"I have refused the Duke. Money is cash—I mean trash. Little one I am yours.—Linda Spavinsky."
The telegram had been sent that afternoon from Chichester.
Hillyard gazed around at the serious faces which hemmed him in. It became a contest as to whose face should hold firm longest. Joan herself was the first to flee, and she was found rocking to and fro in silent laughter in a corner of the library. Then Hillyard himself burst into a roar.
"I bought that fairly," he admitted, and he went up several points in the estimation of them all.
The last day of the races came—all sunshine and hot summer; lights and shadows chasing across the downs, the black slopes of Charlton forest on the one side, parks and green fields and old brown houses, sloping to the silver Solent, upon the other; and in the centre of the plain, by Bosham water, the spire of Chichester Cathedral piercing the golden air. Paddock and lawn and the stands were filled until about two in the afternoon. Then the gaps began to show to those who were concerned to watch. Especially about the oval railings in the paddock, within which, dainty as cats and with sleek shining skins, the racehorses stepped, the crowd grew thin. And in a few moments, the word had run round like fire, "The officers had gone."
Hillyard stood reflecting upon the stupendous fact. Never had he so bitterly regretted that physical disqualification which banned him from their company. Never had he so envied Luttrell. He was in the uttermost depression when a small, brown-gloved hand touched his arm. He turned and saw Joan Whitworth at his side, her lovely face alive with excitement, her eyes most friendly. It was hardly at all the Joan he knew. Joan had courage, but to face Goodwood in the clothes she affected at Rackham Park was beyond it. From her grey silk stockings and suède shoes to the little smart blue hat which sat so prettily on her hair, she was, as Millicent Splay would have admitted, really dressed.
"There is a real telegram for you," she said. She held it out to him enclosed in an envelope which had been already opened.
"Please come to see me—Graham," he read, and the actual receipt of the message stirred within him such a whirl of emotion that, for a moment or two, Joan Whitworth spoke and he was not aware of it. Suddenly, however, he understood that she was speaking words of importance.
"I hope I did right to open it," she said. "Colonel Brockley rode over this morning to tell us that his son had been recalled to his battalion by a telegram. I knew you were expecting one. When this one came, I thought that it might be important and that you ought to have it at once. On the other hand it might be another telegram," and her face dimpled into smiles, "from Linda Spavinsky. I didn't know what to do about it. But Mario Escobar was quite certain that I ought to open it."
"Mario Escobar?" cried Hillyard.
"Yes. He had just arrived. He was quite certain that we ought to open it, so we did."
"We?" A note of regret in his voice made her ask anxiously:
"Was I wrong?"
Hillyard hastened to reassure her.
"Not a bit. Of course you were quite right, and I am very grateful."
Joan's face cleared again.
"You see, I thought that if it was important I could bring it over and drive you back again."
"Will you?" Hillyard asked eagerly. "But now you are here you ought to stay."
Joan would not hear of the proposal, and Hillyard himself was in a fever to be off. They found Sir Chichester and his wife in the paddock, and Hillyard wished his hosts good-bye. Mario Escobar, who had driven over with Joan Whitworth, was talking to them. Escobar turned to Martin Hillyard.
"We met at Sir Charles Hardiman's supper party. You have not forgotten? You are off? A new play, I hope, to go into rehearsal."
He smiled and bowed, and waved his hands. Hillyard went away with Joan Whitworth and mounted beside her into a little two-seated car which she had been accustomed to drive in her unregenerate days. She had not forgotten her skill, and she sent the little car spinning up and down the road into the hills. It was an afternoon of blue and gold, with the larks singing out of sight in the sky. The road wound up and down, dark hedges on one side, fields yellow with young wheat upon the other, and the scent of the briar-rose in the air. Joan said very little, and Hillyard was content to watch her as she drove, the curls blowing about her ears and her hands steady and sure upon the wheel as she swung the car round the corners and folds of the hills. Once she asked of him:
"Are you glad to go?"
He made no pretence of misunderstanding her.
"Very," he answered. "If the great trial is coming, I want to fall back into the rank and file. Pushing and splashing is for peace times."
"Oh, I understand that!" she cried.
These were the young days. The jealousies of Departments, the intrigues to pull this man down and put that man up, not because of his capacity or failure, but because he fitted or did not fit the inner politics of the Office, the capture of honours by the stay-at-homes—all the little miseries and horrors that from time immemorial have disfigured the management of wars—they lay in the future. With millions of people, as with this couple speeding among the uplands, the one thought was—the great test is at hand.
"You go up to London to-night, and it may be a long while before we see you," said Joan. She brought the car to a halt on the edge of Duncton Hill. "Look for luck and for memory at the Weald of Sussex," she cried with a little catch in her throat.
Fields and great trees, and here and there the white smoke of a passing train and beyond the Blackdown and the misty slopes of Leith Hill—Hillyard was never to forget it, neither that scene nor the eager face and shining eyes of Joan Whitworth against the blue and gold of the summer afternoon.
"You will remember that you have friends here, who will be glad to hear news of you," she said, and she threw in the clutch and started the car down the hill.
CHAPTER XI
Stella Runs To Earth
"You have been back in England long?" asked Stella Croyle.
"A little while," said Hillyard evasively.
It was the first week of September. But since his return from Rackham Park to London his days had been passed in the examination of files of documents; and what little time he had enjoyed free from that labour had been given to quiet preparations for his departure.
"You might have come to see me," Stella Croyle suggested. "You knew that I wished to see you."
"Yes, but I have been very busy," he answered. "I am going away."
Stella Croyle looked at him curiously.
"You too! You have joined up?"
Hillyard shook his head.
"No good," he answered. "I told you my lungs were my weak point. I am turned down—and I am going abroad. It's not very pleasant to find oneself staying on in London, going to a little dinner party here and there where all the men are oldish, when all of one's friends have gone."
Stella Croyle's face and voice softened.
"Yes. I can understand that," she said.
Hillyard watched her narrowly, but there was no doubt that she was sincere. She had received him with an air of grievance, and a hard accent in her voice. But she was entering now into a comprehension of the regrets which must be troubling him.
"I am sorry," she continued. "I never cared very much for women. I have very few friends amongst them. And so I am losing—every one." She held out her hand to him in sympathy. "But if I were a man and had been turned down by the doctors, I don't think that I could stay. I should go like you and hide."
She smiled and poured out two cups of tea.
"That is a habit of yours, even though you are not a man," Hillyard replied.
"What do you mean?"
"You run away and hide."
Stella looked at her visitor in surprise.
"Who told you that?"
"Sir Charles Hardiman."
Stella Croyle was silent for a few moments.
"Yes, that's true," and she laughed suddenly. "When things go wrong, I become rather impossible. I have often made up my mind to live entirely in the country, but I never carry the plan out."
She let Hillyard drink his tea and light a cigarette before she approached the question which was torturing her.
"You had a good time in the Sudan!" she began. "Lots of heads?"
