CHAPTER VIII

SIR JOHN BREAKS DOWN

John Westwood was the son of a solicitor, and paternal influence gave him his first start at the Bar. A patient, strenuous, and able man, he missed no chance. The crest of a political wave carried him into Parliament, and, unlike most lawyers, he became a House of Commons success. Successful in love, as in forensic war and party politics, he won a wife who was wooed at the same time by a lover mad in his worship and passion, wholly different in all respects from the cold and more calculating rival, whose methods and success the rejected lover never forgot nor forgave.

Marcus White, after the episode already chronicled, took his headlong way beyond the ken of all his English associates. He was heard of as having made a huge fortune in Mexico, a country offering far more scope for a man of such drastic methods and daring enterprise. Westwood stayed at home and plodded on. After his marriage, and when, as yet, briefs were far from plentiful, he and his wife lived in quite a quiet middle-class way at Norwood. He came to London every day, and took his meagre luncheon daily like any other grubbing barrister at a stuffy restaurant in Fleet Street. To find on his table a brief marked ten and one was quite a rare and gladdening event. In the general way prices ruled considerably lower in his chambers. But it was otherwise after he had entered Parliament. Ten years later there was a shuffling of parties, and John Westwood, who had taken silk, shot into the very bull’s-eye of political life. The prophets said that he would reach the Woolsack; but, meanwhile, sundry faithful if dull members of the bar and of the party blocked the way. The Chancellor clung to life and office with a tenacity which upset all calculations. The Attorney-General, too, refused to recognise the grave complaint from which he suffered as an equivalent to notice to quit. Other Government appointments were, in omnibus language, “full up,” and John Westwood, K.C., M.P., had to be content with a knighthood and the office of Solicitor-General. But his income and fees amounted to some ten thousand a year, and he was a man of thrifty habits, and saved considerably.

Yet a price has to be paid by the man who burns the candle at both ends--in Parliament and in the Law Courts. It is the kind of double life that kills all but the toughest, and Sir John was far from tough. Affairs of state were critical, and at this crisis his “sword hung rusting on the wall,” while he was urgently wanted at Westminster. He was still lingering at Folkestone when delicate problems of international law demanded all the acumen that his brain could bring to bear. The Prime Minister almost implored his assistance, but, the specialist who had come down to the Métropole to see him asserted bluntly that it would be more than his sanity, or perhaps his life, could stand if yet awhile he plunged back into the quagmire of jurisprudence or the sea of party strife.

Such was the man who paced with restless steps the room of the hotel that summer night. On the table were despatch boxes, blue books, blue draft papers, and bulky volumes that had been sent down from London. These were his tools, and he could not handle them! Aldwyth, his only child, and the one being in the world for whom his heart beat with affection, sat by the window anxiously watching him. Her love and tenderness, as she was beginning to realise, were powerless to assuage his mental suffering.

Alone, we come into the world; alone, we tread the winepress of life; alone, we leave it by the darkened door.

Herrick, as he entered, was painfully struck with the changed appearance of his chief. His restless movements, lined cheeks, and twitching facial muscles, told a saddening tale.

“It’s no good,” said Sir John, after the first few words, “I can’t work, I can’t think; worse than all, I can’t sleep. I ought to resign.”

“Father!” exclaimed Aldwyth, appealingly. Herrick was silent. What could he say? It relieved him when, after a few moments of silence, the Solicitor-General drew a long breath and showed a greater self-command.

“By the way,” he said suddenly, “I’ve had a threatening letter. I don’t suppose,” he added, “that any one need feel alarmed.” It was obvious that he regretted having said so much before his daughter.

“The cowards!” she cried indignantly; “the cowards!”

“What did you do with it?” asked the younger man.

“Burnt it,” was the terse reply.

“Wasn’t it a pity to destroy the evidence of handwriting?”

“There was no handwriting; it was typed.”

“And no signature?”

“Only a sign; the embossed outline of a metal disc.”

“Curious,” said Herrick.

“But hardly a curiosity,” was Sir John’s comment. “I understand that various members of the Government have been favoured in the same way, besides all the judges of the King’s Bench Division, and every magistrate in London.”

“Then there’s no special threat so far as you’re concerned, father?” said Aldwyth, watching him uneasily.

“Perhaps not,” said Sir John, speaking slowly, doubtfully.

“I see you have some further information,” said Herrick.

“Plenty of information, and nothing that would stand a moment’s test according to the laws of evidence.”

“And yet there seems to be an attempt at wholesale intimidation. Surely the Government--the Home Secretary----”

“The Home Secretary,” retorted Westwood angrily, “is not the man for times like these. England is face to face with an organised conspiracy. This so-called League, which grows in numbers and power every day, is really an army of anarchy recruited from the criminal classes at home and abroad. It seeks to paralyse the penal law of England. If the State does not crush it, it will overthrow the State. This gang of miscreants, with its weapons of terrorism and bribery----”

“Bribery!” exclaimed Herrick, astonished.

“Yes; bribery on a colossal scale, and expended mainly in corrupting the police, by whom alone the public can be safeguarded; and, mark you this, bribery doesn’t stop so low as that. The wire-pullers know their men--threats for some, and money for others; a ten-pound note for a police sergeant, and so upwards on a sliding scale, until the maximum may reach to thousands.”

Herrick and Aldwyth listened with increased amazement.

“I know it; I have proofs,” Sir John continued.

“At any rate,” interposed Herrick, “the Home Secretary has issued a circular to every local authority offering a hundred pounds’ reward to any person who makes known the illegal manufacture of explosives.”

“Useless!” said Westwood, throwing up his hands. “Police officers are excluded from the offer; they are the only people who could give such information. After the case at Rickmansworth, even if there are traitors in the League, who is likely to seal his own doom as Grady did? Besides, where the Home Office would pay a hundred pounds for betrayal, the men behind the metal disc would pay five hundred pounds for complicity and concealment.”

“The public ought to demand the enforcement of the new Act,” argued Herrick hotly.

“The public don’t understand how to enforce anything; they leave the weapons of agitation in the hands of the lawless, and trust to the executive for the protection of life and property; while the executive----” He shrugged his shoulders, and for a moment stood moodily staring at the wall. “The Government hope the crisis will be averted,” he resumed. “It needed the Phœnix Park murders to bring the Prevention of Crimes Act into force in Ireland. What price in horror and bloodshed will have to be paid in London before this campaign of outrage and dynamite is brought to an end, God only knows. I tell you, Herrick, that to pause or parley while these men perfect their plans is madness, and a betrayal of the nation!” He spoke with force and vehemence. For a moment his growing weakness had been shaken off. Carried away by his subject and his convictions, his voice and gestures gave some indication of the intellectual force that such a man could bring to bear in forensic argument and in debate.

Then, suddenly, there was a swift and shocking change in Westwood’s manner and appearance. His rushing thoughts and excited utterance had produced a terrible reaction. Aldwyth and Herrick were at his side in a moment. They led him to a chair. He sat there, staring, with ghastly cheeks and twitching muscles, manifestly unable to control the convulsive motions of his lower limbs, or the movement of the hands, which kept rising and falling with involuntary gesticulations. Herrick, horror-struck, recalled the conversation he had overheard in the smoking-room below.