I came up by the lift from the lower town, Harry Vandeleur strolled from his more respectable lodging in the upper quarter, and we met unexpectedly in Government Square. It was ten o'clock in the morning, and the Square, a floor of white within a ragged border of trees, glared blindingly under the tropical sun. On each side of the President's door a diminutive soldier rattled a rifle from time to time.
"What? Has he sent for you too?" said Harry, pointing to the President's house.
"Juan Ballester. Yes," said I, and Harry Vandeleur stopped with a sudden suspicion on his face.
"What does he want with us?" he asked.
"We volunteered in the war," said I. "We were both useful to him."
Harry Vandeleur shook his head.
"He is at the top of his power. He has won his three-weeks war. The Army has made him President for the second time. He has so skilfully organised his elections that he has a Parliament, not merely without an Opposition, but without a single man of any note in it except Santiago Calavera. It is not from such that humble people like us can expect gratitude."
Juan Ballester was, in fact, a very remarkable person. Very few people who had dealings with him ever forgot him. There was the affair of the Opera House, for instance, and a hundred instances. Who he really was I should think no one knew. He used to say that he was born in Mexico City, and when he wished to get the better of anyone with a sentimental turn, he would speak of his old mother in a broken voice. But since he never wrote to his old mother, nor she to him, I doubt very much whether she existed. The only certain fact known about him was that some thirteen years before, when he was crossing on foot a high pass of the Cordilleras without a dollar in his pocket, he met a stranger--but no! I have heard him attribute so many different nationalities to that stranger that I wouldn't kiss the Bible even on that story. Probably he was a Mexican and of a good stock. Certainly no Indian blood made a flaw in him. For though his hair was black and a pencil-line of black moustache decorated his lip, his skin was fair like any Englishman's. He was thirty-eight years old, five feet eleven in height, strongly but not thickly built, and he had a pleasant, good-humoured face which attracted and deceived by its look of frankness. For the rest of him the story must speak.
He received us in a great room on the first floor overlooking the Square; and at once he advanced and laid a hand impressively upon my shoulder. He looked into my face silently. Then he said:
"Carlyon, I want you."
I did not believe him for a moment. But from time to time Juan Ballester did magnanimous things; not from magnanimity, of which quality he was entirely devoid, but from a passion for the bran geste. He would see himself a shining figure before men's eyes, the perfect cavalier; and the illusion would dazzle him into generosity. Accordingly, my hopes rose. I was living on credit in a very inferior hotel. "I had thought my work was done," he continued. "I had hoped to retire, like Cincinnatus, to my plough," and he gazed sentimentally out of the window across the city to the wooded hills of Santa Paula. "But since my country calls me, I must have someone about me whom I can trust." He broke off to ask: "I suppose your police are no longer searching for you?"
"They never were, your Excellency," I protested hotly.
"Well, perhaps not," he said indulgently. "No doubt the natural attractions of Maldivia brought you here. You did me some service in the war. I am not ungrateful. I appoint you my private secretary."
"Your Excellency!" I cried.
He shook hands with me and added carelessly:
"There is no salary attached to the post, but there are opportunities."
And there were. That is why I now live in a neat little villa at Sorrento.
Ballester turned to Harry Vandeleur and took him by the arm. He looked from one to the other of us.
"Ever since the day when I walked over a high pass of the Cordilleras with nothing but the clothes I stood up in, and an unknown Englishman gave me the railway fare to this city, I have made what return I could to your nation. You, too, have served me, Señor Vandeleur. I pay some small portion of my debt. Money! I have none to give you"; and he uttered the words without a blush, although the half a million pounds sterling received as war indemnity had already been paid into his private account.
"Nor would you take it if I had," Juan resumed. "But I will give you something of equal value."
He led Vandeleur to the window, and waving his hand impressively over the city, he said:
"I will give you the monopoly of green paint in the city of Santa Paula."
I stifled a laugh. Harry Vandeleur got red in the face. For, after all, no man likes to look a greater fool than he naturally is. He had, moreover, a special reason for disappointment.
"I don't suppose that there are twenty bucketsful used in Santa Paula in the year," he exclaimed bitterly.
"Wait, my friend," said Ballester; "there will be."
And a week afterwards the following proclamation appeared upon the walls of the public buildings:
"Owing to the numerous complaints which have been received of the discomfort produced by the glare of a tropical sun, the Government of the day, ever solicitous to further the wishes of its citizens, now orders that every house in Santa Paula, with the exception of the Government buildings, be painted in green paint within two months of the issue of this proclamation, and any resident who fails to obey this enactment shall be liable to a fine of fifty dollars for every day after the two months have elapsed until the order is carried out."
Juan Ballester was, no doubt, a very great man, but I cannot deny that he strained the loyalty of his friends by this proclamation. Grumblings were loud. No one could discover who had complained of the glare of the streets--for the simple reason that no one had complained at all. However, the order was carried out. Daily the streets of Santa Paula grew greener and greener, until the town had quite a restful look, and sank into its background and became a piece with its surroundings. Meanwhile, Harry Vandeleur sat in an office, rubbed his hands, and put up the price of green paint. But, like most men upon whom good fortune has suddenly shone, he was not quite contented. He found his crumpled rose-leaf in the dingy aspect of the Government buildings and the President's house. They alone now reared fronts of dirty plaster and cracked stucco. I remember him leaning out of Juan Ballester's window and looking up and down with a discontented eye.
"Wants a coat of green paint, doesn't it?" he said with a sort of jocular eagerness.
Juan never even winked.
"There ought to be a distinction between this house and all the others," he said gravely. "The President is merely the butler of the citizens. They ought to know at a glance where they can find him."
