They knew now, they understood, and the storm broke. The smaller men, or such of them as were sober, stared. But the greater number burst into a roar of dissent, of reprobation, of anger, led by the Squire.
“A Whig, by Heaven!” he cried violently. And he thrust his chair as far as possible from his neighbour. “A Whig, by Heaven! And here!” While others cried, “Renegade!” “Radical!” and “What are you doing here?” and hissed him. But above all, in some degree stilling all, rose Cooke’s crucial question, “Are you for the Bill? Answer me that!” And he extended his hand for silence. “Are you for the Bill?”
“I am,” Vaughan answered. The storm steadied him.
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“Fool or rogue, then! which are you?” shrieked a voice from the lower end of the table. “Fool or rogue? Which are you?”
Vaughan turned sharply in the direction of the voice. “That reminds me,” he said with a vigour which seemed after a few seconds to gain him a hearing—for the noise died down—“that reminds me, Sergeant Wathen is against the Bill. But he has addressed himself solely and only to your prejudices, gentlemen! I am for the Bill—I am for the Bill,” he repeated, seeing that their attention was wandering, “I——”
He stopped, silenced and taken aback. For some were on their feet, others were rising; the faces of nine out of ten were turned from him. What was it? He turned to see; and he saw.
A few paces within the door stood Sir Robert himself; his fur collared travelling cloak hanging loose about him and showing his tall spare figure at its best. He stooped, but his high-bred face, cynically smiling, was turned full on the speaker; it was certain that he had heard much, if not all. And Vaughan had been brave indeed, he had been a hero, if taken by surprise and at this disadvantage he had not shown some discomfiture.
It is easy to smile now! Easy to say that this was but an English gentleman, bound like others by the law! And Vaughan’s own kinsman! But few would have smiled then. He, through whose hands passed a quarter of the patronage of a county, who dammed or turned the stream of promotion, who had made many there and could unmake them, whose mere hint could have consigned, a few years back, the troublesome to the press-gang, who belonged almost as definitely, almost as exclusively, to a caste, as do white men in the India of to-day; who seldom showed himself to the vulgar save in his coach and four, or riding with belted grooms behind him—about such an one in ’31 there was, if no divinity, at least the ægis of real power, that habit which unquestioned authority confers, that port of Jove to which men bow! Scan the pictured faces of the men who steered this country through the long war—the faces of Liverpool and Castlereagh—