"Yes. I had a perfect time."
"And your friend? Captain Luttrell. Did you meet him?"
Hillyard had pondered on the answer which he would give to her when she asked that question. If he answered, "Yes,"—why, then he must go on, he must tell her something of what passed between Luttrell and himself, how he delivered his message and what answer he received. Let him wrap that answer up in words, however delicate and vague, she would see straight to the answer. Her heart would lead her there. To plead forgetfulness would be merely to acknowledge that he slighted her; and she would not believe him. So he lied.
"No. I never met Luttrell. He was away down in Khordofan when I was on the White Nile."
Stella Croyle had turned a little away from Hillyard when she put the question; and she sat now with her face averted for a long while. Nothing broke the silence but the ticking of the clock.
"I am sorry," said Hillyard.
No doubt her disappointment was bitter. She had counted very much, no doubt, on this chance of the two men meeting; on her message reaching her lover, and a "little word" now and again from him coming to her hands. Some morning she would wake up and find an envelope in the familiar writing waiting upon the tray beside her tea—that, no doubt, had been the hope which she had lived on this many a day. Hillyard was not fool enough to hold that he understood either the conclusions at which women arrived, or the emotions by which they jumped to them. But he attributed these hopes and thoughts with some confidence to Stella Croyle—until she turned and showed him her face. The sympathy and gentleness had gone from it. She was white with passion and her eyes blazed.
"Why do you lie to me?" she cried. "I met Harry this morning."
Hillyard was more startled by the news of Luttrell's presence in London than confused by the detection of his lie.
"Harry Luttrell!" he exclaimed. "You are sure? He is in England?"
"Yes. I met him in Piccadilly outside Jerningham's"—she mentioned the great outfitters and provision merchants—"he told me that he had run across you in the Sudan. What made you say that you hadn't?"
Hillyard was taken at a loss.
"Well?" she insisted.
Hillyard could see no escape except by the way of absolute frankness.
"Because I gave him your message, Mrs. Croyle," he replied slowly, "and I judged that he was not going to answer it."
Stella Croyle was inclined to think that the world was banded against her, to deceive her and to do her harm. They had all been engaged, Hardiman and the rest of them, in keeping Harry Luttrell away from her: in defending him, whether he wished it or not, from the wiles of the enchantress. Stella Croyle was quick enough in the up-take where her wounded heart was not concerned, but she was never very clear in any judgment which affected Harry Luttrell. Passion and disappointment and hope drew veils between the truth and her, and she dived below the plain reason to this or that far-fetched notion for the springs of his conduct. Almost she had persuaded herself that Harry Luttrell, by the powerful influence of friends, was being kept against his will from her side. Her anger against Hillyard had sprung, not from the mere fact that he had lied to her, but from her fancy that he had joined the imaginary band of her enemies. She understood now that in this she had been wrong.
"I see," she said gently. "It was to spare me pain?"
"Yes."
Suddenly Stella Croyle laughed—and with triumph. She showed to Hillyard a face from which all the anger had gone.
"You need not have been so anxious to spare me. Harry is coming here this afternoon."
She saw the incredulity flicker in Hillyard's eyes, but she did not mind.
"Yes," she asserted. "He goes down this evening to a camp in the New Forest where his battalion is waiting to go to France. He starts at six from Waterloo. He promised to run in here first."
Hillyard looked at the clock. It was already half-past four. He had not the faintest hope that Luttrell would come. Stella had no doubt pressed him to come. She had probably been a little importunate. Luttrell's promise was an excuse, just an excuse to be rid of her—nothing more.
"Luttrell has probably a great deal to do on this last afternoon," he suggested.
"Of course, he won't be able to stay long," Stella Croyle agreed. "Still, five minutes are worth a good deal, aren't they, if you have waited for them two years?"
She was impenetrable in her confidence. It clothed her about like armour. Not for a moment would she doubt—she dared not! Harry was coming back to the house that afternoon. Would he break something—some little china ornament upon the mantel-shelf? He generally knocked over something. What would it be to-day, the mandarin with the nodding head, or the funny little pot-bellied dwarf which she had picked up at Christie's the day before? Stella smiled delightedly as she selected this and that of her little treasures for destruction. Oh, to-day Harry Luttrell could sweep every glass or porcelain trinket she possessed into the grate—when once he had passed through the doorway—when once again he stood within her room. She sat with folded hands, hope like a rose in her heart, sure of him, so sure of him that she did not even watch the hands of her clock.
But the hands moved on.
"I will stay, if I may," said Hillyard uncomfortably. "I will go, of course, when——" and he could not bring himself to complete the sentence.
Stella, however, added the words, though in a quieter voice and with less triumph than she had used before.
"When he comes. Yes, do stay. I shall be glad."
Slowly the day drew in. The sunlight died away from the trees in the park. In the tiny garden great shadows fell. The dusk gathered and Hillyard and Stella Croyle sat without a word in the darkening room. But Stella had lost her pride of carriage. On the mantelpiece the clock struck the hour—six little tinkling silvery strokes. At that moment a guard was blowing his whistle on a platform of Waterloo and a train beginning slowly to move.
"He will have missed his train," said Stella in an unhappy whisper. "He will be here later."
"My dear," replied Hillyard, and leaning forward he took and gently shook her hand. "Soldiers don't miss their trains."
Stella did not answer. She sat on until the lamps were lit in the streets outside and in this room the dusk had changed to black night.
"No, he will not come," she said at last, in a low wail of anguish. She rose and turned to Hillyard. Her face glimmered against the darkness deathly white and her eyes shone with sorrow.
"It was kind and wise of you to wish to spare me," she said. "Oh, I can picture to myself how coldly he heard you. He never meant to come here this afternoon."
Stella Croyle was wrong, just as Hillyard had been. Harry Luttrell had meant to pay his farewell visit to Stella Croyle, knowing well that he was unlikely ever to come back, and understanding that he owed her it. But an incident drove the whole matter from his thoughts, and the incident was just one instance to show how wide a gulf now separated these two.
He had called at a nursing home close to Portland Place where a Colonel Oakley lay dying of a malignant disease. Oakley had been the chief spirit of reviving the moral and the confidence of the disgraced Clayfords. He had laboured unflinchingly to restore its discipline, to weld it into one mind, with dishonour to redeem, and a single arm to redeem it. He had lived for nothing else—until the internal trouble laid him aside. Luttrell called at half-past three to tell him that all was well with his old battalion, and was met by a nurse who shook her head.
"The last two days he has been lying, except for a minute here and there, in a coma. You may see him if you like, but it is a question of hours."
