"There is a man at the door, madam. He says that he is a Ludsey man, and that he worked for Captain Rames during the election."
It was midday. Cynthia had her hat on and was at the moment buttoning her gloves.
"Tell him that Captain Rames is at the House of Commons now, and that he will be back at home by five," she said.
"The man asked for you," said the footman.
"For me? Did he give a name?"
"No. But he said that you would know him."
Cynthia shrugged her shoulders.
"Very well, Howard. Show him in."
Visitors who would not give their names but claimed to be citizens of Ludsey were not infrequent while Parliament was in session. They usually came with the same request--the loan of their fare home, where they had relations to look after them; and they were usually impostors, who had not so much as seen the spire of St. Anne's Church. But, on the other hand, there was always a possibility that the case might be genuine, and Cynthia made it a rule to see them. She had already got her purse out of her bag when the door was opened. But she dropped it when she saw her visitor.
"M. Poizat," she cried, and she held out her hand to him.
M. Poizat, however, did not take it.
"You have been kept waiting. You should have sent in your name."
M. Poizat shook his head.
"Would you have received me if I had, Mrs. Rames?"
"Of course."
"You are very kind."
Cynthia looked at him with a closer scrutiny. Certainly the M. Poizat who confronted her was the merest shadow of the sprightly inventor of Lungatine. The elasticity had gone from his wonderful legs. No longer he danced when he walked. His arms hung loose at his side, and the potency of his elixir had quite failed him. He was now a really old, small man. Indeed, he seemed to have diminished in stature and to have shrivelled in breadth; and his eyes were red, as though he had lately wept. Thus much had been taken from him. Yet something had been added, the dignity of a man whom calamity has overtaken.
"Why am I very kind to receive you?" Cynthia asked gently.
M. Poizat stared at her incredulously.
"Then you do not know what has happened to me?"
"No! Sit down and tell me."
But M. Poizat remained standing.
"I have no longer a friend in the world. I have no longer a house. I have no longer a wife. All is gone."
"I don't understand."
"Ah, I know. Ladies do not read their newspapers very carefully. If the men, too, were like you! But all the same you will have heard of a case which a few days ago was making a great stir in Paris--the Jobert case."
"Of course."
"But you have not followed it in detail."
"No."
The intricacies of that gigantic case of fraud were indeed difficult to follow even for those who gave to it their attention. Nor did Poizat do more than give to Cynthia a necessary outline. Monsieur and Madame Jobert, the latter being the protagonist of the conspiracy, had borrowed over a course of years immense sums of money on the strength of securities which were supposed to exist in a sealed safe. The case could not be opened since a fictitious action by claimants, whom Madame Jobert had invented, was perpetually being deferred in the courts of law. At the last, however, the creditors of the Joberts had obtained authority to break the seals, and a safe which was absolutely empty was exposed. The Joberts alleged a theft, but they were arrested and prosecuted.
"You see, Mrs. Rames, the one hope of the Joberts upon their trial was to establish the existence of a great sum of money which the securities supposed to be stolen could represent. What was this money? How was it come by? And when? Who bequeathed it? Madame Jobert was examined upon these questions by the juge d'instruction week after week, during a whole year. Lie after lie she told. Each explanation she put forward was sifted and proved a lie. At last she cried:
"'It is true. I have lied. I do not wish France to remember what she should forget. I have not told my secret. But, if I must, I will. The great fortune exists. I will tell its origin when I am on my trial; but I warn you, Monsieur le Juge, the revelation will convulse France from the Mediterranean to the Channel.' That is what she said. No one believed her. In Paris, indeed, they had already begun to laugh. Almost they loved her. She was a criminal but magnificent in her crime.
"'La Grande Clothilde,' they named her. Whatblaguewould she have ready for the Cour d'Assizes? No one was alarmed, least of all I, a little restaurant-keeper in a city of the Midlands. Yet this last lie of hers ruined me."
"Ruined you?" cried Cynthia.
"Yes; it is strange, is it not? A great trial like that in Paris, a woman in the dock snatching at any defence or delay; she tells a story so ridiculous in its application that it sets all Paris in a delighted roar of laughter; and that story which could not save her, drags into the light a little man of no importance, who has been hiding his head in a foreign country for thirty years."
"Yes, but if the story is a lie?" cried Cynthia.
"Its application was the lie. It did not explain that fictitious fortune of the Joberts. But the story itself was true," said M. Poizat. He sat down in a chair in a queer, huddled attitude, with his knees and his feet together, his hands joined upon his knees and his chin sunk upon his breast. He seemed to have composed himself to be hit at. "I am amazed," he said. "It seems that one has never quite finished with anything one has done until one is dead. Here is a part of my life which I had buried. Then come thirty years, each one adding its layer of oblivion. Then comes La Grande Clothilde, who has never seen me, nor been seen by me. Look! I was laughing with everybody else. We take in thePetit Parisien. I read the trial in the evening, day by day, to my wife. We both amused ourselves by wondering what will be the great secret which La Grande Clothilde has to reveal. Then comes the day of the revelation, and in Ludsey my newspaper falls from my hands and my wife, who has been my wife for twenty years, looks upon me as a stranger."
