But this simple common-sense view of the case was not the one taken by the persons he had to support, and so he prepared a very neat speech which argued the case from the opposite point of view to his own.
“Awful rot,” he thought, as he jotted down the heads of it. “But this old country takes the cake for rot.”
Naturally, he did not care a straw which way the votes went; the time had long gone by when he had kept a shop, and even the time when he had owned many shops with dummy names over their doors and dummy proprietors returned in the census; and whether Islington, and Notting Hill, and Camden Town, and Bethnal Green burned gas till midnight, or shut up at twilight, did not matter the least to him.
She had prophesied his success in the House, and he soon justified her prophecy. He spoke on questions of home-legislation, and spoke well, in short but telling sentences without nervousness, but with apparent modesty; to be sure, there was the drawback of his accent, which was at once plebeian and Yankee, but of this he was himself unconscious, and the time is passed when the House of Commons exacted either education or elegance; it has heard so many dialects and dropped aspirates within the last twenty years that its ear has grown deaf to such offences. What he had to say seemed to him, in its matter, very poor trash, but he said it well; and a sense that this stout, uncouth, unpleasant person would be a tower of strength in their ranks spread itself downward from their chief throughout all the ranks of the Conservative party, and made them feel that they had better not call him Billy too often.
He was too sagacious a man to be tempted to speak on subjects out of his range of special knowledge; on those of which he had such knowledge, stocks, mining, railways, or finance, he spoke rarely, but with admirable practical astuteness; the House saw that he was an authority not to be despised. In smart society he was embarrassed and ill at ease and conscious of his own deficiencies; but with men on public matters, he was neither daunted nor dazzled. He had a very poor opinion of the House of Commons, whether as a talking-shop or a manager of public business, and he felt nothing of the awe which is popularly supposed to be inspired in all new members by the sight of the Speaker’s Mace.
He had quickly taken the measure of the Assembly, and he was not afraid of it. He thought it a very poor affair; wasting all its time in jaw, and timidly endeavoring to conciliate the masses, which, to his knowledge, were best governed with a stock-whip and a six-shooter. But he was too shrewd to let his private opinion leak out; and he contented himself with making both sides of the House feel that a man had come amongst them who, if they liked to listen to them, could teach them the time of day on all subjects which concerned practical politics and the business side of government.
The Irish members loathed him because he had turned his back on Ireland instead of consecrating his millions to leagues and dynamite. But on the rest of the House the impression he made was favorable. After all, a politician who has Richemont at the head of his kitchen, and gives you the great wines of comet years, is a superior companion on the benches to the Nonconformist schoolmaster, the hungry barrister, or the professor full of crotchets, whom Northern England or Eastern London sends to St. Stephen’s.
“Really, Billy, you got on very well,” said Mouse, who had come to the speaker’s box to hear him; that little box is much more comfortable than the Lady’s Gallery.
“’Twas all soft sawder,” said Mr. Massarene, with grim contempt.
She was standing in the corridor twisting a lace wrap round her head, and he had come upstairs after the division to receive her congratulations and take her orders.