Harry Vandeleur burst suddenly into a laugh. He was an impulsive youth, a regular bubble of high spirits.
"I am an ungrateful beast, and that's the truth," he said. "You have done a great deal for me, more than you know."
"Have I?" asked Juan Ballester drily.
"Yes," cried Harry Vandeleur, and out the story tumbled.
He was very anxious to marry Olivia Calavera--daughter, by the way, of Santiago Calavera, Ballester's Minister of the Interior--and Olivia Calavera was very anxious to marry him. Olivia was a dream. He, Harry Vandeleur, was a planter in a small way in Trinidad. Olivia and her father came from Trinidad. He had followed her from Trinidad, but Don Santiago, with a father's eye for worldly goods, had been obdurate. It was all very foolish and very young, and rather pleasant to listen to.
"Now, thanks to your Excellency," cried Harry, "I am an eligible suitor. I shall marry the Señorita Olivia."
"Is that so?" said Juan Ballester, with a polite congratulation. But there was just a suspicion of a note in his voice which made me lift my head sharply from the papers over which I was bending. It was impossible, of course--and yet he had drawled the words out in a slow, hard, quiet way which had startled me. I waited for developments, and they were not slow in coming.
"But before you marry," said Juan Ballester, "I want you to do me a service. I want you to go to London and negotiate a loan. I can trust you. Moreover, you will do the work more speedily than another, for you will be anxious to return."
With a friendly smile he took Harry Vandeleur by the arm and led him into his private study. Harry could not refuse. The mission was one of honour, and would heighten his importance in Don Santiago's eyes. He was, besides, under a considerable obligation to Ballester. He embarked accordingly at Las Cuevas, the port of call half an hour away from the city.
"Look after Olivia for me," he said, as we shook hands upon the deck of the steamer.
"I will do the best I can," I said, and I went down the gangway.
Harry Vandeleur travelled off to England. He was out of the way. Meanwhile, I stayed in Maldivia and waited for more developments. But this time they were not so quick in coming.
Ballester, like greater and lesser men, had his inconsistencies. Although he paid his private secretary with "opportunities" and bribed his friends with monopolies; although he had shamelessly rigged the elections, and paid as much of the country's finances as he dared into his private banking account; and although there was that little affair of the Opera House, he was genuinely and sincerely determined to give to the Republic a cast-iron Constitution. He had an overpowering faith in law and order--for other people.
We hammered out the Constitution day and night for another fortnight, and then Ballester gabbled it over to a Council of his Ministers. Not one of them could make head or tail of what he was reading, with the exception of Santiago Calavera, a foxy-faced old rascal with a white moustache, who sat with a hand curved about his ear and listened to every word. I had always wondered why Ballester had given him office at all. At one point he interrupted in a smooth, smiling voice:
"But, your Excellency, that is not legal."
"Legal or not legal," said the President with a snap, "it is going through, Señor Santiago"; and the Constitution was duly passed by a unanimous vote, and became the law of Maldivia.
That event took place a couple of months after Harry Vandeleur had sailed for England. I stretched my arms and looked about for relaxation. The Constitution was passed at six o'clock in the evening. There was to be a ball that night at the house of the British Minister. I made up my mind to go. For a certainty I should find Olivia there; and I was seized with remorse. For, in spite of my promise to Harry Vandeleur, I had hardly set eyes upon her during the last two months.
I saw her at ten o'clock. She was dancing--a thing she loved. She was dressed in a white frock of satin and lace, with a single rope of pearls about her throat, and she looked divinely happy. She was a girl of nineteen years, fairly tall, with black hair, a beautiful white face, and big, dark eyes which shone with kindness. She had the hand and foot of her race, and her dancing was rather a liquid movement of her whole supple body than a matter of her limbs. I watched her for a few moments from a corner. She had brains as well as beauty, and though she spoke with a pleading graciousness, at the back of it one was aware of a pride which would crack the moon. She worked, too, as few girls of her station work in the Republics of South America. For her father, from what I then thought to be no better than parsimony, used her as his secretary. As she swung by my corner for the second time she saw me and stopped.
"Señor Carlyon, it is two months since I have seen you," she said reproachfully.
"Señorita, it is only four hours since our brand new Constitution was passed into law, and already I am looking for you."
She shook her head.
"You have neglected me."
"I regret to notice," said I, "that my neglect has in no way impaired your health."
Olivia laughed. She had a taking laugh, and the blood mounted very prettily into her cheeks.
"I could hardly be ill," she said. "I had a letter to-day."
"Lucky man to write you letters," said I. "Let me read it, Señorita."
She drew back swiftly and her hand went to her bosom.
"Oh, it is there!" said I.
Again she laughed, but this time with a certain shyness, and the colour deepened on her cheeks.
"He sails to-day," said she.
"Then I have still three weeks," said I lightly. "Will you dance with me for the rest of the evening?"
"Certainly not," she answered with decision. "But after the fifth dance from now, you will find me, Señor Carlyon, here"; and turning again to her partner, she was caught up into the whirl of dancers.
After the fifth dance I returned to that corner of the ballroom. I found Olivia waiting. But it was an Olivia whom I did not know. The sparkle and the freshness had gone out of her; fear and not kindness shone in her eyes.
Her face lit up for a moment when she saw me, and she stepped eagerly forward.
"Quick!" she said. "Somewhere where we shall be alone!"
Her hand trembled upon my arm. She walked quickly from the room, smiling as she went. She led me along a corridor into the garden of the house, a place of palms and white magnolias on the very edge of the upper town. She went without a word to the railings at the end of the garden, whence one looks straight down upon the lights of the lower town along the river bank. Then she turned. A beam of light from the windows shone upon her face. The smile had gone from it. Her lips shook.
