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.
