“D——n me, but suppose they don’t let us go!” cried Cooke. “Badly arranged! I should think it is, sir! D——d badly arranged! The hustings should have been on this side.”
But hitherto the hustings had been at Chippinge a matter of form, and it had not occurred to anyone to alter their position—cheek by jowl with the Whig headquarters, but divided by seventy yards of seething mob from the White Lion. However, White, on an appeal being made to him, put a better face on the matter. “It’s all right, gentlemen,” he said, “it’s all right! If they have the hustings, we have the returning officer, and they can do nothing without us. I’ve seen Mr. Pybus, and I have his safe conduct for our party to go to the hustings.”
But it is hard to satisfy everybody, and at this there was a fresh outcry. “A safe conduct?” cried the Squire, redder about the gills than before. “For shame, sir! Are we to be indebted to the other side for a safe conduct! I never heard of such a thing!”
“I quite agree with you,” cried the Rector. “Quite! I protest, Mr. White, against anything of the kind.”
But White was unmoved. “We’ve got to get our voters there,” he said. “Sir Robert will be displeased, I know, but——”
“Never was such a thing heard of!”
“No, sir, but never was such an election,” White answered with spirit.
“Where is Sir Robert?”
“He’ll be here presently,” White replied. “He’ll be here presently. Anyway, gentlemen,” he continued, “we had better be going down to the hall. In a body, gentlemen, if you please, and voters in the middle. And keep together, if you please. A little shouting,” he added cheerfully, “breaks no bones. We can shout too!”
The thing was unsatisfactory, and without precedent; nay, humiliating. But there seemed to be nothing else for it. As White said, this election was not as other elections; Bath was lost, and Bristol, too, it was whispered; the country was gone mad. And so, frowning and ill-content, the magnates trooped out, and led by White began to descend the stairs. There was much confusion, one asking if the Alderman was there, another demanding to see Sir Robert, here a man grumbling about White’s arrangements, there a man silent over the discovery, made perhaps for the first time, that here was like to be an end of old Toryism and the loaves and the fishes it had dispensed.