Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “This is for me.”

  But now his thoughts changed. The men of Ludsey did not wait in vain that night. For Harry Rames the glamour faded off the arena. At the very moment when the bars were being withdrawn for him to enter it the exultation of battle died out of his heart. He woke to something new — the claim of the constituency. The longer he looked, the stronger the claim grew, the more loudly the silence of that throng proclaimed and shouted it. They stood under the javelins of the rain, the men who had voted for him. They emphasized their claim by their extraordinary quietude. Almost they menaced.

  “A queer sight,” said a voice at his elbow.

  Harry Rames turned. It was Mr. Arnall who had interrupted him.

  “I shall not easily forget it,” said Rames, drawing a breath, and then with an irritable outburst he said: “They look to Parliament for more than parliaments can do, to candidates for more than members can achieve. Each election is to open paradise for them.”

  “And whose fault is that?” asked Mr. Arnall dryly.

  Rames nodded.

  “Ours, I suppose,” he said; and behind him in the room there was a bustle and a grating of chairs upon the floor. The votes had been sorted. The candidates and their friends gathered about the long table on the raised dais.

  “They are taking yours first,” said Mr. Arnall to Harry. “That’s a good sign.”

  The papers cast for Harry Rames were brought to the table in sets of fifty. They were placed crosswise, one set on the top of the first, and the third on the second, until five hundred had been counted. Against that pile of five hundred votes a second rose. Gradually the orderly heaps of paper extended along the table’s edge in front of the Mayor. There were half a dozen now. Rames’s agent stood by them like a bull-dog on the chain. The half-dozen became ten, eleven, twelve. And as the twelfth heap was completed a quick movement ran among all of Rames’s friends. He had polled now half the electorate of the city. One more set of papers and he was in.

  It was laid next to the others at that moment, and Rames’s hands were silently grasped and shaken. But the heaping up of the votes went on. There were three more piles to be added before the end was reached. Eighty-four per cent of the electorate had recorded their votes. Harry Rames had won by a majority well on to two thousand. He stood there in a buzz of congratulations, with a sudden vacancy of mind and thought. He remembered the extraordinary agility with which Mr. Redling whipped out of the room, trying to say unconcernedly:

  “I’ll just announce the result at once.”

  He heard the storm of cheers in the street below. That patient silence was broken now in a hurricane of enthusiasm and even through it he could distinguish the words of the exultant cry:

  “Rames is our man!”

  He saw the Mayor return, much out of breath. He proposed the vote of thanks to the returning officers, with the usual eulogy of his opponents and depreciation of himself. But even at that moment the claim of the constituency would importunately obtrude and find acknowledgment in his words.

  “You look to me very likely for more than I can do,” he said simply. “At all events you shall have what I can.”

  But the most memorable achievement that night was the reply of Mr. Redling.

  As he rose to his feet to acknowledge the vote of thanks, the man ran forward and got a fair start of the Mayor. He cried out, all one bubble of delight:

  “I need hardly say, gentlemen, how utterly I rejoice at—” and then the Mayor put on a spurt and caught up the man— “at the admirable manner in which this contest has been conducted by both sides.”

  But the correction deceived no one. Mr. Redling’s politics were known, and so, in a general splutter of good-humored laughter, the Ludsey election came to an end.

  The Mayor turned from the table wiping his forehead.

  “I nearly made a bad break there,” he said in a whisper. “They won’t come at you again, I think. I reckon you have got Ludsey, Captain Rames,” and then Rames felt the hand of the chief constable laid upon his arm. He was rushed across the Mayor’s parlor, down the stairs through the police station, where the police at their supper rose and gave him a loud cheer.

  “Silence!” cried the chief constable savagely. He opened the street door and peeped out.

  “All’s clear. Run — down that alley opposite. Say something from your balcony, never mind what — they won’t hear more than two words.”

  “That’s just all that I want them to hear,” cried Rames.

  He had foreseen that moment. He ran with one or two of his friends to the back door of his hotel. A path was made for them through the crowded hall. He came out upon the balcony, and up and down the hill as far as his eyes could see the street was thronged. He stretched out his hand. He had a second of absolute silence, and in that second his voice rang out:

  “My constituents — —”

  The roar which answered him showed him that once more his foresight had served him well. No other word of his was heard. But any other words would have spoiled the two which he had uttered.

  CHAPTER XVI

  WORDS OVER THE TELEPHONE

  THE NEXT TWO hours were for Rames of the tissue whence nightmares are woven. Rames was conscious that he made speeches and still more speeches and yet others on the top of those, until speech-making became a pain in the head for which there was no anodyne. He made them from windows — one at that very window where Taylor, the lily fingered democrat, had by a single sentence won immortality and certain defeat — he made them from tables in club-rooms which he no longer recognized; where men, packed tight as herrings, screamed incoherencies in a blaze of light and the atmosphere of a Turkish bath, or standing upon chairs beat him, as he passed beneath them, on the top of the head with their hats in the frenzy of their delight. For two hours Ludsey went stark mad and Harry Rames had reached exhaustion before a gigantic captain of the fire brigade lifted him panting and dishevelled out of the throng, and drawing him into a small committee-room locked the door against his votaries.

