“If you mean that they have promised to vote for me——”
“That’s it, sir! Vote their living away, they will, and leave ’em alone! Votes are for poor men to make a bit of money by, odd times; but they two Boshams I’ve no patience with. Sally, Ben’s wife, was with me to-day, and the long and the short of it is, Mr. Stubbs has told them that if they vote for you they’ll go into the street.”
“It’s a hard case,” Basset said. “But what can I do?”
“Don’t ha’ their votes. What’s two votes to you? For the matter of that,” Mrs. Toft continued, thoroughly wound up, “what’s all the votes—put together? Bassets and Audleys, Audleys and Bassets were knights of the shire, time never was, as all the country knows! But for this little borough—place it’s what your great-grandfather wouldn’t ha’ touched with a pair of gloves! I’d leave it to the riff-raff that’s got money and naught else, and builds Institutes and such like!”
“But you’d like cheap bread?” Basset said, smiling.
“Bread? Law, Mr. Basset, what’s elections to do wi’ bread? It’s not bread they’re thinking of, cheap or dear. It’s beer! Swim in it they do, more shame to you gentry! I’ll be bound to say there’s three goes to bed drunk in the town these days for two that goes sober! But there, you speak to they Boshams, Mr. Basset, sir, and put some sense into them!”
“I’m afraid I can’t promise,” he answered. “I’ll see!”
But it was not of the Boshams he thought as he rode down the hill with a tight rein—for between fog and frost the road was treacherous. He was thinking of the man who had been his friend and of whose face, sphinx-like in death, he had taken farewell in the library. And solemn thoughts, thoughts such as at times visit most men, calmed his spirit. The fret of the contest, the strivings of the platform, the rubs of vanity flitted to a distance, they became small things. Even passion lost its fever and love its selfishness; and he thought of Audley with patience and of Mary as he would think of her in years to come, when time had enshrined her, and she was but a memory, one of the things that had shaped his life. He knew, indeed, that this mood would pass; that passion would surge up again, that love would reach out to its object, that memory would awake and wound him, that pain and restlessness would be his for many days. But he knew also—in this hour of clear views—that all these things would have an end, and only the love,
That seeketh not itself to please
Nor of itself hath any care,
would remain with him.