Already it had carried him some way. In the matter of the election, indeed, he might be wrong. He might have entered on it too hastily—often he thought that he had—he might be of fibre too weak for the task. It cost him much to speak, and the occasional failure, the mistake, the rebuff, worried him for hours and even days. Trifles, too, that would not have troubled another, troubled his conscience; side-issues that were false, but that he must not the less support, workers whom he despised and must still use, tools that soiled his hands but were the only tools. Then the vulgar greeting, the tipsy grasp, the friend in the market-place:—
The man who hails you Tom or Jack
And proves by thumps upon your back
How he esteems your merit!
Who’s such a friend that one had need
Be very much his friend indeed
To pardon or to bear it!
these humiliated him. But worse, far worse, than all was his unhappy gift of seeing the merits of the other side and of doubting the cause which he had set out to champion. He had fits of lowness when he was tempted to deny that honesty existed anywhere in politics; when Sir Robert Peel no less than Lord George Bentinck—who was coming to the front as the spokesman of the land—Cobden the Radical no less than Lord John Russell, seemed to be bent only on their own advancement, when all, he vowed, were of the School of the Cynics!
But were he right or wrong in his venture—and right or wrong he had small hope of winning—he would not the less cling to the thing which Mary had given him—the will to make something of his life, the determination that he would leave the world, were it only the few hundred acres that he owned, or the hamlet in which he lived, better than he had found them. The turmoil of the election over, he would devote himself to his property at Blore. There John Audley’s twenty thousand pounds opened a wide door. He would build, drain, manure, make roads, re-stock. He would make all things new. From him as from a centre comfort should flow. He saw himself growing old in the middle of his people, a lonely, but not an unhappy man.
As he passed the bridge at Riddsley he thought of the Boshams, and weary as he was, he drew rein at their door. Ben Bosham came out, bare-headed; a short, elderly man with a bald forehead and a dirty complexion, a man who looked like a cobbler rather than the cow-keeper he was.
“Shut your door, Bosham,” Basset said. “I want a word with you.”
And when the man had done this, he stooped from the saddle and said a few words to him in a low voice.