discontinued the numbering of convicts on the ground that it created a state of things "undistinguishable from slavery," though not really slavery – but as though they were railway bridges or district council lamp-posts. "Treat a man as a dog, and he becomes a dog," had been the invincible argument of the band of humanitarians who had introduced what was known as the "Get-up-when-you-like-and-have-what-you-want" system of prison discipline, and "Treat a man as a lamp-post, and he becomes a lamp-post," had been the logical standpoint of the Amalgamated Union of Policemen and Plain Clothes Detectives.
"Yes," replied the girl, and her voice had not quite that agreeable intonation that members of the force usually hear from the lips of fair young ladies nowadays. "Do you wish to see it?"
"What else should I ask you if you had one for?" he demanded with the innate boorishness of the heavy-witted man. "Of course I want to see it."
She opened the little bag that hung from her girdle and handed him a paper without a word.
"Muriel Ursula Percy Sleigh Hampden?" It would be idle to pretend that the names pleased him, or that he tried to veil his contempt.
"Yes," she replied.
He indicated his private disbelief – or possibly merely took a ready means of exercising his authority in a way that he knew to be offensive – by producing a small tin box from one of his pockets and passing it to her without any explanation. The requirement was so universal in practice, however, that no explanation was necessary, for the signature, as the chief mark of identification, had long been superseded by the simpler and more effective thumb-sign. Miss Hampden made a slight grimace when she saw the condition of the soft wax which the box contained, but she obediently pressed it with her thumb and passed it back again. As her licence bore another thumb-sign, stamped in pigment, it was only necessary for the constable to compare the two (a process simplified by the superimposing glass, a contrivance not unlike a small opera-glass with converging tubes) in order to satisfy himself at once whether the marks were the impress of the same thumb. Apparently they were, for with a careless "Right-O," he proceeded on his way, swinging his truncheon with an easy grace, and occasionally striking off the end of an overhanging branch.
"I wonder," said Stobalt, when at length the zealous officer had quite disappeared in search of other fields for tactful activity, "I wonder if you are a daughter of Sir John Hampden?"
"Yes," she replied, looking at him with renewed interest. "His only daughter. Do you know my father?"
He shook his head. "I have been away, but we see the papers sometimes," he said. "The Sir John I mean," he explained, as though the point were a matter of some moment, "was a few years ago regarded as the one man who might unite our parties and save the position."
"There is only one Sir John Hampden," she replied. "But it was too late."
"Oh yes," he admitted vaguely, dismissing the subject.
Both were silent for a few minutes; it might be noticed that people often became thoughtful when they spoke of the past in those years. Indeed, an optimist might almost have had some ground for believing that a thinking era had begun.
When he spoke again it was with something of an air of constraint. "You asked me just now if there was – anything. Well, I have since thought – "
"Yes?" she said encouragingly.
"I have thought that I should like to meet your father. I hear everywhere that he is the most inaccessible man in London; but perhaps if you could favour me with a line of introduction – "
"Oh yes," she exclaimed gladly. "I am sure that he would wish to thank you. I will write to-morrow."
"I have paper and a pencil here," he suggested. "I have been a sailor," he added, as though that simple statement explained an omnipercipient resourcefulness; as perhaps it did.
"If you prefer it," she said, accepting the proffered stationery. It did not make the least difference, she told herself, but this business-like expedition chilled her generous instincts.
"I leave for town to-night," was all he vouchsafed.
For a few minutes she wrote in silence, while he looked fixedly out to sea. "What name am I to write, please?" she asked presently.
"Oh, Salt – George Salt," he replied in a matter-of-fact voice, and without turning his head.
"Is it 'Mr Salt,' or 'Captain,' or – ?"
"Just 'Mr,' please. And" – his voice fell a little flat in spite of himself, but he did not meet her eyes – "and would it be too much if I asked you to mention the circumstances under which we met?"
She bent a little lower over the paper in a shame she could not then define. "I will not fail to let my father know how heroic you have been, and to what an extent we are indebted to you," she replied dispassionately.
"Thank you." Suddenly he turned with an arresting gesture, and impulsive speech trembled on his tongue. But the sophistries of explanation, apology, self-extenuation, were foreign to the nature of this strong keen-featured man, whose grey and not unkindly eyes had gained their tranquil depth from long intercourse with sea and sky – those two masters who teach the larger things of life. The words were never spoken, his arm fell down again, and the moment passed.
"I have never," he was known to say with quiet emphasis in later years, "regretted silence. I have never given way to an impulse and spoken hastily without regretting speech."
The London evening papers were being cried in the streets of the old Cinque Port as "George Salt" walked to the station a few hours later. A general election was drawing to its desultory close, but the results seemed to excite curiously little interest among the well-dressed, leisured class that filled the promenades. It was a longer sweep of the pendulum than had ever been anticipated in the days when politics were more or less the pastime of the rich, and the working classes neither understood nor cared to understand them – only understood that whatever else happened nothing ever came their way.
The man who had been a sailor bought two papers of very different views, the Pall Mall Gazette and the orthodox labour organ called The Masses. Neither rejoiced, but to despair The Masses added a note of ingenuous surprise as it summarised the contest as a whole. This was how the matter stood:
There is no need to trace the development of political events leading up to this position. It lends itself to summary. The Labour party had come into power by pointing out to voters of the working classes that its members were their brothers, and promising them a great deal of property belonging to other people and a good many privileges which they vehemently denounced in every other class. When in power they had thrown open the doors of election to one and all. The Socialist party had come into power by pointing out to voters of the working classes that its members were even more their brothers, and promising them a still larger share of other people's property (some, indeed, belonging to the more prosperous of the Labour representatives then in office) and still greater privileges. Yet the editor of The Masses was both pained and surprised at the result.
CHAPTER IV
THE
