Colonel Challoner was not aware that it was just the weight of the little daughter in Jim’s arms which had made his journey across the Andes possible and profitable. Cynthia left him all the comfort of his delusion, and all its remorse, since the remorse was so completely outweighed by the comfort.
“That’s the last I have been able to find out,” Colonel Challoner resumed. “They disappeared up into the mountains together, and years after Jim — died — in the Argentine. As for the daughter, I have come upon no trace of her. She may have lived. She may have died. Had she lived she would have been just about your age, Mrs. Rames.”
“Indeed?”
“I suppose that you never heard of her?”
“What was her name?”
“Even that I can’t tell you. There was a daughter. That’s all I know.”
Colonel Challoner waited with his eyes upon Cynthia’s face. He longed, yet he hardly dared to hope for an answer. It would be such a wonderful thing for him if the girl facing him in his trim brick-walled garden had when a child eighteen years ago been carried in Jim’s arms over the stupendous passes of the Andes. Surely if it were so, she must admit it now out of gratitude for Jim’s devotion. But Cynthia made no reply and he moved slowly to the door of the garden and held it open for her to pass out. She went from Bramling with her secret still her own, though some remorse was now her penalty for keeping it. She could not quite get rid of the picture of the old man at the open door in the high red-brick wall waiting wistfully for an answer to a question which he could only suggest. But she had made her plan and with a certain stubbornness — almost a hardness which marked this phase of her life — she had abided by it. If Colonel Challoner had said clearly and formally that he made no claim upon her, that he did not ask her to take her place in the family of Challoners, then she would have acknowledged what he plainly suspected. But he had imposed upon himself no such condition. On the contrary she had been led to believe that he would claim her; and that was intolerable to her thoughts. She did not argue or reason; she recollected. And what she recollected was a night of horror when her father had claimed her for the ruin of her body and her soul. When she stepped into the train she made a silent vow that she would never come to Bramling again.
“It’s a strange thing,” said Harry Rames as they were travelling across the country, “that two strangers to Bramling, Devenish and myself, noticed your extraordinary likeness to that picture on the wall, and Challoner who has sat beneath it most nights of the week for years didn’t. It had become so familiar to him, I suppose, that it had ceased to have definite features.”
“That’s how things happen,” said Cynthia, and this time she uttered the phrase with relief. “When you know people very well, you cease to notice the changes, you lose count of how they look. But when we first met at Ludsey he did claim to recognize me, though he could not fix upon the place or time. I have no doubt it was because of that picture.”
Harry Rames agreed. None of Colonel Challoner’s suspicions had even occurred to him. He drifted off to the great subject.
“Devenish won’t be idle, Cynthia,” he said.
“No,” answered Cynthia. “He gives me the impression that even on his death-bed he would be quick about it.”
And on the Tuesday morning, the very day after they had reached home, the Times brought Harry Rames news which sent him out of his study in search of his wife.
“Look, Cynthia,” he said and he handed to her the paper. Cynthia read the paragraph at which he pointed.
“Mr. Devenish returned to London on Sunday evening and putting off two deputations which had been arranged for Tuesday left London hurriedly on Monday afternoon to join the Prime-Minister in Scotland.”
Cynthia laid down the paper with a genuine sense of consternation. She was astonished to realize how much she now longed for the success of Harry’s rather dingy plot. Fear was written upon her face.
“That means — ?” she said.
“That we must look out,” replied Rames. He laughed a little as a man will when the joy of battle is upon him. “Lucky Devenish can’t get at my constituency. I don’t know that he would try to in any case. But he can’t.
“You have Arthur Pynes with you.”
“Yes. And I pledged myself before I was elected to resign at once if any responsible number of my supporters objected to any action I thought it my duty to take in the House. Do you see, Cynthia?” and he laughed again. “That pledge is my safeguard. I thought it would be when I made it. If any one tries to put pressure upon me, I can always point to that pledge. I can always ask whether they would like me to resign.”
“Suppose they said yes,” cried Cynthia in alarm.
Harry Rames grinned.
“I’d get in again if they did. I’d keep nine-tenths of my own people and get a good lot of the other fellow’s because of my independence. But they won’t! No one wants a by-election at Ludsey. Ludsey is too busy.”
“I suppose that’s true,” said Cynthia with a smile of relief. Once more she had occasion to recognize the accuracy of her husband’s foresight. But there was a little change. The recognition was no longer accompanied with regret that the foresight was not being used in a higher cause. She was simply relieved that on this side at all events the great career was not open to attack.
Rames took a turn across the room and stopped at the window.
“But I wonder what his next move will be,” he said.
