IT had been arranged that Mr. Benoliel’s small party should take supper with Harry Rames at his hotel. As they stood waiting at the foot of the platform the agent came to them from the outer doors.
“The way’s clear now,” he said. “I think you can go.”
They passed through the empty hall, Cynthia first at Harry Rames’s side, and in that order they came out upon the steps. A fine rain was falling, but the crowd had not dispersed. The great light over the door showed the climbing street thronged. Coat collars were turned up, hats were pressed down; and so as Rames and Cynthia came out they saw in the glare beneath the rain just a mass of swaying, jostling black things, round black things moving indecisively this way and that like some close-packed herd of blind animals. Just for a moment the illusion lasted. Then Rames was seen and of a sudden the heads were thrown back, the hats shaken high, and all those black round things became the white faces of living men, their eyes shining in the light, their voices shouting in acclamation.
Captain Rames took a step back.
“Did you see?” he cried to Cynthia.
“Yes. They are not animals to draw your chariot,” she replied. “They are men.”
“Yes, men—men to govern,” he answered. His was the spirit of the old Whig families. Though he was not of them, he meant to force his way among them. To govern the people, not to admit it to government, to go far in appeasing it, but not to give it the reins, that was his instinct. He wished to retain the old governing class, but he meant to be one of it. His ambitions soared to-night, and reached out beyond this hilly, narrow street. He led these men now who stood acclaiming him in the rain. His thoughts shot forward to other days when every town in England might at his coming pour out its masses to endorse his words.
He waved his hand toward his companions and the crowd made a lane for them across the street to the hotel. Rames himself was carried shoulder-high, and set down within the doors. He led the way up the stairs to a big room upon the first floor overlooking the street, where supper was laid. A great shout went up from the street as they entered the room.
“They want you,” said Mrs. Royle.
“No,” replied Rames. He opened a door into a smaller room in which no lights were lit and pulled up the blinds. Across the street under a great clock was a newspaper office and in the windows the election returns of the night were being, displayed. All along the line victories were gained for Rames’s party. Arthur Pynes, a young manufacturer, and the chairman of the association, to whose energy the organization was due; an ex-Mayor, a Mr. Charlesworth, and one or two hard fighters of the old school joined the group in the dark room. One of them, a rosy-faced contractor with a high laugh, who had presided over the association in its darker days, leaned against the window by Cynthia Daventry.
“He’ll have to appear on this balcony to-morrow night, as soon as he can after the result’s declared,” he said. “You see, the windows are all boarded up on the ground floors opposite.”
“He’ll speak from here?” asked Cynthia.
“He’ll speak, but they won’t listen,” replied Mr. Arnall. “I remember Sir William Harris, the last time he was elected before he was made a judge—” and he ran off into stories of the old days until the windows of the newspaper office were darkened and the crowd at last dispersed.
“Let us go in to supper,” said Rames, and they all passed into the next room. “Will you sit here, Mrs. Royle, and you here, Miss Daventry?” He placed Diana Royle upon his right hand and Cynthia upon his left. “Pynes, will you take the chair next to Mrs. Royle, and Colonel,” he addressed the tall, gaunt man whose flowing platitudes had left nothing in Cynthia’s mind but a recollection of sonority, a booming as of waves in a hollow cave, “will you sit next to Miss Daventry?”
The colonel bowed and prepared to take his seat. But he was a punctilious old gentleman and stood upon the ceremonies.
“You have not introduced me, Rames,” he said.
“I beg your pardon. Miss Daventry, this is Colonel Challoner. He has made his own seat a safe one—a county division which polls a week later than we do, and he lives in it. So when I applied at head-quarters for help at our last meeting Colonel Challoner was kind enough to volunteer.”
Cynthia shot a startled glance at her neighbor. Her own name was Challoner too; and all that was terrible in her recollections was linked with it. Of course, it did not follow that this Challoner was any relation of hers. There must be many families of that name. Nevertheless, the sudden sound of it caused her a shock. The blood rushed into her face. She made a movement. Almost she shrank away. Challoner, however, was taking his seat. He noticed the quick movement; he did not appreciate the instinct of fear which had caused it.