"What has happened?" I asked.
She spoke in jerks.
"He came to me to-night.... He danced with me...."
"Who?" I asked.
"Juan Ballester," said she.
I had half expected the name.
"He spoke of himself," she resumed. "Sometimes it is not easy to tell whether he is acting or whether he is serious. It was easy to-night. He was serious."
"What did he say?"
"That up till to-night all had been work with him.... That to-night had set the crown upon his work.... That now for the first time he could let other hopes, other thoughts, have play...."
"Yes, I see," I replied slowly. "Having done his work, he wants his prize. He would."
Ballester had toiled untiringly for thirteen years in both open and devious ways, and, as the consequence of his toil, he had lifted his Republic into an importance which it had never possessed before. He had succeeded because what he wanted, he wanted very much. It certainly looked as if there were considerable trouble in front of Olivia and Harry Vandeleur--especially Harry Vandeleur.
"So he wants you to marry him," I said; and Olivia gave me one swift look and turned her head away.
"No," she answered in a whisper. "He wants his revenge, too."
"Revenge?" I exclaimed.
Olivia nodded her head.
"He told me that I must go up to Benandalla"; and the remark took my breath away. Benandalla was the name of a farm which Ballester owned, up in the hills two hours away from Santa Paula; and the less said about it the better. Ballester was accustomed to retreat thither after any spell of unusually arduous work; and the great feastings which went on, the babel of laughter, the noise of music and castanets and the bright lights blazing upon the quiet night till dawn had made the farm notorious. Even at this moment, I knew, it was not nearly uninhabited.
"At Benandalla ... you?" I cried; and, indeed, it seemed to me that the mere presence of Olivia must have brought discomfort into those coarse orgies, so set apart was she by her distinction. "And he tells you to go," I continued, "as if you were his maidservant!"
Olivia clenched her small hands together and leaned upon the railings. Her eyes travelled along the river below and sought a brightness in the distant sky--the loom of the lights of Las Cuevas. For a little while, she was strengthened by thoughts of escape, and then once more she drooped.
"I am frightened," she said, and coming from her, the whispered and childish cry filled me with consternation. It was her manner and what she left unsaid rather than her words, which alarmed me. Where I should have expected pride and a flame of high anger, I found sheer terror, and the reason of that terror she had not yet given me.
"He spoke of Harry," she resumed. "He said that Harry must not interfere.... He used threats."
Yes, I thought, Juan Ballester would do that. It was not the usual way of conducting a courtship; but Juan Ballester's way was not the usual way of governing a country.
"What kind of threats?"
"Prisons," she answered with a break in her voice.
"What?" I exclaimed.
"Yes," she said. "Prisons--especially in the Northern Republics of South America.... He explained that, though you have more liberty here than anywhere else so long as you are free, you are more completely--destroyed--here than anywhere else if you once get into prison." From her hesitation I could guess that "destroyed" was a milder word than Juan Ballester had used.
"He described them to me," she went on. "Hovels where you sleep in the mud at night, and whence you are leased out by day to work in the fields without a hat--until, in a month or so, the sun puts an end to your misery."
I knew there was truth in that description. But it was not possible that Ballester could put his threat into force. It was anger now, not consternation, which filled me.
"Señorita, reflect!" I cried. "In whose garden are you standing now? The British Minister's--and Harry Vandeleur is an Englishman. It was no more than a brutal piece of bullying by Ballester. See! I am his secretary"--and she suddenly turned round towards me with a gleam in her eyes.
"Yes," she interrupted. "You are his secretary and Harry's friend. Will you help us, I wonder?"
"Show me how!" said I.
"It is not Harry whom he threatens, but my father"; and she lowered her eyes from mine and was silent.
"My father"; and her answer made my protestations mere vapourings and foolishness.
The danger was real. The British Minister could hold no shield in front of Santiago Calavera, even if there were no guilt upon him for which he could be properly imprisoned. But Olivia's extremity of terror and my knowledge of Santiago warned me that this condition was little likely to exist. I took Olivia's hands. They clung to mine in a desperate appeal for help.
"Come, Señorita," I said gravely. "If I am to help you, I must have the truth. What grounds had Ballester for his threat?"
She raised her head suddenly with a spurt of her old pride.
"My father is a good man," she said, challenging me to deny it. "What he did, he thought right to do. I am not ashamed of him. No!"--and then she would have stopped. But I would not let her. I dared not let her.
"Go on, please!" I insisted, and the pride died out of her face, and she turned in a second to pleading.
"But perhaps he was indiscreet--in what he wrote. He thought, perhaps, too much of his country, too little of those who governed it."
I dropped her hands. I had enough of the truth now. Rumour had always spoken of Santiago Calavera as an intriguer. His daughter was now telling me he was a traitor, too.
"We must find your father," I cried. "He brought you to the ball."
"Yes," said she. "He will be waiting to take me home."
We hurried back to the house and searched the rooms. Calavera was nowhere to be found.
"He cannot have gone!" cried Olivia, wringing her hands. In both of our minds the same question was urgent.
"Has he been taken away?"
I questioned the servants, and the door-keeper replied. A messenger had come for Don Santiago early in the evening. I found the British Minister at Olivia's side when I returned, and a smile of relief upon her face.
"My father made his excuses and went home," she said. "Important business came. He has sent the carriage back."
"May I take you home?" I asked.
"Thank you," said she.
It was getting near to dawn when we drove away. The streets were empty, the houses dark. Olivia kept her face close to the window, and never stirred until we turned the corner into the Calle Madrid. Then she drew back with a low cry of joy. The windows of the great house were ablaze with light. I helped her out of the carriage and rang the bell. We stood in front of the door talking while the coachman drove away to his stables.
