CHAPTER XII
BY TELESCRIBE
What Sir John Hampden was "about to do" he had decided in the course of the outward journey.
There was nothing in his actions, past or prospective, that struck him as illogical. He would have said, indeed, that they were the only possible outcome of the circumstance.
For the last four hours, as the nameless emissary of the Order to whose discipline he bound himself, he had merged every other feeling in his duty to the dying man and in the fulfilment of a death-bed charge.
That was over; now, as the President of the Unity
League, he was on his way to try by every means in his power to minimise the effect of what he had done; to anticipate and counteract the value of the warning he had so scrupulously conveyed.
It was a fantastic predicament. He had sat for perhaps half an hour with the unsealed envelope in his pocket, and no eye had been upon him. He had declared passionately, year after year, that class and class were now at war, that the time for courteous retaliation was long since past, that social martial law had been proclaimed. Yet as he drove back to Trafalgar Chambers he would have given a considerable sum of money—the League being not ill provided, say fifty thousand pounds—to know the extent of those notes.
When he reached the offices it was almost half-past twelve. Salt would be flying northward as fast as steam could take him, and for the next two hours at least, cut off from the possibility of any communication. The burden of decision lay on Hampden alone.