Fielding’s visit, however, had another consequence beyond the upsetting of a gig.  A few days later an epigram was circulating through the constituency.  The squires passed it on with a smack of the tongue; it had a flavour, to their thinking, which was of the town.  The epigram was this:  ’Lord Cranston lives a business life of vice, with rare holidays of repentance, but being a dutiful husband he always takes his wife with him on his holidays.’  From the squires it descended through the grades of society.  Lord Cranston, at the close of a speech, was invited to mention the precise date at which he intended to end his holidays.  Believing that the question sprang out of an objection to a do-nothing aristocracy, he answered with emphatic earnestness, ’The moment I am returned for Bentbridge.’  The shout of laughter which greeted the remark he attributed at first to political opposition.

Subsequently, however, a sympathiser explained to him delicately the true meaning of the question, and, as a counter-move, Lord Cranston made a violent attack upon ‘Empire building plus finance.’  He drew distinctions between governing men and making money.

Drake accepted the distinctions as obvious platitudes, but failed to see that the capacity for one could not coexist with the capacity for the other.  He asserted, on the contrary, that money was not as a rule made without the exercise of tact, and some aptitude for the management of men.  He was, consequently, not disinclined to believe that money-making afforded a good preliminary lesson in the art of government.  Lord Cranston’s argument, in fact, did little more then alienate a few of his own supporters, who, having raised themselves to affluence, felt quite capable of doing the same for the nation.

On the night of the polling-day Captain Le Mesurier brought his house-party into Bentbridge to dine with Drake, and after dinner the ladies remained in the room overlooking the street, while the gentlemen repaired to the Town Hall, where the votes were being counted.  It seemed to Clarice as she gazed down that all the seven thousand electors had gathered to hear the result announced.  The street was paved with heads as with black cobble-stones.  Occasionally some one would look up and direct now a cheer, now a shout of derision towards the ‘Three Nuns’ or the ‘Yellow Boar.’  But the rooms of both candidates were darkened, and the attention of the crowd was for the most part riveted upon the red blinds of the Town Hall.

For Clarice, the time limped by on crutches.  She barely heard the desultory conversation about her:  she felt as if her life was beating itself out against those red windows.  A clock in the market-place chimed the hour of nine:  she counted the strokes, with a sense of wonder when they stopped.  She seemed to have been waiting for a century.