Cynthia's face changed. The gentleness and the pity vanished. She drew in her breath sharply as though alarm knocked at her heart.
"Something out of your past life has come alive, quite unexpectedly after all these years, and has snatched you back," she said slowly, as if she were comparing the words with others she had once heard spoken. "Quick! Tell me!"
She bent forward with her eyes intent upon M. Poizat's face, and fear growing in them more and more visibly.
"You remember, Mrs. Rames, the night before the election at Ludsey. You were all having supper in the hotel after the meeting. I came in and was asked by Captain Rames to join you. There was a man who claimed to know me."
"Yes, yes, Colonel Challoner," cried Cynthia, with a rising excitement. She remembered that supper-room at Ludsey, and the queer moment of sensation when Colonel Challoner, gaunt and menacing, had recollected, and M. Poizat, in a panic, had denied the recollection. Some vague notion, too, of the defence which Clothilde Jobert had made a week ago returned to her. She began dimly to understand the disaster which had overtaken her little visitor.
"He remembered that he had seen you--Wait! Now I have it-- In a long corridor, in Metz, in '71."
M. Poizat nodded.
"The corridor of the Arsenal. Colonel Challoner--it's so you call him?--he was right. More than once I went along that corridor. I went to see the Marshal Bazaine."
"Yes," replied Cynthia. "And Madame Jobert accounted for the origin of this great sum of money which the prosecution declared to have no existence, by stating that it was the price paid to Bazaine by the Germans for the betrayal of Metz."
"That is so. No such sum of money came that way into Clothilde Jobert's hands. But details of her story were true."
"For instance?" asked Cynthia.
"That a small farmer, a Frenchman on the outskirts of Metz, called Henri Poizat, was the go-between in the negotiations between the Germans and Bazaine."
"That was true?"
"Yes. I am Henri Poizat. With the money I was paid I came to Ludsey and opened my little restaurant. I did well. I returned to France and married, and brought my wife back. Then suddenly this news! My wife is of Lorraine. Her father was of those sturdy ones who would not live under the German rule, but left their homes in Lorraine and began anew in France. Conceive to yourself how she looked at me when she read that statement in the paper, and I could not deny it. She has gone back to her own people. I have had a letter from her brother. I am not to come near them. In Ludsey I was pointed at in the streets as the man who sold his country. My restaurant suffered. My trade began to vanish. I sold it, goodwill and all, two days ago. As I say, I have no longer any house."
He buried his face in his hands. Cynthia watched him uncomfortably. She could not blame the wife. Rather she applauded her. She could find no sincere words of comfort for M. Poizat.
"I think you had better come back at five," she said, "and tell my husband your story."
"But of course he knows it already," cried M. Poizat.
Cynthia shook her head.
"He would have spoken of it to me if he had."
M. Poizat, however, was equally positive.
"But it is in the Ludsey newspapers. Captain Rames takes them in, and reads them of course."
"Of course," said Cynthia.
"Then he must know. Such news is not tucked away in the corner of a local paper. No, indeed. It was printed on the first page."
"Still you had better see him," said Cynthia. She rose as she spoke, and she spoke a trifle absently, as though her thoughts had been suddenly diverted from the consideration of M. Poizat's calamity. "Come back at five. He will advise you."
She rang the bell. She was in a hurry now to get rid of the little Frenchman. Something much more important to her had occurred than the revelations of La Grande Clothilde. Doubts had flashed into her mind--doubts which she was in torture to resolve. As soon as Poizat's back was turned she went quickly into her husband's study. Upon a side-table, carelessly heaped, with their wrappers still gummed about them, she counted a dozen of the local papers of Ludsey. They took two a week, one of each political complexion. It was six weeks then since Harry Rames had taken the trouble to glance at a newspaper from his own constituency.
She stripped off the wrappers to make sure. Then she turned to the calendar upon the top of his writing-table. Six weeks just took her back to the date when Harry Rames had emptied the House with a speech, and had brought home the tragic news of Colonel Challoner's death.
Harry's omission on the surface was trivial enough. But to Cynthia it was significant and disquieting. For it was not in accordance with the deliberate prudence which used to mark the conduct of his political career. To nurse the constituency, to be familiar with its events and its needs, to respond to it, this had been his first care. Now for six weeks he neglected even to inform himself about it. And the omission did not stand alone.
"He will be home at five," Cynthia argued, "he who made it a rule to sit in the House however dull the course of public business."
Often of late he had left the House as soon as questions were over and the usual vote taken upon the suspension of the eleven-o'clock rule, and had only returned thither upon the stroke of eleven on the chance of coming in for a division. Cynthia remembered, too, how indifferent he had been, on the day after he had made his failure, to the criticisms which the failure had evoked. Mr. Devenish had put in some biting and effective work in his reply, which should have been gall and wormwood to the ambitious Harry Rames. But he had not seemed to mind. The newspapers which supported the Government too had not spared him. Conceit and presumption were the least of his failings. ThePiccadilly Newshad published a cartoon of him as Humpty Dumpty. Yet he had remained unmoved, though Cynthia had cried her eyes red over the castigation.
