Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  “What do you give him when he’s tired?” she asked.

  “Well,” the driver replied with diplomacy, “times a quart of ale, Miss. He’ll take it like a Christian.”

  “Then a quart of ale he shall have to-night!” she said with a happy laugh. “And you shall have one, too, Simonds.”

  Her mood held to the end, so that before she was out of her wraps, Mrs. Toft was aware of the change in her. “Why, Miss,” she said, “you look like another creature! It isn’t the bank, I’ll be bound, has put that color in your cheeks!”

  “No!” Mary answered, “I’ve had an adventure, Mrs. Toft. And briefly she told the tale of Ben Bosham’s plight and of her gallant rescue. She began herself to see the comic side of it.

  “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!

  In his chagrin my lord tore the Whip’s letter across and across, and then prudently gummed it together again and locked it away. Certainly the odds were long that it would never be honored; on the one side stood Peel with four-fifths of his Cabinet and half his party, with all the Whigs, all the Radicals, all the League, and the Big Loaf: on the other stood the landed interest! Just the landed interest led by Lord George Bentinck, handsome and debonair, the darling of the Turf, the owner of Crucifix; but hitherto a silent member, and one at whom, as a leader, the world gaped. Only, behind this Joseph there lurked a Benjamin, one whose barbed shafts were many a time to clear the field. The lists were open, the lances were levelled, the slogan of Free Trade was met by the cry of “The Land and the Constitution!” and while old friendships were torn asunder and old allies cut adrift, town and country, forge and field, met in a furious grapple that promised to be final.

  If, amid the dust of such a conflict, the riot at Riddsley obtained a passing notice in London, intense it may be believed was the excitement which it caused in the borough. Hatton and Banfield and their men went about, vowing to take vengeance at the hustings. The mayor went about, swearing in constables. The farmers and their allies went about grinning. Fights took place nightly behind the Packhorse and the Portcullis, while very old ladies, peering over their blinds, talked of the French Revolution, and very young ones thought that the Militia, adequately officered, should be brought into the town.

  The spirit of which Basset had given proof was blazoned about; and he gained in another way. He was one of those to whom a spice of danger is a fillip, whom a little peril shakes out of themselves. On the day after the riot he came upon a score of people collected round a Cheap Jack in the market. The man presently closed his patter and his stall, and, on the impulse of the moment, Basset took his place and made the crowd a speech as short as it was simple. He told them that in his opinion it was impossible to keep food out of the country by a tax while Ireland was threatened by famine. Secondly, that the sacrifice which Peel was making of his party, his reputation, and his consistency was warrant that in his view the change was urgently needed. Thirdly, he asked them whether the farmers were so prosperous and the laborers so comfortable that change must be for the worse. But here he came on delicate ground; murmurs arose and some hisses, and he broke off good-humoredly, thanked the crowd, which had grown to a good size, and, stepping down from his barrow, he walked away amid plaudits. The thing was reported, and though the Tories sneered at it as a hole-and-corner meeting, Farthingale held another view. He told Mr. Stubbs that it was a neat thing — very well done.

  Stubbs grunted. “Will it change a vote?” he growled.

  “Change a — —”

  “Will it change a vote, man? You heard what I said.”

  “Lord, no!” the clerk answered. “I never said it would!”

  “Then why trouble about it?” Stubbs retorted fretfully. “Get on with those poll-cards! I don’t pay you a guinea a day at election time to praise monkey-tricks.”

  For Stubbs was not happy. He knew, indeed, that the breaking-up of the open-air meeting had been fairly successful. It had brought back two votes to the fold; and he calculated that the seat would be held. But by a majority how narrow, how fallen, how discreditable! He blushed to think of it.

  And other things made him unhappy. Those who are politicians by trade are like cardplayers, who play for the game’s sake; one game lost, they cut and deal as keenly as before. Behind the politicians, however, are a few to whom the stake is something; and of these was Stubbs. To him, as we know, the Corn-Tax was no mere toll, but the protection of agriculture, the well-head that guarded the pure waters, the fence that saved from smoke and steam, from slag-heap and brickfield, the smiling face of England. For him, the home of his fathers, the land of field and stubble, of plough and pinfold, was at stake; nay, was passing, wasted by men who thought in percentages and saw no farther than the columns of their ledgers. T
o that England of his memory — whether it had ever existed in fact or no — a hundred associations bound the lawyer; things tender and things true; quaint memories of his first turkey’s nest, of the last load of the harvest, of the loosened plough horses straying to the water at the close of day, of the flat paintings of the Durham Ox and the Coke Ram that adorned the farm parlor.

