly been aware of what he was doing, and he wondered now why the idea to do it had thus irrelevantly entered his head. No doubt an instinctive desire to get relief from the obsession of the sordid tragedy of Challoner's death had prompted him. But, whatever the cause, he had been tapping out, in accordance with the Morse code, a message to the little, black, full-rigged ship far away upon Southern seas.
He sprang up from his chair.
"There's a letter you wanted me to post, Cynthia. I had forgotten it. Give it to me."
"It dropped into the fire," said Cynthia.
Harry looked into the fire; a torn fragment or two had fallen into the grate.
"I dropped it into the fire," said Cynthia. "For I had already changed my mind about it."
The long letter which she had torn up at the first news of Colonel Challoner's defection, the letter which was to commemorate that evening, had been written to Colonel Challoner, and admitted that she was the daughter of his son.