“Tonight we aim a blow at these enemies of progress; if they have been merciless, let us show them that the Red Hundred is not to be outdone in ferocity. As they struck, so let us strike—and, in striking, read a lesson to the men who killed our comrades, that they, nor the world, will ever forget.”
There was no cheering as she finished—that had been the order—but a hum of words as they flung their tributes of words at her feet—a ruck of incoherent phrases of praise and adoration.
Then two men led in the prisoner.
He was calm and interested, throwing out his square chin resolutely when the first words of the charge were called and twiddling the fingers of his bound hands absently.
He met the scowling faces turned to him serenely, but as they proceeded with the indictment, he grew attentive, bending his head to catch the words.
Once he interrupted.
“I cannot quite understand that,” he said in fluent Russian, “my knowledge of German is limited.”
“What is your nationality?” demanded the woman.
“English,” he replied.
“Do you speak French?” she asked.
“I am learning,” he said naively, and smiled.
“You speak Russian,” she said. Her conversation was carried on in that tongue.
“Yes,” he said simply; “I was there for many years.”
After this, the sum of his transgressions were pronounced in a language he understood. Once or twice as the reader proceeded—it was Ivan Oranvitch who read—the man smiled.
The Woman of Gratz recognized him instantly as the fourth of the party that gathered about her door the day Bartholomew was murdered. Formally she asked him what he had to say before he was condemned.
He smiled again.
“I am not one of the Four Just Men,” he said; “whoever says I am—lies.”
“And is that all you have to say?” she asked scornfully.
“That is all,” was his calm reply.
“Do you deny that you helped slay our comrade Starque?”
“I do not deny it,” he said easily, “I did not help—I killed him.”
“Ah!” the exclamation came simultaneously from every throat.
“Do you deny that you have killed many of the Red Hundred?”
He paused before he answered.
“As to the Red Hundred—I do not know; but I have killed many people.” He spoke with the grave air of a man filled with a sense of responsibility, and again the exclamatory hum ran through the hall. Yet, the Woman of Gratz had a growing sense of unrest in spite of the success of the examination.
“You have said you were in Russia—did men fall to your hand there?”
He nodded.
“And in England?”
“Also in England,” he said.
“What is your name?” she asked. By an oversight it was a question she had not put before.
The man shrugged his shoulders.
“Does it matter?” he asked. A thought struck her. In the hall she had seen Magnus the Jew. He had lived for many years in England, and she beckoned him.
“Of what class is this man?” she asked in a whisper.
“Of the lower orders,” he replied; “it is astounding—did you not notice when—no, you did not see his capture. But he spoke like a man of the streets, dropping his aspirates.”
He saw she looked puzzled and explained.
“It is a trick of the order—just as the Muzhik says. …” he treated her to a specimen of colloquial Russian.
“What is your name?” she asked again.
He looked at her slyly.
“In Russia they called me Father Kopab.”1
The majority of those who were present were Russian, and at the word they sprang to their feet, shrinking back with ashen faces, as though they feared contact with the man who stood bound and helpless in the middle of the room.
The Woman of Gratz had risen with the rest. Her lips quivered and her wide open eyes spoke her momentary terror.
“I killed Starque,” he went on, “by authority. François also. Some day”—he looked leisurely about the room—“I shall also—”
“Stop!” she cried, and then:
“Release him,” she said, and, wonderingly, Schmidt cut the bonds that bound him. He stretched himself.
“When you took me,” he said, “I had a book; you will understand that here in England I find—forgetfulness in books—and I, who have seen so much suffering and want caused through departure from the law, am striving as hard for the regeneration of mankind as you—but differently.”
Somebody handed him a book.
He looked at it, nodded, and slipped it into his pocket.
“Farewell,” he said as he turned to the open door.
“In God’s name!” said the Woman of Gratz, trembling, “go in peace, Little Father.”
And the man Jessen, sometime headsman to the Supreme Council, and latterly public executioner of England, walked out, no man barring his exit.
The power of the Red Hundred was broken. This much Falmouth knew. He kept an ever-vigilant band of men on duty at the great termini of London, and to these were attached the members of a dozen secret police forces of Europe. Day by day, there was the same report to make. Such and such a man, whose very presence in London had been unsuspected, had left via Harwich. So-and-so, surprisingly sprung from nowhere, had gone by the eleven o’clock train from Victoria; by the Hull and Stockholm route twenty had gone in one day, and there were others who made Liverpool, Glasgow, and Newcastle their port of embarkation.
I think that it was only then that Scotland Yard realized the strength of the force that had lain inert in the metropolis, or appreciated the possibilities for destruction that had been to hand in the days of the Terror.
Certainly every batch of names that appeared on the commissioner’s desk made him more thoughtful than ever.
“Arrest them!” he said in horror when the suggestion was made. “Arrest them! Look here, have you ever seen driver ants attack a house in Africa? Marching in, in endless battalions at midnight and clearing out everything living from chickens to beetles? Have you ever seen them reform in the morning and go marching home again? You wouldn’t think of arresting ’em, would you? No, you’d just sit down quietly out of their reach and