Certainly some change had come over him, she reflected, and once more she was conscious of fear and a sinking heart. For the story which she had heard this morning from M. Poizat linked itself up in her mind with the warning of Mr. Benoliel. Poizat's history was not quite an illustration of the warning. That she recognized. Mr. Benoliel had bidden her beware of latent tendencies of character, latent cravings and ambitions, taking their origin from the years in which she had had no share. It was a definite act which had sprung into being in the case of M. Poizat. Still Poizat's disaster was a proof of the clutch of finished things, and of the continuity of life; was an instance that to turn over the new page and begin to write afresh as she and Harry Rames had proposed to do, is beyond man's reach. Two lines of verse, gathered she knew not whence, rang in her brain and would not be silenced:
"Our past deeds follow us from afarAnd what we have been makes us what we are."
"Our past deeds follow us from afarAnd what we have been makes us what we are."
After a year's respite Cynthia was again afraid. Mr. Benoliel was magnified by her fears into the semblance of a prophet of old.
Cynthia went that night alone to a dinner party in Seamore Place. But she was ill at ease and as soon as she could get away she hurried home. She had not seen her husband that day. He had returned at five o'clock, had been closeted for a long while with M. Poizat and had then departed, leaving a message that a series of divisions would compel him to dine at the House of Commons. The couple, however, had made it a habit to reserve for themselves, whenever the House was not sitting late, an hour or so at the close of even the busiest day, and Cynthia was fairly sure that she would not have to wait long before Harry Rames came home. As a fact, he was already in his study. The door was ajar and through the opening the light streamed out into the hall.
Cynthia pushed the door open. Harry was sitting at his writing-table on the opposite side of the room and studying with a complete absorption a scroll which he held down unrolled beneath his eyes. Cynthia stood in the doorway for a moment or two watching him with a tender smile upon her face, and speculating idly upon the document which so riveted his attention. For the moment her trouble was quite driven from her thoughts. He was here, after all, in the house with her: he, the loved one: and with a sort of fierceness she was content. Then he looked up and saw her standing in the doorway. His face changed; he had the aspect clearly of a man at bay. He swept a pile of letters and printed papers over his scroll, spreading them out. He rose and stood between her and the writing-table, hiding it from her view.
"You are home early," he said.
"Earlier than you expected! Yet I am later than you."
"Oh, I paired at ten o'clock."
"I see."
The furtive movement of her husband increased her fears and at the same time wounded her pride. They were to be frank with one another. That was the pledge which each had given to the other. And here was the pledge broken, for Harry was definitely practising concealments. Cynthia, however, did not belong to the tribe of the clamorous. She stepped within the room and left him to continue the conversation. Rames spoke hastily to engage her attention.
"Poizat came to see me this afternoon."
"Yes?"
"He was desperate. We talked over his position. I recommended him to go to Tangier and settle there. He has a little money. He will find compatriots, and I should think it's the place where people will be least likely to trouble about him. I fancy that he will go there. But it's a bad business to have to start life all over again at seventy."
"Yes," said Cynthia.
She watched him as he walked up and down the room, making up her mind that on her side at all events the pledge should not be broken.
"M. Poizat said something to me which I think is true. That nothing one has ever done is ever quite done with."
Harry Rames stopped in his walk. He stood quite still for a few moments.
"Oh, surely that's not true," he said carelessly and resumed his pacing. But Cynthia was aware of a change in him. Before he had been thinking of Poizat and his destiny; now he was alert and waiting upon her words.
"I believe that it's more true than he knew. For even if nothing actual comes of the thing done, it's still there, recorded in the character. Harry, we are in the clutch of finished things."
Her voice rose in a low cry and brought Harry swiftly round upon his heel. Her words hit him shrewdly, but her aspect more shrewdly still. She was still standing close by the door. She was dressed in a gown of pale blue and gold with a bright ribbon of blue in her hair. Her cloak had slipped from her shoulders to her feet, her gloves were twisted in her hands, her eyes wide and dark with trouble looked out from a face which was piteously wistful. She made unconsciously a poignant appeal to him. The delicate loveliness of her youth and the gay panoply of her attire contrasted so strikingly with the quivering misery of her face.
"What makes you believe that, Cynthia?" He crossed the room to her side and shook her arm with a friendly gesture familiar to her. "Poizat's case is not enough to build a world of theory on."
"Nor do I," replied Cynthia. "I was adding to that case another." Harry Rames flinched.
"What other?" he asked with an effort.
"Years ago in Argentina I once listened at a door," she began, and in Harry's eyes shone a great relief. "What I heard frightened me. I lay awake in terror all that night. I have lived in fear ever since. I could not shake fear off even after I knew there was no longer any cause for fear. I can find causes anywhere. Fear's the truth of me. Most of the things which I have done have been done from fear."
"I never understood that, Cynthia."
"I never spoke of it before."
"Fear even prompted your marriage?"
Cynthia looked him frankly in the face.
"Yes. You were so frank, so honest about yourself. I felt safe with you. And after we were married--I escaped from fear. I was reprieved."
"Thank you," said Harry with a quiet sincerity. Then he moved away from her to the fireplace and turned again.
"Why do you tell me this for the first time tonight?"
