THE session passed, and Devenish’s land bill, as Rames had foretold, was postponed. It figured again in the Address at the beginning of the following year, but as late as March no definite date had been assigned for its introduction. On a Saturday morning of this month Cynthia and her husband were breakfasting in the dining-room of the white house, when the morning’s letters were brought in by the butler. Harry Rames tossed one or two aside.
“Circulars, pamphlets,” he said. He opened some of the others, taking them from the top of the pile. “Here’s one from the Chamber of Commerce—railway rates. I’ll answer that this morning. Here’s another—the committee of a school wants a grant from the treasury. Here’s a third—” and as he was beginning to tear open the envelope, his voice suddenly stopped.
Cynthia looked up from her own letters and saw that while he was holding the third letter in his hand he was not looking at it. His eyes were fixed upon that one which was now uppermost on the heap. He sat and stared at the envelope for an appreciable time. Then dropping the letter which he held, he picked up this new and startling one and carried it swiftly over to the window. Cynthia followed his movement with her eyes, just curious, but nothing more. Her eyes indeed travelled beyond him and noticed the sunlight in the garden, the yellow and purple crocuses and the first of the daffodils, noticed them with an up-springing lightness of heart. Then the stillness of her husband’s attitude caught her attention. She saw something in his face which she had never seen there before, which she had never thought to see there at all. He wore the look of a man quite caught out of himself. He was as one wrapped in visions and refined by the fires of great longings. It seemed to her that she saw a man whose eyes, brimful of light, looked upon the Holy Grail.
He turned back to her. He brought her the letter still unopened and placed it in her hands. Cynthia received it as though written upon its cover she would read the revelation of his secret. Yet she saw nothing but a soiled envelope with a foreign stamp. She gazed up at her husband mystified.
“Look at the stamp, Cynthia!” said Rames in a queer voice.
Cynthia looked. It wore the head familiar to English people. But the lettering about the head was strange. She spelled it out.
“Rexland.”
With a start she turned to him. “That is the country you discovered.”
“Yes. A stamp was struck to commemorate my discovery of it.”
“A stamp?” cried Cynthia. “Wait a minute, Harry! You once spoke of a stamp to me before. Yes, on the morning of the day when you were to deliver your speech—the speech which failed. It was this stamp of which you were speaking?”
“Yes.”
“You remembered it on that morning, even when your thoughts were full of the speech you were going to deliver.”
“I remembered it by accident,” he said sharply. “I can’t think why. It had been out of my thoughts for so long. Yet it was that stamp.” His voice softened. “It is issued by the post-office—for a penny. Just think of it! A penny stamp brings a letter from the Antarctic seas to us here in Warwickshire.”
“Mr. Hemming sent it?”
“Without a doubt. When he came to see me in London fifteen months ago, he told me that if I intended to go out again he would not use my harbor.”
Harry was standing just behind his wife. Cynthia was not looking at him any longer. But she was listening with a curious intentness as though the words which he spoke were of less importance to her than the accent with which he spoke them. She put questions to him to make yet more sure of it.
“And you gave him permission!”
“Of course. I had not the right to refuse it. I was never going South again. Nothing was further from my thoughts. I told him to use not only my harbor, but the depots of food I had made along my sledge-route from the harbor toward the Pole.”
“You think that he reached the harbor?”
“I am sure of it. Otherwise he would not have used this stamp. He must have wintered there. I did not think that he would reach it before winter closed in upon him. The summer last year must have been very late.”
Cynthia nodded her head.
“Yes.”
Her attention was relaxed. Harry Rames had been striving to keep from his voice any note of regret, to speak in the ordinary level tone suitable to a matter of only ordinary interest. But in spite of his efforts he was not sure that he had succeeded. Cynthia handed to him the letter. He took it and turned it over in his hand.
“He has had time since he wintered in that harbor. One summer would be enough. He may have done it—if his dogs lived. There’s always that condition. If his dogs lived! Mine didn’t. Perhaps—perhaps—” He broke off abruptly and thrust the letter back into Cynthia’s hand.
“You open it! You can tell me what he says.”
Harry Rames walked again to the window and stood with his back to the room. Cynthia’s eyes followed him and travelled past him once more to the garden. She was sure that she would never forget those daffodils and the purple crocuses waving in the sunlight for one day as long as she lived. A minute ago she had noticed them; now she noticed them again; and within that minute had been revealed to her the great secret Harry Rames had been at so much pains to hide. She knew her rival now, and was appalled. “Such men are driven by a torment of their souls.” It was Harry himself who had said that. The wish came to her, “If only this man has succeeded.” She tore open the envelope.