Luttrell went into the bedroom where the sick man lay, so thin of face and hand, so bloodless. But it seemed that the Fates wished to deal the Colonel one last ironic stroke, before they let him die. For, while Luttrell yet stood in the room, Colonel Oakley's eyes opened. This last moment of consciousness was his, the very last; and while it still endured, suddenly, down Portland Place, with its drums beating, its soldiers singing, marched a battalion. The song and the music swelled, the tramp of young, active, vigorous soldiers echoed and reached down the quiet street. Colonel Oakley turned his face to his pillow and burst into tears; the bitterness of death was given him to drink in overflowing measure. It seemed as though a jibe was flung at him.
The tramp of the battalion had not yet died away when Oakley sank again into unconsciousness.
"It was pretty rough that he should just wake up to hear that and to know that he would never have part in it, eh?" said Luttrell, speaking in a low voice more to himself than to the nurse. "What he did for us! Pretty hard treatment, eh?"
Luttrell left the home with one thought filling his mind—the regiment. It had got to justify all Oakley's devotion; it had got somehow to make amends to him, even if he never was to know of it, for this last unfair stroke of destiny. Luttrell walked across London, dwelling upon the qualities of individual men in the company which was his command—how this man was quick, and that man stupid, and that other inclined to swank, and a fourth had a gift for reading maps, and a fifth would make a real marksman; and so he woke up to find himself before the bookstall in the station at Waterloo. Then he remembered the visit he had promised, but there was no longer any time. He took the train to the New Forest, and three days later went to France.
But of Luttrell's visit to Colonel Oakley, Stella Croyle never knew. And, again, very likely it would not have mattered if she had. They were parted too widely for insight and clear vision.
Hillyard carried away with him a picture of Stella's haunted and despairing face. It was over against him as he dined at his club, gleaming palely from out of darkness, the lips quivering, the eyes sad with all the sorrows of women. He could blame neither the one nor the other—neither Stella Croyle nor Harry Luttrell. One heart called to the other across too wide a gulf, and this heart on the hither side was listening to quite other voices and was deaf to her cry for help. But Hillyard was on the road along which Millicent Splay had already travelled. More and more he felt the case for compassion. He carried the picture of Stella's face home with him. It troubled his sleep; by constant gazing upon it he became afraid....
He waked with a start to hear a question whispered at his ear. "Where is she? How has she passed this night?" The morning light was glimmering between the curtains. The room was empty. Yet surely those words had been spoken, actually spoken by a human voice.... He took his telephone instrument in his hand and lifted the receiver. In a little while—but a while too long for his impatience—his call was acknowledged at the exchange. He gave Stella Croyle's number and waited. Whilst he waited he looked at his watch. The time was a quarter past seven.
An unfamiliar and sleepy voice answered him from her house.
"Will you put me on to Mrs. Croyle?" he requested, and the reply came back:
"Mrs. Croyle went away with her maid last night."
"Last night?" cried Hillyard incredulously. "But I did not leave the house myself until well after six, and she had then no plans for leaving."
Further details, however, were given to him. Mrs. Croyle had called up a garage whence cars can be hired. She had packed hurriedly. She had left at nine by motor.
"Where for?" asked Hillyard.
The name of an hotel in the pine country of Surrey was given.
"Thank you," said Hillyard, and he rang off.
She had run to earth in her usual way, when trouble and grief broke through her woman's armour and struck her down—that was all! Hillyard lighted a cigarette and rang for his tea. Yes, that was all! She was acting true to her type, as the jargon has it. But against his will, her face took shape before him, as he had seen it in the darkness of her room and ever since—ever since!
He rang again, and more insistently. He possessed a small, swift motor-car. Before the clocks of London had struck eight he was travelling westwards along the King's Road. Hillyard was afraid. He did not formulate his fears. He was not sure of what he feared. But he was afraid—terribly afraid; and for the first time anger rose up in his heart against his friend. Luttrell! Harry Luttrell! At this very moment he was changing direction in columns of fours upon the drill ground, happy in the smooth execution of the manœuvre by his men and untroubled by any thought of the distress of Stella Croyle. Well, little things must give way to great—women to the exigencies of drill!
Meanwhile, Hillyard grew more afraid, and yet more afraid. He swept down the hill to Cobham, passed between the Hut and the lake, and was through Ripley before the shutters in the shops were down. The dew was heavy in the air; all the fresh, clean smell of the earth was in that September morning. And as yet the morning itself was only half awake. At last the Hog's Back rose, and at a little inn, known for its comfort—and its chef—Hillyard's car was stopped.
"Mrs. Croyle?" Hillyard asked at the office.
"Her maid is here," said the girl clerk, and pointed.
Hillyard turned to a girl, pretty and, by a few years, younger than Stella Croyle.
"I have orders not to wake Mrs. Croyle until she rings," said the maid. Jenny Prask, she was called, and she spoke with just a touch of pleasant Sussex drawl. "Mrs. Croyle has not been sleeping well, and she looked for a good night's rest in country air."
The maid was so healthful in her appearance, so reasonable in her argument, that Hillyard's terrors, fostered by solitude, began to lose their vivid colours.
"I understand that," he stammered. "Yet, Jenny——"
Jenny Prask smiled.
"You are Mr. Hillyard, I think?"
"Yes."
"I have heard my mistress speak of you." Hillyard knew enough of maids to understand that "mistress" was an unusual word with them. Here, it seemed, was a paragon of maids, who was quite content to be publicly Stella Croyle's maid, whose gentility suffered no offence by the recognition of a mistress.
"If you wish, I will wake her."
Jenny Prask went up the stairs, Hillyard at her heels. She knocked upon the door. No answer was returned. She opened it and entered.
Stella Croyle was up and dressed. She was sitting at a table by the window with some sheets of notepaper and some envelopes in front of her, and her back was towards Hillyard and the open door. But she was dressed as she had been dressed the evening before when he had left her; the curtains in the room were drawn, and the electric lights on the writing-table and the walls were still burning. The bed had not been slept in.
Stella Croyle rose and turned towards her visitors. She tottered a little as she stood up, and her eyes were dazed.
"Why have you come here?" she asked faintly, and she fell rather than sat again in her chair.
Hillyard sprang forward and tore the curtains aside so that the sunlight poured into the room, and Stella opened and shut her eyes with a contraction of pain.
"I had so many letters to write," she explained, "I thought that I would sit up and get through with them."
Hillyard looked at the table. There were great black dashes on the notepaper and lines, and here and there a scribbled picture of a face, and perhaps now and again half a word. She had sat at that table all night and had not even begun a letter. Hillyard's heart was torn with pity as he looked from her white, tired face to the sheets of notepaper. What misery and unhappiness did those broad, black dashes and idle lines express?
"You must have some breakfast," he said. "I'll order it and have it ready for you downstairs by the time you are ready. Then I'll take you back to London."
The blood suddenly mounted into her face.
"You will?" she cried wildly. "In a reserved compartment, so that I may do nothing rash and foolish? Are you going to be kind too?"
