“The Canadians, as every one knows, are the best soldiers in the world,” the Speaker interpolated. “They are always fighting.”
“And whom do you fight?” Jeremy asked.
“Oh, anybody.... You see, the people to the south of us are always quarreling among themselves, and we chip in. And then sometimes we send armies down to Mexico or the Isthmus.”
“But the people to the south ...” Jeremy began. “Haven’t you still got the United States to the south of you? And I should have thought they’d be too many for you?”
“There are no United States now—I’ve heard of them.” Thomas Wells’s dislike of Jeremy seemed to have been overcome by a swelling impulse of boastfulness. “From what I can make out, they never did get their people in hand as we did. They’ve always been disturbed. Their leaders don’t last long, and they fight one another. And we’re always growing in numbers and getting harder, while they get fewer and softer. Why, they’re easy fruit!”
Jeremy could find nothing for this but polite and impressed assent. Thomas Wells allowed his lean face to be split by a startling grin and went on: “I suppose you’ve never heard of me? No! Well, I’m not like these people here. I was brought up to fight. My dad fought his way to the top. His dad was a small man, out Edmonton way, with not more than two or three thousand bayonets. But he kept at it, and now none of the Bosses in Canada are bigger than we are. It was me that led the raid on Boston when I was only twenty.”
Jeremy turned aside from the last announcement with a feeling of disgust. He thought that Thomas Wells looked like some small blood-thirsty animal, a ferret or a stoat, with pale burning eyes and thin stretched mouth that sought the throat of a living creature. He was saved from the necessity for an answer by the Canadian turning sharply on his heel, as though something had touched a spring in his body. Jeremy followed the movement with his eyes and saw the Lady Eva making her way towards them through the crowd.
Thomas Wells went to meet her with an air of exaggerated gallantry, and murmured something with his bow. She seemed to be to-day in a mood of modest behavior, for she received his salutation with downcast eyes and no more than a movement of the lips. As he watched them Jeremy again became aware of the Speaker standing beside him, whom he had for a moment forgotten. He stole a look at the old man and saw that his brow was troubled and that, though his hands were clasped behind his back in an apparently careless attitude, the fingers were clenched and the knuckles white. As he registered these impressions, the Lady Eva, still with downward glance, sailed past Thomas Wells and approached him. When he saw her intention, a faint disturbance sprang up in his heart and interfered with his breathing.
She had already halted beside him when he realized that now, in the presence of this company, her deportment being what it was, he must make the first speech. He stuttered awkwardly and said: “I have been hoping to see you again.”
She raised her eyes a trifle, and he fancied that he saw the shadow of a smile in the corners of her mouth. Her reply was pitched in so low a tone as to be at first incomprehensible, and there followed a moment of emptiness before he realized that she had said, “You have been with Roger Vaile.”