The Four Corners of the World Part 7

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 Sh.o.r.e 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 steams.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.senger 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 pa.s.sengers 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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 l.u.s.tre 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ning 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!"