You shall have your answer, I promise you, by the time we make our landfall--perhaps before."
"The sooner, the better."
"Are you sure, monsieur? But one thought it was the tortoise who won the famous race."
"Take all the time you need," Captain Monk conceded generously, "to come to a sensible decision."
"But how good you are to me, monsieur!"
[XXV]
THE MALCONTENT
Singular though the statement may seem, when one remembers the conditions that circumscribed his freedom of action on board the Sybarite, that he stood utterly alone in that company of conspirators and their creatures, alone and unarmed, with never a friend to guard his back or even to whisper him one word of counsel, warning or encouragement, with only his naked wits and hands to fortify and sustain his heart: it is still no exaggeration to say that Lanyard got an extraordinary amount of private diversion out of those last few days.
From the hour when Liane Delorme, Phinuit and Captain Monk, in conclave solemnly assembled at the instance of the one last-named, communicated their collective mind in respect of his interesting self, the man was conscious of implicit confidence in a happy outcome of the business, with a conscientiousness less rational than simply felt, a sort of bubbling exhilaration in his mood that found its most intelligible expression in the phrase, which he was wont often to iterate to himself: Ça va bien--that goes well!
That--the progressive involution of this insane imbroglio--went very well indeed, in Lanyard's reckoning; he could hardy wish, he could not reasonably demand that it should go better.