HARRY RAMES and Cynthia travelled up to London the next day. Cynthia was restless and excited.
“Let us dine at a restaurant and go to a theatre, Harry,” she said. “I can’t sit still and stay at home to-night.”
“Very well. What shall we go and see?”
“Oh, something with bright colors and movement and music.”
But there ran through the piece she chose a melody of a haunting wistfulness and Harry Rames, happening to glance at his wife in the darkness of the auditorium, saw that the tears were raining silently down her cheeks.
“What’s the matter, Cynthia?” he asked in a whisper.
Cynthia smiled at him through her tears and laid a hand upon his arm.
“Hush!” she answered. “It’s all right, Harry.”
As the curtain descended at the end of the act she said, “Let us go now quickly, do you mind? Before the lights are turned up.”
They were, fortunately, near to the end of their row of stalls, and they were able to slip out while the curtain was still ascending and descending upon the lighted stage, and the auditorium still dark. Rames left Cynthia in the lobby while he went in search of his carriage. When he returned he found her standing with her face carefully turned to the wall in front of a commonplace engraving, which seemed to be demanding from her the most meticulous study.
“Have you found it?” she asked, and she hurried with him across the pavement. “Let us go home, Harry. It was nothing except nerves. I was stupid. We have been doing a good deal lately, haven’t we?”
“That’s all right, Cynthia. You poor little girl,” said Rames as he crossed her cloak over her throat. He knew her too well to make the mistake of plying her with questions, and they drove to their home in silence.
“You had better go to bed, Cynthia,” he said. “I’ll send your maid to you.”
“No. I am all right now,” she answered. “I have something to say, Harry.”
She went forward to his study—that room with the mahogany panels where both had faced the hardest crises of their lives, had known the worst of their sorrows, the sweetest of their joys. Harry followed her, turned on the lights, and closed the door. Cynthia was already standing by the fireplace with a foot upon the fender; and she shivered as though she were cold.
“Yes, it’s chilly,” said Rames. “Ill light the fire.”
He struck a match and set light to the paper. The wood crackled, the flames spurted up. Cynthia threw off her cloak and, crouching before the fire, warmed herself. Harry Rames drew up an arm-chair for her.
“Won’t you sit here, Cynthia, and be comfortable?” he asked, and his voice seemed to rouse her from a gloomy contemplation. She stood up and walked over to his bureau.
Harry’s eyes followed her movements closely. With a growing consternation he saw her grasp the handles of a locked drawer and try to open it.
“What do you keep in here, Harry?” she asked.
“Oh, some old forgotten things.”
“Your charts?”
“My word, yes. I believe they are there,” he said with an air of surprise.
“Will you show them to me?” Cynthia asked. “I should like to see them.”
“I don’t know where the key is. It’s lost.”
“Are you sure?”
“For all the chance I have of finding it, dear, it might just as well be at the bottom of the Serpentine.”
Harry had not moved away from the fireplace. Cynthia, her back toward him, had been playing with the brass handles of the locked drawer. Now she swung round suddenly. Often she had wondered what errand had taken him from the house at one o’clock of the morning after she had revealed her heart to him in this very room. Now she guessed the truth. It was on that night that he had begun to build up his dykes against the encroachments of his longings. She faced him; her eyes burned steadily upon his face, thoughtful, but betraying nothing of her thoughts.
“Yes,” she said, “I suppose it might as well be in the Serpentine.” She turned again to the drawer.
“A knife will open it easily, Harry.”
Harry Rames moved uncomfortably.
“It had better be left alone, Cynthia,” he said. But she insisted and, opening a blade of his knife, he went reluctantly across the room to her side.
“It is your wish, Cynthia. You will remember that?” he said gravely. “For myself I would much rather that it should never be unlocked until both of us are dead.”
Cynthia showed no surprise at the gravity of his voice. But now she too paused. “There is still time,” she was saying to herself in feverish trouble of mind, though her face was calm. “There is still time. He is giving me my chance—my last chance.” Her eyelids were lowered over her eyes and she glanced at him under the thick lashes.
“You are afraid to open it, Harry?”
“Yes, I am afraid.”
