“I don’t know how to tell you what I feel about it, sir. I’m a broken-down man. I’ve run straight, or pretty nearly straight, till I let myself go into this here. If you’ll believe me, sir, it’s not just the money, though I reckoned there would be pretty near enough for me to retire on. But I was never easy about that. I wouldn’t have been if I’d had it in the bank at home. I’d have known the Lord’s blessing wasn’t on it.”
Edmund got up and went to the window. He remained there, looking out across the sea. But there was not a tinge of hypocrisy in Captain Welfare. His God was horribly unjust in most things, so unjust that, as I already knew, he thought it necessary to fear him in the literal sense of the word. But he would adjust his rewards and punishments with a nice sense of commercial probity.
“No,” he continued; “what gets me is the way I’ve treated you, sir, after all you’d done for us. I can do no less than take it all on myself. Your brother was against it from the start. I only wish I hadn’t overbore him. But I never planned it out beforehand. It came on bit by bit. I honestly thought, sir, as we’d go to Guernsey and back as arranged. Then when we got warned off there was nothing for it but to carry on. You’ll understand now it wasn’t only Jakoub was in danger. Well, there’s times a man can’t tell the truth, and we couldn’t then. I think you’ll see that yourself?”
“Quite,” I said.
“Well, we deceived you then. It wasn’t the first time, I admit. I suppose we’d been deceiving you all the time. I was nervous at first, but if you’ll excuse me, sir, it seemed to come natural to you to be took in.”
“Yes, I’m afraid it did. I assure you I blame myself very much.”
“Don’t do that, sir. For God’s sake, don’t do that! All the blame there is is wanted. Don’t you waste it where it ain’t wanted. Well, we had this job on, though we didn’t mean to do it so soon. But it come over me that if we could work you in, it would make all plain-sailing. There didn’t seem any harm in it. I didn’t see what harm could come to you. But what I can’t forgive myself is them books. Them books I showed you was false.”
This seemed to me a curiously minor point to rankle so in his queer crooked conscience.
“I do wish now I hadn’t done that,” he added.
“It seems unnecessary to me,” I said. “It’s almost the only inartistic thing in the whole process.”