“My dear Joan, whatever are you saying? Captain Doubleday would never so forget himself. He sent roses to my cabin directly I went on board.”
“Because he wanted you to help navigate the ship, cousin. He said you were a born seaman. Now, when I go back to London——”
“Are you returning this winter?” I asked with as much indifference as I could command. She shook her head sadly.
“We never know where my father is going. It’s always rush and hurry except when we are here at Santa Maria. And there’s no one but the parish priest to flirt with. I tried so hard when we first came here—such a funny little yellow man, just like a monkey. My heart was half broken when Cousin Emma cut me out.”
“Cousin Emma”—by whom she indicated the masculine Miss Aston—protested loudly for the second time, and again the talk reverted to Europe. I, however, had two facts which I entered in my notebook directly I went upstairs. And this is the entry that I made:
“(1) Joan Fordibras left Dieppe at a moment’s notice. Ergo, her departure was the direct issue of my own.
“(2) The General’s yacht put out to sea, but returned when I had left. Ergo, his was not the yacht which I had followed to South Africa.”
These facts, I say, were entered in my book when I had said good-night to Joan, and left her at the stair’s foot—a merry, childish figure, with mischief in her eyes and goodwill toward me in her words. Whatever purpose had been in the General’s mind when he brought her to Santa Maria, she, I was convinced, knew nothing of it. To me, however, the story was as clear as though it had been written in a master book.
“They hope that I will fall in love with her and become one of them,” I said. Such an idea was worthy of the men and their undertaking. I foresaw ripe fruit of it, and chiefly my own salvation and safety for some days at least.
Willingly would I play a lover’s part if need be. “It should not be difficult,” I said, “to call Joan Fordibras my own, or to tell her those eternal stories of love and homage of which no woman has yet grown weary!”
CHAPTER XIII.
THE CAVE IN THE MOUNTAIN.
Dr. Fabos Makes Himself Acquainted with the Villa San Jorge.
Joan had spoken of a Bluebeard’s cupboard in my bedroom. This I opened the moment I went up to bed. It stood against the outer wall of the room, and plainly led to some apartment or gallery above. The lock of the inner door, I perceived, had a rude contrivance of wires attached to it. A child would have read it for an ancient alarm set there to ring a bell if the door were opened. I laughed at his simplicity, and said that, after all, General Fordibras could not be a very formidable antagonist. He wished to see how far my curiosity would carry me in his house, and here was an infantile device to discover me. I took a second glance at it, and dismissed it from my mind.
I had gone up to bed at twelve o’clock, I suppose, and it was now nearly half an hour after midnight. A good fire of logs still burned in the grate, a hand lamp with a crimson shade stood near by my bed. Setting this so that I could cast a shadow out upon the verandah, I made those brisk movements which a person watching without might have interpreted as the act of undressing, and then, extinguishing the light and screening the fire, I listened for the footsteps of my servant, Okyada. No cat could tread as softly as he; no Indian upon a trail could step with more cunning than this soft-eyed, devoted, priceless fellow. I had told him to come to me at a quarter to one, and the hands of the watch were still upon the figures when the door opened inch by inch, and he appeared, a spectre almost invisible, a pair of glistening eyes, of white laughing teeth—Okyada, the invincible, the uncorruptible.
“What news, Okyada?”
He whispered his answer, every word sounding as clearly in my ears as the notes of a bell across a drowsy river.
“There is that which you should know, master. He is here, in this house. I have seen him sleeping. Let us go together—the white foot upon the wool. It would be dangerous to sleep, master.”
I thought that his manner was curiously anxious, for here was a servant who feared nothing under heaven. To question him further, when I could ascertain the facts for myself, would have been ridiculous; and merely looking to my pistols and drawing a heavy pair of felt slippers over my boots, I followed him from the room.
“Straight down the stairs, master,” he said; “they are watching the corridors. One will not watch again to-night—I have killed him. Let us pass where he should have been.”
I understood that he had dealt with one of the sentries as only a son of Hiroshima could, and, nodding in answer, I followed him down the stairs and so to the dining-room I had so recently quitted. The apartment was almost as I had left it an hour ago. Plates and glasses were still upon the table; the embers of a fire reddened upon the open hearth. I observed, however, that a shutter of a window giving upon the verandah had been opened to the extent of a hand’s-breadth, and by this window it was plain that my servant meant to pass out. No sooner had we done so than he dexterously closed the shutter behind him by the aid of a cord and a little beeswax; and having left all to his satisfaction, he beckoned me onward and began to tread a wide lawn of grass, and after that, a pine-wood, so thickly planted that an artificial maze could not have been more perplexing.
Now it came to me that the house itself did not contain the man I was seeking nor the sights which Okyada had to show me. This woodland path led to the wall of the mountain, to the foot of that high peak visible to every ship that sails by Santa Maria. Here, apparently, the track terminated. Okyada, crouching like a panther, bade me imitate him as we drew near to the rock; and approaching it with infinite caution, he raised his hand again and showed me, at the cliff’s foot, the dead body of the sentinel who had watched the place, I made sure, not a full hour ago.
“We met upon the ladder, master,” said my servant, unmoved. “I could not go by. He fell, master—he fell from up yonder where you see the fires. His friends are there; we are going to them.”
I shuddered at the spectacle—perhaps was unnerved by it. This instant brought home to me as nothing else had done the nature of the quest I had embarked upon and the price which it might be necessary to pay for success. What was life or death to this criminal company my imagination had placed upon the high seas and on such shores as this! They would kill me, if my death could contribute to their safety, as readily as a man crushes a fly that settles by his hand. All my best reasoned schemes might not avail against such a sudden outbreak of anger and reproach as discovery might bring upon me. This I had been a fool not to remember, and it came to me in all its black nakedness as I stood at the foot of the precipice and perceived that Okyada would have me mount. The venture was as desperate as any a man could embark upon. I know not to this day why I obeyed my servant.
Let me make the situation clear. The path through the wood had carried us to a precipice of the mountain, black and stern and forbidding. Against this a frail iron ladder had been raised and hooked to the rock by the ordinary clamps which steeplejacks employ. How far this ladder had been reared, I could not clearly see. Its thread-like shell disappeared and was quickly lost in the shadows of the heights; while far above, beyond a space of blackness, a glow of warm light radiated from time to time from some orifice of the rock, and spoke both of human presence and human activities. That the ladder had been closely watched, Okyada had already told me. Did I need a further witness, the dead body at the cliff’s foot must have answered for my servant’s veracity. Somewhere in that tremendous haze of light and shadow the two men had met upon a foothold terrible to contemplate; their arms had been locked together; they had uttered no cries, but silently, grimly fighting, they had decided the issue, and one had fallen horribly to the rocks below. This man’s absence must presently be discovered. How if discovery came