Hope shook off the grip on his arm with a gesture of impatience. He pushed open the cellar door.
“Now, Neal,” he said, “pick up as many of the cases as you think you can carry.”
James Finlay turned from Hope and seized Neal by the hands. The man was trembling from head to foot; his face was deadly white; the sweat was trickling down his cheeks in little streams.
“Don’t let him. Oh! don’t let him. He won’t listen to me. Stop him. Make him fly.”
He fell on his knees on the floor and clasped Neal’s legs. He grovelled. There was no possibility of doubting the reality of his emotion. This was not acting. The terror was genuine. James Finlay was desperately frightened.
“Get out of my way. No one is going to hurt you in any case.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “Believe me if you can. Believe me as you hope to be saved. I can’t, I won’t see him hanged. I can’t bear it.”
He was speaking the literal truth. He believed that James Hope would be caught and would then and there be hanged. Finlay had betrayed many men, had earned the basest wages a man can earn—the wages of a spy. He knew that his victims went to flogging and death, but he never watched them flogged, he never saw them die. He even bargained never to stand in a witness box. The results, the inevitable issues of his betrayals, were never immediately before his eyes. Between him and the punishment of his victims there was always some space of time spent in prison, some appearance of a legal trial, some pretence of a just judgment. He was able, with that strange power of self-deception which most men possess, to conceal from himself that it was his information which led to the brutalities which followed it. If James Finlay had been obliged himself to execute the men whose execution his testimony secured; if he had been forced to lay the lash on quivering flesh or fit the noose round the necks of living men; it is likely that no bribe would have bought him, that sheer cowardice and an instinctive horror of death and pain would have saved him, as no consideration of honour and truth did, from the extreme baseness of an informer’s trade. Here lay part of the meaning of his terrified desire for Hope’s escape. He could not bear to see men hanged before the door of his own house, or hear with his ears their shrieks under the lash.
But there was more behind this feeling than utter cowardice. He knew James Hope, knew him intimately, though he had known him only for a short time. Like Neal Ward he had walked with Hope along the roads and lanes of County Antrim, had heard him talking, had seen—as no man, even the basest, could fail to see—the wonderful purity and unselfishness of Hope’s character. James Finlay had sold his own honour, but there remained this much good in him, he refused to sell Hope’s life. God, reckoning all the evil and baseness of James Finlay’s treachery and greed, will no doubt set on the other side of the account the fact that even Finlay recognised high goodness when he saw it, that he did not betray Hope, that he grovelled on the floor before a man whom he hated for the chance of saving Hope from what seemed certain death.
Neal pushed Finlay aside and stepped forward. He took five of the cases of cartridges—three under his right arm two under his left. Hope raised the other three. Then, picking up a bundle from a corner, he said—