CHAPTER XVI.

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 cataract close to the wall of the mountain at the one spot where a clever mountaineer might have climbed thearrêteof the precipice and so broken the prison. This coincidence hardly presented its true meaning to me at the first glance. I came to understand it later, as you shall see.

Walls of rock everywhere; no visible gate; no path or road, no crevice or gully by which a man might enter this almost fabulous valley from without! To this conclusion I came at the end of my first tour of the grounds. No prison had ever been contrived so cunningly; no human retreat made more inaccessible. As they had carried me through a tunnel of the mountain last night, so I knew that the owner of the châlet came and had returned, and that, until I found the gate of that cavern and my wits unlocked it, I was as surely hidden from the knowledge of men as though the doors of the Schlussenburg had closed upon me.

Such a truth could not but appal me. I accepted it with something very like a shudder and, seeking to forget it, I returned to the hither garden and its many evidences of scientific horticulture. Here, truly, the hand of civilisation and of the human amenities had left its imprint. If this might be, as imagination suggested, a valley of crime unknown, of cruelty and suffering and lust, none the less had those who peopled it looked up sometimes to the sun or bent their heads in homage to the rose. Even at this inclement season, I found blooms abundantly which England would not have given me until May. One pretty bower I shall never forget—an arbour perched upon a grassy bank with a mountain pool and fountain before its doors, and trailing creeper about it, and the great red flower of begonia giving it a sheen of crimson, very beautiful and welcome amidst this maze of green. Here I would have entered to make a note upon paper of all that the morning had taught me; but I was hardly at the door of the little house when I discovered that another occupied it already, and starting back as she looked up, I found myself face to face with Joan Fordibras.

She sat before a rude table of entwined logs, her face resting upon weary arms, and her dark chestnut hair streaming all about her. I saw that she had been weeping, and that tears still glistened upon the dark lashes of her eloquent eyes. Her dress was a simple morning gown of muslin, and a bunch of roses had been crushed by her nervous fingers and the leaves scattered, one by one, upon the ground. At my coming, the colour rushed back to her cheeks, and she half rose as though afraid of me. I stood my ground, however, for her sake and my own. Now must I speak with her, now once and for ever tell her that which I had come to Santa Maria to say.

“Miss Fordibras,” I said quietly; “you are in trouble and I can help you.”

She did not answer me. A flood of tears seemed to conquer her.

“Yes,” she said—and how changed she was from my little Joan of Dieppe!—“Yes, Dr. Fabos, I am in trouble.”

I crossed the arbour and seated myself near her.

“The grief of being misnamed the daughter of a man who is unworthy of being called your father. Tell me if I am mistaken. You are not the daughter of Hubert Fordibras? You are no real relative of his?”

A woman’s curiosity is often as potent an antidote to grief as artifice may devise. I shall never forget the look upon Joan Fordibras’s face when I confessed an opinion I had formed but the half of an hour ago. She was not the General’s daughter. The manner in which he had spoken of her was not the manner of a father uttering the name of his child.

“Did my father tell you that?” she asked me, looking up amazed.

“He has told me nothing save that I should enjoy your company and that of your companion at the breakfast table. Miss Aston, I suppose, is detained?”

This shrewd and very innocent untruth appeared to give her confidence. I think that she believed it. The suggestion that we were not to be alone together did much to make the situation possible. She sat upright now, and began again to pluck the rose leaves from her posy.

“Miss Aston is at the Villa San Jorge. I did not wish to come alone, but my father insisted. That’s why you found me crying. I hated it. I hate this place, and everyone about it. You know that I do, Dr. Fabos. They cannot hide anything from you. I said so when first I saw you in London. You are one of those men to whom women tell everything. I could not keep a secret from you if my life depended upon it.”

“Is there any necessity to do so, Miss Fordibras? Are not some secrets best told to our friends?”

I saw that she was greatly tempted, and it occurred to me that what I had to contend against was some pledge or promise she had given to General Fordibras. This man’s evil influence could neither be concealed nor denied. She had passed her word to him, and would not break it.

“I will tell you nothing—I dare not,” she exclaimed at length, wrestling visibly with a wild desire to speak. “It would not help you; it could not serve you. Leave the place at once, Dr. Fabos. Never think or speak of us again. Go right now at once. Say good-bye to me, and try to forget that such a person exists. That’s my secret; that’s what I came up here to tell you, never mind what you might think of me.”

A crimson blush came again to her pretty cheeks, and she feared to look me in the eyes. I had quite made up my mind how to deal with her, and acted accordingly. Her promise I respected. Neither fear of the General nor good-will toward me must induce her to break it.

“That’s a fine word of wisdom,” I said; “but it appears to me that I want a pair of wings if I am to obey you. Did they not tell you that I am a prisoner here?”

“A prisoner—oh no, no⁠——”

“Indeed, so—a prisoner who has yet to find the road which leads to the sea-shore. Sooner or later I shall discover it, and we will set out upon it together. At the moment, my eyes show me nothing but the hills. Perhaps I am grown a little blind, dear child. If that is so, you must lead me.”

She started up amazed, and ran to the door of the arbour. The quick pulsations of her heart were to be counted beneath her frail gown of muslin. I could see that she looked away to the corner of the gardens where the boiling spring swirled and eddied beneath the shallow cliff.