"Because fear's awake in me again to-night," she answered simply. "I have had another visitor today besides M. Poizat."
"Who?"
"Howard Fall."
Harry Rames's voice hardened.
"He came to complain of me, I suppose."
"It wasn't complaint; it was regret. He thought it would be such a loss if you ceased to be interested in Parliament. He was afraid that Colonel Challoner's death had been a shock to you."
Harry Rames looked curiously at his wife.
"And what did you say?"
"That I knew you well enough to be sure that wasn't the case. He said you had not spoken once since the debate on the Address and that the organization against the land bill was tumbling to pieces."
Harry's face cleared.
"There's a very good reason for that. The government programme is overloaded and Devenish's bill won't come on this year after all. Our opposition shook their confidence in it besides. No, it won't come on."
Cynthia moved swiftly forward to the fireplace.
"You know that?"
"Yes. Hamlin told me in confidence."
"When, Harry?"
"A month ago at least. We can always whip up the opposition to Devenish's bill when it becomes once more a practical proposition."
Perhaps after all the Government's change of plan was the simple explanation of the change in her husband. Cynthia sank down into a chair. Before now, she remembered, she had tortured herself with unnecessary fears.
"Oh, I am glad. I am glad," she cried. All her heart was in her voice and tuned it to a note full and low and wonderfully sweet. Harry was moved by the music of it. There was a joy, a tenderness, which he had noticed more than once of late, but which had never rung so clear as it did to-night. He planted himself in front of her with a wry sort of smile upon his face.
"Cynthia."
"Yes."
"You want me to go on--just as I am going? You are satisfied? There have been times when you have wanted more----"
But Cynthia broke in upon him. She shut her eyes upon her ideals and her dreams. They were for the girl steeped to the lips in romance, not for the woman made real by love. Something had come between them. Something secret. Something which threatened even such community of life as they had. She was in revolt against it.
"Yes, yes," she cried passionately. "I do want you to go on. I want you to make a great career. I want my share in it, my pride in it. I shall be satisfied. I shall be thankful. Oh, my dear, are you blind?" She rose abruptly and stood in front of him. "What I want and all that I want is to keep you." If she had never spoken the words, the eagerness of her voice and the prayer of her clasped hands would have uttered them for her. But she had spoken them deliberately. She knew very well the danger for a woman in telling a man who does not love her, that she loves him. But she accepted the danger. She was playing for a great stake that night, and great stakes are not to be won without great risks. She laid her reticence aside and made her appeal. But it seemed that her appeal failed. Harry Rames stood watching her, at a loss for words, with a face which concealed carefully all his thoughts. Cynthia stooped and gathered up her gloves which had fallen to the floor.
"I shall go up now," she said.
Yet she waited; and Harry still was silent. A moment of passion had caught him unprepared with any words.
"What are you thinking about, Harry, so profoundly?" Cynthia asked in an indifferent voice. His silence was a rebuff most bitter to her. But she would not betray herself a second time. Her eyes and her hands were busy with some imaginary fault in the fit of her dress.
"That you have never shown me yourself before," he said, moving toward her. She stood quite still as he came close. He put his arm about her and she asked quietly:
"Wasn't I wise, Harry? It's a little disconcerting, isn't it, when a woman shows you something you know nothing about. Just a little disconcerting, isn't it?"
She left him standing in the room and went upstairs. She had made her plea with all the frankness which had been the condition of their marriage. She would not ask for a like frankness in return. It was for him to give it. She had made it quite plain that on her side she wanted frankness. More she would not do. Not for anything would she ask what secret thing he had hidden under the papers upon his table. But she knew that there was a secret thing and her feet dragged as she mounted the stairs.
She had been in bed according to her reckoning for about an hour when she heard a noise of the shutting of a door. And the door was the front-door of the house. Cynthia sprung from her bed and lifting the blind looked out from the window. It was a dark night, but there was no fog. By the light of the street lamps she saw a man crossing the road toward the corner of South Audley Street. He had the look of her husband. She flung up the window and the sound of his footsteps made her sure. Her eyes gazing into the tempered darkness of a London street might well have deceived her, her ears could not. There was no one else walking in Curzon Street at that moment; the sound of his footsteps reverberated unmistakably, diminishing as the distance between him and the window increased. The man who now vanished into South Audley Street was Harry Rames.
Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her watch. It was one o'clock in the morning. She wrapped a dressing-gown about her and sat down trying to think calmly, seeking to discover, if she could, some other reason for his departure than the obvious one. But the obvious one recurred again and again in her thoughts. It explained everything, fitted in with everything, as no other reason did. His sudden indifference to his career, his furtive movement at his writing-table upon her appearance, his refusal to meet frankness with frankness could all thus be accounted for. His departure from the house was thus explained. He had not come up into his room next to hers; he had waited in his study for an hour; he had given her time to fall asleep; he had gone out. It was a woman then who had twisted the current of his life as she, Cynthia, could not, who had moved him to passion as she even that evening had failed to do. Cynthia raged in fury against herself for having so weakly betrayed herself. She sat in torture. Then her jealousy flamed up.That--no! Her pride must give way. If there was another woman in her story--why then the other woman must look to herself. Cynthia would fight. She hurried down-stairs into the study. She switched on the lights and tumbled hither and thither the papers on the writing-table for the one so swiftly hidden which should betray the other woman's name and her abode. But she found nothing to satisfy her. She looked round the room. From a drawer in a bureau against the wall Harry's keys had been dangling. That she had noticed; and the keys were gone now. She tried the drawer. It was locked. In that drawer then was hidden the key to his secret. So much knowledge at all events Cynthia was sure that she had gained. She went back to her room and lying in bed ran over all the names of her acquaintances, even of her friends. She was not in the mood to trust any of them, but she could not fix upon any of them either. One and all they were cats and treacherous. Cynthia was no longer afraid; she was simply furious; and her fury was not diminished when she heard the front-door open and shut once more, almost noiselessly--so much caution was being used.
