The Secret Of The League Part 19

"I swear to do as you ask me. Go on quickly."

"To-night, now. Do not ... do not let ... do not wait...."

"Yes, yes. But the notes? Where are they? How am I to know them?" The voice was growing very thin and faltering, weaker with every word. The disappointment had sapped all its failing strength at a single blow.

"The notes ... yes. You will explain.... The black wall ... how it towers!..." He was whispering inaudibly.

Hampden leaned over the dying man in a final effort.

"Flak!" he cried, "the notes on the Unity League! Where are they?

Speak!"

"The envelope"--he caught a breath of sound--"... coat lining.... _I must go_!"

Twenty minutes later Sir John picked up his motor brougham in New Oxford Street. He had telephoned immediately on leaving Paradise Buildings for it to start out at once and wait for him near Mudie's corner. In Paradise Street he had seen a baccha.n.a.lian group surrounding "Mrs Flak,"

high priestess, who chanted a song in praise of home and the domestic virtues. It was at this point that he missed the ghoul-child from his side.

A south-east wind was carrying the midnight boom of the great clock at Westminster as far as Kilburn when he turned out of the High Road, and the little clocks around had taken up the chorus, like small dogs envious of the baying of a hound, as he stopped before the Home Secretary's house.

There was a light still burning in a room on the ground floor, and it was Mr Tubes himself who came to the door.

"I have to place in your hands an envelope of papers entrusted to me by a man called Flak who died in Paradise Street an hour ago," said Hampden, and with the act he brought his night of duty as a faithful servant of his Order to an end.

"Oh, that's you," said Mr Tubes, peering out into the darkness. "I had a wire about it. So the poor man is dead?"

"Yes," replied Hampden a shade drily. "The poor man is dead."

Mr Tubes fancied that he saw the lamps of a cab beyond his garden gate, and he wondered whether he was being expected to offer to pay the fare.

"Well, it's very good of you to take the trouble, though, between ourselves, I hardly imagine that the papers are likely to be of any importance," he remarked. "Now may I ask who I am indebted to?"

Hampden had already turned to go. He recognised that in the strife which he was about to precipitate, the man who stood there would be his natural antagonist, and he regretted that he could not find it in his nature to like him any better than he did.

"What I have done, I have done as a servant of the Order of St Martin,"

he replied. "What I am about to do," he added, "I shall do as Sir John Hampden."

And leaving Mr Tubes standing on the doorstep in vast surprise, the electric carriage turned its head-lights to the south again.

CHAPTER XII

BY TELESCRIBE

What Sir John Hampden was "about to do" he had decided in the course of the outward journey.

There was nothing in his actions, past or prospective, that struck him as illogical. He would have said, indeed, that they were the only possible outcome of the circ.u.mstance.

For the last four hours, as the nameless emissary of the Order to whose discipline he bound himself, he had merged every other feeling in his duty to the dying man and in the fulfilment of a death-bed charge.

That was over; now, as the President of the Unity

League, he was on his way to try by every means in his power to minimise the effect of what he had done; to antic.i.p.ate and counteract the value of the warning he had so scrupulously conveyed.

It was a fantastic predicament. He had sat for perhaps half an hour with the unsealed envelope in his pocket, and no eye had been upon him. He had declared pa.s.sionately, year after year, that cla.s.s and cla.s.s were now at war, that the time for courteous retaliation was long since past, that social martial law had been proclaimed. Yet as he drove back to Trafalgar Chambers he would have given a considerable sum of money--the League being not ill provided, say fifty thousand pounds--to know the extent of those notes.

When he reached the offices it was almost half-past twelve. Salt would be flying northward as fast as steam could take him, and for the next two hours at least, cut off from the possibility of any communication.

The burden of decision lay on Hampden alone.

He had already made it. Within an hour he would have pledged the League to a line of policy from which there was no retreat. Before another day had pa.s.sed the Government could recall the little band of secret service agents and consign their reports to the wastepaper basket. Every one would know everything. Everything? He smiled until the remembrance of that cheap frayed envelope in Mr Tubes's possession drove the smile away.

Next to his own office stood the instrument room. Here, behind double doors that deadened every sound, were ranged the telephones, the tape machines, the Fessenden-d'Arco installation, and that most modern development of wireless telegraphy which had come just in time to save the over-burdened postal system from chronic congestion, the telescribe.

Hampden had not appeared to move hurriedly, but it was just seventeen seconds after he had sent his brougham roving eastward that he stood before the telephone.

"1432 St Paul's, please."

There was a sound as of rus.h.i.+ng water and crackling underwood. Then the wire seemed to clear itself like a swimmer rising from the sea, and a quiet, far-away voice was whispering in his ear: "Yes, I'm Lidiat."

"I am at Trafalgar Chambers," said Hampden, after giving his name. "I want you to drop _anything_ you are on and come here. If my motor is not waiting for you at the corner of Chancery Lane, you will meet it along the Strand."

At the other end of the wire, Lidiat--the man who possessed the sixth code typewriter--looked rather blankly at his pipe, at the little silver carriage clock ticking on the mantelpiece, at the fluted white-ware coffee set, and at his crowded desk. Then, concluding that if the President of the Unity League sent a message of that kind after midnight and immediately rang off again he must have a good reason for it, he locked up his room as it stood, took up a few articles promiscuously from the rack in the hall, and walked out under the antique archway into Fleet Street.

In the meantime the Exchange was being urged to make another attempt to get on with "2743 Vincent," this time with success.

"Mr Salt is not 'ere, I repeat, sir," an indignant voice was protesting.

"He is out of town."

"Yes, yes, Dobson, I know," replied "St James's." "I am Sir John Hampden. What train did your master go by?"

"Beg pardon, sir," apologised "Vincent." "Didn't recognise your voice at first, Sir John. The wires here is 'issing 'orrible to-night. He went by the 10 o'clock from the Great Central, and told me to meet the 10.40 Midland to-morrow morning."

"He did actually go by the 10 train?"

"I 'anded him the despatch case through the carriage window not five minutes before the whistle went. He was sitting with his----"

"Thank you, Dobson. That's all I wanted to know. Sorry if you had to get up. Good night," and Sir John cut off a volume of amiable verbosity as he heard the bell of his Launceston ring in the street below.

"Fellow watching your place," said Lidiat, jerking his head in the direction of a doorway nearly opposite, as Hampden admitted him. Had he himself been the object of the watcher's attention it would have been less remarkable, for had not the time and the place been London after midnight, Lidiat's appearance must have been p.r.o.nounced bizarre.

Reasonable enough on all other points he had a fixed conviction that it was impossible for him to work after twelve o'clock at night unless he wore a red silk skull cap, flannels, and yellow Moorish slippers. Into this aesthetic costume he had changed half an hour before Hampden rang him up, and in it, with the addition of a very short overcoat and a silk hat that displayed an inch of red beneath the brim, he now stepped from the brougham, a large, bovine-looking man, perfectly bald, and still clinging to his pipe.

Hampden laughed contemptuously as he glanced across the street.

"They have put on half a dozen private enquiry men lately," he explained. "They are used to divorce, and their sole idea of the case seems to be summed up in the one stock phrase, 'watching the house.'

Possibly they expect to see us through the windows, making bombs. Why don't they watch Paris instead? Egyptian Three Per Cents. have gone up 75 francs in the last fortnight, all from there, and for no obvious reason."

Lidiat nodded weightily. "We stopped too much comment," he said. "Lift off?"