He paused, and then the worldly wisdom which he had learnt from his father--that worldly wisdom which is sometimes called cynicism--prompted him to lay the matter before her in its worst light.
“It will mean waiting for a couple of years at least. And for you it will mean the dulness of a long engagement, and the anomalous position of an engaged girl without her rightful protector. It will mean that your position in society will be quite different--that half the world will pity you, while the other half thinks you--well, a fool for your pains.”
“Of course,” he went on, “I must go away. That is the only way to get on in politics in these days. I must go away and get a speciality. I must know more about some country than any other man; and when I come back I must keep that country ever before the eye of the intelligent British workman who reads the halfpenny evening paper. That is fame--those are politics.”
She laughed. There seemed to be no fear of her taking life too seriously yet. And, truth to tell, he did not appear to wish her to do so.
“But you must not go very far,” she said sweetly.
“Africa? That does not sound interesting.”
“It is interesting: moreover, it is the coming country. I may be able to make money out there, and money is a necessity at present.”
“I do not like it, Jack,” she said in a foreboding voice. “When do you go?”
“At once--in fact, I came to say good-bye. It is better to do these things very promptly--to disappear before the onlookers have quite understood what is happening. When they begin to understand they begin to interfere. They cannot help it. I will write to Lady Cantourne if you like.”
So he bade her good-bye, and those things that lovers say were duly said; but they are not for us to chronicle. Such words are better left to be remembered or forgotten as time and circumstance and result may decree. For one may never tell what words will do when they are laid within the years like the little morsel of leaven that leaveneth the whole.
Who knows? the man is proven by the hour.
In his stately bedroom on the second floor of the quietest house in Russell Square Mr. Thomas Oscard--the eccentric Oscard--lay, perhaps, a-dying.
Thomas Oscard had written the finest history of an extinct people that had ever been penned; and it has been decreed that he who writes a fine history or paints a fine picture can hardly be too eccentric. Our business, however, does not lie in the life of this historian--a life which certain grave wiseacres from the West End had shaken their heads over a few hours before we find him lying prone on a four-poster counting for the thousandth time the number of tassels fringing the roof of it. In bold contradiction to the medical opinion, the nurse was, however, hopeful. Whether this comforting condition of mind arose from long experience of the ways of doctors, or from an acquired philosophy, it is not our place to inquire. But that her opinion was sincere is not to be doubted. She had, as a matter of fact, gone to the pantomime, leaving the patient under the immediate eye of his son, Guy Oscard.