then
in one further afield, he was left by the roadside, while the tide of
politics swept on. His wife consoled herself by thinking that at the
next opportunity he would surely get in. But when the opportunity came,
she was so ill that he could not leave her, and the moment passed. Then
when they began to realise what her ultimate condition might be, and she
was recommended to take some special German waters which might work a
cure, he and Rachel went with her. Sir William, when the necessity of
going abroad first presented itself to him--a heroic necessity for the
ordinary stay-at-home Englishman--had felt the not unpleasant stimulus,
the tightening of the threads of life, which the need for a given
unexpected course of action presents to the not very much occupied
person. Then came those months away from his own country and his own
surroundings--months in which he acquired the habit of reading an
English newspaper two days old and being quite satisfied with it, when
everything else also had two days' less importance than it would at
home, and gradually he tasted the delights of the detached onlooker who
need do nothing but warn, criticise, prophesy, protest. With absolute
sincerity to himself he attributed this attitude which Fate had assigned
to him as entirely owing to his having had to leave England on his
wife's account. He had quite easily, quite calmly drifted into a
conviction that for his wife's sake he had chivalrously renounced his
chances of distinction. Lady Gore on her side--it was another bitterness
added to the rest--did not for a moment doubt that it was her condition
and the sacrifice that her husband had made of his life to her which had
ruined his political career. And they both of them gradually succeeded
in forgetting that the alternative had not been a certainty. They
believed, they knew, they even said openly, that if it had not been for
his incessant attendance on her he would have gone into the House, he
would have taken office, and eventually have been one of the shapers of
his country's destiny. The phraseology of their current talk to one
another and to outsiders reflected this belief. "If I had continued in
the House," Sir William would say, with a manner and inflection which
conveyed that he had left it of his own free will and not attempted to
return to it, "I should have----" or, "If I had taken office----" or
even sometimes, "If I were leading the Liberal party----" and no one,
indeed,