  To the men who bade him look up and see that in his Elysium the farmer struggled and the laborer starved, his answer was short. “Better ten shillings and fresh air, than shoddy dust and a pound a week!”

  In the country as a whole — and as time went on — he despaired of success. But he found Lord George a leader after his own heart, and many an evening he pored over the long paragraphs of his long-winded speeches. When he heard that the owner of Crucifix had dismissed his trainers, released his jockeys, sold his stud, and turned his back on the turf, he could have wept. Lord George and Stubbs, indeed, were the true country party. For Lord George’s sake Stubbs was prepared to taken even the “Jew boy” to his heart.

  As to the potato famine, he did not believe a word of it. He called the Premier, “Potato Peel!”

  The rains of February are apt to damp enthusiasm, but before eleven o’clock on the nomination day Riddsley was like a hive of bees about to swarm. The throng in the streets was such that Mottisfont could hardly pass through it. He made his entry into the borough on horseback at the head of a hundred mounted farmers wearing blue sashes and favors. Before him reeled a huge banner upheld by eight men and bearing on one side the legend, “The Land and the Constitution,” on the other, “Mottisfont the Farmers’ Friend!” Behind the horsemen, and surrounded by a guard of laborers in smocked frocks, moved a plough mounted on a wain and drawn by eight farm horses. Flags with “Speed the Plough,” “England’s Share is England’s Fare,” and “Peace and Plenty,” streamed from it. Three bands of varying degrees of badness found their places where they could, and thumped and blared against one another until the panes rattled in the deafened streets. The butchers, with marrow-bones and cleavers, brought up the rear, and in comparison were tuneful.

  Had Basset got his way, he would have dispensed with pomp and walked the hundred yards which separated his quarters at the Swan from the hustings. But he was told that this would never do. What would the landlord of the Swan say, who kept postchaises? And the postboys who looked for a golden tip? And the men who would hand him in and hand him out, and the men who would open the door and shut the door, and the men who would raise the steps and lower the steps, who would all look for the same tip? So, perforce, he drove in state to the Town Hall — before which the hustings stood — in a barouche and four accompanied by Banfield and Hatton and his agent. The rest of his Committee followed in postchaises. A bodyguard of “hands” escorted them, and they, too, had their bands — of equal badness — and their yellow banners with “Down with the Corn Laws,” “Vote for Basset the Poor Man’s Friend,” and “No Bread Taxes.” The great and little loaf pranced in front of him on spears, and if his procession was not quite so fine or so large as his opponent’s, it must be admitted that the blackguards of the town showed no preference and that he could boast about an equal number of the tagrag and bobtail.

  The left hand of the hustings was allotted to him, the right hand to Mottisfont, and by a little after eleven both parties had crammed and crushed,

  With blustering, bullying, and brow-beating,

  A little pummelling and maltreating,

  And elbowing, jostling and cajoling,

  into their places in front of the platform, the bullies and truncheon-men being posted well to the fore, or craftily ranged where the frontiers met. The bands boomed and blared, the men huzzaed, the air shook, the banners waved, every window that looked out upon the seething mob was white with faces, every ‘vantage-point was occupied. It was such a day and such a contest as Riddsley had never seen. The eyes of the country, it was felt, were upon it! Fights took place every five minutes, oaths and bets flew like hail over the heads of the crowd, coarse wit met coarser nicknames, and now and again shrieks varied the hubbub as the huge press of people, gathered from miles round, swayed under the impact of some vicious rush.

  “Hurrah! Hurrah! Mottisfont for ever! Basset! Basset and the Big Loaf! Basset! Basset! Hurrah! Mottisfont! Hurrah!”

  Then, in a short-lived silence, “Ten to one on Mottisfont! Three cheers for the Duke!” and a roar of laughter.

  Or a hundred voices would raise

  John Barley-corn, my Joe, John!

  When we were first acquaint!

  but never got beyond the first two lines, either because they were howled down or they knew no more of the words. The Peelites answered with their mournful,

  Child, is thy father dead?

  Father is gone!

  Why did they tax his bread?

  God’s will be done!

  or with the quicker,

  Oh, landlords’ devil take

  Thy own elect I pray!

  Who taxed our cake, and took our cake,

  And threw our cake away!

