The Great House

by Stanley John Weyman

Farthingale pondered for a time, but shook his head. “No one,” he said. “You might try Hayward if you like. They deal.”

“What’s to be done, then?”

“There’s only one way that I can think of,” the clerk replied, his eyes on his master’s face. “Rattle them! Set the farmers on them! Show them that what they’re doing will be taken ill. Show ’em we’re in earnest. Badger’s a poor creature and Thomas’s wife’s never off the twitter. I’d try it, if I were you. You’d pull some back.”

They talked for a time in low voices and before he went into the Portcullis that night Farthingale ordered a gig to be ready at daylight.

It might have been thought that with this unexpected gain, Basset would be in clover. But he, too, had his troubles and vexations. John Audley’s death and Mary’s loneliness had made drafts on his time as well as on his heart. For a week he had almost withdrawn from the contest, and when he returned to it it was to find that the extreme men—as is the way of extreme men—had been active. In his address and in his speeches he had declared himself a follower of Peel. He had posed as ready to take off the corn-tax to meet an emergency, but not as convinced that free trade was always and everywhere right. He had striven to keep the question of Irish famine to the front, and had constantly stated that that which moved his mind was the impossibility of taxing food in one part of the country while starvation reigned in another. Above all, he had tried to convey to his hearers his notion of Peel. He had pictured the statesman’s dilemma as facts began to coerce him. He had showed that in the same position many would have preferred party to country and consistency to patriotism. He had painted the struggle which had taken place in the proud man’s mind. He had praised the decision to which Peel had come, to sacrifice his name, his credit, and his popularity to his country’s good.

But when Basset returned to his Committee Room, he found that the men to whom Free Trade was the whole truth, and to whom nothing else was the truth, had stolen a march on him. They had said much which he would not have said. They had set up Cobden where he had set up Peel. To crown all, they had arranged an open-air meeting, and invited a man from Lancashire—whose name was a red rag to the Tories—to speak at it.

Basset was angry, but he could do nothing. He had an equal distaste for the man and the meeting, but his supporters, elated by their prospects, were neither to coax nor hold. For a few hours he thought of retiring. But to do so at the eleventh hour would not only expose him to obloquy and injure the cause, but it would condemn him to an inaction from which he shrank.

For all that he had seen of Mary, and all that he had done for her, had left him only the more restless and more unhappy. To one in such a mood success, which began to seem possible, promised something—a new sphere, new interests, new friends. In the hurly-burly of the House and amid the press of business, the wound that pained him would heal more quickly than in the retirement of Blore; where the evenings would be long and lonely, and many a time Mary’s image would sit beside his fire and regret would gnaw at his heart.

The open-air meeting was to be held at the Maypole, in the wide street bordered by quaint cottages, that served the town for a cattle-market. The day turned out to be mild for the season, the meeting was a novelty, and a few minutes before three the Committee began to assemble in strength at the Institute, which stood no more than a hundred yards from the Maypole, but in another street. Hatton was entertaining Brierly, the speaker from Lancashire, and in making him known to the candidate, betrayed a little too plainly that he thought that he had scored a point.

“You’ll see something new now, sir,” he said, rubbing his hands. “What’s wanting, he’ll win! He’s addressed as many as four thousand persons at one time, Mr. Brierly has!”