Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 2.pdf/9

 {|
 * colspan=3 |""

CONDUCTED BY ""
 * No. 27..
 * SATURDAY, JUNE 5, 1869.
 * }
 * }
 * }

was the opportunity just offered to Walter Joyce by the parliamentary agents, it is more than probable that he would have declined to profit by it had the scene of action been laid anywhere else than in Brocksopp, had his opponent been any one other than Mr. Creswell. Although utterly changed from the usher in a country school, who was accustomed to take life as it came—or indeed from the young man who, when he obtained Lord Hetherington'a private secretaryship, looked upon himself as settled for life—Joyce had even now scarcely any ambition, in the common acceptation of the word. To most men brought up as he had been, membership of parliament would have meant London life in good society, excellent station of one's own, power of dispensing patronage and conferring favours on others, and very excellent opportunity for getting something pleasant and remunerative for oneself, when the chance offered. To Walter Joyce it meant the acceptance of a sacred trust, to the proper discharge and fulfilment of which all his energies were pledged by the mere fact of his acceptance of the candidature. Not, indeed, that he bad ever had any thoughts of relinquishing his recently acquired profession, the press; he looked to that as his sole means of support; but he felt that should he be successful in obtaining a seat in the House, his work would be worth a great deal more than it had hitherto been, and he should be able to keep his income at the same amount while he devoted the half of his time thus saved to hie political duties.

But being, as has been said, thoroughly happy in his then career, Joyce would never have thought of entertaining the proposition made to him through the medium of Messrs. Potter and Fyfe had it not been for the desire of revenging himself on Marian Creswell by opposing to the last, and, if possible, in every honourable way, by defeating, her husband. Joyce felt perfectly certain that Mr. Creswell—quiet easy-going old gentleman as he had been of late years, and more likely than ever to be disinclined to leave his retirement and do battle in the world since his son's death—was a mere puppet in the hands of his wife, whose ambition had prompted her to make her husband seek the honour, and whose vanity would be deeply wounded at his failure. Walter Joyce's personal vanity was also implicated in the result, and he certainly would not have accepted the overtures had there not been a good chance of success; but Mr. Harrington, who, out of his business, was a remarkably sharp, shrewd, and far-seeing man of the world and of business, spoke very positively on this point, and declared their numbers were so strong, and the popular excitement so great in their favour, that they could scarcely fail of success, provided they had the right man to bring forward. To win the day against her, to show her that the man she basely rejected and put aside was preferred, in a great struggle, to the man she had chosen; that the position which she had so coveted for her husband, and towards the attainment of which she had brought into play all the influence of her wit and his money, had been snatched from her by the poor usher whom she had found good enough to play with in her early days, but