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THE TURNSTILE

BOOKS BY A. E. W. MASON

Published By CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

The Broken Road. $1.50

At the Villa Rose. Illustrated. $1.50

The Turnstile. net $1.30

THE TURNSTILE

BY

A. E. W. MASON

AUTHOR OF "FOUR FEATHERS," "RUNNING WATER,"
"THE BROKEN ROAD," ETC.

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK :: :: :: 1912

Copyright, 1911, 1912, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published June, 1912

CONTENTS

THE TURNSTILE

THE TURNSTILE

CHAPTER I

[THE SWINGING OF A CHANDELIER]

At the first glance it looked as if the midnight chimes of a clock in an old city of the Midlands might most fitly ring in this history. But we live in a very small island, and its inhabitants have for so long been wanderers upon the face of the earth that one can hardly search amongst them for the beginnings of either people or events without slipping unexpectedly over the edge of England. So it is in this instance. For, although it was in England that Captain Rames, Mr. Benoliel, Cynthia, the little naturalized Frenchman, and the rest of them met and struggled more or less inefficiently to express themselves; although, too, Ludsey, the old city, was during a period the pivot of their lives; for the beginnings of their relationship one with another, it is necessary to go further afield, and back by some few years. One must turn toward a lonely estancia in the south-west of Argentina, where, on a hot, still night of summer, a heavy chandelier touched by no human hand swung gently to and fro.

This queer thing happened in the dining-room of the house, and between half-past ten and eleven o'clock. It was half-way through January, and Mr. and Mrs. Daventry were still seated at the table over a late supper. For Robert Daventry had on that day begun the harvesting of his eight leagues of wheat, and there had been little rest for any one upon the estancia since daybreak. He sat now taking his ease opposite his wife, with a cup of black coffee in front of him and a cigar between his lips, a big, broad, sunburnt man with a beard growing gray and a thick crop of brown hair upon his head; loose-limbed still, and still getting, when he stood up, the value of every inch of his six feet two. As he lounged at the table he debated with his wife in a curious gentle voice a question which, played with once, had begun of late years to insist upon an answer.

"We are both over fifty, Joan," he said. "And we have made our money."

"We have also made our friends, Robert," replied his wife. She was a short, stoutish woman, quick with her hands, practical in her speech. Capacity was written broad upon her like a label, and, for all her husband's bulk, she was the better man of the two, even at the first casual glance. There was a noticeable suggestion of softness and amiability in Robert Daventry. It was hardly, perhaps, to be localized in any feature. Rather he diffused it about him like an atmosphere. One would have wondered how it came about that in a country so stern as Argentina he had prospered so exceedingly had his wife not been present to explain his prosperity. It was so evident that she drove the cart and that he ran between the shafts--evident, that is, to others than Robert Daventry. She had been clever enough and fond enough to conceal from him their exact relationship. So now it was with an air of pleading that she replied to him:

"We have not only made our friends, Robert. We have made them here. If we go, we lose them."

"Yes," he answered. "But it wouldn't be as if we had to start quite fresh again. I have old ties with Warwickshire. Thirty years won't have broken them all."

Joan Daventry answered slowly:

"Thirty years. That's a long time, Robert."

"And yet," said Robert Daventry with a wistfulness in his voice which almost weakened her into a consent against which her judgment no less than her inclinations fought. "And yet there's a house on the London road which I might have passed yesterday--it's so vivid to me now. A white house set back from the highway behind a great wall of old red brick. Above the coping of the wall you can see the rows of level windows and the roof of a wing a story lower than the rest of the house. And if the gates are open you catch a glimpse of great cedar trees on a wide lawn--a lawn of fine grass like emeralds."

His eyes turned back upon his boyhood, and the thought of his county set his heart aching. Long white roads, rising and dipping between high elms, with a yard or two of turf on either side for a horse to canter on; cottages, real cottages, not shapeless buildings of corrugated iron standing gauntly up against the sky-line at the edge of a round of burnt, bare plain, but cottages rich with phlox and deep in trees--the pictures were flung before his eyes by the lantern of his memories as if upon a white sheet. But, above all, it was the thought of the greenery of Warwickshire which caught at his throat; the woods flecked with sunlight, the lawns like emeralds.

He glanced at a thermometer which hung against the wall. Here, even at eleven o'clock of the night, it marked this January ninety-seven degrees of heat. The mosquitoes trumpeted and drummed against the gauze curtains which covered the open windows; and outside the windows the night was black and hot like velvet.

Robert Daventry drew his handkerchief across his forehead and with his elbow on the table leaned his face upon his hand. His wife looked at him quickly and with solicitude.

"You are tired to-night, Robert," she said gently. "That's why you want to give the estancia up."

Robert Daventry shook his head and corrected her.

"No, Joan. But I am more tired to-night and very likely that's the explanation." Then he laughed at a recollection. "Do you remember when the squadron came to Montevideo two years ago? There was a dinner at the legation at Buenos Ayres. I sat next to the commodore, and he asked me how old I was. When I told him that I was just fifty, he replied: 'Ah, now you will begin to find life very interesting. For you will notice every year that you are able to do a little less than you did the year before.' Well, I am beginning, my dear, to find life interesting from the commodore's point of view."

Joan did not answer him at once, and the couple sat for awhile in silence, with their thoughts estranged.

For Joan Daventry shrank, with all her soul, from that coveted white house on the London road. Old ties could be resumed, was Robert's thought. He was forgetful that the ties were his, and his alone. She had no share in them and she had come to a time of life when the making of new friends is a weariness and a labor. With infinite toil and self-denial they had carved out their niche here in the Argentine Republic. They spent the winter in their house in Buenos Ayres, the summer upon the Daventry estancia. Their life was an ordered, comfortable progression of the months. For both of them, to her thinking, the time for new adventures had long gone by. They had had their full proportion of them in their youth. And so while Robert Daventry dreamed of a green future Joan was busily remembering.

"When we first came here to settle," she said slowly, as she counted up all that had been done in these twenty-seven years, "we drove for two days. If the house on the London road is vivid to you, that drive is as clear to me. Our heaviest luggage was our hopes;" and Robert Daventry smiled across the table.

"I have not forgotten that either," he said; and there was a whole world of love in his voice.

"When we reached here we found a tin house with three rooms and nothing else, not a tree, hardly a track. Now there's an avenue half a mile long, there are plantations, there's a real brick house for the plantations to shelter. There are wells, there's a garden, there's a village at the end of the avenue, there's even a railway station to-day. These things are our doing, Robert;" and her voice was lifted up with pride.

"I know," replied her husband. "But I ask myself whether the time has not come to hand them on."

Once more the look of solicitude shone in his wife's eyes.

"I could leave the estancia," she said doubtfully, "though it would almost break my heart to do it. But suppose we did. What would become of you in England? I have a fear," and she leaned forward across the table.

"Why a fear?" he asked.

"Because I think that people who have lived hard, like you and me, run a great risk if they retire just when they feel that they are beginning to grow old. A real risk of life, I mean. I think such as you and I would be killed off by inactivity rather than by any disease."

She did not deny that something was wrong in their present situation. But she had a different conception of what that something was; and she had a different remedy.

"We should find life too dull?" he exclaimed. "Too lonely, Joan?" and he struck the table with his hand; "I find it lonely here;" and at that she uttered a low cry:

"Oh, my dear, and what of me?" and the wistfulness of her voice struck him to silence, a remorseful silence. After all, his days were full.

"There's our other plan," she suggested gently.

"Yes. To be sure! There's our other plan," he said. He leaned back in his chair, his face upturned toward the ceiling, and a thoughtful look in his eyes.

"We have talked it over, haven't we? But we have played with it all the time. It would be so big an experiment."

He ended the sentence abruptly. The look of thought passed from his face. It became curious, perplexed. Then he cried with a start of dismay:

"You see, Joan, even my eyes are beginning to play tricks with me. I could swear that the chandelier is swinging to and fro above our heads."

Joan looked anxiously at her husband, and then up toward the ceiling. At once surprise drove the anxiety from her face and thoughts.

"But it is swinging," she exclaimed. Both of them stared at the chandelier. There was not a doubt about the phenomenon possible. Not a breath of wind stirred in the garden, not a sound was audible overhead. Yet very gently the chandelier, with its lighted globes, oscillated above their heads. Robert Daventry rose to his feet and touched it.

"Yes, it is swinging," he said. He stopped it, and held it quite still. Then he resumed his seat.

"Very well, Joan," he said with a new briskness in his voice, "we will make the experiment. Come! When we go to Buenos Ayres in the winter! We will try the other plan. Even if it fails it will be worth making."

Joan's face lighted up.

"If it fails, then we'll go home," she said.

No doubt the relief which Robert Daventry felt in the proof that his eyes were not failing him led him thus briskly to fall in with the scheme which both approached with timidity; and so the swinging of the chandelier had its share in bringing them to their decision. But the chandelier had not done with them. For hardly had Robert Daventry ceased to speak when it began again to swing backward and forward before their eyes. So it swung for exactly five minutes and then of its own accord it stopped.

"That's very strange," said Robert Daventry. He looked at the clock upon the mantel-shelf. It was five minutes past eleven.

"It's unaccountable," he continued. But he was able to account for it the next day. For a local paper brought to them the news that at ten minutes to eleven o'clock on the evening before, seven hundred miles away on the other side of the great barrier of the Andes, an earthquake had set the shores of the Pacific heaving like a sea, and Valparaiso, that city of earthquakes, had tumbled into ruins.

CHAPTER II

[OF AN EARTHQUAKE AND JAMES CHALLONER]

The experiences of James Challoner on that day of ruin at Valparaiso were various, but none of them were pleasant. It was his twenty-eighth birthday and up to two o'clock in the afternoon he was, as for the last six weeks he had been, a clerk in the great house of R. C. Royle & Sons. There was no sort of business in Chile which R. C. Royle & Sons were not prepared to undertake and carry through with efficiency, from a colossal deal in nitrates to the homeward freight of your portmanteau. It was, to be sure, upon the latter class of work that James Challoner was asked to concentrate his abilities. But advancement was a principle of the house, and in the vast ramifications of its business, opportunities of advancement came quickly. James Challoner, who for the best part of five years had been drifting unsuccessfully up and down the Pacific Coast, between Callao and Concepcion, was consequently accounted a lucky man to have secured employment in that house at all.

"If he can only keep it!" said his friends, shrugging their shoulders, and his young wife, in the little house up the hill, bent over her child and whispered the same words. But in her mouth they were a prayer.

At two o'clock, then, upon his birthday, James Challoner returned from his luncheon to the office, but as he took his seat he was summoned to the manager's room. He walked down the long room between the tables on which samples of produce were exhibited, then past the cashier's brass-fenced desks where the banking business was done, to a little compartment partitioned off in a corner. There Wallace Bourdon, a young partner in control of this branch of the firm, sat in a tilted chair, with his knees against a table, awaiting him.

"Mr. Challoner, it is within your knowledge, I suppose, that we are negotiating with the Government at Santiago for the construction of a new railway in the north."

Challoner shook his head.

"That's not in my department, sir," he said.

"Quite true," said Wallace Bourdon. He opened a drawer of the table and threw half a dozen letters down on the top of it under Challoner's eyes. "These letters are copies of our proposals. There are two firms competing with us to which these copies would be valuable. They were found in your desk while you were out at luncheon. What were they doing there?"

James Challoner stared at the letters and pulled at his moustache.

"I can't think, sir. They must have been put there," he said, and then with a cry of indignation: "I must have an enemy in the office."

"Well, that's hard," said Wallace Bourdon sympathetically. "For he seems to have got back on you good and strong. You can draw your money from the cashier, Mr. Challoner, and clear out of this house just as soon as you can find it convenient;" and Wallace Bourdon dropped the legs of his chair onto the floor.

James Challoner took his money and went out into the town. He sat moodily on a high stool at a bar for an hour or so. Then some men of his acquaintance joined him, and from moody he became blusterful and boisterous. But both the moodiness and the bluster were phases of the one deep-seated feeling--a reluctance to go up the hill and meet his wife. It was seven o'clock before he had gained the necessary courage, and when he did face his wife he followed the usual practice of his kind and blurted out aggressively the news of his dismissal.

"I was lowering myself by going into the office at all as a clerk," he cried. "I told you so when you urged me to do it. Upon my word it almost serves me right, Doris. I have never known any good come from a man's lowering himself. He is bound to make enemies amongst his new associates. Jealousy is a despicable thing, but there's a deal of it floating about in the world, and one's a fool to shut one's eyes to it. However, we can't let the business rest there. My honor's impugned. That's the truth of it, Doris. I lie under a dishonorable charge. There's a stigma on our child's name, and it must be removed."

He drew a chair briskly up to the table, pulled a piece of note-paper toward him, and dipped his pen in the ink.

"Let me see, now! Who can my enemy be? Who is it that hates me? Can't you think of some one?" and in an instant he pushed the blotting pad from him. "You might say something, Doris. You just stand and look and never open your mouth."

That was James Challoner's trouble, and the cause of his uneasiness. His wife neither buoyed him up with high-sounding phrases, nor afforded him the opportunity by any reproach to work himself into a fine heat of indignation. She had given him one dreadful look, her whole countenance a quivering cry of dismay made visible, and thereafter she had just stood with no word on her lips, her great eyes disconcertingly fixed upon his face and her mind quite hidden. She went out from the room and left him sitting in great discomfort. He detested her habit of silence, but he feared still more the thought of him which it might conceal, and he dared not break it with acrimonies. When she returned again into the room it was to say:

"Dinner is ready."

"Well, we must dine," said Challoner.

"It is fortunate that after all I didn't hire that servant at once," said Doris.

"Yes, that was lucky. We can't afford a servant now," said James Challoner.

Fear lest his wife should "lower herself" did not trouble him at all. During dinner he talked in self-defence, flurriedly, about his enemy, pointing vaguely to this man or to that, and watching keenly for some droop of disdain about Doris's lips. But she gave no sign, and at the back of all his thought was the wounding question:

"What does she think of me?"

He smoked his pipe outside the door after dinner, with the lighted streets of the town spread out below him. The house stood apart, high up on the great amphitheatre of hills above Valparaiso; and on the opposite side of the road the ground fell steeply. The great bay lay open beneath his eyes to the distant tip of its northern horn; no inland pool could have slept more quietly than did the Pacific on that summer night; still water and mirrored stars, it widened out in the warm dusk to the sky's rim. A huge black steamer lay out beyond the edge of the jetty, with the great lights blazing from its saloon windows and the little lights steady on its masts. From the close-built streets at the water's edge there rose a pleasant murmur of many voices. No warnings were being given. Valparaiso, like any other tropical city, was taking its ease in the cool of the evening.

At ten o'clock James Challoner, having nothing better to do and no money to spend, went indoors. He locked the front door and with a definite relief found that his wife had already gone to bed. He stood in the empty, barely furnished sitting-room, and his thoughts were swept back to the morning at Southampton, five years ago, when Doris had crept on board the steamer which was to take them to South America. He remembered bitterly the buoyant hopes with which that runaway marriage had begun and Doris's fears that her flight had been already discovered and that an attempt at the last moment might be made to stop her.

"It has been a bad mistake for me," he said, as all the wonderful things which he might have done, had he not been hampered with a wife, glittered in his mind. The truth, however, was not to be grasped by him unless he would face truthfully the history of his marriage, and that he was not constituted to do. It was a story common enough: A young man with no will and caressing manners, who was hastily packed off to South America, with a few hundred pounds in his pocket, to avoid exposure in his own country, and a young girl too staunch to her beliefs--these were the characters, and, given them, the story tells itself. "Yes, it has all been a very bad mistake for me," thought James Challoner, and switching off the lights he betook himself to bed. A door in the inner wall of his bedroom opened into the room where his wife and child slept. He listened for a moment with his ear against the panel. All was silent in that room.

"She can sleep," he grumbled, finding even a grievance here. But he did not sleep for long. For, just at the moment when the chandelier began to swing in Mr. Daventry's dining-room, he was shaken out of his slumber. He lay for a few seconds in the vague and pleasant space between wakefulness and dreams, playing with the fancy that he was in a cabin on a ship at sea. But the fancy passed, and he was beset by a stranger illusion. He happened to be lying upon his side, with his face turned toward the outer wall of his bedroom; and as he lay he saw quite distinctly the wall gently and noiselessly split open. It split open high up and near to the ceiling, and it let through the stars and a strip of sky. Then the wall closed neatly together again, brick fitting with brick, so that not a chink was left. The room once more was black, the stars shut out.

Challoner was still pondering upon this remarkable phenomenon when a third sensation shook him altogether out of his lethargy. He was violently jolted. This could be no illusion. It was as if some one, crouching beneath the bed, had suddenly risen on hands and knees and struck the mattress with his shoulders. Challoner sprang out of bed, tottered, and clung to the bedpost for support. The room was rocking like a tree in a gale and underneath his feet the boards strained and heaved. It was his first experience of an earthquake, but he had no doubt that he was undergoing it, and fear made his hands grip the iron post of the bed so that his palms were bruised. His chief terror was the floor. The feel of it moving unstably beneath his feet, the sound of its boards cracking loosened his knees. At any moment it might burst upward and explode. At some moment and very soon it must. He had no fear that it would collapse and gape open; it would surely burst like a shell; and in his fear of that explosion the rocking of the walls was of no account.

He tried to think, and instinct reminded him of civilized man's chief necessities.

"My shoes, my money."

He groped along the bed for the switch of the light, but light did not answer to the summons. In the darkness he stooped, found his shoes, and slipped them on. His few dollars, drawn that afternoon from the cashier of R. C. Royle & Sons, were in the drawer of a night-table by his bed. He found them. There was a cupboard in the inner wall. He lurched across to it, and, tearing a long overcoat from a hook, slipped it on and dropped the money in his pocket. Close by the cupboard was the door of his wife's bedroom. He remembered her now, and flung the door open.

"Doris," he cried, and no answer was returned to him.

"Doris," he cried again, and this time the wail of his child answered him from her cot.

He crossed to the bed. He leaned over it and put out his hand to shake his wife by the shoulder out of her deep sleep. And with a shock he became aware that she was leaning upon her elbow in the darkness. She was wide-awake all the time.

"Quick!" he cried, in a sudden exasperation. "There is an earthquake. The house is falling."

She replied in a strange, quiet voice:

"I know."

She made no beginning of a movement. She was awake, had been, perhaps, longer awake than he himself; she knew the swift peril which had befallen them; yet she remained propped on her elbow in the darkness, passively expectant. Or was she dazed? Even at that moment the question flashed through Challoner's mind and brought him a queer relief. But it was answered in a moment.

"I called to you twice," he said; and his wife answered:

"I heard;" and there was again no hint of bewilderment in her voice. It was the voice of a woman who had all her wits about her; not of one who was stunned.

Meanwhile the earth rumbled beneath them and the room shook. Challoner felt for a candle by the bedside, struck a match, and lighted it. His wife watched him quietly. Her dark eyes shone in the candle-light, inscrutably veiling her thoughts.

"Quick!" he cried. "Get up. There's no time to lose." He lifted the child out of the cot, still wrapped in her bedclothes.

"Come."

His wife rose, as it seemed to him, with incredible slowness. He could have screamed in his terror. As he stumbled across the floor to the door, she opened a wardrobe and, taking out a cloak, drew it about her shoulders. In the door-way he turned and saw her.

"Good God!" he cried, and the question in his mind leaped to his lips and was uttered. "Do you want to kill us all?"

"I had to find a cloak."

"A cloak!" he cried contemptuously. He himself had tarried to slip on his overcoat, but, no doubt, that was different. Certainly his wife made no rejoinder. "To be buried under this house for the sake of a cloak," he cried, his lips so chattering with terror that he could hardly pronounce the words.

"Go first," she said; and he ran out of the doorway. She followed him, leaving the door open behind her, and the candle burning in the room. They were still in the passage when an appalling roar deafened their ears. The lighted candle shot up into the air and was extinguished, and in the darkness the splitting of timber, the overthrow and the wreckage of furniture, rent the air and ceased. Of a sudden the throats of the fugitives were choked with dust. The fear which had so terrified him was justified. The floor had exploded, like artillery, in the room he had this moment quitted. His terror became a panic. He would have killed his wife had she stood in his way. He rushed downstairs, inarticulately crying. He fumbled in the darkness for the bolt of the front door, sobbing and cursing. He found it, flung the door open, and leaped out into the open air. He ran across the road, and as he ran a great stone fell with a crash, from the archway of the door, and the walls of the passage clashed together behind him. With a loud clatter of thunder the whole house crumbled down into a smoking heap of bricks. Challoner turned. He was quite alone with the child in his arms. And for a little while he stood very still.

But he was no longer in darkness. About many of the villas on the hillside the flames were creeping, and their inhabitants were racing upward to the open heights, or searching desperately among the ruins for those whom the earthquake had entrapped. While lower down by the water's edge the city was ablaze and over all the bay the sky was red. The ground still shook beneath Challoner's feet, and the child in his arms began to cry. He laid it down against the low wall of the path and crept cautiously back to the ruins of his house.

"Doris," he called, and again, "Doris."

