"Ain't I in the brewery every day for seven or eight hours, and often more?"
"Yes, T., you are; and what's like to come of it if you go on so? What would be my feelings if I saw you brought into the house struck down with apoplepsy and paralepsy because I let you go on in that way when you wasn't fit? No, T.; I know my duty and I mean to do it. You know Dr. Haustus said only last month that you were that bilious—"
"Pshaw! bilious! it's enough to make any man bilious!"
"Or any dog," he would have added, had he thought of it. Thereupon Tappitt rushed away from his wife, back into his little office, and from that soon made his way to the Jew's committee-room at the Dragon, at which he was detained till nearly eleven o'clock at night.
"It's a kind of work in which one has to do as much after dinner as before," he said to his wife when he got back.
"For the matter of that," said she, "I think the after-dinner work is the chief part of it."
On the day of the election Luke Rowan was to be seen standing in the High Street talking to Butler Cornbury the candidate. Rowan was not an elector, for the cottages had not been in his possession long enough to admit of his obtaining from them a qualification to vote; but he was a declared friend of the Cornbury party. Mrs. Butler Cornbury had sent a message to him saying that she hoped to see him soon after the election should be over: on the following day or on the next, and Butler Cornbury himself had come to him in the town. Though absent from Baslehurst Rowan had managed to declare his opinions before that time, and was suspected by many to have written those articles in the "Baslehurst Gazette" which advocated the right of any constituency to send a Jew to Parliament if it pleased, but which proved at the same time that any constituency must be wrong to send any Jew to Parliament, and that the constituency of Baslehurst would in the present instance be specially wrong to send Mr. Hart to Parliament. "We have always advocated," said one of these articles, "the right of absolute freedom of choice for every borough and every county in the land; but we trust that the day is far distant in which the electors of England shall cease to look to their nearest neighbours as their best representatives." There wasn't much in the argument, but it suited the occasion, and added strength to Rowan's own cause in the borough. All the stanch Protestants began to feel a want of good beer. Questions very ill-natured as toward Tappitt were asked in the newspapers. "Who owns The Spotted Dog at Busby-porcorum; and who compels the landlord to buy his liquor at Tappitt's brewery?" There were scores of questions of the same nature, all of which Tappitt attributed, wrongly, to Luke Rowan. Luke had written that article about freedom of election, but he had not condescended to notice the beer at the Spotted Dog.
And there was another quarrel taking place in Baslehurst, on the score of that election, between persons with whom we are connected in this story. Mr. Prong had a vote in the borough, and was disposed to make use of it; and Mrs. Prime, regarding her own position as Mr. Prong's affianced bride, considered herself at liberty to question Mr. Prong as to the use which he proposed to make of that vote. To Mrs. Prime it appeared that anything done in any direction for the benefit of a Jew was a sin not to be forgiven. To Mr. Prong it seemed to be as great a sin not to do anything in his power for the hindrance and vexation of those with whom Dr. Harford and Mr. Comfort were connected by ties of friendship. Mrs. Prime, who, of the two, was the more logical, would not disjoin her personal and her scriptural hatreds. She also hated Dr. Harford; but she hated the Jews more. She was not disposed to support a Jew in Baslehurst because Mr. Comfort, in his doctrines, had fallen away from the purity of his early promise. Her idea was that a just man and a good Christian could not vote for either of the Baslehurst candidates under the present unhappy local circumstances;—but that under no circumstances should a Christian vote for a Jew. All this she said, in a voice not so soft as should be the voice of woman to her betrothed.
"Dorothea," said Mr. Prong very solemnly;—they were sitting at the time in his own little front parlour, as to the due arrangement of the furniture in which Mrs. Prime had already ventured to make some slight alterations which had not been received favourably by Mr. Prong,—"Dorothea, in this matter you must allow me to be the best judge. Voting for Members of Parliament is a thing which ladies naturally are not called upon to understand."
"Ladies can understand as well as gentlemen," said Mrs. Prime, "that a curse has gone out from the Lord against that people; and gentlemen have no more right than ladies to go against the will of the Lord."