Could I, therefore, trust him? Was I discreet to rely on him when great stakes, not only mine but England’s, hung in the balance?
On and on sped the train through hamlet, village and township. The twilight faded slowly into night, and as the gas lamps above my head flamed coarsely upward a terrible temptation assailed me and kept knocking on the doors of my brain in form something like this:
1. Why be a merely passive instrument in this great struggle between nations and persons for this Lake of Sacred Treasure?
2. Casteno stole the documents from the hunchback as he lay in the tent at Worcester senseless; why don’t you take them from Casteno now he is senseless? Then you would be quite certain England would get her just rights.
3. You need not fear what the Spaniard might say or do to you if he caught you in the act. After all, you have got those clever imitations of the real thing which the hunchback and Paul Zouche prepared, and at a pinch you could substitute for the true manuscripts the false, and get clear away from St. Bruno’s to the protection of the Foreign Office before the fraud were discovered.
Everybody is a potential scoundrel in some great crisis of his career. “Opportunity makes the thief,” says one old school of cynics; and I was, I admit, sore beset to do this deed, with some excuse for my own conscience that after all it was but the doing of a patriot and that it had the sanction of a sacred national need.
But as I toyed with the temptation compromise came and sat beside me and told me that, if I didn’t do the trick then, I could do it some other moment, when I was the more convinced of Casteno’s mala fides. Fate also took a hand in the struggle between conscience and duty and a sense of honour.