"This is for me."

But now his thoughts changed. The men of Ludsey did not wait in vain that night. For Harry Rames the glamour faded off the arena. At the very moment when the bars were being withdrawn for him to enter it the exultation of battle died out of his heart. He woke to something new--the claim of the const.i.tuency. The longer he looked, the stronger the claim grew, the more loudly the silence of that throng proclaimed and shouted it. They stood under the javelins of the rain, the men who had voted for him. They emphasized their claim by their extraordinary quietude. Almost they menaced.

"A queer sight," said a voice at his elbow.

Harry Rames turned. It was Mr. Arnall who had interrupted him.

"I shall not easily forget it," said Rames, drawing a breath, and then with an irritable outburst he said: "They look to Parliament for more than parliaments can do, to candidates for more than members can achieve. Each election is to open paradise for them."

"And whose fault is that?" asked Mr. Arnall dryly.

Rames nodded.

"Ours, I suppose," he said; and behind him in the room there was a bustle and a grating of chairs upon the floor. The votes had been sorted. The candidates and their friends gathered about the long table on the raised dais.

"They are taking yours first," said Mr. Arnall to Harry. "That's a good sign."

The papers cast for Harry Rames were brought to the table in sets of fifty. They were placed crosswise, one set on the top of the first, and the third on the second, until five hundred had been counted.

Against that pile of five hundred votes a second rose. Gradually the orderly heaps of paper extended along the table's edge in front of the Mayor. There were half a dozen now. Rames's agent stood by them like a bull-dog on the chain. The half-dozen became ten, eleven, twelve. And as the twelfth heap was completed a quick movement ran among all of Rames's friends. He had polled now half the electorate of the city.

One more set of papers and he was in.

It was laid next to the others at that moment, and Rames's hands were silently grasped and shaken. But the heaping up of the votes went on.

There were three more piles to be added before the end was reached.

Eighty-four per cent of the electorate had recorded their votes. Harry Rames had won by a majority well on to two thousand. He stood there in a buzz of congratulations, with a sudden vacancy of mind and thought.

He remembered the extraordinary agility with which Mr. Redling whipped out of the room, trying to say unconcernedly:

"I'll just announce the result at once."

He heard the storm of cheers in the street below. That patient silence was broken now in a hurricane of enthusiasm and even through it he could distinguish the words of the exultant cry:

"Rames is our man!"

He saw the Mayor return, much out of breath. He proposed the vote of thanks to the returning officers, with the usual eulogy of his opponents and depreciation of himself. But even at that moment the claim of the const.i.tuency would importunately obtrude and find acknowledgment in his words.

"You look to me very likely for more than I can do," he said simply.

"At all events you shall have what I can."

But the most memorable achievement that night was the reply of Mr.

Redling.

As he rose to his feet to acknowledge the vote of thanks, the man ran forward and got a fair start of the Mayor. He cried out, all one bubble of delight:

"I need hardly say, gentlemen, how utterly I rejoice at--" and then the Mayor put on a spurt and caught up the man--"at the admirable manner in which this contest has been conducted by both sides."

But the correction deceived no one. Mr. Redling's politics were known, and so, in a general splutter of good-humored laughter, the Ludsey election came to an end.

The Mayor turned from the table wiping his forehead.

"I nearly made a bad break there," he said in a whisper. "They won't come at you again, I think. I reckon you have got Ludsey, Captain Rames," and then Rames felt the hand of the chief constable laid upon his arm. He was rushed across the Mayor's parlor, down the stairs through the police station, where the police at their supper rose and gave him a loud cheer.

"Silence!" cried the chief constable savagely. He opened the street door and peeped out.

"All's clear. Run--down that alley opposite. Say something from your balcony, never mind what--they won't hear more than two words."

"That's just all that I want them to hear," cried Rames.

He had foreseen that moment. He ran with one or two of his friends to the back door of his hotel. A path was made for them through the crowded hall. He came out upon the balcony, and up and down the hill as far as his eyes could see the street was thronged. He stretched out his hand. He had a second of absolute silence, and in that second his voice rang out:

"My const.i.tuents----"

The roar which answered him showed him that once more his foresight had served him well. No other word of his was heard. But any other words would have spoiled the two which he had uttered.

CHAPTER XVI

WORDS OVER THE TELEPHONE

The next two hours were for Rames of the tissue whence nightmares are woven. Rames was conscious that he made speeches and still more speeches and yet others on the top of those, until speech-making became a pain in the head for which there was no anodyne. He made them from windows--one at that very window where Taylor, the lily fingered democrat, had by a single sentence won immortality and certain defeat--he made them from tables in club-rooms which he no longer recognized; where men, packed tight as herrings, screamed incoherencies in a blaze of light and the atmosphere of a Turkish bath, or standing upon chairs beat him, as he pa.s.sed beneath them, on the top of the head with their hats in the frenzy of their delight.

For two hours Ludsey went stark mad and Harry Rames had reached exhaustion before a gigantic captain of the fire brigade lifted him panting and dishevelled out of the throng, and drawing him into a small committee-room locked the door against his votaries.

"Better wait for a little while here, sir," he said; and it was one o'clock in the morning before he ventured to return to his hotel.

By that time the madness was already past. There was still noise in the blazing rooms of the clubs. But the streets were empty and up the climbing hill the city was quiet as a house of mutes. A placard in the window of the newspaper office recorded the figures of the election, and the boarding which protected the shops opposite to his hotel shone white in the light of the lamps. But for those two signs, even Rames might have found it difficult of belief that so lately this very hill had rung with cheers and seethed with a tumultuous populace.

To-morrow, however, the sirens of the factories would shrill across the house-tops at six and the work of a strenuous industrial town begin. Ludsey had no time to dally with victories won and triumphs which had pa.s.sed.

Nor indeed had Harry Rames. He rang the bell at the door and entered the hall quickly. There was something which he should have done before now, though only now he remembered it. With a word to the porter, he went into the office and switched on the electric light. He crossed to the corner where the telephone was fixed and called up the White House. A woman's voice, very small and clear, came back to him over the lines. He recognized it with a thrill of satisfaction. It was Cynthia Daventry's.

"Oh, it's you yourself," he cried eagerly, and he heard Cynthia, at the other end of the telephone, laugh with pleasure at his eagerness.

"Yes," she answered. "I thought perhaps you might ring me up."

So she had waited--just that they might talk together for a few moments. Harry Rames, however, did not answer her. It seemed to him from the intonation of her voice that she had more to say if she would only make up her mind to say it. He stood and waited with the receiver at his ear, and after a little while Cynthia spoke again upon a lower note.

"I am glad that you did. I should have been disappointed if you hadn't."

"Thank you," said Rames.

He spoke very gently. There was no smile of triumph upon his face. It had become of vast importance to him within the last two hours to know how her thoughts dealt with him; and he was not sure. There was friendship between them--yes. But how far on her side did it reach? He had no answer to that question.

"You have heard the result?" he asked.

"Yes. Mr. Benoliel telephoned to me at once from the Mayor's parlor."

"I ought to have done that," said Harry Rames.

"Oh, no. You were making speeches," replied Cynthia with a laugh. She was at all events not offended by his omission.