"Say nothing to my father," Olivia pleaded. "Promise me, Señor."
I promised readily enough.
"I will come in with you, Señorita," I said. "I must talk with your father"; and I turned impatiently to the door and rang the bell again.
"To-night?" said she.
"Yes," said I. "I promised Harry Vandeleur to look after you."
"Did you?" said she, and though her anxieties were heavy upon her, a tender smile parted her lips.
Still no one came to the door.
"They must have gone to bed," I said, pushing against the panels. To my surprise the door yielded and quietly swung wide. We looked into a hall silent and empty and brightly lit. We were both in a mood to count each new phenomenon a disaster. To both of us there was something eerie in the silent swinging-in of the door, in the emptiness and bright illumination of the hall. We looked at one another in dismay. Then Olivia swept in, and I followed. She walked straight to a door at the back of the hall, hesitated with her hand upon the knob for just the fraction of a second, and flung it open. We went into a room furnished as a study. But the study, too, was empty and brightly lit. There was a green-shaded reading-lamp beside an armchair, as though but now the occupant had sat there and read. Olivia stood in the centre of the room and in a clear and ringing voice she cried:
"Father!"
Her voice echoed along the passages and up the stairs. And no answer came. She turned abruptly, and, moving with a swift step, she opened door after door. Each door opened upon a brightly lit and empty room. She ran a few steps up the stairs and stood poised, holding up in her white gloved hand the glistening skirt of her white frock. One by one she called upon the servants by name, looking upwards. Not a door was opened above our heads. Not a sound of any movement reached our ears.
Olivia ran lightly up the stairs. I heard the swift rustle of her gown as she moved from room to room; and suddenly she was upon the stairs again looking down at me, with her hand like a flake of snow upon the bannister. She gleamed against the background of dark wood, a thing of silver.
"There is no one in the house," she said simply, in a strange and quiet voice. She moved down the stairs and held out her hand to me.
"Good night," she said.
Though her voice never shook, her eyes shone with tears. She was but waiting until I went, to shed them.
"I will come to-morrow," I stammered; "in the morning. I may have news for you," and I bent over her hand and kissed it.
"Good night," she said again, and she stood with her hand upon the latch of the door. I went out. She closed the door behind me. I heard the key turn in the lock, the bolt shoot into its socket. There was a freshness in the air, a paling of the stars above my head. I waited for a while in the street, but no figure appeared at any window, nor was any light put out. I left her alone in that empty and illumined house, its windows blazing on the dawn.
I walked back to the President's house and sat comfortably down in my office to think the position over with the help of a pipe. But I had hardly struck the match when the President himself came in. He had changed his dress-coat for a smoking-jacket, and carried a few papers in his hand.
"I am glad to see that you are not tired," he said, "for I have still some work for you to do. I have been looking through some letters, and there are half-a-dozen of so much importance that I should like copies made of them before you go to bed."
He laid them on my writing-table with an intimation that he would return for them in an hour. I rose up with alacrity. I was in no mood for bed, and the mechanical work of copying a few letters appealed to me at the moment. A glance at them, however, startled me into an even greater wakefulness. They were letters, typewritten for the most part, but undoubtedly signed by Santiago Calavera, and all of them dated just before the outbreak of the war. They were addressed to the War Minister of Esmeralda, and they gave details as to where Maldivia was weak, where strong, what roads to the capital were unguarded, and for how many troops provisions could be requisitioned on the way. There was, besides, a memorandum, written, I rejoiced to see, from beginning to end in Santiago's own hand--a deadly document naming some twenty people in Santa Paula who would need attention when Juan Ballester had been overthrown. It was impossible to misunderstand the phrase. Those twenty citizens of Santa Paula were to be shot out of hand against the nearest wall. I was appalled as I copied it out. There was enough treachery here to convict a regiment. No wonder the great house in the Calle Madrid stood empty! No wonder that Calavera---- But while I argued, the picture of the daughter in her shining frock, alone amidst the glitter and the silence, smote upon me as pitiful, and struck the heart out of all my argument.
Juan Ballester was at my elbow the moment after I had finished.
"It is five o'clock," he said, as he gathered the letters and copies together, "and no doubt you will want to be on foot early. You can tell her that I sent her father in a special train last night to the frontier. He is no doubt already with his friends in Esmeralda."
"Then the prisons----" I exclaimed.
"A lover's embroideries--nothing more," said Ballester, with a smile. "But it is interesting to know that you are so thoroughly acquainted with the position of affairs." And he took himself off to bed.
His last remark, however, forced me to consider my own position, and reflection showed it to be delicate. On the one hand I was Ballester's servant, on the other I was Harry Vandeleur's friend. I could not side with both, and I must side with one. If I threw in my lot with Juan Ballester, I became a scoundrel. If I helped Olivia, I might lose my bread and butter. I hope that in any case I should have decided as I did, but there was a good deal of virtue in the "might." For, after all, Juan seemed to recognise that I should be against him and to bear no malice. He had even bidden me relieve Olivia of her fears concerning her father's disappearance. He was a brute, but a brute on rather a grand scale, who took what he wanted but, in spite of Olivia, disdained revenge. I decided to help Olivia, and before nine the next morning I knocked upon her house-door. She opened it herself.
"You have news?" she asked, watching me with anxious eyes, and she stood aside in the shadow of the door while I went in.
"Your father is safe. He was sent to the frontier last night on a special train. He is free."
She had been steel to meet a blow. Now that it did not fall, her strength for a moment failed her. She leaned against a table with her hand to her heart; and her face suddenly told me that she had not slept.
