Then another step sounded on the pavement and he turned away from his vision. After all he might be laughing at all these fears in an hour's time, he took the courage to reflect; and he went up the stairs and across the lobby into the Chamber itself. He looked for a seat on the second bench below the gangway, but the House was full.

Colonel Challoner, again pa.s.sed over in the choice of under-secretaries, looked up at him from the corner seat, and noticed the blue-book and a volume of Hansard under his arm.

"Are you going to speak?" he asked.

"If I can get called," said Rames.

Challoner made room for him at his side.

"I mean to say a word or two myself," he said, "but we shall probably neither of us get a chance. Those front-bench men think it beneath their dignity to take less than an hour."

Certainly, so far as the first speech was concerned, Colonel Challoner was right. It was delivered from the opposition bench by an ex-minister, William Kenway, a man of a kindly and generous disposition who yet managed by some perversity of tact to rasp the temper of the House from wall to wall. For a full hour he stood there now, saying the wrong thing with determination, giving little lessons with the air of a school-master, irritating by a certain priggishness his friends behind him as well as his opponents in front.

Rames sat and listened. He realized that the very opportunity which he wanted was being given to him. Kenway, with a white paper in his hand, came to the problem of Asiatic immigration. Rames was no longer trying to remember the consecution of his speech. He sat waiting for the long speech to end, making a note or two, grasping at a beginning for his speech, and clinging firmly to it.

When Kenway sat down, he found himself standing upon his legs. He was aware at once that some one was standing beside him, Colonel Challoner. Both men had risen. Almost he resumed his seat, and then he heard his name called by the chairman, and from a very long way off an encouraging cheer reached his ears.

He was conscious of the lack of a table in front of him or the barrier of a platform--something on which he could rest a hand. He felt strangely defenceless without it. He faltered through his opening sentences in a voice which sounded to his ears weak and thin as a ghost's. He saw a member take off his hat on the opposite benches, rise, and make his way out; and at once he was certain that he was making a dismal failure. Suddenly he remembered one member who had risen to speak, had been called upon and had sunk back in his seat without uttering more than a few unintelligible words. Was his to be the same fate, he asked himself? And asking himself he lost the thread of what he was saying and with a gasp retrieved it.

"It seemed to me," he said in describing the scene to Cynthia, "that I stood there dumb and helpless for twenty seconds. As a matter of fact, the interval was so short that not even my neighbors noticed it. I suppose that I only paused for the fraction of a second, really."

"Yes," said Cynthia, and the trifle remained in her mind.

He was speaking, too, with a haze before his eyes and his hands clutching at the edges of his coat. But he went on, and then quite suddenly the haze thinned so that he saw the House and he heard his voice ringing out clear and firm, not loud nor arrogant, filling the Chamber and with just that note of deference which he had planned to strike and had struck because the deference was sincere. He turned in his place. He was no longer conscious of the need of a table in front of him; he looked down the House toward the clock above the entrance door, and he saw that the bar was thronged with members. Curiosity, no doubt, had brought them in from the library and the smoking-room and the lobby when his name went up on the tape--he had, after all, a reputation. He, the least romantic of men, had some aura of romance about him in that a.s.sembly; enough at all events to invite a momentary interest. But they stayed, and as he spoke in a voice that went steadily forward with the rhythm of marching men, he saw now one, now another come out from the throng at the bar and slip into a seat. With a throb of joy he realized that he was not failing, that now he was not going to fail. The House had filled since he had risen and on all the benches there was a great quiet. He turned toward the Speaker's chair. The s.p.a.ce at the sides of it was crowded too. He saw more than one cabinet-minister standing. Above, behind the grille, he saw the big hats and shadowy forms of the ladies in the gallery, and here and there the gleam of an ermine stole against the light behind them. That happened to him again which had happened in the Corn Exchange at Ludsey. He turned over the consecutions of his argument like the pages of a printed book. He was master of himself. He worked in his predecessor's points and replied to them with force and without offence because they were just the points he had foreseen. He provoked interruptions from his opponents; he had foreseen them and was ready, and the cheers broke out from the benches about him and behind him. He spoke for just twenty minutes. The applause, generous and friendly, came from both sides of the House when he resumed his seat. The Prime-Minister leaned across the gangway and shook him by the hand.

And as for the great battle-ship at Spithead, anybody could have it as a gift.

Rames leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. So the third step of the great career had been taken. He had been chosen candidate, he had been elected member, he had made something of a small triumph out of his maiden speech. Now he would wait without any hurry. He would make one speech more later on in the session, perhaps two--not more than two, certainly. And next session he would plunge boldly and take up his part in the impromptu debating on the Committee stages of Bills. In that work lay the real test of parliamentary capacity.

Thus he planned, and content with his plan he opened his eyes again.

At once he was made uneasy. He met the eyes of a small, white-haired man with a deeply lined, brown face who was watching him fixedly from the benches opposite. This was Albert Coulter, a man of many expeditions in untravelled countries, when there were countries still untravelled, whose name had become a signal for dark whispers. A callous selfishness, when selfishness might mean the life or health of his companions, and a relentless severity with his natives, was rightly or wrongly imputed. The survivors of his expeditions came back with queer stories. But he had never failed until the moment, when at the age of fifty and with the looks of seventy, he had entered the House of Commons. There, an interesting yet ineffective figure, he sat day after day, solitary, disliked, with brooding eyes under a bristle of gray eyebrows which seemed to be haunted with sinister memories of deep tropical forests and days long past. His eyes rested upon Harry Rames now, not enviously, not encouragingly, but without expression, almost indeed like the eyes of a dead man. Their fixed gaze chilled the blood of Harry Rames and all his satisfaction was marred. He had to move from his place and beyond the reach of those brooding eyes before he shook the impression off. And even now so distinct was it in his memories that he omitted it altogether and deliberately from the story he told that afternoon to Cynthia Daventry. He related in its place another incident which had happened later in the evening.

