CYNTHIA smiled, but she did not believe.
“I think,” she said, “that this is the very first time you have gone beyond the truth to say a pleasant thing to me.”
“It is the truth,” he insisted. “I almost did more than come to you. I almost asked you to let me inflict my speech on you before I made it in the House.”
“Oh, I wish you had!” cried Cynthia. “It would have made a difference to me this last week—a great difference.” Then she turned swiftly toward Harry Rames with a glance of distrust. “Why didn’t you come then?” she asked coldly. “There was nothing to hinder you. You knew that you would be very welcome. I should like to have known beforehand what you were going to say;” and once more a gentle wistfulness crept into her voice. “I should have liked also to have heard you in the House. I should have liked, in a word—not to have been shut out.”
“You weren’t shut out,” Harry Rames exclaimed. “You mustn’t fancy that! It’s not true. If I did not come, it was really because I had you in my thoughts. Yes. I stayed away deliberately because of a saying of Smale’s which I know to be true, which I quoted to you at Ludsey.”
The distrust grew stronger in Cynthia’s mind. What had Smale to do with the matter? Her face hardened. Harry Rames had, till this moment, at all events, been honest, had always stood apart in her eyes by reason of his honesty. Must she strip him now of that quality even as she had to do of the other, the imagined ones?
“What saying?” she asked.
“That many a man may cut a great figure upon the platforms who will never get the ear of the House of Commons. I wanted to be sure that I was not one of those—before I came to you.”
A particular significance in the intonation of the words warned her—and then troubled her. She looked at him swiftly, and as swiftly looked away. The blood mounted into her face and flushed her throat.
“I wanted to be sure that I should come not quite empty-handed,” he continued.
Cynthia made no pretence to misunderstand him, and no answer. All was explained to her now: why he had stayed away, why he now returned—all those particulars which he had told her she might have guessed, and not one of which had to this moment entered her head. She had never stepped beyond the border-line of friendship in her thoughts of Harry Rames—never once. She was startled now that she was asked to. She needed time to adjust herself to the new point of view. He had been honest with her, after all. That was her first instinctive recollection.
“So I am here now to ask you to marry me,” he continued. He spoke very quietly and simply. He did not simulate any passion, and again in her heart comparing him with that other wooer in the Row, she thanked him for his honesty.
Still she made no answer, but calmness had returned to her. She sat looking out of the window, straight ahead of her, with her chin propped in the palm of her hand. She was quite still, and the stillness of her attitude was no greater than the stillness of her mind. There was no throb of joy at her heart. But Harry Rames had been honest with her, and she had been taught not to expect so very much.
“I think you know whom you will be marrying,” he resumed. “I have tried to make what I know about myself clear to you as well as to me. You once agreed that I left you no illusions about me.”
“Yes. On the platform at the Corn Exchange in Ludsey,” Cynthia replied. “I remember quite well. I remember your answer too: That you did not mean to.”
“Yes,” said Harry Rames. “That was my answer.”
Cynthia paused for a few seconds. Then in her turn she began to question him.
“So even then you were thinking that if you succeeded in Parliament—this afternoon would come?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps even before then?”
“Yes, even before then.”
Cynthia nodded her head. With a smile in which there was irony and a little of her old resentment, she remarked:
“Yes, you have always looked ahead.”
Harry replied simply and gravely:
“Always.”
“Thank you,” said Cynthia.
She thanked him because he was so perfectly honest with her. He admitted—for his words were no less than such an admission—that he had deliberately thought of her because she had money. On the other hand, it was true that he had stood by and left the opportunity open for any one to snatch until he could himself bring something into the partnership. That weighed with her in his favor.
“Will you tell me when you first began to think of me in this way?” she asked with an earnestness which to Harry Rames appeared quite singular. To his direct mind the one question which needed answering was whether she meant to marry him or no.
“Does the exact date matter?”
“Very much.”
Rebellion again broke out in Cynthia. “I believe it is quite a usual question for maidens to ask on these occasions. But no doubt I ought to have asked it with a deeper bashfulness.”
Harry reflected. Here was one of the nice subtleties of the feminine mind which somehow he must satisfy.
