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"My uncle was the spy who stole the papers," replied Fisher,
"or who tried to steal the papers when I stopped him--in the only
way I could. The papers, that should have gone west to reassure
our friends and give them the plans for repelling the invasion,
would in a few hours have been in the hands of the invader.
What could I do? To have denounced one of our friends at this moment
would have been to play into the hands of your friend Attwood,
and all the party of panic and slavery. Besides, it may be that a
man over forty has a subconscious desire to die as he has lived,
and that I wanted, in a sense, to carry my secrets to the grave.
Perhaps a hobby hardens with age; and my hobby has been silence.
Perhaps I feel that I have killed my mother's brother, but I
have saved my mother's name. Anyhow, I chose a time when I knew
you were all asleep, and he was walking alone in the garden.
I saw all the stone statues standing in the moonlight;
and I myself was like one of those stone statues walking.
In a voice that was not my own, I told him of his treason and
demanded the papers; and when he refused, I forced him to take
one of the two swords. The swords were among some specimens sent
down here for the Prime Minister's inspection; he is a collector,
you know; they were the only equal weapons I could find.
To cut an ugly tale short, we fought there on the path in front
of the Britannia statue; he was a man of great strength, but I
had somewhat the advantage in skill. His sword grazed my forehead
almost at the moment when mine sank into the joint in his neck.
He fell against the statue, like Caesar against Pompey's,
hanging on to the iron rail; his sword was already broken.
When I saw the blood from that deadly wound, everything else
went from me; I dropped my sword and ran as if to lift him up.
As I bent toward him something happened too quick for me to follow.
I do not know whether the iron bar was rotted with rust and came
away in his hand, or whether he rent it out of the rock with his
apelike strength; but the thing was in his hand, and with his dying
energies he swung it over my head, as I knelt there unarmed beside him.
I looked up wildly to avoid the blow, and saw above us the great
bulk of Britannia leaning outward like the figurehead of a ship.
The next instant I saw it was leaning an inch or two more than usual,
and all the skies with their outstanding stars seemed to be leaning
with it. For the third second it was as if the skies fell;
and in the fourth I was standing in the quiet garden, looking down on
that flat ruin of stone and bone at which you were looking to-day.
He had plucked out the last prop that held up the British goddess,
and she had fallen and crushed the traitor in her fall.
I turned and darted for the coat which I knew to contain the package,
ripped it up with my sword, and raced away up the garden
path to where my motor bike was waiting on the road above.
I had every reason for haste; but I fled without looking back
at the statue and the. body; and I think the thing I fled from
was the sight of that appalling allegory.
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