His voice was low, but there was more of awe than grief audible in the cry. "Doris," he called a third time, but in a louder and more urgent tone. A few bricks, hanging to a fragment of wall dislodged themselves and clattered down upon the heap of ruin. But no other answer came. He stooped suddenly where the archway of the entrance door had been. The great stone had fallen with so much force that one end had sunk into the ground; the other, however, rested upon a fragment of the stone pillar of the door; and so the stone lay under a pile of bricks titled at an angle. Through the space left by the angle a woman's hand and arm protruded. It was not pinned down by the stone. It pointed with limp fingers toward Challoner, and beside it a trickle of blood ran out. Challoner knelt and touched the hand.

"Doris," he said.

Her voice had not answered to his, and now there was no response in her fingers to his touch. The arm moved quite easily. The walls of the passage had borne her down and crushed her. Challoner remembered with a shiver the crash and clatter of them as they had knocked together just behind his heels. His wife had been killed in that downfall. She could not have survived.

Challoner rose again to his feet.

"She was awake," he said, and he talked aloud to himself. "She should have hurried. She could have escaped had she hurried;" and the picture of her leaning upon her elbow in her bed in the dark troubled his soul. There is no terror like the terror which comes from the shaking of the earth and the overthrow of its houses. Yet she, a woman--so ran his thoughts--had endured it. Her hand pointing, from beneath the stones, accused him for all the limpness of its fingers. She had welcomed it.

The child wailed from the other side of the road. Challoner crossed to it. He stood and looked at it doubtfully. Still in doubt, he looked away. From the blazing town rose a babel of cries, a roar of flames, a crash of buildings falling in, and every now and then, quite distinct from the confusion, a shrill, clear scream would leap into the air like a thin fountain of water. But the sea was calm; the great ship, with every cord of its rigging strung black against the glowing sky, lay without a movement. Boats were plying between it and the shore. Challoner could see the tiny specks of them on the red water.

"There's no tidal wave," he said in a dull voice. "That's extraordinary;" and then he picked up his daughter in his arms, and climbed higher up the hill to await the dawn.

CHAPTER III

[CHALLONER'S PILGRIMAGE]

There were two more shocks that night, the first at five minutes past one, the second half an hour before sunrise. James Challoner sat in the centre of the most open space he could find, his overcoat drawn close about him and his daughter clasped tightly to his breast. But it was almost unconsciously that he held her so. His brain was dazed, and the only image at all clear in his mind was that of his dead wife's hand protruding beneath the great stone and directing against him its mute accusation. But, even so, it was the limp look of the fingers which chiefly troubled him, and that only troubled him from time to time. For the greater part of the interval before daybreak he sat watching the roofs of the buildings below him burst in tongues of fire and topple down with a clatter of slates in bright showers of sparks, much as a child sits open-mouthed at the fireworks. Now he huddled his coat close about him, now some spire of flame towering skyward more terribly beautiful than the rest, drew a cry from his lips; and now again, looking out over the quiet pond of the bay, he asked dully, "Why is there no tidal wave?"

Morning came at last over the hill behind him, gray and extraordinarily cold. All about him he saw people, huddled like himself upon the slopes, men, women, and children, shivering in their night-attire and their bare feet bloody from the stones. All at once Challoner was aware that he was hungry. His little daughter reached out her arms and wailed. Hunger, too, as the sun rose, mastered the fears of the refugees upon the hill-side. One by one, group by group, they rose stiffly and straggled down to the ruined ways by the water-side. Challoner went with the rest; and half-way down they all began to hurry, beset by the same fear. There would not be food enough for all. The thought seemed to sweep like a wind across the face of the hill, and the hurry became savage.

Along the open esplanade families were squatting side by side. A few of the more fortunate had somehow secured and erected tents; and others were crowded into storage sheds. But the most of them were sitting in the open waiting desolately for they knew not what. And already in that town, though the earthquake was barely six hours old, catastrophe had made its sharp division between the sheep and the goats. For whereas upon the esplanade men and women, and amongst them many unexpected figures, were already organizing succor for the outcasts, amongst the smoking ruins the marauders were already at work, robbing, murdering. There was no longer any law in Valparaiso.

Challoner made his way to the esplanade. A man whom he knew, the agent of a steamship company, hurried past him. Challoner stopped him.

"Where can I get food?" he asked.

Challoner was a strongly built, tall man, and the agent answered roughly.

"You? You will have to wait. You are able to;" and then he caught sight of the child in Challoner's arms, still wrapped about with her bedclothes. His voice changed to friendliness.

"Yours?" he asked.

Challoner nodded.

"Where's its mother?"

Challoner answered simply:

"Dead."

The agent took out a piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket. "Sorry," he said. "Of course, that alters the case." He wrote a line upon the paper and gave it to Challoner. Then he pointed to a tin shed, around which a crowd was already collecting.

"We are distributing a little food there. You'll be given your share, for you have a child to look after. But I should advise you to look slippy;" and the agent hurried off.

Challoner did look slippy. Because of his child he got food for himself as well as for his child; and as he sat on the ground, in the shadow of a low wall, after his meal, that fact set him thinking. There is much loving kindness for children in South America. From east to west it runs across the continent, just as from east to west human life is cheap, provided that it is grown up. You might, anywhere in those days, and, in some places you may still, slay your neighbor and avoid anything like excessive inconvenience as a result of your slaying. But if you kick a boy into the gutter because he refuses to desist from whistling, to your distraction, outside your office window, you are liable to be fined heavily, and you may be sent to prison. For you have hurt the dignidad del hombre. Challoner was aware generally of the consideration for children which prevailed. But now it was brought very practically home to him in the particular. His little daughter Doris was a definite asset to him. He looked down upon her with new eyes as she slept on the ground at his side, with a chubby hand thrown across his knee. She was no longer a nuisance. She was as good as money--better, indeed, since money could not buy food to-day in Valparaiso. And there had been a moment when he had stood, up there before the ruins of his house, doubting whether he should leave her behind or no. James Challoner was quite chilled by the thought of the mistake he had almost made, and the fool he had almost been.

Doris moved her head in her sleep.

"Precious one," he said affectionately; and he proceeded in his turn to sleep.

He woke up in time to see two great Chilian cruisers sweep round the point into the bay, and a stoutly built, square captain, whom he could have mistaken for an Englishman, come ashore with his sailors, to take command of the town. He obtained shelter in a hut for that night, and during the hours of darkness he thought out his own immediate problem.

Valparaiso was not, and for some months would not be. Even when it should be rebuilt there would be no work for him, since--in his thoughts he clung to euphemisms--his enemies had ruined his good name. Therefore he must get away and he had his daughter at his hand to assist him.

He obtained, through his good Samaritan, the agent, a rough suit for himself and some clothing for his child and a parcel of food. He slung the parcel over his shoulders, lifted his child in his arms, and walked out that afternoon from Valparaiso up the great post-road toward the Andes. He was strong and his girl inherited of his strength. It was summer, a summer of no rain. He tramped along the valleys of Chile, and his daughter was his passport and franked his way. He secured a night's shelter at a farm-house here, food and a trifle of money there, a ride for Doris upon a mule one day, a lift for both of them in a cart the next. The valley narrowed, the green floor of it became stones, the trees thinned, the great barrier of the cordilleras closed in about James Challoner and towered higher and higher above his head. The road wound sharply upward, now backward, and forward in a desolate, wild country of gray rock splashed with orange and yellow and deep red. He started early one morning and stood on the top of the Cumbre Pass, thirteen thousand feet above the sea, by mid-day. On the very summit he was overtaken by the post and driven down at a gallop to Las Cuevas. From Las Cuevas he walked to Punta del Inca. And at Punta del Inca he took his ease for a week, with the great snow-mass of Aconcagua showing in a gap of the hills across the valley.

It was the season of the baths at Punta del Inca. The hotel was full and James Challoner prospered, as from the beginning he had thought that he would. He had reckoned upon Punta del Inca on that night in Valparaiso when he had determined upon his journey. He sat by the natural bridge, with his little daughter in his arms, a travel-stained and patient figure, and amongst those gigantic hills he told his moving story to such as passed and would listen. He went up to the hotel at night, and under the lights of the veranda he told it again. Amongst the many qualities which he misused was a vivid gift of narrative, and he possessed, at this time at all events, a gentle voice with an admirable note of emotion. Thus all was in his favor. The beauty and peace of the scenery, his manner, the prettiness of his child--even the story which he had to tell. But it was not quite the story which would have been told at Valparaiso where, to be sure, he had, as we know, enemies.

"Why did you come to South America?" some curious soul would ask.

"I was a younger son," he would answer; and then, with a charming modesty for the benefit of any English who might be present, "I am of the Dorsetshire Challoners. These old properties.... Land isn't what it was.... An estate mortgaged to the hilt. How could any one take an allowance that must be wrung from it at the cost of the very laborers? No, I thought I would make my own way in the new lands."

He spoke without any arrogance of virtue, any contempt for other younger sons who had not his own compunction, any consciousness of heroism. He went on to tell the romantic story of his marriage and elopement.

"I made my way," he continued, "at least I was making it. My wife, of course, helped me--" and perhaps here his voice would falter ever so slightly, he would turn his face aside and whisper to the stars, yet so that the whisper was audible to people nearer than the stars--"My God, how she helped me! We had dug out our little corner in Valparaiso. There was just room in it for a wife and a child and myself. And then the earthquake came and ruined all."

He made no complaint; he stated the simple facts; he was reticent concerning his wife's death. But by his reticence he managed to wring from it the last ounce of profit; he did not, for instance, describe how he had found her leaning upon her elbow in the darkness, with the walls of her room tottering about her. James Challoner had not forgiven her for that. She had made it so plain that she preferred for her child and herself an appalling death beneath the bricks than the slower decline into misery which awaited them. He tried to omit that remembrance from his mind, as he certainly did from his story.

A collection was made for him to send him on his way. He accepted it with dignity.

"I do not ask for your names," he said. "It would be the merest pretence. I cannot promise to pay you back. I take it as from one man to another." And so with his pocket full he journeyed downward to the vineyards of Mendoza.

At Mendoza he took the train and in a night and a day came to Buenos Ayres. It was in the cool of the evening that he stepped out upon the platform. He was in no doubt what he should do. He had stopped in Buenos Ayres for a month on his way out from England; and he had thought out his plan very carefully during his last night in Valparaiso. He took a train for Barracas, and in the train he tied an old bootlace about his daughter's arm. He left the train before it crossed the bridge, and walked up a hill where great houses stand back behind walls and gardens much as one may see them in Clapham. Some way up the hill he stopped in front of one of these houses.

It was noticeable amongst the houses, because a curious turnstile was let into the garden wall. The turnstile supported a small circular platform partitioned off with screens. James Challoner placed his child upon the platform, rang the bell, and turned the stile. The platform revolved, the child disappeared from view within the garden, and the screens were so arranged that those who received the child within could not see James Challoner outside.

James Challoner went back into the middle of the road, yawned, and stretched his arms above his head. To-day you may cross the Andes from Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres in forty-eight hours. James Challoner had taken four months. He thought of his journey with a chuckle. His daughter had made his way easy.

"Nine hundred miles and I've done 'em on eiderdown," he said. "That's the only bit of comfort I've ever got out of my marriage."

He had left his child in a foundling hospital kept by some wealthy old ladies. He had tied a bootlace round her arm, rather because it was the conventional thing to do, than with any intention of reclaiming her. He was now a free man. He lit his pipe and stuck his hands in his pockets. With a pleasant sense of lightness, he strolled down to exploit his freedom in the bright streets of Buenos Ayres.

CHAPTER IV

[CYNTHIA'S BIRTHDAY]

Cynthia woke on the eighth of January to the knowledge that a thrilling day for her had just begun. She looked out beneath the sun blinds across the Daventry estancia. Not a hand-breadth of cloud was visible. The brown earth baked under a blinding sun and the sky fitted down-upon it like a cap of brass. Inside the room, however, there was neither glare nor heat; and Cynthia stood with her expectations of the day fluttering about her like a shower of rose leaves. She was seventeen this morning, and the pride of it set her heart dancing. There would be letters downstairs from her friends, she hoped. There was a string of pearls, she knew. It had been bought that winter in Buenos Ayres with so elaborate a secrecy, and after so much furtive discussion as to whether it was good enough, that she could not but know of it. Moreover, there was a most important telegram to be despatched immediately after breakfast; a telegram of so much consequence that no hand but hers must write it out and send it off. So Cynthia was quick this morning. She dressed herself in a cool white frock, her white shoes and stockings, and ran lightly down the stairs into that room where years before a chandelier had of its own accord swung to and fro.

Valparaiso had long since been rebuilt, but Robert and Joan Daventry still kept house in Buenos Ayres through the winter, and made the estancia their summer home. The years, however, had brought their changes. Robert and Joan were frankly an old couple nowadays; a young Englishman was sitting at the breakfast table; he undertook the whole burden of management; and, finally, there was Cynthia. The "other plan," so often debated and so often shelved, had been adopted, after all; the experiment from which Robert Daventry had so shrunk had been risked; and Cynthia was the triumphant flower of it.

She greeted the old couple tenderly, shook hands with Richard Walton, the young manager, and received his good wishes with a pretty assumption of great dignity. But her eyes strayed to the table, where her place was piled high with parcels and letters, and her dignity vanished in her delight.

"I have many friends," she cried, with a sort of wonder in her voice very taking to those who looked on her while she spoke. For she could not but have friends, it seemed. So frank a wish to please and so sweet a modesty were linked to so much beauty. It was not the beauty of Argentina, though a rhapsodist might have maintained that some of its sunlight was held prisoner in the heavy ripples of her hair. But the hair was light brown in color, where the gold did not shine, and the rose was in her cheeks. A broad forehead, eyebrows thick and brown, curving across a fair skin above great eyes of a deep blue set rather wide apart, gave to her face a curious distinction. And her eyes looked out from so dark a wealth of lashes that they seemed unfathomable with mysteries--until she spoke. Then kindliness and a fresh joy in life lit them with soft fires. For the rest, she was neither short nor remarkable for height, the nose and the nostrils delicate, the chin small, but a definite chin. As for her mouth, it was not a rosebud, nor again was it a letter-box. It suited her and she could afford to smile. One granted her, at a glance, health and a look of race.

She began to open her letters and her presents. "Yes, I have many friends," she repeated.

"It may be surprising," said Robert Daventry. "But it seems to be true. In fact, I am not quite sure that I have not some small token about me that Joan and I don't dislike you altogether."

He fumbled first in one pocket, then in another.

"Really?" cried Cynthia. She leaned toward him, all eagerness and curiosity. Her lips were parted in a smile. She followed the movements of his hands with an air of suspense. She knew very well that half the pleasure of the givers would be spoilt if she betrayed any knowledge of the gift.

"What can it be?" Her whole attitude asked, while Robert Daventry slapped himself and looked under the table in a great fluster lest he should have mislaid the present. His concern was sheer farce; she, with a subtle skill of comedy, played her little part of happy impatience.

"Ah!" cried Robert Daventry at last. "It is not lost;" and he took out from his breast pocket a narrow case of green leather and from the white satin lining of the case the expected string of pearls. She stood up while Robert Daventry clasped it about her throat, and, as she took her seat again, she said in a low voice:

"You are both extraordinarily kind to me. I often wonder what would have become of me but for you--where I should be now."

For a moment both of the old people looked startled. Then Robert Daventry hastened to protest.

"My dear," he cried in a flurry, "you are, after all, of my flesh and blood. And flesh and blood has its claims."

Joan's quiet voice came to his help:

"Besides, the debt is not all on one side, Cynthia. We were not very contented until you came to us, were we Robert?"

"No, we weren't," he replied with relief, like a man floundering who finds solid ground under his feet. "We had lived hard and had done a great deal of work, and we were beginning to ask ourselves why. The heat and the ardor were over, you see. Our lives were cooling down. We had come to a time when one is apt to sit at night over the fire and wonder regretfully, now that no change is possible, whether we hadn't aimed at the wrong things and got less than we might have got out of our lives. We had piled up, and were still piling up, a great deal more money than we had any use for. We had made Daventry out of a plain as bare as the palm of my hand, and we had no one very dear to us to whom we could leave it. There didn't seem to be much use in things. Next week was going to be like this week, and the week after like next week, and life altogether nothing more than a succession of dull things. We were very nearly abandoning the estancia and retiring to England when my brother died."

"And left me to you," said Cynthia.

Robert Daventry nodded.

"And then our discontent vanished," said he.

Cynthia shook her head.

"I don't remember very much of those days, but I remember enough to be sure that I gave you a good deal of trouble." She spoke lightly to hide the emotion which the kindness of these friends had stirred in her.

Joan Daventry smiled.

"Yes, you gave us trouble, Cynthia," she said. "We are frightened by it still, at times. We are growing old and there is no other young spirit in the house, and it is possible that you might find your life rather dull, just as we did before you came to us."

"Dull?" cried Cynthia. "With you two dear people?" She held a hand lovingly to each, and now was hiding nothing of what she felt. "Besides, I have my friends. I meet them in Buenos Ayres. They come here to visit me. You gave them to me, as you have given me everything. Look at the number of them!" and she proudly pointed to her letters. She read them through and she breakfasted, and at the end of the meal gathered them in her hands.

"I must send some telegrams," she said. "I will drive to the railway station."

"Now?" Joan Daventry asked anxiously. "Can't they be sent later, in the afternoon, Cynthia?"

"No, mother," Cynthia replied. "Some might wait, but there's one which must go off now."

Joan Daventry looked at Richard Walton. The blinds were down and the window closed; so that the room was dark and cool. But a glance at her manager's face told her sufficiently what the heat was like outside. He had been abroad since daybreak and he was the color of a ripe mulberry. Joan Daventry looked to him for assistance. But, though his eyes were fixed with a momentary intentness upon Cynthia, he did not give it. He spoke on another subject.

"If you go, Miss Cynthia, I hope you will leave at home the pearls you are wearing round your throat. We are cutting the corn to-day and there are a good many men about of whom I know nothing at all. More hands came in last night than we had use for. It's all right, of course, but I shouldn't wear those pearls."

"Of course not," said Cynthia. "I will put them away."

"And you will take a man with you," said Robert Daventry. Neither he nor Joan had been brought up in cotton-wool; nor did they ever think to cloister Cynthia. She was left her liberty; and so half an hour afterward, with a big straw hat shading her face from the sun, she drove in her cart along the avenue to the railway station. She sent off the messages of thanks and then wrote out the important telegram which was to mark the day for her. She wrote it out without an alteration. For her thoughts had run fastidiously on the wording of it all through breakfast-time. She addressed it to:

Captain Rames, R. N.,

S.S. Perhaps,

Tilbury Docks,

London.

And she handed it to the operator with a certain trepidation like one who does some daring and irrevocable deed. The operator, however, was quite unmoved. The important message to which so much consideration had been given, wore to him quite a commonplace look. It amounted, indeed, to no more than this:

"Every heart-felt wish for a triumphant journey, from an unknown friend in South America."

Thus, the very words were conventional and the sentiment no great matter to make a fuss about. But this was not Cynthia's point of view.

She had spoken the truth at the breakfast table when she had told Joan and Robert Daventry that she did not find her life dull. But they were old people, and, in spite of her many friends, she was, to be sure, much alone with them. She was reticent of her feelings in their presence, not through any habit of concealment, but from modesty and the disparity of years. On the other side it was Joan's theory that youth should be trusted rather than pried upon. Cynthia was thus thrown back a good deal upon herself, and if she did not find life dull, it was, perhaps, because with life she had very little to do. She was seventeen, a girl of clear eyes and health and silver thoughts; and romance had its way with her. All that loving care could imagine for the clean and delicate training of mind and body had been lavished on her; and little by little she had fashioned for herself a wonderland of dreams and beautiful things. The only ugly thing about it was the iron turnstile in the wall by which you gained admittance. But that could not be helped. Its ugliness was recognized. The turnstile had been there from the beginning--why, Cynthia could not have told you. It was indeed itself the beginning. It was there in her dreams and her fancies, offering admission to somewhere, before the somewhere was explored, and found to be the wonderland.

In this world, then, she moved amidst a very goodly company. She was careful about her company, choosing it from the world at large. She claimed the best of all the nations for her friends, yet with a pretty shyness which often enough set her blushing and laughing at her own pretension. She had a test. Unless you answered to it, there was no admission, the turnstile did not revolve. Coronets went for nothing, even brave deeds did not suffice. He who entered--and, by the way, it must regretfully be admitted that "he" does accurately represent the sex of those who were allowed to enter. For it had never occurred to Cynthia at all to let another woman into her world. She was modest, but her modesty had its limits. He who entered, then, must have given proofs that he was possessed with a definite idea, that his life moved to the tune of it.

The population of Cynthia's private enclosure was consequently strictly limited; and, since she only knew her heroes through the newspaper and books, some even of those who were admitted came in under false pretences, and had summarily to be ejected. She was thus on the lookout for recruits. Captain Rames was the latest of them, and Cynthia knew less of him even than of the others. She had seen a blurred portrait of him in a daily paper; she knew that he was an officer in the navy, aged thirty-four, and it seemed to her that he had passed her test. For, this very afternoon, in command of a Dundee whaler, he was off southward into seas where no ship yet had sailed.

The clerk stamped her telegram and took it behind the partition into his office. Cynthia climbed back into her cart.

"I will drive back across the farm," she said. "I want to see the reaping."

