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."
"Thank 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.