A stronger man might have seized the moment to face it out, while Archie's words held the door open to confession. A line too direct for Dick. He did nothing—not from fear, as he explained no doubt truthfully to Norah, but from a sense of the supreme awkwardness of the position. That was how he put it: you would probably say 'seeing what a poor fish he'd look.'
It is possible, even easy, to seduce a man's wife with a certain air. The gesture has been made picturesque, amusing, sublime, according to the clothes, characters, circumstances of the puppets. Don Juan, Casanova, young Lochinvar were masters of the different genres.
But collect your troop on a desert island of limited acreage, give Menelaus the sole power of rescue, and the laughter veers round against Paris. Worse still, Helen might lead it. And when you throw in one loaded rifle and give it to Menelaus, the romantic farce may degenerate into tragedy.
Dick, whatever he told Norah, cannot have been long realising that his position was not only false but dangerous, and his life at the mercy of the man he had wronged. He may not have expected actual violence, for Norah's allusions to her husband at that date of her disillusionment would have outlined a deliberate, cautious, rather pale-blooded being in whom civilisation had destroyed all sudden impulse. One who had reduced 'soundness' to a vice and was lamentably sure 'to do the sensible thing'; who, meditating both sides of every question and avoiding the ill-considered move, had almost lost power of action. One of those irritating people who are too busy giving the devil his due to reach for the holy water.
Since Dick, like the rest of us, preferred to use labels and pigeon-holes instead of observation and thought, he did not stop to compare this pallid creation with the lean, taciturn individual who slept a few feet from him.
But although the eminently 'sound' man of Dick's and Norah's fancy does not go about shooting people even on considerable provocation, he is not, Dick argued, of the type that steps far out of the way to save the lives of enemies.
There are men who would never tolerate the unsavoury and dangerous business of murder, but who would make slight effort to prevent the death of an enemy out of sight and earshot—witness the mediæval popularity of the oubliette. So Dick did not find unconvincing the figure of an outraged husband who pursued his way to Abercorn and left the identified Mr. and Mrs. Brown to shift for themselves.
Fear of some such fate is the only excuse I can find for the scheme which he afterwards confessed to Norah. It was, he said, the only way out of the impasse. It does not seem to have occurred to him that there was anything unsporting in his plan, any gleam of the phosphorescent aura of treachery. If pressed, he might have produced the old excuse about Love and War; a sophism, which, pushed to logical extremes, justifies, I suppose, arsenic in the Burgundy and babies on the bayonet.
An acute moral sense was never Dick's weakness; still, one would have expected common sense to save him from the stupidity of confiding in Norah his happy thought of stealing her husband's gun and leaving him and his natives to ... fend for themselves. He must have been very sure of the spell his adoration cast.
No doubt Africa was probing him too deep. In the last twenty-four hours she had unmasked batteries too heavy for her victim. Blow on blow had been hammered at his weakest points. She had opened with her favourite gambit of starvation and had daunted his courage with its shadow. She had lowered his vitality by an interminable day of incessant toil and disappointed hope. She tormented him with the sudden display of a salvation that faded into a trap from which there was no honourable issue.