The little lady turned dejectedly away, her brightness all crushed, and I went on to Paradise Terrace. But before I got there the rain came on again, and I was fumbling under my umbrella for the everlasting cards, when Mrs. Salisbury came to the door on her way out, dangling a large key from her finger.
“Conservative!” she said, when I explained my errand. “I used to be, but I voted for the Liberals last time, because the Conservatives, to my mind, ain’t actin’ straight. They do more ’arm than good, and, like enough, I shan’t give me vote at all this year. I ’aven’t made up me mind. I shall hear what’s said a bit first, and what they’re going to do. It’s as much as I can do to pay me rent as it is.... Oh yes, I’ve got ’is picture; yer needn’t leave any more. I’ll just think it over.”
“Yes,” I said to myself as I turned away, “so will I think it over—in the seclusion of my own apartments.”
For three weeks this was my daily life, and at last we went to the poll—all of us, shepherds and sheep—in borrowed carriages, motors, traps, and side-cars. It would take another chapter to describe the fever and the flurry, the mistakes, the counter-orders, the number of canvassers sent at once to the same house to fetch hale and hearty supporters of the opposite party, while faithful invalids who had hobbled to our assistance for eighty years were never fetched at all. However, when the last bedridden cripple had been hoisted into a motor at the eleventh hour, and the door of the polling-booth had been held open by courtesy for an extra moment, only to find that his name was not on the Register, we went back to supper feeling that we didn’t care! They might elect the Rev. Griffiths ap Davis if they liked, or carry Mr. Potts or the Anti-Vaccinator shoulder-high, and proclaim him king if they were so disposed. All that we wanted was food and a fender. But by ten o’clock we were all in Reginald’s club, shouting ourselves hoarse, and by a quarter past he and Polly were in such a turmoil of speeches, and handshaking, and general absurdity, that I slipped out at a side door and took a taxi home. Half an hour afterwards I laid my weary head uncombed upon the pillow.
CHAPTER XV: LETTERS OF GEORGINA BROWN
“Longmoor,” Millport.
My dear Louise,—The address on this paper does not mean that I have run away with a rich merchant. There is one in the house, but I am not his affianced bride. What has happened is far more absurd, and bewildering, and unaccountable. He wants me to paint his portrait, and, “if it is satisfactory,” as he says, I have his leave to go on to mamma and the children. Unfortunately, they are not a very reproductive family, or else I might have become a naturalized member of it; while I was painting one child, they could be getting another ready, and so on, until my old hands were hardly able to handle the brush.
What moved these people to choose me for the task is an interesting problem. I rather suspect that it was my weak points. To begin with, it was Bessie Lovelace’s idea; you know she was at school with me, and the merchant’s wife is her second cousin. She told them that I have remarkable talent, and am to be had cheap (God forgive her!). But still, that was only the placing by a master hand of a germinal spot within the protoplasm of their intelligence. A lot more was needed before that spot became the full-blown absurdity which it is now. It had to be fed and kept warm by some natural inclination on their part.
Here it was, I believe, that my weak points came in. You know as well as I do what is bad in my work. A certain sickliness creeps into it, do what I will. I can’t trace this quality in my tastes, except that I have a passion for over-ripe melons, and I feel a stirring in my gizzard when I am in a dark church, and the little choir boys look more saintly than my reason tells me that they are. But the main thing is that I am here and likely to stay some weeks at any rate.