Part 2
"I think that's most lovely. Let me get that sentence--'the equivocal position of the whole Spanish question, owing to the unsettled relations with America'! And then say he won't make a diplomatist! Well, you must know that Mercy and I have already got our plans fixed up. She's going out with me. I suppose I can do as I like. And if I take a sudden fancy to go to Madrid, I suppose I may go. And if I can't go alone, I suppose I may take Mercy with me. At any rate, that's what I'm going to do. I take Mercy's part in this, and agree that it's horrid you should be packed off out of the country and away from her and all your friends in this way, and that it's only right and proper that you should have your sister out just to show people that you're not an Ishmaelite among your own kith and kin. And as she must have someone to look after her, I'm going too. I can't do less than that for my dearest friend."
"I'm sure Mercy is happy to have such a friend, Mrs. Curwen, but----"
I hesitated, and before I resumed, the door opened and Lascelles came in. This was genuinely unexpected by us all, and apparently none too agreeable to my brother, who stopped with a frown on his long, narrow face. But Mrs. Curwen was equal to the occasion.
"Here is another surprise. Do come in, Mr. Carbonnell, and hear all our plans."
"It's too bad of you, Mercy, to monopolise Mrs. Curwen in this way," said my brother, solemnly, smothering his mortification.
"It's not Mercy who arranged this, I assure you; I did. I'm dreadfully unconventional, and I just wanted to say good-bye to your brother quietly and cheer him up with the news that I mean to take Mercy out to see him in Madrid soon; as soon, say, as he has had time to really miss her and feel lonesome."
"That is news, indeed," said Lascelles, looking mightily uncomfortable at hearing it. "And what does Ferdinand say to that?"
"He's rather absurd over it, I think. He says Madrid isn't a very safe place just now. Let me see what was his reason? Oh, I know--because of 'the equivocal position of the whole Spanish question, owing to the unsettled relations with America,'" and she looked up at him audaciously.
"I think that's a very powerful reason," agreed Lascelles, solemnly; he did not perceive the double application of the phrase. "There can be no doubt that the possible war with the States, and the attitude we have been compelled to adopt, might render the position of both American and English people in Madrid fraught with some danger. I think Ferdinand is quite right." He was so earnest that he was entirely surprised when Mrs. Curwen received his remark with a burst of hearty and very mischievous laughter.
"I must be off," I said then, seeing the prudence of retreat. "I have lots to do. Good-bye, Mrs. Curwen. Take my advice and don't go to Madrid. You're much better off in London."
"Good-bye, Mr. Ferdinand--till we meet in Madrid;" and the expression of her eyes was almost a challenge as we shook hands.
She was a good-enough little soul, and pretty and fascinating, too, in her way; but she did not appeal to me. I was perfectly sincere in my advice to her not to come out to Madrid, and the news of her marriage either with Lascelles or anybody else would not have disturbed me in the least.
On my journey I thought over the incidents with no stronger feeling than that of a kind of neutral amusement; and although I would gladly have stopped in London for awhile and regretted sincerely the separation from Mercy, the moving bustle of the journey, the opening of a fresh page of experiences, the anticipation of seeing my old friend, Mayhew, and the general sense of independence, woke my roving instincts, and I was quite ready to forgive the cheery little widow for having been the innocent cause of my exile, and to wish my brother success in his venture.
It was about ten o'clock at night when I arrived in Madrid, and I was standing by my luggage waiting for the porter of the hotel to which I had telegraphed for a room, and looking about me leisurely according to my wont, when I found myself the object of the close scrutiny of a stranger. He passed me two or three times, each time scanning me and my luggage so intently that I was half inclined to be suspicious of him. He did not look like a detective, however, and was too well dressed for a thief; and he puzzled me. At last, to my surprise, he came up, raised his hat, and addressed me by name in Spanish, with a great show of politeness.
"I am not mistaken. Your name is Carbonnell, Ferdinand Carbonnell?"