"We had a division," he said. "I was walking through the lobby and just at the turnstiles where the clerks tick off our names, I found Henry Smale in front of me. The R's and the S's go through the same turnstile. He turned round as I pa.s.sed through behind him, and said to me in a low voice, 'You have the ear of the House now. Keep your eye on the treasury bench.' That from Smale, who was dissuading me to enter Parliament, means a good deal."

Harry Rames turned and looked at Cynthia.

"Yes," said Cynthia.

There was a smile upon her face rather wistful, rather ironic.

"So you have turnstiles in your House of Commons," she said slowly.

"No. Did I say turnstiles?" he asked. "There's no actual barrier which revolves. But there's only room for one at a time to pa.s.s between the desks. The clerks stand at the desks and register your votes for publication. Otherwise where would party government be?"

"You mean if the votes weren't published men would vote according to their convictions?"

Rames nodded.

"But it's a superficial view," he said. "You have got to take the sum of your policy. As a whole, is it better than the other fellow's?

That's what you have to ask yourself when you are going to register a vote upon some particular point which may help to turn your government out and let the other fellows in."

"Yes, I see that," said Cynthia; and once more her eyes fell upon the _Times_ and she was suddenly conscious of a queer pride. Others to-day were aware of the success which Harry Rames had made; probably she alone was aware of the thought, and the apprehension and the tribulation of soul which had gone to the making of the success. To the others he would just be one of the inevitably successful--what indeed she had herself been wont to think him. To-day, however, he was to her human as he had never been. He had shown himself to her, bleating with fear like an ordinary man at the approach of the fateful moment which was to put him to the test. He had drawn the picture with a sense of humor, but he had not blurred it. Would he have drawn it for any one else, she asked herself? She turned impulsively toward him:

"I wanted you to come to me this week," she said impulsively. "And I thank you very much for telling me not merely that you succeeded, but how near you were to breaking down. But," and she hesitated for a few moments, "I should have been still more grateful if you had come to me the day before you made your speech."

"I almost did," said Harry Rames.

CHAPTER XIX

AND A PROPOSAL

Cynthia smiled, but she did not believe.

"I think," she said, "that this is the very first time you have gone beyond the truth to say a pleasant thing to me."

"It is the truth," he insisted. "I almost did more than come to you. I almost asked you to let me inflict my speech on you before I made it in the House."

"Oh, I wish you had!" cried Cynthia. "It would have made a difference to me this last week--a great difference." Then she turned swiftly toward Harry Rames with a glance of distrust. "Why didn't you come then?" she asked coldly. "There was nothing to hinder you. You knew that you would be very welcome. I should like to have known beforehand what you were going to say;" and once more a gentle wistfulness crept into her voice. "I should have liked also to have heard you in the House. I should have liked, in a word--not to have been shut out."

"You weren't shut out," Harry Rames exclaimed. "You mustn't fancy that! It's not true. If I did not come, it was really because I had you in my thoughts. Yes. I stayed away deliberately because of a saying of Smale's which I know to be true, which I quoted to you at Ludsey."

The distrust grew stronger in Cynthia's mind. What had Smale to do with the matter? Her face hardened. Harry Rames had, till this moment, at all events, been honest, had always stood apart in her eyes by reason of his honesty. Must she strip him now of that quality even as she had to do of the other, the imagined ones?

"What saying?" she asked.

"That many a man may cut a great figure upon the platforms who will never get the ear of the House of Commons. I wanted to be sure that I was not one of those--before I came to you."

A particular significance in the intonation of the words warned her--and then troubled her. She looked at him swiftly, and as swiftly looked away. The blood mounted into her face and flushed her throat.

"I wanted to be sure that I should come not quite empty-handed," he continued.

Cynthia made no pretence to misunderstand him, and no answer. All was explained to her now: why he had stayed away, why he now returned--all those particulars which he had told her she might have guessed, and not one of which had to this moment entered her head. She had never stepped beyond the border-line of friendship in her thoughts of Harry Rames--never once. She was startled now that she was asked to. She needed time to adjust herself to the new point of view. He had been honest with her, after all. That was her first instinctive recollection.

"So I am here now to ask you to marry me," he continued. He spoke very quietly and simply. He did not simulate any pa.s.sion, and again in her heart comparing him with that other wooer in the Row, she thanked him for his honesty.

Still she made no answer, but calmness had returned to her. She sat looking out of the window, straight ahead of her, with her chin propped in the palm of her hand. She was quite still, and the stillness of her att.i.tude was no greater than the stillness of her mind. There was no throb of joy at her heart. But Harry Rames had been honest with her, and she had been taught not to expect so very much.

"I think you know whom you will be marrying," he resumed. "I have tried to make what I know about myself clear to you as well as to me.

You once agreed that I left you no illusions about me."

"Yes. On the platform at the Corn Exchange in Ludsey," Cynthia replied. "I remember quite well. I remember your answer too: That you did not mean to."

"Yes," said Harry Rames. "That was my answer."

Cynthia paused for a few seconds. Then in her turn she began to question him.