“Ay,” the sergeant answered morosely, “you may whistle. There’s some black business on foot, you may depend upon it. And ten to one it’s about my seat. He’s a broom,” he continued, tugging at the whiskers which the late King had stamped with the imprimatur of fashion, “that will make a clean sweep of us if we don’t take care. Whatever he does, there’s something behind it. Some bedchamber plot, or some intrigue to get A. out and put B. in. If it was a charwoman’s place he wanted, he’d not ask for it and get it. That wouldn’t please him. But he’d tunnel and tunnel and tunnel—and so he’d get it.”
“Still,” the other replied, with secret amusement—for he had no seat, and the woes of our friends, especially our better-placed friends, have their comic side—“I thought that you had a safe thing, Wathen? That old Vermuyden’s nomination at Chippinge was as good as an order on the Bank of England?”
“It was,” Wathen answered drily. “But with the country wild for the Bill, there’s no saying what may happen anywhere. Safe!” he continued, with a snarl. “Was there ever a safer seat than Westbury? Or a man who had a place in better order than old Lopes, who owned it, and died last month; taken from the evil to come, Jekyll said, for he never could have existed in a world without rotten boroughs! It’s not far from Chippinge, so I know—know it well. And I tell you his system was beautiful—beautiful! Yet when Peel was there—after he had rattled on the Catholic Claims and been thrown out at Oxford, Lopes made way for him, you remember?—he would not have got in, no, by G—d, he wouldn’t have got in if there had been a man against him. And the state in which the country was then, though there was a bit of a Protestant cry, too, wasn’t to compare with what it will be now. That man”—he shook his fist stealthily in the direction of the Chancellor’s Court—“has lighted a fire in England that will never be put out till it has consumed King, Lords, and Commons—ay, every stick and stone of the old Constitution. You take my word for it. And to think—to think,” he added still more savagely, “that it is the Whigs have done this. The Whigs! who own more than half the land in the country; who are prouder and stiffer than old George the Third himself; who wouldn’t let you nor me into their Cabinet to save our lives. By the Lord,” he concluded with gusto, “they’ll soon learn the difference!”
“In the meantime—there’ll be dead cats and bad eggs flying, you think?”
Wathen groaned. “If that were the end of it,” he said, “I’d not mind.”
“Still, with it all, you are pretty safe, I suppose?”
“With that fellow closeted with the Chancellor? No, no!”
“Who is the young spark!” the other asked carelessly. “He looked a decentish kind of fellow. A little of the prig, perhaps.”
“He’s that!” Wathen answered. “A d——d prig. What’s more, a cousin of old Vermuyden’s. And what’s worse, his heir. That’s why they put him in the corporation and made him one of the thirteen. Thought the vote safe in the family, you see? And cheaper?” He winked. “But there’s no love lost between him and old Sir Robert. A bed for a night once a year, and one day in the season among the turnips, and glad to see your back, my lad! That’s about the position. Now I wonder if Brougham is going to try—but Lord! there’s no guessing what is in that man’s head! He’s fuller of mischief than an egg of meat!”
The other was about to answer when one of the courts, in which a case of some difficulty had caused a late sitting, discharged its noisy, wrangling, perspiring crowd. The two stepped aside to avoid the evasion, and did not resume their talk. Wathen’s friend made his way out by the main door near which they had been standing; while the sergeant, with looks which mirrored the gloom that a hundred Tory faces wore on that day, betook himself to the robing-room. There he happened upon another unfortunate. They fell to talking, and their talk ran naturally upon the Chancellor, upon old Grey’s folly in letting himself be led by the nose by such a rogue; finally, upon the mistakes of their own party. They differed on the last topic, and in that natural and customary state we may leave them.