"Certainly it is. The name's on my luggage," said I. I was not a diplomatist for nothing. He bowed and smiled and gestured.
"It is also here in my instructions;" and he took from his pocket a sheet of notepaper from which he read in Spanish, "Ferdinand Carbonnell, coming by the mail train arriving ten o'clock." Having read this, he added: "I am to ask you to accompany me to No. 150, Calle de Villanueva. May I ask you to do so?"
I looked at him in profound astonishment, as indeed I well might. Then it dawned on me that Mayhew had somehow heard of my arrival and had sent him.
"Do you come from Mr. Silas Mayhew?"
"No, indeed. I am from Colonel Juan Livenza, at your service, senor." This with more shrugs, bows, and smiles.
"Thank you, but I don't know any Colonel Livenza. I can, however, call on him; shall we say, to-morrow?"
"I was to say that the Senorita Sarita Castelar wishes to see you urgently. My instructions are, however, not to press you to accompany me if you are unwilling; but in that case to beg you to name the hotel to which you go, and where Colonel Livenza himself may have the honour of waiting upon you."
"I still don't understand," I replied. I did not; but the mention of the name of Sarita Castelar made a considerable impression upon me.
"It is my regret I can explain no more. I thought perhaps you would know the urgency of the matter, and that it might be the result of the telegram. But I am only a messenger."
"Telegram?" I cried, catching at the word. Could my father have had important news about the Castelars after I had left and have telegraphed to Madame Chansette to have me met? It was possible, for he knew my route and the time I was to arrive. "What telegram do you mean?" I asked.
"Alas, senor, I know no more than I say. I presume it is the telegram announcing your arrival. But I do not know. If you prefer not to come, it is all one to me. I will say you are going to what hotel? I was told it was very urgent. Pardon me that I have detained you."
"Wait a moment. You say the matter is urgent for to-night?"
"I do not know. I believe it is. I was instructed to tell you so. That is all."
At that moment the hotel porter arrived, hot and flurried and apologetic for being late. An idea occurred to me then.
"Look here," I said to the porter; "take my things to the hotel, and listen a moment. This gentleman has met me unexpectedly with a message from a Col. Livenza to go to No. 150, Calle de Villanueva. I am going there first, and do not expect to be detained long. If I am there more than an hour I shall need some fresh clothes. Come to that address, therefore, at half-past eleven, bring that portmanteau, and ask for me;" and to impress him with the importance of the matter, I gave him a good tip.
"Now, I am at your disposal," I said to the stranger.
"You are suspicious, senor?" he said, as we stepped into a cab.
"Not a bit of it. But I am an Englishman, you know, an old traveller--and when I come off a journey I can't bear to sit for more than an hour without putting on a clean shirt." I spoke drily, and looked hard at him.
"You are English?" he said, with a lift of the eyebrows. "Some of the English habits are very singular."
"Yes, indeed; some of us have a perfect passion for clean linen--so much so, in fact, that sometimes we actually wash our dirty linen in public."
Not understanding this, he looked as if he thought I was half a lunatic; but what he thought was nothing to me. If there was any nonsense at the bottom of this business, I had arranged that the hotel people should know of my arrival, and where to look for me; and my companion understood this. In the rumbling, rattling, brute of a cab the clatter was too great for us to speak, and after one or two inefficient shoutings we gave up the attempt, and I sat wondering what in the world the thing could mean.
I was curious, but not in the least suspicious; and when we drew up at an important-looking house, I followed my companion into it readily enough. The hall was square and lofty, but ill-lighted, and the broad stairway, up one flight of which he took me, equally gloomy. He ushered me into a room at the back of the house and left me, saying he would tell the Colonel of my arrival.