  “Better wait for a little while here, sir,” he said; and it was one o’clock in the morning before he ventured to return to his hotel.

  By that time the madness was already past. There was still noise in the blazing rooms of the clubs. But the streets were empty and up the climbing hill the city was quiet as a house of mutes. A placard in the window of the newspaper office recorded the figures of the election, and the boarding which protected the shops opposite to his hotel shone white in the light of the lamps. But for those two signs, even Rames might have found it difficult of belief that so lately this very hill had rung with cheers and seethed with a tumultuous populace. To-morrow, however, the sirens of the factories would shrill across the house-tops at six and the work of a strenuous industrial town begin. Ludsey had no time to dally with victories won and triumphs which had passed.

  Nor indeed had Harry Rames. He rang the bell at the door and entered the hall quickly. There was something which he should have done before now, though only now he remembered it. With a word to the porter, he went into the office and switched on the electric light. He crossed to the corner where the telephone was fixed and called up the White House. A woman’s voice, very small and clear, came back to him over the lines. He recognized it with a thrill of satisfaction. It was Cynthia Daventry’s.

  “Oh, it’s you yourself,” he cried eagerly, and he heard Cynthia, at the other end of the telephone, laugh with pleasure at his eagerness.

  “Yes,” she answered. “I thought perhaps you might ring me up.”

  So she had waited — just that they might talk together for a few moments. Harry Rames, however, did not answer her. It seemed to him from the intonation of her voice that she had more to say if she would only make up her mind to say it. He stood and waited with the receiver at his ear, and after a little while Cynthia spoke again upon a lower note.

  “I am glad that you did. I should have been disappointed if you hadn’t.”

  “T
hank you,” said Rames.

  He spoke very gently. There was no smile of triumph upon his face. It had become of vast importance to him within the last two hours to know how her thoughts dealt with him; and he was not sure. There was friendship between them — yes. But how far on her side did it reach? He had no answer to that question.

  “You have heard the result?” he asked.

  “Yes. Mr. Benoliel telephoned to me at once from the Mayor’s parlor.”

  “I ought to have done that,” said Harry Rames.

  “Oh, no. You were making speeches,” replied Cynthia with a laugh. She was at all events not offended by his omission.

  “And you are glad that I have won?” he asked. And again she waited a while before she answered; and when she did speak it was with that little spirit of resentment which Rames had heard before in her voice.

  “Well, — since your heart was so much set on winning, — yes, there you have your triumph — I am glad that you won.”

  Cynthia meant what she said, but she was reluctant to mean it. She spoke, too, under a constraint to speak. She had a picture before her eyes of the man at the other end of the line quietly waiting upon her, certain perhaps of what she would say. And the picture and the sense of compulsion were both an offence to her.

  “Good-night,” she added curtly and with a sharp, quick movement she hung up the receiver. The little clang of metal travelled along the line to Harry Rames and emphasized her resentment.

  But he was not disturbed by that. On the whole he looked upon it as a favorable sign. So definite a resentment implied that she was interested and set a value on their friendship. Rames went upstairs to bed, but he was too tired to sleep and his thoughts raced ahead and scouted in the future. He had leaped the first obstacle in the race, but that once leaped and looked back upon became a tiny thing compared with those which lay ahead.

  “Will she? Will she not?” he asked. All hung upon the answers to those questions. He was poor. He must marry. He must marry money and even money was not enough. Other qualities were needed to help him to the great career. But they were all there, a few miles away, possessed by the young mistress of the White House. She had looks and manners and a distinction of her own. You could not be in a room with her, however crowded, and be long unaware that she was present too. Only — would she?

  He had very little to offer her — beyond this earnest of future success which he had won to-night. And six hundred and seventy others would have won just the same opportunity before the year was a fortnight older. Moreover, Cynthia was romantic and he was not. For all her friendliness he was a bitter disappointment to her. He recognized it all and began to regret that he had not donned the glittering cloak of romance which so often she had held out to him. But his foresight came to console him.

  “I could never have lived up to it,” he reflected. “She would have found me out. I have been honest with her and she likes honesty.”

  Certainly there were points in his favor. Rames took heart. She had run the gauntlet of the drawing-rooms through a London season. Men had gone down before her satin slippers, men ancient and modern. Mothers of daughters had frowned upon her, mothers of sons had smiled. Young Lord Helmsdale, adored of the ladies, had pursued her, and it was his habit to be pursued. Yet she had come out of the throng to Warwickshire heart-free. Of that he was sure.

  Besides, she had waited up to speak to him. That was something, — not very much, perhaps, — but surely something. Also, since he had wished to win, she was glad that he had won. Rames’s memories took him back to the night when they first met at the Admiralty. Not thus had she spoken then. She had moved toward him since that night — reluctantly, slowly. Yet she had moved.

  He was still casting up this ledger of his chances when a lonely booming sound broke upon the stillness of the night and penetrated through the open window like some melancholy siren of the sea. It was repeated and repeated, growing louder with each repetition yet hardly more articulate, and without any change of intonation. And every now and then it was interrupted for a few seconds by a dull crash. Rames tried to thrust it from his notice.

