“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.”
CHAPTER XXX
THE LETTER
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.
<
br /> “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.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 503