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Sommerset and his friends had, of course, the accredited weapons of their party wherewith to attack the adversary, and Stopford was called everything, from Radical up to Atheist. Thus the battle began, and fiercely was it fought; but suffice it to say, that all the usual means for obtaining the independent suffrage of freeborn Englishmen were put in requisition.
His Oxford tutor had made him a strong Tory; old Cloudesly had averred, that was the only politics for a gentleman; and though Sommerset believed in all the alarms of his time, his faith being particularly strong for terrors, he had always supposed himself to be somebody.
Sommerset Cloudesly occupied a large but neat brick house on the verge of our town's liberties, with a meadow-like lawn in front, and acres of orchard in the rear.
Life could not be entirely folded up like a napkin, and put into its proper drawer; and everything annoyed Sommerset Cloudesly. The coming off of his waistcoat button was the destruction of Messina. The world was going to ruin if his horse lost a shoe.
It was not inordinate ambition that disturbed his days, for though, like most of us, Sommerset would have rather preferred being a great man, could greatness be easily come at, he lost no labour in its pursuit.
Sir Jonas and the Earl of Lumberdale assured him he was the hope of Tattleton; and, in an evil hour, he consented, in electioneering phrase, to contest the borough. With his relations, who regarded Sommerset as their top branch, the step was in high favour; and all his friends came out strong in approbation, excepting old Tom Prior.
There are ten children in the brick-house, but Mrs Cloudesly looks as composed as ever; and when her husband reads to her at work on the winter nights, as he dutifully does, in the newspapers, she sometimes remarks, at the close of long parliamentary debates, to which Sommerset was always partial: 'What trouble those people have in that House of Commons, my love!
By and by, however, it became evident to his most sanguine supporter that Sommerset had no chance; Sir Jonas and Lord Lumberdale themselves advised him to give up the contest; but the man had been persuaded that the safety of Great Tattleton, if not that of the British nation, depended on him, and a persuasion once in Sommerset's head was not easily got out.
I can vouch for old Tom and Miss Croply leading off a country-dance the same evening in Prior Cottage; but it is two-and-twenty years ago. There is a tombstone over the old man and his wife. Miss Croply has left her bank deposit to three nieces. Sommerset Cloudesly grew less fidgety long ago, and some people say less genteel, but he brews the best beer, and makes the best cider now in the county.
Sommerset was a tall, thin, genteel-looking man, in his thirtieth year. Motherless, sisterless, and wifeless strange to say, under such circumstances, he was restless too. It was not a weight of crime that pressed upon his conscience. Cloudesly's life had been as harmless as those of his own apple-trees.
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