We might have sat there indefinitely as far as I was concerned. But the bishop with a sigh recalled us to the immediate necessities of our situation.
We had been discoursing pleasantly of many things interesting but remote from our immediate circumstances, when he broke in on our artificial calm.
“Well, we are keeping Jakoub waiting,” he said; “had we not better know the facts about this new charge against him?”
“Yes. You must know the facts. I have been waiting to tell you,” Edmund answered. “I can only give you the facts as I have heard them from a man who has no reason to love Jakoub. All I can say is that both Welfare and I have every reason to believe the story, for we both knew the man who was killed. Either of us would have killed him if we could. It is a disgusting story.”
It was a story so loathsome in its details that I have tried to blot them from my mind. It concerned an elderly Egyptian who had made vast sums of money by land speculations at the time when the Egyptian cotton industry was embryonic. He had chosen one of his sons as his heir, and sent the youth to Europe to be “educated.” The young man had absorbed all the villainy and corruption that can be found in the lowest classes of the great cities of England and the continent, and returned to inherit his father’s wealth with his native Oriental brutality instructed and refined by Western cunning and Western niceties of debauchery and greed. As he lost his inherited wealth to more cunning rogues, he tried to recover it by becoming the principal organiser of the hashish trade. In this capacity he came to owe Jakoub the wages of subordinate villainy. Jakoub had taken him by surprise in his secret villa at Damanhour. He had found him torturing a woman who had been a girl in Jakoub’s village in the Delta. Jakoub had slain him and escaped undetected. Edmund had now found a witness who could prove Jakoub to be the murderer.
“I have threatened Jakoub with this knowledge,” Edmund concluded, “but sooner than use it against him really, I would have my tongue torn out.”
Neither of us made any comment on the story, and Edmund remained silent during a considerable pause, nervously fidgeting with his napkin ring.
“I think we must have the man in, Davoren,” the bishop said at last, “but first we must be quite assured as to what we are to say to him.”
“Yes. We had better get it over,” I agreed.
“Am I to understand definitely,” the bishop asked Edmund, “that if all goes well you will accept this offer of the Colonial Secretary?”