"Jim!" she exclaimed, "Look! Look!"
I saw the line of fire and the policemen"s saddles emptying fast. The people were closing round the building. Guest stood frowning by our side.
"This is what comes," he said, "of making London the asylum for all the foreign sc.u.m of the earth. How goes it, Courage?"
"Staunton is still writing, and the machinery is untouched."
"For how long, I wonder," he muttered. "The police are going over like ninepins."
I looked below longingly, for my blood was up. It was no ordinary mob this. They were beginning to fire in volleys now, and leaders were springing up. As far as we could see there was a panorama of white faces.
It was easy to understand what had happened. We had been followed, and our purpose guessed. Tomorrow"s edition of the _Daily Oracle_ was never meant to appear!
"The place will be at their mercy in another few minutes," Guest said gloomily. "Twenty-four hours ago who would have dared to predict a riot like this, in London of all places? Not all the police in Scotland Yard would be of any avail against this mob."
"They may stop the paper," I said; "but Staunton"s word--and these events--should go for something with Polloch."
Guest looked at me and away out of the window. Adele was behind us, and out of hearing.
"Do you suppose," he said in a low tone, "that Staunton or any of us are meant to leave this place alive? I am afraid our friends below know too well what they are doing."
The door opened, and Staunton himself appeared. He looked years older than the strong, debonair man to whom I had told my story a few hours ago, but in his face was none of the despair which I had feared. He was pale, and his eyes were shining with suppressed excitement, but he had by no means the air of a beaten man. He came over to where we were standing.
"It is finished," he said calmly. "I read your story in print."
"Magnificent," I murmured, "but look! Do you think that a single copy will ever leave this place?"
He stood looking downwards with darkening face. For several moments he was silent.
"Look at them!" he muttered. "At last! The tocsin has sounded, and the rats have come out of their holes! Half a million and more of sc.u.m eating their way into the entrails of this great city of ours. For years we have tried to make the government see the danger of it. It is our cursed British arrogance which has shut the ears and closed the eyes of the men who govern our destinies. Supposing your invasion should take place, who is going to keep them in check? The sack of London would be well on its way before ever a German soldier set foot upon our coast."
"The question for the moment," I remarked, "seems to be how long before the sack of this place takes place. Look, the police are falling back.
The mob are closing in the street!"
Staunton was unmoved.
"The soldiers are on their way," he answered. "We received a message just now by the private wire. The other has been cut. Look! My G.o.d, they"ve brought the guns! There are some men at headquarters who are not fools."
We pressed close to the windows, and indeed it was a wonderful sight.
From the far end of the street, where the police had retreated, men were flying in all directions. We caught a gleam of scarlet and a vision of grey horses. There was no parley. The dead bodies of the police in all directions, and the crack of the rifles, were sufficient. We saw the gleam of fire, and we heard the most terrible of all sounds--the quick spit-spit of the maxims. I drew Adele away from the window.
"Don"t look, dear," I said, for already the ranks of the mob were riven.
We saw the upflung hands, we heard their death cries. Leaders leaped up, shouting orders, only to go down like ninepins as the line of fire reached them. There was no hope for them or any salvation save flight.
Before our eyes we saw that great concourse melt away, like snow before the midday sun. Staunton drew a great breath of relief.
"In half an hour," he said, turning abruptly to Adele, "I will present you with a copy of the _Daily Oracle_."
CHAPTER XL
_THE ORACLE_ SPEAKS
The issue of the _Daily Oracle_ which appeared on the following, or rather the same, morning electrified Europe. Nothing like it had been known in the memory of man. For one halfpenny, the city clerk, the millionaire, and the politician were alike treated to a sensation which, since the days of Caxton, has known no parallel. The whole of the front page of the paper was devoted to a leading article, printed in large type, and these questions were the text of what followed:
"1. Do the Government know that within eighty miles of Kiel are one hundred and eighty thousand troops, with guns and all the munitions of war, a.s.sembled there for the purpose of an immediate invasion of England, a.s.sembled partly in secrecy, and partly under the ridiculous pretexts of manoeuvres?
"2. Do the Government know that it is a skeleton fleet, the weedings of the German navy, which awaits our squadron in Kiel waters, and that the remainder of the German fleet, at its full strength and ready for action, is lying in hiding close at hand?
"3. That there exists in London, under the peaceful guise of a trade union, an army of nearly 200,000 Germans, who have pa.s.sed their training, and that a complete scheme exists for arming and officering same at practically a moment"s notice?
"4. That a German army is even now ma.s.sed upon the French frontier, prepared to support the claims to the throne of France of Prince Victor of Normandy, and that a conspiracy has been discovered within the last forty-eight hours amongst the French army, to suffer an invasion of their country on this pretext?
"5. That an American paper is to-day publishing the names of some of her richest citizens, who are finding the money for French Royalist agents, to buy over the wavering officers of the army of our ally, the army of the French Republic!
"There is ignorance which is folly," the article went on, "and ignorance which is sin. The Government have proved themselves guilty of the first; if they show themselves guilty also of the second, the people of this country have the right to hurl from their places the fools who have brought them to the brink of disaster, and to save themselves. In their name, we demand two things:
"The dispatch of a gunboat with orders to the Channel Squadron to at once return to their waters.
"The mobilization of our Mediterranean Fleet."
With this text Staunton had written his article, and he had written it with a pen of fire. Every word burned its way home. With the daring of those few hours of inspiration, he had turned inference into fact, he had written as a man who sees face to face the things of which he writes.
There could be but one result. At ten o"clock a Cabinet Council was called, and Staunton was telephoned for. Before midday, everything that he had suggested was done.
Even then, we knew that the question of peace or war must be trembling in the balance.
"Let it come if it will," Guest declared from his easy-chair in Gilbert"s study, "the great plot is smashed. I pledge you my word that to-morrow the German newspapers will hold us up to scorn, will seek to make of us the laughing-stock of the world. They will explain everything. There will be no war. A German invasion of England is only possible by intrigues which will keep France apart, and treachery which will render our fleet ineffective. This plot has taken five years to develop, and I have been on its track from the first. Thank G.o.d, I can call myself square now with the past! ..."
There was no war, but the laughter of the German newspapers was a little hysterical. The Press of the world took the matter more seriously. But there was no war, and there are people even to-day, mostly his journalistic enemies, who say that Staunton was hoaxed.
"Do we receive our deserts in this world?" some one asked one night, when our dinner table at Saxby was like a suggestion of old times--and we all paused to think.
"Staunton has a peerage," Adele remarked.
"Luckier than I," Guest laughed; only he called himself Guest no longer, but Lord Leslie Wendover. "My past disgrace had to be wiped out by an invitation to Windsor and a ribbon. Such are the ways of diplomacy, which never dare own a mistake."
"The amazing denseness of the man!" his wife murmured. "Do I count for nothing?"
He bent and touched her hand with his lips, as Adele leaned forward and laughed at me across the table.
"I think," she said; "that you both deserve--what you got--us!"