“Lord save us! How they dawdle over matters here!” thought the successful candidate. “In Dakota I’d just have run in thirty thousand miners, and the trick’d been done.” He almost, for an instant, regretted that he had forsaken the congenial country of mug-wamps and roar-backs, where the ten-dollar bill could satisfactorily circulate and settle everything, as the power of the purse should do. He was with difficulty restrained from exercising those feudal rights which he conceived were his through the possession of Vale Royal, and giving notice to quit to everybody on his estate who had voted against him.
“If my hands had voted against me in the States,” he said, with his blackest frown, “they’d hev known a hotter hole than hell.”
“Yes, Billy, but we are not in the States,” said his fair guide, philosopher and friend, “and there are a few people here who can’t be bought, and mustn’t be bullied.”
“One don’t meet that sort in society, nor see ’em in church,” he growled under his breath.
“Perhaps you don’t,” she replied, not well pleased. “But they are not a quantité négligéable. I mean, you mustn’t set their backs up and their tongues wagging. I don’t know what the Carlton wouldn’t do to you if you turned out the lowest Tommy Trot of them all from one of your cottages, because he voted against you. On the contrary, it is to that particular Tommy Trot who voted against you that you must send coals and blankets at Christmas, and port wine and beef tea when he gets fever.”
He muttered that he couldn’t do more than that for the Tommy Trots who had voted for him.
“Of course you can’t,” she answered. “And for them you may do less.”
William Massarene pondered silently on this reply, and came to the conclusion that if political life in England was much less corrupt than in the States—as they all said—it was certainly, also, much more complicated. On the whole, he had preferred Limehouse to Southwoldshire; the London mechanics had understood him with a wink, and their stomachs had not “riz” at bribery direct or indirect.
“My vote’s my own, ain’t it?” one rivet maker there had said to him. “Well, I can do what I like with my own, can’t I? I can wallup my old ’ooman, and my brats, and my dawg, and I can sell my vote, that’s flat. Yah!—hand the blunt over, old un.”
That was a practical politician, with whom he had rejoiced to make a deal. But these rural electors, who turned him out of their hovels, and chalked up on their walls “Roxhalls for us; not no Yankees,” were so abhorrent to his feelings as a county magnate and a future peer that he would have seen them all dead of fen fever with pleasure, and would not have sent them a single drop of port wine, however much Lady Kenny and the Carlton had counseled it. But she and the Carlton between them contrived to restrain him from any public or compromising expression of his feelings, and although there was some talk of a petition against his return being made, it never went farther than words, and when the new Parliament assembled, William Massarene represented in it one of the most aristocratic counties in England, which had been represented by some Roxhall’s nominee ever since George the Third had ascended the throne.