“Oh, dear no, sir. You’ve been told practically everything. I only meant that if we had kept it quiet about the warrants you’d maybe have been easier in your mind.”
“There’s no need for us to start disliking each other,” Edmund remarked judicially; “the situation is simply this. Jakoub must go. If you don’t like to go with him he must go alone. In that case he risks his own liberty and our profit. If you choose, you can save both. I quite admit it’s asking a good deal of you. But what you do not know is Egypt and the ways of the Egyptian police and their courts. Jakoub probably does not deserve justice, but he certainly won’t get it from them. He would probably get off scot free simply because he really is a rogue. In the meantime, I don’t see why he should not be serving us.”
“It seems to me that I am now being asked to go practically on behalf of the firm. That is a very different thing from having a sort of pleasure trip arranged for my benefit.”
I spoke thus in loyalty to my pose, of which I was getting sicker every moment. I had made up my mind to go, since I had learned that Jakoub had good reasons for letting me continue to live, and that handing him over to Egyptian justice was apparently patronising a kind of lottery, in which he might draw a ticket entitling him to be tortured to death, or a different-coloured one letting him go free. I wanted to see him decently but quite certainly hanged.
“I’m afraid I’m to blame,” said Captain Welfare. “I hadn’t ought to have put it to you as I did. I was going on to explain how you might give us all a leg-up, all of us as a firm I mean, but if you remember, sir, you rayther cut me short about Jakoub.”
This was a very unnecessary remark of Captain Welfare’s. It merely emphasised the personal side of my present attitude, which I was now anxious to abandon. Edmund’s delicate tact evidently recognised this.
“I am certainly asking you to go on behalf of the firm,” he said. “We must have someone we can trust in charge of Jakoub, whom we cannot trust. And at present there simply isn’t anyone else but you.”
This, of course, settled it, and I had very soon graciously promised to go.
On looking back it seems to me that in every one of these transactions I allowed myself to become as it were committed, without knowing the details, or anything of the possible objections. When these became obvious it was too late for me to withdraw.
I was, in fact, dragged at the heels of Edmund’s fate. That is the only excuse I can offer to those who, knowing the sequel, will judge that I require one.