Wrecked in Port: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

The house was all aroused, lights were gleaming in the windows, as the doctor drove up the avenue, and Marian was standing in the hall when he entered. She stepped forward to meet him, but there was something in the old man's look which stopped her from putting out her hand as she had intended, so they merely bowed gravely, and she led the way to her husband's room, where she left him.

Half an hour elapsed before Dr. Osborne reappeared. His face was very grave and his eyes were red. This time it was he who made the advance. A year ago he would have put his arm round Marian's neck and kissed her on the forehead. Those days were past, but he took her hand, and in reply to her hurried question, "What do you think of him?" said, "I think, Mrs. Creswell, that my old friend is very ill. It would be useless to disguise it--very ill indeed. His life is an important one, and you may think it necessary to have another opinion"--this a little pompously said, and met with a gesture of dissent from Marian--"but in mine, no time must be lost in removing him, I should say, abroad, far away from any chance of fatigue or excitement."

"But, Dr. Osborne--the--the election!"

"To go through the election, Mrs. Creswell, would kill him at once! He would never survive the nomination day!"

"It will be a dreadful blow to him," said Marian. But she thought to herself, "Here is the chance of our escape from the humiliation of defeat by Walter Joyce! A means of evoking sympathy instead of contempt!"

[CHAPTER XXXIII.]

TOO LATE.

Dr. Osborne's opinion of Mr. Creswell's serious state, and the absolute necessity for the old gentleman's immediate withdrawal from everything calculated to cause worry or excitement, consequently from the election, was soon promulgated through Brocksopp, and caused the greatest consternation amongst the supporters of the Tory policy. Mr. Teesdale was summoned at once to Woolgreaves, and there had a long interview with Mrs. Creswell, who convinced him--he had been somewhat incredulous at first, being a wary man of the world, and holding the principle that doubt and disbelief were on the whole the safest and most remunerative doctrines--that it was physically impossible for her husband to continue the contest. The interview took place in the large, carpeted, and furnished bow-window recess on the landing immediately outside the door of Mr. Creswell's room, and, as Mr. Teesdale afterwards remarked in conversation with Mr. Gould, whom he summoned by telegraph from London, there was no question of any malingering or shamming on the old gentleman's part, as he could be heard groaning, poor old boy, in a very lamentable manner, and Dr. Osborne, who called at the time, said his patient was by no means out of the wood yet. Mr. Teesdale's talk, professional as it was, was tinged with more sympathy and respect for the sufferer than were Mr. Gould's remarks. Mr. Teesdale had other relations in business with Mr. Creswell; he was his land agent and general business representative, had known him intimately for years, and had experienced innumerable kindnesses at his hands; whereas, Mr. Gould had simply made Mr. Creswell's acquaintance in his capacity of Conservative candidates' dry-nurse, and Mr. Creswell was to him merely an errant and peccant ninepin, which, from fate or its own shortcomings, it was impossible for him, skilful "setter-up" though he were, to put properly on end. He saw this after five minutes' conversation with his local representative, Mr. Teesdale, and saw that there was an end of his chance, so far as Brocksopp was concerned. "It won't do here, Teesdale," he said; "this finishes our business It hasn't looked very promising throughout, but if this old character had gone to the poll, and specially if he had said one or two things you could have crammed him with on the nomination day, we might have pulled through! You see he's so eminently respectable, and though he, of course, is not to be compared with this young chap that Potter and Fyfe's people have got hold of--and where they dug him up astonishes me! Newspaper office, eh? 'Gad, we haven't got much of that sort of stuff in the newspaper offices of our party-I'm not sure that we couldn't have got him in. They'd have had the show of hands and the hurraying and all that; but we know how much that's worth, and what with Sir George Neal's people and our own, we could have run him deuced close, even if we didn't win. Nuisance it is, too, for he's kept us from running anybody else. There was young Clare, Sir Willis Clare's eldest son, was up in Pall Mall the other day, ready to go in for anything, and with rather a hankering for this place, which his father sat for once; but I said we were booked, and now--confound it!"

Mr. Teesdale was scarcely less upset. He talked vaguely of getting Mr. Creswell's consent, so soon, as he was sufficiently recovered to be able to entertain the topic, to the substitution of some good Conservative candidate in his place; but Mr. Gould treated this proposition with a scornful laugh, and told him that they would have had to do all they knew to pull Mr. Creswell through, and that to attempt to run anybody else at that late period would be madness. So a private meeting of the principal supporters of the party was held at the Lion, and Mr. Gould--who had run up to London in the interim, and had an interview with the chief wire-pullers--announced that in consequence of Mr. Creswell's unfortunate illness, it had been decided to withdraw him from the candidature, and, as there was no prospect of success for any one else who might be started in the same interest, to refrain from contesting the borough at this election. This announcement was received in dead silence, broken by Mr. Croke's frank and outspoken denunciation of the cowardice, the "trem'lousness," the "not to put too foin p'int upon it, the funk" which seemed to have seized upon some as "owt t' knaw better." The meeting was held in the evening, most of the company present had steaming glasses of grog before them, and Mr. Croke's outspoken oratory elicited a vast amount of applause and knocking on the tables with the stalwart feet of the tumblers. A young farmer of the neighbourhood, popular from his openhandedness and, his skill in rifle-shooting--he was champion badge-holder in the local volunteers--rose and suggested that any such abject surrender as that proposed was ill-advised and inexpedient, and sat down, after finishing a long rambling speech, the purport of which was that some one should be put forward to fill the gap created by Mr. Creswell's lamented but unavoidable illness. That the gap should be filled, seemed to be a popular idea; but each of the ten or twelve speakers who subsequently addressed the meeting had different people for the post: and it was not until Mr. Teesdale pointed out the utter futility of attempting to begin the fight anew under a fresh banner, confessing that they would have had very great difficulty in bringing matters to a successful issue even with all the prestige of Mr. Creswell's name and position, that it seemed to dawn upon the meeting that their chance was hopeless. This had been told them at the outset by Mr. Gould; but he was from London, and, consequently, in the ideas of the farmers present, steeped in duplicity of every kind, and labouring under an impossibility of truth-speaking. Mr. Teesdale had infinitely more weight with his audience. They knew him as a man whose word was to be relied on, and the impossibility of doing anything beyond swallowing the bitter pill was acknowledged among them from that moment. True, that the pill was so bitter as to require the consumption of an extraordinary amount of brandy-and-water to get it down, a fact which helped to console old Tilley, the landlord, for the shock to his political principles. It is to be noted, also, that after the withdrawal of Messrs. Gould and Teesdale, the meeting gave itself up to harmony of a lugubrious character, and dismal ditties, mixed with fierce denunciations of democrats and reformers, were borne away on the still night air.

So, within a day or two, the walls of Brocksopp were covered with placards signed in Mr. Creswell's name, setting forth the sad cause which prevented him from further exertion in the interests of freedom and purity of election, lamenting the impossibility of being able conscientiously to recommend a proper candidate to the constituency at so short a notice, but bidding the electors not to despair so long as there remained to them a House of Lords and an omniscient aristocracy. This document, which was the production of Mr. Teesdale (Mr. Gould had been called away to superintend certain other strongholds where the fortifications showed signs of crumbling), was supplemented by the copy of a medical certificate from Dr. Osborne, which stated that Mr. Creswell's condition was such as to imperatively demand the utmost quietude, and that any such excitement as that to be caused by entering on an election contest would probably cost him his life.