  “Will she? Will she not?” he asked himself. But the booming sound would not be denied. It was as the wail of some utterly friendless man who cared not whether his fellows slept or waked. It was thoroughly pitiless. Nearer it came to the hotel, and now wavering, heavy feet could be heard to beat an irregular accompaniment. The occasional thud was explained. A very drunken man was staggering up the hill and from time to time he fell upon the pavement, unconscious that he fell, barely aware only that his long-drawn cry had ceased. Rames thought of him as a malignant creature determined to inflict torture — until the sound at last sifted itself into definite words. “Vote for Harry Rames!” the nightfarer cried aloud to a city which had already done so; and at times he dropped the Harry and inserted an epithet of color common no doubt in his vocabulary. He passed beneath the windows and with many a tumble faded into distance, invoking the unresponsive gas lamps.

  Rames turned over on his side with relief.

  “My dear,” he whispered, “take his advice and vote for Harry Rames! I shall owe you much, but I’ll make it up to you. I’ll not ask you till I am sure I can. I must risk Helmsdale carrying you off.”

  He fell asleep and even the tune the clock chimes in Ludsey church played at four o’clock in the morning did not make him stir. But at the White House just at that hour Cynthia waked. It was not the clock which waked her. It seemed to her that she had heard a step in the corridor. She sat up in her bed and in a few seconds was sure of it. Some one was moving very stealthily about the house. For a moment her old horror gripped her. Here was her father come at last with authority to claim her. She sat staring wide-eyed into the darkness, flung back to the days when she was a child. Then her reason reasserted itself. Her father was dead. The blood flowed again to her heart. But the stealthy sound continued. She heard a door gently latched. She sprang out of bed, opened her own door, and switched on the light. The corridor was empty to the edge of the shadows. She peered into them. She saw nothing, and no sound reached her now.

  “Who is it?” she asked in a loud voice, and no answer came to her. She waited in her doorway with a hand to her breast. The plank of a stair cracked loudly, close to her; but no footsteps made it crack. She went back into her room.

  Yet she had not been mistaken. Any one in the road that night might have seen a light ascending past the windows of the staircase and then moving through the upper rooms, until at last in one it remained for a long time. The light was carried by Diana Royle. She passed up the staircase to an unfurnished room used for the storage of old boxes and discarded things. From the corner of this room she rolled out a great bale, dusty with years, and tied up like a carpet with an old piece of rope. She cut the rope and spread it out upon the floor, cautiously and silently. Then lowering her candle she examined it. With a smile upon her lips she stood up again. She fastened the bale and dragged it back into its corner. The smile did not leave her lips. Chance had led her up here some weeks ago. She had discovered the bale and had wondered what it was. An old carpet? A disused curtain? Now she knew. In an attic of this old house she had discovered the lost strip of the Ludsey tapestry.

  CHAPTER XVII

  A REFUSAL

  “SO YOU HAVE refused young Helmsdale.”

  Three months had passed since the Ludsey election. The air was warm and golden and already the world whispered of summer, yet not too loud lest it should seem to boast and so be balked of its desire. Parliament had met, London was full, and in the country the foxes and the pheasants had leisure to attend to their own affairs. And with the rest Cynthia had come to town. She rode on this morning out of the park, where the buds were running along the branches of the trees like delicate green flames, about eleven o’clock, and turning out of South Audley Street into Curzon Street, she saw Mr. Benoliel waiting upon the pavement in front of her new house. As she stopped her horse before the door he re
primanded her:

  “Cynthia, you have refused him.”

  Cynthia blushed. Then she exclaimed:

  “But how in the world could you know! It isn’t half an hour since I refused him.” Then she bent down over her saddle and gazed at him in the fulness of admiration. “But you know everything. It wouldn’t be of much use trying to keep things from you, would it?”

  Mr. Benoliel smiled grimly.

  “Yes, that’s the way, Cynthia, and no doubt a neater style of doing it will come in time.”

  Cynthia sat upright, swift as a spring, and remained so, with her nose in the air, haughty for five complete seconds. Then curiosity restored her to her sex and she swooped again over her saddle.

  “How did you know?”

  “He borrowed a horse from me this morning,” said Mr. Benoliel— “a good horse. He was very particular that it should be a valuable horse. So I gathered that he wanted to make on this morning of all mornings a specially favorable impression.”

  Cynthia’s lips twitched.

  “You lent him a very good horse,” she said. “But the horse didn’t tell you.”

  “That’s where you are wrong, Cynthia. The horse did,” said Mr. Benoliel. “Ten minutes ago, as I was turning out of Grosvenor Square, I met my very valuable horse being led by a ragged beggarman whom I had never seen in my life before. I asked him what the dickens he was doing with it and he explained that as he was standing by the rails in Hyde Park a young man rode up to him in a violent rage, dismounted, tossed him the reins and a shilling and told him to lead the rotten beast back to Grosvenor Square. Just fancy that! My horse! I might have lost him altogether.”