She broke into a peal of shrill and bitter laughter. Then her head went down upon her hands, and she gave herself up to such a passion of sobbing and tears as was quite beyond all Hillyard's experience. Yet he would rather hear those sobs and see her bowed shoulders shaking under the violence of them than listen again to the dreadful laughter which had gone before. He had not the knowledge which could enable him to understand her sudden outburst, nor did he acquire that knowledge until long afterwards. But he understood that quite unwittingly he had touched some painful chord in that wayward nature.
"I am going to take you back in my motor-car," he said. "I'll be downstairs with the breakfast ready."
She had probably eaten nothing, he reckoned, since teatime the day before. Food was the steadying thing she needed now. He went to the door which Jenny Prask held open for him.
"Don't leave her!" he breathed in a whisper.
Jenny Prask smiled.
"Not me, sir," she said fervently.
Hillyard remembered with comfort some words which she had spoken in appreciation of the loving devotion of her maid.
"In three-quarters of an hour," said Jenny; and later on that morning, with a great fear removed from his heart, Hillyard drove Stella Croyle back to London.
CHAPTER XII
In Barcelona
It was nine o'clock on a night of late August.
The restaurant of the Maison Dorée in the Plaza Cataluña at Barcelona looks across the brilliantly-lighted square from the south side. On the pavement in front of it and of its neighbour, the Café Continental, the vendors of lottery tickets were bawling the lucky numbers they had for sale. Even in this wide space the air was close and stale. Within, a few people left over in the town had strayed in to dine at tables placed against the walls under flamboyant decorations in the style of Fragonard. At a table Hillyard was sitting alone over his coffee. Across the room one of the panels represented a gleaming marble terrace overlooking a country-side bathed in orange light; and on the terrace stood a sedan chair with drawn curtains, and behind the chair stood a saddled white horse. Hillyard had dined more than once during the last few months at the Maison Dorée; and the problem of that picture had always baffled him. A lovers' tryst! But where were the lovers? In some inner room shaded from the outrage of that orange light which never was on sea or land? Or in the sedan chair? Or were their faces to be discovered, as in the puzzle pictures, in the dappling of the horse's flanks, or the convolutions of the pillars which supported the terrace roof, or the gilded ornamentations of the chair itself? Hillyard was speculating for the twentieth time on these important matters with a vague hope that one day the door of the sedan chair would open, when another door opened—the door of the restaurant. A sharp-visaged man with a bald forehead, a clerk, one would say, or a commercial traveller, looked round the room and went forward to Hillyard's table. He went quite openly.
The two men shook hands, and the new-comer seated himself in front of Hillyard.
"You will take coffee and a cigar?" Hillyard asked in Spanish, and gave the order to the waiter.
The two men talked of the heat, the cinematograph theatres at the side of the Plaza, the sea-bathing at Caldetas, and then the sharp-faced man leaned forward.
"Ramon says there is no truth in the story, señor."
Hillyard struck a match and held it to his companion's cigar.
"And you trust Ramon, Señor Baeza?"
Lopez Baeza leaned back with a gesture of unqualified assent.
"As often and often you can trust the peasant of my country," he said.
Hillyard agreed with a nod. He gazed about the room.
"There is no one interesting here to-night," he said idly.
"No," answered Lopez Baeza. "The theatres are closed, the gay people have gone to St. Sebastian, the families to the seaside. Ouf, but it is hot."
"Yes."
Hillyard dropped his voice to a whisper and returned to the subject of his thoughts.
"You see, my friend, it is of so much importance that we should make no mistake here."
"Claro!" returned Lopez Baeza. "But listen to me, señor. You know that our banks are behind the times and our post offices not greatly trusted. We have therefore a class of messengers."
Hillyard nodded.
"I know of them."
"Good. They are not educated. Most of them can neither read nor write. They are simply peasants. Yet they are trusted to carry the most important letters and great sums of money in gold and silver from place to place. And never do they betray their trust. It is unknown. Why, señor, I know myself of cases where rich men have entrusted their daughters to the care of the messengers, sure that in this way their daughters will arrive safely at their destination."
"Yes," said Hillyard. "I know of these men."
"Ramon Castillo is as honest as the best of them."
"Yes, but he is not one of them," said Hillyard. "He is a stevedore with thirty years of the quayside and at the port of Barcelona, where there are German ships with their officers and crews on board."
Hillyard was troubled. He drew from his pocket creased letters and read them for the twentieth time with a frowning countenance.
"There is so much at stake. Two hundred feluccas—two hundred motor-driven feluccas! And eighteen thousand men, on shore and sea? See what it means! On our side, the complete surveillance of the Western Mediterranean! On the other side—against us—two hundred travelling supply bases for submarines, two hundred signal stations. I want to be sure! I want neither to give the enemy the advantage by putting him upon his guard, nor to miss the great opportunity myself."
Lopez Baeza nodded.
"Why not talk with Ramon Castillo yourself?" he asked.
"That is what I want to do."
"I will arrange for it. When?"
"To-night," said Hillyard.
Lopez Baeza lifted his hands in deprecation.
"Yes. I can take you to his house—now. But, señor, Ramon is a poor man. He lives in a little narrow street."
Hillyard looked quietly at Lopez Baeza. He had found men on the Mediterranean littoral whom he could trust with his life and everything that was his. But a good working principle was to have not overmuch faith in any one. A noisome little street in the lower quarters of Barcelona—who could tell what might happen after one had plunged into it?
"I will come with you," he said.
"Good," said Lopez. "I will go on ahead." And once more Hillyard's quiet eyes rested upon Baeza's face. "It is not wise that we should walk out together. There is no one here, it is true, but in the chairs outside the cafés—who shall say?"
"Yes. You go on ahead," Hillyard agreed. "That is wise."
Lopez rose.
"Give me five minutes, señor. Then down the Rambla. The second turning to the right, beyond the Opera House. You will see me at the corner. When you see me, follow!"
Hillyard rose and shook hands cordially with Lopez Baeza with the air of a man who might never see his friend again for years. Baeza commended him to God and went out of the restaurant on to the lighted footway.
Hillyard read through the two creased letters again, though he knew them by heart. They had reached him from William Lloyd, an English merchant at Barcelona, at two different dates. The first, written six weeks ago, related how Pontiana Tabor, a servant of the firm, had come into Lloyd's private office and informed him that on the night of the 27th June a German submarine had entered a deep cove at the lonely north-east point of the island of Mallorca, and had there been provisioned by José Medina's men, with José Medina's supplies, and that José Medina had driven out of Palma de Mallorca in his motor-car, and travelling by little-known tracks, had been present when the operation was in process. The name of a shoemaker in a street of Palma was given as corroboration.
The second letter, which had brought Hillyard post-haste off the sea into Barcelona, was only three days old. Once more Pontiana Tabor had been the bearer of bad news. José Medina had been seen entering the German Consulate in Barcelona, between eleven and twelve o'clock of the morning of August 22nd.
Hillyard was greatly troubled by these two letters.
"We can put José Medina out of business, of course," he reflected. For José Medina's tobacco factories were built at a free port in French territory. "But I want the man for my friend."
