"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 pa.s.s 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 gra.s.s.
"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 const.i.tuency. 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 st.u.r.dily on both his feet in front of her.
"Nevertheless you do," he insisted.
In spite of herself, a faint smile of amus.e.m.e.nt 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 Ca.n.a.l 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.