At the end of the short, wide street of one-storied huts and houses she turned through a gate in a wire fence onto a wide plain of brown grass. A mile across the plain, separated by no fence or hedge, the glistening acres of wheat began, and at the edge Cynthia could see little men seated on reaping-machines drawn by little horses like toys. She drove toward them thinking of the telegram, and, with a blush under her straw hat, of its reception. As a matter of fact, Captain Rames was rather busy that day, and anonymous telegrams did not receive from him the attention which was no doubt their due. In three hours' time, she thought, Captain Rames might be wondering what his unknown friend was like, with a heart full of gratitude for her unknown friendship. Meanwhile, she was driving nearer and nearer to the little toys at the edge of the wheat-field. The little toys were growing larger and larger. Cynthia came out of her rose-mist.

"There are some new machines," she said, with interest, to the man who was with her. He was an old half-breed who had long been on the estate.

"Yes, Senorita," he answered. He pointed to one longer than the rest and drawn by six horses. "It does everything. It cuts, it ties in sheaves."

The whirring of the machinery came louder and louder to their ears. The young horse which she was driving cocked its ears and became restive. She gave the reins to the servant.

"I will walk forward," she said. "You can wait here." She descended to the ground. She walked forward toward the edge of the wheat. There realities awaited her.

CHAPTER V

[THE REAPER]

The great reaping-machine came swaying over the uneven ground toward her, along the edge of those glistening acres. A huge arm of iron rose and fell, catching up the swathes of wheat and flinging them into the machine, whence they rolled out tied. Six horses harnessed behind pushed it and a man, perched upon a tiny saddle, steered and controlled it. The machine was about twenty paces from her when it came suddenly to a stop. The driver leaped down from his seat. It seemed to Cynthia that the mechanism must have gone wrong. She expected to see him bend over a joint or a spring. But he did not stoop. The moment his feet touched the ground, he ran straight toward her and very swiftly.

He ran with his head down, and his shoulders bent. It was a heavy rush rather than a run. Cynthia recoiled. The words of Richard Walton sprang into her mind, and her hand rose instinctively to her throat. Could she have forgotten after all to remove the string of pearls? But she had removed it. And still the man was running toward her. The fear that she wore the pearls, and the proof that she did not, had followed so immediately upon his rush that he had as yet covered only half the ground between them. It was herself he aimed at then. She cast a rapid glance toward her cart. The Gaucho was leaning down over the opposite side, and talking to some one who stood by the wheel. A cry would not bring him to her side in time. She turned, with half a mind to run. But, though her white skirt reached only to her ankles, it would still impede her. She turned back and with a beating heart faced him. And a few feet from her he stopped.

He looked at her, drew a great breath, and cried "Ah!" like a man who has reached his goal.

"What do you want?" asked Cynthia, and in spite of her efforts her voice shook.

A South American harvest finds no use for the weak. The man who stood opposite to her was broad and powerful, with a heavy, coarse face, burnt to the color of brick by the sun. The sweat streaked it, and the dirt of many a day clung to it, and it was seamed by exposure. He was of the men who move from estancia to estancia while the harvest lasts, working from sunrise to dark, living upon mate tea and roasted sheep, and earning a pound a day, and thereafter lying soddened in some den until the last centavo has been squandered. A battered black hat was pressed low upon his clotted hair; a month's growth of beard straggled over his chin and cheeks. And his eyes were evil. That, more than any other quality of the man, Cynthia noticed. Their quick glance held her. She was terrified.

"What do you want?" she asked a second time, and her voice wavered still more audibly.

She stood in front of him, her lovely brows, under the big brim of her straw hat, troubled, and her great eyes wide and alert with fear. She was in the poise for flight like a startled deer, yet did not dare to turn to fly. And in the man, as he looked at her, there came a change.

He did not answer her question. But very slowly he smiled, and the smile was spiteful. He nodded his head at her; a malicious contentment overspread his face; and from head to heel his eyes inspected her. They approved her beauty and the simple daintiness of her clothes; they took note of her slenderness of hand and foot; they remarked the lines and supple youth of her figure; and through her white frock they seemed to make sure of the roundness of her limbs. Cynthia grew suddenly hot with shame. This man was appraising her--nothing less. Appraising her as if for a market! Her fear dropped from her. She cried a third time, but with spirit:

"What do you want of me?" and if her voice shook now, it was with a quiver of indignation.

She heard the thud of a horse's hoofs behind her. The reaper heard it, too. Without a word, and without any hurry, he turned away from her and slouched back to his machine. Cynthia's cart the next moment was driven up to her side. She climbed into it and took the reins. The encounter had shaken her more than she had thought. She was trembling, and she drove over the ground quickly, until she saw the slate roof of the house, flashing like silver, from a clump of dark trees quite near.

Then she reined in her horse and turned round. Far away at the edge of the wheat, the man and the machine and the six horses stood out black like a little toy. The clank and rattle of the iron came to her ears through the still air, faintly, like the mechanism of a toy. But Cynthia shivered as she looked back.

"Who is he?" she asked of the old Gaucho. He shrugged his shoulders.

"I do not know him, Señorita. I do not think he was here last year. They come in herds and go in herds when the corn is stacked."

Up and down, along the glistening line, the man drove his horses and manipulated his machine. He stopped no more. With each journey a wide band of wheat went down. Thus he had been working, balanced in his saddle, since daybreak. So, with but a two hours' rest, he would go under the burning afternoon sun until darkness came and bade him stop. To the Gaucho he was one of a herd of men who did the like; for a few weeks here; then for another few weeks on another estancia further down the line. But for Cynthia this man stood strangely out from the herd. He had stopped her, and she did not know why. She sat and watched his slow, obstinate progression. The persistence, the physical strength of the man daunted her. There was something of nature's own relentlessness in his capacity to endure and work. She magnified him, and was, at the same time, interested and alarmed. For of this she was sure. He had not stopped her merely because she was a girl, and alone. He had stopped her because she was herself. She remembered his smile, his nods of the head, his malice. He had a personal feeling, a personal animosity. She could not understand it, yet she was sure.

"How long will he stay?" she asked.

"A month," said the Gaucho.

"He was not here last year?"

"I do not recognize him."

"Why, then--" she began and did not finish the question. It was in her mind to ask, "Why does he hate me?" But she was aware at once that the Gaucho could not answer it. "And he will stay a month?" she asked again, uneasily.

"Yes, unless the Señorita wishes him to go. It will be, of course, as the Señorita wishes."

Cynthia nodded her head. There was a way out of the trouble, to be sure. But, on the other hand, she would have to say why she wished the man to go. At the recital of her story Mr. and Mrs. Daventry would be excited and alarmed. She herself would henceforth be surrounded with precautions. She determined to say nothing at all about her adventure. She would be careful during this month where she roamed. The man would be at work and it would be easy to avoid him. She gathered the reins again in her hands and drove to the house.

CHAPTER VI

[A VISITOR AT THE ESTANCIA]

Cynthia accordingly held her tongue. Nevertheless, that evening Richard Walton said to her across the dinner table:

"So you were, after all, molested by one of the hands, Miss Cynthia."

"Molested!" cried Robert Daventry indignantly.

Cynthia's face flamed.

"Who told you?" she asked of Richard Walton.

"Pedro."

Cynthia had not thought of the Gaucho. He had seemed so entirely uninterested, so utterly unalarmed.

"'Molested' is too strong a word," she said hastily. She now meant to make as light of the encounter as she possibly could. "It was very likely my fault. I got out of the trap and walked toward the wheat. It may be that the man fancied I wished to speak to him."

"What did he do?"

The question came from Joan Daventry.

"He sprang from his seat, ran to me, and stopped in front of me. That was all."

"Quite all?"

Cynthia nodded.

"He just stood and stared at me until Pedro drove up."

"Did he say nothing?"

"Not a word."

In spite of her resolve to treat the adventure lightly, Cynthia's voice grew troubled as she answered the questions. For she answered them with her eyes upon Joan Daventry's face, and she saw the perplexity there deepen into disquietude and misgiving. She turned toward Robert Daventry. Upon his face uneasiness was still more evident. He was plainly agitated. He sat listening in suspense. His indignation had gone.

Cynthia's fear revived under the stimulation of their anxiety. She continued slowly:

"But although he did me no harm, although he threatened none, there was something strange. He saw me at once. He ran so very quickly to me the moment I was within reach. He seemed almost to be looking out for me."

Joan sank back into her chair with a gesture of helplessness, which was all the more alarming because it was so singularly out of keeping with her character. Her eyes sought her husband's and sought them in dismay. Cynthia noticed both the gesture and the look. They kindled a vague terror in the girl. The wide brown plain was as a picture before her. She saw the great wheat-field glistening in the heat, a wind-wheel in a corner above a well, and this man with the evil eyes and the face of malice looking her over from head to foot.

"Yes," she said. "He seemed to be expecting me, and there was something else. He seemed to hate me;" and Robert Daventry with a cry sprang sharply to his feet.

Joan raised a quick warning hand. But the cry had been uttered; and with a sob Cynthia buried her face in her hands.

"I am frightened now," she said. "You frighten me."

Robert Daventry stood over her, clumsily remorseful, and laid his great hand on her shoulder.

"There's nothing to fear, Cynthia," he began. "Joan and I--" he broke off abruptly at a second warning from his wife. "We will pack that man off about his business to-morrow."

"Yes," said Mrs. Daventry. She had mastered her agitation, and now affected carelessness. "We can't really have Cynthia's birthday spoilt in this way."

"No, of course not," cried Robert Daventry, seizing upon this explanation of his distress. But he could not leave it in its simplicity. "It's abominable that Cynthia should have her birthday spoilt. She has only one a year, poor girl. That's what's troubling us, Cynthia. Nothing else. But it's enough to upset us, isn't it? To think that you should actually have your birthday spoilt--by one of my men, too."

So he went on, like a commentator on an ancient text, expanding the explanation, underlining it, and forcing upon Cynthia's intelligence its complete improbability. Even in the midst of her fears she could not but look with amusement toward Joan; and the two women exchanged the smile of their sex at the perennial clumsiness of man.

"He shall go first thing to-morrow morning," cried Mr. Daventry; and Richard Walton quietly rejoined:

"He has gone already. I paid him off this morning."

Mr. Daventry ceased abruptly from his vociferations.

"Thank you, Walton," he said. "Then that's ended," and he sat down.

But he had hardly taken his seat when the door opened and the parlor-maid brought to him upon a salver a folded slip of dirty paper.

"A man came with this to the door, sir. He is waiting for an answer."

Robert Daventry unfolded the slip and read the message written within it. He did not lift his eyes when he had read. He sat staring at the paper like a statue. And he sat amidst a deep silence. The cloud which had but now been lifted, had gathered once more above the heads of that small company. Though Robert Daventry did not speak, his long silence spoke for him; and though he schooled his face to composure, it was plain that he schooled it. A vague disquiet held the others at the table. Not one of them but had a conviction that this dirty, insignificant, scrap of writing announced a catastrophe.

Joan was the first to move. She walked round the table and stood behind her husband. He did not hear the rustle of her gown; and he was not aware that she leaned over him to read the message until the pressure of her hand upon his shoulder reminded him that she was his ally.

"You had better see the man, Robert," she said. "He calls late, but probably he needs help."

Thus she sought to pass the message off.

"Very well, I will," said Robert. He turned to the parlor-maid. "Bring him to my study when I ring the bell."

"I will come with you," said Joan, as the servant went out from the room.

Richard Walton rose from his chair.

"Perhaps you would like me, too?"

"No, I don't think that's necessary," replied Joan Daventry. "But perhaps you would stay within sound of the bell. We don't know who this man is or what he wants. If we ring again, you would know that we needed your advice."

"Certainly, I will be upon the lookout," said Walton, and he went from the room and crossed to the servants' quarters. There he would hear the bell at once should it ring for him. Joan meanwhile turned with a smile to Cynthia.

"We will leave you here for a few minutes," she said, and the composure of her voice almost reassured the girl; would, indeed, have quite reassured her but for Robert Daventry. She saw that his hands trembled so that the paper shook in them, even as her hands had trembled this morning when she climbed up by the edge of the wheat into her cart.

"Yes, wait here, Cynthia," said Robert Daventry, as he got to his feet; and Cynthia noticed that while he spoke to her he altogether avoided the glance of her eyes. The old couple went out of the room together, leaving her alone, and carefully latched the door behind them. In the hall for a moment they stood resting from their pretence. A broken word or two burst from Robert Daventry:

"What shall we do, Joan? This is what we have dreaded always."

Joan raised her finger to her lips.

"Hush! Speak lower. What I said was true. We don't know who he is, or what he wants. He may not be the man who stopped her in the field at all."

Robert Daventry shook his head. It was rather his nature to run to meet misfortune if he saw its shadow in his way.

"What shall we do?" he repeated. "Money will send him away," said Joan.

"And bring him back again," replied Robert hopelessly. "Sooner or later Cynthia will know;" and Joan threw up her head at his words.

"No," she said vigorously. "No."

At her left hand a door stood open upon a dark room. This was the smoking-room. She entered the room and crossed it to the opposite wall. Then she opened a second door, and advancing into this inner room, felt for the switch in the darkness and turned on the light. Bookcases, filled for the most part with books on agriculture, lined the room, a round table, littered with papers, occupied the centre, in the recess of a window stood a writing-desk. This was Robert Daventry's study. Her husband followed her, and saw that her finger was already on the bell.

"Let us decide what we are to do," he said, "before you ring."

Joan shook her head.

"We can't. We must be guided by what the man knows, and by what he wants. Only we admit nothing," she declared resolutely; and she pressed the bell. It rang in the passage by the kitchen, but Cynthia, left alone in the dining-room, heard it too.

The moment she heard it, Cynthia rose from her chair, and ran silently to the door. She unlatched it without a sound, and drew it toward her until it was just wide enough open for her to see out. There she stood grasping the door-knob, and in a moment a heavy foot sounded in the hall. Cynthia set her eyes to the chink. She saw first a maid-servant cross the hall, and pass into the smoking-room, and after the maid a man. The man was the reaper who had leapt from his machine and rushed toward her that morning. The maid-servant came back alone and crossed the hall again to the servants' quarters. A door was shut loudly--the door of Robert Daventry's study--and then another door opened noiselessly, and opened wide--the door of the dining-room. Cynthia came out into the hall. All the color had gone from her face, her eyes were wide with terror. The man meant her harm--not a doubt of it. He had some power to inflict the harm--that was sure. Otherwise why was he admitted, why were her friends in such concern?

Cynthia was quite alone in the hall now. Voices sounded faintly from the kitchen and in the room behind her a clock ticked. But there were no other sounds. She crossed to the threshold of the smoking-room and looked in. At the other end a bright bar of light on the floor held her eyes. The light came from the study. Cynthia watched it for a moment irresolute. But the temptation grew. She was sure that beyond that bright bar of light, behind that closed door, here in this far-away corner of Argentina, good and evil were at grips for her. A sense of loneliness suddenly possessed her, she longed for the neighborly noises of a city. And while she stood she heard her own name pronounced by Robert Daventry, and at once a harsh, strange voice rose in a laugh, loud and arrogant. She looked about her in a panic. She must fly, or she must know the truth, the whole of it, the worst of it. She stole swiftly and noiselessly into the room. Close by that bar of light a big, low chair stood against the wall. Cynthia crouched in the chair, her frock a blur of misty white in the darkness. There she remained, very still and quiet; and every word spoken in the study came clearly to her ears.

CHAPTER VII

[BOTH SIDES OF THE DOOR]

Within the room the three people were standing, the reaper upon one side of the table, Joan and Robert Daventry close together upon the other. The reaper was still laughing.

"Cynthia!" he cried, repeating contemptuously the name which Robert Daventry had used. "There's no Cynthia. There's a very pretty little girl I saw this morning in the corn. But her pretty little name is Doris Challoner. And, taking all in all, it's the better name of the two."

He spoke with an easy and most disquieting assurance, but Joan had enough of that quality to meet with him in the gate. She had always been a good fighter; she had stood by her husband often enough in the early days of the estancia, when his nerve would have failed him but for her; and she was for putting up to-night the best fight of her whole long, active life. Money, to her thinking, they could make again, old as they were, if the need came. But they could not open their hearts to a second Cynthia, even if they could find one.

"Nonsense," she answered boldly. "Her name is Cynthia Daventry."

"Where was she born, then?" asked the reaper.

"In Patagonia."

"Never in this world," cried the man. "She was born in Concepcion, and that's her farthest south."

Joan shrugged her shoulders.

"We ought to know. She is my husband's niece."

A grin overspread the reaper's face.

"And is that so?" he asked, in a mock surprise. "I wasn't aware of it."

"Well, you are now," said Joan.

"Yes, and the news alters our relations altogether, doesn't it?" he said pleasantly.

He tossed his battered hat upon the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down in it at his ease, his legs stretched out, his hands deep in his pockets. He nodded familiarly to Joan.

"How do you do, sis?" He turned his face toward Mr. Daventry, "You have got a nice little place, brother Robert. Shows what honest work can do if persevered with day after day for a great number of consecutive years. Quite a nice little place. You haven't, by any chance, got a nice little cigar, too, have you, Robert, for your long-lost brother?"

Robert Daventry's face grew red, and the veins swelled upon his forehead. He was a man quickly moved to passion, and quick, too, the passion exhausted, to swing back into doubts and hesitations. He blew either hot or cold, and, sooner or later, he was sure to blow cold. Now, however, his temper was up, and he brought his great fist down with violence upon the table.

"What do you mean by your insolence?" he shouted "Stand up!"

Joan laid a hand upon the old man's arm to restrain him. The reaper, for his part, never budged from his attitude.

"You have got a nerve," he said. "You tell me a pack of lies--that's all right, you've got money. But when I take you at your word, it's 'insolence' and 'stand up.' How's that, if you please?" He sat and laughed for a little in contemptuous jerks. "Your niece, indeed! The girl's my daughter."

Neither Joan nor Robert believed him for a moment. They thought of Cynthia, and compared that image at their hearts with the actual man who sprawled on the chair in front of them. Robert counted him up, his heavy features, his grime-engrained, spoilt hands, the whole degraded, unkempt look of him. Cynthia's father! The claim was preposterous.

"Her father!" cried Robert Daventry, leaning across the table. "Look at yourself in the glass!"

The sneer stung the reaper to a fury. He sprang to his feet, and from habit his hand slipped to the knife at the back of his waistband. But he mastered himself in a second or two. He was there for other ends than violence, and he withdrew his hand.

"I sha'n't forget that," he said, in a perfectly quiet voice, which contrasted in the strangest way with the convulsion of his face. "You got home there. Right home;" and he sat down again.

Joan interposed before her husband could say another word, and used soft words. The man was not Cynthia's father to be sure, but he knew something of the girl's history. That was certain--and he knew more than either Joan or Robert knew themselves. If she was to fight her battle with success, she must know what he knew.

"You could not expect us to accept your mere statement," she said.

"No, that's reasonable," said the reaper, and he began his story. But the insult rankled in his breast and as he spoke he kept turning a murderous eye on the man who had inflicted it.

He told the story of the earthquake at Valparaiso, and the flight of James Challoner across the Andes. It was a story told with a wealth of detail, and difficult altogether to discredit. Neither Joan nor Robert did altogether discredit it. It might be true or it might not. This man might have obtained it from James Challoner, or might somehow have come across it by himself. But they were still convinced he could not be James Challoner himself.

"We shall want more proof than that," said Joan calmly, and Robert nodded his head. Neither of them had felt more confidence than at this moment since the crumpled slip of paper had been brought into the dining-room.

But outside the door Cynthia huddled in the great chair with her ear to the door, listened with a growing terror. She had never doubted until this hour that she was the daughter of Robert Daventry's brother. She had been secure in that belief. Now the security was going. She clutched the arms of her chair, feeling the whole world slipping from beneath her feet--even as it had slipped at Valparaiso. For certain memories, quite clear in her mind, were being explained to her. An open hill-side at night, a strange red light upon the world, the crash of houses, little flames creeping, and ships quietly at anchor on the smoothest of seas--that was one picture in her memories which had often puzzled her, which would puzzle her no longer if she believed the story which was being told on the other side of the door. She remembered, too, a long journey amongst mountains, and a bridge over a deep and narrow torrent, and many people with kind faces who spoke to her.

"Of course, it isn't certain," she pleaded to herself desperately; and the husky voice behind the door began again:

"I travelled down to Buenos Ayres by train. I had little money, and no prospects, and a child on my hands. I couldn't make a home for her. So I went straight to the foundling hospital. It stands back in a garden, and is kept by some wealthy sisters. There's a turnstile in the brick wall of the garden, a little iron turnstile--but you know it well, both of you;" and he broke off with a laugh.

Inside the study Joan and Robert Daventry, still remained unconvinced. Outside Cynthia was persuaded.

"It's true then," she whispered to herself. "It's quite true;" and she wrung her hands in the darkness, and her voice broke in a sob. She had no longer any shadow of doubt. The turnstile in the brick wall was for her the overwhelming proof.

Examined in a court of law by the rules of evidence, it might seem flimsy enough. To Cynthia, it was complete corroboration of the testimony of her memories. The turnstile in the brick wall--the one ugly thing in her imagined wonderland of heroes--the turnstile which had always been there before the land was--how had it come there, she asked herself? And she was in no doubt as to the answer. The turnstile was a memory too. It was the turnstile of a foundling hospital, where her father had left her and gone his way. No wonder, she reflected bitterly, it was the one ugly thing in her world of fancies.