“Ah, it is true then, Miss Daventry,” he said. “We have already met. You remember it, too.”
Cynthia was startled.
“No, Colonel Challoner,” she replied quickly. “I don’t think that we have. Indeed, I am sure we have not. I should surely have remembered if we had.”
“That is a pretty thing for a young lady to say to an old man,” the colonel answered with a smile. “But my memory is a good one. I never forget a face.”
He had the particular pride of all men with good memories, and ambition had intensified it into an obstinacy. For he had his ambition, and successive disappointments had only strengthened its hold upon his heart. He aimed to be Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He had been military attaché at so many Embassies, the post, to his thinking, was marked out for him. At each new promotion to the Cabinet, at each general election, he was sure that he could no longer be overlooked. He ran from platform to platform to increase his claim upon the office should his party be returned. A telegram from the chief whip had brought him to Ludsey, would send him to-morrow into Yorkshire. Now, surely, his turn must come! He had one persistent fear, lest he should be thought too old. And he clung with an almost piteous reiteration to the accuracy of his recollections as a vindication of the alertness of his powers.
“When I saw you upon the platform I was quite sure that it was not for the first time, Miss Daventry,” he insisted.
“During the season, perhaps,” Cynthia replied. “At some reception or ball. Did you hear that, Colonel Challoner?” and she turned quickly toward Mr. Arnall, who was telling an old story of the days and the hustings when broken heads were common about the doors of the polling-booths.
Cynthia laughed eagerly with the rest in her anxiety to keep Colonel Challoner from plying her with questions. She was ready with her answers, but greatly she feared, lest by probing into his memories he should understand of a sudden where he had seen her before. And for a time she was successful. The confidence which had run from man to man in the great Corn Exchange an hour before was present at this supper-table and kindled them all to cheeriness. The ex-Mayor said with a pleasant drawl, which was his habit:
“Do you remember Taylor the Democrat, Arnall? He fought two elections here within three months and then went bankrupt. He was an adventurer and the most eloquent man I ever heard. But he was a caution.”
“Yes,” cried Mr. Arnall, with a clicking laugh at the back of his throat. “Do you remember his meeting down by the club? ‘Gag that calf,’” and Mr. Arnall spluttered with delight.
“That’s it,” said the ex-Mayor. “You must know that Taylor stood as a Democrat, Captain Rames. That’s where the fun comes in. He wore a blue swallow-tail-coat with brass buttons and his hair down to his shoulders. ‘Your father was a miller,’ one fellow shouted from the crowd. ‘Gag that calf,’ cried Taylor and he held up his arms in the air. ‘Look at these fair hands. No work has ever sullied them.’ That did him all right.”
A quiet, elderly man leaned over the table.
“Did you notice the flag upon the chairman’s table, Captain Rames?” he asked. “It was woven out of Ludsey silk fifty years ago. It’s the true Ludsey blue. My father wove it for Sir William Harris’s first election, and the other fellows swore they would have it on the polling-day. But we carried it about the streets from morning to evening, with twelve big fellows to protect it. It was nearly down once, I remember. I was a lad at the time—at the corner of Stapley’s Lane. But we saved it and it was your table-cloth to-night, Captain Rames. It brought us victory then. It will again to-morrow.”
The stories were continued. They were often not very pointed; often enough the humor was far to seek; but they were alive. They were told with infinite enjoyment, and the smallest details were remembered over decades. Cynthia began now to listen to them for their own sake; she was learning with surprise the value of politics to the lives of men in a busy city of the provinces. But the colonel at her elbow was not longer to be diverted.
“I think it must have been in Dorsetshire that we met,” he said. “I live near to Wareham.”
Cynthia looked at him quite steadily.
“I have never been in Dorsetshire in my life, Colonel Challoner.”
“Yet I associate you with that county,” he persisted. “Now, why should I do that, Miss Daventry? You have not been to my house, I know. For since my wife died and my son went away, I have not had so many young people to stay with me as I should have liked.”