But Cynthia, though she was right in her facts, had never been so mistaken in her conclusions. The scroll which Harry Rames had pushed beneath his papers was simply a chart of the Antarctic seas; whereon lines distinguished one from the other by the manner of their tracing recorded the journeys of successive explorers and marked each one's "farthest South." He stood for a little while after Cynthia had left him on the same spot half-way between his chart and her position at the door. Then he turned back to his writing-table and spread out the map once more. The call of the unknown places was loud in his ears that night.
"Come back! Come back!"
Six weeks ago it had been the merest whisper--flashed to the wireless poles on the roof of the Admiralty and heard by him one afternoon, a message very small and clear amidst the clatter of Parliament Street. But the whisper had gathered volume and vehemence, until the map before him seemed a mouth shouting it, and the room throbbed with it as though the walls would burst asunder.
"Come back! Come back!"
It seemed to him that the command was not to be denied or must ring in his ears forever; and that arena of the House of Commons, where man fought with man, became a trivial place of meanness and intrigue compared with the vast battle-ground in the South, where one fought in a grandeur of silence with the careless, stubborn elements of a wild and unknown world.
He bent over his map and across it, as across the table of a camera obscura he saw moving, in miniature and brilliantly defined, the ships of the men who had sailed to the South. James Cook's two vessels, theResolutionand theAdventure, crossed the Antarctic circle as it seemed underneath his eyes--the first, of all the ships that were ever built, to sail upon these waters. Bellingshausen of Kronstadt came next and dropped his anchor under the shelter of Peter I Island and gave to it its name. He was followed by the whaling captains, each choosing his own line, great navigators inspired by a great and spirited firm. Weddell and Biscoe in their brigs. Balleny in his schooner. The later ships of the scientific expeditions under D'Urville of France and Wilkes of Chesapeake Bay moved southward in the track of the whaling captains, and close upon their heels James Ross from England with theErebusand theTerrorburst for the first time in the history of the world through the ice-pack into the open sea beyond and sailed from west to east along the great ice-barrier. There were other lines where theChallengerhad sailed, and the official expeditions; and there was yet another, the longest of all the lines upon the chart, a line stretching out to a harbor never visited before, and against that line in tiny letters was printed "Rames." He followed the course of his ship from his first harbor in the Antarctic continent with the wooden cross high on a hill above it, which marks the grave of a naturalist of a past expedition. He fell to speculating where thePerhapslay now. Parliament had met in the first days of January. It was just before the opening of Parliament that Hemming had started on the mail steamer to New Zealand to pick up his ship in Lyttelton Harbor. Allow him five weeks for his journey. The second week of February would have come to an end before thePerhapshad steamed out past the headland. Hemming himself had recognized that he was late. The difficulty of collecting money to finance the expedition had detained him beyond his time. A fortnight out from New Zealand, where was thePerhapsnow? She might still be in the stormy seas on the outer edge of Ross's pack with the petrels and the albatrosses like a cloud about her yards. Or she might have touched at one of the northerly harbors of the continent. Perhaps winter was coming early on to wrap her about with snow and ice. If that happened, Hemming's chance was gone, for he had only money for one year. He must reach the Pole this next summer or not at all. He must therefore winter well to the South.
Rames got up from his chair, trying not to hope that Hemming's expedition would fail. He looked up from this map to the spot where Cynthia had stood close to the door, and a smile came upon his face.
"She was wrong," he said. "We are in the clutch of the unfinished, not the finished things."
He carried his map over to a bureau which stood against the wall and opened a drawer from the lock of which his bunch of keys was dangling. There were other charts in the drawer, a barometer which had hung in his cabin in thePerhapsthroughout the three years during which that ship had been his home, a shell or two dredged up from the depths of the sea, and a brown paper package tied up with a piece of string. The charts lying there were all the charts which existed of the Antarctic seas, arranged in the order of their making. He added to them now his map, the last of them all; the printed facsimile of his own chart. Then reluctantly he locked the drawer. The reverberation of the seas seemed to fill the room and through it imperative and loud rang the call of the South. Yet he was aware, too, of Cynthia standing in her delicate blue frock, subduing her pride, revealing herself in a passionate appeal. He was stirred to shame at the poverty of his own response. She had been friend, counsellor, wife in the normal way. They had jogged side by side along the low road of his endeavor. To-night she pleaded for more, she offered more. He could never quite look upon her as he had been wont to. For she had stirred him to shame.