She leaned back, shivering, with her hands covering her face. She was humiliated, but she was still more terrified. Shame cut deep, but fear touched the very nerves of her heart. The man who had this morning rushed at her was her father, and she remembered the malice of his smile, and the evil, covetous look of him as he appraised her. She grew hot, now, as she thought upon it.

"What harm does he mean?" she asked; and suddenly she sat forward on the edge of her chair, quivering from head to foot like a spring some touch had released. For her father's voice rose again:

"I tied a bootlace round the child's arm. I can't say that I ever thought to come back for her. But there's a convention in these things, isn't there?" he added with a grin. "I have been a conservative all my life, and now I have found the advantage of it."

"How?" asked Joan. "Even if your story were true, your daughter wouldn't be wearing a bootlace or even the mark of it round her arm now."

"No, from the look of her she'd be more likely to be wearing a diamond bangle, bless her! But all the same the bootlace helps."

"How?"

Again the implacable question was uttered by Joan. She must know all that this man had upon his side by way of argument. That was her first necessity.

"How does the bootlace help?"

"It helps because the child wearing that bootlace was received by the same old ladies who allowed you a few months afterward to adopt her--that's how. Don't you leave those old ladies out of your reckoning, Mrs. Daventry, or you will run up against a snag. I went back to the foundling a year ago and claimed my daughter."

"You did?" cried Joan. She was startled. For a moment, too, she was disconcerted. She knew nothing of any such visit. But the statement was so easily capable of proof that the reaper would hardly have made it, had it not been true. And she was quick to see how strong a presumption such a visit would create, that he was the girl's father. Then she sprang to the weak point in the statement.

"If it were true that Cynthia was your daughter, and that you claimed her a year ago, how is it that you wait until a chance meeting in a field brings you face to face?"

"There's no chance about it, believe me," James Challoner returned. For it was he. The delicate manners had been rubbed off him, the gentle voice, which had charmed so many dollars from reluctant pockets long ago at Punta del Inca, had thickened and grown husky, the well-knit figure had spread to heaviness. But this was James Challoner, after fourteen years had told their tale. "The old ladies lied to me. Yes, actually lied to me," and he spread out his hands in indignation. "Lied to a father about his daughter! They were religious people too!"

"If they did lie," Robert Daventry burst in, "they did the best thing they ever did in all their good lives."

James Challoner waved Robert Daventry and his outburst aside. He kept his eyes fixed upon Joan's face.

"Yes, they lied to me," he said. "I gave them the day and the month and the year, when I placed Doris on the turnstile. They pretended to make inquiries, and they lied to me. They told me she was dead. Ah!" and he suddenly leaned forward and pointed an accusing finger at Joan, "You are glad to hear that. Yes, I thought you would be."

Try as she did, Joan had not been able to keep a flash of joy out of her face.

"It's a matter of indifference to me," she replied, "since Cynthia is not your child."

She still clung obstinately to that belief. He might have heard the story from James Challoner, and James Challoner might be dead. Any hypothesis was possible in her eyes, except the one which was true. She would not have it that this man was Cynthia's father.

"Oh, it is a matter of indifference to you!" said Challoner ironically. "I will tell you something that won't be. Those old ladies lied just as clumsily as I have ever seen it done. Poor old souls, they were rattled out of their senses at the thought of the sin they were committing. A child could have seen they were lying--as I did who am no child. And I began to cast about for a reason for the lie. It wasn't very difficult to find it. Some one had adopted her, some one they didn't want me to discover, some one rich, then, I reckoned, who could give the girl a position."

At the word "rich" Robert and Joan exchanged a glance. So much were they disconcerted by Challoner's knowledge and assurance that now they hoped rather than feared that blackmail was the end he had in view.

"So I began to make inquiries," continued Challoner. "I found out who were the patrons, who took most interest in the institution, and amongst them who had adopted a child. I came upon you in the end." And again he began to laugh. "Those poor innocent old women had actually given me the date when you took Doris away as the date of the child's death. It took me a little time to find out all about you; and when I had found out I had no money. So I had to work my way along until I reached you. But I have reached you," he exclaimed, lolling back in his chair, "and, by George, the very first day I am at work here, out the girl comes to meet me. Why, I recognized her in a second;" and Joan slipped in, as she thought, under his guard. With a thrill of delight she believed that he had made a mistake, and a mistake which would discredit every word of his story.

"Recognized her!" she repeated scornfully. "And the last time, when, on your own showing, you saw her she was three years old!"

Challoner, however, merely smiled at her.

"If you had a family at your back, old lady, you wouldn't be so high," he said; and once more Robert Daventry interposed.

"Speak respectfully to my wife," he cried.

"What, are you butting in again?" asked Challoner, with a look of surprise. "You didn't do any good, you know, the last time you interfered."

Once more Joan was called upon to restrain her husband. She saw the man convicted of a lie, and she did not mean to lose the advantage of that conviction.

"How did you recognize her?" she asked, smiling in her turn. "How did you recognize in the girl of seventeen the child of three?"

"I'll tell you," said Challoner confidently. "And, by the way, she's not seventeen to-day. It might interest you to know that. She's seventeen and a half. She was born on the seventeenth of July."

"Keep to the point," said Joan.

"Certainly, I will," replied Challoner, "though it's by no means necessary to substantiate my authority--yes," and his voice suddenly rang out loud upon the word, so that Cynthia in the darkness on the other side of the door shivered as if she had been struck, "yes, my authority. I don't say that she's like what she was when she was three. I don't even say she's like her mother. She isn't. She's a Challoner--and in the Challoner's home, by Wareham in Dorsetshire, there are some pictures worth looking at. I sat opposite one of them at the dinner table all through my boyhood, and whenever I was at home afterward--until I came out here. It was the portrait of my great-great-grandmother, painted by Romney, when she was a girl; and I tell you the girl who came stepping so prettily across the field this morning, in her white frock and big straw hat, might have stepped right out of that picture frame. That's how I recognized her."

He ended on a note of triumph, and for the first time Joan's confidence failed her altogether. Again, it was not, of course, a conclusive piece of evidence, gauged by any laws of reasoning, but just as Challoner's description of the turnstile had convinced Cynthia outside the door because of the particular illumination it lent to an obscure fancy, so this detail of the picture did more to convince Joan Daventry than the rest of the story. Some portions of that story she knew to be true: the bootlace, the abandonment of the child. But what she had obstinately been combating was the contention that it was true of this man who sat before her. He might have learnt it all from the real father; he might now be seeking to make his profit out of the knowledge. That had been her hope. But it failed her now. For the particular detail of the girl's resemblance, now that she was seventeen, to the Romney portrait in the Challoners' dining-room he could not have learned from another. It did suggest that the man in front of her was the Challoner he claimed to be. Of course the detail might have been invented. But it did not sound to her invented; and, so far as her knowledge could test it, the rest of his story was true. She looked him over again with new eyes.

"But you can't prove that," she said. "Even if it were true, you couldn't prove it."

"Should I need to?" asked Challoner. "After I had put those old ladies from the Foundling into the witness-box, should I need to, Mrs. Daventry? Would they stick to their lie? Any tenth-rate attorney could turn 'em inside out as easy as an old glove, if they tried to. But they wouldn't try--and you know it as well as I do."

Challoner had put his finger on the danger-spot of the Daventrys' position. Those two old ladies would have suffered much heart-searching before they told their lie, and not a little remorse afterward. Questioned upon their oaths they would speak the truth, and the whole truth. Of that Joan felt sure.

"There are men, too, in Buenos Ayres who knew me when I was in Chile," Challoner continued; and then once more Robert Daventry interposed.

"But you wouldn't be mad enough to go to law with us," he cried, and Challoner laughed.

"Oh, yes, I would, and I would put you into the witness-box, too. A pretty figure you would cut, with your Patagonian brother, eh? I wouldn't bring my action here, of course, in this district. You've got your local syndic in your pocket, I grant you. But the law runs in Buenos Ayres nowadays, and don't you forget it."

Robert Daventry turned aside to hide his discomfiture, and walked once or twice across the room. He had no doubt that this man was James Challoner and Cynthia's father. His story was too circumstantial to be disputed. Moreover, neither he nor Joan could publicly dispute it. There had been no brother in Patagonia. He turned abruptly to Challoner: "How much do you want?"

Joan moved quickly to his side with a cry of protest. Money it might be necessary to pay, but it must be asked for, not offered. To offer it was to admit the claim.

"What are you saying, Robert?" she cried.

Robert turned to her quietly.

"It must come to that in the end. Why not now and have done with it? How much?"

A smile of triumph broadened over Challoner's face. Outside the door Cynthia leaned forward, her hands clasped over her heart in an agony of suspense. Why didn't he answer? Why was he so long?

The answer came at length:

"I want my daughter, nothing else. She is not of age. I have a right to her; I'll take her away with me to-night."

Cynthia crouched back in her chair, clasping its arms tightly with her hands, and making herself very small. To Joan and Robert Daventry the demand was incredible, even though their ears had heard it. Challoner could not mean it. It was an expedient to raise the price. But Cynthia had caught a note of malice in his voice which brought back before her eyes the malice of his looks as he had stood before her in the field. He meant to take her away, and that night. She glanced toward the door. To leave her home, to be swallowed up in the darkness with this stranger for her companion! She clung to the chair in a panic of terror. Then she heard Robert Daventry repeating the words in a daze:

"You want to take her away? Cynthia?" And as though the meaning of Challoner's demand for the first time broke in on him, "Never!" he cried violently.

"I want to take her away to-night;" and now the malice in Challoner's voice was audible to Joan too. She stared at him over the table. He sat nodding his head at her with little quick movements, his eyes very bright, and a horrid smile about his mouth. She remembered what Cynthia herself had said: "He seemed to hate me."

"You grudge her her happiness, her life with us!" she exclaimed; and Challoner beat his fist upon the table in a sudden anger.

"Is it strange?" he cried. "All these years here she has been sitting soft and walking daintily. What have I been doing? 'Look at yourself in a glass'--That's what you said," and he turned to Robert Daventry. "I told you I'd remember it, and I do. A fine life I have had of it for fourteen years. Mate tea and enough work a day to throw a trades-unionist into hysterics! No wonder I've lost my looks."

All the bitterness of his fourteen years of degradation seemed to be concentrated in his words. The easy good-humor with which he had begun had vanished. He was a man venomous with grievances. He was still the old James Challoner in this; he had enemies, only now the enemies were not a few to be searched for through a list, but all who had a sixpence in their pockets. Joan herself was frightened. She realized the mistake which she and her husband had made in their eagerness to disbelieve the story of this man. She understood now that when she had thought of Cynthia and compared her with the reaper, she had been thinking only of the flower and had omitted her own assiduous cultivation of the plant. She recognized now that the look of race which fourteen years of luxury had refined in the girl, fourteen years of degradation might well have obliterated in the man.

"I have had enough of it," cried James Challoner. "It's now her turn."

"But we offer you freedom from that life," said Joan, and her voice began to plead.

"I want my daughter," Challoner retorted implacably.

"But you can't make a home for her," said Robert Daventry.

Challoner chuckled and his voice lost its violence.

"You must take me for a softy," he said with a drawl of amusement. "I mean her to make a home for me, where I can do a bit of sitting soft and recover my good looks."

"But she can't make a home for you," said Joan.

"Oh, yes she can."

"How?"

Cynthia outside the door waited in a despairing bewilderment. The changed tones of those whom she had looked upon as her parents assured her that the reaper had authority and rights, could claim her, could take her away. But how, she asked herself, was she to make a home for him? She had learned no profession, practised no art. The tears rose to her eyes and flowed down her cheeks; and the answer came.

"She's a rare one for looks," said Challoner. His eyes narrowed to slits and his face became mean and despicable to look upon. "You'll not find her equal strolling under the lamps of Buenos Ayres."

Joan flinched and uttered a cry. The movement was that of one who has been slapped in the face. Cynthia felt her heart stand still within her breast. She had lived in Buenos Ayres, where knowledge comes quickly to women. She was neither ignorant nor a fool. She understood, and once more her eyes went to the door. It was all quiet in the hall. A few quick steps and she would be out of the house. She rose from her chair. For the dark night, which a minute before had so appalled her, now appealed to her as a friend and refuge. But as she turned, she heard Robert Daventry say in a choking voice:

"Go! or I'll have you thrown out;" and the bell rang violently.

"Oh, is that the game?" replied Challoner.

Daventry strode round the room.

"Not a word! Go! I loathe you."

And the door was wrenched violently open. Cynthia had just time to drop into her chair. She heard her father's voice close to her, and no longer through the panels of a door. She cowered down, covering her face with her hands, and drawing in her feet.

"All right, I'll go," said Challoner. "I can afford to go. For I have the law on my side."

"The law! Try it!"

"I will."

Challoner was standing in the doorway now. He was looking back into the study. But he had only to turn his head to see that blur of misty white in the chair, only to bend down and draw the trembling hands from the girl's face to find his daughter in his grasp. Cynthia lay holding her breath, ready at a touch of him to swoon.

"She's my daughter. All your money won't get over that. Just wait and see. I'll come back with the law at my side, and take her away--yes--if I have to tie her hand and foot to take her."

He flung out across the smoking-room, looking neither to the right nor to the left. Joan and Robert Daventry followed quickly behind him, afraid lest he should force his way into the dining-room where they had left Cynthia. Not one of them saw the girl huddled in the great chair in the dark room. Richard Walton came into the hall.

"I'll see you off the premises," he said to Challoner, and a moment afterward the front door slammed.

With the slamming of that door Cynthia seemed to swim back into life; and all at once there came upon her a great longing for comfort and kind words. She was hurt and humiliated as she had never thought to be. It seemed to her that she was tainted, and she was terribly afraid. She took a swift step toward the door, and there Joan's voice speaking in a whisper arrested her.

Joan was standing with her husband by the dining-room, and seeking to compose her agitation before she entered it. Her voice was still shaking from her encounter.

"Not a word to Cynthia," she said. "We sha'n't let her go, Robert," and her voice was very wistful, and appealed for confirmation of her words. "So there's no need to trouble her--as this story would trouble her."

"No, we'll not say a word to her," replied Robert. He made an effort to be hearty, but it quite failed to hide his distress. "We shall find a way out somehow when we think it all over. No, we'll not breathe a word, my dear. Cynthia's birthday mustn't be spoilt," and, thoroughly miserable, the old couple went into the dining-room and closed the door behind them.

Cynthia made up her mind. Since they wished her not to know, since it would add so much to their distress if they learned that she did know, she would keep her knowledge to herself. It seemed to her then a small return to make to them for their devotion, but it was to cost her much more than she imagined. She would wait, schooling herself to patience, hiding her fears. But she could not face her friends to-night and keep her secret. For that she had not the strength. She ran swiftly and silently up to her room and flung herself upon her bed and buried her face in the pillows. There she lay trembling until the thought came to her that Joan would not retire without coming to ask why she had gone upstairs so early. She undressed and was hardly in bed before Joan knocked on the door.

"I had a headache," said Cynthia. "It is the heat, no doubt. I shall be myself in the morning."

"You are sure? You wouldn't like the doctor?" Joan asked anxiously.

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Cynthia.

Joan put her hand to the switch of the light, and Cynthia started up in bed with a wild gesture.

"Don't turn the light out, please, mother," she cried; and the next moment feared that Joan would have heard the terror underneath her words. But Joan herself was occupied. She kissed Cynthia and left her alone with the light burning in her room.

CHAPTER VIII

[THE FLIGHT]

But though the light burned in her room, Cynthia did not sleep till daybreak. For the first few hours there was a strange bustle about the passages of the house, for which she did not seek at all to find a cause. She welcomed it for its companionship. Familiar voices informed her that her friends were awake about her, and she was comforted. She tried to fall asleep before the noise should cease, but gradually the estancia sank into silence, and she was still awake. Then began her hours of terror. Her window was open, and every flutter of the night air which shook the curtains was her father's coarse, strong hand upon the sill. If she closed her eyes for a moment, his dark and evil face was already bending over her, as she lay helpless in her bed. If she heard a wardrobe crack it was he stepping clumsily about the room. Half the night she spent crouching up in her bed, her eyes wild with fear, her heart racing and stopping, while she listened for the sound of his footsteps outside the house. And she heard them; did a twig snap on a tree in the garden, she heard them. There was he, prowling about the walls, watching, perhaps, for just her light to be put out before he slipped in through a window to take her away. If she heard no sounds, then he was already in the house, creeping along the corridor toward her door. From the moment when this particular fear seized hold upon her, her eyes were fixed in an agony of suspense upon the long mirror in her room. The door was at her right hand, set in the wall against which the head of her bed was placed. A high screen stood by the side of the bed and hid it from her altogether. But across the room the long mirror faced her, and by looking at its bright surface she could see whether the door opened or not. It was a white door, with a round brass handle, and, continually, she was very sure that she saw the handle turn. In her frantic imaginings her father's very semblance changed. Gross though he was, still more she distorted him, making his likeness fit with the knowledge which she had of him. He meant to drag her away, and batten on what she had of youth and freshness and good looks; and this, out of malice almost as much as for profit, and to punish her for the happiness of her life. He swelled into some grotesque and corpulent thing of evil with a fat, loathsome face and gripping hands.

The night was a night of disillusionment for Cynthia. Romance was stunned in her. All her pretty dreams, wherein she shyly walked with the bright ones of the earth, were rent and blown to space like gossamer. She seemed separated from them by a generation of years. She looked back upon them with derision. A fine heroine she was to be if that door opened. She was to walk--yes--but under the gas-lamps, and not shyly, and with any who would. That was the plan deliberately conceived for her and conceived by her own father. The mere thought of it seemed to sully her, to make her unworthy. She remembered that only that morning she had sent a telegram to Captain Rames, with a thrill of excitement, as though she were doing a remarkable thing. She had actually dared. She sat up, and in the bitterness of her heart laughed at the great significance she had set upon herself. Her father had a different view of her importance, and from head to foot she ached with the pain of her humiliation.

Thus through the long hours she swung between terror and abasement, each one mastering her in turn. Once she started up with a despairing cry as she imagined her father driving her out into the street with blows.

Could she make her living honestly if she ran away from him, she wondered miserably, bethinking that at the worst she must kill herself? At another moment she would recall with a pang of contempt her enchanted garden and scorch its flowers with her ridicule. She would walk in that garden no more. It was closed. She had been an impostor in it always. It was a place of falsities. There was but one true, real thing in it all--the turnstile in the wall which gave admission to its precincts. Yes, that was true, and the turnstile, with all it meant of shame and indifference, became to her a new epitome of life.

Gradually the night wore through. A finger of gray light slipped through the curtains, and was laid upon the ceiling of the room. Birds began to sing in the garden. Cynthia turned out her light and fell asleep at last. She slept late and woke to just such another day of heat as yesterday. She lay for a moment, happily convinced that all which had occurred last night had occurred only in a dream. But she looked into the mirror across the room and saw the door, and the truth was made known to her. These things had happened.

Certainly the door was still closed, the night had passed. But other nights would follow, and through the closed door, not her father, but fear and shame had passed to bear her company. She came down to breakfast pale and heavy-eyed, and found Joan and Robert Daventry already at the table. She was afraid lest they should remark the alteration in her looks, and she set herself to counterfeit an air of gaiety. It was not very successful, but Joan and Robert Daventry were making precisely the same pretence, with still poorer results. They could not meet her eyes any more than she theirs; and they were trying for the sake of her happiness to hide from her a catastrophe, her knowledge of which for the sake of their happiness she was trying to hide from them. Thus they all talked with great speed about things of no importance, and laughed noisily whether laughter was appropriate or not, until Robert Daventry suddenly turned to Cynthia and blurted out with an affected blitheness:

"I hope, my dear, that you haven't made many absolutely unalterable arrangements for the summer." And Cynthia turned as white as the table-cloth and looked suddenly down to hide the terror in her eyes. They were going to give her up, then! That was her first despairing thought. No doubt it could not be helped. They were compelled to.

"No," she answered faintly. "No arrangements that cannot be altered. I was going to stay for a week with--" and as she compared the summer which she had planned with that which awaited her, she stopped, lest the choking of her voice should betray her.

"That's well," continued Robert, "for you have a journey to make, Cynthia. I have had a telegram this morning from England. I bought some property in Warwickshire a few years ago. We thought you would not, perhaps, want to live all your life in the Argentine after we had gone. So we bought it for you. But it appears there's some sort of lawyer's trouble over the title."

"We have known there was some trouble," Joan hastened to explain, "for quite a long time. But until this telegram arrived we did not think it very serious."

"Now we know what it is," continued Robert, "and I am afraid that we must go to England and attend to it. Luckily, we have Walton now to look after the estancia." And since Cynthia made no reply, but still looked upon the cloth, he continued in some perplexity: "I hope, my dear, you won't be disappointed. Joan and I, indeed, were inclined to be confident that you would enjoy the trip."

"And, of course, I shall," cried Cynthia; and now she raised her head and gazed at her friends with shining eyes. She had not dared to yield her face to their scrutiny in the first revulsion of her feelings. Even now the room whirled about her. "I shall be delighted to go with you. When shall we start?"

"Yes, that's the point," said Mr. Daventry, uncomfortably. "The telegram is very urgent, and there's a boat sailing from Buenos Ayres to-morrow. I am afraid, Cynthia, that we must catch it. There's certain to be no difficulty about cabins just at this time of the year, and, in fact, I have already telegraphed to retain them. So you see we must leave Daventry by the night train. Can you be ready?"

