A MAN ON THE MAKE
A week later, and much about the same hour, Captain Rames was driven
along the Mall in St. James's Park. Friday had come round again, and
the light did not burn in the clock-tower at Westminster. But the
windows of the admiralty blazed upon the horse-guards' parade, and its
great doors stood open for a glittering company. It was the night of
official dinners and receptions in honor of the king's birthday.
Soldiers in scarlet, sailors in blue, ministers and privy councillors
in gold, and ladies in their shimmering gowns thronged with the
smaller fry in black coats up the shallow steps into a hall decorated
with Union Jacks. There was a thrill of expectancy in the air that
evening. Rumors were rife that the government was inclined to advise a
dissolution. Members' wives were speculating whether they must go back
to the constituencies and tread the ways of deference; their husbands
how soon the time would come when they must exchange the erect dignity
of the member for the supple curves of the candidate; and curious eyes
dwelt, as if in hope of answer upon a sturdy white-haired man with a
blunt, good-humored face, who, wearing a uniform with epaulets, left
you in doubt whether he was a fireman or an admiral. He was, however,
the Prime-Minister, and he stood in the hall amongst his friends,
bearing the world lightly according to his wont. He stepped forward
and shook hands with Rames as he passed, and so turned again to his
friends. He was heard to say, "I have to-day achieved the ambition of
my life;" and curious ears eager to glean a hint were inclined toward
him.
"To-day?" one of the group exclaimed. "You have been Prime-Minister
for three years."
The Prime-Minister laughed.
"That's nothing," he said. "To become Prime-Minister was merely to
take a step on the way. But to-night I wear for the first time the
uniform of an Elder Brother of the Trinity, and that means that I need
never wear knee-breeches again as long as I live."
The curious ears were disappointed; Harry Rames shook hands with the
First Lord of the Admiralty, passed on, and in the second room was
touched on the elbow by Isaac Benoliel.
"I have been asked by a young friend of mine to bring you to her, and
I beg you to come at once, for she is in her most imperious mood,"
said Mr. Benoliel in a voice of whimsical entreaty.
"We will go to her as fast as we can," said Captain Rames.
He had now been three months in England, and the shy warmth of many
welcomes had made him thoroughly aware that he was a momentous
personage to young ladies. He was human enough to enjoy his
importance, and he followed Mr. Benoliel with alacrity toward a side
of the room where Cynthia Daventry sat talking to a young man in the
office of the Board of Trade. Rames noticed the clear and delicate
profile of her face and the distinction which set her apart; he
noticed, too, that, although she did not once look his way, the young
gentleman in the Civil Service uniform was summarily dismissed.
"Cynthia, this is Captain Rames," said Isaac Benoliel, and however
imperious a mood Cynthia might have shown to him, she had reserved
none of it for Captain Rames. Her eyes swept over him swiftly with the
shy and eager look to which he had grown accustomed: she gave him her
hand.
"I am very glad to meet you," she said impulsively, "because--" and
she halted suddenly upon the word, with the color like a rose in her
cheeks, "I suppose that you are tired of congratulations."
Captain Rames expanded: he laughed genially, a fastidious critic might
have said too noisily.
"By no means," he exclaimed. "Indeed, Miss Daventry, you may lay it on
with a trowel."
"I am not prepared to do that," answered Cynthia, and though she spoke
lightly, her voice was guarded, and even in the eager eyes there was a
constant watchfulness.
Eight months had passed since Cynthia had sat by the bedside of Robert
Daventry and listened to his instructions. She had taken Diana Royle
to live with her as he had bidden, though she had taken her
reluctantly. She had spent nearly all that time at the white house
upon the London road, in spite of Mrs. Royle's repeated suggestion
that Beaulieu, or preferably Cap D'Ail in the south of France would be
more satisfactory places for wintering. Diana Royle was glad to be
relieved from her genteel penury in Sussex Gardens, Kensington, but
she had no liking for the country. Cynthia, however, was deaf to her
hints. She lived for a while in solitude, broken only by the
companionship of the few neighbors with whom she was most intimate.
