But it is hard to satisfy everybody, and at this there was a fresh outcry. “A safe conduct?” cried the Squire, redder about the gills than before. “For shame, sir! Are we to be indebted to the other side for a safe conduct! I never heard of such a thing!”
“I quite agree with you,” cried the Rector. “Quite! I protest, Mr. White, against anything of the kind.”
But White was unmoved. “We’ve got to get our voters there,” he said. “Sir Robert will be displeased, I know, but——”
“No, sir, but never was such an election,” White answered with spirit.
“He’ll be here presently,” White replied. “He’ll be here presently. Anyway, gentlemen,” he continued, “we had better be going down to the hall. In a body, gentlemen, if you please, and voters in the middle. And keep together, if you please. A little shouting,” he added cheerfully, “breaks no bones. We can shout too!”
The thing was unsatisfactory, and without precedent; nay, humiliating. But there seemed to be nothing else for it. As White said, this election was not as other elections; Bath was lost, and Bristol, too, it was whispered; the country was gone mad. And so, frowning and ill-content, the magnates trooped out, and led by White began to descend the stairs. There was much confusion, one asking if the Alderman was there, another demanding to see Sir Robert, here a man grumbling about White’s arrangements, there a man silent over the discovery, made perhaps for the first time, that here was like to be an end of old Toryism and the loaves and the fishes it had dispensed.
In the hall where the party was reinforced by a crowd of their smaller supporters a man plucked White’s sleeve and drew him aside. “She’s out now!” he whispered. “Pybus has left two with him and they won’t leave him for me. But if you went and ordered them out there’s a chance they’d go, and——”
“No, and Pillinger’s well enough to come, if you put it strong. He’s afraid of his wife and they’ve got him body and soul, but——”
White cast a despairing eye on the confusion about him. “How can I come?” he muttered. “I must get these to the poll first.”
“Then you’ll never do it!” the man retorted. “There’ll be no coming and going, to-day, Mr. White, you take it from me. Now’s the time while they’re waiting for you in front. You can slip out at the back and bring him in and take him with you. It’s the only way, so help me! They’re in that temper we’ll be lucky if we’re all alive to-morrow!”