"Of course," said Cynthia.

The color came back again into her pale cheeks and made them rosy, and the smile returned to her lips. No telegram had come. The bustle in the corridors during the early hours of the evening was explained to her. Over night, Robert and Joan had made up their minds to an instant flight, and had set about their preparations. Cynthia drew her breath again. She resumed life and some part of her faith in life. The world was not peopled with James Challoners, as, in the shock of her horror, she had almost been persuaded. Here were two who, for her sake, were abandoning their home and the place which their labors had made for them in the country of their adoption. Her great trouble during that day of hurried preparation was to avoid blurting out to her two friends her gratitude and her knowledge.

They travelled by night and, reaching Buenos Ayres in the morning, drove straight along the docks to their ship. Once on board, Cynthia noticed that Joan made this and that excuse about the arrangement of her cabin to keep her from the deck until the steamer had warped out into the basin. Then she gave a sigh of relief and sat down in a chair.

"You won't mind, dear, will you?" she said. "We shall probably be kept some time in England. But you will soon make friends. Robert was speaking about it last night. He said it was a good hunting country, and that we could get you some fine horses and--" and suddenly she felt Cynthia's arms about her neck, and the girl's tears upon her cheeks.

"My dear, my dear, you are too kind to me!" cried Cynthia. "I don't mind about the horses, if only you'll keep me with you."

"Of course, of course," said Mrs. Daventry. "What should we do without you ourselves."

The screw was churning up the mud of the River Plate, the flat banks dotted with low trees were slipping past the port-holes.

"Let us go out and get the steward to arrange our chairs on deck," said Mrs. Daventry. She put Cynthia's outburst down, not to any guess at the true reason of their flight, but to a young girl's moment of emotion.

The steamer put into Montevideo, and Santos, and Rio, and glided northward along the woods and white sands of Brazil. It passed one morning into the narrows of the Cape Verde Islands, and there was dressed from stem to stern with flags.

Cynthia asked the reason of the first officer, who was leaning beside her on the rail, and for answer he pointed northward to a small black ship which was coming down toward them, and handed to her his binocular.

"That's the Perhaps, bound for the South," he said; and he saw the girl's face flush red.

She put the glasses to her eyes, and gazed for a long while at the boat. The Perhaps was a full-rigged ship, with auxiliary steam, broad in the beam, with strong, rounded bows. She had the trade-wind behind her, and came lumbering down the channel with every sail set upon her yards.

"But she's so small," cried Cynthia.

"She has to be small," replied the first officer. "Length's no use for her work. Look at us! We should crack like a filbert in the ice-pack. She won't."

"But she's out for three years," said Cynthia.

"There'll be a relief ship with fresh stores, no doubt. And there are not many of them on board, twenty-nine all told."

Cynthia looked again, and held the glasses to her eyes until the boats drew level. She could make out small figures upon the bridge and deck; she saw answering signals break out in answer to their own good wishes; and then the name in new gold letters came out upon the black stern beneath the counter.

"Thank you," she said as she handed back the glasses. But her eyes were still fixed upon that full-rigged ship lumbering heavily to the unknown South.

"I am very glad to have seen the Perhaps," she said slowly.

The first officer looked at her curiously. There was a quiver of emotion in her voice.

"Perhaps you have friends on board," he said. "If you have, I envy them."

"No," she said slowly. "I know no one on board. But I am glad to have seen the ship, for I was interested in it in a part of my life which is now over."

The first officer was about to smile. Here was a remarkably pretty girl of seventeen or so, talking about a part of her life which was over! But the big, dark-blue eyes swept round and rested gravely on his face, and he bowed to her with a fitting solemnity.

Cynthia exaggerated, no doubt, taking herself seriously as young girls will. But the shock of that last night in the estancia had wrought a revolution in her thoughts. Though James Challoner no longer seemed to grip her hand, she walked in the chill shadow of his presence. Nor did that shadow quite lift even when she had landed in England.

They travelled into Warwickshire, and so came to that white house behind the old wall of red brick on the London road which Robert Daventry had once coveted for himself and had afterward bought for Cynthia. The Daventrys made it their home now. Though Cynthia never read a word about it in the papers, that disputed title took a long while in the settling. Robert Daventry resumed the old ties. Joan, with Cynthia at her side, found the making of new ones not the laborious business she had feared, and Cynthia had her horses and as many friends as she had room for in her life. But the shadow was still about her. James Challoner might have found the means to follow them to England. At any corner of a lane she might discover his gross and sinister figure upon the path. A few miles away, the ancient city of Ludsey lifted high its old steeples and its modern chimneys. She was always secretly upon her guard in its climbing streets. There was always in her life a mirror facing a closed door, and at her heart a great fear lest she should see the door open.

CHAPTER IX

[ROBERT DAVENTRY EXPLAINS]

Thus the greater part of three years passed, but toward the end of the third the influenza became virulent throughout that country. It was a winter of sharp frosts and sudden thaws. One week the lanes were deep in snow and the fields white squares ruled off by the hedges; the next the whole country-side ran water. The epidemic was at its worst in November, and during that month it attacked Joan Daventry. She was now a woman of seventy, and the activity of her life had worn out her heart. She died within a week of her seizure, and from that time Robert Daventry's strength steadily declined. It may have been that the loss of Joan loosened his hold on life, or, again it may have been, as Dr. Hill declared, that he caught a chill at the graveside which he could not shake off. But, whatever the cause, he ailed through November, and in the beginning of the following month, while sitting on the bench at Ludsey, he was seized with a great faintness. He was driven back to the white house, and took to his bed; and on the next day the snow fell again.

Ten days after he had fallen sick, Dr. Hill came from the bedroom and found Cynthia waiting as ever for his news. He was an oldish man, and quite at home in that house. He slipped his arm through hers and said in a grave and gentle voice:

"Your father wants you, my dear. He has something to say to you."

Cynthia looked at him anxiously.

"Won't it tire him too much to talk?"

"He will not, I think, be tired for very long. You had better go to him at once, for his mind is quite clear now. I will come back to-morrow morning, unless you telephone to me before then that you want me. It is now, I am afraid, a matter of waiting."

He drove away from the door. Cynthia walked back along the passages to the room where the old man lay in a great four-poster bed. The afternoon was closing in, and the room was not yet lit. But there was light enough for her to appreciate all that Dr. Hill had meant. Robert Daventry had grown so frail, his hands and face were so very nearly transparent.

"I have a good deal to tell you, Cynthia," he said feebly, and his lips tried to smile. "So listen to me carefully."

The nurse went out of the room. Cynthia sat down by the bed and took the old man's hand in hers. She made no pretence that another opportunity would come.

"You will be very well off, my dear, I am thankful to say," he continued. "There's the estancia, about which I will say a word to you later, and a little more than four hundred thousand pounds in the stocks. It's practically all coming to you. Of course, the profit on the estancia varies with the season, and may in bad years mean nothing; but on the average, I reckon you ought to have about twenty-five thousand a year. That leaves out this house and the little farm which goes with it. They are yours already. I have made Hill one of my executors--he'll be rather a figurehead, I expect--and Isaac Benoliel, of Culver, the other. They are both friends and neighbors of yours, and understanding people. I have tied up half the money on you and your children. If you haven't any children you will bequeath it as you like. But I am hoping very much that you will have them. I once asked a woman what she looked back upon as the happiest time of her life, and she said the evenings when she and her husband used to sit alone together before their first child was born. I think that was a wise saying, Cynthia. It struck me very much at the time, and has never since seemed to me less true than it did then. And, you know, everybody can't expect quite the same luck as Joan and I had in finding you." He pressed her hand with such strength as he had, and lay for a little while silent, husbanding his strength.

"I was advised by my lawyer," he resumed, "to tie my whole fortune up. But I talked it over with Joan and we were afraid that it might perhaps occur to you afterward that we didn't completely trust you."

"Oh, father, I should never have thought that," Cynthia protested gently.

The old man shook his head.

"One can never be quite certain that queer, stinging ideas won't come," he said. "And we both were anxious that you should be sure always that we had no fear of the way in which you would manage your life. So you will be completely mistress of half your fortune," and he hesitated for a moment, "when you come of age. But I would like you, when you are in doubt, to consult Isaac Benoliel. I have a great faith in him."

"I, too," said Cynthia. "I will consult him."

A look of relief came into Robert Daventry's face.

"I am glad of that," he said. "There are people, of course, who are prejudiced against him. He is a Jew, and he's new, and he has that queer sort of indefinable position which attracts criticism. But I think you will find him a valuable friend."

Daventry's voice had weakened to a whisper, and he lay back upon his pillows with his eyes closed. Cynthia moved, but the pressure of his hand retained her. She sat and waited, speaking no word and holding back the tears which smarted in her eyes. Robert Daventry spoke again.

"There's some medicine," he said. "Hill gave it me to keep me going. It's in a glass."

Cynthia lifted a glass filled with some grayish liquid, and held it to the old man's lips. He drank, and resumed:

"I have written down during the last day or two the heads of what I wanted to say on a paper."

Cynthia found a slip of paper on the table by the bedside.

"Just read."

There were some words written one below the other on the paper in a straggling hand. Cynthia read them out.

"Money."

"I have said all I have to say, I think, about that."

"Diana Royle," Cynthia read next. But she read the name slowly, so slowly that Robert Daventry noticed her deliberation.

"I don't think you can see, Cynthia," he said. "It's getting dark."

"Oh, yes, father, I can see quite clearly," she replied. "What of Mrs. Royle?"

"You know her," said Robert. "You like her, too, I think, don't you?" Cynthia did not reply, but Daventry had not asked the question in the tone of one needing a reply. "You will want some one to live with you until you get married, which, by the way, you don't seem to be in a hurry to do, my dear. The young fellows round here don't seem to have made much impression. Oh! I am not bustling you, my dear. Only--only--don't leave it too long, Cynthia," he said, and his hand sought hers again.

Cynthia stirred uneasily. It was the way of men, to want to marry every girl off as soon as possible, she knew. It was a form of vanity. But she wished to give no promise.

"You will probably go to London, I don't want you to mope down here all the time. There's no reason that you should. You can have your house in town. But you will want some one with you, and I thought my cousin, Diana Royle, would be the most suitable person."

Cynthia raised her head as if she was about to speak. But she did not, and Daventry said:

"I wrote to her about it."

"Oh," said Cynthia slowly. "You have already written?"

"Yes, and she consented at once. You see her husband left her badly off when he died. So it will be an advantage to her. And though she is older than you are, she is not so much older that you won't be in sympathy with one another."

Cynthia nodded her head.

"I see," she said. "Yes, of course, I know her very well." But a note of reserve was audible, or rather would have been audible to any other in that room. But Robert Daventry was altogether occupied in the effort to master his overmastering weakness. There was more which he wished to say; there was something which he must say.

"Then that's settled," he whispered; and with his eyes he asked for his cordial. Cynthia once more supported him, and held the glass to his lips.

"Now, what comes next?" he asked, and Cynthia looked at the paper.

"The estancia," she said.

"Yes," said Daventry, and a smile suddenly illumined his face and made it young. "The estancia! You have the right to dispose of it, Cynthia. For one never knows what changes may come. But I don't want you to let it go unless there is some great necessity. It brings in, generally, a good income, and now that Walton looks after it, it gives very little trouble. Walton is a good man. I should give him an interest in it, if I were you, and as time goes on increase his interest. Keep him and keep it. I want you very much to do that. I am proud of the Daventry estancia, for one thing. For another, the best part of Joan's life and of mine was spent there. There, too, we first brought you when you came to us. There's yet another reason," and he stopped, and thought. "Yes, there's yet another reason why I care for it so much--but--" and he shook his head and gave up the effort to interpret it: "it's not very clear in my mind just now. I only know it's there--a strong reason."

He was speaking with a depth of tenderness in his voice for which Cynthia was hardly prepared. Always he had seemed to her to look upon the estancia as a business proposition rather than as the soil in which his heart was rooted. Always, too, he had seemed so contented to live in England, and he had taken his part with so much zest in the local administration of the county. She was as puzzled now by this note of yearning--for it was no less than yearning--as by the reason which he could not interpret. It was all made plain to her in after years, but by another than Robert Daventry.

"I want you very much to keep the estancia, Cynthia."

"Of course I will keep it," she said, and again she made no pretence that the day was distant when it would be hers to keep. Her heart was heavy with grief, it went out in love to this dear friend of hers; she was young and the cry was loud in her bosom, "What will I do without you?" but her lips did not utter it. He would be quite sure of her love without her protests. There was comprehension enough, and to spare, between them to make her certain of that. And, since he wanted her to listen, she put aside her distress and the thought of the loneliness which awaited her and obeyed him.

"I would even be glad"--and the old man hesitated with the timidity of one asking a heavy favor.--"Yes, I would be glad if you would go back there--oh, not often--but just once or twice to see that all was going on well."

Cynthia's hand trembled for a moment. She looked at him with a sudden terror in her eyes. But he was lying now upon his side with his face to the window, and seeing things not to be seen through its panes. It cost Cynthia a great deal to make the promise he sought from her. She shrank from a return to the estancia with every fibre of her body. But she made it. He besought her in so wistful a voice.

"Yes, I will go back, father."

"Thank you," he said gently.

Outside the window the snow lay white and deep upon the slate roofs of the outbuildings, and was piled upon the black branches of the trees. Overhead was a gray sky of winter. But for the glimmer of the snow it would almost have been dark. A smile shone again on the old man's face.

"Perhaps Walton's cutting the corn to-day! Think of it!" he said, with a great longing, and before Cynthia's eyes there rose immediately the vision of a great glistening field of standing wheat and a reaping-machine like a black toy outlined against it. They remained thus in silence for a little while. Cynthia was thinking.

"After all, he may not be in the Argentine.... I may not meet him.... He will have no power over me.... There is no reason why I should be afraid."

And then, as though in answer to these arguments, Robert Daventry said:

"You can go back now, Cynthia, without fear."

The girl looked at him with startled eyes. Had she spoken aloud, she asked herself? Had she betrayed her secret just at this last moment? But her eyes fell upon the slip of paper in her hand, and there she saw written plainly under the word "estancia" the name "James Challoner."

Robert Daventry looked toward a bureau which stood by the window.

"The little drawer on the left. No, the one above that. There's a cutting from a newspaper."

Cynthia found in the drawer half a column of a Spanish newspaper. The name was on the top of the column. It was a paper published in Buenos Ayres. She brought the cutting back to the bed and placed it between his fingers.

"Yes, that's it," he said, and he lay back upon his pillows, and gathered his strength. "I have got to tell you now something which we have always kept a secret from you."

"There is no need to tell it," said Cynthia.

Robert Daventry stared at her.

"If you do know it," he said slowly, "we have made the cruellest mistake we could possibly have made. You can't know it!"

"It's about James Challoner--my father?" asked Cynthia, and Robert Daventry shut his eyes with a look of great distress upon his face.

"How long have you known?" he asked.

"From the night when he came to the estancia," she answered. And she told how she had slipped into the smoking-room and how, huddled in the great chair, she had heard all that James Challoner proposed for her. The shadow deepened upon Daventry's face as he listened, and when she had ended he asked with deep regret:

"Why didn't you tell us this, Cynthia?"

"Because, just outside the smoking-room door in the hall, you both decided not to tell me--not to breathe a word of--of my father's visit. You thought the knowledge would trouble and frighten me. You thought it would hurt. Well, I was as certain that you would be greatly distressed to know that already I had the knowledge. So I held my tongue."

"And it did trouble you?"

"Yes."

"A great deal?"

"Yes," Cynthia admitted. "I was frightened. I did not know what power he might have. I knew you had fled from him for my sake."

"And since you have been here--during these three years--you have still been troubled, still frightened lest he should come and claim you with the law at his side?"

Though the old man could hardly speak above a whisper, he was strangely insistent in his questioning. The words came unevenly, with breaks between, and now and then a weak gasp for breath. Cynthia replied quite simply:

"Yes, here, too, I have thought that he might come. I used to be frightened at night. I used to hear him in the house."

And with every word she spoke the compunction and distress deepened in Daventry's mind.

"What a pity!" he said. "Neither of us guessed, not even Joan, who was quicker than I to notice things. And we thought we knew all about you, Cynthia!" A faint smile lit up his face. "How little, after all, we did know! For we could have spared you all this trouble. Read." And opening his hand he let her take from it the newspaper slip. She uttered a cry as she read the first lines.

"It's true," said Daventry, from the bed.

Cynthia carried the cutting over to the window and read by the fading light. It gave the account of an inquest held at a small town twenty-five miles up the line from the Daventry estancia on the body of an Englishman who had been stabbed to the heart by a Gaucho in a drunken quarrel at a tavern. There was a witness who had worked with the Englishman, and could identify him. He called himself James Challoner, and, when he was drunk, he would boast of his family. Cynthia looked at the date of the paper. It was almost three years old. James Challoner had been killed within a week of his dismissal by Robert Daventry. Cynthia let the slip of paper fall from her fingers, and stood by the window until Robert Daventry called her to his side.

"You held your tongue so as not to distress us," he whispered. "We held ours so as not to frighten you. And so because we were careful of your happiness, and you of ours, you have gone through years of anxiety and terror. Needless anxiety! Terror without a cause! I am so sorry. It seems so pitiful. It seems rather grim to me, Cynthia."

Cynthia answered quietly:

"That's the way things happen." And when she had spoken, Robert Daventry, with an effort, raised himself upon his elbow and peered into her face.

"You oughtn't to be able to say that, Cynthia," he said remorsefully. "You oughtn't to be able to think it. It's not the proper philosophy for twenty. I am afraid, my dear, that trouble has gone deep." He fell back and in a moment a little whimsical smile flickered upon his face. "I don't think I'll tell Joan about this," he said. "She wouldn't like it. She wouldn't forgive herself for not having noticed that you were troubled."

"After all, it was my fault," said Cynthia. "For I hid in the room. However, it's all over now."

But Daventry was not prepared to accept her word. Some flash of insight forbade him.

"It has left its mark, my dear," he insisted, and in broken sentences he dwelt upon his theme. His mind began to wander after a little, but through his wanderings there ran the thread of this idea:

"Joan was always so careful.... Even when you were quite a little girl ... we were never to laugh at you.... 'Children and dogs' she used to say, 'you must never laugh at them. Little things warp children for life.' ... Do you remember when you used to write plays and perform them to us at Christmas, in a toy theatre, with small figures in tin slides?... Joan was always careful that we should take them seriously, and not laugh at the wrong place. I never did want to laugh at the wrong place. I thought you wrote very good plays, Cynthia. I used to say you were a genius. But Joan wouldn't have it. 'No!' she said, 'All children are born dramatists, but they forget the trick of it afterward.' ... I suppose she knew. She was a very clever woman--" and so he drifted off gradually into sleep. Cynthia stayed by his side while the twilight faded and the darkness came; and the light of the fire danced ever more brightly upon the ceiling of the room. The wind set from the west, and as the hours passed the chimes from the great clock in Ludsey Church tower came softly and faintly into the room. But they did not disturb the old man's rest. He went floating out on a calm tide of sleep to his death, and Cynthia sat by his side wondering in the intervals of her grief at the strange arrangement of life which ordained that the efforts of people to secure the happiness of others should only cause needless terrors and vain miseries.

CHAPTER X

[MR. BENOLIEL]

"There are no ladies," Captain Rames said indignantly, as he took his seat in Mr. Benoliel's dining-room.

His neighbor, a florid and handsome man, a little past the prime of life, glanced at the name on the visiting-card which marked Captain Rames's place, and smiled sympathetically.

"I can quite understand," he returned with a pleasant pomposity, "that to a sailor who has been three years in the Antarctic the deficiency is a very lamentable business. But there are some elements of consolation. Amongst the twelve men seated at this round table of mahogany, you will hardly see one who has not made some stir in the world. Upon your right, for instance, you will see Mr. Winthrop, that long and sallow person. He is a political resident in one of the native States of Rajputana, and his work, in six volumes, on the Indian bangle, is, I believe, supposed to be the last word upon the subject. A little nearer to you you will see a youth, though he is not so young as he looks. He is M. Poileaux, and the only aviator who has not yet fallen into the sea. When he does, he will come here no more. I myself am a surgeon whose name, I believe, is not unknown."

And with a large white hand the famous Sir James Burrell discreetly pointed out others of note to his companion.

Captain Rames glanced indifferently round the table. A few of the twelve were in black coats, and amongst those few was Mr. Benoliel. It was the night of a court ball, and most of the guests were in some uniform or another, or shone in the gold of the privy councillor.

"They are, no doubt, men of vast importance," replied Captain Rames bluntly. "But leaving you out of account, Sir James, I could dispense with the lot of them. When I dine in Grosvenor Square, in June, I do ask that there should be a petticoat on one side of me, at all events."

The surgeon laughed good-humoredly. He studied his neighbor with a quick observing eye. Captain Rames was of the middle height with a squareness of build, which his gold epaulets exaggerated at this moment, and he was square, too, of face. His hair was thick and curved over from the side, parting in a dark turbulent comb, his forehead was broad, his eyes keen and very steady. Vigor rather than refinement was the mark of him; he had more character than intellect, more capacity than knowledge; thus Sir James Burrell defined him.

"I have played the comforter," he said, "at so many bedsides that I should feel my vanity touched if I failed to console you," he returned. "Let me bring to your attention the menu. I am confident that it will appeal to you."