It was not merely the outrush of old and overwhelming memories which he dreaded. But that locked drawer had become to him a symbol of his own self-mastery. So long as it remained locked, and no longer, he would dominate his torments and be the captain of his soul. For so long he would keep locked a frail door against his yearnings. Cynthia, in a voice so faltering and low that it was hardly audible, said:
“Still I should like it opened.”
“Very well.”
She stood with her fingers clenched upon her palms whilst Harry inserted the blade of his knife in the chink of the drawer, ran it along until it touched the lock, and then forced apart the fastenings. There was a crack as of splintering wood. Harry Rames replaced his knife in his pocket, pulled out the drawer, and carried it over to his writing-table.
“There it is,” he said, moving away from it to the fireplace. Cynthia bent over the drawer and turned on the light of a reading lamp which stood upon the table.
“This is your own chart upon the top, Harry?”
“Yes. It is the last one, you see. Hemming may be bringing back another.”
“Will you show me exactly the point you reached?”
It seemed to Harry as if she was bent on trying him to the last point of endurance.
“It is marked there quite plainly, Cynthia,” he said.
Cynthia leaned over the drawer—for a long time. Harry Rames was quite surprised at the closeness of her scrutiny. It was so long since she had shown any interest in his journey or indeed in anything except his political career. As a matter of fact, Cynthia saw of that map nothing but a blur: for her eyes were dim with tears, and she bent so low over its configurations simply because in that attitude her face was hidden.
She moved.
“What is this?”
She took up a brown package, tied up with string, which lay in a corner of the drawer.
“I don’t know,” said Rames with a puzzled face. “I have forgotten.”
“May I open it?”
“Of course.”
Cynthia cut the string and, one after another, perhaps a score of brown telegraph envelopes slipped out in a cascade and fell upon the table in front of her.
“Telegrams,” she said curiously. “Unopened, too! Oh, Harry!” this with a mocking laugh of reproach. Then she looked at the address of one of the telegrams. It ran:
|
RAMES, |
As she read her face changed. There came a look of introspection in her dark, wide-open eyes. She swept back in her thoughts over the course of years and took note of the irony of things and of the surprising changes in a life like hers which, to all the world, was uneventful and prescribed.
“I remember,” she said. “These are the good wishes sent to you when you started. You once told me that you never opened them.”
“I hadn’t the time. We had to catch the tide out of London. We were late getting away. I had forgotten that I had kept them all.”
“I am going to open them.”
“It is too late to answer them.”
“I wonder.”
Cynthia opened the telegrams until she came upon one about half through the number which arrested her attention. This she spread out before her and smiled at its phrasing.
“Harry!” she said.
Rames turned about.
“Yes?”
“Come and read this.”
He stood behind Cynthia’s chair and read aloud the message still legible upon the form.
“Every heart-felt wish for a triumphant journey from an unknown friend in—;” and then he stopped with an intake of his breath. “In South America,” he resumed, and so stood quite still for the space of a few seconds. Then he leaned forward and looked at the name of the telegraph office from which the message had been sent.
“Daventry,” he cried.
“Yes,” said Cynthia with a little laugh upon which her voice broke. “We had a telegraph office on the estancia. We were very proud of it, I can tell you”; and then the amusement died away from her voice, and “oh!” she whispered in a long sigh, as she felt his arm about her.
“You sent that! You! Cynthia! Before I knew you, before we met.”
“Yes, dear, I sent it.”
“Just think,” he cried. “It reached me at Tilbury. It travelled out with me to the South. It was in the desk in my cabin for three long dark winters. It came back with me to England. By chance I met you——”
“No, not by chance, Harry,” Cynthia interrupted. “I sent Mr. Benoliel to fetch you.”
“Yes, you did,” he agreed, with a laugh. “We met, and we married, and through all these changes it has lain here unopened. Why didn’t I open it? That was conceit, Cynthia. I was haughty. I was going out to discover the South Pole. I didn’t open my telegrams.”
“But if you had opened it, Harry, you would only have laughed. For it’s just the message of a schoolgirl, isn’t it? You were one of my heroes—oh, not the only one but the latest one—I had just let you in past the turnstile to my enchanted garden. I was seventeen on the very day I sent it. I drove down to the office—oh in such a condition of importance. I pictured to myself you, the unknown you, sitting in your cabin and wondering and wondering and wondering who your little friend was in South America. Then I drove back and”—she stopped and went on again slowly—“yes, other things happened to me that day.” She looked down again at the telegram. “Yes, the message of a foolish and romantic school-girl.”
