Chippinge Borough

by Stanley John Weyman

Certainly Vaughan had, if man ever had, grounds for a quarrel with fate. He had left London heart-whole and happy, the heir to a large fortune. He returned a fortnight later, a member of the Commons House indeed, but heart-sick and soured, beggared of his expectations and tortured by the thought of what might have been—if his love had proved true as she was fair, and constant as she was sweet. Fond dreams of her beauty still tormented him. Visions of the modest home in which he would have found consolation in failure, and smiles in success, rose up before him and derided him. He hated Sir Robert. He hated, or tried to hate, the weakest and the most despicable of women. He saw all things and all men with a jaundiced eye, the sound of his voice and the look of his face were altered. Men who knew him and who passed him in the street, or who saw him eating his chop in solitary churlishness, nudged one another and said that he took his reverses ill; while others, wounded by his curtness or his ill-humour, added that he did not go the right way to make the most of what was left.

For a certainty he was become a man unpleasant to handle. But within, under the thorns, was a very human soul, wounded, sore, and miserable, seeking every way for an outlet from its pains, and finding hope of escape at one point only. Men were right, when they said that he did not go the way to make the most of his chances. For he laid himself out to please no one at this time; it was not in him. But he worked late and early, and with a furious energy to fit himself for a political career; believing that success in that career was all that was left to him, and that by the necessary labour he could best put the past behind him. Love and pleasure, and those sweets of home life of which he had dreamed, were gone from him. But the stern prizes of ambition, the crown of those who live laborious days, might still be his—if the Mirror of Parliament were never out of his hands, and if Mr. Hume himself were not more constant to his favourite pillar under the gallery than he to such chance seat as might fall to him on the same side of the House.

Alas, he had not taken the oaths an hour—with a sore heart, in a ruck of undistinguished new Members—before he saw that success was not so near or so clearly within reach, as hope, with her flattering tale, had argued. The times were propitious, certainly. The debates were close and fiery, and were scanned out of doors with an interest unknown before. The strife between Croker and Macaulay in the Commons, the duel between Brougham and Lyndhurst in the Lords, were followed in the country with as much attention as a battle between Belcher and Tom Cribb; and by the same classes. Everywhere men talked politics, talked of Reform, and of little else. The clubs, the ’Change, the taverns, nay, the drawing-rooms and the schools rang with the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill; with Schedule A, cruel as Herod, and Schedule B, which spared one of twins. Before the window in the Haymarket which weekly displayed H.B.’s Political Caricatures, crowds stood gazing all day long, whatever the weather.

These things were in his favour. He remembered, too, the stress which the Chancellor had laid on the advantage of entering the House in advance of the crowd of new men whom the first Reformed Parliament must contain.

Unfortunately it seemed to him that he was one of just such a mob of new men, as it was. Nearly a fourth of his colleagues were strange to St. Stephen’s; and the greater part of these, owing to the circumstances of the election, were Whigs and sat on his side of the House. To raise his head above the level of a hundred competitors, numbering not a few men of wit and ability, and to do so within the short life of the present Parliament—-for he saw no certain prospect of being returned again—was no mean task. Little wonder that he was as regular in his attendance as Mr. Speaker, and grew pale of nights over Woodfall’s Important Debates.

In the pride of his first return he had dreamed of a reputation to be gained by his maiden speech; of burning periods that would astonish all who heard them, of flights of fancy to live forever in the mouths of men, of a marshalling of facts so masterly, and an exposition of figures so clear, as to obscure the fame of Single-speech Hamilton, or of that modern phenomenon, Mr. Sadler. But whatever the effect of the present chamber on the minds of novices, there was that in the old,—mean and dingy as was its wainscotted interior, and cumbered by overhanging galleries—there was a something, were it but the memory that those walls had echoed the diatribes of Chatham and given back the voice of Burke, had heard the laugh of Walpole and the snore of North, which cooled the spirit of a new member; which shook his knees as effectually as if the panelling of the room had vanished at a touch, and revealed the glories of the Gothic Chapel which lay behind it. For behind that panelling and those galleries, the ancient Chapel, with its sumptuous tracery and statues, its frescoed walls and stained glass, still existed; no unfit image of the stately principles which lie behind the dull everyday working of our Constitution.

To Arthur Vaughan, a student of the history of the House, this effect of the Chamber upon a new member was a commonplace. But he was a practised speaker in the mimic arena; and he thought that he might rise above this feeling in his own case. He fancied that he understood the Genius Loci; its hatred of affectation, and almost of eloquence, its dislike to be bored, its preference for the easy, the conversational, and the personal. And when he had waited three weeks—so much he gave to prudence—his time came.

He rose in a moderately thin house in the middle of the dinner-hour; and rose as he thought fully prepared. Indeed he started well. He brought out two or three sentences with ease and aplomb; and he fancied the difficulty over, the threshold passed. But then—he knew not why, nor could he overcome the feeling—the silence, kindly meant, in which as a new Member, he was received, had a terrifying effect upon him. A mist rose before his eyes, his voice sounded strange to him—and distant. He dropped the thread of what he was saying, repeated himself, lost his nerve. For some seconds, standing there with all faces turned to him—they seemed numberless seconds to him, though in truth they were few—he could see nothing but the Speaker’s wig, grown to an immense white cauliflower, which swelled and swelled and swelled until it filled the whole House. He stammered, repeated himself again—and was silent. And then, seeing that he was embarrassed, they cheered him—and the mist cleared; and he went on—hurriedly and nervously. But he was aware that he had dropped a link in his argument—which he had not now the coolness to supply. And when he had murmured a few sentences, more or less inept and incoherent, he sat down.

In fact, though he had made no mark, he had also incurred no discredit. But he felt that the eyes of all were on him, that they were gloating over his failure, and comparing what he had done with what he had hoped to do, his achievement with those secret hopes, those cherished aspirations, he felt all the shame of open and disgraceful defeat. His face burned; he sat looking before him, not daring for a while to divert his gaze, or to learn in others’ eyes how great had been his mishap.

Unfortunately, when he ventured to change his posture, and to put on his hat, which he discovered he had been holding in his hand, he encountered Sergeant Wathen’s eyes; and he read in them a look of amusement, which wounded his pride more than the open ridicule of a crowd. That was the finishing stroke. He walked out soon afterwards, bearing himself as indifferently as he could. But no man ever carried out of the House a lower heart or a sense of more utter failure. He had mistaken his talents, he had no aptitude for debate. Success as a speaker was not within his reach.