"Yes, that's all right," Rames admitted, as he leaned forward and glanced at the card. "But why should it particularly appeal to me?"

Sir James Burrell shrugged his shoulders.

"My profession brings me into touch with interesting people. I take my pleasure in observing them. And I have always noticed that the men who cheerfully endure the greatest hardships are also the first to demand the best of the luxuries, when they are within reach."

"Well, it's true," said Captain Rames. "I can make a shift with pemmican, but I honestly like a good dinner. It's the contrast, I suppose."

Sir James shook his head.

"It goes deeper than that," said he. "Your pale saints are no doubt profitable to the painters of glass windows, but I doubt if the world owes so very much to them. The great things are really done by the people who have a good deal of the animal in them; and animals like good dinners."

Captain Rames was mollified, and his face took on a jovial look.

"I am animal enough," he said, "to purr when my back is scratched."

But Sir James Burrell was mounted on a hobby and hardly heeded the interruption.

"I could quote historical instances, but I need go no further than this room. Do you see the man sitting next to our host, and upon his right?"

Captain Rames saw a small thin man in the dress of a privy councillor, a man with a peaked, fleshless face, in which a pair of small eyes twinkled alertly. A scanty crop of gray hair covered the back of his skull, and left markedly visible the height and the narrowness of his forehead. Captain Rames leaned forward with a new interest.

"Yes, and I recognize his face," he said. "Surely that is Henry Smale."

"Exactly," returned Sir James. "He is in the cabinet, and, quite apart from politics, he is, upon scientific grounds, a man of great distinction."

"But, surely, he disproves your theory. He looks an ascetic."

"And is nothing of the kind," interrupted Sir James. "I admit that his look of asceticism has been a great asset to him in his career. But the public has quite misjudged him. He is a voluptuary, with the face of a monk--the most useful combination for public life in this country which you could possibly imagine. If he dines alone at his club, he will not dine under a guinea; and he has the animal weaknesses up to the brim of him. For instance, he is as jealous as a dog. Filch from him the smallest of his prerogatives, and he will turn upon you bitterly. Yet he has done great things, and initiated bold policies. Why? Because he has enough of the animal in him to do great things." And upon that Sir James broke off.

The butler was standing at the elbow of Captain Rames, with a jug of champagne in one hand and a decanter of red wine in the other. He bent down and offered Captain Rames his choice. Sir James Burrell intervened.

"By the way," he said, "have you any wish to stand particularly well with your host?"

"I am now beginning to think that I have," replied Captain Rames.

"Then I should choose his Burgundy. He has his fancies, like the rest of us, and to prefer his Nuits-St.-George to champagne is one way to his esteem."

Captain Rames took the hint, and, as he raised his glass to his lips, Mr. Benoliel smiled to him across the table.

"I will ask your opinion upon that wine, Captain Rames," he said, and so turned again to Henry Smale.

"You see, he noticed at once," said Sir James.

Captain Rames had noticed something too. At the mention of his name, Henry Smale had looked up with interest. He was even now obviously asking a question of Mr. Benoliel about him. Rames began to take more careful stock of his host. Mr. Benoliel was a tall, high-shouldered man, with a dark thin face in which delicacy seemed to predominate over strength. His hair was black, and a little black moustache drew a pencil line along his upper lip. His fingers were long and extraordinarily restless. It was difficult to make a guess at his age. A first glance would put him in the forties. But when Mr. Benoliel showed his eyes--which was not always, for he had a trick of looking out between lids half-closed--it seemed that he must have lived for centuries; so much of fatigue and so much of patience were suddenly revealed.

"I wonder why he asked me to dine here," said Harry Rames.

"You were certain to dine here," replied Sir James.

"I met him but the once by the purest accident."

"You were certain to meet him," said Sir James. "All famous people meet him. All famous people dine here once. But he is not really a snob. For, quite a number of them are never invited twice."

"He can be a good friend?"

"Of that I cannot speak," said Sir James.

The courses followed one after the other, and Harry Rames found his eyes continually wandering back across the silver and bright flowers to the exotic figure of his host. He took his share in the conversation about him, but a movement of Mr. Benoliel would check him in his speech or cause him to listen with an absent ear. He watched the play of his delicate fingers upon the table-cloth, the continual restlessness of his body. Mr. Benoliel was of his race; there was in his aspect a queer mixture of the financier and the dilettante, the shrewd business man and the sensuous apprecitator of art. There was a touch, too, of the feminine in him.

"I told you that you would not be bored," said Sir James Burrell toward the end of the dinner. "You are not the first man who has fallen under the spell of Mr. Benoliel."

Harry Rames laughed.

"I am under no spell, I assure you," he said frankly. "I was wondering whether he was likely to be of use to me."

"It is very likely," returned Sir James. "He has been of use to many. He plays at omniscience. To anticipate a wish before it is expressed, to serve an ambition before it has been revealed--that is one of our host's little vanities. He may have asked you here with no other object than to gratify it."

Harry Rames glanced quickly at his companion.

"Is that so?" he asked eagerly. Then his face fell. "But I am not even a friend of his."

"I do not think that matters," said the surgeon. "He likes to pose as Providence, and the posture will be more dramatic if it is assumed toward an acquaintance rather than a friend."

"He is a sham, then," said Rames bluntly.

"By no means," Sir James replied suavely. "Let us say, rather, that he is an artist."

Captain Rames turned with a furrowed brow to his companion.

"I am no great hand at subtleties," he said. "Will you tell me what you know of Mr. Benoliel? I am a beginner in the world, and he may be of importance to me."

Sir James Burrell smiled. He was in his element. To supply a character much as some author of the seventeenth century might have done, was a foible which continually tempted him. He was not always successful. Paradox allured him into difficulties, cheap epigrams at times blazed before him, and would not be quiet until he had uttered them. But often he managed to hit off, with some happiness, at all events, the externals of the person whom he described. He drank his wine now slowly and set down his glass. Then, twisting the delicate stem with the finger-tips of his large and handsome hand, he began:

"He is a Jew, of course, and an Oriental. But from what quarter of the Orient, who shall say? You may give him any birthplace, from the Levant to Casa Blanca, and no one will contradict you. Some hold him to be a charlatan, as you are inclined to do. But he is an accepted personage, not blown into notice and out of it by the favor of a season, but a permanency. How he became so, I cannot tell you. He is very busy all day, although when the darkness comes it would be difficult to point to any one thing which he has done. He is always at the top table at public dinners, and very near to the chairman. But he never proposes a toast or responds to one. If he writes a letter to the Times, it appears in leaded type. If you want secret information on any subject, he can get it for you. If you want help, he will find the man who can give it. He is a power in the city. He is a power in politics, and the motor-cars of prime-ministers stand at his door at ten o'clock in the morning. Yet he was never in the House, and has never made a speech on any platform. It is believed by many that he might achieve greatness if he chose. But he never chooses. He has the air at a discussion of being able to say the last word on any subject, but he does not say it. He seems, indeed, to stand high in the world on a pedestal which has no legs to it. That is how I describe him. For the rest, he is rich, and I have never heard him utter an opinion which was not derived from others or altogether banal. But, listen! He is going to speak to us."

"However, I can recommend the old brandy," was all that Mr. Benoliel had at that moment to say.

"There, what did I tell you!" said Sir James, triumphant at the success of his diagnosis.

"Well, if his talk is banal his brandy isn't, God bless him," said Captain Rames. "But I interrupted you."

"He has been guilty of one weakness," Sir James resumed. "He married into an old family of great poverty and the marriage lasted for six months. His wife lives handsomely in Eton Square--But I see that I am going to lose you, for our host is beckoning to you."

Captain Rames obeyed the summons with alacrity and walked round the table.

"I see that you are going on to Buckingham Palace," said Mr. Benoliel. "So I thought that I would interrupt your conversation with Sir James Burrell. For I want to introduce you to Mr. Smale."

Mr. Smale held out his hand. At a sign from Benoliel, the butler brought up a chair and placed it between Smale and his host.

"Sit down," said Benoliel, and Captain Rames obeyed.

"Benoliel tells me," said Smale, "that you are thinking of Parliament."

Captain Rames was startled. He could not remember that in his one brief conversation with his host he had even mentioned his ambition.

"I inferred it from a casual word or two you let drop," said Benoliel with a smile.

"Well, it's true," said Rames. "I should like to stand on your side very much, Mr. Smale, if I could find a seat to contest."

Henry Smale nodded.

"That, no doubt, could be arranged. You would be a strong candidate. You bring a reputation and some breath of romance to favor you. But--" and he pursed up his lips as if in doubt and looked at Captain Rames with a searching eye. Rames was disconcerted. He had been back in England for some six months, and during those six months he had been much sought after. At this period of his life, doubts of him had been rarely expressed behind his back, and never to his face. Young ladies whom he did not know had clamored for his autograph, young ladies whom he did know had approached him with a winning humility; established beauty had smiled at him; established fame had welcomed him as an equal. The calm scrutiny of Henry Smale was a displeasing splash of cold water.

"Of course," he said, with a diffidence which he did not feel, "I might be a failure."

And Henry Smale replied promptly:

"That's just it. You might be a failure. Meanwhile you are a great success, and have the chance of standing quite alone in your career. For what you set out to do is not yet done. You leave the laurel for another to snatch."

"That is quite true, Mr. Smale," Harry Rames replied. "But I have considered it. I am not yielding to an impulse. I have counted the risk!"

He spoke with a nice adjustment of firmness and modesty. Henry Smale rose from his chair.

"Very well," he said. "Will you come down to the House at four o'clock to-morrow afternoon? I will introduce you to Hanley, the chief whip."

Captain Rames flushed with pleasure.

"Thank you, I shall be delighted," he cried, rising in his turn; and as the two men shook hands, Mr. Benoliel said gently:

"I was thinking of Ludsey. It has no candidate on your side, Smale."

CHAPTER XI

[A MAN ON THE MAKE]

A week later, and much about the same hour, Captain Rames was driven along the Mall in St. James's Park. Friday had come round again, and the light did not burn in the clock-tower at Westminster. But the windows of the admiralty blazed upon the horse-guards' parade, and its great doors stood open for a glittering company. It was the night of official dinners and receptions in honor of the king's birthday. Soldiers in scarlet, sailors in blue, ministers and privy councillors in gold, and ladies in their shimmering gowns thronged with the smaller fry in black coats up the shallow steps into a hall decorated with Union Jacks. There was a thrill of expectancy in the air that evening. Rumors were rife that the government was inclined to advise a dissolution. Members' wives were speculating whether they must go back to the constituencies and tread the ways of deference; their husbands how soon the time would come when they must exchange the erect dignity of the member for the supple curves of the candidate; and curious eyes dwelt, as if in hope of answer upon a sturdy white-haired man with a blunt, good-humored face, who, wearing a uniform with epaulets, left you in doubt whether he was a fireman or an admiral. He was, however, the Prime-Minister, and he stood in the hall amongst his friends, bearing the world lightly according to his wont. He stepped forward and shook hands with Rames as he passed, and so turned again to his friends. He was heard to say, "I have to-day achieved the ambition of my life;" and curious ears eager to glean a hint were inclined toward him.

"To-day?" one of the group exclaimed. "You have been Prime-Minister for three years."

The Prime-Minister laughed.

"That's nothing," he said. "To become Prime-Minister was merely to take a step on the way. But to-night I wear for the first time the uniform of an Elder Brother of the Trinity, and that means that I need never wear knee-breeches again as long as I live."

The curious ears were disappointed; Harry Rames shook hands with the First Lord of the Admiralty, passed on, and in the second room was touched on the elbow by Isaac Benoliel.

"I have been asked by a young friend of mine to bring you to her, and I beg you to come at once, for she is in her most imperious mood," said Mr. Benoliel in a voice of whimsical entreaty.

"We will go to her as fast as we can," said Captain Rames.

He had now been three months in England, and the shy warmth of many welcomes had made him thoroughly aware that he was a momentous personage to young ladies. He was human enough to enjoy his importance, and he followed Mr. Benoliel with alacrity toward a side of the room where Cynthia Daventry sat talking to a young man in the office of the Board of Trade. Rames noticed the clear and delicate profile of her face and the distinction which set her apart; he noticed, too, that, although she did not once look his way, the young gentleman in the Civil Service uniform was summarily dismissed.

"Cynthia, this is Captain Rames," said Isaac Benoliel, and however imperious a mood Cynthia might have shown to him, she had reserved none of it for Captain Rames. Her eyes swept over him swiftly with the shy and eager look to which he had grown accustomed: she gave him her hand.

"I am very glad to meet you," she said impulsively, "because--" and she halted suddenly upon the word, with the color like a rose in her cheeks, "I suppose that you are tired of congratulations."

Captain Rames expanded: he laughed genially, a fastidious critic might have said too noisily.

"By no means," he exclaimed. "Indeed, Miss Daventry, you may lay it on with a trowel."

"I am not prepared to do that," answered Cynthia, and though she spoke lightly, her voice was guarded, and even in the eager eyes there was a constant watchfulness.

Eight months had passed since Cynthia had sat by the bedside of Robert Daventry and listened to his instructions. She had taken Diana Royle to live with her as he had bidden, though she had taken her reluctantly. She had spent nearly all that time at the white house upon the London road, in spite of Mrs. Royle's repeated suggestion that Beaulieu, or preferably Cap D'Ail in the south of France would be more satisfactory places for wintering. Diana Royle was glad to be relieved from her genteel penury in Sussex Gardens, Kensington, but she had no liking for the country. Cynthia, however, was deaf to her hints. She lived for a while in solitude, broken only by the companionship of the few neighbors with whom she was most intimate. The swift deaths of the two old people who had so long lived for her and in her, left her desolate and inclined ever regretfully to search back across her life for occasions in which she had failed of kindness toward them, or hurt them by forgetfulness. She was young, however, and with no taint of morbidness. The sense of desolation passed, and Diana Royle began to urge a new plan.

"You ought to take a house in town for the season, Cynthia. I know of one in an excellent position, which would just suit you. It's in Curzon Street, and the right end of the street, one of those nice, flat-fronted houses, old outside and tiled bath-rooms inside. I happened, I think, to see an advertisement of it to-day."

Mrs. Royle handed the newspaper to Cynthia, looked it over.

"We might think of it," she said.

"I am sure neither Mr. nor Mrs. Daventry would have wished you to bury yourself always in the country."

"That's true," said Cynthia. "My father looked forward to my taking a house in town."

"I don't think you could do better than this, dear," said Diana Royle. "I know the house quite well by sight."

"Well, we'll think of it," said Cynthia.

Mrs. Royle suppressed a shrug of irritation.

"You will find the house will be snapped up, dear, if you take too long thinking of it," she said with asperity.

Cynthia looked at her with innocent eyes.

"But I expect there will be other houses in London, won't there?" she asked.

She had no wish to be churlish, she understood how deeply her companion longed for the paved roadways and the streets. And in her own heart, too, she was beginning to turn to the unknown world of London with an expectancy of adventure, which drew her and thrilled her, even while she hesitated.

"I don't understand you, Cynthia," Diana Royle cried in exasperation. "Are you afraid?"

The question was intended merely as a gibe, but Cynthia turned to her with startled eyes, and Mrs. Royle knew that she had chanced upon a truth.

"Of what are you afraid?" she asked curiously, and Cynthia answered while she looked into the fire:

"I once lay all night staring into a great bright mirror which revealed to me a shut door. I was in terror lest the door should open. I dreaded what might come through. I seem still to be looking into the great mirror, and with the same kind of fear. Only now the door opens upon the world, and not on the passage of a house."

Diana Royle gathered up her embroidery and her book.

"If you are going to talk that sort of nonsense, Cynthia, I shall go to bed," she remarked sternly, and left Cynthia still gazing into the fire.

Cynthia had not been speaking with affectation. The terror with which her father had for so long inspired her had left its mark deep, as Robert Daventry upon his death-bed had understood. He was dead--yes, but she could not rid her thoughts of the dreadful destiny which he had proposed for her. By so little she had escaped it. She would look round the room with its books and its dainty appointments, and feel the arms of her chair to make sure that all was real.

"If he had carried me away!" she would cry. "If he had come back with the law at his side and had carried me away!" And the streets of Buenos Ayres would pass before her eyes in a procession of blazing thoroughfares and dimly lighted lanes. And because she had escaped by so little, she looked out upon all unknown things with apprehension. Moreover, Daventry's disclosure to her upon his death-bed had, in a strange way, added to her apprehension. There were three people--thus her thoughts ran; two of them seeking to hide from her knowledge which they thought would cause her pain; and she the third, seeking to hide from them, just for the same reason, that the knowledge was hers already. The years of terror had been needless, yet they had been endured, and it was love itself which had inflicted them. Kindness then could do just the same harm as the deliberate will to hurt. She took that thought into her heart of hearts, and because of it dreaded what might come through when the door opened upon the world.

With the coming of the spring, however, there came a stir in her blood. It was a spring of sunlit days and warm, soft nights. The great garden bursting into leaf and blossom, the annual miracle of tender green, the return of the birds, and the renewal of melody quickened the girl's pulses, gave to her a lightness of spirit, and made her dreamily expectant of wonders. She walked of an evening under her great cedar trees, with the flowers and the paths glimmering pale in the warm dusk, and the earth whispered to her of things as yet beyond her knowledge; throbbing moments of life, dreams minted in events. She woke eagerly to the clear, early mornings and the blackbirds calling on the lawn; she lingered on that lawn when the windows in the house were alight and the nightingales sang in the copses, and from some distant wood the clear, double note of a cuckoo was borne to her across the darkness. There came an evening in the middle of May when she burst her sheath like any bud on the bole of one of her chestnut trees. She stood a creature of emotion. The soft wind brought to her ears the chimes of the clock in the great church tower at Ludsey. Desire for the adventure overswept her fears. Her feet danced, and her youth had its way with her.

She could see through the long open window Diana Royle in the drawing-room. She ran across the grass.

"Di!"

Some new sound in her voice, a leap, a thrill, made Diana look up. She saw a look in the girl's face, a light in her eyes, a soft color in her cheeks which quite transfigured her.

"I have been rather a brute, Di," cried Cynthia. "We will go to London."

"When?"

"As soon as we can pack."

A telegram was sent off to Mr. Benoliel, who was now in Grosvenor Square. He was bidden to work his quickest and his best. The furnished house in Curzon Street was still unlet. It was secured, and by the beginning of June Cynthia had come to town. There she was of course unknown. But she had made many friends in Warwickshire. Mr. Benoliel set his shoulder to the wheel; and she had a handsome balance at the bank. Add to these advantages her looks, and it will be seen that it was fairly smooth sailing for Cynthia during her first season. She danced, she dined, she lunched at Hurlingham, she went to plays and to the opera, she rode under the trees of the Row in the morning, she went up in a balloon; she came with both hands outstretched for new experiences. Yet she grasped them with a certain wariness. Eager she was, but her eagerness was guarded. For dim in the shadows at the back of her mind there was still the image of the mirror and the door. She had been in London less than a month when Harry Rames was brought to her side by Mr. Benoliel.

They talked for a moment upon immaterial topics, and then Mr. Benoliel turned to Harry Rames:

"So it is all settled, I hear."

"Practically," replied Rames. "I have still to be formally adopted as prospective candidate by the Three Hundred, but that will be done at a meeting on Monday night."

"Then there is no longer any reason why we should keep the matter secret, especially from Miss Daventry, who lives not five miles from your constituency. Cynthia," and both men turned toward her, "Captain Rames is going to stand for Ludsey at the next election."

Captain Rames smiled modestly, expecting congratulations. He liked congratulations, especially from pretty girls, but he was disappointed. He saw only a wrinkle of perplexity upon Cynthia's forehead and a shadow in her eyes.

"Why?" she asked.

"You disapprove?" said Rames.

Cynthia drew back.

"I have no right to disapprove," she said coldly, and Harry Rames planted himself sturdily on both his feet in front of her.

"Nevertheless you do," he insisted.

In spite of herself, a faint smile of amusement played about Cynthia's lips as she watched him. She felt constrained to accept his challenge.

"I should have thought--" she said with a trifle of hesitation; "it's not my business, of course--you may think it an impertinence--but since you challenge me, I should have thought that you would have done better to have gone back to the Antarctic again."

"That's just what Smale said," remarked Mr. Benoliel, and he moved away.

"That's just what Smale said, what every one will say. But it's all wrong," Rames exclaimed emphatically. "I was very glad to go South. I am very glad now that I went; but once is enough."

A little wrinkle of disdain showed about Cynthia's mouth.

"No doubt there were many hardships."

Captain Rames was nettled.

"Yes, there were, Miss Daventry, a great many, and singularly unpleasant ones. I have been twenty-four hours in a sleeping-bag with two other men. The sleeping-bag was sewn up on the inside, it was within a tent, we were so close together that we could only turn round one at a time, and we smoked in the bag, and still we were deadly cold. And I hate being cold. Yes, there were hardships, and though it's easy enough to remember them lightly here in the Admiralty, they were not delightful when they happened. But I should face them once more if I wanted to go back. Only I don't. I never want to see an ice-pack again as long as I live."

The bluff confidence with which he spoke convinced Cynthia that it was not a fear of the hardships which had affected him. There she had been wrong, and she made amends.

