"I suppose it will," said the king gloomily; "but you must remember you are the only friend I have, and I have reached an age when a man does not pick up friends readily."
Cromwell stopped in his walk, and grasped the king by the arm. "And are not you the only friend I have?" he said. "And why can you not abandon this ghastly sham and come with me, as I asked you to at first? How can you hesitate when you think of the glorious freedom of the African forest, and compare it with this cribbed, and cabined, and confined business we are now at?"
The king shook his head slowly, and knocked the ashes from his pipe. He seemed to have some trouble in keeping it alight, probably because of the prohibition on the wall.
"As I said before," replied the king, "I am too old. There are no 'pubs' in the African forest where a man can get a glass of beer when he wants it. No, Ormond, African travel is not for me. If you are resolved to go—go, and God bless you; I will stay at home and carefully nurse your fame. I will from time to time drop appetizing little paragraphs into the papers about your wanderings, and when you are ready to come back to England, all England will be ready to listen to you. You know how interest is worked up in the theatrical business by judicious puffing in the papers, and I imagine African exploration requires much the same treatment. If it were not for the press, my boy, you could explore Africa till you were blind and nobody would hear a word about it; so I will be your advance agent, and make ready for your home coming."
At this point in the conversation between these two historical characters, the janitor of the theatre put his head into the room and reminded the celebrities that it was very late; whereupon both king and commoner rose with some reluctance and washed themselves—the king becoming, when he put on the ordinary dress of an Englishman, Mr. James Spence, while Cromwell, after a similar transformation, became Mr. Sidney Ormond; and thus, with nothing of royalty or dictatorship about them, the two strolled up the narrow street into the main thoroughfare, and entered their favorite midnight restaurant, where, over a belated meal, they continued the discussion of the African project, which Spence persisted in looking upon as one of the maddest expeditions that had ever come to his knowledge. But the talk was futile—as most talk is—and within a month from that time Ormond was on the ocean, headed for Africa.
Another man took Ormond's place at the theatre, and Spence continued to play his part, as the papers said, in his usual acceptable manner. He heard from his friend, in due course, when he landed. Then at intervals came one or two letters showing how he had surmounted the unusual difficulties he had to contend with. After a long interval came a letter from the interior of Africa, sent to the coast by messenger. Although at the beginning of this letter Ormond said he had but faint hope of reaching his destination, he nevertheless gave a very complete account of his wanderings and his dealings with the natives; and up to that point his journey seemed to be most satisfactory. He enclosed several photographs, mostly very bad ones, which he had managed to develop and print in the wilderness. One, however, of himself was easily recognizable, and Spence had it copied and enlarged, hanging the framed enlargement in whatever dressing-room fate assigned to him, for Spence never had a long engagement at any one theatre. He was a useful man who could take any part, but had no specialty, and London was full of such.
For a long time he heard nothing from his friend; and the newspaper men to whom Spence indefatigably furnished interesting items about the lone explorer began to look upon Ormond as an African Mrs. Harris, and the paragraphs, to Spence's deep regret, failed to appear. The journalists, who were a flippant lot, used to accost Spence with, "Well, Jimmy, how's your African friend?" and the more he tried to convince them the less they believed in the peace-loving traveller.
At last there came a final letter from Africa, a letter that filled the tender middle-aged heart of Spence with the deepest grief he had ever known. It was written in a shaky hand, and the writer began by saying that he knew neither the date nor his locality. He had been ill and delirious with fever, and was now at last in his right mind, but felt the grip of death upon him. The natives had told him that no one ever recovered from the malady he had caught in the swamp, and his own feelings led him to believe that his case was hopeless. The natives had been very kind to him throughout, and his followers had promised to bring his boxes to the coast. The boxes contained the collections he had made and also his complete journal, which he had written up to the day he became ill.
Ormond begged his friend to hand over his belongings to the Geographical Society, and to arrange for the publication of his journal, if possible. It might secure for him the fame he had died to achieve, or it might not; but, he added, he left the whole conduct of the affair unreservedly to his friend, on whom he bestowed that love and confidence which a man gives to another man but once in his life, and then when he is young. The tears were in Jimmy's eyes long before he had finished the letter.
He turned to another letter he had received by the same mail as Ormond's and which also bore the South African stamp upon it. Hoping to find some news of his friend, he broke the seal, but it was merely an intimation from the steamship company that half a dozen boxes remained at the southern terminus of the line addressed to him; but, they said, until they were assured the freight upon them to Southampton would be paid, they would not be forwarded.