He put the letters back in his pocket and paid his bill. As he went out of the Maison Dorée, he felt in the right-hand pocket of his jacket to make sure that a little deadly life preserver lay ready to his hand.
He did not distrust Lopez Baeza. All the work which Baeza had done for him had, indeed, been faithfully and discreetly done. But—but there was always a certain amount of money for the man who would work the double cross—not so very much, but still, a certain amount. And Hillyard was always upon his guard against the intrusion of a contempt for the German effort. That contempt was easy enough for a man who, having read year after year of the wonders of the loud-vaunted German system of espionage, had come fresh from his reading into contact with the actual agents. Their habit of lining their pockets at the expense of their Government, their unfulfilled pretensions, their vanity and extravagance, and, above all, their unimaginative stupidity in their estimation of men—these things were apt in the early years of the war to bewilder the man who had been so often told to fall down before the great idol of German efficiency.
"The German agent works on the assumption that the mind of every foreigner reasons on German lines, but with inferior intelligence. But behind the agent is the cunning of Berlin, with its long-deliberated plans and its concocted ingenuity of method. And though on the whole they are countered, as with amazement they admit, by the amateurs from England, still every now and then—not very often—they do bring something off."
Thus Hillyard reasoned as he turned the corner of the Plaza Cataluña into the wide Rambla. It might be that the narratives of Pontiana Tabor and the denials of Ramon Castillo were all just part of one little subsidiary plan in the German scheme which was to reach its achievement by putting an inconvenient Englishman out of the way for good in one of the dark, narrow side streets of Barcelona.
After the hot day the Rambla, with its broad tree-shaded alley in the middle, its carriage-ways on each side of the alley, and its shops and footwalks beyond the carriage-ways, was crowded with loiterers. The Spaniard, to our ideas, is simple in his pleasure. To visit a cinematograph, to take a cooling temperance drink at the Municipal Kiosque at the top of the Rambla, and to pace up and down the broad walk with unending chatter—until daybreak—here were the joys of Barcelona folk in the days of summer. Further down at the lower end of the Rambla you would come upon the dancing halls and supper-cafés, with separate rooms for the national gambling game, "Siete y Media," but they had their own clientele amongst the bloods and the merchant captains from the harbour. The populace of Barcelona walked the Rambla under the great globes of electric light.
Hillyard could only move slowly through the press. Every one dawdled. Hillyard dawdled too. He passed the Opera House, and a little further down saw across the carriage-way, Lopez Baeza in front of a lighted tobacco shop at the corner of a narrow street. Hillyard crossed the carriage-way and Baeza turned into the street, a narrow thoroughfare between tall houses and dark as a cavern. Hillyard followed him. The lights of the Rambla were left behind, the houses became more slatternly and disreputable, the smells of the quarter were of rancid food and bad drains. Before a great door Baeza stopped and clapped his hands.
A jingle of keys answered him, and rising from the step of another house the watchman of the street crossed the road. He put a key into the door, opened it, and received the usual twopence. Baeza and Hillyard passed in.
"Ramon is on the top floor. We have to climb," said Baeza.
He lit a match, and the two men mounted a staircase with a carved balustrade, made for a king. Two stories up, the great staircase ended, and another of small, steep and narrow steps succeeded it. When Baeza's match went out there was no light anywhere; from a room somewhere above came a sound of quarrelling voices—a woman's voice high and shrill, a man's voice hoarse and drunken, and, as an accompaniment, the wailing of a child wakened from its sleep.
At the very top of the house Baeza rapped on a door. The door was opened, and a heavy, elderly man, wearing glasses on his nose, stood in the entrance with the light of an unshaded lamp behind him.
"Ramon, it is the chief," said Baeza.
Ramon Castello crossed the room and closed an inner door. Then he invited Hillyard to enter. The room was bare but for a few pieces of necessary furniture, but all was scrupulously clean. Ramon Castillo set forward a couple of chairs and asked his visitors to be seated. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and he wore the rope-soled sandals of the Spanish peasant, but he was entirely at his ease. He made the customary little speech of welcome with so simple a dignity and so manifest a sincerity that Hillyard could hardly doubt him afterwards.
"It is my honour to welcome you not merely as my chief, but as an Englishman. I am poor, and I take my pay, but Señor Baeza will assure you that for twenty-five years I have been the friend of England. And there are thousands and thousands of poor Spaniards like myself, who love England, because its law-courts are just, because there is a real freedom there, because political power is not the opportunity of oppression."
The little speech was spoken with great rapidity and with deep feeling; and, having delivered it, Ramon seated himself on the side of the table opposite to Hillyard and Baeza and waited.
"It is about Pontiana Tabor," said Hillyard. "He is making a mistake?"
"No, señor; he is lying," and he used the phrase which has no exact equivalent in the English. "He is a sin verguenza."
"Tell me, my friend," said Hillyard.
"Pontiana Tabor swears that José Medina was seen to enter the German Consulate before noon on August the 22nd. But on August the 21st Medina was in Palma, Mallorca; he was seen there by a captain of the Islana Company, and a friend of mine spoke to him on the quay. If, therefore, he was in the German Consulate here on the 22nd, he must have crossed that night by the steamer to Barcelona. But he did not. His name was not on the list of passengers, and although he might have avoided that, he was not seen on board or to come on board. I have spoken with officers and crew. José Medina did not cross on the 21st. Moreover, Señor Baeza has seen a letter which shows that he was certainly in Palma on the 23rd."
"That is true," said Baeza. "Medina was in Palma on the 21st, and in Palma on the 23rd, and he did not cross to Barcelona on the night of the 21st, nor back again to Palma on the night of the 22nd. Therefore he was not seen to visit the German Consulate on the morning of the 22nd, and, as Ramon says, Pontiana is lying."
"Why should Pontiana lie?" asked Hillyard.
Ramon took his pince-nez from the bridge of his nose, and, holding them between his finger and thumb, tapped with them upon his knee.
"Because, señor, there are other contrabandists besides José Medina; one little group at Tarragona and another near Garucha—and they would all be very glad to see José Medina get into trouble with the British and the French. His feluccas fly the British flag and his factories are on French soil. There would be an end of José Medina."
The letters were put in front of Hillyard. He read them over carefully, and at the end he said:
"If Pontiana Tabor lied in this case of the Consulate—and that seems clear—it is very likely that he lied also in the other. Yes."
As a matter of fact, Hillyard had reasons of his own to doubt the truth of the story which ascribed to Medina the actual provisioning of a submarine—reasons which had nothing whatever to do with José Medina himself.
The destruction of shipping by German submarines in this western section of the Mediterranean had an intermittent regularity. There would be ten successive days—hardly ever more than ten days—during which ships were sunk. Thereafter for three weeks, steamships and sailing ships would follow the course upon which they were ordered, without hurt or loss. After three weeks, the murderous business would begin again. There was but one explanation in Hillyard's opinion.
