Part 4

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.

IV

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.