"I will follow him," she said, and she hurried up the stairs. I looked out a train. One left Santa Paula in an hour's time. I went out, leaving the door ajar, and fetched a carriage. Then I shouted up the stairs to Olivia, and she came down in a travelling dress of light grey and a big black hat. Excitement had kindled her. I could no longer have guessed that she had not slept.
"You will see me off?" she said, as she handed me her bag; and she stepped gaily into the carriage.
"I will," I answered, and I jumped in behind her.
The die was cast now.
"Drive down to the station!" I cried.
It was an open carriage. There were people in the street. Juan Ballester would soon learn that he had played the grand gentleman to his discomfiture.
"Yes, I will see you off, Señorita," I said. "But I shall have a bad half-hour with Ballester afterwards."
"Oh!" cried Olivia, with a start. She looked at me as though for the first time my existence had come within her field of vision.
"I am quite aware that you have never given a thought to me," I said sulkily, "but you need hardly make the fact so painfully obvious."
Olivia's hand fell lightly upon mine and pressed.
"My friend!" she said, and her eyes dwelt softly upon mine. Oh, she knew her business as a woman! Then she looked heavenwards.
"A man who helps a woman in trouble----" she began.
"Yes," I interrupted. "He must look up there for his reward. Meanwhile, Señorita, I am envying Harry Vandeleur," and I waved my hand to the green houses. "For he has not only got you, but he has realised his nice little fortune out of green paint." And all Olivia did was to smile divinely; and all she said was "Harry." But there! She said it adorably, and I shook her by the hand.
"I forgive you," she said sweetly. Yes, she had nerve enough for that!
We were driving down to the lower town. I began to consider how much of the events of the early morning I should tell her. Something of them she must know, but it was not easy for the informant. I told her how Juan Ballester had come to me with letters signed by her father and a memorandum in his handwriting.
"The President gave them to me to copy out," I continued; and Olivia broke in, rather quickly:
"What did you do with them?"
I stared at her.
"I copied them out, of course."
Olivia stared now. Her brows puckered in a frown.
"You--didn't--destroy them when you had the chance?" she asked incredulously.
I jumped in my seat.
"Destroy them?" I cried indignantly. "Really, Señorita!"
"You are Harry's friend," she said. "I thought men did little things like that for one another."
"Little things!" I gasped. But I recognised that it would be waste of breath to argue against a morality so crude.
"You shall take Harry's opinion upon that point," said I.
"Or perhaps Harry will take mine," she said softly, with a far-away gaze; and the fly stopped at the station. I bought Olivia's ticket, I placed her bag in the carriage, I stepped aside to let her mount the step; and I knocked against a brilliant creature with a sword at his side--he was merely a railway official. I begged his pardon, but he held his ground.
"Señor, you have, no doubt, his Excellency's permit for the Señorita to travel," he said, holding out his hand.
I was fairly staggered, but I did not misunderstand the man. Ballester had foreseen that Olivia would follow her father, and he meant to keep her in Santa Paula. I fumbled in my pocket to cover my confusion.
"I must have left it behind," I said lamely. "But of course you know me--his Excellency's secretary."
"Who does not?" said the official, bowing politely. "And there is another train in the afternoon, so that the Señorita will, I hope, not be greatly inconvenienced."
We got out of the station somehow. I was mad with myself. I had let myself be misled by the belief that Ballester was indulging in one of his exhibitions as a great gentleman. Whereas he was carefully isolating Olivia so that she might be the more helplessly at his disposition. We stumbled back again into a carriage. I dared not look at Olivia.
"The Calle Madrid!" I called to the driver, and Olivia cried "No!" She turned to me, with a spot of colour burning in each cheek, and her eyes very steady and ominous.
"Will you tell him to drive to the President's?" she said calmly.
The conventions are fairly strict in Maldivia. Young ladies do not as a rule drop in casually upon men in the morning, and certainly not upon Presidents. However, conventions are for the unharassed. We drove to the President's. A startled messenger took in Olivia's name, and she was instantly admitted. I went to my office, but I left the door ajar. For down the passage outside of it Olivia would come when she had done with Juan Ballester. I waited anxiously for a quarter of an hour. Would she succeed with him? I had no great hopes. Anger so well became her. But as the second quarter drew on, my hopes rose; and when I heard the rustle of her dress, I flung open the door. A messenger was escorting her, and she just shook her head at me.
"What did he say?" I asked in English, and she replied in the same language.
"He will not let me go. He was--passionate. Underneath the passion he was hard. He is the cruellest of men."
"I will see you this afternoon," said I; and she passed on. I determined to have it out with Ballester at the earliest possible moment. And within the hour he gave me the opportunity. For he came into the room and said:
"Carlyon, I have not had my letters this morning.
"No, your Excellency," I replied. I admit that my heart began to beat more quickly than usual. "I took the Señorita Olivia to the station, where we were stopped."
"I thought you would," he said, with a grin. "But it is impossible that the Señorita should leave Santa Paula."
"But you can't keep her here!" I cried. "It's--it's----" "Tyrannical" would not do, nor would "autocratic." Neither epithet would sting him. At last I got the right one.
"Your Excellency, it's barbaric!"
Juan Ballester flushed red. I had touched him on the raw. To be a thoroughly civilised person conducting a thoroughly civilised Government over a thoroughly civilised community--that was his wild, ambitious dream, and in rosy moments he would even flatter himself that his dream was realised.
"It's nothing of the kind," he exclaimed. "Don Santiago is a dangerous person. I was moved by chivalry, the most cultured of virtues, to let him go unpunished. But I am bound, from the necessities of the State, to retain some pledge for his decent behaviour."