"The submarines come out of Pola. When they reach the line between the Balearics and the Spanish coast, they have oil for ten days' cruising, and then return to their base," he argued.
Now, if a submarine had been provisioned by José Medina in a creek of Mallorca, the ten days' cruise would be extended to three weeks. This had never happened. Moreover, the date fixed by Pontiana Tabor happened to fall precisely in the middle of one of those periods of three weeks during which the terror did not haunt those seas. Pontiana Tabor had not known enough. He had fixed his date at a venture.
"Yes," said Hillyard, rising from his chair. "I agree with you, Señor Ramon. Tabor is a liar. What troubled me was that I had no clue as to why he should lie. You have given me it, and with all my heart I thank you."
He shook the stevedore's hand and stood for a moment talking and joking with him upon other subjects. Hillyard knew the value of a smile and a jest and a friendly manner. Your very enemy in Spain will do you a good turn if you meet him thus. Then he turned to Baeza.
"I shall be back, perhaps, in a week, but perhaps not. I will let you know in the usual way."
The two men went down the stairs and into the street. It was empty now and black, but at the far end, as at the end of a tunnel, the Rambla blazed and roared and the crowds swung past like a procession.
"It is best that we should separate here," said Lopez Baeza, "if you have no further instructions."
"Touching the matter of those ships," Hillyard suggested.
"Señor Fairbairn has it in hand."
"Good. Then, my friend, I have no further instructions," said Hillyard. "I agree with you about Ramon. I will go first."
He shook hands with Baeza, crossed the road and disappeared into the mouthway of an alley which ran up the hill parallel to the Rambla. The alley led into another side street, and turning to the right, Hillyard slipped out into the throng beneath the trees. He sauntered, as idle and as curious as any in that broad walk. He took a drink at a café, neither hiding himself unnaturally nor ostentatiously occupying a chair at the edge of the awning. He sat there for half an hour. But when he rose again he made sure that no one was loitering to watch his movements. He sauntered up to the very end of the Rambla past the ice-cream kiosque. The great Plaza spread in front of him, and at the corner across the road stood a double line of motor-cars, some for hire, others waiting for parties in the restaurants opposite. He walked across the roadway and disappeared in between the motor-cars as if he intended to cross the Plaza by the footway to the Paseo de la Reforma. A second later a motor-car shot out from the line and took the road to Tarragona.
Hillyard was inside the car. The tall houses of the city gave place to villas draped in bougainvillea behind gardens of trees. Then the villas ceased and the car sped across the flats of Llobegrat and climbed to the finest coast-road in the world. It was a night for lovers. A full moon, bright as silver, sailed in the sky; the broad, white road rose and dipped and wound past here and there a blue cottage, here and there a peasant mounted on his donkey and making his journey by night to escape the burning day. Far below the sea spread out most gently murmuring, and across a great wide path of glittering jewels, now a sailing-ship glided like a bird, now the black funnels of a steamer showed. So light was the wind that Hillyard could hear the kick of its screw, like the beating of some gigantic clock. He took his hat from his head and threw wide open his thin coat. After the heavy days of anxiety he felt a nimbleness of heart and spirit which set him in tune with the glory of that night. Suspicions, vague and elusive, had for so long clustered about José Medina, and then had come the two categorical statements, dates and hours, chapter and verse! He was still not sure, he declared to himself in warning. But he was sure enough to risk the great move—the move which he alone could make! He should no doubt have been dreaming of Joan Whitworth and fitting her into the frame of that August night. But he had not thought of her by one o'clock in the morning; and by one o'clock in the morning his motor-car had come to a stop on the deserted quay of Tarragona harbour under the stern of an English yacht.
CHAPTER XIII
Old Acquaintance
At six o'clock on the second morning after Hillyard's visit to Barcelona, the steam-yacht Dragonfly swept round the point of La Dragonera and changed her course to the south-east. She steamed with a following breeze over a sea of darkest sapphire which broke in sparkling cascades of white and gold against the rocky creeks and promontories on the ship's port side. Peasants working on the green terraces above the rocks stopped their work and stared as the blue ensign with the Union Jack in the corner broke out from the flagstaff at the stern.
"But it's impossible," cried one. "Only yesterday a French mail-steamer was chased in the passage between Mallorca and Minorca. It's impossible."
Another shaded his eyes with his hand and looked upon the neat yacht with its white deck and shining brass in contemptuous pity.
"Loco Inglés," said he.
The tradition of the mad Englishman has passed away from France, but it has only leaped the Pyrenees. Some crazy multi-millionaire was just running his head into the German noose. They gave up their work and settled down contentedly to watch the yacht, multi-millionaire, captain and crew and all go up into the sky. But the Dragonfly passed from their sight with the foam curling from her bows and broadening out into a pale fan behind her; and over the headlands for a long time they saw the streamer of her smoke as she drove in to Palma Bay.
Hillyard, standing by the captain's side upon the bridge, watched the great cathedral rise from out of the water at the end of the bay, towers and flying buttresses and the mass of brown stone, before even a house was visible. The Dragonfly passed a German cargo steamer which had sought refuge here at the outbreak of war. She was a large ship, full of oil, and she had been moved from the quay-side to an anchorage in the bay by the captain of the port, lest by design or inadvertence she should take fire and set the town aflame. There she lay, a source of endless misgiving to every allied ship which sailed these waters, kept clean and trim as a yacht, her full crew on board, her dangerous cargo below, in the very fairway of the submarine; and there the scruples of the Allies allowed her to remain while month followed month. Historians in later years will come across in this or that Government office in Paris, in London and in Rome, warnings, appeals, and accounts of the presence of this ship; and those anxious for a picturesque contrast may set against the violation of Belgium and all the "scrap of paper" philosophy, the fact that for years in the very centre of the German submarine effort in the Western Mediterranean, the German steamer Fangturm, with her priceless cargo of oil, was allowed by the scrupulous honour of the Allies to swing unmolested at her anchor in Palma Bay. Hillyard could never pass that great black ship in those neutral waters without a hope that his steering-gear would just at this moment play him false and swing his bows at full speed on to her side. The Dragonfly ran past her to the arm of the great mole and was moored with her stern to the quay. A small crowd of gesticulating idlers gathered about the ropes, and all were but repeating the phrases of the peasants upon the hill-side, as Hillyard walked ashore down the gangway.
"But it's impossible that you should have come."
"Just outside there is one. The fisherman saw her yesterday."
"She rose and spoke to one of the fishing-boats."
"But it is impossible that you should have come here."
"Yet I am here," answered Hillyard, the very mad multi-millionaire. "What will you, my friends? Shall I tell you a secret? Yes, but tell no one else! The Germans would be most enraged if they found out that we knew it. There aren't any submarines."
A little jest spoken in a voice of good-humour, with a friendly smile, goes a long way anywhere, but further in Spain than anywhere else in the world. The small crowd laughed with Hillyard, and made way for him.