The swift deaths of the two old people who had so long lived for her
and in her, left her desolate and inclined ever regretfully to search
back across her life for occasions in which she had failed of kindness
toward them, or hurt them by forgetfulness. She was young, however,
and with no taint of morbidness. The sense of desolation passed, and
Diana Royle began to urge a new plan.
"You ought to take a house in town for the season, Cynthia. I know of
one in an excellent position, which would just suit you. It's in
Curzon Street, and the right end of the street, one of those nice,
flat-fronted houses, old outside and tiled bath-rooms inside. I
happened, I think, to see an advertisement of it to-day."
Mrs. Royle handed the newspaper to Cynthia, looked it over.
"We might think of it," she said.
"I am sure neither Mr. nor Mrs. Daventry would have wished you to bury
yourself always in the country."
"That's true," said Cynthia. "My father looked forward to my taking a
house in town."
"I don't think you could do better than this, dear," said Diana Royle.
"I know the house quite well by sight."
"Well, we'll think of it," said Cynthia.
Mrs. Royle suppressed a shrug of irritation.
"You will find the house will be snapped up, dear, if you take too
long thinking of it," she said with asperity.
Cynthia looked at her with innocent eyes.
"But I expect there will be other houses in London, won't there?" she
asked.
She had no wish to be churlish, she understood how deeply her
companion longed for the paved roadways and the streets. And in her
own heart, too, she was beginning to turn to the unknown world of
London with an expectancy of adventure, which drew her and thrilled
her, even while she hesitated.
"I don't understand you, Cynthia," Diana Royle cried in exasperation.
"Are you afraid?"
The question was intended merely as a gibe, but Cynthia turned to her
with startled eyes, and Mrs. Royle knew that she had chanced upon a
truth.
"Of what are you afraid?" she asked curiously, and Cynthia answered
while she looked into the fire:
"I once lay all night staring into a great bright mirror which
revealed to me a shut door. I was in terror lest the door should open.
I dreaded what might come through. I seem still to be looking into the
great mirror, and with the same kind of fear. Only now the door opens
upon the world, and not on the passage of a house."
Diana Royle gathered up her embroidery and her book.
"If you are going to talk that sort of nonsense, Cynthia, I shall go
to bed," she remarked sternly, and left Cynthia still gazing into the
fire.
Cynthia had not been speaking with affectation. The terror with which
her father had for so long inspired her had left its mark deep, as
Robert Daventry upon his death-bed had understood. He was dead--yes,
but she could not rid her thoughts of the dreadful destiny which he
had proposed for her. By so little she had escaped it. She would look
round the room with its books and its dainty appointments, and feel
the arms of her chair to make sure that all was real.
"If he had carried me away!" she would cry. "If he had come back with
the law at his side and had carried me away!" And the streets of
Buenos Ayres would pass before her eyes in a procession of blazing
thoroughfares and dimly lighted lanes. And because she had escaped by
so little, she looked out upon all unknown things with apprehension.
Moreover, Daventry's disclosure to her upon his death-bed had, in a
strange way, added to her apprehension. There were three people--thus
her thoughts ran; two of them seeking to hide from her knowledge which
they thought would cause her pain; and she the third, seeking to hide
from them, just for the same reason, that the knowledge was hers
already. The years of terror had been needless, yet they had been
endured, and it was love itself which had inflicted them. Kindness
then could do just the same harm as the deliberate will to hurt. She
took that thought into her heart of hearts, and because of it dreaded
what might come through when the door opened upon the world.
With the coming of the spring, however, there came a stir in her
blood. It was a spring of sunlit days and warm, soft nights. The great
garden bursting into leaf and blossom, the annual miracle of tender
green, the return of the birds, and the renewal of melody quickened
the girl's pulses, gave to her a lightness of spirit, and made her
dreamily expectant of wonders. She walked of an evening under her
great cedar trees, with the flowers and the paths glimmering pale in
the warm dusk, and the earth whispered to her of things as yet beyond
her knowledge; throbbing moments of life, dreams minted in events. She
woke eagerly to the clear, early mornings and the blackbirds calling
on the lawn; she lingered on that lawn when the windows in the house
were alight and the nightingales sang in the copses, and from some
distant wood the clear, double note of a cuckoo was borne to her
across the darkness. There came an evening in the middle of May when
she burst her sheath like any bud on the bole of one of her chestnut
trees. She stood a creature of emotion. The soft wind brought to her
ears the chimes of the clock in the great church tower at Ludsey.