“It was after I had driven out once or twice from Ludsey to see you. That is as near as I can put it. It was after I had got to know you a little.”
“As soon, in a word, as you concluded that I would suit the place.” Though the sentence was phrased still in the ironical form, the irony had suddenly gone from her voice. She was so relieved that a smile trembled about her lips. Her next words gave the reason of her relief.
“So really and truly you want me personally—as well.”
The question would have sounded vague to a stranger, but these two understood that it was her fortune which she omitted to name. Cynthia knew, as she could not but know, that her wealth had first set his thoughts running toward her. But it was some personal quality which in the end had decided him to ask for her. He must have money—yes, but other help than money as well. It was a satisfaction to her pride that he found it in her.
“Yes,” he returned. “A wife can do so much for a man in politics if she is the right wife. I should be very glad if you would marry me,” Rames resumed. “I think that we should get along together very well, and together we might do important things.”
“Be important things,” Cynthia corrected.
Harry Rames smiled.
“That’s an old quarrel of ours, Cynthia. I mean ‘do’ this time.”
Cynthia looked at him quickly. She was in the mood to find in that hope the strongest of appeals.
“You really think so?”
“I do. I should owe so very much to you. I should be conscious of my debt. I should try with all my strength to pay it back.”
Cynthia gave him her face frankly now. A smile of confidence quite lit it up.
“I have no doubt of that,” she said; and then the smile faded, and there came a look of longing.
“But I would rather, of course, that it were work for love of me, than work to repay me. There’s a difference, isn’t there? But I suppose one can’t have everything, and—perhaps—I might be content to help you on.”
She fell again to a wistful silence, pursuing the vision of a happiness which might have been down an avenue of bright imagined years. The happiness did exist. She had seen the evidences of it often enough. All men were not tant soit peu cochons, as she had once heard an unhappy French lady describe them, nor were all women neurotic. She had heard of lovers who felt that they had been waiting for one another since the beginning of the world. But it seemed that such happiness was for others, not for her.
“Tell me!” she said. “When you were making your speech, after the agitation had passed and when you were master of yourself, you looked up to the ladies’ gallery, you said, and noticed the women behind the grille?”
“Yes.”
“Well—it is a little difficult to ask the question—But”—she stopped for a moment or two, and then went on with an appealing timidity, while the color once more mounted into her face—“but I suppose that then—when you knew you were making a success—it never came into your mind that you would have liked to have got me up there in the gallery while you were speaking?”
The temptation to lie was strong upon Harry Rames now. The very timidity of her appeal moved him. It taught him that the truth would hurt her much more than he had ever dreamed. He hesitated. For the first time in her company he was at a loss.
“The truth, please,” she pleaded earnestly. “You said that your mind was free, that you could stand outside yourself and look on at what you were doing, as artists do. It never once occurred to you that you wanted me up there in the ladies’ gallery, too, at the moment of your success, to witness it—to—yes, to share it with you?”
The word was out at last—the word which she had been striving with her modesty to reach.
“Be frank, please,” she prayed.
Harry Rames was at a loss how to wrap the brutal truth up so that it should not hurt overmuch. He had no other intention at this moment. He was for once not considering what effect his answer would have upon his own prospects and future.
“You were in my thoughts,” he said. “That’s true. For I was thinking that now I could come to you. But, yes, I wanted to be sure of myself first.”
“Yes,” said Cynthia slowly, and with humility she analyzed the meaning of his words. “You never thought of me as a kind of inspiration to an even greater success in the future if you succeeded now, or as a kind of consolation if you failed. It may be vanity to say so, but I think that is what a woman in whom you were interested, and who was interested in you, would have liked you to have thought. I was, after all, shut out, wasn’t I? I was to hear of the achievement after it was done and over, and I was neither to share the preliminary fears, nor feel the revulsion when the triumph came.”
“Yes, but look at it from my point of view. There are many who want to marry you—men with something to offer. It wouldn’t have been fair if I didn’t bring something in my basket too.”
“Fair!” cried Cynthia scornfully. “Oh, I know, that’s the point of view of the man—at least,” and as she realized that she had been unjust, her face dimpled to smiles, “of the men one rather likes.” For it occurred to her that Lord Helmsdale would have been troubled by no such scruples.