Harry Rames stood at the window waiting for the letter to be read to him; and it seemed to him that he waited for an eternity. He had heard the tearing of the envelope. The letter was open in Cynthia’s hands. Yet she did not speak a word. Rames’s heart sank.
“Then he has reached the Pole?” he asked with a studied carelessness.
“I don’t know,” Cynthia replied in perplexity.
“Read it.”
“There is nothing to read.”
Rames turned round and came swiftly toward her.
“He must have forgotten to enclose his letter. There is nothing but this,” said Cynthia. She was holding a single blank sheet of note-paper in her hand. She turned it over. “No, there’s not a word written anywhere. Do you understand it?”
“Yes. He has failed.”
There was no doubt left to her of her husband’s joy. The cry which broke from his lips was not to be denied. It was a real cry of exultation. Cynthia turned pale as she heard it. But she would not acknowledge that she understood it, nor would she look into Harry’s face lest she should see the same exultation blazoned there.
“Poor Hemming,” said Rames. “That’s bad luck. The disappointment must have hit him hard.”
“You can understand that,” said Cynthia steadily.
“Yes. He would have written, you see, if he had taken it more lightly. He has nothing to say. That is what his blank sheet of paper means. That is what it must mean. Well, I must go and write to the Chamber of Commerce, Cynthia;” and gathering up his letters he went out of the room.
As for Cynthia, she remembered that the North Warwickshire met that morning at eleven o’clock four miles from the house. She rode to the meet and followed the hounds over a good grass country flying her hedges on a big horse which old Mr. Daventry had given to her on the very first day when she had hunted over six years ago. It had always been her experience that when troubles and fears overburdened her, a hard day’s hunting was her best medicine. It smoothed out the creases of her mind, whipped up the blood in her veins, set her pulses dancing with the joy of living and unrolled her courage like a banner. The sunlight, the swift rush through the air, the rhythm of movement, the keenness of the animal beneath her, the flight over hedge and ditch, had never failed her up till now. It always seemed to her that by some process, of which she was quite unconscious, the direct and simple thing to do emerged from the confusion of her thoughts and shone out unmistakably. And it shone out to-day. But she could not bring herself to accept it. As she rode homeward through the lanes she was at her arguments again.
“No! With time contentment will come to him. He will be subdued to the matter he works in. And I cannot let him go.”
Mr. Benoliel’s warning obstinately confronted her.
“One party doesn’t keep the bargain or keeps it half-heartedly as an irksome thing and day by day the separation grows more complete until you are living with your enemy or living quite alone.”
But she would not be convinced; she battled against it. “There was a saving clause. ‘Unless on both sides there is love.’ In that case a way could be found. And on both sides there may be love.”
She had treasured up little acts of thoughtfulness on Harry Rames’s part, the merest small things which women are quick to notice and to build upon; such as having a cloak ready for her shoulders almost before she was aware that she was cold. She ran these trifles over in her mind, clutching at them for proof that the longed for change was coming—nay, perhaps had come. There had been a constant watchfulness, a constant care for her shown by her husband during this last year. It might be of course that a certain remorse was stirring in him—remorse that he was only keeping his side of the bargain in the letter and not the spirit.
“But I cannot let him go,” she insisted. The perils, the hardships, the dangers of snow-storms and cold and shipwreck and famine which had all seemed so trivial to her in her days of romance now loomed up before her terrible and dark. It was no use to argue that other men had gone that road and had come back. This one might not. She reached her home with her distress as heavy upon her as when she had set out; and was told that Mr. Benoliel was waiting to see her.
She went at once into the drawing-room and gave Mr. Benoliel some tea.
“Will you tell Mr. Rames,” she said to her butler, “that Mr. Benoliel is here.”
“He’s not in the house,” said Benoliel. “He’s in Ludsey. I asked for him when I heard that you were out. I am glad. For I should like to tell you my news first.”
The butler left the room and Mr. Benoliel became at once mysterious and omniscient.
“Sir George Carberley is going to resign,” he said.
Cynthia looked at him in surprise.
“The member for our division?”
The white house was not within the borough limits of Ludsey. It stood in the Hickleton Division of the county of Warwickshire and Sir George Carberley, an important unit of the opposition, was Harry Rames’s representative in the House of Commons.
“Yes,” said Mr. Benoliel. “He has sat for the division for forty years now and he is tired. He intends to resign when this session is over.”
“Are you sure?” asked Cynthia. “How do you know this?”
“Ah!” said Benoliel with a smile. “You mustn’t ask me that, Cynthia. Indeed I am not quite sure that I ought to have told you the news at all. But I thought that it was so important for you to know it at once that I stretched a point of confidence.”
