Nor had Sir John any delusions about his fellow-members. His manner was genial; he would gamble and drink (in moderation) with the sinners. But in his heart he despised most of them. They had never had the great idea and the Napoleonic collapse. Their weakness and not their strength had been their ruin. It was not their mind but their body that had run away with them. Sir John had not lived the life of an ascetic, far from it, but his tastes were in favour of a decent reserve and a sufficient moderation. From no man will the slave of the flesh receive more hearty contempt than from the man of the world; and in the difficult task of his reclamation it may be that the sneer of the worldling has sometimes effected more than the tears of the spiritual.
Yet even in his contempt for many of his fellow-members he found some source of gratification. He liked to wonder where on earth they would have been without him, and to feel his sense of responsibility increased. From their depth he could contemplate with the more satisfaction his own eminence.
But there were a few members whom Sir John could regard with more respect. Bassett, for instance, had worked admirably for the club, and had shown something of Sir John’s own talent for organisation. He had now lost his head in a crisis and acted, Sir John considered, like a fool. However, he would get a good scare—Sir John doubted if the King had really intended more than that—and would not be likely to act on impulse again. Then there was Hanson, a quiet man and an ardent chess-player. He had character and ability, and Sir John hoped that he would one day replace the Rev. Cyril Mast on the committee. Mast had a gift for public speaking, and owed his election to it, but Sir John found him quite useless. Probably the man whom Sir John liked most, respected most, trusted most and understood least was Dr Pryce.
The men were as different as possible. Dr Pryce had never shown the slightest interest in the working of the syndicate which financed Smith, although he was a member of it. He had been approached by Sir John on the subject, had put down his money without inquiry, and apparently had never thought about the subject again. In an ordinary way Sir John would have taken this as evidence that the man was a fool, but Pryce’s rather various abilities could not be doubted. The doctor’s contempt for vain assumption sometimes wounded Sir John, who habitually called his own vain assumptions by prettier names. Pryce never pretended to be any better than his fellow-members, nor had he that not uncommon form of perverted vanity which made a man like Mast pretend sometimes to be the greatest of sinners. Sir John had a sufficiency of physical courage for ordinary uses, but Pryce had shown himself on many occasions to be absolutely reckless of his own life. This had occurred not only in such forms of sport as the island afforded, but more frequently in the practice of his science; the island offered drugs that were not in the pharmacopœia, and Pryce, in his enthusiastic study of them, did not stop short at experiments upon himself. It was a great thing, Sir John felt, to have an able and qualified doctor in the club, and with his customary generosity he suggested that a consignment of drugs and apparatus from London for the doctor should be charged to the club account. Pryce replied that his little box of rubbish was paid for already, and changed the subject.
The present crisis in the club’s affairs brought out strongly the changes in Sir John’s character. The cornered rat was showing fight. Sir John contemplated the destruction of the Snowflake and all aboard her without the faintest feeling of remorse. But Pryce’s careless offer to undertake the work did not satisfy him.
The man who scuttled the Snowflake in mid-ocean would probably be committing suicide; Sir John had no doubt about that. And Pryce was too valuable to lose. Why, Sir John himself might be taken ill at any time. There was a queer form of island fever, as to which he was nervous. The King himself had suffered from it.
And on further consideration Sir John doubted the feasibility of the scheme. By this time Lechworthy probably knew all about the Exiles’ Club, and would see for himself the danger that he represented to them; Bassett’s attempt to murder him would have illuminated the question. Under the circumstances it was unlikely that he would allow any member of the club on board the Snowflake, unless possibly his religious feelings were involved and that member played the part of a repentant and converted sinner. And Sir John knew that Pryce would not do that.
“We’ll think about it, Pryce,” he said finally. “There may be some other way. Something may turn up.”