CHAPTER XLI.
AN ENVOY OF DELIVERANCE.
From the time that the Tsar had received the conditional declarationof war from the President of the Anglo-Saxon Federation in America tonightfall on the 29th of November, when the surrender of the capitalof the British Empire was considered to be a matter of a few daysonly, the Commander-in-Chief of the forces of the League wasabsolutely in the dark, not only as to the actual intentions of theTerrorists, if they had any, but also as to the doings of his alliesin America.
According to the stipulations arranged between himself and theconfidential agent of the American Government, the blockadingflotilla of dynamite cruisers ought to have sailed from America assoon as the cypher message containing the news of the battle of Doverreached New York. The message had been duly sent _via_ Queenstown andNew York, and had been acknowledged in the usual way, but no definitereply had come to it, and a month had elapsed without the appearanceof the promised squadron. The explanation of this will be readilyguessed. The American end of the Queenstown cable had beenreconnected with Washington, but it was under the absolute control ofTremayne, who permitted no one to use it save himself.
Other messages had been sent to which no reply had been received, anda swift French cruiser, which had been launched at Brest since thebattle of Dover, had been dispatched across the Atlantic to discoverthe reason of this strange silence. She had gone, but she had neverreturned. The Atlantic highway appeared to be barred by someinvisible force. No vessels came from the westward, and those whichstarted from the east were never heard of again.
His Majesty had treated the summons of the President of theFederation with silent contempt, just as such a victorious autocratmight have been expected to do. True, he knew the terrific powerwielded by the Terrorists through their aerial fleet, and he had anuncomfortable conviction, which refused to be entirely stifled, thatin the days to come he would have to reckon with them and it.
But that a member of the Terrorist Brotherhood could by any possiblemeans have placed himself at the head of any body of men sufficientlynumerous or well-disciplined to make them a force to be seriouslyreckoned with in military warfare, his Majesty had never for a momentbelieved.
And, more than this, however disquieting might be the uncertainty dueto the ominous silence on the other side of the Atlantic, and thenon-arrival of the expected fleet, there stood the great andsignificant fact that the army of the League had been permitted,without molestation either from the Terrorists or the Federation inwhose name they had presumed to declare war upon him, not only todestroy what remained of the British fleet, but to completely investthe very capital of Anglo-Saxondom itself.
All this had been done; the sacred soil of Britain itself had beenviolated by the invading hosts; the army of defence had been slowly,and at a tremendous sacrifice of life on both sides, forced back fromline after line, and position after position, into the city itself;his batteries were raining their hail of shot and shell from theheights round London, and his aerostats were hurling ruin from thesky upon the crowded millions locked up in the beleaguered space; andyet the man who had presumed to tell him that the hour in which heset foot on British soil would be the last of his Empire, had doneabsolutely nothing to interrupt the march of conquest.
From this it will be seen that Alexander Romanoff was at least ascompletely in the dark as to the possible course of the events of thenear future as was the King of England himself, shut up in hiscapital, and cut off from all communication from the rest of theworld.
On the morning of the 29th of November there was held at the PrimeMinister's rooms in Downing Street a Cabinet Council, presided overby the King in person. After the Council had remained for about anhour in earnest consultation, a stranger was admitted to the room inwhich they were sitting.
The reader would have recognised him in a moment as Maurice Colston,otherwise Alexis Mazanoff, for he was dressed almost exactly as hehad been on that memorable night, just thirteen months before, whenhe made the acquaintance of Richard Arnold on the Thames Embankment.
Well-dressed, well-fed, and perfectly at ease, he entered the CouncilChamber without any aggressive assumption, but still with the quietconfidence of a man who knows that he is practically master of thesituation. How he had even got into London, beleaguered as it was onevery side in such fashion that no one could get out of it withoutbeing seen and shot by the besiegers, was a mystery; but how he couldhave in his possession, as he had, a despatch dated thirty-six hourspreviously in New York was a still deeper mystery; and upon neitherof these points did he make the slightest attempt to enlighten themembers of the British Cabinet.
All that he said was that he was the bearer of a message from thePresident of the Anglo-Saxon Federation in America, and that he wasinstructed to return that night to New York with such answer as theBritish Government might think fit to make to it. It was this messagethat had been the subject of the deliberations of the Council beforehis admission, and its net effect was as follows.
It was now practically certain, indeed proved to demonstration, thatthe forces at the command of the British Government were not capableof coping with those brought against them by the commanders of theLeague, and that therefore Britain, if left to her own resources,must inevitably succumb, and submit to such terms as her conquerorsmight think fit to impose upon her. The choice before the BritishGovernment thus lay between surrender to her foreign enemies, whoseobjects were well known to be dismemberment of the Empire and thereduction of Great Britain to the rank of a third-class Power,--tosay nothing of the payment of a war indemnity which could not fail tobe paralysing,--and the consent of those who controlled the destiniesof the mother country to accept a Federation of the whole Anglo-Saxonrace, to waive the merely national idea in favour of the racial one,and to permit the Executive Council of the Federation to assume thosegovernmental functions which were exercised at present by the Kingand the British Houses of Parliament.
In a word, the choice lay between conquest by a league of foreignpowers and the merging of Britain into the Federation of theEnglish-speaking peoples of the world.
