At The Butterflies, whither the cheering of the crowd came in gusts that rose and fell by turns, Stubbs nodded to the maid and went up the stairs unannounced. Audley was writing at a side-table facing the room. He looked up eagerly. “Well?” he said, putting down his quill. “Is it over?”
Stubbs laid the slip of paper before him. “It’s not over, my lord,” he answered soberly. “But that is the result. I am sorry that it is no better.”
Audley looked at the paper. “Nine!” he exclaimed. He looked at Stubbs, he looked again at the paper. “Nine? Good G—d, man, you don’t mean it? You can’t mean it! You don’t mean that that is the best we could do?”
“We hold the seat, my lord,” Stubbs said.
“Hold the seat!” Audley replied, staring at him with furious eyes. “Hold the seat? But I thought that it was a safe seat? I thought that it was a seat that couldn’t be lost! When five, only five, votes would have cast it the other way! Why, man, you cannot have known anything about it! No more about it than the first man in the street!”
“My lord——”
“Not a jot more!” Audley repeated. He had been prepared for something like this, but the certainty that if he had cast his weight on the other side, the side that had sinecures and places and pensions, he would have turned the scale—this was too much for his temper. “Nine!” he rapped out with another oath. “I can only think that the Election has been mismanaged! Grievously, grievously mismanaged, Mr. Stubbs!”
“If your lordship thinks so——”
“I do!” Audley retorted, his certainty that the man before him had thwarted his plans, carrying him farther than he intended. “I do! Nine! Good G—d, man! When you assured me——”
“Whatever I assured your lordship,” Stubbs said firmly, “I believed. And—no, my lord, you must allow me to speak now—what I promised would have been borne out—fully borne out by the result in normal times. But I did not allow enough for the split in the party, nor for the wave of madness——”