“A deputation will wait upon you to give you such assurances as you may desire. But as Parliament meets on an early date, and the present member may at once apply for the Chiltern Hundreds, we shall be glad to have your answer before the New Year.”
“Well?” Basset asked. “What do you think?”
“It opens a wide door.”
“If you wish to have your finger pinched,” Basset replied, flippantly, “it does. I don’t know that it is an opening to anything else.” And as Colet refrained from speaking, “You don’t think,” he went on, “that it’s a way into Parliament? A repealer has as much chance of getting in for Riddsley against the Audley interest as you have of being an archdeacon! Of course the Radicals want a fight if they can find a man fool enough to spend his money. But as for winning, they don’t dream of it.”
“It is better to lose in some causes than to win in others.”
Basset laughed. “Do you know why they have come to me? They think that I shall carry John Audley with me and divide the Audley interest. There’s nothing in it, but that’s the notion.”
“Why look at the seamy side?” Colet objected. “I suppose there always is one, but I don’t think that it was at that side Sir Robert looked when he made up his mind to put the country first and his party second! I don’t think that it was at that side he looked when he determined to eat his words and pocket his pride, rather than be responsible for famine in Ireland! Believe me, Mr. Basset,” the clergyman continued earnestly, “it was no easy change of opinion. Before he came to that resolution, proud, cold man as I am told he is, many a sight and sound must have knocked at the door of his mind; a scene of poverty he passed in his carriage, a passage in some report, a speech through which he seemed to sleep, a begging letter—one by one they pressed the door inwards, till at last, with—it may be with misery, he came to see what he must do!”
“Possibly.”
“The call came, he had to answer it. Here is a call to you.”
“And do you think,” the other retorted, “that I can answer it more cheaply than Sir Robert? So far as I have thought it out, I am with him. But do you think I could do this,” he tapped the letter, “without misery—of a different kind it may be? I am not a public man, I have served no apprenticeship to it, I’ve not addressed a meeting three times in my life, I don’t know what I should say or how I should say it. And for Hatton and his friends, they would rub me up a dozen times a day.”