The room, like the rest of the house, was dimly lighted, and the furniture heavy and shabby, and abominably gloomy and dirty. I was weary with my journey, and threw myself into a big chair with a yawn and a wish that the business, whatever it might be, would soon be over. No one came for some minutes, and I lighted a cigarette and had smoked it half through, when my impatience at this discourteous treatment got the better of me, and I resolved to go in search of some means of bringing this Col. Livenza to me. Then I made a disconcerting discovery. The door was locked or bolted on the outside. I looked about for a bell, but there was none. There was, however, another door, and that I found unfastened.
I had now had enough of this kind of Spanish hospitality, and was for getting out of the house without any more nonsense. The second door opened into a room which was quite dark; but as soon as my eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, I made out a thin streak of light at the far end, which told of another door, ajar.
I crossed the room very cautiously and slowly, lest in the darkness I should stumble over any furniture, and was close to the door, when I was brought to a sudden halt by hearing my own name pronounced by a heavy, strident, and obviously angry voice.
"I tell you, gentlemen, this Ferdinand Carbonnell is a traitor and a villain. He is playing a game of devilish duplicity, pretending to help the Carlist cause and intriguing at the same time with the Government. He has come to Madrid now for that purpose. There are the proofs. You have seen them, and can judge whether I have said a word too much in declaring him a dangerous, damnable traitor."
In the start that I gave at hearing this extraordinary speech, my foot struck a small table and overturned it. Some kind of glass or china ornament standing on it fell to the ground, and the crash of the fall was heard by the men in the room, who flung the door wide open and came rushing in to learn the cause.
*CHAPTER III*
*CARLISTS*
A man does not knock about the world for nothing, and the one or two ugly corners I had had to turn in my time had taught me the value of thinking quickly and keeping my head in a crisis. I looked from one to the other of the men--there were three of them--and asked in a cool and level tone--
"Is either of you gentlemen Colonel Livenza?"
"I am. Who are you, and what are you doing here?"
"Considering the rather free use you've been making with my name, Ferdinand Carbonnell, and that I was brought here by someone who called himself your messenger--and, if I'm not mistaken, is now standing beside you--and was left in a locked room yonder, that question strikes me as a little superfluous. Anyway, I shall be glad of an explanation," and I pushed on through the door into the lighted room.
The men made way for me, and the moment I had passed shut and locked the door behind me. I affected to take no heed of this act, suggestive though it was, and turned to Colonel Livenza for his explanation.
He was a dark, handsome fellow enough, somewhere about midway in the thirties; a stalwart, upright, military man, with keen dark eyes, and a somewhat fierce expression--a powerful face, indeed, except for a weak, sensual, and rather brutish mouth, but a very awkward antagonist, no doubt, in any kind of scrimmage. One of the others was he who had met me at the station, and the third was of a very different class; and I thought that if his character paired with his looks, I would rather have him in my pay than among my enemies.
"So you are Ferdinand Carbonnell?" cried the Colonel, after staring at me truculently, and with a gaze that seemed to me to be inspired by deep passion. The note in his voice, too, was distinctly contemptuous. What could have moved him to this passion I could not, of course, for the life of me even guess.
"Yes, I am Ferdinand Carbonnell, and shall be glad to understand the reason of this most extraordinary reception, and of the far more extraordinary blunder which must be at the bottom of it."
"You carry things with a high hand--but that won't serve you. We have brought you here to-night--trapped you here if you prefer it--to make you explain, if you can, your treachery to the Carlist cause, and if you cannot explain it, to take the consequences."
The gross absurdity of the whole thing struck me so forcibly at that moment, and his exaggerated and melodramatic rant was so ridiculously out of proportion that I laughed as I answered--
"Really this is farce, not tragedy, senor. I have never seen you before; I know nothing of you or your affairs; I am not a Carlist, and never have been; I am not a Spaniard, but an Englishman; I have just come from London; and I assure you, on my honour as an Englishman, that you are labouring under a complete mistake as to myself. I beg you, therefore, to put an end to a false position, and allow me to leave, before you make any further disclosures which may compromise you and these other gentlemen."
