Mr. Clutterbuck, his wife, Fitzgerald, and Mr. Maple, the agent, went the round all day till the candidate himself was fit to drop. At one place they smiled and bowed at a little group of lads who replied with glares, at another they steadily worked half a street, only to find at last that it was just outside the constituency. At a third, a seedy man, a most undoubted voter, who had been present at every meeting approached Mr. Clutterbuck and spoke a word in his ear.
Mr. Clutterbuck good-naturedly proffered half a sovereign; the coin had barely changed hands when the agent—who had caught the gesture in the nick of time—pounced on the needy citizen and wrenched his fingers open by main force. The struggle was brief, and Mr. Maple—a man of stature and consequence—triumphantly returned the coin to the candidate.
Whether from the wrestling or some other emotion he was trembling as he returned it.
"Oh! Mr. Clutterbuck—Oh! It would have cost you your seat!" he puffed out.
Mr. Clutterbuck was grateful indeed, but he heard for hours the echo of the angry borrower's blasphemy and his repeated vow to vote for that fallen angel whom an older theology has regarded as the Enemy of Mankind before he would vote National again.
So Tuesday ended—and here my duty compels me to introduce the repugnant subject of the Opposition candidate, lest the reader should forget in the fever of enthusiasm which I have described, the very presence of a man who dared to set himself against the expressed opinion of The People.
Lord Henfield was his name. His hairs, which were of the palest yellow and few in number for a man of but thirty years, were parted down the middle with an extraordinary accuracy which was no more disturbed when he appeared in the early morning after rising from repose than when in the last hours of the night he would withdraw from the critical and angry audiences which he too often had to encounter.
His face was not clean-shaven: contrariwise, he wore long and drooping moustaches of the same character and complexion as his hair, and forming a singular contrast with that virile grey crescent upon Mr. Clutterbuck's upper lip, of which the reader has so often heard.
His eyes were of a very watery blue; he lisped a little, and such decision as he may have possessed was only to be discovered in his apparently complete indifference to the judgment of men poorer than himself.
The deference due to his rank and wealth forbade any assault upon his person; all other forms of opposition he met with a slight and rather mournful smile, and with the regret that there should be any differences between himself and those whom he hoped would soon prove to be his constituents.