One thing only was certain. I must remain where I was until the Astarte came into harbour. Then I must face Edmund. I felt how much easier it would be to be the guilty one. What was I to say to him? How were we to adjust our new relationship? I was determined to insist on his coming out of this life in which he had lost his honour and his caste. I did not shrink from the notion of impoverishing myself if necessary. But even if I succeeded in restoring Edmund to his caste, how could he take his place in it?
I knew that, as a matter of practical experience, there really is no absolution without penance. Knowing Edmund as I did, I knew that he would impose the penance on himself, and refuse the absolution. How was I to persuade him that all the best of his life, which lay before him, must be lived vigorously and honourably if only to make reparation?
I feared the weakness and petulance in his character, which I knew might drive him to shirk the issue in a cowardly suicide. I determined that I would hold him by the immediate plain duty of getting rid of this present cargo of potential infamy. I began to see in the hated packing-cases the means of Edmund’s deliverance from himself.
About their destination I was clear and determined, but as to how to get them there, how even to move them from this room without exposure and disgrace, I had no idea whatever.
Of Captain Welfare I thought little. In other circumstances he would no doubt have prosperously added sand to sugar like my churchwarden at home, or have made an “honest living” out of poverty as a pawnbroker. He belonged to the class whose ideal is “respectability.” It would be wrong to expect of such a higher ethical standard than their own.
No doubt he had expected to retire on his share of the profits of this infamy. Once I had seen the stuff destroyed I would give him his pieces of silver. He could just “put up the shutters” for the last time and appear no more in his shirt sleeves.
The long day wore itself away amid my fretting; but Edmund did not come. Once more I watched the sun set across the sea and, with the darkness, my fear of Jakoub revived.
I knew now that he was in league with Van Ermengen, that they both knew I was an enemy to their schemes. In my loneliness and sense of weakness I wished that even Brogden were back. I was in the enemy’s camp and had no means of finding even one man whom I could trust. I wondered about the fragments of their conversation I had overheard. What key was it they spoke of?
“A part of it—our share—to-night!”
I had not thought much of the words when I heard them. I was not quite certain if I had their meaning right, caught as they were in isolated fragments of a conversation I could not understand. Besides, my mind had been concentrated on the fear of Jakoub’s appearing and being recognised. But now, at the end of my day of solitary pondering, they came back into my mind, and it seemed their meaning was obvious.