Whether this declaration would have had any pacifying effect upon him had I not prefaced it with my ill-advised laughter I cannot say; but the laugh seemed to goad him into a paroxysm of such uncontrollable rage that he could barely endure to hear me to the end, and when I ended, he cried, in a voice positively thick and choking with fury--
"You are a liar, a smooth-tongued, hypocritical, cowardly liar; and having done your dirty traitor's work, you seek to cheat us by these lies. I know them to be lies."
This was unendurable. However much the person for whom this angry fool mistook me deserved this flood of abuse, it was certain that I didn't, and I wasn't going to put up with it. The quarrel, which belonged obviously to somebody else, was fast being foisted on to me, but no man can stand that sort of talk, and my temper began to heat up quickly. I moved a pace or two nearer, to be within striking distance, and then gave him a chance of retracting.
"I have explained to you that you have made a mistake, and in return you call me a liar. I repeat you are entirely in error, and I call upon you, whoever you are, to withdraw your words unconditionally, make such enquiries as will satisfy you of your blunder, and then apologise to me. Otherwise----"
He listened with a smile on his face, and shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, at my unfinished sentence.
"Well, otherwise? I tell you again you are a liar and a perjured traitor to the cause."
I raised my fist to strike him in the face, when the two others interposed, thrust me back and away from him with considerable violence, and then covered me with their revolvers.
"No, no; none of that," growled one of them, threateningly. "You've done enough harm already. If what we believe is true, you're not fit for that kind of punishment. We'll deal with you, for the cursed pig you are."
I was not such a fool as to argue against two loaded revolvers levelled dead at my head and held within a yard. But it struck me that Colonel Livenza was not altogether satisfied with the interruption, and that he had some kind of personal interest in the affair which was apart from the motives of his companions.
"Do as you will," I said, after a second's thought. "And do it quickly. The people at the hotel to which I was going know where I have come. I told them; and a messenger will be here shortly from there." I intended this to frighten them; and for the moment it did so. But in the end it acted merely as a warning, and gave them time to concoct a lie with which to get rid of the hotel porter when he arrived.
One of them kept me covered with his pistol while the others talked together and referred to some papers which lay on a table. Then the man who had met me at the station, and whom I judged to be in some way the Colonel's inferior, turned to me with the papers in his hand, and began to question me.
"You admit you are Ferdinand Carbonnell?"
"My name is Ferdinand Carbonnell; I am an Englishman, the son of Lord Glisfoyle, an English nobleman, and I have come to Madrid from London to join----"
"Enough; you are Ferdinand Carbonnell. You have just come from Paris, haven't you?"
"I came through Paris, from London." A sneer showed that he regarded this admission as a contradiction of my previous statement. "Paris is on the direct route from London," I added.
"And on the indirect route from a thousand other places," he retorted. "Your only chance is to stick to the truth. You shall have a fair trial, and it will go less hard with you if you speak the truth. I am Felipe Corpola, and this is Pedro Valera--you will know our names well enough."
"On the contrary, I never heard your names until this instant, nor that of Colonel Livenza until it was told me at the station."
"Santa Maria! what a lie!" exclaimed the third man, Valera, in a loud aside; and by this I gathered they were two Carlists prominent enough to be fairly well-known in the ranks of that wide company.
"On the 20th of last month you were at Valladolid, two days later at Burgos, and two days later still at Saragossa, urging that a rising should take place there simultaneously with that planned at Berga two months hence in May."
"I have not been at either of those places for three years past. At the dates you mention I was in London; and I warn you that you are giving me information which may prove very compromising for you and those associated with you. I am no Carlist." My protestation was received with fresh symptoms of utter disbelief.
"You were to go to Paris in connection with the funds needed for the enterprise; the two leaders chosen to go with you to receive the money were Tomaso Garcia and Juan Narvaez; and a list of the names of all the leaders in the matter was given to you."
"This is all an absolute blunder," I cried, indignantly. "I know nothing whatever of a jot or tittle of it."