"I have no doubt the hardships wouldn't deter you if you wanted to go," she admitted. "But what I don't understand is why you don't want to." And a greater emphasis crept into her voice than she had meant to use, and gave to her words the wistfulness of an appeal. "I should have thought," she cried, "that you could never have rested until you had finished what you had begun."

"That's true to the letter," he replied. "That's why I am standing for Ludsey."

Cynthia looked up at him in surprise.

"I don't think that I understand," she said quietly, and she made room upon the couch at her side. Harry Rames took the place. The appeal in her voice was a flattery which he quite failed to understand. Though Cynthia was young, and though she walked no longer in her enchanted garden, something of that spirit of romance, which had guided her there, had revived in her of late. Captain Rames was one of the chosen men for whom the turnstile had revolved; now that she met him in the flesh she could not forget it. He was of her dreams, he had marched in the procession of heroes, and though disillusionment had come to her he still wore a look of the heroic in her thoughts. All the more because disillusionment had come to her she wished him to retain the look. Her appeal was a prayer that he should stamp it upon his image for good and all.

"May I explain it all to you?" he asked. He sat down beside her, and in answer to that gentle appeal of hers to make the best of himself, he drew for her clearly and succinctly and proudly the picture of a man on the make. "I went South, first and last, to get on in the world," he began. "As I say, I was very glad to go. The journey was a great experience. Yes, three years of my life were very well spent upon it; but they were very well spent, not because the journey was a great experience, but because it is now the great help to me in getting on, which I always thought it was going to be."

He took no notice of the disappointment gathering upon Cynthia's face. He was not aware of it. Here was a girl of remarkable loveliness, wistfully appealing to him to explain the inner workings of his mind, and he was delighted to gratify her wish.

"I can hardly remember the time when I was not diligently looking for a chance to get on. I was poor, you see. I am so still, indeed. I had none of those opportunities which money commands. I had somehow to create or find them. There's a motto in gold letters above the clock in the great hall at Osborne, the first of all mottoes in its superb confidence:

"'There is nothing the navy cannot do.'"

Cynthia turned to him with eagerness.

"Yes," she said with a smile. "For a boy to have that plain and simple statement before his eyes each day, that's splendid. I suppose a boy would never speak of it, but it would be to him a perpetual inspiration."

"Yes," said Rames, "if all he thought of was the navy; if his ambitions were bound up with the navy. But mine weren't, you see, and I used to worry over that sentence even then. 'There is nothing the navy cannot do.' Very well. But that didn't mean that this little particular, insignificant cog-wheel in the navy machine was going to do anything special, or, indeed, anything at all. And I wanted to do things--I myself, not the navy."

"To do things?" Cynthia asked quietly, and her lips drooped a little at the corners, "Or to become a personage?"

Captain Rames laughed good-humoredly.

"I can meet you there, Miss Daventry. There's no contradiction in the phrases. To become a personage is to secure the opportunity of doing things, and when you are a personage you soon find things which want doing. After all, how many of the great statesmen started out to be big men first. They had ideas, I grant you, but they had to make themselves big men by hook or by crook before they could carry them out. Look at Disraeli. I have been reading up these fellows. He did a lot of things. He got the Suez Canal shares. He is the author and begetter of the Imperial Idea. That's what you remember and admire him for. Yes; but don't forget his velvet trousers, and his habit of reciting his epic poems in the drawing-room after dinner. He set out first of all to be a personage. So do I in my small way. He chose velvet trousers and epic poems. I went down toward the South Pole. We each chose the path of least resistance."

Cynthia was silenced, but not convinced. There must be hundreds of instances to confute him, only for the moment she could not remember any of them. And one quality in Captain Rames impressed her.

"You speak as if you had thought all these things out," she said.

"I have had to," he replied.

"I wonder that you went into the navy at all."

"My father put me there," he answered.

Cynthia looked him over again, noting the strong, square face, the direct, the practical, common-sense, uninspired look of him. He would get on without a doubt. There was a great deal of force to push him on, and no great delicacy of character to hold him back. Scruples would not trouble him, and he would not fail of friends. He was of the type which makes friends easily. Even she herself was attracted. He would get on probably by trampling upon others, but he would do it good-humoredly, and with no desire to cause unnecessary pain. There are men, after all, who put nails in their boots to do the trampling.

"I wonder, with your views," she said, upon an impulse, "that you didn't leave the navy long ago and go into the city."

Harry Rames looked at her quickly.

"It's rather curious that you should have said that; for, a few years ago, I was actually thinking of the city, and wondering whether I could make a fortune quickly there."

Cynthia laughed suddenly. Her suggestion had been uttered in sarcasm. Youth is disinclined to rate the making of money high in its standard of careers. Captain Ramos would never have passed the turnstile had she spoken with him when the turnstile was.

"What held me back," he continued, quite unconscious that he was toppling off a hero's perch,--and indeed he would have been totally indifferent had he known,--"what held me back was the knowledge that I should be beginning too old. One has so very little time," he exclaimed with a touch of passion in his voice. "I would like to go on living and living and living for a century. As it is, one begins at twenty at the earliest, and then with luck one may have fifty-five years--that's all," and the prospect of the disintegration of his powers at the early age of seventy-five affected him with so much melancholy that Cynthia laughed again, but this time with a clear and joyous ring of amusement.

"Never mind, Captain Rames, I am sure you will live every day of your fifty-five years, and that is more than all can say."

"They are only thirty-five now," he grumbled. "However,"--he was not to be diverted from the pleasant business of unfolding his character,--"I might still have gone into the city, when one morning in June, as I was walking round the corner of Buckingham Palace to Constitution Hill, I saw on the other side of the road the president of the Geographical Society. I knew him slightly. I had read of the expedition; I was aware that he was organizing it. It came upon me in a flash, 'By George, here's my chance at last,' and I ran across the road and applied for the command."

Cynthia nodded her head.

"So that's how you became connected with the expedition--a pure piece of chance," she said slowly. "If you hadn't turned round that corner to Constitution Hill----"

"Oh, I should have dropped across something else, no doubt," said Rames.

"And now you are going into Parliament."

Cynthia was endeavoring to readjust her forecasts with the facts.

"If I get elected," said Rames.

"Oh, you will get elected," replied Cynthia confidently, but there was no admiration in her confidence. It was almost disdainful. "They will call you 'Breezy Harry Rames,' and they will elect you by an immense majority."

"I am very glad you think that," Rames returned imperturbably; and he leaned forward with his elbow on his knees and spoke to her upon an altogether different note; so that the disdain died out of her face. He told her how in answer to Henry Smale's invitation he had gone down to Westminster in the afternoon, had sent in his card, had waited by the rails in the great round of St. George's Hall. Smale had come out from the House, and had fetched him down the stone passage into the lobby. A great man was speaking, and the lobby was nearly empty. But he finished his speech in a few moments, and the doors burst open and there was an eruption of members from the Chamber. Some stood in groups talking eagerly, others hurried to the libraries and the smoking-room, and barristers walked up and down in pairs, talking over their cases for the morrow. There was not a thing in that lobby, from the round clock above the doors of the House to the post-office and the whip's rooms which had not impressed itself vividly upon Rames's mind. Every now and then the doors would swing open as a member passed into the Chamber, and just for a moment Rames had a glimpse of the green benches, saw the great mace gleam upon the table, the books and the three clerks gowned and wigged behind it, and behind the clerks the dim figure of the Speaker under the canopy of his chair.

Of what he saw on that afternoon Rames spoke with an enthusiasm and a modesty which quite took Cynthia by surprise. He saw dignity in every detail, was prepared to magnify with great meanings the simplest ceremony and form. He could not but impress her with his picture, so greatly impressed was he himself, so keenly had he longed to walk unchallenged down that forbidden way between the rails and to pass through the swing doors over the matting to his place on the green benches. People in the streets might sneer, or go about their business unconcerned. The cynics might talk of the Ins and Outs, and speak of Parliament as the most expensive game in which a race of players of games indulges, but there in that small room, with the soft light pouring down from the roof, and very often the morning light streaming in through the clerestory windows, the great decisions were ratified which might hamper or advance the future of forty millions.

Henry Smale had paced the lobby for half an hour with Rames, setting before him clearly the risks which he would run.

"I don't want to advise you one way or the other," said Smale, "but it is not as if you had no career, and you should come to your decision with your eyes open. I speak to you as to one of the ambitious. If you go in, I take it, you go in with an eye on the Treasury bench. Well, I can tell you this: the House of Commons makes a few, but it breaks a few, and if it advances some, it mars a good many. Poverty is a serious hindrance, for it means that you cannot give the time to the House of Commons which it now claims."

"There are the barristers," objected Rames.

"The House of Commons is in their line of business," returned Henry Smale. "The highest offices of the law are reached through the House of Commons. Moreover, the questions which arise for debate here have often been the subject already of suits in the law courts. They have acquired, too, the knack of extracting rapidly the essential things out of a paper or a bill. Thus, the barristers come especially equipped. Yet, even so, very often they do not make their mark. And here is a point for you, Captain Rames." Henry Smale turned with a warning finger upraised and stopped in his walk. "The most distinguished men enter this House and never get the ear of it. The House of Commons is not ungenerous, but for eight hours a day through a long portion of the year people are talking in that Chamber there, and it will not provide an audience unless, first, the speaker has something of his own to contribute, and, secondly, can express his contribution. It does not, on the one hand, ask for oratory; it is not, on the other, content even with exhaustive knowledge; it demands character, personality, the power of coining out of your knowledge some judgments of your own, the power of explaining your judgment in clear and intelligible phrases sufficiently vivid to arrest its attention. I admit at once that if you succeed, success here is sweeter than anywhere else; its recognition is so immediate. But, on the other hand, here disappointment is more bitter. To come in with ambition, and to be left behind in the race--there is no destiny more galling."

"Yes," said Rames quietly, "I have thought over these things. There is that risk. I am prepared to take it."

"Very well," returned Smale, and once more he turned on the stone pavement, and with Rames at his side retraced his steps. "Let us suppose that you have got the ear of the House, that the benches fill up when you rise, and men stand at the bar to listen to you. Well, even so, you may lose your seat, and you may not yet have established yourself firmly enough to make your party find you another. There you are--out, your dreams dissolved, your ambitions stopped, yourself miserable, and your presence in this lobby an insignificance. Where you walked by right, you come as a guest; you have been, and you are not; you must turn to something else, while your thoughts are here, and very likely you are already too old to turn to something else."

"You put the worst side of it all in front of me, Mr. Smale."

"No," replied Mr. Smale. "Visit the political clubs a couple of months after a general election, talk to the defeated candidates who two months back were members, you will know I am talking the truth. The place enmeshes you. And mind, not because of the sensations. The sensations happily are rare. It is a humdrum assembly. I remember once taking a foreigner into the strangers' gallery at the time of a European crisis. An indiscreet letter had been sent. The foreigner was elated. He said to me, 'This will be very interesting. The Commons will discuss the letter which has so convulsed Europe.' But it was doing nothing of the kind. It was discussing whether the Tyne, Durham, and Hartlepool Railway paid its employees sufficiently well to justify Parliament in allowing it to build a bridge across a stream of which you have never heard."

Captain Rames smiled.

"I see a good many men in this lobby," he rejoined. "I do not notice that any of them are bored. Indeed, for the most part, they seem very busy."

"That is one of the tragedies of the House of Commons," Smale replied. "There are so many men in who during the whole of each session are extremely busy doing nothing; they haven't a moment to spare, they do nothing with so much energy and persistence. One moment they are in the library writing to a constituent who wants to know why the medal which his father earned in the Crimea has not yet arrived; the next moment they rush into the House because the famous Irishman with the witty tongue is up; they are off again to the outer lobby to tell a visitor that he can't see the Prime-Minister--'Industry without work, idleness without rest,' that is how this House was once described, and, believe me, the description is not inapt."

Thus said Henry Smale, but Harry Rames was not to be turned aside.

"I will take all these risks very willingly, Mr. Smale," he cried, "I want to be in here."

Henry Smale smiled, ceased from his arguments, and clapped Rames in a kindly fashion on the shoulder. "I have done my duty," he said. "Come!"

He led Rames through a little doorway at the side of which sat three or four messengers, and at the end of a narrow passage tapped upon a door.

"Come in," said a voice, and as Smale ushered in Harry Rames a man of pleasant address and an exquisite suit of clothes arose and welcomed them.

"Hamlin," said Henry Smale, "this is Captain Rames."

Mr. Hamlin shook hands cordially with Rames and invited him to a chair.

"We shall be very glad to have you in the House," he said. He beamed. He seemed to have been waiting for Captain Rames to complete his happiness. "I think Ludsey was suggested."

"Benoliel suggested it," said Smale. "He's a good judge too."

"There is no candidate arranged yet. I will write to Ludsey at once."

Smale and Rames left the room together.

"I should think you might consider that settled," said Smale.

Rames thanked him and referred to Hamlin's charm of manner. Smale's small eyes twinkled.

"That's why he sits in that room. He's the chief Whip." And shaking hands with Rames Mr. Smale abruptly returned to the House.

The gist of the conversation with Smale Rames told to Cynthia in the reception-room at the Admiralty, and she listened with a growing interest. Then once more his note changed. He spoke with a boyish enthusiasm of his aims. To force an entrance into that arena; the entrance gained, to fight himself into the station of a great man; ultimately to govern and exercise authority--the note of personal ambition rose to a pitch of exultation in his voice. Of principles he obviously had no care, theories of politics were to him of no account. He was the political adventurer pure and simple. Cynthia sat with her eyes of dark blue clouded, and a real disappointment at her heart. She raised her face to his, and a little smile trembled upon her lips, and even her voice shook ever so slightly.

"You have been very honest to me about it all," she said. "I thank you for that."

Captain Rames was a trifle bewildered. He could not see that he had anything to conceal.

"Good-night," she said as she rose, "I see my friend Mrs. Royle waiting for me."

She gave him her hand and moved away for a few steps and then stopped. Harry Rames was at her side before she had stopped. She turned to him timidly with the blood mounting very prettily into her cheeks.

"I suppose," she said, "that your journey to the South really counts now for very little in your thoughts. Yet you must have had a great many wishes for your success sent to you from all parts of the world before you started. I wonder you can forget them all, and leave that work unfinished."

It seemed to Captain Rames that she had hit upon a rather far-fetched argument to persuade him to a second journey to the South.

"Well, I am getting a good many wishes for my success now, and I hear them spoken," he said with a smile. "It is true that I got all sorts of messages and telegrams before I sailed to the South. But to tell you the truth I was rather too busy to read them. I have got them all tied up somewhere in a brown-paper parcel."

Cynthia seemed actually to flinch. She turned away abruptly.

"I wanted to ask of you a favor," said Rames. "Mr. Benoliel said that you lived near Ludsey. You could do a great deal if you would help me. Will you?"

Cynthia turned back to him, her eyes shone angrily, the blood came into her cheeks in a rush.

"No," she said decisively, and without another word she walked away.

"I might have struck her," thought Captain Rames. He knew nothing of a telegram from the Daventry estancia which lay forgotten in that brown-paper parcel.

None the less he walked home across the Mall treading upon air. Great people had moved out of their way to make his acquaintance; Cabinet ministers had promised to speak for him; important ladies had smiled their friendliest. He looked back upon the days of his insignificance, and his heart was buoyant within him. Certainly one girl with dark-blue eyes and a face like a rose-leaf had presumed to disapprove of him. But there! Girls! You never knew what odd notions nested in their pretty heads. If a man on the make steered his course by a girl's favor, he would soon shipwreck on a snag. However, this girl must be soothed down. Harry Rames could not afford to have an enemy at Ludsey. But he had no doubt that he could soothe her down. He walked home, softly whistling under his breath.

Cynthia for her part went home in a different mood. She had lost another illusion to-night.

CHAPTER XII

[LUNGATINE]

The threatened dissolution was, after all, postponed, and through the autumn months Captain Rames went busily up and down between London and Ludsey. He made his head-quarters at an hotel on a climbing street in the thick of the town, and spent his days in the public view and his nights at meetings and at local festivities.

Cynthia Daventry, five miles away, heard stories of his indefatigable energy and once or twice she met him in the streets; and once or twice he snatched an afternoon and swept over in a motor-car to see her. She welcomed him with a pleasure which she rather resented, and not for worlds would she have asked him how his campaign was faring. She did not, however, have to ask. For either Diana Royle was present and eagerly questioned him, or if Cynthia were alone he plunged into the subject himself. Captain Rames was at some pains to amuse her and he succeeded. Little incidents of the campaign, whether they told against himself or not; sketches of queer characters whom he came across; an anecdote now and then, drawn from the ancient history of the City--he poured them out to her, making it quite clear with an apparently ingenuous frankness that he had deliberately stored them in his memory purely for her amusement. He was engaged in the work of soothing her down. Diana Royle would rhapsodize after he had whirled away in a cloud of dust.

"What a wonderful man! How energetic! How clever!"

"And how complacent!" said Cynthia.

"What high principle!" Diana gushed lyrically. "What character!"

"And what cunning!" added Cynthia, with a droop of her lips.

Diana tapped the floor with an irritable foot.

"Very well, darling. Look for an angel, by all means. You will be very glad of a man later on." Then she laughed pleasantly. "But I am not deceived. You talk lightly of him when he is gone, but when he is here you fix your big eyes on him, and, though you say nothing, every movement of you asks for more."

Cynthia was startled.

"Well, perhaps I do," she admitted. "I suppose that I have a kind of hope that I will hear, not more, but something different from what I am hearing."

"That's so like you, my dear," Diana rejoined; she was all sugar and vinegar. "If Julius Cæsar came back to earth, you would want him different. But that's the way with romantic people. They look for heroes all day and never see them when they knock at the front door."

Cynthia laughed good-humoredly. There was this much of truth in Diana Royle's attack. She had been searching through the words of Harry Rames all the while when he was uttering them for a glimpse of some other being beside the man on the make. Certain qualities she recognized. Enthusiasm, for instance. But it was enthusiasm for the arena, not for any cause to be won there. A shrewd foresight again was evident. But it was foresight to pluck the personal advantage. Here, it seemed to her, was the conscience of the country stirring on all sides to the recognition of great and unnecessary evils in its midst, and Harry Rames was alone unaffected. Yet in a measure she was impressed. He had so closely laid his plans. He gave her yet more evidence when he came again.

"I have got a rule or two," he said. "All demands for pledges from leagues and associations go into the waste-paper basket. I'll answer questions if they are asked me by a man in my constituency. I won't put my name to a general proposition and post it to London. Many a good man has been let down that way. Then I won't canvass. I won't solicit a vote. I don't believe in it. There's one only point of view for a candidate: that the electors are doing themselves a service by electing him, and not doing him one. You have got to persuade them of that."

"Don't you find it difficult?" asked Cynthia, innocently.

Rames laughed.

"Yes, I do," he said. "The electors have their point of view, too. But I won't canvass, I am there at my hotel if any one wants to see me. I am at public meetings, and I go to social functions. That's a good move," and Captain Rames nodded his head. "You meet the fellows on the other side and if you can get them friendly, you stop them coming out hot against you. Makes a lot of difference, that. Then there's wisdom in taking a firm stand upon a point or so. Your own people, treat them properly, will always give you a bit of latitude, and a reputation for courage is a fine asset in politics as in anything else."

"But you mustn't overdo it, I suppose," said Cynthia ironically.

"Oh, no, you must be careful about that," replied Rames seriously. "What you want to produce is an impression that you are not pliable, that industries will be safe under your watch--that's for the business men--and that social advancement will not be neglected--that's for the artisans. You know the election is coming now," he suddenly exclaimed. "Do come to one of my meetings!"

Cynthia looked doubtful.

"I don't think," she said, "that I believe very much in any work which--I don't express what I mean very well--which hasn't a great dream at the heart of it."

Rames looked up into her face quickly and grew suddenly serious. He made no comment upon her words, however.

"After all that's no reason why you shouldn't come to one of my meetings."

Cynthia smiled.

"I will come to the last one on the night before the poll," she replied reluctantly.

"I shall hold you to it," said Harry Rames, and he went away well pleased with his visit. Cynthia was popular in Ludsey. So Cynthia should sit on that momentous evening in the front row upon the platform. Also he would make for her benefit an unusually effective speech. Cynthia from the window watched his motor-car spin away in a whirl of dust. He was going to preside that evening at a meeting of the Salvation Army.

The dissolution took place on the fifteenth of January. But the real contest had begun a fortnight before in Ludsey. Harry Rames rushed into it as if it had been a foot-ball rally. He spoke all day, in factories and outside factories, in halls and schoolrooms and from club-room windows. He ransacked the morning papers for new pegs on which to hang his arguments; he kicked off at foot-ball matches and the aim of the kick was entirely political; and at the end of three weeks even he was very tired and inclined to recognize an element of humiliation in the conduct of a successful campaign.

It was eleven o'clock at night. There was to be but one more day of it, but one more meeting to-morrow night, the big, final rally on the eve of the poll. Harry Rames lay outstretched upon his sofa with his pipe between his lips cradled pleasantly upon that reflection, when the door of his room opened and a waiter brought in a card. Rames waved it aside.

"I can see no one."

"The gentleman said that his business was important."

Rames grumbled and took the card from the salver.

"M. Poizat," he read. "A Frenchman. Certainly not. I won't see him."

The waiter, an old English servant, a rare being nowadays, even in a country hotel, stood his ground.

"He's lived in Ludsey a long time, sir."