“Thank you,” said Cynthia. “But what I don’t understand is why it is so important for us to have the news before the others?”
“Captain Rames is on the executive of your association, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Then he will have a voice in the selection of the candidate who will fight the seat from your political point of view.”
“Of course.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Benoliel. “If he has a candidate ready when the news of the approaching resignation is published, and if that man is willing to follow not simply the Government’s policy, but also your husband’s policy as regards Devenish’s land bill, don’t you see what a chance he gets? If Rames can secure the selection of his man as candidate and then can win over the seat, he strengthens his position with the Government enormously. He has put his views about Devenish’s bill to the test of an election, and he has won.”
“Yes, I see that,” said Cynthia doubtfully. She was considering the prospect Mr. Benoliel held out to her from a quite different point of view. If Harry succeeded in this plan, his victory would be one more link in the chain of obligation which bound him to his present life. If he failed, his failure would be another disappointment weakening it.
“But can we win?” she cried. “The seat’s supposed to be impregnable.”
“That’s one of your advantages. More seats are lost by over-confidence than by bad candidates. Besides, the mere fact that one man has held a seat for forty years is against the probability of another man of the same color succeeding. There are lots of people who will be ready to say ‘It’s time we gave the other fellows a look-in.’ Your husband has only got to throw himself heart and soul into the fight and he will stand a very good chance. No doubt of that.”
Cynthia reflected. “Why did you wish to tell me this news before you told it to Harry?” she asked, bending her brows upon Mr. Benoliel in a steady frown which had before now warned him to walk with circumspection.
“I wasn’t quite sure,” he explained, “that you would wish him now to undertake a further obligation of political service.”
“Indeed!” said Cynthia icily. “And why shouldn’t I wish it now, Mr. Benoliel?”
Mr. Benoliel had no intention to allow himself to be browbeaten by a slip of a girl for whose happiness he was in a measure responsible.
“Because, my dear Cynthia,” he answered, “it has seemed to me on the last few occasions when I have met your husband that he was feeling the strain of a Parliamentary life. He has looked worn and tired. I could almost fancy that he was disheartened.”
Cynthia’s thoughts did Mr. Benoliel some injustice at this moment. Certainly he was suggesting to her that his neglected warning had been justified, that Harry’s Parliamentary ambition had been a mere phase in his life, which was now passing or had already passed. But she went further and assumed in him a kind of triumph at the accuracy of his diagnosis. Right underneath his sympathetic words she seemed to hear the whisper of a question:
“Am I not a clever man?”
The whirr of a motor-car grew loud and ceased. Harry had returned from Ludsey. Mr. Benoliel sat patiently in front of her, awaiting her decision. Was he to break his news to Harry Rames or was he not? Cynthia felt that Harry’s destiny and hers were in her hands. She must make her choice and by that choice it seemed to her they would be both inextricably bound, their happiness or their misery allotted to them for the whole span of their lives.
She sat with her chin propped in the palm of her hand and her eyes brooding darkly on Mr. Benoliel. A door was shut somewhere in the house. She rose and pressed the bell.
“Howard,” she said to her butler, “was that Mr. Rames?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“He is in his study I think?”
“Yes.”
“Will you show Mr. Benoliel in to him?” And as Benoliel rose, she said to him, “Will you come back after you have told your news? You will have an opportunity of reconsidering your judgment. I should like to hear whether you still think him disheartened.”
Cynthia was in her most aggrieved and stately mood. She usually was when she knew herself to be in the wrong. She would not admit Mr. Benoliel’s sympathy or affection for her. She had an epithet for him very near to the tip of her tongue at this moment. Mr. Benoliel was officious. With a distant bow she dismissed him.
She had the satisfaction half an hour later of hearing Mr. Benoliel’s complete recantation.
“I was quite wrong, Cynthia. He was in the best of spirits. He was elated. The look of strain had gone if it was ever there. I have been mistaken. I am happy to admit it.”
Cynthia relaxed from her frigidity. But her satisfaction was a poor one and had little life in it. She had merely tricked Mr. Benoliel into the belief that his insight had been at fault. For in truth, as she knew very well, it had never been more shrewd. What had led Mr. Benoliel into error was his ignorance of the letter with the “Rexland” stamp which had arrived at the white house by the morning’s post. Hemming’s failure was a kind of reprieve for Harry Rames. In a sudden revulsion he had been lifted out of his discouragement. His exultation had remained with him all that day. Cynthia had counted upon it when she had sent Benoliel to his study.
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