Desire for the adventure overswept her fears. Her feet danced, and her
youth had its way with her.
She could see through the long open window Diana Royle in the
drawing-room. She ran across the grass.
"Di!"
Some new sound in her voice, a leap, a thrill, made Diana look up. She
saw a look in the girl's face, a light in her eyes, a soft color in
her cheeks which quite transfigured her.
"I have been rather a brute, Di," cried Cynthia. "We will go to
London."
"When?"
"As soon as we can pack."
A telegram was sent off to Mr. Benoliel, who was now in Grosvenor
Square. He was bidden to work his quickest and his best. The furnished
house in Curzon Street was still unlet. It was secured, and by the
beginning of June Cynthia had come to town. There she was of course
unknown. But she had made many friends in Warwickshire. Mr. Benoliel
set his shoulder to the wheel; and she had a handsome balance at the
bank. Add to these advantages her looks, and it will be seen that it
was fairly smooth sailing for Cynthia during her first season. She
danced, she dined, she lunched at Hurlingham, she went to plays and to
the opera, she rode under the trees of the Row in the morning, she
went up in a balloon; she came with both hands outstretched for new
experiences. Yet she grasped them with a certain wariness. Eager she
was, but her eagerness was guarded. For dim in the shadows at the back
of her mind there was still the image of the mirror and the door. She
had been in London less than a month when Harry Rames was brought to
her side by Mr. Benoliel.
They talked for a moment upon immaterial topics, and then Mr. Benoliel
turned to Harry Rames:
"So it is all settled, I hear."
"Practically," replied Rames. "I have still to be formally adopted as
prospective candidate by the Three Hundred, but that will be done at a
meeting on Monday night."
"Then there is no longer any reason why we should keep the matter
secret, especially from Miss Daventry, who lives not five miles from
your constituency. Cynthia," and both men turned toward her, "Captain
Rames is going to stand for Ludsey at the next election."
Captain Rames smiled modestly, expecting congratulations. He liked
congratulations, especially from pretty girls, but he was
disappointed. He saw only a wrinkle of perplexity upon Cynthia's
forehead and a shadow in her eyes.
"Why?" she asked.
"You disapprove?" said Rames.
Cynthia drew back.
"I have no right to disapprove," she said coldly, and Harry Rames
planted himself sturdily on both his feet in front of her.
"Nevertheless you do," he insisted.
In spite of herself, a faint smile of amusement played about Cynthia's
lips as she watched him. She felt constrained to accept his challenge.
"I should have thought--" she said with a trifle of hesitation; "it's
not my business, of course--you may think it an impertinence--but
since you challenge me, I should have thought that you would have done
better to have gone back to the Antarctic again."
"That's just what Smale said," remarked Mr. Benoliel, and he moved
away.
"That's just what Smale said, what every one will say. But it's all
wrong," Rames exclaimed emphatically. "I was very glad to go South. I
am very glad now that I went; but once is enough."
A little wrinkle of disdain showed about Cynthia's mouth.
"No doubt there were many hardships."
Captain Rames was nettled.
"Yes, there were, Miss Daventry, a great many, and singularly
unpleasant ones. I have been twenty-four hours in a sleeping-bag with
two other men. The sleeping-bag was sewn up on the inside, it was
within a tent, we were so close together that we could only turn round
one at a time, and we smoked in the bag, and still we were deadly
cold. And I hate being cold. Yes, there were hardships, and though
it's easy enough to remember them lightly here in the Admiralty, they
were not delightful when they happened. But I should face them once
more if I wanted to go back. Only I don't. I never want to see an
ice-pack again as long as I live."
The bluff confidence with which he spoke convinced Cynthia that it was
not a fear of the hardships which had affected him. There she had been
wrong, and she made amends.
"I have no doubt the hardships wouldn't deter you if you wanted to
go," she admitted. "But what I don't understand is why you don't want
to." And a greater emphasis crept into her voice than she had meant to
use, and gave to her words the wistfulness of an appeal. "I should
have thought," she cried, "that you could never have rested until you
had finished what you had begun."