He slipped the key off the ring and swung it round upon his finger. At all events he would keep his bargain.
"It's a queer piece of irony," he said to himself, "that the very thing which I would give my soul to do, she was urging me to do two years ago; and now I must keep my longing hidden. Our positions are quite reversed."
But he would keep to his bargain. Perhaps after all Hemming would succeed; and sooner or later no doubt the reverberation of the seas would die away in the porches of his ears.
He went out into the hall, carrying the key in his hand, and let himself out at the front-door. He walked quickly up South Audley Street, turned to the left, and crossed Park Lane into Hyde Park. He walked to the stone bridge which crosses the Serpentine. The night was quiet and dark about him, and from afar off the never ceasing roar of the London traffic came to him like the roar of distant seas. He leaned over the parapet and stretching out his hand opened it. He heard a tiny splash in the water beneath the bridge.
He walked back more slowly than he had come to where the glare of the sky indicated the houses and the streets. As he crossed Park Lane again two men arm-in-arm passed him and one of them stopped.
"Is that you, Rames?" asked a friendly and solicitous voice.
Rames recognized it at once as the voice of Hamlin the chief Whip.
"You had paired for to-night," Hamlin continued, "hadn't you? You didn't miss much. But I want to be able to rely on you for Thursday. We know, of course, that you are against us over Devenish's land bill. That's all right. But you are with us on the rest of our policy and we want your help."
"I shall be there on Thursday," answered Harry Rames. "It's quite true that I have not been so much in the House this session as I used to be. But you will see me in my old place to-morrow. Good-night."
He walked on and Hamlin rejoined his companion.
"It was Rames," he said. "We're not going to lose him. I am glad. He's marked out for a great position if he doesn't throw it away."
But Rames through the roar of the traffic, carriages rolling home, wagons lumbering in to Covent Garden, heard louder than ever the boom of Southern seas and the wind whistling between the halyards of a ship.
The session passed, and Devenish's land bill, as Rames had foretold, was postponed. It figured again in the Address at the beginning of the following year, but as late as March no definite date had been assigned for its introduction. On a Saturday morning of this month Cynthia and her husband were breakfasting in the dining-room of the white house, when the morning's letters were brought in by the butler. Harry Rames tossed one or two aside.
"Circulars, pamphlets," he said. He opened some of the others, taking them from the top of the pile. "Here's one from the Chamber of Commerce--railway rates. I'll answer that this morning. Here's another--the committee of a school wants a grant from the treasury. Here's a third--" and as he was beginning to tear open the envelope, his voice suddenly stopped.
Cynthia looked up from her own letters and saw that while he was holding the third letter in his hand he was not looking at it. His eyes were fixed upon that one which was now uppermost on the heap. He sat and stared at the envelope for an appreciable time. Then dropping the letter which he held, he picked up this new and startling one and carried it swiftly over to the window. Cynthia followed his movement with her eyes, just curious, but nothing more. Her eyes indeed travelled beyond him and noticed the sunlight in the garden, the yellow and purple crocuses and the first of the daffodils, noticed them with an up-springing lightness of heart. Then the stillness of her husband's attitude caught her attention. She saw something in his face which she had never seen there before, which she had never thought to see there at all. He wore the look of a man quite caught out of himself. He was as one wrapped in visions and refined by the fires of great longings. It seemed to her that she saw a man whose eyes, brimful of light, looked upon the Holy Grail.
He turned back to her. He brought her the letter still unopened and placed it in her hands. Cynthia received it as though written upon its cover she would read the revelation of his secret. Yet she saw nothing but a soiled envelope with a foreign stamp. She gazed up at her husband mystified.
"Look at the stamp, Cynthia!" said Rames in a queer voice.
Cynthia looked. It wore the head familiar to English people. But the lettering about the head was strange. She spelled it out.
"Rexland."
With a start she turned to him. "That is the country you discovered."
"Yes. A stamp was struck to commemorate my discovery of it."
"A stamp?" cried Cynthia. "Wait a minute, Harry! You once spoke of a stamp to me before. Yes, on the morning of the day when you were to deliver your speech--the speech which failed. It was this stamp of which you were speaking?"
"Yes."
"You remembered it on that morning, even when your thoughts were full of the speech you were going to deliver."
"I remembered it by accident," he said sharply. "I can't think why. It had been out of my thoughts for so long. Yet it was that stamp." His voice softened. "It is issued by the post-office--for a penny. Just think of it! A penny stamp brings a letter from the Antarctic seas to us here in Warwickshire."
"Mr. Hemming sent it?"
"Without a doubt. When he came to see me in London fifteen months ago, he told me that if I intended to go out again he would not use my harbor."
Harry was standing just behind his wife. Cynthia was not looking at him any longer. But she was listening with a curious intentness as though the words which he spoke were of less importance to her than the accent with which he spoke them. She put questions to him to make yet more sure of it.
"And you gave him permission!"
"Of course. I had not the right to refuse it. I was never going South again. Nothing was further from my thoughts. I told him to use not only my harbor, but the depots of food I had made along my sledge-route from the harbor toward the Pole."
"You think that he reached the harbor?"
