Yes and no, Volume 1 (of 2)

1st Officer. How many stand for consulships?

2nd Officer. Three, they say; but ’tis thought of every one Coriolanus will carry it. There have been many great men that have flattered the people, who ne’er loved them; and there be many that they have loved they know not wherefore; so that, if they love they know not why, they hate upon no better ground: therefore, for Coriolanus neither to care whether they love or hate him, manifests the true knowledge he has in their disposition; and out of his noble carelessness, plainly lets them see’t.

Shakspeare.

“I hope you saw our friend Lady Boreton,” said Fitzalbert, who had come in on horseback from Latimer to see the fun; “there she was, fixed to the spot, but waving about like Daphne upon the turn, green even to the tips of her fingers. Well, she is a most formidable antagonist; for if she has not a vote, at least she has a voice. That savage, Oakley—I think he showed very little regard for his former friend in the language he used; and that too after you had been unnecessarily civil to him in your speech. It would serve him quite right, Germain, and be your best chance of success, if you were to join at once with that Knight of the Plough and Pigtail, Stedman.”

“To that I have a great objection,” answered Germain; “I know Oakley well enough to have a due regard for his intrinsic qualities, and however rough his manner or rugged his temper, I am sure at bottom he has a good heart.”

“I never knew a disagreeable man who had not, or was not said to have. I should not call a man well-dressed because he had an embroidered birth-day suit locked up in his wardrobe—your good heart is not every-day wear; it may not come into use above once or twice in a man’s life.”

“Well, I know you were never fond of Oakley; but as to coalescing with Stedman, though I think Oakley’s dislike of contradiction and confidence in his own judgment make him a little wild in some of his political opinions, yet I am much nearer agreeing with him than with Stedman.”

“Oh! this is a part of the subject upon which you must excuse me; I look upon the whole affair as little better than a sort of seven years’ suicide; but if you choose to buy that most expensive luxury, the privilege of losing your hunting in the winter and your dinners in the spring, and the pleasure of hearing men speak by the hour whose talk you would not endure by the minute—why I was only endeavouring to gratify your taste, such as it is. So adieu! Any message to Lady Latimer?”

Germain returned to his committee-room, certainly not gratified at the events of the morning, but by no means so much dispirited as might have been expected; he had at all times a happy knack of seeing every thing in the most favourable point of view, and at any rate he found a sufficiency of occupation for the moment in listening to the various counsels which alternately preponderated in the little conclave, every one in turn seeming to think that they rendered him the most effectual assistance by differing diametrically from the advice of the last speaker.

His party, it must have been observed, was throughout rather of a mixed character. He had the strenuous support of some of the great families of the county; and as far as personal influence extended, he had made the best possible use of the short period he had been before the public eye, to conciliate and attach people to himself individually, but his best chance of success was to depend upon his being considered as the “least evil of the two” by one or other of his competitors.

“This will never do,” said Mr. Macdeed, shaking his head despondingly; “we can’t afford to go on feeding the poll with plumpers. It is very well for that purse-proud Oakley, with high-sounding principles for those who are not to be bought, and plenty of money for those who are; it is very well for him to stand aloof, but we have neither funds nor faction enough to prosper alone; and as it is plain we shall never get any assistance from the green party, the alternative seems to me obvious.”

Germain’s answer to this was interrupted by the entrance of a figure with blue and red ribbons mixed, who thrust a brown sunburnt hand into his, with “How d’ye do to-day, sir?” Germain immediately recognised Captain Wilcox, and the captain continued: “Is your friend Lord Latimer here, sir?”

“Not exactly,” replied Germain, rather amused at this eastern idea of freedom of election.

“Oh!” said the captain, “I thought he might have been here, backing you up; you see I’ve got on the livery too—blue and red mixed—united service colours, as I call them. I hope they’ll be seen in common to-morrow, and that you’ll contrive between you to keep out that long-winded chap.”

“Won’t you take a chair, Captain Wilcox?” said Mr. Macdeed, who was delighted at the prospect of such a reinforcement to his view of the subject; but Germain was for the present resolute in postponing any consideration of a coalition till after the close of the next day’s poll.

The next day’s poll closed, and left Oakley still at the head, and Germain rather lower in proportion than he had been. There is no species of success for the moment so intoxicating as the temporary elevation of a popular candidate at a contested election. It was under the excitement of this influence that Oakley spoke on the second day, and to this is to be attributed much of the intemperance and indiscretion, which gave the more offence from assuming the character of contempt for both of his competitors. He who would have scorned to yield his judgment to the arguments of any man, allowed his conduct to be influenced by the unmeaning outcries of the senseless rabble that surrounded the hustings.

Not that those vociferous excitements were either so loud or so general as they had been the day before; to explain which it is necessary to own that one of Mr. Macdeed’s accusations, that of buying suffrages, was quite unfounded as far as regarded Oakley. He was not a man who ever professed a principle which he did not mean to practise. He did not therefore conceive purity of election to mean the purchase of huzzas from thirsty throats in exchange for hogsheads of ale. His disbursements were confined to what are called strictly legal expenses. The discovery of this fact had its effect upon the degree of enthusiasm with which he was received on the second day. Yet still he was at the head of the poll, and spoke in the full confidence of continuing there till a final happy result of the contest.