The words sounded very fine and politic, but they could not obscure the springs of his conduct. He had first got Harry Vandeleur out of the way; then, and not till then, he had pounced upon Don Santiago. His aim had been to isolate Olivia. There was very little chivalry about the matter.
"Besides," he argued, "if there were any barbarism--and there isn't--the Señorita can put an end to it by a word."
"But she won't say it!" I cried triumphantly. "No, she is already pledged. She won't say it."
Juan Ballester looked at me swiftly with a set and lowering face. No doubt I had gone a step too far with him. But I would not have taken back a word at that moment--no, not for the monopoly of green paint. I awaited my instant dismissal, but he suddenly tilted back his chair and grinned at me like a schoolboy.
"I like a good spirit," he said, "whether it be in the Señorita or in my private secretary."
It was apparent that he did not think much of me as an antagonist.
"Well," I grumbled, "Harry Vandeleur will be back in three weeks, and your Excellency must make your account with him."
"Yes, that's true," said Ballester, and--I don't know what it was in him. It was not a gesture, for he did not move; it was not a smile, for his face did not change. But I was immediately and absolutely certain that it was not true at all. Reflection confirmed me. He had taken so much pains to isolate Olivia that he would not have overlooked Harry Vandeleur's return. Somewhere, on some pretext, at Trinidad, or at our own port here, Las Cuevas, Harry Vandeleur would be stopped. I was sure of it. The net was closing tightly round Olivia. This morning the affair had seemed so simple--a mere matter of a six hours' journey in a train. Now it began to look rather grim. I stole a glance at Juan. He was still sitting with his chair tilted back and his hands in his pockets, but he was gazing out of the window, and his face was in repose. I recalled Olivia's phrase: "He is the cruellest of men." Was she right? I wondered. In any case, yes, the affair certainly began to look rather grim.
I was not free until five that afternoon. But I was in the Calle Madrid before the quarter after five had struck. Again Olivia herself admitted me. She led the way to her father's study at the back of the house. Though I had hurried to the house, I followed her slowly into the study.
"You are still alone?" I asked.
"An old woman--we once befriended her--will come in secretly for an hour in the morning."
"Secretly?"
"She dare not do otherwise."
I was silent. There was a refinement about Juan Ballester's persecution which was simply devilish. He would not molest her, he left her apparently free. But he kept her in a great, empty house in the middle of the town, without servants, without power to leave, without--oh, much more than I had any idea of at the time. He marooned her in the midst of a great town even as Richard the Third did with Jane Shore in the old play. But, though I did not know, I noticed that she had changed since the morning. She had come out from her interview with Juan Ballester holding her head high. Now she stood in front of me twisting her hands, a creature of fear.
"You must escape," I said.
Her great eyes looked anxiously at me from a wan face.
"I must," she said. "Yes, I must." Then came a pause, and with a break in her voice she continued. "He warned me not to try. He said that it would not be pleasant for me if I were caught trying."
"A mere threat," I said contemptuously, "like the prisons." But I did not believe my own words, and my blood ran cold. It would be easy to implicate Olivia in the treachery of her father. And the police in Maldivia are not very gentle in their handling of their prisoners, women or men. Still, that risk must be run.
"The Ariadne--an English mail-steamer--calls at Las Cuevas in a fortnight," I said. "We must smuggle you out on her."
Olivia stared at me in consternation. She stood like one transfixed.
"A fortnight!" she said. Then she sat down in a chair clasping her hands together. "A fortnight!" she whispered to herself, and as I listened to her, and watched her eyes glancing this way and that like an animal trapped in a cage, it was borne in on me that since this morning some new thing had happened to frighten the very soul of her. I begged her to tell it me.
"No," she said, rising to her feet. "No doubt I can wait for a fortnight."
"That's right, Olivia," I said. "I will arrange a plan. Meanwhile, where can I hear from you and you from me? It will not do for us to meet too often. Have you friends who will be staunch?"
"I wonder," she said slowly. "Enrique Gimeno and his wife, perhaps."
"We will not strain their friendship very much. But we can meet at their house. You can leave a letter for me there, perhaps, and I one for you."
Enrique Gimeno was a Spanish merchant and a gentleman. So far, I felt sure, we could trust him. There was one other man in Santa Paula on whom I could rely, the agent of the steamship company to which the Ariadne belonged. I rang him up on the telephone that afternoon and arranged a meeting after dark in a back room of that very inferior hotel in the lower town where for some weeks I had lived upon credit. The agent, a solid man with business interests of his own in Maldivia, listened to my story without a word of interruption. Then he said:
"There are four things I can do for you, and no more. In the first place, I can receive here the lady's luggage in small parcels and put it together for her. In the second, I can guarantee that the Ariadne shall not put into Las Cuevas until dusk, and shall leave the same night. In the third, I will have every bale of cargo already loaded into her before the passenger train comes alongside from Santa Paula. And in the fourth, I will arrange that the Ariadne shall put to sea the moment the last of her passengers has crossed the gangway. The rest you must do for yourself."
"Thank you," said I. "That's a great deal."
But the confidence was all in my voice and none of it at all in my heart. I went back to Juan Ballester and tried persuasion with him.
"I have seen Olivia Calavera this afternoon," I said to him.
"I know," said he calmly.
I had personally no longer any fear that he might dismiss me. I would, I think, have thrown up my job myself, but that I seemed to have a better chance of helping the girl by staying on.
"You will never win her," I continued, "your Excellency, by your way of wooing."
"Oh, and why not?" he asked.
"She thinks you a brute," I said frankly.
Juan Ballester reflected.
"I don't much mind her thinking that," he answered slowly.
