becomes still and tense, and you can
hear a pin drop. It is the prompt and sometimes almost irresistible
expression of the feeling that Destiny is throwing the die, and that you
have to watch the grim and fateful result.

[Sidenote: The Treasury Bench looks awkward.]

And if you looked on the Treasury Bench, you could see that the feeling
was not altogether comfortable. It was no secret that the ninth clause
was the one which offered to the Government the one perilous fence they
had still to take--that is to say, so far as their own followers were
concerned. Hitherto the attitude of the Government was quite unknown;
and, indeed, it was quite probable that the Government themselves had
not finally decided what their attitude should be. But when Mr.
Gladstone--pale, excited, and angry--jumped in with this outburst, it
seemed all at once as if the fateful and final word of Destiny had been
spoken, and as if the whole fate of Ireland, of Mr. Gladstone, of this
great Ministry, and of this mighty Bill, had been definitely pledged to
one throw of the dice. Imagine one of those contests which you find in
the pages of Turgenieff or Tolstoi, which perchance you may have seen at
Monte Carlo, which in the last few days may have been observed at Epsom
Downs--in which life or death, ruin or halcyon fortune, depended on one
throw--and you can have some sense of all that passed through the
imagination of the House and that made it almost audibly shiver when Mr.
Gladstone made this slight and terse interruption. Mr. Morley's
face--serious, often sombre--cast in a mould and reflective of a soul
inclined to the darker rather than the more cheerful view of life's
tangled and unsatisfactory workings--grew black and troubled; the other
Ministers who were present looked--not so eloquently, but still
perceptibly--uncomfortable; Mr. Asquith--who had been a close
observer--could not keep his keen anxiety from breaking through the mask
of easy equanimity with which he is able to clothe his readiness to meet
fortune in all her moods; in short, it was for Ministerialists one of
those uncomfortable quarters of an hour in which life seems to
concentrate all its bitterness, sorrow, and anxieties within a terribly
brief space of time. And if you wanted to know further what was the full
significance of what had taken place, you saw it in the open and almost
indecent joy of Mr. Chamberlain's face; in the more subdued but a still
unctuous look of Mr. Co