An unnameable fear! A dread surpassing all power of expression! Such terror as might abase a man to the very dust, send him weeping like a child, or craving mercy from his bitterest enemy. This I suffered in that moment when my imagination reeled at its own thoughts, when it depicted for me the agony that a man must suffer, cast pitilessly into the bowels of a flaming furnace, and burned to ashes as coal is burned when the blast is turned upon it. Nothing under heaven or earth would I not have given the men if thereby the dread of the fire had been taken from me. I believe that I would have bartered my very soul for the salvation of the pistol or the knife.
Let this be told, and then that which follows after is the more readily understood. The men dragged me down into the pit and stood crying about me like so many ravening wolves. The Jew, forcing his way through the press, uttered strange sounds, incoherent and terrible, and seeming to say that he had already judged and condemned me. In such a sense the men interpreted him, and two of them moving the great levers which opened the furnace doors, they revealed the very heart of the monstrous fire, white as the glory of the sun, glowing as a lake of flame, a torrid, molten, unnameable fire toward which strong arms impelled me, blows thrust me, the naked bodies of the human devils impelled me. For my part, I turned upon them as a man upon the brink of the most terrible death conceivable. They had snatched my revolver from me. I had but my strong arms, my lithe shoulders, to pit against theirs; and with these I fought as a wild beast at bay. Now upon my feet, now down amongst them, striking savage blows at their upturned faces, it is no boast to say that their very numbers thwarted their purpose and delayed the issue. And, more than this, I found another ally, one neither in their calculations nor my own. This befriended me beyond all hope, served me as no human friendship could have done. For, in a word, it soon appeared that they could thrust me but a little way toward the furnace doors, and beyond that point were impotent. The heat overpowered them. Trained as they were, they could not suffer it. I saw them falling back from me one by one. I heard them vainly crying for this measure or for that. The furnace mastered them. It left me at last alone before its open doors, and, staggering to my feet, I fell headlong in a faint that death might well have terminated.
* * * * *
A cool air blowing upon my forehead gave me back my senses—I know not after what interval of time or space. Opening my eyes, I perceived that men were carrying me in a kind of palanquin through a deep passage of the rock, and that torches of pitch and flax guided them as they went. The tunnel was lofty, and its roof clean cut as though by man and not by Nature. The men themselves were clothed in long white blouses, and none of them appeared to carry arms. I addressed the nearest of them, and asked him where I was. He answered me in French, not unkindly, and with an evident desire to be the bearer of good tidings.
“We are taking you to the Valley House, monsieur—it is Herr Imroth’s order.”
“Are these the men who were with him down yonder?”
“Some of them, monsieur. Herr Imroth has spoken, and they know you. Fear nothing—they will be your friends.”
My sardonic smile could not be hidden from him. I understood that the Jew had found his tongue in time to save my life, and that this journey was a witness to the fact. At the same time, an intense weakness quite mastered my faculties, and left me in that somewhat dreamy state when every circumstance is accepted without question, and all that is done seems in perfect accord with the occasion. Indeed, I must have fallen again into a sleep of weakness almost immediately, for, when next I opened my eyes, the sun was shining into the room where I lay, and no other than General Fordibras stood by my bedside, watching me. Then I understood that this was what the Frenchman meant by the Valley House, and that here the Jew’s servants had carried me from the cave of the forges.
Now, I might very naturally have looked to see Joan’s father at an early moment after my arrival at Santa Maria; and yet I confess that his presence in this room both surprised and pleased me. Whatever the man might be, however questionable his story, he stood in sharp contrast to the Jew and the savages with whom the Jew worked, up yonder in the caves of the hills. A soldier in manner, polished and reserved in speech, the General had been an enigma to me from the beginning. Nevertheless, excepting only my servant Okyada, I would as soon have found him at my bedside as any man upon the island of Santa Maria; and when he spoke, though I believed his tale to be but a silly lie, I would as lief have heard it as any common cant of welcome.
“I come to ask after a very foolish man,” he said, with a sternness which seemed real enough. “It appears that the visit was unnecessary.”
I sat up in bed and filled my lungs with the sweet fresh air of morning.
“If you know the story,” I said, “we shall go no further by recalling the particulars of it. I came here to find what you and your servants were doing at Santa Maria, and the discovery was attended by unpleasant consequences. I grant you the foolishness—do me the favour to spare me the pity.”
He turned away from my bedside abruptly and walked to the windows as though to open them still wider.
“As you will,” he said; “the time may come when neither will spare the other anything. If you think it is not yet——”
“It shall be when you please. I am always ready, General Fordibras. Speak or be silent; you can add very little to that which I know. But should you choose to make a bargain with me——?”
He wheeled about, hot with anger.
“What dishonour is this?” he exclaimed. “You come here to spy upon me; you escape from my house like a common footpad, and go up to the mines——”
“The mines, General Fordibras?”
“Nowhere else, Dr. Fabos. Do you think that I am deceived? You came to this country to steal the secrets of which I am the rightful guardian. You think to enrich yourself. You would return to London, to your fellow knaves of Throgmorton Street, and say, ‘There is gold in the Azores: exploit them, buy the people out, deal with the Government of Portugal.’ You pry upon my workmen openly, and but for my steward, Herr Imroth, you would not be alive this morning to tell the story. Are you the man with whom I, Hubert Fordibras, the master of these lands, shall make a bargain? In God’s name, what next am I to hear?”
I leaned back upon the pillow and regarded him fixedly with that look of pity and contempt the discovery of a lie rarely fails to earn.
“The next thing you are to hear,” I said quietly, “is that the English Government has discovered the true owners of the Diamond Ship, and is perfectly acquainted with her whereabouts.”
It is always a little pathetic to witness the abjection of a man of fine bearing and habitual dignity. I confess to some sympathy with General Fordibras in that moment. Had I struck him he would have been a man before me; but the declaration robbed him instantly even of the distinction of his presence. And for long minutes together he halted there, trying to speak, but lacking words, the lamentable figure of a broken man.
“By what right do you intervene?” he asked at last. “Who sent you to be my accuser? Are you, then, above others, a judge of men? Good God! Do you not see that your very life depends upon my clemency? At a word from me——”
“It