Small, who daily realised and regretted the crafty machinations of the enemy in entrapping him by means of the moneylender in Hull, was inclined to go to the police, confess, and expose the whole affair.
Rodwell, with his shrewd intuition, knew this, and in consequence treated father and son with very little consideration.
Even as he stood in the room that night fingering the secret instruments, which he had just revealed by lifting the cover, he turned to the weatherbeaten old man and said, in a hard, sarcastic voice:
“You see the war is lasting longer than you expected, Small—isn’t it? I suppose you’ve seen all that silly nonsense in the papers about Germany being already at the end of her tether? Don’t you believe it. In a year’s time we shall have only just started.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the old fellow, in a thick voice. “But—well, sir, I—I tell you frankly, I’m growing a bit nervous. Mr Judd, from the Chapel Point coastguard, came ’ere twice last week and sat with me smokin’, as if he were a-tryin’ to pump me.”
“Nervous, be hanged, Small. Don’t be an idiot!” Rodwell replied quickly. “What can anybody know, unless you yourself blab? And if you did—by Gad! your own people would shoot you as a traitor at the Tower of London—you and your boy too! So remember that—and be very careful to keep a still tongue.”
“But I never thought, when that Mr Josephs, up in London, wrote to me sending me a receipt for the money I owed, that I was expected to do all this!” Small protested.
“No, if you had known you would never have done it!” laughed Rodwell. “But Germany is not like your gallant rule-of-thumb England. She leaves nothing to chance, and, knowing the cupidity of men, she takes full advantage of it—as in your case.”
“But I can’t bear the suspense, sir; I feel—I feel, Mr Rodwell—that I’m suspected—that this house is under suspicion—that—”
“Utter bosh! It’s all imagination, Small,” Lewin Rodwell interrupted. “They’ve cut the cable at the Spurn, and that’s sufficient. Nobody in England ever dreams that the German Admiralty prepared for this war five years ago, and therefore spliced a second end into the cable.”