"That's true to the letter," he replied. "That's why I am standing for
Ludsey."
Cynthia looked up at him in surprise.
"I don't think that I understand," she said quietly, and she made room
upon the couch at her side. Harry Rames took the place. The appeal in
her voice was a flattery which he quite failed to understand. Though
Cynthia was young, and though she walked no longer in her enchanted
garden, something of that spirit of romance, which had guided her
there, had revived in her of late. Captain Rames was one of the chosen
men for whom the turnstile had revolved; now that she met him in the
flesh she could not forget it. He was of her dreams, he had marched in
the procession of heroes, and though disillusionment had come to her
he still wore a look of the heroic in her thoughts. All the more
because disillusionment had come to her she wished him to retain the
look. Her appeal was a prayer that he should stamp it upon his image
for good and all.
"May I explain it all to you?" he asked. He sat down beside her, and
in answer to that gentle appeal of hers to make the best of himself,
he drew for her clearly and succinctly and proudly the picture of a
man on the make. "I went South, first and last, to get on in the
world," he began. "As I say, I was very glad to go. The journey was a
great experience. Yes, three years of my life were very well spent
upon it; but they were very well spent, not because the journey was a
great experience, but because it is now the great help to me in
getting on, which I always thought it was going to be."
He took no notice of the disappointment gathering upon Cynthia's face.
He was not aware of it. Here was a girl of remarkable loveliness,
wistfully appealing to him to explain the inner workings of his mind,
and he was delighted to gratify her wish.
"I can hardly remember the time when I was not diligently looking for
a chance to get on. I was poor, you see. I am so still, indeed. I had
none of those opportunities which money commands. I had somehow to
create or find them. There's a motto in gold letters above the clock
in the great hall at Osborne, the first of all mottoes in its superb
confidence:
"'There is nothing the navy cannot do.'"
Cynthia turned to him with eagerness.
"Yes," she said with a smile. "For a boy to have that plain and simple
statement before his eyes each day, that's splendid. I suppose a boy
would never speak of it, but it would be to him a perpetual
inspiration."
"Yes," said Rames, "if all he thought of was the navy; if his
ambitions were bound up with the navy. But mine weren't, you see, and
I used to worry over that sentence even then. 'There is nothing the
navy cannot do.' Very well. But that didn't mean that this little
particular, insignificant cog-wheel in the navy machine was going to
do anything special, or, indeed, anything at all. And I wanted to do
things--I myself, not the navy."
"To do things?" Cynthia asked quietly, and her lips drooped a little
at the corners, "Or to become a personage?"
Captain Rames laughed good-humoredly.
"I can meet you there, Miss Daventry. There's no contradiction in the
phrases. To become a personage is to secure the opportunity of doing
things, and when you are a personage you soon find things which want
doing. After all, how many of the great statesmen started out to be
big men first. They had ideas, I grant you, but they had to make
themselves big men by hook or by crook before they could carry them
out. Look at Disraeli. I have been reading up these fellows. He did a
lot of things. He got the Suez Canal shares. He is the author and
begetter of the Imperial Idea. That's what you remember and admire him
for. Yes; but don't forget his velvet trousers, and his habit of
reciting his epic poems in the drawing-room after dinner. He set out
first of all to be a personage. So do I in my small way. He chose
velvet trousers and epic poems. I went down toward the South Pole. We
each chose the path of least resistance."
Cynthia was silenced, but not convinced. There must be hundreds of
instances to confute him, only for the moment she could not remember
any of them. And one quality in Captain Rames impressed her.
"You speak as if you had thought all these things out," she said.
"I have had to," he replied.
"I wonder that you went into the navy at all."
"My father put me there," he answered.
Cynthia looked him over again, noting the strong, square face, the
direct, the practical, common-sense, uninspired look of him. He would
get on without a doubt. There was a great deal of force to push him
on, and no great delicacy of character to hold him back. Scruples
would not trouble him, and he would not fail of friends. He was of the
type which makes friends easily. Even she herself was attracted. He
would get on probably by trampling upon others, but he would do it
good-humoredly, and with no desire to cause unnecessary pain. There
are men, after all, who put nails in their boots to do the trampling.