"She hates you," I went on.
"And I don't seriously object to her thinking that," he replied.
"She despises you," I said in despair.
"Ah!" said Ballester, with a change of voice. "I should object to her doing that. But then it isn't true."
I gave up efforts to persuade him. After all, the brute knew something about women.
I was thrown back upon the first plan. Olivia must escape from the country on the Ariadne. How to smuggle her unnoticed out of her empty house, down to Las Cuevas, and on board the steamer? That was the problem; but though I lay awake over it o' nights, and pondered it as I sat at my writing-table, the days crept on and brought me no nearer to a solution.
Meanwhile, the world was going very ill with Olivia. Santa Paula, fresh from its war, was aflame with patriotism. The story of Santiago Calavera's treachery had gone abroad--Juan Ballester had seen to that--and since his daughter had been his secretary, she too was tarnished. Her friends, with the exception of Enrique Gimeno, closed their doors upon her. If she ventured abroad, she was insulted in the street, and at night a lamp in a window of her house would bring a stone crashing through the pane. Whenever I saw her, I noticed with an aching heart the tension under which she laboured. Her face grew thin, the tone had gone from her voice, the lustre from her eyes, the very gloss from her hair. Sometimes it seemed to me that she must drop into Ballester's net. I raged vainly over the problem, and the more because I knew that Ballester would reap prestige instead of shame if she did. The conventions were heavy on women in Maldivia, but they were not the outward signs of any spiritual grace in the population. On the contrary, they were evidence that the spiritual grace was lacking. If Olivia found her way in the end to the Benandalla farm, Ballester would be thought to have combined pleasure with the business of revenge in a subtle and enviable way. The thought made me mad. I could have knocked the heads together of the diminutive soldiers at the sides of the President's doorway whenever I went in and out. And then, when I was at my wits' end, a trivial incident suddenly showed me a way out.
I passed down the Calle Madrid one night, and the sight of the big, dark house, with here and there a broken window, brought before my mind so poignant a picture of the girl sitting in some back room alone and in misery, and contrasted that picture so vividly with another made familiar to me by many an evening in Santa Paula--that of a girl shining exquisite beyond her peers in the radiance and the clean strength of her youth--that upon returning to my room I took the receiver from the telephone with no other thought than to talk to her for a few moments and encourage her to keep a good heart. I gave the number of her house to the Exchange, and the answer came promptly back:
"The line is out of order."
I might have known that it would be. Olivia was to be marooned in her great town-house as effectively as though she had been set down in a lone island of the coral seas. I hung up the receiver again, and as I hung it up suddenly I saw part of the way clear. I suppose that I had used that telephone a hundred times during the past week. It had stood all day at my elbow. Yet not until to-night had it reminded me of that little matter of the Opera House--one of those matters in which dealings with Ballester had left their mark. I had the answer to a part of the problem which troubled me. I saw a way to smuggle Olivia from Santa Paula on board the Ariadne. The more I thought upon it, the clearer grew that possibility. There still remained the question: How to get Olivia unnoticed from her house in the middle of a busy, narrow street on the night when the Ariadne was to sail. The difficulties there brought me to a stop. And I was still revolving the problem in my mind when the private bell rang from Ballester's room. I went to see what he wanted; and I had not been five minutes in his presence before, with a leaping heart, I realised that this question was being answered too.
Juan had of late been troubled. But not at all about Olivia. As far as she was concerned, he ate his meals, went about his business, and slept o' nights like any good man who has not a girl in torment upon his conscience. But he was troubled about a rumour which was spreading through the town.
"You have heard of it?" he asked of me. "It is said that I am proposing to run away secretly from Maldivia."
I nodded.
"I have laughed at it, of course."
"Yes," said he, with his face in a frown. "But the rumour grows. I doubt if laughter is enough"; and then he banged his fist violently upon the table and cried: "I suppose Santiago Calavera is at the bottom of it!"
Santiago had become something of an obsession to the President. I think he excused to himself his brutality towards Olivia by imagining everywhere Don Santiago's machinations. As a fact, the rumour was spontaneous in Santa Paula. It was generally suspected that the President had annexed the war indemnity and any other portions of the revenue which he could without too open a scandal. He was a bachelor. The whole of Santa Paula put itself in his place. What else should he do but retire secretly and expeditiously to some country where he could enjoy the fruits of his industry in peace and security? Calavera had nothing whatever to do with the story. But I did not contradict Ballester, and he continued:
"It is said that I have taken my passage in the Ariadne."
I started, but he was not looking at me.
"I must lay hold upon this rumour," he said, "and strangle it. I have thought of a way. I will give a party here on the evening of the day the Ariadne calls at Las Cuevas. I will spend a great deal of money on that party. It will be plain that I have no thought of sailing on the Ariadne. I hope it will be plain that I have no thought of sailing at all. For I think everyone in Santa Paula," he added with a grim laugh, "knows me well enough to feel sure that I should not spend a great deal of money on a party if I meant to run away from the place afterwards."
Considering Santa Paula impartially, I found the reasoning to be sound. Juan Ballester was not a generous man. He took, but he did not give.
"This is what I propose," he said, and he handed me a paper on which he had jotted down his arrangements. He had his heart set on his Republic, that I knew. But I knew too that it must have been a fearful wrench for him to decide upon the lavish expenditure of this entertainment. There was to be dancing in the ballroom, a conjuror where the Cabinet met--that seemed to be a happy touch--supper in a marquee, fairy lights and fireworks in the garden, and buffets everywhere.
"You yourself will see after the invitations," he said, with a grin.
"Certainly, your Excellency," I answered. They would come within the definition of opportunities.
