Rames got up from his chair, trying not to hope that Hemming's expedition would fail. He looked up from this map to the spot where Cynthia had stood close to the door, and a smile came upon his face.
"She was wrong," he said. "We are in the clutch of the unfinished, not the finished things."
He carried his map over to a bureau which stood against the wall and opened a drawer from the lock of which his bunch of keys was dangling. There were other charts in the drawer, a barometer which had hung in his cabin in the Perhaps throughout the three years during which that ship had been his home, a shell or two dredged up from the depths of the sea, and a brown paper package tied up with a piece of string. The charts lying there were all the charts which existed of the Antarctic seas, arranged in the order of their making. He added to them now his map, the last of them all; the printed facsimile of his own chart. Then reluctantly he locked the drawer. The reverberation of the seas seemed to fill the room and through it imperative and loud rang the call of the South. Yet he was aware, too, of Cynthia standing in her delicate blue frock, subduing her pride, revealing herself in a passionate appeal. He was stirred to shame at the poverty of his own response. She had been friend, counsellor, wife in the normal way. They had jogged side by side along the low road of his endeavor. To-night she pleaded for more, she offered more. He could never quite look upon her as he had been wont to. For she had stirred him to shame.
He slipped the key off the ring and swung it round upon his finger. At all events he would keep his bargain.
"It's a queer piece of irony," he said to himself, "that the very thing which I would give my soul to do, she was urging me to do two years ago; and now I must keep my longing hidden. Our positions are quite reversed."
But he would keep to his bargain. Perhaps after all Hemming would succeed; and sooner or later no doubt the reverberation of the seas would die away in the porches of his ears.
He went out into the hall, carrying the key in his hand, and let himself out at the front-door. He walked quickly up South Audley Street, turned to the left, and crossed Park Lane into Hyde Park. He walked to the stone bridge which crosses the Serpentine. The night was quiet and dark about him, and from afar off the never ceasing roar of the London traffic came to him like the roar of distant seas. He leaned over the parapet and stretching out his hand opened it. He heard a tiny splash in the water beneath the bridge.
He walked back more slowly than he had come to where the glare of the sky indicated the houses and the streets. As he crossed Park Lane again two men arm-in-arm passed him and one of them stopped.
"Is that you, Rames?" asked a friendly and solicitous voice.
Rames recognized it at once as the voice of Hamlin the chief Whip.