“Motht unthcrupulouth,� said Mr. Low virtuously.
Enoch Oates rose slowly like an enormous leviathan rising to the surface of the sea; his large sallow face had never changed in expression; but he had the air of one drifting dreamily away.
“Wal,� he said, “I dare say it’s true I’ve done some graft in my time, and a good many deals that weren’t what you might call modelled on the Sermon on the Mount. But if I smashed people, it was when they were all out to smash me; and if some of ’em were poor, they were the sort that were ready to shoot or knife or blow me to bits. And I tell you, in my country the whole lot of you would be liable to be lynched or tarred and feathered to-morrow, if you talked about lawyers taking away people’s land when once they’d got it. Maybe the English climate’s different, as you say; but I’m going to see it through. As for you, Mr. Rosenbaum——�
“My name is Low,� said the philanthropist. “I cannot thee why anyone should object to uthing my name.�
“Not on your life,� said Mr. Oates affably. “Seems to me a pretty appropriate name.�
He drifted heavily from the room, and the four other men were left, staring at a riddle.
“He’s going on with it, or, rather, they’re going on with it,� groaned Horace Hunter. “And what the devil is to be done now?�
“It really looks as if he were right in calling it too late,� said Lord Normantowers bitterly. “I can’t think of anything to be done.�
“I can,� said the Prime Minister. They all looked at him; but none of them could read the undecipherable subtleties in his old and wrinkled face under his youthful yellow hair.
“The resources of civilization are not exhausted,� he said grimly. “That’s what the old governments used to say when they started shooting people. Well, I could understand you gentlemen feeling inclined to shoot people now. I suppose it seems to you that all your power in the State, which you wield with such public spirit of course; all Sir Horace’s health reforms, the Normantowers’s new estate, and so on, are all broken to bits, to rotten little bits of rusticity. What’s to become of a governing class if it doesn’t hold all the land, eh? Well, I’ll tell you. I know the next move, and the time has come to take it.