“No,” she said. “You wouldn’t have borrowed another man’s thoroughbred so that you might cut a dashing figure while you proposed.”
Rames had no idea of what she meant, and he behaved as he usually did when unintelligible things were said to him by women. He asked for no explanations and just took no notice of Cynthia’s words. He sat quietly at her side and waited.
The clock struck the hour. He put his hand into his pocket, and at the movement Cynthia started.
“There is no hurry,” said Harry Rames. “I was only getting out my cigarette case. May I smoke?”
“Of course,” replied Cynthia; she was relieved that she need not answer upon the moment. She was still in a great perplexity; and while Harry Rames smoked his cigarette she sought this way and that for a light to guide her. Here was not the marriage of which she had dreamed. No. But he was honest. It was possible, too, that she might be able to help him on, as he had said. And it might be well worth doing. It might be true that the ambitious men are the world’s best servants, and not the men possessed with ideas. Ideas, she remembered, with a bitter little smile at her folly, had once given the right of entrance to her enchanted garden. But she had travelled far from its gateway, and the flowers were all dead in it, and its pathways overgrown. It might be that the fixed idea meant the narrow vision. Harry Rames might be right; and if he were, by helping him on, she would make her money of real and great value. It was a gray world anyway—and Harry Rames was honest. She could trust him—though he wounded her.
She turned suddenly toward him.
“Do you remember the supper party at Ludsey?” she asked.
“Of course,” he replied: “And the little Frenchman, Monsieur Poizat.”
“I was not thinking of him,” said Cynthia. A sentence or two spoken at that table by Colonel Challoner had leaped into her memory. Politics meant color in the lives of men. It was the craving for color which fired enthusiasm in the towns of the provinces. Well, she herself craved for bright colors in her life too. Might she not get them out of the paint-pot of politics just as men did?
“If I were to say yes,” she remarked, “I would not be content to be merely the witness of your success. I must share the fears which go to make it. I could not sit quiet and twirl my thumbs, shut out from the hopes and apprehensions and endeavors, and just smile admiringly at the result. I must share everything.”
“Of course,” said Harry Rames. “From the moment you say ‘yes,’ you share everything. I meant that too when I said that I needed your help.”
He spoke gravely and sincerely, and again Cynthia said, “Thank you.”
She sat for a little while longer, hesitating upon the brink. To say “yes” would solve the question of a companion. Oh, certainly, there were practical advantages in the acceptance of Harry Rames’s proposal. She would have to abandon the hope of beauty in her life. Color, excitement, interest, she might get. But the beautiful life would not be for her. Still, under no circumstances, perhaps, might it have been for her. No one, she reflected, and with some sadness—no one by his approach had ever set her heart beating to a quicker tune. Perhaps there was some defect in her, some want of human passion, she reflected, which placed her in the second rank of women. When Cynthia was humble there was no girl so humble as Cynthia. And, after all, Harry Rames was honest. To that one stable point all her questions brought her back.
She moved at last, and Harry Rames rose and stood before her.
“Well?” he asked.
Cynthia dropped her hands loose at her sides and answered with a smile:
“Why not?”
It was in those words that she accepted him. There was no spirit in them, and very little of expectation. But she had come to expect not very much; and she had travelled a long way from the garden of her dreams.
“After all, there’s a turnstile in this affair, too,” she said, with a note of bitterness. “A very important one too. For it leads not into a garden, but straight to the treasury bench.”
Harry Rames was bewildered. But he made no comment. Women were queer, and it was good to disregard their moments of excitement. Cynthia sprang up the next moment and laid her hand upon his arm.
“Oh, yes, we’ll follow Mr. Smale’s advice, Harry,” she cried, “and we’ll keep our eyes on the treasury bench. Why not? Now go, and come back to-morrow.”
She was laughing a little wildly, and Harry Rames had the sense to take her at her word. He went out of the room, and Cynthia flung herself down upon the cushions and cried for an hour by the clock.
“Well,” she said to herself at the end, as she rose and dried her eyes, “Mr. Benoliel will be satisfied. That’s one thing.” Almost she seemed to blame Mr. Benoliel for the fact of her engagement.
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