“I am in your hands, of course, and therefore it seems in the bishop’s. I shall certainly do what you and he think right, only first I must tell him everything myself.”
“That is exactly what I want you to do.”
I had greatly dreaded the possibility of Edmund’s refusing to meet the bishop at all. I knew how intensely his pride must be wounded by the prospect of such a meeting, of such a confession. But I knew, too, how necessary it was for the healing of his soul. I regarded it as his penance, and for him the way of salvation. I was accordingly careful to conceal my knowledge of his feelings and to treat the bishop’s visit as a matter of course.
“With all your news,” I said, “I have had no time to tell you that the bishop is coming mainly to offer you an appointment abroad under the Colonial Office. He will tell you the details, but I think it is one you would like.”
“Like it!” he exclaimed, “I am sure I should ‘like it.’ I should like it better than going to prison as the accomplice of a set of particularly unclean Dagoes. But don’t you see I am much more in the hands of Jakoub than of the bishop? I can decide nothing until Jakoub is muzzled or—dead. And if Jakoub is taken—well, the matter is settled as far as I am concerned.”
I saw it very clearly, and there was nothing to reply.
We spent the evening under a cloud of anxiety trying to calculate the chances of Jakoub’s evading the police at Southampton and the probable time of his arrival at the vicarage if he succeeded.
CHAPTER XVI
IN WHICH CAPTAIN WELFARE MAKES A SIGNAL
BOTH Edmund’s temper and my own were naturally worn a little thin under the tension of this uncertainty, and the friction of our futile calculations of chances. But neither of us could leave the subject alone or settle our minds to anything else. Each of us made guesses which to the other seemed more and more foolish and irritating. Edmund set himself to prove the inevitability of disaster, really, I suppose, in order to elicit my arguments in favour of optimism, which nevertheless he took a morbid pleasure in demolishing.
The bishop’s arrival on the following afternoon was only just in time to dispel something like a positive mutual dislike which was being engendered between us by the strain.