Capitalists and financiers -- Fiction; Great Britain -- Politics and government -- Fiction; Political fiction
So Tuesday ended--and here my duty compels me to introduce the
repugnant subject of the Opposition candidate, lest the reader should
forget in the fever of enthusiasm which I have described, the very
presence of a man who dared to set himself against the expressed
opinion of The People.
Lord Henfield was his name. His hairs, which were of the palest yellow
and few in number for a man of but thirty years, were parted down the
middle with an extraordinary accuracy which was no more disturbed when
he appeared in the early morning after rising from repose than when in
the last hours of the night he would withdraw from the critical and
angry audiences which he too often had to encounter.
His face was not clean-shaven: contrariwise, he wore long and drooping
moustaches of the same character and complexion as his hair, and
forming a singular contrast with that virile grey crescent upon Mr.
Clutterbuck's upper lip, of which the reader has so often heard.
His eyes were of a very watery blue; he lisped a little, and such
decision as he may have possessed was only to be discovered in his
apparently complete indifference to the judgment of men poorer than
himself.
The deference due to his rank and wealth forbade any assault upon
his person; all other forms of opposition he met with a slight and
rather mournful smile, and with the regret that there should be any
differences between himself and those whom he hoped would soon prove to
be his constituents.
The weakness of his position was not, it may be admitted, entirely due
to his personality nor even to the wild popularity which the cause of
Fishmonger and Another had recently acquired. Indeed he was as ardent a
champion of the incarcerated Fishmonger as was Mr. Clutterbuck himself,
and differed from his opponent only in modifying his language where it
might have shocked the English sense of the respect which we all owe to
the Bench.
His principal ally in a struggle which seemed to disturb him so little
was his wife. Lady Henfield, a woman of the most captivating vitality,
called at every house in the constituency, smiled, flattered, and joked
into friendship the hearts of all the women, and fearlessly bestowed
upon either sex indifferently the marks of a warm appreciation which,
from such a woman, are never thrown away. Many a household could tell,
long before the contest was engaged, of deeds of kindness which her
genuine sympathy with the populace forbade her to noise abroad, and
her known influence upon the Board of Pleeson's Charity, a social work
of immense importance in the neighbourhood, lent her a high and most
legitimate influence in all that she did in Mickleton. She had had
the sense to take a house for her husband in the locality, and though
they but rarely slept in this distant quarter of the metropolis, the
excellent way in which it was served and furnished naturally impressed
her neighbours of every degree.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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