Ten o'clock. The news was abroad in the house. Alicia had gone to
spread it. Maggie had startled everybody by deciding to go down and
tell Clara herself, though Albert was bound to call. The nurse had laid
out the corpse. Auntie Hamps and Edwin were again in the drawing-room
together; the ageing lady was making up her mind to go. Edwin, in
search of an occupation, prepared to write letters to one or two distant
relatives of his mother. Then he remembered his promise to Big James,
and decided to write that letter first.
"What a mercy he passed away peacefully!" Auntie Hamps exclaimed, not
for the first time.
Edwin, at a rickety fancy desk, began to write: "Dear James, my father
passed peacefully away at--" Then, with an abrupt movement, he tore the
sheet in two and threw it in the fire, and began again: "Dear James, my
father died quietly at eight o'clock to-night."
Soon afterwards, when Mrs Hamps had departed with her genuine but too
spectacular grief, Edwin heard an immense commotion coming down the road
from Hanbridge: cheers, shouts, squeals, penny whistles, and trumpets.
He opened the gate.
"Who's in?" he asked a stout, shabby man, who was gesticulating in glee
with a little Tory flag on the edge of the crowd.
"Who do _you_ think, mister?" replied the man drunkenly.
"What majority?"
"Four hundred and thirty-nine."
The integrity of the empire was assured, and the paid agitator had
received a proper rebuff.
"Miserable idiots!" Edwin murmured, with the most extraordinary
violence of scorn, as he re-entered the house, and the blare of triumph
receded. He was very much surprised. He had firmly expected his own
side to win, though he was reconciled to a considerable reduction of the
old majority. His lips curled.
It was in his resentment, in the hard setting of his teeth as he
confirmed himself in the rightness of his own opinions, that he first
began to realise an individual freedom. "I don't care if we're beaten
forty times," his thoughts ran. "I'll be a more out-and-out Radical
than ever! I don't care, and I don't care!" And he felt sturdily that
he was free. The chain was at last broken that had bound together those
two beings so dissimilar, antagonistic, and ill-matched--Edwin
Clayhanger and his father.