A Peoples Man | Page 7

upraised, listening. From the street outside came a strange, rumbling sound.
"You permit?" he asked, stepping to the window and drawing the curtain a few inches on one side. "There is something familiar about that sound. I heard it last in Chicago."
Mr. Foley rose slowly from the easy-chair into which he had thrown himself, and stood by his visitor's side. Outside, the pavements were lined by policemen, standing like sentries about half-a-dozen yards apart. The tented entrance to the house was guarded by a solid phalanx of men in uniform. A mounted inspector was riding slowly up and down in the middle of the road. At the entrance to the street, barely fifty yards away, a moving mass of people, white-faced, almost spectral, were passing slowly beneath the pale gas-lamps.
"The people!" Maraton murmured, with a curious note in his tone, half of reverence, half of pity.
"The mob!" Mr. Foley echoed bitterly. "They brawl before the houses of those who do their best to serve them. They bark always at our heels. Perhaps to-night it is you whom they have come to honour. Your bodyguard, eh, Mr. Maraton?"
"If they have discovered that I am here, it is not unlikely," Maraton admitted calmly.
Mr. Foley dropped the curtain which he had taken from his companion's fingers. Moving back into the room, he turned on more light. Then he resumed his seat.
"Mr. Maraton," he began, "we met only once before, I think. That was four years ago this summer. Answer me honestly--do you see any change in me?"
Maraton leaned a little forward. His face showed some concern, as he answered:
"You are not in the best of health just now, I fear, Mr. Foley."
"I am as well as I shall ever be," was the quiet reply. "What you see in my face is just the record of these last four years, the outward evidence of four years of ceaseless trouble and anxiety. I will not call myself yet a broken man, but the time is not far off."
Maraton remained silent. His attitude was still sympathetic, but he seemed determined to carry out his role of listener.
"If the political history of these four years is ever truthfully written," Mr. Foley continued, "the world will be amazed at the calm indifference of the people threatened day by day with national disaster. We who have been behind the scenes have kept a stiff upper lip before the world, but I tell you frankly, Mr. Maraton, that no Cabinet who ever undertook the government of this country has gone through what we have gone through. Three times we have been on the brink of war--twice on our own account and once on account of those whom we are bound to consider our allies. The other national disaster we have had to face, you know of. Still, here we are safe up to to-night. There is nothing in the whole world we need now so much as rest--just a few months' freedom from anxiety. Until last week we had dared to hope for it. Now, breathless still from our last escape, we are face to face suddenly with all the possibilities of your coming."
"You fear the people," Maraton remarked quietly.
Mr. Foley's pale, worn face suddenly lit up.
"Fear the people!" he repeated, with a note of passion in his tone. "I fear the people for their own sake; I fear the ruin and destruction they may, by ill-advised action, bring upon themselves and their country. Mr. Maraton, grant, will you not, that I am a man of some experience? Believe, I pray you, that I am honest. Let me assure you of this. If the people be not wisely led now, the Empire which I and my Ministers have striven so hard to keep intact, must fall. There are troubles pressing upon us still from every side. If the people are wrongly advised to-day, the British Empire must fall, even as those other great dynasties of the past have fallen."
Maraton turned once more to the window, raised the curtain, and gazed out into the darkness. There was a little movement at the end of the street. The police had driven back the crowd to allow a carriage to pass through. A hoarse murmur of voices came floating into the room. The people gave way slowly and unwillingly--still, they gave way. Law and order, strenuous though the task of preserving them was becoming, prevailed.
"Mr. Foley," Maraton said, dropping the curtain and returning once more to his place, "I am honoured by your confidence. You force me, however, to remind you that you have spoken to me as a politician. I am not a politician. The cause of the people is above politics."
"I am for the people," Mr. Foley declared, with a sudden passion in his tone. "It is their own fault, the blind