“Yes ...” Jeremy murmured doubtfully in the pause.
“Well, I was wrong. It seems that a survivor got away to the west this morning, apparently just after Thomas Wells took the Chairman prisoner. I don’t know how he went. I think he must have got on to the railway somewhere and found an engine ready to move. He could hardly have moved so fast otherwise. Anyway, he found the President, with the greater part of his army, at Oxford—and the President has sent a letter to me. It reached me only a few minutes ago.” He stopped and ran a hand through his beard, regarding Jeremy thoughtfully with tranquil eyes.
“Go on ... go on,” Jeremy whispered tensely.
“That was quick work, wasn’t it?” the Speaker ruminated. “He can’t have started before seven this morning, because I’m sure the Chairman wasn’t taken till then. The letter reached me here at a quarter to midnight—less than seventeen hours. The President was in a great hurry—I know him well, I can see him raging.” He checked himself and smiled at Jeremy with a kind of genial malice. “You want to know what he said in his letter? Well, he warned me that he would hold me responsible for the Chairman’s safe-keeping; and he summoned me to a conference at Oxford where the three of us were to settle our differences and rearrange the affairs of the country.”
“And what answer will you make?” Jeremy managed to utter.
“I have ordered the messenger to be flogged by the grooms,” the Speaker replied composedly. “I expect that they are flogging him now. The only other answer we have to give, Jeremy, will be delivered by your guns.”
“But this is terrible,” Jeremy cried, springing up from his chair. “You don’t understand——”
“Rubbish, my friend,” the old man interrupted with an air of serene commonsense. “It means only that the President does not know what has happened. If he still wishes to fight when he knows—why, then we will fight him. I hope he will wish it. Perhaps when he is broken we shall have peace forever.”
Jeremy walked three or four times up and down the room, pressing his hands together and trying vainly by a violent tension of all his muscles to regain his composure.
“You don’t understand a bit,” he burst out at last, “what luck it all was. I tell you it was luck, merely luck....” He stopped, stumbling and stuttering, so much confounded by this unexpected and horrible menace to his happiness, that he was unable to frame any words of explanation.