"Where you have found yours," said Burrell firmly.
"Not a bit of it," said Rames, and then he woke from his moodiness to a savage outburst of contempt. "Oh, I am going on with it. Don't be alarmed, Burrell. I'll lead you. We'll put up a fight. We'll make the fur fly. Very possibly we'll pull the whole Government down with a run. But--" and drawing his chair nearer to the youth he changed his tone. "I'll tell you the truth about the House of Commons. It's the place where the second-rate gets the finest show in the world. In no walk of life does second-rate intellect reap so high a reward or meet with such great esteem. But it won't lift you to the very top. Nor will first-rate intellect either. Remember that!"
"What will then?" asked Burrell in perplexity, and Harry Rames shrugged his shoulders.
"The little bit extra. Character, perseverance! I don't know. Something anyway. It's the same everywhere now. There are too many clever people about. Faith in a cause, I think will do it. That's why the sentimentalists do so much harm in public affairs. They get their way, because they believe. They are not playing the political game. Cleverness is twelve for a penny nowadays. To get up to the top you must have the little bit extra. Now in the sphere of politics I haven't got it. I don't say office is out of my reach. It isn't. I have been offered it. I have refused it. But I haven't got the little bit extra. Outside politics--in quite another sphere--I believe I have. But that's all done with. I was warned when I went into politics--warned by a shrewd, wise man. But I wouldn't listen, and so some day amongst the second-rate Right Honorables half a dozen lines will announce my death in the Times."
Young Burrell had no great experience of the intenser emotions, and the bitterness with which Rames spoke appalled him. He saw a man in torture, and he listened to a cry of pain grown intolerable. Then in a second all was changed again. Rames was on his feet replacing the stoppers in the decanters, taking the shades from off the candles, performing the little conventional acts of a host in his dining-room. The chasm in the ordinary level surface of things which had yawned for a moment and given Burrell a glimpse of the pit where misery gnawed had closed up.
"We will join my wife," said Rames. He stopped at the door.
"Were you ever at Toulon?"
"No."
"There's a statue on the quay there, at the water's edge, overlooking the harbor. A great bronze figure, extraordinarily alert, with a light upon its forehead, the Genius of the Sea. And on the open pages of a bronze book in the front of the pedestal, the names of the great sailors are engraved. Cook and the rest of them. The list ends with D'Urville, I remember. I only saw the statue once. My father showed it to me when I was a boy. I don't suppose that I have ever thought of it until to-day." He repeated softly as though speaking to himself:
"Yes the list ends with D'Urville." Then he roused himself. "Bring your cigar in. Cynthia doesn't mind. By the way," and a smile of tenderness transfigured his face, "not a word of this to her. She thinks I am going to be a great man. She's wrong, but I don't want her to know before she needs must." Burrell consented at once. He followed Rames from the room with all joy in his victory quite overcast. He looked beyond the surprising revelations of his host and obtained a glimpse into a new side of life. He was the spectator of one of the grim comedies of marriage. Here was the wife--so it seemed to him--believing joyfully in the great destiny of her husband; and the husband laboring in torment to sustain her belief, while all the while he knew that his destiny was thwarted and that the true current of his life ran through other fields.