“You'll get an anarchist,” said Willy Cameron, slightly flushed.
“If you want my opinion, young man, this is a trick, a political trick. And how do we know that your Vigilance Committee isn't a trick, too? You try to tell us that there is an organized movement here to do heaven knows what, and by sheer terror you build up a machine which appeals to the public imagination. You don't say anything about votes, but you see that they vote for your man. Isn't that true?”
“Yes. If they can keep an anarchist out of office. Akers is an anarchist. He calls himself something else, but that's what it amounts to. And those bombs last night were not imaginary.”
The introduction of Louis Akers' name had a sobering effect on Anthony Cardew. After all, more than anything else, he wanted Akers defeated. The discussion slowly lost its acrimony, and ended, oddly enough, in Willy Cameron and Anthony Cardew virtually uniting against Howard. What Willy Cameron told about Jim Doyle fed the old man's hatred of his daughter's husband, and there was something very convincing about Cameron himself. Something of fearlessness and honesty that began, slowly, to dispose Anthony in his favor.
It was Howard who held out.
“If I quit now it will look as though I didn't want to take a licking,” he said, quietly obstinate. “Grant your point, that I'm defeated. All right, I'll be defeated—but I won't quit.”
And Anthony Cardew, confronted by that very quality of obstinacy which had been his own weapon for so many years, retired in high dudgeon to his upper rooms. He was living in a strange new world, a reasonable soul on an unreasonable earth, an earth where a man's last sanctuary, his club, was blown up about him, and a man's family apparently lived only to thwart him.
With Anthony gone, Howard dropped the discussion with the air of a man who has made a final stand.
“What you have said about Mr. Doyle interests me greatly,” he observed, “because—you probably do not know this—my sister married him some years ago. It was a most unhappy affair.”
“I do know it. For that reason I am glad that Miss Lily has come home.”