"But here," he continued, "is a list of those who must be asked"; and it was not until I had the list in my hand that I began to see that here I might find an answer to my question. I looked quickly down the names.
"Yes, she's there," said Juan Ballester; and there she was, as plain as a pikestaff--Olivia Calavera. I was not surprised. Ballester never troubled about such trifles as consistency. He wanted her, so he invited her. Nevertheless, I could have danced a pas seul. For though Olivia could hardly slip out of her own house in any guise without detection since she had no visitors, she would have a good chance of escaping from the throng of guests at the President's party. I left Juan Ballester with a greatly lightened heart. I looked at my watch. It was not yet eleven. Full of my idea, nothing would serve me but I must this moment set it in motion. I went downstairs into the Square. Though the night was hot, I had slipped on an overcoat to conceal the noticeable breastplate of a white shirt, and I walked quickly for half a mile until I came opposite to a high and neglected building, a place of darkness and rough shutters. This was the Opera House. Beside the Opera House was a little dwelling. I rang the bell, and the door was opened by a tall, lean gentleman in a frock-coat. For the third time that night good luck had stood my friend.
"Mr. Henry P. Crowninshield," I said, "the world-famous impresario, I believe?"
"And you, Mr. Carlyon, are the President's private secretary?" he said coldly.
"Not to-night," said I.
With a grunt Mr. Crowninshield led the way into his parlour and stood with his finger-tips resting on the table and his long body bent over it. Mr. Crowninshield came from New York City, and I did not beat about the bush with him. I told him exactly the story of Olivia and Juan Ballester.
"She is in great trouble," I concluded. "There is something which I do not understand. But it comes to this. She must escape. The railways are watched, so is her house. There is only one way of escape--and that is on the seventeenth, the night when the Ariadne calls at Las Cuevas and the President gives his party."
Mr. Crowninshield nodded, and his long body slid with a sort of fluid motion into a chair.
"Go on, sir," he said; "I am interested."
"And I encouraged," said I. "Let us follow the Señorita's proceedings on the night of the seventeenth. She goes dressed in her best to the President's party. She is on view to the last possible moment. She then slips quietly out into the garden. In the garden wall there is a private door, of which I have a key. I let her out by that door. Outside that door there is a closed, inconspicuous carriage waiting for her. She slips into that carriage--and that is where you come in."
"How?" asked Mr. Crowninshield.
"Inside the carriage she finds a disguise--dress, wig, everything complete--a disguise easy to slip on over her ball-gown and sufficient to baffle a detective half a yard away."
"You shall have it, sir! My heart bleeds for that young lady!" cried Mr. Crowninshield, and he grasped my hand in the noblest fashion. He had been a baritone in his day. "Besides," and he descended swiftly to the mere level of a human being, "I have a score against Master Juan, and I should like to get a little of my own back."
That was precisely the point of view upon which I had counted. Throughout his first term of office Juan Ballester had hired a box at the Opera. Needless to say, he had never paid for it, and Mr. Crowninshield unwisely pressed for payment. When requests failed, Mr. Crowninshield went to threats. He threatened the Law, the American Eagle, and the whole of the United States Navy. Ballester's reply had been short, sharp, and decisive. The State telephone system was being overhauled. Juan Ballester moved the Exchange to a building on the other side of the Opera House, and then summarily closed the Opera House on the ground that the music prevented the operators from hearing the calls. It was not astonishing that Mr. Crowninshield was eager to help Olivia Calavera. He lit a candle and led me through his private door across the empty theatre, ghostly with its sheeted benches, to the wardrobe-room. We chose a nun's dress, long enough to hide Olivia's gown, and a coif which would conceal her hair and overshadow her face.
"In that her own father wouldn't know her. It will be dark; the Quay is ill-lighted, she has only to shuffle like an old woman; she will go third-class, of course, in the train. Who is to see her off?"
"No one," I answered. "I dread that half-hour in the train for her without a friend at her side. The Quay will be watched, too. She must run the gauntlet alone. Luckily there will be a crowd of harvesters returning to Spain. Luckily, also, she has courage. But it will be the worst of her trials. My absence would be noticed. I can't go."
"No, but I can!" cried Mr. Crowninshield. "An old padre seeing off an old nun to her new mission--eh? Juan will be gritting his teeth in the morning because I am an American citizen."
Mr. Crowninshield was aflame with his project. He took a stick and tottered about the room in the most comical fashion. "I will bring the carriage myself to the garden door," said he. "I will be inside of it. My property man--he comes from Poughkeepsie--shall be the driver. I will dress the young lady as we drive slowly to the station, and Sister Pepita and the Padre Antonio will direct their feeble steps to the darkest corner of the worst-lit carriage in the train."
I thanked him with all my heart. It had seemed to me terrible that Olivia should have to make her way alone on board the steamer. Now she would have someone to enhearten and befriend her. I met Olivia once at the house of Enrique Gimeno, and made her acquainted with the scheme, and on the night of the sixteenth the steamship agent rang me up on the telephone.
"The Ariadne will arrive at nine to-morrow night. The passengers will leave Santa Paula at half-past ten. Good luck!"
I went to the window and looked out over the garden. The marquee was erected, the fairy lights strung upon the trees, a set piece with the portrait of Juan Ballester and a Latin motto--semper fidelis--raised its monstrous joinery against the moon. Twenty-four hours more and, if all went well, Olivia would be out upon the high seas, on her way to Trinidad. Surely all must go well. I went over in my mind every detail of our preparations. I recognised only one chance of failure--the chance that Mr. Crowninshield in his exuberance might over-act his part. But I was wrong. It was, after all, Olivia who brought our fine scheme to grief.