“I told you, sir, I told you how it would be,” said Henry Watkins at once in a voice like the insistent notes of a tolling bell.
The Speaker made an abrupt gesture. “You have heard then?” he asked sharply.
“We passed a man outside, sir, in the courtyard, lying on the ground beside his tethered horse,” John Hammond interposed, “and we made inquiries while we were waiting to be brought in to you.”
“I have made no secret of it,” the Speaker said simply. “Every waking man in the Treasury may know all about it by now. Well, then....” And in his deliberate and unconcerned manner he repeated to them the same story that he had told to Jeremy. “Nor am I sorry for it,” he concluded. “It is as well that we should be done with all this at once, as I think we shall be.”
When he had finished the Canadian shifted slightly in his chair. “You say they are at Oxford now?” he asked, his voice a little muffled by the thick fur that brushed his lips. The Speaker assented. “And the Gloucestershire men have joined them?” Again the Speaker assented. “Ah!” murmured the Canadian enigmatically; and he seemed to sink further into the folds of his gown, as though he were preparing himself for sleep.
Henry Watkins and John Hammond made no answer, but looked at one another lugubriously.
“Come, gentlemen,” the Speaker cried heartily. “We know now that we have nothing to be afraid of. I have determined that Jeremy Tuft shall take command of the whole army; and I am sure that the man who saved us this morning can save us again.”
“Ah, that is a good plan,” observed John Hammond sagely. He was a heavy man of slow speech, and he wagged his head solemnly while he talked. “Jeremy Tuft will command the whole army. That is a very good plan.”
“We could not do better,” said Henry Watkins with an approach to cheerfulness.
Jeremy fancied that he heard Thomas Wells sniff under his wrappings; and the justice of the implied criticism twitched horribly at his nerves. He stared out of the window into the blackness, a resolve taking shape in his mind. At last he stood up deliberately and spoke with a roughness, almost arrogance, that he certainly did not feel.