"I wonder, with your views," she said, upon an impulse, "that you
didn't leave the navy long ago and go into the city."
Harry Rames looked at her quickly.
"It's rather curious that you should have said that; for, a few years
ago, I was actually thinking of the city, and wondering whether I
could make a fortune quickly there."
Cynthia laughed suddenly. Her suggestion had been uttered in sarcasm.
Youth is disinclined to rate the making of money high in its standard
of careers. Captain Ramos would never have passed the turnstile had
she spoken with him when the turnstile was.
"What held me back," he continued, quite unconscious that he was
toppling off a hero's perch,--and indeed he would have been totally
indifferent had he known,--"what held me back was the knowledge that I
should be beginning too old. One has so very little time," he
exclaimed with a touch of passion in his voice. "I would like to go on
living and living and living for a century. As it is, one begins at
twenty at the earliest, and then with luck one may have fifty-five
years--that's all," and the prospect of the disintegration of his
powers at the early age of seventy-five affected him with so much
melancholy that Cynthia laughed again, but this time with a clear and
joyous ring of amusement.
"Never mind, Captain Rames, I am sure you will live every day of your
fifty-five years, and that is more than all can say."
"They are only thirty-five now," he grumbled. "However,"--he was
not to be diverted from the pleasant business of unfolding his
character,--"I might still have gone into the city, when one morning
in June, as I was walking round the corner of Buckingham Palace to
Constitution Hill, I saw on the other side of the road the president
of the Geographical Society. I knew him slightly. I had read of the
expedition; I was aware that he was organizing it. It came upon me in
a flash, 'By George, here's my chance at last,' and I ran across the
road and applied for the command."
Cynthia nodded her head.
"So that's how you became connected with the expedition--a pure piece
of chance," she said slowly. "If you hadn't turned round that corner
to Constitution Hill----"
"Oh, I should have dropped across something else, no doubt," said
Rames.
"And now you are going into Parliament."
Cynthia was endeavoring to readjust her forecasts with the facts.
"If I get elected," said Rames.
"Oh, you will get elected," replied Cynthia confidently, but there was
no admiration in her confidence. It was almost disdainful. "They will
call you 'Breezy Harry Rames,' and they will elect you by an immense
majority."
"I am very glad you think that," Rames returned imperturbably; and he
leaned forward with his elbow on his knees and spoke to her upon an
altogether different note; so that the disdain died out of her face.
He told her how in answer to Henry Smale's invitation he had gone down
to Westminster in the afternoon, had sent in his card, had waited by
the rails in the great round of St. George's Hall. Smale had come out
from the House, and had fetched him down the stone passage into the
lobby. A great man was speaking, and the lobby was nearly empty. But
he finished his speech in a few moments, and the doors burst open and
there was an eruption of members from the Chamber. Some stood in
groups talking eagerly, others hurried to the libraries and the
smoking-room, and barristers walked up and down in pairs, talking over
their cases for the morrow. There was not a thing in that lobby, from
the round clock above the doors of the House to the post-office and
the whip's rooms which had not impressed itself vividly upon Rames's
mind. Every now and then the doors would swing open as a member passed
into the Chamber, and just for a moment Rames had a glimpse of the
green benches, saw the great mace gleam upon the table, the books and
the three clerks gowned and wigged behind it, and behind the clerks
the dim figure of the Speaker under the canopy of his chair.
Of what he saw on that afternoon Rames spoke with an enthusiasm and a
modesty which quite took Cynthia by surprise. He saw dignity in every
detail, was prepared to magnify with great meanings the simplest
ceremony and form. He could not but impress her with his picture, so
greatly impressed was he himself, so keenly had he longed to walk
unchallenged down that forbidden way between the rails and to pass
through the swing doors over the matting to his place on the green
benches. People in the streets might sneer, or go about their business
unconcerned. The cynics might talk of the Ins and Outs, and speak of
Parliament as the most expensive game in which a race of players of
games indulges, but there in that small room, with the soft light
pouring down from the roof, and very often the morning light streaming
in through the clerestory windows, the great decisions were ratified
which might hamper or advance the future of forty millions.