If the former choice were taken, the only prospect possible under thecondition of things was a possibly enormous sacrifice of human lifeon the side of both Britain and its enemies, a gigantic loss inmoney, the crippling of British trade and commerce, and then apossible, nay probable, social revolution to which the messagedistinctly pointed.
If the latter choice were taken, the forces of the Federation wouldbe at once brought into the field against those of the League, thesiege of London would be raised, the power of the invaders would beeffectually broken for ever, and the stigma of conquest finally wipedaway.
It is only just to record the fact that in this supreme crisis ofBritish history the man who most strongly insisted upon theacceptance of the terms which he had previously, as he now confessedin the most manly and outspoken fashion, rejected in ignorance of thetrue situation of affairs, was the man who believed that he wouldlose a crown by accepting them.
When the Ambassador of the Federation had been presented to theCouncil, the King rose in his place and handed to him with his ownhands a sealed letter, saying as he did so--
"Mr. Mazanoff, I am still to a great extent in ignorance as to theinexplicable combination of events which has made it necessary for meto return this affirmative answer to the message of which you are thebearer. I am, however, fully aware that the Earl of Alanmere, whosename I have seen at the foot of this document with the most profoundastonishment, is in a position to do what he says.
"The course of events has been exactly that which he predicted. Iknow, too, that whatever causes may have led him to unite himself tothose known as the Terrorists, he is an English nobleman, and a manto whom falsehood or bad faith is absolutely impossible. In yourmarvellous aerial fleet I know also that he wields the only powercapable of being successfully opposed to those terrible machineswhich had wrought such havoc upon the fleets and armies, not only ofBritain, but of Europ
e.
"To a certain extent this is a surrender, but I feel that it will bebetter to surrender the destinies of Britain into the hands of herown blood and kindred than to the tender mercies of her alienenemies. My own personal feelings must weigh as nothing in thebalance where the fate, not only of this country, but perhaps of thewhole world, is now poised.
"After all, the first duty of a Constitutional King is not to himselfand his dynasty, but to his country and his people, and therefore Ifeel that it will be better for me and mine to be citizens of a freeFederation of the English-speaking peoples, and of the nations towhich Britain has given birth, than the titular sovereign and Royalfamily of a conquered country, holding the mockery of royalty on thesufferance of their conquerors.
"Tell Lord Alanmere from me that I now accept the terms he hasoffered as President of the Anglo-Saxon Federation, first, because atall hazards I would see Britain delivered from her enemies; and,secondly, because I have chosen rather to be an English gentlemanwithout a crown, than to wear a crown which after all would only begift from my conquerors."
Edward VII. spoke with visible emotion, but with a dignity which evenMazanoff, little and all as he respected the name of king, felthimself compelled to recognise and respect. He took the letter with abow that was more one of reverence than of courtesy, and as he put itinto his breast-pocket of his coat he said--
"The President will receive your Majesty's reply with as genuinepleasure and satisfaction as I shall give it to him. Though I am aRussian without a drop of English blood in my veins, I have alwayslooked upon the British race as the real bulwark of freedom, and Irejoice that the King of England has not permitted either traditionor personal feeling to stand in the way of the last triumph of theAnglo-Saxon race.
"As long as the English language is spoken your Majesty's name willbe held in greater honour for this sacrifice which you make to-day,than will that of any other English king for the greatest triumph ofarms ever achieved in the history of your country.
"I must now take my leave, for I must be in New York to-morrow night.I have your word that I shall not be watched or followed after Ileave here. Hold the city for six days more at all costs, and on theseventh at the latest the siege shall be raised and the enemies ofBritain destroyed in their own entrenchments."
So saying, the envoy of the Federation bowed once more to the Kingand the astonished members of his Council, and was escorted to thedoor.
Once in the street he strode away rapidly through Parliament Streetand the Strand, then up Drury Lane, until he reached the door of amean-looking house in a squalid court, and entering this with alatch-key, disappeared.
Three hours later a Russian soldier of the line, wearing an almostimperceptible knot of red ribbon in one of the button-holes of histunic, passed through the Russian lines on Hampstead Heathunchallenged by the sentries, and made his way northward to NorthawWood, which he reached soon after nightfall.
Within half an hour the _Ithuriel_ rose from the midst of a thickclump of trees like a grey shadow rising into the night, and dartedsouthward and upward at such a speed that the keenest eyes must soonhave lost sight of her from the earth.
She passed over the beleaguered city at a height of nearly tenthousand feet, and then swept sharply round to the eastward. Shestopped immediately over the lights of Sheerness, and descended towithin a thousand feet of the dock, in which could be seen thedetachment of the French submarine vessels lying waiting to be senton their next errand of destruction.
As soon as those on board her had made out the dock clearly sheascended a thousand feet and went about half a mile to the southward.From that position she poured a rapid hail of shells into the dock,which was instantly transformed into a cavity vomiting green flameand fragments of iron and human bodies. In five minutes nothing wasleft of the dock or its contents but a churned-up swamp of muddywater and shattered stonework.
Then, her errand so far accomplished, the air-ship sped away to thesouth-westward, and within an hour she had destroyed in like fashionthe submarine squadron in the Government dock at Portsmouth, and waswinging her way westward to New York with the reply of the King ofEngland to the President of the Federation.
The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror Page 42