“I should like to be able to think, Cynthia,” said her husband, “that I had opened it when it came.”
“But you didn’t,” said Cynthia, “and so—” she broke off her sentence. She took the telegram form, folded it, and replaced it in its envelope. She took a brush from a little bottle of gum which stood ready upon the table by the inkstand and, smearing the inner border of the envelope, stuck it down again. Then she stood up and turned to her husband. “And so,” she continued, “you must take it, Harry, as though it were despatched to you by me only to-day for the first time and delivered to you here now at midnight.”
She held out to him the telegram and he took it, gazing at her with a look of wonder. And then hope flamed in his eyes. Cynthia turned away abruptly. To her that swift flame of hope, of life, was almost intolerable.
“Then you knew,” he cried.
Cynthia nodded her head, but she kept her face averted.
“I have known a long time,” she answered in a low voice. “Ever since the letter came to you with the Rexland stamp.”
The sound of her voice and her attitude pierced to Rames’s heart. His exultation gave way to concern.
“I am very sorry, Cynthia,” he said gently. “I tried to hide it.”
“Oh, my dear, I know you did. With all your strength you tried to hide it. You watched yourself each minute. But,” and she turned to him with a little smile of tenderness, “I watched you closer still, and the longing grew too big to be hidden.”
Harry Rames made no pretence to deny the truth of her words, knowing full well that all denial would be vain. The screen was down between them.
“Yes,” he said; “but Cynthia, I keep my bargain.”
“My dear, there is no longer any bargain between us,” she answered, “for on both sides there is love. Of that I am very sure.”
She held out her hands to him and he caught them and held her against his breast.
“You said you had rather that drawer was not unlocked until both of us were dead,” she whispered. “My dear, if that drawer was not to be unlocked, we might both of us be dead at once for all the value our lives were going to be. So you will go, you must, unless we are to be wrecked altogether. We have been most unhappy, both of us. I, because I thought of the dangers,” and she suddenly caught him close as though even now she dared not let him go, “and could not bring myself to make the sacrifice and let you run the risk—you, because the call was always in your ears. It couldn’t go on. That’s the truth, Harry. Especially now that you know that your secret’s no longer a secret to me. We should grow estranged, embittered, each one thinking the other horribly selfish. Perhaps, even hatred might come.”
“No,” protested Harry.
“Oh, yes, yes. It has come from smaller causes often enough. It might come, Harry, and that would be terrible. I have thought it out, my dear. All the time we were cruising down in the West I was thinking our position over and over and over. And it seemed to me that you must win this Hickleton election first—and then I would tell you that I understood your great trouble and let you go. But you had to win first. I couldn’t let you go while people might be able to say that you had gone because you had been beaten in your political ambitions. I was too proud of you, my dear, to allow that. You must lay down your career at a moment of success, leaving behind you a good name amongst your colleagues and perhaps a great many regrets. But you have won the election now, you have made good, as they say, and so, for both our sakes, you must go.”
She drew herself out of his arms and moved away to the fire.
“Of course it’s just what I wanted when I first met you, isn’t it?” she said with a wavering effort of a laugh. “I urged you to go back and finish your work the first time I met you—one night at the Admiralty. Only things have changed a good deal since then, haven’t they?”
Her voice, which had been steady up till now, broke, and with a sob she suddenly hid her face in her hands. “Oh, Harry,” she cried as though her heart was breaking, and he hurried to her, exclaiming:
“Cynthia, I am a brute. I can’t leave you here for three years alone.”
She held him off with her arm outstretched, dreading lest she should weaken and take her advantage of his remorse and so have to go through all this heart-rending renunciation again at some future time.
“You won’t, Harry,” she said, drying her eyes with her handkerchief. “I have thought it all out. My father asked me on his death-bed not to desert the Daventry estancia altogether. He loved it so himself that he did not wish to think that he would die and that no one of his own people would ever see it again and make sure that all was going well with it. And here’s the opportunity. While you go down to the Antarctic I will go back to the Daventry estancia. I couldn’t live here day after day with you away amidst the storms and the snow. There I shall be able to. I will have the estancia to look after. When will you go?”