"I warned you not to lie," cried Corpola, sternly. "This is all proved here in black and white under your own name;" and he flourished before me some documents. "This is the charge against you and explain it if you can. Almost directly afterwards our two comrades, Garcia and Narvaez, disappeared; nearly the whole of the men whose names were on that list given to you were arrested at one swoop by the Government; and a secret information in your handwriting together with the original list of the leaders found their way into the hands of the Government. Explain that act of foul treachery if you can"--and his voice almost broke with passion--"or may the Holy Mother have more mercy on you than we will have."
The intense earnestness and passion of the man were a proof of his sincerity, and also of the danger in which I stood. The whole thing was a mad mistake, of course; but that I could prove it in time to stop them taking the steps which I could see they contemplated was far less clear; and for the moment I was nonplussed. Up to that instant I had been so confident the mistake would be discovered that I had felt no misgivings as to the issue. But the sight of Corpola's burning indignation, his obvious conviction. that I was the man who had been guilty of the act which had so moved him, and my intuitive recognition that his fanaticism made him really dangerous, disturbed me now profoundly.
"Speak, man, speak," he cried, stridently, when I stood thinking in silence.
"I can only say what I have said before, that it is all a horrible mistake. I am not the man you think me."
"You are Ferdinand Carbonnell, you have admitted it."
"I am not the Ferdinand Carbonnell you accuse of treachery."
"What! Would you fool us with a child's tale that there are two Ferdinand Carbonnells? Can your wits, so subtle and quick in treachery spin no cleverer defence than that? By the Virgin, that one so trusted should sink so low! All shame to us who have trusted so poor a thing! Can you produce the list that was given you, or tell us something to let us believe that at the worst it was filched from you when you were drunk and so conveyed to the Government. Anything, my God, anything, but the blunt fact that we have harboured such a treacherous beast as a man who would deliberately sell his comrades." The sight of his passion tore me as a harrow tears and scarifies the ground.
"What I have told you is the truth. I am not the man."
"It is a lie; a damnable lie, and you are the paltry, filthy dog of a coward that you were called and shall have a dog's death. What say you, Valera?"
"He is guilty; serve him as he has served our comrades," growled the brute, with a scowl, taking some of the other's vehement passion into his more dogged, sluggish nature.
"Colonel, you are right. He _is_ the traitor you declared, and I give my voice for his death. Aye, and by the Holy Cross, mine shall be the hand to punish him;" and he raised it on high and clenched it while the fury of his rage flashed from his eyes, flushed his mobile swarthy face, and vibrated in his impetuous, vindictive utterance. I had never seen a man more completely overwhelmed by the flood of passion; and for the moment I half expected him to turn his pistol on me there and then and send a bullet into my brain.
Colonel Livenza appeared also to have some such thought for he put himself between us.
"We must be cautious, Corpola," he said, and drew him aside to confer apparently as to the best means of dealing with me, Valera meanwhile keeping me covered with his revolver.
What to do I could not think. I made no show of resistance; that was clearly not my cue at present; but I had no intention of giving in without a very desperate attempt to escape; and I stood waiting for the moment which would give me the chance I sought, and planning the best means. By hook or crook I must get possession of one of the revolvers, and I watched with the vigilance of a lynx for an opportunity; I was a stronger man than either of the three and my muscles were always in excellent trim, and in a tussle on equal terms I should not have feared the result of a scrimmage with two of them. Unarmed, however, I was completely at their mercy; and hence my anxiety.
The Colonel and Corpola were conferring together, arguing with much energy and gesture when someone knocked. The door was opened cautiously and I heard someone say that the porter from the hotel had brought my bag and had asked for me. There was another whispered conference, and then a message was sent in my name to the effect that I was not going to the hotel that night and probably not on the next day, as I had been called away. I would send for my luggage later. I protested vehemently against this, but my protest was disregarded; and I suffered a keen pang of mortification at seeing my precaution quietly checkmated in this way. It impressed upon me more vividly than anything else could have done the reality of the peril in which I stood.