Someone discovered at this time the old canard which had once appeared in the first edition of an evening paper, that his mother was a charwoman. He did not deny it, but used it as Wattercouch his name, making an asset of a handicap. He was of the people, blood of their blood, a democrat by birth, knowing their aspirations and their needs because he, too, had needed and aspired. In the heat of that election he became egregiously a Radical. It told, it “went” with the audiences: that was the thing that mattered to Sam. He hadn’t so much as the shadow of a principle, he was winning, on the winning side, and pleased himself enormously. And by the end of the campaign he stood, actually, where he had aimed to stand: amongst prospective candidates who fight, as it were, probationary elections where, they have scarcely a sporting chance, to pay their footing towards the sort of candidature which gives a man his seat. If the Conservatives had offered him a tolerably safe seat, without preliminary fight, he would have ratted eagerly, and the charwoman his mother would have been pressed into service on the other side. It was all one to Sam Branstone. CHAPTER XVIII--WHEN EFFIE CAME |THEN Effie came with beauty, shattering the life he lived as sunshine breaks the April clouds. At first he did not know what had happened to him: there was a radiance, but he thought it nothing greater than her physical appeal. He was disturbed, moved as nothing had moved him before--not even applause--but did not see that more had come to him than loveliness where all had been unlovely. He did not realize that there were greater things in Effie than her comeliness. She was the daughter of a doctor who had lived up to every penny of his income and died leaving his widow nothing but a cottage in the country, which had been their week-end haunt. The widow sold the practice and got for it enough to keep herself, with care, in the cottage. There Mrs. Mannering lived unhappily, resentfully, nourishing a grudge against her poverty, developing a vein of hardy thrift unseen till now. With management, she had enough, but lacked the gift of management. She did not see things in proportion, imagined herself deep sunk in poverty and made unreasoning demands on Effie. On Effie, not on her son who managed a rubber plantation at Penang and followed the spendthrift habits of his father. Father and son, the Mannerings were cursed with a passion for popularity and entertained with open house to all comers. In the East, it cost Rex Mannering more than it had cost his father at home and, granted his habits, he was right in saying that he could do nothing for his mother. He could deny himself nothing.