“Not so very soon, Cynthia, after all,” he said. “It will take me a year before the preparations are complete. Besides, there’s the money to be raised.”
Cynthia raised her shoulders in a gesture of reproach.
“Oh, Harry! There’s no trouble about the money, of course.”
Rames stared at her. “Cynthia,” he cried. “You’ll help?”
“More than help, Harry,” she answered. “You see I let you go—yes. I even bid you go—yes. But I mean to have my share, my dear, in whatever you do. I mean that you shall carry something of me, something more than a telegram this time, to your farthest South.”
Rames sat down in a chair by the side of the fire close to where she stood. He gazed into the flames in silence. With all gentleness and love she was heaping coals of fire upon his head. Every look, every word she spoke, confessed the deep pain which he was causing her. She was brave, but through the curtain of her bravery her fear and anguish shone. He spoke as a man will who is smitten by his conscience.
“I am very sorry, Cynthia. When I asked you to marry me I had no suspicion that any longing could get so strong a hold on me. I once told you carelessly that men were driven out upon these expeditions by the torment of their souls. I said that knowing it only by hearsay and by the plain proof of it which they show in what they have written. Now I know it—here,” and he struck his breast above his heart. “Yes, I have got to go if I am ever to have peace. But I am sorry, Cynthia.”
His voice trailed off into silence and Cynthia laid a hand upon his head and stroked his hair. “I know,” she said, “I know.”
“All that I thought so fine, so well worth having—the fight with other men for mastery, the conquest with what conquest would bring—power and rule and governing—it’s extraordinary how completely all desire for it has vanished out of me!” he continued. “Do you remember the account I gave you of my maiden speech?”
“Yes.”
Cynthia’s hand had gone to her breast, but her voice was steady.
“There was a fragment of time when the world went blank, when I lost the thread of my speech, and stood dumb. A fragment of time so short that it wasn’t noticeable to any one in the House except myself.”
“Yes.”
“Well, these three years of politics seem to me just such an unnoticeable interruption of my real life. The fight which I revelled in appears to me now a squabble made ignoble with intrigues, bitter with mean disappointments, the victory not worth the fight. No doubt I am wrong. I went into the House of Commons, you see, without ideas,” and Cynthia started at the word so familiar to her fancies. “Now I have one, a big one, and it has mastered me.”
And so Harry Rames passed at last through the turnstile into Cynthia’s private garden. But it was in accordance with the irony of their lives that she wished with every drop of her blood that he had remained outside.
“I long for simple things, not shifts and intrigues and bitterness; the gray mists on glaciers; the day’s journey over the snow, with its wind ridges and its storms; the hard, lean life of it all; the fight, not with men, but with enormous things of nature, some dangerous, some serene, but, whether dangerous or serene, wholly indifferent.” He gazed for a little while into the fire, seeking in the analysis of his emotions his apologia.
“I think, Cynthia,” he continued, “that once a man has gone far into the empty spaces of the earth, he has the mark of them upon him. Voices call from them over all the leagues of all the seas and need no receivers at the end.”
“Yes,” said Cynthia, and once more her memories travelled back to the death-bed of old Daventry in the dark room of the white house. He had given her reasons for his great love of his estancia on the wide plains of Argentina. But there had been another reason, she remembered, which his failing wits had not allowed his tongue to formulate. Cynthia had often wondered what that reason was. She had no doubt that her husband had explained it now. “Yes, my father also heard those voices.”
After a short silence Harry Rames reached out his hand and took hers.
“I think, my dear,” he said gently, “that things would have been different, that I should not have wanted to go, had we been fortunate enough to have children—” and with a cry Cynthia turned to him fiercely.
“No, no!” she exclaimed. “During this hour, for the first time, I have been thanking God we had no children. For if we had, you would still have wanted to go just as much as you do now, and that I could not have borne.”
Harry had no answer for her outburst. In his heart he knew that what she had said was true. He sat in silence, his eyes upon the fire and her hand in his; and a moment or two later she dropped upon her knees at his side.
“But oh, Harry, come back to me!” she cried. “You must go I know. That’s the way things happen. But oh, come back to me.”
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