“I see.”
“I asked him,” Audley continued, rubbing his knees with sly enjoyment, “what Stubbs the lawyer was doing about it. He’s the party manager. Why didn’t he come to me?”
Basset smiled. “What did he say to that?”
“Hummed and hawed. At last he said that owing to Stubbs’s connection with—you know who—it was thought that he was not the right person to come to me. So I asked him what Stubbs’s employer was going to do about it.”
“Ah!”
“He didn’t know what to say to that, the ass! Thought I should go the other way, you see. So I told him”—John Audley laughed maliciously as he spoke—“that, for the landed interest, the law had taken away my land, and, for politics, I would not give a d—n for either party in a country where men did not get their rights! Lord! how he looked!”
“Well, you didn’t hide your feelings.”
“Why should I?” John Audley asked cheerfully. “What will they do for me? Nothing. Will they move a finger to right me? No. Then a plague on both their houses!” He snapped his fingers in schoolboy fashion and rose to his feet. He lit a candle, taking a light from the fire with a spill. “I am going to bed now, Peter. Unless——” he paused, the candlestick in his hand, and gazed fixedly at his companion. “Lord, man, what we could do in two or three hours! In two or three hours. This very night!”
“I’ve told you that I will have nothing to do with it!” Basset repeated.
John Audley sighed, and removing his eyes, poked the wick of the candle with the snuffers. “Well,” he said, “good-night. We must look to bright eyes and red lips to convert you. What a man won’t do for another he will do for himself, Peter. Good-night.”