Henry Smale had paced the lobby for half an hour with Rames, setting
before him clearly the risks which he would run.
"I don't want to advise you one way or the other," said Smale, "but it
is not as if you had no career, and you should come to your decision
with your eyes open. I speak to you as to one of the ambitious. If you
go in, I take it, you go in with an eye on the Treasury bench. Well, I
can tell you this: the House of Commons makes a few, but it breaks a
few, and if it advances some, it mars a good many. Poverty is a
serious hindrance, for it means that you cannot give the time to the
House of Commons which it now claims."
"There are the barristers," objected Rames.
"The House of Commons is in their line of business," returned Henry
Smale. "The highest offices of the law are reached through the House
of Commons. Moreover, the questions which arise for debate here have
often been the subject already of suits in the law courts. They have
acquired, too, the knack of extracting rapidly the essential things
out of a paper or a bill. Thus, the barristers come especially
equipped. Yet, even so, very often they do not make their mark. And
here is a point for you, Captain Rames." Henry Smale turned with a
warning finger upraised and stopped in his walk. "The most
distinguished men enter this House and never get the ear of it. The
House of Commons is not ungenerous, but for eight hours a day through
a long portion of the year people are talking in that Chamber there,
and it will not provide an audience unless, first, the speaker has
something of his own to contribute, and, secondly, can express his
contribution. It does not, on the one hand, ask for oratory; it is
not, on the other, content even with exhaustive knowledge; it demands
character, personality, the power of coining out of your knowledge
some judgments of your own, the power of explaining your judgment in
clear and intelligible phrases sufficiently vivid to arrest its
attention. I admit at once that if you succeed, success here is
sweeter than anywhere else; its recognition is so immediate. But, on
the other hand, here disappointment is more bitter. To come in with
ambition, and to be left behind in the race--there is no destiny more
galling."
"Yes," said Rames quietly, "I have thought over these things. There is
that risk. I am prepared to take it."
"Very well," returned Smale, and once more he turned on the stone
pavement, and with Rames at his side retraced his steps. "Let us
suppose that you have got the ear of the House, that the benches fill
up when you rise, and men stand at the bar to listen to you. Well,
even so, you may lose your seat, and you may not yet have established
yourself firmly enough to make your party find you another. There you
are--out, your dreams dissolved, your ambitions stopped, yourself
miserable, and your presence in this lobby an insignificance. Where
you walked by right, you come as a guest; you have been, and you are
not; you must turn to something else, while your thoughts are here,
and very likely you are already too old to turn to something else."
"You put the worst side of it all in front of me, Mr. Smale."
"No," replied Mr. Smale. "Visit the political clubs a couple of months
after a general election, talk to the defeated candidates who two
months back were members, you will know I am talking the truth. The
place enmeshes you. And mind, not because of the sensations. The
sensations happily are rare. It is a humdrum assembly. I remember once
taking a foreigner into the strangers' gallery at the time of a
European crisis. An indiscreet letter had been sent. The foreigner was
elated. He said to me, 'This will be very interesting. The Commons
will discuss the letter which has so convulsed Europe.' But it was
doing nothing of the kind. It was discussing whether the Tyne, Durham,
and Hartlepool Railway paid its employees sufficiently well to justify
Parliament in allowing it to build a bridge across a stream of which
you have never heard."
Captain Rames smiled.
"I see a good many men in this lobby," he rejoined. "I do not notice
that any of them are bored. Indeed, for the most part, they seem very
busy."
"That is one of the tragedies of the House of Commons," Smale replied.
"There are so many men in who during the whole of each session are
extremely busy doing nothing; they haven't a moment to spare, they do
nothing with so much energy and persistence. One moment they are in
the library writing to a constituent who wants to know why the medal
which his father earned in the Crimea has not yet arrived; the next
moment they rush into the House because the famous Irishman with the
witty tongue is up; they are off again to the outer lobby to tell a
visitor that he can't see the Prime-Minister--'Industry without work,
idleness without rest,' that is how this House was once described,
and, believe me, the description is not inapt."
Thus said Henry Smale, but Harry Rames was not to be turned aside.