"Oh, has he!" said Rames. "Tell him I am out."

The waiter shook his head.

"He has already told me that you are in, sir. Come, you had better see him, sir. Perhaps he's the ha'porth of tar."

"Oh, very well," said Rames. "But I tell you, William, that I am in the mood to assert my rights as a man."

"Mustn't do that, sir, until the day after to-morrow. You are only a candidate till then."

William retired. Rames fell back upon his sofa. He meant to lie there prone upon his back, even if his visitor held all the votes of Ludsey in the hollow of his hand. Then the door opened and was shut again. A little, puckish old man stood in the room, danced lightly on his feet, skipped in the air, twirled before Captain Rames's astonished eyes and finally struck an inviting attitude, both arms extended and one foot advanced, like the pictures of the quack doctors in the newspaper advertisements.

"Oh, he's out of a lunatic asylum," Captain Rames almost groaned aloud. "He won't even have a vote."

The little man skimmed forward with agility, fixing a bright and twinkling pair of eyes upon the prostrate candidate.

"How old do you think I am?" he asked, and he whirled his arms.

"You are the youngest thing I have ever seen," replied Rames with conviction. "I didn't know that people were even born as young as you are."

"I am seventy-three," exclaimed the little man with a chuckle. He squared up at an imaginary antagonist and delivered a deadly blow in the air.

"Do you mind not doing that!" said Rames mildly. "My nerves are not what they should be, and if you do it again I shall probably cry. I suppose that you are M. Poizat----"

"I am, sir," said the little man. He changed his tactics. He no longer whirled his arms in the air. He advanced to the sofa and suddenly put up his foot on the edge.

"Feel my calf!" he said abruptly.

Captain Rames meekly obeyed.

"You ought to have a medal," he said languidly. "You really ought. At seventy-three, too! For myself I am like butter, and rather inferior butter, on a very hot day."

M. Poizat nodded his head.

"I know. That's why I am here!" He looked about the room and with the importance of a conspirator he drew out of his pocket a medicine bottle filled with a brown liquid. "Why am I so young?" he asked. "Why is my leg of iron? Listen to my voice. Why is it so clear?--It's all 'Lungatine,'" and with immense pride he reverently placed the bottle on the mantel-shelf. He turned again to Captain Rames.

"I heard you to-night. I suffered with you. What a voice! How harsh! How terrible! And yet what good words if only one could have heard them! I said to myself: 'That poor man. I can cure him. He does not know of Lungatine. He makes us all uncomfortable because he does not know of Lungatine.' So I ran home and brought a bottle."

"It's very good of you, I am sure," said Rames, "But look!" He pointed to a table. Throat sprays, tonics, lozenges, encumbered it. "The paraphernalia of a candidate," he said.

M. Poizat smiled contemptuously. He drew from his breast pocket a sheaf of letters.

"See how many in Ludsey owe their health to me!" he cried, and he gave the letters to Rames, who read them over with an 'oh' and an 'ah' of intense admiration when any particularly startling cure was gratefully recorded.

"You are a chemist here I suppose--naturalized, of course?" asked Captain Rames.

"I have a restaurant," M. Poizat corrected him. "Lungatine is merely one of my discoveries."

He sat down complacently. Captain Rames started up in dismay upon his elbow.

"I have a great deal to do to-morrow," he said piteously. The plea was of no avail. Captain Rames was in the grip of that most terrible of all constituents, the amateur inventor. M. Poizat drew his chair to the side of the sofa and went through the tale of his inventions. It was the usual inevitable list--an automatic lift which would work with absolute safety in any mine, a torpedo which would destroy any navy, a steel process which would resist any torpedo, and a railway-coupling.

"I'll bring you the models," he cried.

"No, no," cried Rames, springing from his sofa in dismay. Then he laid his hand on the inventor's shoulder and smiled wisely:

"Royal commissions for you," he said. "They're the fellows for models. I'll see about some. Royal commissions for you. Thank you for your Lungatine. Good-night, my friend, good-night."

Gently, but firmly, he raised the inventor from his chair, while he shook hands with him, and conducted him toward the door.

"You have your hat? Yes."

"A tablespoonful six times a day in a wineglass of water."

"Yes. The instructions, I see, are on the bottle."

Captain Rames opened the door with his pleasantest smile.

"To-morrow at your great meeting," said M. Poizat, "I shall be there. I shall hear what you say. Your voice will ring like a trumpet. And perhaps at the end of your speech, you will say that it is all due to Lungatine."

A frosty silence followed upon the words. Captain Rames said indifferently:

"You have been in England a long time. You are naturalized, of course?"

M. Poizat did not reply to the question.

"Perhaps you will say that it is all due to Lungatine," he repeated softly. "Perhaps you will say that. Who knows?"

Captain Rames looked up at the ceiling.

"Ah, who knows?" he said enigmatically.

M. Poizat shook hands for a second time and went down the stairs. Captain Rames closed the door, took the cork from the bottle, wetted the tips of his finger, and tasted the brown liquid. It was a simple solution of paregoric.

"I don't believe the fellow's naturalized," cried Rames, and he raised the bottle in the air above the coal-scuttle. But he did not let it drop.

"Perhaps he is though," he thought. He poured away a portion of the liquid amongst the coal, replaced the cork, and set the bottle prominently upon the mantel-shelf so that if M. Poizat took it into his head to call again he would see it there. Then he betook himself to bed; and M. Poizat figured in his dreams, a grotesque, little, capering creature, a figure of fun, as indeed he was, to the eyes of wakefulness. There are people upon whose faces nature writes plainly hints of tragic destinies, and M. Poizat had certainly no relationship with these. But then nature is apt to be freakish.

CHAPTER XIII

[THE NIGHT BEFORE THE POLL]

The walls of the great Corn Exchange were draped with banners and hung with gigantic mottoes. Cynthia sat in the front row of chairs upon the platform with Isaac Benoliel upon one side of her, and beyond him Diana Royle. It was the first public meeting at which she had ever been present, and now that the shy uneasiness at the prominence of her position which had troubled her when she took her seat was passing away, she gazed about her, eagerness in her eyes and a throb of excitement at her heart. In front of her a rostrum had been built out from the edge of the platform so that the speakers might stand upon the exact spot whence the voice carried with the greatest sonority. The rostrum was railed and hung with red cloth; the chairman's table, with the inevitable water-bottle, occupied it; and the small, square space was the only empty space in all that cavern of a hall. A few rows of chairs for members of the association were ranged at the front upon the floor; behind the chairs the people stood packed and massed to the doors, most of them men. The one gallery was crowded to its furthest nook; behind Cynthia the platform was thronged. Wherever her eyes turned she saw faces, faces, faces, all set in one direction, all white under the glare of light, all inclined toward the empty rostrum. It was the eve of the poll. There was a tingle of excitement in the air, a hushed expectancy. Only when Cynthia raised her eyes did she lose the vague feeling of suspense. Overhead a skylight in the roof was covered with a horizontal blind. One tattered corner hung down and as she looked up from the indistinguishable throng of faces, it arrested her attention as something especially individual and definite and single.

Suddenly came a buzz and a stir. The chairman was seen to rise from a flight of steps at the side of the platform. He was followed by a tall, gaunt, loose-limbed man with a bony face, a white moustache, and a high, bald head. He had the look of a soldier. Cynthia took no heed of him. He stalked before her and sank unnoticed in his place. Behind him came Harry Rames, and as he passed along the narrow gangway between the crowded chairs, those who had seats sprang to their feet; and three thousand people broke like a wave into a flutter of handkerchiefs and a shattering thunder of applause. Above the applause a chant gradually swelled, two lines of a tune rather like a chime. Cynthia could not hear the words, but the sound, with its rise and fall, surged backward and forward against the walls of the Exchange for a full minute.

Mr. Benoliel leaned toward Cynthia.

"They have given him their foot-ball song. In a city of artisans, keen on foot-ball, that's a good sign."

Cynthia nodded. But she hardly heard, she could not have answered. Here was something quite new to her, and overwhelmingly new. The thunderous outburst had taken her by the throat; for a second she felt choked; she had no part in politics, yet emotion woke in her and the tears sprang into her eyes.

"What's the matter, Cynthia?" asked Diana Royle.

Cynthia replied with a break in her voice between a laugh and a sob.

"I don't know. It's just the crowd, I think."

"And the enthusiasm of the crowd," added Mr. Benoliel. "You make me feel very old, Cynthia. I can listen to it quite unmoved now. But there was a time when I couldn't without a choking in my throat. It's the splendid faith of the crowd."

Cynthia, arrested by the phrase, looked quickly at Benoliel. Greatly as she liked him she was never quite sure of him. Kind as he had been to her she always suspected some touch of the charlatan. He had the look of a man quite in earnest.

"I wonder," she said, "whether mere magnetism is enough to arouse it."

Mr. Benoliel did not answer; for the chairman rose at his table; and while he spoke the harmless necessary words, Cynthia took stock of Harry Rames, who was seated in the rostrum at the side of the table in front of her and a little to her left. The last weeks of exertion had left their marks; the flesh had worn thin upon his face; there were dark hollows beneath his eyes; he had gained a look of spirituality which did not belong to him. He was nervous; his hands, with the long fingers which never seemed to accord with the rest of him, moved uneasily and restlessly from the buttons of his coat to the slip of notes which he had placed upon the table. Cynthia was deceived by the look of him as she had been deceived by the fervor of the gathering. The outburst was not entirely, was not even chiefly, a tribute to the candidate. Ludsey was a political city, and by three weeks of speeches and agitation political feeling had been whipped to a climax of excitement. It sought and found its outlet to-night at this final rally before the poll.

The cheers broke out again when Harry Rames rose and leaned his hand upon the rail of the rostrum. When they died down he began to speak--first a faltering word or two of thanks. Then his voice suddenly strengthened and rang firm. His fingers ceased to twitch, and he turned over in his mind the consecutions of his thoughts as though he were turning over the pages of a book. All that he had planned to say came clearly to him in its due order, and brought the comforting assurance that the rest would follow. He was master of himself, and being master of himself set his audience at ease to listen, Cynthia among the rest. Anxious as he himself, she knew now that the speech would go right on to its considered end. She leaned forward, all ears to catch the words, and all eagerness to read into them, if she could, the something more which was not there.

But she could not; yet it was a night of triumph for Harry Rames, "Breezy Harry Rames." She recalled her own phrase with a disappointed droop of the lips more than once during the next hour. He was going to win. She had no doubt of it. Confidence swept from his audience to him and back again in waves. And he savored the joys of the orator as he never had before. He had the arts of the platform, and more than the arts, a power to bend his audience to sympathy. He knew that night the supreme reward, the hush of a mass of people constraining themselves to silence and even to immobility while a voice, low as a whisper, sounded audibly in every nook. He played with the suspense, prolonging it to the last moment of endurance, and then, by a sudden swoop to a sharp, clever phrase, drawing the audience to its feet and coining the silence in a stormy tumult of applause.

He had the gift of speech; Cynthia gladly conceded it. An aptness of homely words, an absence of all extravagance, and a voice resonant and pleasant as a clear-toned, bell impressed her more than she had expected to be impressed. A day's rest had restored his voice for the time, even though M. Poizat's Lungatine had not contributed to the restoration.

She was surprised, too, by a certain shrewdness in the matter of the speech. It was not so much of the platform as his manner. There was very little reference to the navy. "I don't mean to be considered a 'service member,'" he had said to her once. "No one pays attention to the service member in the House of Commons." But here and there came views which struck her as new and worth consideration.

"If you could teach the wives of the artisans to cook and to take an interest in cooking, you would have done a great deal more to solve the question of intemperance in this country than if you closed half the public-houses," he cried once and developed his theme with humor and some courage. He drew a picture of a wife putting her husband's supper on the fire, ready against the time when he should come home from his factory, and then running out into the street to talk to a neighbor and leaving the meat to grill to the toughness and dryness of leather.

"The man comes home, sits down to it, and rises from it unsatisfied. What does he do? He goes out and strolls round to the public-house. Put a good meal, well-cooked, inside of him, and he'll not be so disposed to move. He'll be inclined to smoke his pipe by the fire in his kitchen."

He passed on to other topics. The whole speech was clever and was uttered on a lift of enthusiasm. But again Cynthia argued, it was the enthusiasm for the arena, not for a cause. It was ambition without ideals, power without high motive.

Diana Royle inclined toward her.

"Aren't you satisfied now?" she asked.

"Oh, he will get on," said Cynthia; and then she suddenly sat upright in her chair, with her lips parted and the blood bright in her cheeks.

"But, after all," Rames was saying; his voice was beginning to grow hoarse and he raised his hand in an appeal for silence, "here are we discussing the work to be done, and leaving out in our discussion the great necessity. I don't know what you think, but to my notion there is no greatness in any work unless it has a dream at the heart of it. The world's work is done by the great dreamers. Well, here is my last word before the poll, perhaps the last word I shall speak in this constituency."

He was interrupted as he had meant to be by loud repudiations of such a possibility.

"No, no!"

"You're a member already."

"We'll put you in."

Such phrases broke in upon the words and then a cheery voice, louder than the rest, shouted from the back of the hall:

"Never fear! You're well patronized in Ludsey, Captain."

A burst of laughter followed upon the words, and a flush of annoyance darkened Rames's face.

"I will remind my friend that I am not a public entertainer," he said. "And it's really against the spirit represented in that sentence that I wish to direct my first words. I have my dream too--a dream. I speak openly to you--at my very heart. Let me tell it you. It involves a confession. When I first came to Ludsey six months ago, when for the first time I saw from the windows of my railway carriage across the summer fields the tall chimneys and high, long roofs of its factories, the delicate steeples of its churches, it was to me just a town like another. I will be frank, it was just a polling-booth. But as I got to know your city that error passed out of my thoughts."

Cynthia leaned forward. He had used her own words. She could not but be flattered by his use of them. They had been acclaimed, too, by this great gathering, and she was proud of that. Not for anything would she have had their authorship revealed, but she was proud to hear them used, proud, too, because they seemed to have led, if she dared believe her ears, Harry Rames out of his detested breeziness into a contemplation of something other than the personal gain. She could hardly doubt him now; he spoke with so simple a sincerity. She had a sudden glimpse once more of her enchanted garden wherein she had walked with and helped the great ones of the earth. To help, herself unknown except by those she helped!--that had been the dream when she had encouraged dreams; and it sprang once more into life now as she listened.

"It is a city," Rames continued, "where a few steps will take you out of the thronged streets into some old garden, quiet with the peace of ancient memories; some old close of plaster and black beams; some old room with windows deep-set in four-foot walls and wide hearths of centuries ago. And round about these old places stands a ring of factories where in good times the lights blaze until the morning and the whir of its machines never ceases from your ears. It is a city whose continuous life is written for all to see upon its buildings. Here kings and queens have tarried on their journeys; there chambers of commerce hold their meetings. From small and ancient beginnings it has been made by the activity of generations of men into a modern industrial city. Well, I have my dream. It is to be one little link in the continuity of its life and to do my share of service in the forwarding of its prosperity."

A shout answered his words. He had his audience in hand. He stilled it with a swift gesture and his voice rang out with a laugh which had all the exultation of battle.

"Well, we shall know to-morrow night. We are in the ice-pack now, but we are coming to the outer rim of it. We can see the blue water already. We shall be sailing smoothly upon it this time to-morrow night."

He had been chary of references to the voyage which had made his reputation; all the more, therefore, this one struck home. He sat down tempestuously acclaimed, and turning in his chair held out his hand to Cynthia Daventry.

"I am glad that you came," he said. "I have achieved two triumphs to-night. I have brought you and Mr. Benoliel to your first political meeting and both of you are on my platform."

He shook hands with Isaac Benoliel and with Diana Royle. Cynthia leaned a little forward.

"I, too, am glad that I came," she returned with a smile. Because of those last words of his, friendship was warm in her toward Harry Rames. She added, "You knew then that I was here--just behind you?"

Rames nodded.

"Yes, but I was too nervous to turn to you before I had made my speech. The flesh wears a little thin after three weeks of this. One gets jumpy. Even the tattered corner of blind hanging down there from the skylight seemed to-night charged with some important message." He spoke, ridiculing the fancy, and Cynthia, with a smile and a quick lift of her eyebrows, cried:

"I noticed that too."

"Then for the first time," said Rames, "we have something in common. You and I are probably the only people in the hall who noticed it. We have a bond of union."

"A strip of tattered blind!" said Cynthia.

"Well, there was nothing at all before," said Captain Rames, and he suddenly turned back to his seat. For the tall, gaunt man was on his legs.

Cynthia neither heard his name nor followed his speech with any particular attention. It was indeed difficult to follow. He was an old hack of the platform with all the sounding phrases at the tip of his tongue. Rolling sentences, of the copybook, flowed out of him; declamations too vague to be understood were delivered with the vigor of a prophet. But he interspersed them with the familiar clichés of the day and each one received its salvo of applause. To Cynthia he was a man not so much stupid as out of place. She could imagine him at the head of a cavalry squadron. Here he seemed simply grotesque.

On the other hand, Captain Rames did not; and the contrast between the two men bent her to consider whether, after all, she had not been wrong in her condemnation of his new career. She was in the mood to admit it; and when the meeting broke up and the crowd was pouring through the doors into the street, and those upon the platform were descending its steps, she found herself alone for a second on the rostrum with Harry Rames.

"Perhaps I was wrong," she said. "I remember what you told me of Mr. Smale. A vivid gift of phrase--he thought that necessary. You have it."

"On the platform--yes. But the platform's not the House," said Rames. "Smale told me that too. I have yet to see whether I shall carry the House."

"Yet those last words," said Cynthia--"about the city and the continuity of its life and your pride to have a little share in it. Oh, that was finely done."

And upon Rames's face there came a grin.

"Yes, I thought that would fetch 'em," he said.

Cynthia stepped back. Once again it occurred to Rames, as it had done on the night of their first meeting at the Admiralty, that just so would she look if he struck her a blow.

"Then--then--the city is still a polling-booth," she stammered.

"Yes," said Rames.

The hero newly perched upon his pediment tumbled off again.

"You used what I said to you because you just thought it would go down."

Rames did not deny it. He remained silent.

"I remember," she continued, "it was no doubt a foolish thing I said. But even when I said it, you were thinking this is the sort of thing that will take."

That she was humiliated, her voice and her face clearly proved. Yet again Rames did not contradict her. Again he was silent. For there was nothing to be said.

"You do not allow me many illusions about you," Cynthia said gently, and she began to turn away.

But now he arrested her.

"I don't mean to," he said quickly; and by the reply he undid some portion of the harm he had done himself in her eyes.

CHAPTER XIV

[COLONEL CHALLONER'S MEMORY]

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.

CHAPTER XV

[THE MAYOR AND THE MAN]

St. Anne's Hall stands tucked away in a narrow street of Ludsey by the spacious square; and from its ancient windows you look out between the lozenges of stained glass upon the great church of St. Anne with its soaring spire and its wide graveyard. Into this hall the ballot-boxes were brought from the polling-booths on the next evening, and at long tables in the Council Chamber the voting papers were sorted and counted. Harry Rames walked from table to table. He seemed to see nothing but crosses against his opponent's name. He did not dare to put a question to any of the scrutineers standing behind the sorters. The very swiftness with which the votes were counted impressed him with a sense of disaster. For the first time he began to ask himself how he was to shape his life if to-night he were defeated. Thus an hour passed and then the chief constable drew him aside to a bench under the musician's gallery at one end of the room.

"I've been watching the tables, Captain Rames," he said, "and I think you are going to be elected."

"You do?" said Rames eagerly. "Yes, and I shall be very glad if you are."

"Thank you," exclaimed Rames. He could have wrung off the chief constable's hand in the fervor of his gratitude.

"Oh, I am not speaking as a politician," the chief constable returned with a smile. "I have the order of my city to look after. That's all I am thinking about. If you weren't by any chance to get in, I am afraid there would be trouble to-night in Ludsey. And I want you if you are returned to get back to your hotel at once. It's important from my point of view that you should show up on your balcony as soon as possible after the result is declared."

"I see," said Rames.

"I will take you out the back way through the police station," the chief constable continued, "and there's a lane opposite which will lead you straight to your back door. You had better run, I think. For your own friends would tear you to pieces to-night without noticing they were doing you any harm."

The chief constable suddenly changed his tone. One of the scrutineers on the side of Rames's opponent had drawn close to them. The chief constable had no intention to allow a suspicion that he favored one side more than the other. He raised his voice.

"You have noticed our tapestry, perhaps. It is quite invaluable, I believe. We lent it two years ago to the South Kensington Museum. There was an American millionaire here the other day who wished to buy it."

Raines looked across the room.

"Isn't there some portion of it missing?" he asked.

"Yes. That disappeared in the Commonwealth times. Let us go and look at it."

Rames walked at the chief constable's side up the floor of the room toward the dais where Mr. Redling the Mayor, with his chain of office about his shoulders, sat in his big chair in the centre of the long council table. His mace lay upon the table in front of him, and he surveyed the busy scene over which he presided with an imperturbable gravity. But Mr. Redling was a genial soul with a twinkling eye and a red, round face like a crumpled cherub's; and as Harry Rames advanced toward the dais, Mr. Redling beckoned to him with a discreet twist of the finger of a hand lying idle upon the table.

Harry Rames took a seat beside the Mayor at the long table and again words of comfort were poured into his ears in a gentle undertone.