In the meantime Fitzalbert had returned, and told Lord Latimer of the difficulty there seemed in so completely detaching Oakley from Germain, as to induce him to throw him overboard and unite with the other; which, as Fitzalbert said, would insure their success.

Lord Latimer was now so regularly worked up by the excitement of the contest, as to think success an affair of the first moment; he had also originally engaged in the affair principally from a dislike of Oakley; he could not bear, therefore, the prospect of defeat from such a cause as consideration for the person, whose mortification would be rather an additional enjoyment to him: not that he was really an ill-natured person, or that his feelings one way or other would have been very durable, but at the moment he certainly would have thought Oakley’s defeat improved the joke. He therefore wrote to Germain earnestly, though good-humouredly, urging him not to throw away the chances in what he justly considered their joint concern.

After this letter was dispatched, and till the event was known, the conversation at Latimer of course rarely diverged from the all-engrossing topic of the election. And as, during the delusion of such a period, there is hardly an imaginable vice of which people will not accuse a rival candidate, it was not to be expected that Oakley would be spoken of in very favourable terms.

There was one there, however, who heard all the disparaging mention of him in silent dissent. With too much gentleness to dispute, and yet too much character to believe all she heard, the only impression it made upon her mind was, that Lord Latimer, with all his general facility of temper, was prejudiced when thwarted; that Fitzalbert, with all his pleasantry, would say any thing for the sake of a joke; and that even Lady Latimer, in whom it pained her to find any fault, was rather more eager about the event of the election than became one of her sex, unconnected as she was with any of the candidates.

“Can it be,” thought Helen, “when I hear Mr. Oakley denounced as having adopted levelling opinions, unbefitting his rank in life, from a constitutional impatience of contradiction, a discontented intolerance of an equal, and a purse-proud desire to be the head of his company—can this be the person whose delight it seemed to be to listen with so much interest to the crude, half-formed impressions of an untutored girl, and to explain (oh, how persuasively!) the errors into which utter ignorance of the world might lead me? I can never believe that selfishness is the actuating ingredient in such a character.”

Helen had certainly some pretty distinct recollections of ebullitions of impatience even to her upon the subject of the election; but the blame of them she was not willing to attribute exclusively to him, and the only light in which she now recollected them was, as proving the excessive eagerness with which he sought a distinction for which she was sure his talents peculiarly fitted him; and the only regret they now enhanced was, that the attainment of that object, so much desired, seemed by no means certain.

Had Helen even been aware of the concurrence of circumstances which first attracted Oakley’s attention towards her, she would not readily have admitted what might have occurred to those who took a more unfavourable view of his character, that it was perhaps her very dependence upon him, which the selfish abstraction of his nature considered as an additional charm; but, on the contrary, she would gladly have been convinced of what had indeed latterly been the case, that his conduct towards her had been caused by the working of a passion which has immemorially been allowed to soften rugged natures, and to occasion striking incongruities in a man’s general character, and his peculiar deportment when under its influence.

When Germain received Lord Latimer’s letter, he had just returned from the hustings after the second day’s poll, feeling as much exasperated as it was in his nature to feel at the wanton, unprovoked tone of offence which Oakley had again assumed; yet he had been even more disgusted with a few further specimens of combined ignorance and intolerance from some of the Stedmanites, and in spite of the little personal soreness of the moment, he never could stop to form any comparison between the pleasure he should feel at commencing his public career hand in hand with the friend of his youth, or going into parliament with such a live log tied to him for a colleague as Squire Stedman.

This was not however exactly the alternative he had to decide upon. Lord Latimer’s letter put it to him again in a stronger light, that the most probable contingency was that he should himself lose his election. Guy Faux himself, of gunpowder memory, is not more completely a puppet in the hands of the November urchins who set him up, than a candidate at a contested election often is in those of the party which upholds him. This Germain found in the eagerness with which he was now urged to accede to the proposed coalition. There were not precedents wanting for it, even among those most differing from Mr. Stedman in principles. In contests like the present, individual security, not political consistency, is made the first object. Mr. Macdeed, who had been very active all the morning in attempting to arrange this junction, found Mr. Stedman’s party even more anxious for it, for they had at length discovered that that fine old scarlet bugbear, the Pope, had been rather worn out in the course of the last seven years, and as they had nothing to replace him, they were desirous to take any measures to patch up their threadbare pretensions. The event may be anticipated—an exchange of second votes, as far as they had it in their power to arrange it, was determined upon, and the effect was soon apparent.

For though it gave Oakley an additional opening for some fine bursts of indignant declamation, yet at the same time it so far increased the irritability of his temper, as to make him unintentionally offend some of his most zealous partizans.

Combined too with the limitations which upon principle he had put to the expenses, it caused a visible diminution in his relative strength. After, therefore, an animated but fruitless contest, in which it would be difficult to say whether he had most succeeded in extorting admiration, or provoking hostility, the numbers were declared at the final close of the poll,