This time there was no mistaking the accuracy with which he had gauged the minds of his associates.
“One thing remains to be decided: a plan of action, something which will demand all that we have of imagination, ingenuity, common sense, and far prevision. We can afford to waste not a single ounce of strength: the blow, when we strike, must be sudden, sharp, merciless—irresistible. But if Thirteen is not over-confident of the discovery which he says he has to-day perfected, the means to deal just such a blow is ready to our hands.... Thirteen?”
A nod and gracious smile invited that one to speak. He rose, trembling a little with excitement, bowed to Number One and, delving into capacious pockets, produced a number of small tin canisters together with three sealed bottles of brown glass. Surveying these, as he arranged them on the teakwood table before him, he smiled a little to himself: the stars, it seemed to him, were warring in their courses in his behalf; this was to prove his hour of hours.
He began to speak in a quivering voice which soon grew more steady.
“It is true, Excellency—it is true, comrades—I have perfected a discovery which I offer as a free gift to the cause, and by means of which, intelligently employed, we can, if we will, make all London a graveyard. Put the resources of this organization at my command, give me a week to make the essential preparations, select a time of national crisis when the Houses of Parliament are sitting and the Cabinet meets in Downing Street with the King attending or in Buckingham Palace ...”
He paused and held the pause with a keen feeling for dramatic effect, his eyes seeking in turn the faces of his fellow conspirators, an insuppressible grin of malicious exultation twisting his scornful and mutinous mouth.
“Let this be done,” he concluded, “and by means of these few tins and bottles which you see before you, in one brief hour the ruling classes will have perished almost to a man, there will be no more government of a tyrannical bourgeoisie to grind down the proletariat, a bloodless revolution will have made England the cradle of the new liberty!”
“Bloodless?” the man on the dais repeated; and even he was seen perceptibly to shudder at the prospect unfolded to the vision of his mind. “Yes—but more terrible than the massacre of the Huguenots, more savage than the French Revolution!”
“But I believe,” the inventor commented, “your Excellency said we required the means to deal a ‘blow sudden, sharp, merciless—irresistible’.”
“Surely now,” the Irishman suggested, mockingly—where a wiser man would have held his tongue—“you’ll not be sticking at a small matter like wholesale murder if it’s to make us masters of England?”