XXVI
THE SCENE IN THE HALL
Arthur Vaughan had been quick to see that he could not step at once into place and fame; that success in political life could not in these days be attained at a bound. But had he been less quick, the great debate which preceded the passage of the Bill through the Commons must have availed to persuade him. That their last words of warning to the country, their solemn remonstrances, might have more effect, the managers of the Opposition had permitted the third reading to be carried in the manner which has been described. But, that done, they unmasked all their forces, bent on proving that if in the time to come the peers threw out the Bill they would do so with a respectable weight, not only of argument, but of public feeling behind them; and that, not only in the country, but in the popular House. All that the bitter invective of Croker, the mingled gibes and predictions of Wetherell, the close and weighty reasoning of Peel, the precedents of Sugden could do to warn the timid and arouse the prudent was done. That ancient Chamber, which was never again to echo the accents of a debate so great, which stood indeed already doomed, as if it could not long survive the order of things of which it had been for centuries the centre, had heard, it may be, speeches more lofty, men more eloquent—for whom had it not heard?—but never men more in earnest, or words more keenly barbed by the prejudices of the passing, or the aspirations of the coming, age. Of the one party were those who could see naught but glory in the bygone, naught but peril in change, of the other, those whose strenuous aim it was to make the future redress the wrongs of the past. The former were like children, viewing the Armada hangings which tapestried the neighbouring Chamber, and seeing only the fair front: the latter like the same children, picking with soiled fingers at the backing, coarse, dusty and cobwebbed, which for two hundred years had clung to the roughened masonry.
Vaughan sat through the three nights, brooding darkly on the feats performed before him. If they who fought in the arena were not giants, if the House no longer held a match for Canning and Brougham, the combatants seemed giants to him; for a man’s opinion of himself is never far from the opinion which others hold of him. And he soon perceived that a common soldier might as easily step from the ranks and set the battle in order as he, Arthur Vaughan, rise up, without farther training, and lead the attack or cover the defence. He sat soured and gloomy, a mere spectator; dwelling, even while he listened to the flowery periods of Macaulay, or the trenchant arguments of Peel, on the wrong done to himself by the disposal of his seat.
It was so like the Whigs, he told himself. Here on the floor of the House who so loud as they in defence of the purity of elections, of the people’s right to be represented, of the unbiassed vote of the electors? But behind the scenes they were as keenly bent on jobbing a seat here, or neutralising a seat there, and as careless of the people’s rights as they had ever been! It was atrocious, it was shameful! If this were political life, if this were political honesty, he had had enough of it!
But alas, though he said it in his anger, there was the rub! He had not had, and now he was not likely to have, enough of it. The hostility to himself, of which he had come slowly to be conscious, as a man grows slowly to perceive a frostiness in the air, had insensibly sapped his self-confidence and lowered his claims. He no longer dreamt of rising and outshining the chiefs of his party. But he still believed that he had it in him to succeed—were time given him. And all through the long hours of the three nights’ debates his thoughts were as often on his wrongs as on the momentous struggle which was passing before his eyes, and for the issue of which the clubs of London were keeping vigil.
But enthusiasm is infectious. And when the tellers for the last time walked up to the table, at five o’clock on the morning of the 22nd of September, with the grey light of daybreak stealing in to shame the candles and betray the jaded faces—when he and all men knew that for them the end of the great struggle was come—Vaughan waited breathless with the rest and strained his ears to catch the result. And when, a moment later, peal upon peal of fierce cheering shook the old panels in their frames, and being taken up by waiting crowds without, carried the news through the dawn to the very skirts of London—the news that Reform had passed the People’s House, and that only the peers now stood between the country and its desire—he shared the triumph and shouted with the rest, shook hands with exultant neighbours, and waved his hat, perspiring.
But in his case the feeling of exultation was short-lived; perhaps in the case of many another, who roared himself hoarse and showed a gleeful face to the daylight. Certainly it was something to have taken part in such a scene, the memory of which must survive for generations. It was something to have voted in such a division. He might talk of it in days to come to his grandchildren. But for him personally it meant that all was over; that here, if the Lords passed the Bill, was the end. A Dissolution must follow, and when the House met again, his place would know him no more. He would be gone, and no man would feel the blank.
Nor were less selfish doubts wanting. As he stood, caught in the press and awaiting his turn to leave the crowded House, his eyes rested on the pale, scowling faces which dotted the opposite benches; the faces of men who, honestly believing that here and now the old Constitution of England had got its deathblow, could not hide their bitter chagrin, or their scorn of the foe. Nor could he, at any rate, view those men without sympathy; without the possibility that they were right weighing on his spirits; without a faint apprehension that this might indeed be the beginning of decay, the starting point of that decadence which every generation since Queen Anne’s had foreseen. For if many on that side represented no one but themselves, they still represented vast interests, huge incomes, immense taxation. They were those who, if England sank, had most to lose. He, in the past, had given up almost his all that he might stand aloof from them; and that, because he thought them prejudiced, wrong-headed, unreasonable. But he respected them. And—what if they were right?
Meanwhile the persistent cheering of his friends began to jar on his tired nerves. He seemed to see in this a beginning of disorder, of license, of revolution, of all those evils which the other party foretold. And then he had little liking for the statistics of Hume: and Hume with his arm about his favourite pillar, was high among the triumphant. Hard by him again was the tall, thin form of Orator Hunt, for whom the Bill was too moderate; and the taller, thinner form of Burdett. They, crimson with shouting, were his partners in this; the bedfellows among whom his opinions had cast him.
Thinking such thoughts, he was among the last to leave the House, which he did by way of Westminster Hall. The scene as he descended to the Hall was so striking that he stood an instant on the steps to view it. The hither half of the great space was comparatively bare, but the farther half was occupied by a throng of people held back by a line of the New Police, who were doing all they could to keep a passage for the departing Members. As groups of the latter, after chatting awhile at the upper end, passed, conscious of the greatness of the occasion, down the lane thus formed, bursts of loud cheering greeted the better-known Reformers. Some of the more forward of those who waited shook hands with them, or patted them on the back; while others cried “God bless you, sir! Long life to you, sir!” On the other hand, an angry moan, or a spirit of hissing, marked the passage of a known Tory; or a voice was raised calling to these to bid the Lords beware. A few lamps, which had burned through the night, contended pallidly with the growing daylight, and gave to the scene that touch of obscurity, that mingling of light and shadow—under the dusky, far-receding roof—which is necessary to the picturesque.