Sweet and Twenty by Joan Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

honest man. Perhaps he is too honest for this game.”
    “Maybe you should give him a hand with his speech-writing till he gets on to it,”she said, feeling this idea might not sit well with Mr. Hudson.
    “I wrote him a good speech. That is, we worked it out together, you know. But Alistair threw himself open to questions from the floor and Fellows followed his lead. It was during the unrehearsed question period that he went all to pieces. Reising put Alistair up to it, I fancy. He sized Tony up pretty well yesterday. Last night was a total disaster for us, but we hadn’t much hope for the farm vote in any case. I hope our jaunt to the village yesterday did some good with the merchants.”
    Lillian hadn’t the heart to tell him what Sara had been up to. “I’m sure it did. All the things you bought and gave to the poor must have given the tradesmen a good opinion of your candidate.”
    “That’s pretty well standard procedure. Reising would have done the same. One can’t afford not to do it.”
    He then turned to hear what Fellows was saying to the older ladies. “. . . and if they don’t watch out we’ll have a whole nation of beggars,” he finished up, still discussing his speech. “Isn’t that right, Matthew?”
    “The grain-growers certainly won’t be beggars, as Alistair pointed out. I think it is the matter of all taxes ultimately coming out of the pockets of those who make more than a living wage you should stress. They are robbing Peter to pay Paul, the way they go about it.”
    “Ho, the Tories would rob anyone,”Tony replied. “And Peter Peckham is the worst of the lot. But as to paying Paul, he’ll keep the whole lot for himself.”
    “Who is Peter Peckham?”Hudson inquired, dazed.
    “Why, robbing Peter as you just said. He would rob from his own mother if he were given half a chance.”
    “No, no, that was not my meaning.”
    “Oh, well, I know you don’t want any ad hominem’s, but as you mentioned Peter Peckham yourself, and we are among friends, there is no harm in saying the fellow is a scoundrel. I wouldn’t trust him with a brass farthing. He is a sly one. But then it takes one to know one, as they say.”
    “Oh ho, so you are a sly one too, eh, Mr. Fellows?”Martha joked him. He looked grossly offended at this effort to read meaning into his words.
    A confused discussion followed, during which Mr. Hudson tried once again to inculcate into Mr. Fellows’s mind his reasons for being against the Corn Laws, and at the termination of his labor Sara said, “I think you are all wrong.”
    She had an attentive audience, for she rarely spoke out in such a firm voice and never on a serious matter. “The Tories only want to stop other countries from dumping their grain on us.”She had been much struck with the phrase in the pamphlet, wondering where those countries would dump it, and thinking how odd it would look—great stacks of grain sitting about the countryside.
    “Bless me, where did you learn such a thing, love?”her mother asked, very proud of her. “Your papa was used to say that very thing. Only think, she remembers that from her father, and Gerald in his grave over a year.”
    This was Mr. Hudson’s first indication that the Tory element in the house was still active, and he looked a question at Martha.
    “Gerald always talked a deal of nonsense. Have no fear, gentlemen. We are on your side.”
    “That is an old Tory idea—that countries are dumping their excess grain on us—but when our own harvest was poor, as it was last year and this, it should not be called dumping, but honest trading; God knows we export enough products to other countries.”He addressed these remarks to Tony, but his candidate was looking elsewhere, for he was once again struck by Sara’s beauty.
    “It’s unusual to find brains and beauty in a lady,”he congratulated her.
    “Oh, I am not at all clever, Mr. Fellows,”she objected.
    “What you just said about dumping—that was