“He always was a fool, was Ben!” Mrs. Toft commented. “And that,” she continued shrewdly, “was how you come to see his lordship was it, Miss?”
“How did you know I saw him?” Mary asked in surprise. “But you’re right, I did.” Then, as she entered the parlor, “Perhaps I’d better tell you, Mrs. Toft,” she said, “that the engagement between my cousin and myself is at an end. You were one of the very few who knew of it, and so I tell you.”
Mrs. Toft showed no surprise. “Indeed, Miss,” she answered, stooping to the hearth to light the candles with a piece of wood. “Well, one thing’s certain, and many a time my mother’s drummed it into me, ‘Better a plain shoe than one that pinches!’ And again, ‘Better live at the bottom of the hill than the top,’ she’d say. ‘You see less but you believe more.’”
Neither she nor Mary saw Toft. But Toft, who had entered the hall a moment before, was within hearing, and Mary’s statement, so coolly received by his wife, had an extraordinary effect on the man-servant. He stood an instant, his lank figure motionless. Then he opened the door beside him, slipped out into the chill and the darkness, and silently, but with extravagant gestures, he broke into a dance, now waving his thin arms in the air, now stooping with his hands locked between his knees. Whether he thus found vent for joy or grief was a secret which he kept to himself.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE RIDDSLEY ELECTION
The riot at Riddsley found its way into the London Press, and gained for the contest a certain amount of notoriety. The Morning Chronicle pointed out that the election had been provoked by the Protectionists in a constituency in Sir Robert’s own country; and the writer inferred that, foreseeing defeat, the party of the land were now resorting to violence. The Morning Herald rejoiced that there were still places which would not put up with the incursions of the Manchester League, “the most knavish, pestilent body of men that ever plagued this or any country!” In the House, where the tempest of the Repeal debate already raged, and the air was charged with the stern invective of Disraeli, or pulsed to the cheering of Peel’s supporters—even here men discussed the election at Riddsley, considered it a clue to the feeling in the country, and on the one side hardly dared to hope, on the other refused to fear. What? cried the Land Party. Be defeated in an agricultural borough? Never!
For a brief time, then, the contest filled the public eye and presented itself as a thing of more than common interest. Those who knew little weighed the names and the past of the candidates; those behind the scenes whispered of Lord Audley. Whips gave thought to him, and that one to whom his lordship was pledged, wrote graciously, hinting at the pleasant things that might happen if all went well, and the present winter turned to a summer of fruition.
Alas, Audley felt that the Whip’s summer, and
The friendly beckon towards Downing Street,
Which a Premier gives to one who wishes
To taste of the Treasury loaves and fishes,
were very remote, whereas, if the other Whip, he who had the honors under his hand and the places in his power, had written so! But that cursed Stubbs had blocked his play in that direction by asserting that it was hopeless, though Audley himself began at this late hour to suspect that it had not been hopeless! That it had been far from hopeless!