From the moment when Colonel Challoner had claimed her recognition, Cynthia had not doubted that she was sitting next to a relation. And Colonel Challoner’s location of his home in Dorsetshire, near to Wareham, had confirmed her belief. She knew quite well how it came about that he had seemed to recognize her, that he associated her with his own parish. She knew because upon one unforgettable night she had crouched in a great chair in a dark room and through the panels of a door had heard her father claim her as his daughter. He, too, had recognized her as Colonel Challoner now did, and just by the same means. For there was a Romney hanging upon the dining-room wall in that house near Wareham which might have been a portrait of herself. But until this moment she had not guessed what degree of relationship bound her to the old man at her side.
Now, however, she knew that too. The hesitation, the gentle wistfulness with which he had spoken of his son struck home at her. She was this man’s granddaughter. She was moved by what he had said. A big house empty of young people must be a place of melancholy and hollow as a shell. Yet she would not reveal herself. She had it fixed now as an instinct of her nature that she would never wear the name of Challoner, nor admit a link with any of that name. . . . But she turned toward her grandfather with a greater sympathy.
“You have given up your whole life to politics now?” she asked, and a wave of pity swept through her. It could not be possible that he should win any success in that sphere, and she was young and could hardly conceive of life at all without success.
“Yes. I left the army twenty-five years ago. Sometimes I think that I may have made a mistake,” he answered. “But it is too late for me to go back upon a mistake, even were I sure that I had made one. Politics is all I have now. I have no longer any family. And I have politics in my bones. I do not know what I should do if I lost my seat. I should probably die.” He spoke with absolute simplicity, absolute sincerity: Cynthia was greatly moved. An old futile man without wife or family in a big, empty house, feeding himself from day to day with the disappointments of a hopeless ambition—it made for her a dismal picture. She contrasted it with the other one before her eyes—Harry Rames at the head of the table, confident, comfortable, young as politicians go, with the world a smooth sea for his conquering sails; and once again an unaccountable resentment against Harry Rames flared up within her. Almost she wished that for once he might fail. Almost she revealed herself then to Colonel Challoner. But she did not. She had painfully learned a great gift—silence.
She knew very well with what relief she would wake on the morrow to the recollection that she was still Cynthia Daventry and not Cynthia Challoner.
“I expect that what I say will sound extravagant to you, Miss Daventry,” Colonel Challoner continued. “You at your age could hardly understand it.”
The spell which was upon Cynthia was broken. She looked thoughtfully about the table.
“I should not have understood it an hour ago. I was inclined to think it really didn’t matter very much in the long run who was in and who was out, that the things which wanted doing and which legislation could do, would get themselves done sooner or later by one side or the other and perhaps by both; and that for the rest the nation went on its way, leaving the talk and the honors to the politicians because it had no time for either and doing the work itself.”
Colonel Challoner laughed.
“That’s a definite point of view, at all events.”
“I expect that I was drawing my ideas from another—” she was about to say “country,” but checked herself lest she should be asked what country and so put Colonel Challoner on the track of her relationship to him. She went on hastily: “But since I have been sitting here, I have learned how much of color politics can bring into the lives of men.”
And Colonel Challoner looked at her and cried:
“That’s it, Miss Daventry. Color! That’s the great need. That’s why the quack religions flourish in the back streets. We all need it—all except the man there at the head of the table,” and Colonel Challoner looked a trifle enviously at Harry Rames. “He has it and to spare.”
The door opened by a few inches at this moment and a wrinkled pippin of a head was pushed in. A pair of little bright eyes surveyed the company and then the door was thrust wide open and M. Poizat stepped lightly in.
Harry Rames rose and shook hands with the little Frenchman. Colonel Challoner stroked his white moustache.
“You were present to-night?” said Rames. “What a difference, eh?”
“Yes, I was proud,” M. Poizat returned. “But always I waited for some little word—some little word which did not come.”
“One always forgets an important point and generally the most important. It is the experience of all speakers,” said Rames. He turned to the table. “I must introduce to you M. Poizat, and if ever your voices are hoarse in Ludsey, please ask for Lungatine.”
