“Too thin for a prospectus,” said Aldgate East, weighing the letter in his hand.
“Patent medicine, then,” persisted the light of Brondesbury. “I get one every morning—‘Don’t burn the candle at both ends’, and all that sort of rot. Last week a feller sent me——”
“Open it,” someone suggested, and the member obeyed. He read a few lines and turned red.
“Well, I’m damned!” he gasped, and read aloud:
Citizens,
The Government is about to pass into law a measure which will place in the hands of the most evil Government of modern times men who are patriots and who are destined to be the saviours of their countries. We have informed the Minister in charge of this measure, the title of which appears in the margin, that unless he withdraws this Bill we will surely slay him.
We are loath to take this extreme step, knowing that otherwise he is an honest and brave gentleman, and it is with a desire to avoid fulfilling our promise that we ask the members of the Mother of Parliaments to use their every influence to force the withdrawal of this Bill.
Were we common murderers or clumsy anarchists we could with ease wreak a blind and indiscriminate vengeance on the members of this assembly, and in proof thereof, and as an earnest that our threat is no idle one, we beg you to search beneath the table near the recess in this room. There you will find a machine sufficiently charged to destroy the greater portion of this building.
(Signed)
Four Just Men
Postscript.—We have not placed either detonator or fuse in the machine, which may therefore be handled with impunity.
As the reading of the letter proceeded the faces of the listeners grew pallid.
There was something very convincing about the tone of the letter, and instinctively all eyes sought the table near the recess.
Yes, there was something, a square black something, and the crowd of legislators shrank back. For a moment they stood spellbound—and then there was a mad rush for the door.
“Was it a hoax?” asked the prime minister anxiously, but the hastily summoned expert from Scotland Yard shook his head.
“Just as the letter described it,” he said gravely, “even to the absence of fuses.”
“Was it really——”
“Enough to wreck the House, sir,” was the reply.
The premier, with a troubled face, paced the floor of his private room.
He stopped once to look moodily through the window that gave a view of a crowded terrace and a mass of excited politicians gesticulating and evidently all speaking at once.
“Very, very serious—very, very serious,” he muttered. Then aloud, “We said so much we might as well continue. Give the newspapers as full an account of this afternoon’s happenings as they think necessary—give them the text of the letter.” He pushed a button and his secretary entered noiselessly.
“Write to the Commissioner telling him to offer a reward of a thousand pounds for the arrest of the man who left this thing and a free pardon and the reward to any accomplice.”
The Secretary withdrew and the Scotland Yard expert waited.
“Have your people found how the machine was introduced?”
“No, sir; the police have all been relieved and been subjected to separate interrogation. They remember seeing no stranger either entering or leaving the House.”
The Premier pursed his lips in thought.
“Thank you,” he said simply, and the expert withdrew.
On the terrace Aldgate East and the oratorical member divided honours.
“I must have been standing quite close to it,” said the latter impressively; “ ’pon my word it makes me go cold all over to think about it. You remember, Mellin? I was saying about the duty of the Ministry——”
“I asked the waiter,” said the member for Aldgate to an interested circle, “when he brought the letter: ‘Where did you find it?’ ‘On the floor, sir!’ he said. I thought it was a medicine advertisement; I wasn’t going to open it, only somebody——”
“It was me,” claimed the stout gentleman from Brondesbury proudly; “you remember I was saying——”
“I knew it was somebody,” continued Aldgate East graciously. “I opened it and read the first few lines. ‘Bless my soul,’ I said——”
“You said, ‘Well, I’m damned,’ ” corrected Brondesbury.
“Well, I know it was something very much to the point,” admitted Aldgate East. “I read it—and, you’ll quite understand, I couldn’t grasp its significance, so to speak. Well—”
The three stalls reserved at the Star Music Hall in Oxford Street were occupied one by one. At half past seven prompt came Manfred, dressed quietly; at eight came Poiccart, a fairly prosperous middle-aged gentleman; at half past eight came Gonsalez, asking in perfect English for a programme. He seated himself between the two others.
When pit and gallery were roaring themselves hoarse over a patriotic song, Manfred smilingly turned to Leon, and said:
“I saw it in the evening papers.”
Leon nodded quickly.
“There was nearly trouble,” he said quietly. “As I went in somebody said, ‘I thought Bascoe had paired,’ and one of them almost came up to me and spoke.”
CHAPTER IV ONE THOUSAND POUNDS REWARD
To say that England was stirred to its depths—to quote more than one leading article on the subject—by the extraordinary occurrence in the House of Commons, would be stating the matter exactly.
The first intimation of the existence of the Four Just Men had been received with pardonable derision, particularly by those newspapers that were behindhand with the first news. Only the Daily Megaphone had truly and earnestly recognised how real was the danger which threatened the Minister in charge of the obnoxious Act. Now, however, even the most scornful could not ignore the significance of the communication that had so mysteriously found its way into the very heart of Britain’s most jealously guarded institution. The story of the “Bomb Outrage” filled the pages of every newspaper throughout the country, and the latest daring venture of the Four was placarded the length and breadth of the Isles.
Stories, mostly apocryphal, of the men who were responsible for the newest sensation made their appearance from day to day, and there was no other topic in the mouths of men wherever they met but the strange quartet who seemed to hold the lives of the mighty in the hollows of their hands.
Never since the days of the Fenian outrages had the mind of the public been so filled with apprehension as it was during the two days following the appearance in the Commons of the “blank bomb,” as one journal felicitously described it. Perhaps in exactly the same kind of apprehension, since there was a general belief, which grew out of the trend of the letters, that the Four menaced none other than one man.
The first intimation of their intentions had excited widespread interest. But the fact that the threat had been launched from a small French town, and that in consequence the danger was very remote, had somehow robbed the threat of some of its force. Such was the vague reasoning of