No. He could not bring himself to do it. It was as though Ferrier, lying still and cold at Lytchett, would know of it--as though the act would do some roughness to the dead.
He went into his sitting-room, found an empty drawer in his writing-table, thrust in the newspaper, and closed the drawer.
CHAPTER XX
"I regard this second appeal to West Brookshire as an insult!" said the Vicar of Beechcote, hotly. "If Mr. Marsham must needs accept an office that involved re-election he might have gone elsewhere. I see there is already a vacancy by death--and a Liberal seat, too--in Sussex. We told him pretty plainly what we thought of him last time."
"And now I suppose you will turn him out?" asked the doctor, lazily. In the beatitude induced by a completed article and an afternoon smoke, he was for the moment incapable of taking a tragic view either of Marsham's shortcomings or his prospects.
"Certainly, we shall turn him out."
"Ah!--a Labor candidate?" said the doctor, showing a little more energy.
Whereupon the Vicar, with as strong a relish for the primeur of an important piece of news as any secular fighter, described a meeting held the night before in one of the mining villages, at which he had been a speaker. The meeting had decided to run a miners' candidate; expenses had been guaranteed; and the resolution passed meant, according to Lavery, that Marsham would be badly beaten, and that Colonel Simpson, his Conservative opponent, would be handsomely presented with a seat in Parliament, to which his own personal merits had no claim whatever.
"But that we put up with," said the Vicar, grimly. "The joy of turning out Marsham is compensation."