‘Dig up the dead, eh? That was the mediæval notion. You tar and feather their corpses, and you hang them in chains: most indecent, and no good to anybody. One of them is here now,—“The Man in the Iron Mask” as we call him,—a much improved character, his world-politics a failure, they no longer interest him; he plays on the French horn,—badly, but it amuses him; when he strikes a false note he calls it the Double Entente. He means that for a joke. He says they may dig him up and hang him in chains of iron, or brass, or glass-lustre, or daisies, or anything else if it amuses them. But you are not proposing to hang anybody, are you?’
Mr. Trimblerigg, voicing his notion in the scriptural phraseology which had prompted it, explained that skinning for the one, and hewing, not hanging, for the other was the process proposed.
‘Who is your man?’ the Voice inquired sharply.
Agag was indicated.
Came a dead pause; then, very emphatically, ‘I won’t have him here!’ said the Voice.
Here? His auditors looked at each other in consternation.
What on earth, or above earth, or under earth, did ‘here’ mean?
The Prime Minister and Mr. Trimblerigg had both by now become convinced that they were in the actual Presence that had been promised them. But they could not admit to the world, or even to themselves, that there was a possibility of Agag going to the place where the Presence was supposed to be; or of the Presence being in the place where Agag was supposed to be going. They sat like cornered conspirators.
‘I won’t have it!’ said the Voice, almost violently. ‘We are not on speaking terms. He and I do not get on together. Send him to Eliza: she’ll manage him!’
This was more awful still. The Presence and ‘Eliza’, it seemed, were not in that happy reunion which for Christian families is the expected thing. Yet as to where Eliza had gone no reasonable doubt was possible.