"I am sure of it. Otherwise he would not have used this stamp. He must have wintered there. I did not think that he would reach it before winter closed in upon him. The summer last year must have been very late."
Cynthia nodded her head.
"Yes."
Her attention was relaxed. Harry Rames had been striving to keep from his voice any note of regret, to speak in the ordinary level tone suitable to a matter of only ordinary interest. But in spite of his efforts he was not sure that he had succeeded. Cynthia handed to him the letter. He took it and turned it over in his hand.
"He has had time since he wintered in that harbor. One summer would be enough. He may have done it--if his dogs lived. There's always that condition. If his dogs lived! Mine didn't. Perhaps--perhaps--" He broke off abruptly and thrust the letter back into Cynthia's hand.
"You open it! You can tell me what he says."
Harry Rames walked again to the window and stood with his back to the room. Cynthia's eyes followed him and travelled past him once more to the garden. She was sure that she would never forget those daffodils and the purple crocuses waving in the sunlight for one day as long as she lived. A minute ago she had noticed them; now she noticed them again; and within that minute had been revealed to her the great secret Harry Rames had been at so much pains to hide. She knew her rival now, and was appalled. "Such men are driven by a torment of their souls." It was Harry himself who had said that. The wish came to her, "If only this man has succeeded." She tore open the envelope.
Harry Rames stood at the window waiting for the letter to be read to him; and it seemed to him that he waited for an eternity. He had heard the tearing of the envelope. The letter was open in Cynthia's hands. Yet she did not speak a word. Rames's heart sank.
"Then he has reached the Pole?" he asked with a studied carelessness.
"I don't know," Cynthia replied in perplexity.
"Read it."
"There is nothing to read."
Rames turned round and came swiftly toward her.
"He must have forgotten to enclose his letter. There is nothing but this," said Cynthia. She was holding a single blank sheet of note-paper in her hand. She turned it over. "No, there's not a word written anywhere. Do you understand it?"
"Yes. He has failed."
There was no doubt left to her of her husband's joy. The cry which broke from his lips was not to be denied. It was a real cry of exultation. Cynthia turned pale as she heard it. But she would not acknowledge that she understood it, nor would she look into Harry's face lest she should see the same exultation blazoned there.
"Poor Hemming," said Rames. "That's bad luck. The disappointment must have hit him hard."
"You can understand that," said Cynthia steadily.
"Yes. He would have written, you see, if he had taken it more lightly. He has nothing to say. That is what his blank sheet of paper means. That is what it must mean. Well, I must go and write to the Chamber of Commerce, Cynthia;" and gathering up his letters he went out of the room.
As for Cynthia, she remembered that the North Warwickshire met that morning at eleven o'clock four miles from the house. She rode to the meet and followed the hounds over a good grass country flying her hedges on a big horse which old Mr. Daventry had given to her on the very first day when she had hunted over six years ago. It had always been her experience that when troubles and fears overburdened her, a hard day's hunting was her best medicine. It smoothed out the creases of her mind, whipped up the blood in her veins, set her pulses dancing with the joy of living and unrolled her courage like a banner. The sunlight, the swift rush through the air, the rhythm of movement, the keenness of the animal beneath her, the flight over hedge and ditch, had never failed her up till now. It always seemed to her that by some process, of which she was quite unconscious, the direct and simple thing to do emerged from the confusion of her thoughts and shone out unmistakably. And it shone out to-day. But she could not bring herself to accept it. As she rode homeward through the lanes she was at her arguments again.
"No! With time contentment will come to him. He will be subdued to the matter he works in. And I cannot let him go."
Mr. Benoliel's warning obstinately confronted her.
"One party doesn't keep the bargain or keeps it half-heartedly as an irksome thing and day by day the separation grows more complete until you are living with your enemy or living quite alone."
But she would not be convinced; she battled against it. "There was a saving clause. 'Unless on both sides there is love.' In that case a way could be found. And on both sides there may be love."
She had treasured up little acts of thoughtfulness on Harry Rames's part, the merest small things which women are quick to notice and to build upon; such as having a cloak ready for her shoulders almost before she was aware that she was cold. She ran these trifles over in her mind, clutching at them for proof that the longed for change was coming--nay, perhaps had come. There had been a constant watchfulness, a constant care for her shown by her husband during this last year. It might be of course that a certain remorse was stirring in him--remorse that he was only keeping his side of the bargain in the letter and not the spirit.
"But I cannot let him go," she insisted. The perils, the hardships, the dangers of snow-storms and cold and shipwreck and famine which had all seemed so trivial to her in her days of romance now loomed up before her terrible and dark. It was no use to argue that other men had gone that road and had come back. This one might not. She reached her home with her distress as heavy upon her as when she had set out; and was told that Mr. Benoliel was waiting to see her.
She went at once into the drawing-room and gave Mr. Benoliel some tea.
"Will you tell Mr. Rames," she said to her butler, "that Mr. Benoliel is here."
"He's not in the house," said Benoliel. "He's in Ludsey. I asked for him when I heard that you were out. I am glad. For I should like to tell you my news first."
The butler left the room and Mr. Benoliel became at once mysterious and omniscient.
