With Edged Tools | Page 9

father for everything. We could not
marry without his consent."
A peculiar, hard look crept into her eyes, and in some subtle way it
made her look older. After a little pause she said:
"But we can surely get that--between us?"
"I propose doing without it."
She looked up--past him--out of the window. All the youthfulness
seemed to have left her face, but he did not appear to see that.
"How can you do so?"
"Well, I can work. I suppose I must be good for something--a bountiful
Providence must surely have seen to that. The difficulty is to find out
what it intends me for. We are not called in the night nowadays to a
special mission--we have to find it out for ourselves."
"Do you know what I should like you to be?" she said, with a bright
smile and one of those sudden descents into shallowness which he
appeared to like.
"What?"
"A politician."
"Then I shall be a politician," he answered, with loverlike promptness.
"That would be very nice," she said; and the castles she at once began
to build were not entirely aerial in their structure.
This was not a new idea. They had talked of politics before as a
possible career for himself. They had moved in a circle where politics

and politicians held a first place--a circle removed above the glamour
of art, and wherein Bohemianism was not reckoned an attraction. She
knew that behind his listlessness of manner he possessed a certain
steady energy, perfect self-command, and that combination of
self-confidence and indifference which usually attains success in the
world. She was ambitious not only for herself but for him, and she was
shrewd enough to know that the only safe outlet for a woman's
ambition is the channel of a husband's career.
"But," he said, "it will mean waiting."
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."
"I don't care," she answered.
"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."
"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."
"No, I will tell her."
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.


CHAPTER IV.
A TRAGEDY

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