There being no help for it, Rupert rose, and was warmly greeted. He had never given his mind to public speaking, and although his voice was good and resonant, it cannot be said that at the beginning his remarks compelled attention. Indeed, after five minutes of them, Dick and his agent, counting him a failure, began to consult as to how they could get him down, while Edith felt mortified. Then, as he wandered on with a long and scientific account of the Egyptian campaigns, someone shouted: “Stow all that history book, and tell us about Gordon.”
Instantly Rupert took fire, for Gordon was his favourite hero, the man whom he had known, loved and revered above all other men. He began to tell them about Gordon, about his glorious and desperate enterprise undertaken at the request of the Government, about his splendid fight against overwhelming odds, whilst sick at heart he awaited the relief which was sent too late; about that journey to save him in which he, Rupert, had shared, about the details of his martyr-death. Then, quite forgetting the occasion and whom he had come to support, he broke into a really eloquent tirade against those whom he considered to be responsible for the desertion of Gordon.
To finish up with, in answer to the suggestion of a voice in the audience that Gordon was not really dead, he actually quoted some well-known lines of poetry which he had by heart:
“He will not come again, whatever our need,
He will not come, who is happy, being freed
From the deathly flesh and perishable things,
And lies of statesmen and rewards of kings,”
and then suddenly sat down amidst a tempest of cheers, mingled with cries of “Shame!” in which the whole room joined.
“Great Heavens!” said Dick fiercely, to his agent, “I believe that speech will lose us the election.”
“Shouldn’t wonder,” answered the agent grimly. “Whatever did you get him here for? Better have stuck to the party patter.”
Meanwhile a man, standing on a form, bawled out:
“And is them the beggars as you wishes us to vote for, master?”
Whereon followed what the local paper (luckily for Rupert his remarks were reported nowhere else) described as “great confusion,” which culminated in something like a free fight.