  On this would ensue a volley of personalities. “What would you be without your starch, Hayward?” “How’s your dad, Farthingale?” “Who whopped his wife last Saturday?” “Hurrah! Hurrah! Who said Potatoes?”

  For nearly an hour this went on, the blare of the bands, the uproar, the cheering, the abuse never ceasing. Then the town-crier appeared upon the vacant hustings. He rang his bell for silence and for a moment obtained it. On his heels entered, first the mayor and his assistants, then the candidates, the proposers, the seconders. Each, as he made his appearance, was greeted with a storm of groans, cheers, and cat-calls. Each put on to meet it such a show of ease as he could, some smiling, some affecting ignorance. The candidates and their supporters filed to either side, while the flustered mayor took his stand in the middle with the town clerk at his elbow.

  Basset, nearly at the end of his troubles, sought comfort in looking beyond the present moment. He feared that he was not likely to win, but he had done his duty, he had made his effort, and soon he would be free to repeat that effort on a smaller stage. Soon, these days, that in horror rivalled the middle passage of the slave trade, would be over, and if he were not elected he would be free to retire to Blore, and to spend days, lonely and sad indeed, but clean, in the improvement of his acres and his people. His eyes dwelt upon the sea of faces, and from time to time he smiled; but his mind was far away. He thought with horror of elections, and with loathing of the sordid round of flattery and handshaking, of bribery and intimidation from which he emerged. Thank God, the morrow would see the end! He would have done his best, and played his part. And it would be over.

  What the mayor said and what the town clerk said is of no importance, for no one heard them. The proposers, the seconders, the candidates, all spoke in dumb show. Basset dwelt briefly on the crisis in Ireland, the integrity of Peel, and the doubtful wisdom of taxing that which, to the poorest, was a necessity of life. If bread were cheaper all would have more to spend on other things and the farmer would have a wider market for his meat, his wool, and his cheese. It read well in the local paper.

  But one man was heard. This was a man who was not expected to speak, whose creed it had ever been that speeches were useless, and whom tradition almost forbade to speak, for he was an agent. At the last moment, when a seconder for a formal motion was needed, he thrust himself forward to the astonishment of all. The same astonishment stilled the mob as they gazed on the well-known figure. For a minute or two, curiosity and the purpose in the man’s face, held even his opponents silent.

  The man was Stubbs; and from the moment he showed himself it was plain that he was acting under the stress of great emotion. The very fuglemen forgot to interrupt him. They scented something out of the common.

  “I have never spoken on the hustings in my life,” he said. “I speak now to warn you. I believe that you, the electors of Riddsley, are going to sell the birthright of health whic
h you have received; and the heritage of freedom which this land has enjoyed for generations and on which the power of Bonaparte broke as on a rock. You think you are going to have cheap bread, and, maybe, you are! But at what a cost! Cheap bread is foreign bread. To you, the laborers, I say that foreign bread means that the fields you till will be laid to grass and you will go to work in Dudley and Walsall and Bury and Bolton, in mills and pits and smoke and dust! And your children will be dwarfed and wizened and puny! Foreign bread means that. And it means that the day will come when war will cut off your bread and you will starve; or the will of the foreigner who feeds you will cut it off — for he will be your master. I say, grow your own bread and eat your own bread, and you will be free men. Eat foreign bread and in time you will be slaves! No land that is fed by another land — —”

  His last words were lost. Signals from furious principals roused the fuglemen, and he was howled down, and stood back ashamed of the impulse which had moved him and little less astonished than those about him. Young Mottisfont clapped him on the back and affected to make much of him. But even he hardly knew how to take it. Some said that Stubbs had had tears in his eyes, while the opposing agent whispered to his neighbor that the lawyer was breaking and would never handle another contest. Sober men shook their heads; agents should hardly be seen, much less heard!

  But Stubbs’s words were marked, and when the bad times came thirty years later, aged farmers recalled them and thought over them. Nor were they without fruit at the time. For next morning when the poll opened, Basset’s people suffered a shock. Two men on whom he had counted appeared and voted short and sharp for Mottisfont. Basset’s agent asked them pleasantly if they were not making a mistake; and then less pleasantly had the Bribery Oath administered to them. But they stuck to their guns, the votes were recorded, and Mottisfont shook hands with them. Later in the day when the two were fuddled they denied that they had voted for Mottisfont. They had voted for old Stubbs — and they would do it again and fight any man who said to the contrary. Their desire in this direction was quickly met, and both, to the indignation of the Tories, were fined five shillings at the next petty sessions.