In a month he knew. The movement was swift and dramatic. Rames was summoned to London by a letter from the Prime-Minister. He travelled up from Ludsey in the morning; he reached home again in time for dinner.
“They are raising Lamson to the peerage,” he said to Cynthia. “That means the Under Secretaryship of the Local Government Board will be vacant. It was offered to me.”
Cynthia was radiant.
“That’s splendid,” she cried.
“I refused it,” said Harry Rames.
Cynthia stared at him. Here was a definite step onward, a step refused.
“Why?” she asked in her perplexity.
“It would have meant the end of me, had I accepted it. It was offered to me to make an end of me, to break up the opposition to Devenish’s bill, to show me a traitor to my friends, and an enemy who could be silenced by a bribe. If I had taken it, not merely the government, but the House, the whole House, would have despised me. I should have been done for. I should be an Under Secretary for a year, two years, three years — after that nothing and never anything so long as I lived. I refused it, Cynthia;” and he bent over the table toward her.
“You mustn’t blame me. I am not failing you. I was thinking of you, my dear, when I refused office. An Under Secretaryship? You remember Challoner’s question to Bradley? I should have failed you had I taken it.”
Cynthia was almost conscious of disappointment. She liked definite things and here was a tangible sign of Harry Rames’s advancement. But she received confirmation very soon that he had been right in refusing it.
It was at the reception at the Foreign Office in January which marked the beginning of the session. Mr. Devenish himself came up to her with a smile. For a moment Cynthia felt an awkwardness at meeting him, but he was quick to put her at her ease.
“Captain Rames did well to refuse office,” he said. “I congratulate you, for I suppose that you had some share in the decision.”
“No,” she replied honestly. “To tell you the truth I was a trifle disappointed.”
Mr. Devenish shook his head.
“His whole reputation was at stake. It’s character which counts in the House of Commons. If he had taken that Under Secretaryship, he would have been pigeon-holed. We should have had the measure of him. We should not have troubled our heads about him again. For once, Mrs. Rames, you were wrong; he was right.”
Cynthia looked at him, her great eyes full of a gentle reproach.
“Wasn’t it a little unkind of you to offer it then. You are a friend of
mine, aren’t you, Mr. Devenish?”
There was no anger in her voice, only a wondering melancholy, a kind of piteous despair that she was living in so graceless a world. Mr. Devenish stared, then he smiled, and he looked at Cynthia with enjoyment.
“It wants a woman to use that argument, Mrs. Rames. No man alive would have the nerve. You are out for a fight with me. Yes, but I am a friend of yours, so I mustn’t defend myself.” He shook his head. “The House of Commons isn’t a nursery, Mrs. Rames. You have got to stand by yourself if you’re going to stand, neither being kind nor expecting kindness. Captain Rames stands — and he stands to fight me. Very well — but you can’t expect me to prop him up.”
“I quite understand,” said Cynthia in her iciest manner. “I am not at all hurt or offended. You mustn’t think that, Mr. Devenish,” she bowed to him distantly and sailed off with great dignity. But she had humor enough to appreciate her discomfiture, and, even as she turned her back, her lips were twitching into a smile which she did not mean him to see. But ten minutes later in another of the rooms she came face to face with him again. He looked at her whimsically, and with a blush and a laugh she made friends with him again.
“Tell me,” he said. “Your husband refused the post with decision after the merest pause for thought, though the offer surprised him. I know that. Was he troubled about his decision afterward?”
“Not at all,” said Cynthia. “He slept perfectly; he ate his dinner with absolute contentment.”
“Now I am afraid of him,” said Mr. Devenish gravely, and he added a shrewd saying to explain his fear. “Here’s the great difference which makes art and politics incompatible. The men who succeed in politics are the men who don’t worry. The men who succeed in art are the men who do. Yes, I am afraid of him now, and if I hit hard, Mrs. Rames, bear me no grudge. I shall hit hard because I must.”
Cynthia’s heart warmed to him. She laughed joyously.
“I’ll bear no grudge, Mr. Devenish.”
“By the way, why isn’t he here to-night? He ought to be.”
“He was here,” Cynthia replied. “But a telephone message was brought to him. Some one had called at our house who was urgent to see him. So he went home.”
Mr. Devenish saw Cynthia into her carriage and she drove back to Curzon Street. The visitor was still with Harry Rames in his study when she reached home. As she went up to her room she heard his voice through the door, and once she waked up from her sleep and in the small hours she again heard his voice. He was in the hall taking his leave of Harry Rames. Cynthia switched on the light and looked at her watch. It was three o’clock in the morning. Drowsily she asked herself who this visitor could be, but she was asleep again almost before the question was formulated in her mind.
CHAPTER XXVIII
WIRELESS
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 the Perhaps. 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?”
“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.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 501