"Oh, Harry! There's no trouble about the money, of course."

Rames stared at her. "Cynthia," he cried. "You'll help?"

"More than help, Harry," she answered. "You see I let you go--yes. I even bid you go--yes. But I mean to have my share, my dear, in whatever you do. I mean that you shall carry something of me, something more than a telegram this time, to your farthest South."

Rames sat down in a chair by the side of the fire close to where she stood. He gazed into the flames in silence. With all gentleness and love she was heaping coals of fire upon his head. Every look, every word she spoke, confessed the deep pain which he was causing her. She was brave, but through the curtain of her bravery her fear and anguish shone. He spoke as a man will who is smitten by his conscience.

"I am very sorry, Cynthia. When I asked you to marry me I had no suspicion that any longing could get so strong a hold on me. I once told you carelessly that men were driven out upon these expeditions by the torment of their souls. I said that knowing it only by hearsay and by the plain proof of it which they show in what they have written.

Now I know it--here," and he struck his breast above his heart. "Yes, I have got to go if I am ever to have peace. But I am sorry, Cynthia."

His voice trailed off into silence and Cynthia laid a hand upon his head and stroked his hair. "I know," she said, "I know."

"All that I thought so fine, so well worth having--the fight with other men for mastery, the conquest with what conquest would bring--power and rule and governing--it's extraordinary how completely all desire for it has vanished out of me!" he continued. "Do you remember the account I gave you of my maiden speech?"

"Yes."

Cynthia's hand had gone to her breast, but her voice was steady.

"There was a fragment of time when the world went blank, when I lost the thread of my speech, and stood dumb. A fragment of time so short that it wasn't noticeable to any one in the House except myself."

"Yes."

"Well, these three years of politics seem to me just such an unnoticeable interruption of my real life. The fight which I revelled in appears to me now a squabble made ign.o.ble with intrigues, bitter with mean disappointments, the victory not worth the fight. No doubt I am wrong. I went into the House of Commons, you see, without ideas,"

and Cynthia started at the word so familiar to her fancies. "Now I have one, a big one, and it has mastered me."

And so Harry Rames pa.s.sed at last through the turnstile into Cynthia's private garden. But it was in accordance with the irony of their lives that she wished with every drop of her blood that he had remained outside.

"I long for simple things, not shifts and intrigues and bitterness; the gray mists on glaciers; the day's journey over the snow, with its wind ridges and its storms; the hard, lean life of it all; the fight, not with men, but with enormous things of nature, some dangerous, some serene, but, whether dangerous or serene, wholly indifferent." He gazed for a little while into the fire, seeking in the a.n.a.lysis of his emotions his apologia.

"I think, Cynthia," he continued, "that once a man has gone far into the empty s.p.a.ces of the earth, he has the mark of them upon him.

Voices call from them over all the leagues of all the seas and need no receivers at the end."

"Yes," said Cynthia, and once more her memories travelled back to the death-bed of old Daventry in the dark room of the white house. He had given her reasons for his great love of his estancia on the wide plains of Argentina. But there had been another reason, she remembered, which his failing wits had not allowed his tongue to formulate. Cynthia had often wondered what that reason was. She had no doubt that her husband had explained it now. "Yes, my father also heard those voices."

After a short silence Harry Rames reached out his hand and took hers.

"I think, my dear," he said gently, "that things would have been different, that I should not have wanted to go, had we been fortunate enough to have children--" and with a cry Cynthia turned to him fiercely.

"No, no!" she exclaimed. "During this hour, for the first time, I have been thanking G.o.d we had no children. For if we had, you would still have wanted to go just as much as you do now, and that I could not have borne."

Harry had no answer for her outburst. In his heart he knew that what she had said was true. He sat in silence, his eyes upon the fire and her hand in his; and a moment or two later she dropped upon her knees at his side.

"But oh, Harry, come back to me!" she cried. "You must go I know.

That's the way things happen. But oh, come back to me."

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

THE LAST

At nine o'clock on a morning of July during the next year an auxiliary barquentine of four hundred and fifty tons steamed westward with the tide past the Isle of Wight. Besides the helmsman, Cynthia and Harry Rames were upon the bridge. They stood side by side, Cynthia gripping the rail in front of her with both of her hands. They did not speak.

The ship glided past Cowes gay with its white yachts and crowded esplanade and rounded Gurnard Point into Newtown Bay. Cynthia looked ahead through a blur of tears, watching for and yet dreading to see a low square church tower stand out against the sky close to the water in a dip of the coast-line hills. Opposite to that church the ship was stopped and a boat was lowered. Cynthia, with Robert Brook to look after her, was put ash.o.r.e on Yarmouth pier; and the barquentine dipped her flag and steamed on to the Needles and the open sea on its three years' voyage.

Robert Brook escorted Cynthia across the water to Southampton, and the next day witnessed her departure from the docks on a steamer of the Royal Mail for Buenos Ayres. He returned to London that afternoon, took a solitary dinner at his club, and walked afterward to Curzon Street. The Rames's house was all lit up, and from the open windows music drifted out upon the summer night. Harry and Cynthia had let their house a week before, and to-night the new residents were giving a party. Robert Brook had an invitation and went in. He listened for half an hour to a party of c.o.o.ns and then could endure no more. The comic songs and the laughter seemed to him that night in this house a desecration. For in the characters of Harry Rames and his wife he chose to see something of greatness, in their lives something of achievement. He looked about the walls. Some dark and terrible hours must needs have been pa.s.sed by both Harry and Cynthia within them before the great resolution had been taken which had condemned her to three years of loneliness on an estancia in South America and had stripped him of a sure career in politics.

Robert Brook fell into a black mood and an utter weariness with his own life. For him season was to follow season and to find him still a guest at the parties and the entertainments until he became old and a bore. He envied Harry his expedition, Cynthia her sorrow. He went out wretched and walked by instinct down Whitehall. On his way to his club he pa.s.sed the windows of the Board of Trade. These, too, were brilliantly lit; for within the building a Cabinet Minister was endeavoring to compose an acute struggle between artisans and their employers. Robert Brook watched those windows; and his disgust with his own life increased. Here again was achievement for others, not for himself. There would never be room for him within that building, nor within any other where the nation's administration was being done. And his life was going; indeed, the best part of it was done. He walked on to his own small house and let himself in with his key. The pa.s.sage was dark and the house quite silent. He stood for a while alone in the darkness and the silence. He thought of Cynthia and Harry, of Devenish and his colleagues, of others without eminence, but, at all events, with wives and children. He had given up his life to the House of Commons and the House of Commons repaid him by barely knowing his name. There was probably no man in London more wretched that night than Robert Brook.

The End