Rames drew a chair to the table, pressed M. Poizat into it, and filled for him a glass of champagne. The little man was delighted. He drank Captain Rames’s health, he bowed to the company; and his hand was arrested in mid-air, holding the wine-glass by its stem. Colonel Challoner was gazing fixedly across the table at him. A look of trouble took all the merriment out of M. Poizat’s face.
“I have seen you before, M. Poizat,” said Colonel Challoner.
Cynthia began to think that the colonel had a mania for recognizing people.
“I am Mr. Poizat, an Englishman,” the little confectioner answered hurriedly.
“Naturalized,” said the colonel.
“It is true,” said M. Poizat reluctantly.
“If you had only said that last night,” thought Harry Rames. “You would have got your advertisement, my friend.”
But he said not a word aloud, and M. Poizat continued:
“But it was a long time ago. And all the years since I have spent in Ludsey.”
Colonel Challoner shook his head.
“It was not in Ludsey that I saw you. For I was never here in my life before.”
M. Poizat shrugged his shoulders.
“We have sat opposite to one another in a train perhaps. We have run against one another in the traffic of a London street.”
“No, it was on some occasion more important. I do not forget a face.”
“Nor I,” said M. Poizat. “And I have never seen yours, sir, until this moment;” and though he spoke with spirit his uneasiness was apparent to every one at that table.
Colonel Challoner sat back in his chair and let the subject drop. But he was not satisfied. He was even annoyed at his failure to identify the Frenchman, and he sat relentlessly revolving in his mind the changing scenes of his life. Meanwhile the talk drifted back to by-gone elections and this or that great night when some famous statesman was brought into the town and never allowed to speak one audible word. Mr. Arnall mentioned one whose name resounded through England.
“Next night in Warrington he said that he had been struggling with the beasts at Ephesus,” said Mr. Arnall with a chirrup of delight. The old Adam was strong in him at this moment and his own solemn exhortations to hear all sides clean forgotten. Suddenly Colonel Challoner broke in upon him. He leaned across the table and with a smile of triumph stared between the candles at M. Poizat.
“It was in a corridor,” he said, “a vast bare corridor—somewhere—a long time ago. You were coming out of a room—wait!—wait!—No, I cannot name the place,” and he sank back again disappointed.
But M. Poizat’s face wore now a sickly pallor.
“In no corridor—nowhere,” he stammered and his eyes, urgent with appeal, turned toward Harry Rames.
Harry Rames did his first service for an elector of Ludsey. He glanced toward Mr. Benoliel, who rose.
“It is getting late,” said Benoliel, “and Rames has a busy day in front of him.”
“I will order your motor-car round to the door,” said Rames. He rang the bell and the rest of the company left the table. Diana Royle and Cynthia sought their cloaks in the adjoining sitting-room. Harry Rames took M. Poizat by the arm and led him to the door.
“I am very grateful to you,” he said. “Good-night.” And even as M. Poizat’s foot was over the threshold the voice of Colonel Challoner brought him to a halt:
“One moment. I remember now. You come from Alsace, M. Poizat.”
“I come from Provence,” cried the little man, facing about swiftly with a passionate, white face.
Harry Rames had begun to think Colonel Challoner rather a bore with his incomplete reminiscences. That thought passed from him altogether. He had but to look at the two men to know that some queer and unexpected moment of drama had sprung from their chance meeting at this hotel at Ludsey. They stood facing one another, the little Frenchman in the doorway with fear and rage contending in his face, his mouth twisted into a snarl, his lips drawn back from his gums like an animal, his teeth gleaming; the colonel erect above the table with the candle-light shining upward upon a triumphant and menacing face.
“You were in Metz in ’71,” cried Challoner. “So was I. I was a lad at the time. I was aide to our attaché. That’s where I saw you, M. Poizat—in the long corridor of the Arsenal. Yes, you were in Metz in ’71.”
And behind M. Poizat appeared the waiter announcing that Mr. Benoliel’s motor-car was at the door.
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