He interrupted me with just a spark of reanimation, perplexing for the moment, but to be remembered afterwards by me to the end of my life.
“Is my daughter more than my honour, then? Leave her out of this if you please. You have put a plain question to me, and I will answer you in the same terms. Your visit here is a delusion; your story a lie. If I do not punish you, it is for my daughter’s sake. Thank her, Dr. Fabos. Time will modify your opinion of me and bring you to reason. Let there be a truce of time, then, between us. I will treat you as my guest, and you shall call me host. What comes after that may be for our mutual good. It is too early to speak of that yet.”
I did not reply, as I might well have done, that our “mutual good” must imply my willingness to remain tongue-tied at a price—to sell my conscience to him and his for just such a sum as their security dictated. It was too early, as he said, to come to that close encounter which must either blast this great conspiracy altogether or result in my own final ignominy. The “truce of time” he offered suited me perfectly. I knew now that these men feared to kill me; my own steadfast belief upon which I had staked my very life, that their curiosity would postpone their vengeance, had been twice justified. They spared me, as I had foreseen that they would, because they wished to ascertain who and what I was, the friends I had behind me, the extent of my knowledge concerning them. Such clemency would continue as long as their own uncertainty endured. I determined, therefore, to take the General at his word, and, giving no pledge, to profit to the uttermost by every opportunity his fears permitted to me.
“There shall be a truce by all means,” I said; “beyond that I will say nothing. Pledge your honour for my safety here, and I will pledge mine that if I can save you from yourself, I will do so. Nothing more is possible to me. You will not ask me to go further than that?”
He replied, vaguely as before, that time would bring us to a mutual understanding, and that, meanwhile, I was as safe at Santa Maria as in my own house in Suffolk.
“We shall keep you up here at the Châlet,” he said. “It is warmer and drier than the other house. My daughter is coming up to breakfast. You will find her below if you care to get up. I, myself, must go to St. Michael’s again to-day—I have urgent business there. But Joan will show you all that is to be seen, and we shall meet again to-morrow night at dinner if the sea keeps as it is.”
To this I answered that I certainly would get up, and I begged him to send my servant, Okyada, to me. Anxiety for the faithful fellow had been in my mind since I awoke an hour ago; and although my confidence in his cleverness forbade any serious doubt of his safety, I heard the General’s news of him with every satisfaction.
“We believe that your man returned to the yacht last night,” he said. “No doubt, if you go on board to-day, you will find him. The Irish gentleman, Mr. McShanus, was in Villa do Porto inquiring for you very early this morning. My servants can take a message down if you wish it.”
I thanked him, but expressed my intention of returning to the yacht—at the latest to dinner. He did not appear in any way surprised, nor did he flinch at my close scrutiny. Apparently, he was candour itself; and I could not help but reflect that he must have had the poorest opinion both of my own prescience and of my credulity. For my own part, I had no doubts at all about the matter, and I knew that I was a prisoner in the house; and that they would keep me there, either until I joined them or they could conveniently and safely make away with me.
Nor was this to speak of a more dangerous, a subtler weapon, which should freely barter a woman’s honour for my consent, and offer me Joan Fordibras if I would save a rogue’s neck from the gallows.
CHAPTER XVI.
AT VALLEY HOUSE.
Joan Fordibras Makes a Confession.
A French valet came to me when General Fordibras had gone, and offered both to send to the yacht for any luggage I might need, and also, if I wished it, to have the English doctor, Wilson, up from Villa do Porto, to see me. This also had been the General’s idea; but I had no hurt of last night’s affray beyond a few bruises and an abrasion of the skin where I fell; and I declined the service as politely as might be. As for my luggage, I had taken a dressing-case to the Villa San Jorge, and this had now been brought up to the châlet, as the fellow told me. I said that it would suffice for the brief stay I intended to make at Santa Maria; and dressing impatiently, I went down to make a better acquaintance both with the house and its inmates.
Imagine a pretty Swiss châlet set high in the cleft of a mountain, with a well-wooded green valley of its own lying at its very door, and beyond the valley, on the far side, the sheer cliff of a lesser peak, rising up so forbiddingly that it might have been the great wall of a fortress or a castle. Such was Valley House, a dot upon the mountain side—a jalousied, red-roofed cottage, guarded everywhere by walls of rock, and yet possessing its own little park, which boasted almost a tropic luxuriance. Never have I seen a greater variety of shrubs, or such an odd assortment, in any garden either of Europe or Africa. Box, Scotch fir, a fine show both of orange and lemon in bloom, the citron, the pomegranate, African palms, Australian eucalyptus, that abundant fern, the native cabellinho—here you had them all in an atmosphere which suggested the warm valleys of the Pyrenees, beneath a sky which the Riviera might have shown to you. So much I perceived directly I went out upon the verandah of the house. The men who had built this châlet had built a retreat among the hills, which the richest might envy. I did not wonder that General Fordibras could speak of it with pride.
There was no one but an old negro servant about the house when I passed out to the verandah; and beyond wishing me “Good-morning, Massa Doctor,” I found him entirely uncommunicative. A clock in the hall made out the time to be a quarter past eleven. I perceived that the table had been laid for the mid-day breakfast, and that two covers were set. The second would be for Joan Fordibras, I said; and my heart beating a little wildly at the thought, I determined, if it was possible, to reconnoitre the situation before her arrival, and to know the best or the worst of it at once. That I was a prisoner of the valley I never had a doubt. It lay upon me, then, to face the fact and so to reckon with it that my wit should find the door which these men had so cunningly closed upon me.
Now, the first observation that I made, standing upon the verandah of the house, was one concerning the sea and my situation regarding it. I observed immediately that the harbour of Villa do Porto lay hidden from my view by the Eastern cliff of the valley. The Atlantic showed me but two patches of blue-green water, one almost to the south-west, and a second, of greater extent, to the north. Except for these glimpses of the ocean, I had no view of the world without the valley—not so much as that of a roof or spire or even of the smoke of a human habitation. Whoever had chosen this site for his châlet of the hills had chosen it where man could not pry upon him nor even ships at sea become acquainted with his movements. The fact was so very evident that I accepted it at once, and turned immediately to an examination of the grounds themselves. In extent, perhaps, a matter of five acres, my early opinion of their security was in no way altered by a closer inspection of them. They were, I saw, girt about everywhere by the sheer walls of monstrous cliffs; and as though to add to the suggestion of terror, I discovered that they were defended in their weakness by a rushing torrent of boiling water, foaming upwards from some deep, natural pool below, and thence rushing in a very