"I will take all these risks very willingly, Mr. Smale," he cried, "I
want to be in here."
Henry Smale smiled, ceased from his arguments, and clapped Rames in a
kindly fashion on the shoulder. "I have done my duty," he said.
"Come!"
He led Rames through a little doorway at the side of which sat three
or four messengers, and at the end of a narrow passage tapped upon a
door.
"Come in," said a voice, and as Smale ushered in Harry Rames a man of
pleasant address and an exquisite suit of clothes arose and welcomed
them.
"Hamlin," said Henry Smale, "this is Captain Rames."
Mr. Hamlin shook hands cordially with Rames and invited him to a
chair.
"We shall be very glad to have you in the House," he said. He beamed.
He seemed to have been waiting for Captain Rames to complete his
happiness. "I think Ludsey was suggested."
"Benoliel suggested it," said Smale. "He's a good judge too."
"There is no candidate arranged yet. I will write to Ludsey at once."
Smale and Rames left the room together.
"I should think you might consider that settled," said Smale.
Rames thanked him and referred to Hamlin's charm of manner. Smale's
small eyes twinkled.
"That's why he sits in that room. He's the chief Whip." And shaking
hands with Rames Mr. Smale abruptly returned to the House.
The gist of the conversation with Smale Rames told to Cynthia in the
reception-room at the Admiralty, and she listened with a growing
interest. Then once more his note changed. He spoke with a boyish
enthusiasm of his aims. To force an entrance into that arena; the
entrance gained, to fight himself into the station of a great man;
ultimately to govern and exercise authority--the note of personal
ambition rose to a pitch of exultation in his voice. Of principles he
obviously had no care, theories of politics were to him of no account.
He was the political adventurer pure and simple. Cynthia sat with her
eyes of dark blue clouded, and a real disappointment at her heart. She
raised her face to his, and a little smile trembled upon her lips, and
even her voice shook ever so slightly.
"You have been very honest to me about it all," she said. "I thank you
for that."
Captain Rames was a trifle bewildered. He could not see that he had
anything to conceal.
"Good-night," she said as she rose, "I see my friend Mrs. Royle
waiting for me."
She gave him her hand and moved away for a few steps and then stopped.
Harry Rames was at her side before she had stopped. She turned to him
timidly with the blood mounting very prettily into her cheeks.
"I suppose," she said, "that your journey to the South really counts
now for very little in your thoughts. Yet you must have had a great
many wishes for your success sent to you from all parts of the world
before you started. I wonder you can forget them all, and leave that
work unfinished."
It seemed to Captain Rames that she had hit upon a rather far-fetched
argument to persuade him to a second journey to the South.
"Well, I am getting a good many wishes for my success now, and I hear
them spoken," he said with a smile. "It is true that I got all sorts
of messages and telegrams before I sailed to the South. But to tell
you the truth I was rather too busy to read them. I have got them all
tied up somewhere in a brown-paper parcel."
Cynthia seemed actually to flinch. She turned away abruptly.
"I wanted to ask of you a favor," said Rames. "Mr. Benoliel said that
you lived near Ludsey. You could do a great deal if you would help me.
Will you?"
Cynthia turned back to him, her eyes shone angrily, the blood came
into her cheeks in a rush.
"No," she said decisively, and without another word she walked away.
"I might have struck her," thought Captain Rames. He knew nothing
of a telegram from the Daventry estancia which lay forgotten in that
brown-paper parcel.
None the less he walked home across the Mall treading upon air. Great
people had moved out of their way to make his acquaintance; Cabinet
ministers had promised to speak for him; important ladies had smiled
their friendliest. He looked back upon the days of his insignificance,
and his heart was buoyant within him. Certainly one girl with
dark-blue eyes and a face like a rose-leaf had presumed to disapprove
of him. But there! Girls! You never knew what odd notions nested in
their pretty heads. If a man on the make steered his course by a
girl's favor, he would soon shipwreck on a snag. However, this girl
must be soothed down. Harry Rames could not afford to have an enemy at
Ludsey. But he had no doubt that he could soothe her down. He walked
home, softly whistling under his breath.
Cynthia for her part went home in a different mood. She had lost
another illusion to-night.