“To-morrow? Thank you for apprising me; his rooms shall be prepared.”
“I suppose he will only stay to see Leslie and myself, and pay the money.”
“Aha! Pay the money. Is it so, then?”
“Twice the sum, and, it seems, as a gift, which Leslie only asked as a loan. Really, my Lord, Mr. Leslie is a very clever man; and though I am at your commands, I should not like to injure him. With such matrimonial prospects, he could be a very powerful enemy; and if he succeed in parliament, still more so.”
“Baron, these gentlemen are waiting for you. I will follow by myself.”
CHAPTER XXV.
In the centre of the raised platform in the town-hall sat the mayor. On either hand of that dignitary now appeared the candidates of the respective parties,—to his right, Audley Egerton and Leslie; to his left, Dick Avenel and Leonard.
The place was as full as it could hold. Rows of grimy faces peeped in, even from the upper windows outside the building. The contest was one that created intense interest, not only from public principles, but local passions. Dick Avenel, the son of a small tradesman, standing against the Right Honourable Audley Egerton, the choice of the powerful Lansmere aristocratic party,—standing, too, with his nephew by his side; taking, as he himself was wont to say, “the tarnation Blue Bull by both its oligarchical horns!”—there was a pluck and gallantry in the very impudence of the attempt to convert the important borough—for one member of which a great earl had hitherto striven, “with labour dire and weary woe” into two family seats for the House of Avenel and the triumph of the Capelocracy.
This alone would have excited all the spare passions of a country borough; but, besides this, there was the curiosity that attached to the long-deferred public appearance of a candidate so renowned as the ex-minister,—a man whose career had commenced with his success at Lansmere, and who now, amidst the popular tempest that scattered his colleagues, sought to refit his vessel in the same harbour from which it had first put forth. New generations had grown up since the name of Audley Egerton had first fluttered the dovecotes in that Corioli. The questions that had then seemed so important were, for the most part, settled and at rest. But those present who remembered Egerton in the former day, were struck to see how the same characteristics of bearing and aspect which had distinguished his early youth revived their interest in the mature and celebrated man. As he stood up for a few moments, before he took his seat beside the mayor, glancing over the assembly, with its uproar of cheers and hisses, there was the same stately erectness of form and steadfastness of look, the same indefinable and mysterious dignity of externals, that imposed respect, confirmed esteem, or stilled dislike. The hisses involuntarily ceased.