The stranger squared his shoulders and thrust his chin forward with an air of dogged ferocity. “We caame to get yes or noa,” he answered in a deep grumbling voice. “T’ letter saays soa.”
Henry Watkins started at this outburst in the negotiations and looked around him with an appearance of fright. In doing this he caught sight of Jeremy hesitating by the door, and whispered a word to the Speaker, who cried out, without moderating the violence of his tone: “There you are! Come here now, I want you.” And turning again to the strangers, he added, with an odd note of triumph: “This is Jeremy Tuft. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”
The strangers, who had not yet noticed Jeremy’s arrival, slewed around together and stared at him; and one of them said: “Oh, ay, we’ve heerd on him, reet enough.” The others at the table stared too, while Jeremy reluctantly advanced. But before he could speak, Henry Watkins sprang up and murmured importunately in the Speaker’s ear. Jeremy could catch the words:
“Talk privately ... before we decide....”
“Very well,” said the Speaker roughly, aloud. “Have it your own way. But I won’t change my mind.”
Henry Watkins returned to the table and addressed the strangers suavely: “The Speaker will give you his answer in a very short time,” he said. “Will you be so good as to withdraw while he considers it?” And, when they had uncouthly assented, he conducted them to the door, showed them into an ante-room, and returned, his face full of anxiety.
Jeremy stood apart in a condition of great discomfort. He realized that he was regarded by all, save the Speaker, as an intruder, the reason for whose presence none could conjecture. He was not relieved by the dubious glance which Henry Watkins threw at him before he began to speak. But the Speaker made no sign, and the anxious counselor proceeded, with an air of distraction and flurry.
“Think, sir,” he pleaded, “before you refuse. It is so grave a thing to begin again—after a hundred years. And who can tell what the end of it may be? We know that they are formidable——”
“All this is nonsense to Jeremy Tuft,” the Speaker interrupted harshly. “We must tell him what the matter is before we go any further.” Henry Watkins, with a movement of his hands, plainly expressed his opinion that there was no good reason why it should not all remain nonsense to Jeremy; and Jeremy felt slightly less at ease than before.
But the Speaker had begun to explain, with the sharp jerkiness of impatience in his voice: “We’ve had a message from the people up north. Perhaps you could see for yourself what sort of men they are. They are very unlike any one you have ever met here—rough, fierce, quarrelsome men. They have kept some of their machinery still going up there—in some of the towns they even work in factories. They have been growing more and more unlike us for a hundred years, and now the end has come—they want to force a quarrel on us. Do you understand?”