A man offered to him with a flourish and a bow a card advertising a garage at which motor-cars could be hired for expeditions in the island. Hillyard accepted it and put it into his pocket. He paid a visit to his consul, and thereafter sat in a café for an hour. Then he strolled through the narrow streets, admired this and that massive archway, with its glimpse of a great stone staircase within, and mounted the hill. Almost at the top, he turned sharply into a doorway and ran up the stairs to the second floor. He knocked upon the door, and a maid-servant answered.
"Señor José Medina lives here?"
"Yes, señor."
"He is at home?"
"No, señor. He is in the country at his finca."
Hillyard thanked the girl, and went whistling down the stairs. Standing in the archway, he looked up and down the street with something of the air of a man engaged upon a secret end. One or two people were moving in the street; one or two were idling on the pavement. Hillyard smiled and walked down the hill again. He took the advertisement card from his pocket and, noting the address, walked into the garage.
"It will please me to see something of the island," he said. "I am not in Mallorca for long. I should like a car after lunch." He gave the name of a café between the cathedral and the quay. "At half-past two? Thank you. And by which road shall I go for all that is most of Mallorca?"
This was Spain. A small group of men had already invaded the garage and gathered about Hillyard and the proprietor. They proceeded at once to take a hand in the conversation and offer their advice. They suggested the expedition to Miramar, to Alcudia, to Manacor, discussing the time each journey would take, the money to be saved by the shorter course, the dust, and even the gradients of the road. They had no interest in the business in the garage, and they were not at all concerned in the success of Hillyard's excursion. That a stranger should carry away with him pleasant recollections of the beauties of Mallorca, was a matter of supreme indifference to them all. But they were engaged in the favourite pursuit of the Spaniards of the towns. They were getting through a certain small portion of the day, without doing any work, and without spending any money. The majority favoured the road past Valdemosa, over the Pass of Soller to Miramar and its rocky coast on the north-east side of the island, as indeed Hillyard knew the majority must. For there is no road like it for beauty in the Balearics, and few in all Spain.
"I will go that way, then," said Hillyard, and he strolled off to his luncheon.
He drove afterwards over the plain, between groves of olive and almond trees with gnarled stems and branches white with dust, mounted by the twisting road, terraces upon his left and pine-clothed mountainside upon his right, past Valdemosa to the Pass. The great sweep of rock-bound coast and glittering sea burst upon his view, and the boom of water surging into innumerable caves was like thunder to his ears. At a little gate upon the road the car was stopped at a word from Hillyard.
"I am going in here," he said. "I may be a little while."
The chauffeur looked at Hillyard with surprise. Hillyard had never been to the house before, but he could not mistake it from the description which he had been given. He passed through an orchard to the door of an outrageous villa, built in the style of a Swiss chalet and glaring with yellow paint. A man in his shirt-sleeves came to the door.
"Señor José Medina?" Hillyard inquired.
He held out his card and was ushered into the room of ceremony which went very well with the exterior of the yellow chalet. A waxed floor, heavy white lace curtains at the windows, a table of walnut-wood, chairs without comfort, but with gold legs, all was new and never to be used and hideous. Hillyard looked around him with a nod of comprehension. This is what its proprietor would wish for. With a hundred old houses to select from for a model—no! This is the way his fancies would run. The one beauty of the place, its position, was Nature's. Hillyard went to the window, which was on the side of the house opposite to the door. He looked down a steep terraced garden of orange trees and bright flowers to the foam sparkling on the rocks a thousand feet below.
"You wished to see me, señor," and Hillyard turned with curiosity.
Twelve years had passed since he had seen José Medina, but he had changed less than Hillyard expected. Martin remembered him as small and slight, with a sharp mobile face and a remarkable activity which was the very badge of the man; and these characteristics he retained. He was still like quick-silver. But he was fast losing his hair, and he wore pince-nez. The dress of the peasant and the cautious manner of the peasant, both were gone. In his grey lounge suit he had the look of a quick-witted clerk.
"You wished to see me, señor," he repeated, and he laid the card upon the table.
"For a moment. I shall hope not to detain you long."
"My time and my house are yours."
José Medina had clearly become a caballero since those early days of adventure. Hillyard noted the point for his own guidance, thanking his stars meanwhile that the gift of the house was a meaningless politeness.
"I arrived at Palma this morning, in a yacht," said Hillyard.
José Medina was prepared for the information. He bowed. There had been neither smile nor, indeed, any expression whatever upon his face since he had entered the room.
"I have heard of the yacht," he said. "It is a fine ship."
"Yes."
José Medina looked at Hillyard.
"It flies the English flag."
Hillyard bowed.
"As do your feluccas, señor, I believe."
A mere twitch of the lips showed that Medina appreciated the point.
"But I," continued Hillyard, "am an Englishman, while you, señor——"
José Medina was not, if he could help it, to be forced to cry "a hit" again.
"Whereas I, señor, am a neutral," he answered. The twitch of the lips became a smile. He invited Hillyard to a chair, he drew up another himself, and the two men sat down over against one another in the middle of that bare and formal room.
That one word neutral, so delicately emphasised, warned Hillyard that José Medina was quite alive to the reason of his visit. He could, of course, have blurted it out at once. He could have said in so many words, "Your tobacco factories are on French soil, and your two hundred feluccas are nominally owned in Gibraltar. Between French and English we shall close you down unless you help." But he knew very well that he would have got no more than fair words if he had. It is not thus that delicate questions are approached in Spain. Even the blackmailer does not dream of bluntly demanding money, or exposing his knowledge that he will get it. He pleads decently the poverty of his family and the long illness of his mother-in-law; and with the same decency the blackmailed yields to compassion and opens his purse. There is a gentlemanly reticence to be observed in these matters and Hillyard was well aware of the rules. He struck quite a different note.
"I shall speak frankly to you, Señor Medina, as one caballero to another"; and José Medina bowed and smiled.
"I put my cards upon the table. I ask you whether in your heart you are for the Germans or for us."
José Medina hitched his chair a little closer and holding up one hand with fingers spread ticked off his points, as he spoke them, with the other.
"Let us see! First, you come to me, señor, saying you are English, and speaking Spanish with the accent of Valencia. Good! I might reply, señor, how do I know? I might ask you how I am to be sure that when that British flag is hauled down from your yacht outside the bay over there, it is not a German one which should take its place. Good! But I do not make these replies. I accept your word as a caballero that you are English and not an enemy of England laying a trap for me. Good!" He took off his eye-glasses and polished them.
"Now listen to me!" he continued. "I am a Spaniard. We of Spain have little grievances against England and France. But these are matters for the Government, not for a private person. And the Government bids us be neutral. Good! Now I speak as a private person. For me England means opportunity for poor men to become great and rich. You may say I have become rich without the opportunities of England. I answer I am one in many thousands. England means Liberty, and within the strict limits of my neutrality I will do what a man may for that great country."