"Sir George Carberley is going to resign," he said.
Cynthia looked at him in surprise.
"The member for our division?"
The white house was not within the borough limits of Ludsey. It stood in the Hickleton Division of the county of Warwickshire and Sir George Carberley, an important unit of the opposition, was Harry Rames's representative in the House of Commons.
"Yes," said Mr. Benoliel. "He has sat for the division for forty years now and he is tired. He intends to resign when this session is over."
"Are you sure?" asked Cynthia. "How do you know this?"
"Ah!" said Benoliel with a smile. "You mustn't ask me that, Cynthia. Indeed I am not quite sure that I ought to have told you the news at all. But I thought that it was so important for you to know it at once that I stretched a point of confidence."
"Thank you," said Cynthia. "But what I don't understand is why it is so important for us to have the news before the others?"
"Captain Rames is on the executive of your association, isn't he?"
"Yes."
"Then he will have a voice in the selection of the candidate who will fight the seat from your political point of view."
"Of course."
"Very well," said Mr. Benoliel. "If he has a candidate ready when the news of the approaching resignation is published, and if that man is willing to follow not simply the Government's policy, but also your husband's policy as regards Devenish's land bill, don't you see what a chance he gets? If Rames can secure the selection of his man as candidate and then can win over the seat, he strengthens his position with the Government enormously. He has put his views about Devenish's bill to the test of an election, and he has won."
"Yes, I see that," said Cynthia doubtfully. She was considering the prospect Mr. Benoliel held out to her from a quite different point of view. If Harry succeeded in this plan, his victory would be one more link in the chain of obligation which bound him to his present life. If he failed, his failure would be another disappointment weakening it.
"But can we win?" she cried. "The seat's supposed to be impregnable."
"That's one of your advantages. More seats are lost by over-confidence than by bad candidates. Besides, the mere fact that one man has held a seat for forty years is against the probability of another man of the same color succeeding. There are lots of people who will be ready to say 'It's time we gave the other fellows a look-in.' Your husband has only got to throw himself heart and soul into the fight and he will stand a very good chance. No doubt of that."
Cynthia reflected. "Why did you wish to tell me this news before you told it to Harry?" she asked, bending her brows upon Mr. Benoliel in a steady frown which had before now warned him to walk with circumspection.
"I wasn't quite sure," he explained, "that you would wish him now to undertake a further obligation of political service."
"Indeed!" said Cynthia icily. "And why shouldn't I wish it now, Mr. Benoliel?"
Mr. Benoliel had no intention to allow himself to be browbeaten by a slip of a girl for whose happiness he was in a measure responsible.
"Because, my dear Cynthia," he answered, "it has seemed to me on the last few occasions when I have met your husband that he was feeling the strain of a Parliamentary life. He has looked worn and tired. I could almost fancy that he was disheartened."
Cynthia's thoughts did Mr. Benoliel some injustice at this moment. Certainly he was suggesting to her that his neglected warning had been justified, that Harry's Parliamentary ambition had been a mere phase in his life, which was now passing or had already passed. But she went further and assumed in him a kind of triumph at the accuracy of his diagnosis. Right underneath his sympathetic words she seemed to hear the whisper of a question:
"Am I not a clever man?"
The whirr of a motor-car grew loud and ceased. Harry had returned from Ludsey. Mr. Benoliel sat patiently in front of her, awaiting her decision. Was he to break his news to Harry Rames or was he not? Cynthia felt that Harry's destiny and hers were in her hands. She must make her choice and by that choice it seemed to her they would be both inextricably bound, their happiness or their misery allotted to them for the whole span of their lives.
She sat with her chin propped in the palm of her hand and her eyes brooding darkly on Mr. Benoliel. A door was shut somewhere in the house. She rose and pressed the bell.
"Howard," she said to her butler, "was that Mr. Rames?"
"Yes ma'am."
"He is in his study I think?"
"Yes."
"Will you show Mr. Benoliel in to him?" And as Benoliel rose, she said to him, "Will you come back after you have told your news? You will have an opportunity of reconsidering your judgment. I should like to hear whether you still think him disheartened."
Cynthia was in her most aggrieved and stately mood. She usually was when she knew herself to be in the wrong. She would not admit Mr. Benoliel's sympathy or affection for her. She had an epithet for him very near to the tip of her tongue at this moment. Mr. Benoliel was officious. With a distant bow she dismissed him.
She had the satisfaction half an hour later of hearing Mr. Benoliel's complete recantation.
"I was quite wrong, Cynthia. He was in the best of spirits. He was elated. The look of strain had gone if it was ever there. I have been mistaken. I am happy to admit it."
Cynthia relaxed from her frigidity. But her satisfaction was a poor one and had little life in it. She had merely tricked Mr. Benoliel into the belief that his insight had been at fault. For in truth, as she knew very well, it had never been more shrewd. What had led Mr. Benoliel into error was his ignorance of the letter with the "Rexland" stamp which had arrived at the white house by the morning's post. Hemming's failure was a kind of reprieve for Harry Rames. In a sudden revulsion he had been lifted out of his discouragement. His exultation had remained with him all that day. Cynthia had counted upon it when she had sent Benoliel to his study.