Hillyard listened and nodded. The speech was flowing and spoken with great fervour. It might mean much. It might mean nothing at all. It might be the outcome of conviction. But it might again be nothing more than the lip-service of a man who knew very well that England and France could squeeze him dry if they chose.
"I wish," said Hillyard cordially, "that the captains of the ports of Spain spoke also with your voice."
José Medina neither assumed an ignorance of the German leanings of the port officials nor expressed any assent. But, as if he had realised the thought which must be passing in Hillyard's mind, he said:
"You know very well, señor, that I should be mad if I gave help to the Germans. I am in your hands. You and France have but to speak the word, and every felucca of mine is off the seas. But what then! There are eighteen thousand men at once without food or work thrown adrift upon the coast of Spain. Will not Germany find use for those eighteen thousand men?"
Hillyard agreed. The point was shrewd. It was an open, unanswerable reply to the unuttered threat which perhaps Hillyard might be prompted to use.
"I have spoken," continued José Medina. "Now it is for you, señor. Tell me what within the limits of my neutrality I can do to prove to you the sincerity of my respect for England?"
Hillyard took a sheet of paper and a pencil from his pocket. He drew a rough map.
"Here are the Balearic Islands; here, farther to the west, the Columbretes; here the African coast; here the mainland of Spain. Now watch, I beg you, señor, whilst I sketch in the routes of your feluccas. At Oran in Africa your factories stand. From them, then, we start. We draw a broad thick line from Oran to the north-east coast of Mallorca, that coast upon which we look down from these windows, a coast honeycombed with caves and indented with creeks like an edge of fine lace—a very storehouse of a coast. Am I not right, Señor Don José?" He laughed, in a friendly good-humoured way, but the face of José Medina did not lose one shade of its impassiveness. He did not deny that the caves of this coast were the storehouse of his tobacco; nor did he agree.
"Let us see!" he said.
"So I draw a thick line, since all your feluccas make for this island and this part of the island first of all. From here they diverge—you will correct me, I hope, if I am wrong."
"I do not say that I shall correct you if you are wrong," said José Medina.
Hillyard was now drawing other and finer lines which radiated like the sticks of an outspread fan from the north-east coast of Mallorca to the Spanish mainland; and he went on drawing them, unperturbed by José's refusal to assist in his map-making. Some of the lines—a few—ended at the Islands of the Columbretes, sixty miles off Valencia.
"Your secret storehouse, I believe, señor," he remarked pleasantly.
"A cruiser of our Government examined these islands most carefully a fortnight ago upon representations from the Allies, and found nothing of any kind to excite interest," replied José Medina.
"The cruiser was looking for submarine bases, I understand, not tobacco," Martin Hillyard observed. "And since it was not the cruiser's commission to look for tobacco, why should it discover it?"
José Medina shrugged his shoulders. José Medina's purse was very long and reached very high. It would be quite impolitic for that cruiser to discover José Medina's tobacco stores, as Medina himself and Martin Hillyard, and the captain of the cruiser, all very well knew.
Martin Hillyard continued to draw fine straight lines westwards from the northern coast of Mallorca to the mainland of Spain, some touching the shore to the north of Barcelona, some striking it as far south as Almeria and Garrucha. When he had finished his map-making he handed the result to José Medina.
"See, señor! Your feluccas cut across all the trade-routes through the Mediterranean. Ships going east or going west must pass between the Balearics and Africa, or between the Balearics and Spain. We are here in the middle, and, whichever course those ships take, they must cross the lines on which your feluccas continually come and go."
José Medina looked at the map. He did not commit himself in any way. He contented himself with a question: "And what then?"
"So too with the German submarines. They also must cross and cross again in their cruises, those lines along which your feluccas continually come and go."
José Medina threw up his hands.
"The submarines! Señor, if you listen to the babblers on the quays, you would think that the seas are stiff with them! Schools of them like whales everywhere! Only yesterday Palma rang with the account of one. It pursued a French steamer between Minorca and Mallorca. It spoke to a fishing boat! What did it not do? Señor, there was no submarine yesterday in the channel between Minorca and Mallorca. If there had been I must have known."
And he sat back as though the subject were disposed of.
"But submarines do visit these waters, Señor Medina, and they do sink ships," replied Hillyard.
José Medina shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands.
"Claro! And it is said that I supply them with their oil." He turned swiftly to Hillyard. "Perhaps you have heard that story, señor?"
Hillyard nodded.
"Yes. I did not believe it. It is because I did not believe it that I am here, asking your help."
"I thank you. It is the truth. I will tell you something now. Not one of my captains has ever seen one of those submarines, neither on this side nor on that," and Medina touched the lines which Hillyard had drawn on both sides of the Balearics on his chart. "Now, what can I do?"
"One simple thing, and well within your scruples as a neutral," replied Hillyard. "These submarines doubly break the laws of nations. They violate your territorial waters, and they sink merchant ships without regard for the crews."
"Yes," said José Medina.
"You have agents along the coast. I have friends too in every town, Englishmen who love both England and Spain, Spaniards who love both Spain and England. We will put, if you permit, your agents in touch with my friends."
"Yes," said José Medina innocently. "How shall we do that? We must have lists prepared."
Hillyard smiled gently.
"That is not necessary, señor. We know your agents already. If you will secretly inform them that those who speak in my name," and he took his card from the table, and gave it into Medina's hands, "are men to be trusted, it will be enough."
José Medina agreed.
"I will give them instructions."
"And yet another instruction if you will be so kind, to all your captains."
"Yes?"
"That they shall report at the earliest possible moment to your nearest agent ashore, the position of any submarine they have seen."
José Medina assented once more.
"But it will take a little time, señor, for me to pass that instruction round. It shall go from captain to captain, but it will not be prudent to give it out more widely. A week or two—no more—and every captain in my fleet shall be informed. That is all?"
Hillyard was already rising from his chair. He stood straight up.
"All except that they will be forbidden too," he added with a smile, "to supply either food or drink or oil to any enemy vessel."
José Medina raised his hands in protest.
"That order was given months ago. But it shall be repeated, and you can trust me, it shall be obeyed."
The two men went to the door of the villa, and stood outside in the garden. It seemed the interview was over, and the agreement made. But indeed the interview as Hillyard had planned it had hardly begun. He had a series of promises which might be kept or broken, and the keeping or breaking of them could not be checked. José Medina was very likely to be holding the common belief along that coast that Germany would surely win the war. He was in the perfect position to keep in with both sides were he so minded. It was not to content himself with general promises that Hillyard had brought the Dragonfly to Palma.
He turned suddenly towards José Medina with a broad laugh, and clapped him heartily upon the back.
"So you do not remember me, Señor José?"
Medina was puzzled. He took a step nearer to Hillyard. Then he shook his head, and apologised with a smile.
"I am to blame, señor. As a rule, my memory is not at fault. But on this occasion—yes."