“The bridge is there—down there by the water,” she cried excitedly. “I crossed it an hour ago—an iron bridge, Dr. Fabos, with a little flight of steps leading up to it. Why do you talk so wildly? Am I so foolish, then?”

I went and stood beside her, a rose from her bundle in my hand.

“The elves play with us,” I said evasively; “your bridge has vanished with the morning mists. The fairies must have carried it over the mountains for the love of a footprint. Let us put it out of our thoughts. Who knows, if we have the mind, that we cannot build another?”

This I said that she might read into it a deeper meaning of my confidence, but the words were vain. White and frightened and terribly afraid, she looked at me for an instant as though I were in some way a consenting party to this evil conspiracy; then as quickly repented of her look, and declared her woman’s heart.

“I cannot believe it,” she cried; “I am so helpless. Tell me, Dr. Fabos, what shall I do—in God’s name, what shall I do?”

“Accept my friendship and bestow upon me your confidence. Promise that you will leave this place when I leave it, and end for ever your association with these men? I ask nothing more. My own secret must go with me yet a little while. But I shall call you Joan, and no name shall be dearer to me—if you wish it, little comrade?”

She turned from me, the hot tears in her eyes. I knew that she would never be afraid of me again, and when a little while had passed I led her to the house, and, as any brother and sister, we sat at the breakfast table and spoke of common things.

And yet, God knows, the shame of such an hour lay heavily upon me. For had not these people been willing to buy their own safety at the price of this young girl’s honour?

CHAPTER XVII.

THE NINE DAYS OF SILENCE.

Dr. Fabos Comes to Certain Conclusions.

We were nine days together at the Valley House without any word or sign from those without. The evil of this conspiracy I found almost less to be condemned than the childish folly of it. There is nothing more remarkable in the story of crime than the senile mistakes of some of its masters—men, shrewd to the point of wonder in all other affairs, but betraying their mental aberration in some one act at which even the very ignorant might smile. So it was with this sham story of the valley and the pretended accident which kept me from the ship. Every day, with a punctuality as amusing as the tale was plausible, the old negro and the servants below apologised for the accident which alone, they declared, prevented my return to the ship.

A disaster had overtaken the valley bridge; the passage by the mountains was never used but by General Fordibras alone! That was their tale. As for the General, his desolation would be beyond words when he heard of it. Unfortunately he had been detained at St. Michael’s, and they could only imagine that the rough seas of the last few days were answerable for it. All that was humanly possible, they felt sure, was being done by the engineers below. Fortunate that the mining operations in the mountains had brought so many workmen to the island. My release, they said, and that of their young mistress could be but a matter of a few hours.

Now, I have turned up my diary for those nine days, and I find that upon the first of them I came to certain definite conclusions which may be of interest to my readers. They were these:

(1) The criminals feared nothing from the presence of my yacht. Either the island was watched by some powerful and speedy armed ship of their own, or they had convinced Captain Larry that all was well with me.

(2) They were in league with the local Portuguese officials of Villa do Porto, who, I did not doubt, had been richly rewarded for a little diligent blindness.

(3) They believed that I had fallen in love with Joan Fordibras, and for her sake would either hold my peace for ever or join them. This was their master stroke. It was also the apotheosis of their folly.

Imagine, at the same time, my own difficulties. Save for two ancient servants, a maid and a negro, this young girl and I were alone at the châlet and seemingly as remote from the world as though we had been prisoners of an Eastern despotism. She knew and I knew with what hopes and designs this clumsy trap had been contrived. Let us find solace in each other’s society, and our human passion must prove stronger than any merely moral impulse directed against Valentine Imroth and his confederates. Such was the argument employed by our enemies. They would expose me to the condemnation of the world if I withstood them, or secure my silence if I assented to their plans. The thing was so daring, so utterly unexpected, that I do believe it would have succeeded but for one plain fact these men had overlooked. And that was nothing less than the good commonsense and real womanly courage which my little companion brought to our assistance, and offered me unflinchingly in that amazing hour.

For you must understand that we had talked but in enigmas hitherto, both at Dieppe and at the Villa San Jorge, where I went upon landing from my yacht. Now, it fell upon me to speak to her as to one who must share my secrets and be the confidante of them. Cost me what it might, let there be a great love for her growing in my heart, I resolved that not one word of it should be uttered at Santa Maria. So much I owed both to myself and her. There were subjects enough, God knows, upon which a man might be eloquent. I chose the story of her own life to begin with, and heard her story as no other lips could have told it so sweetly.

This was upon the second day of our captivity, a warm, sunny day with a fresh breeze blowing in from west by north and a glorious heaven of blue sky above us. I remember that she wore a gown of lace and had a turquoise chain about her throat. We had breakfasted together and heard the servants’ familiar apologies. The General would certainly return from St. Michael’s to-day, they said; the engineers could not fail to restore the bridge by sunset. Joan heard them with ears that tingled. I did not hear them at all, but going out with her to the gardens, I asked her if she had always known General Fordibras, and what her recollections of that association were. To which she replied that she remembered him as long as she remembered anyone at all.

“There was another face—so long ago, so very long ago,” she said, almost wearily. “I have always hoped and believed that it was my mother’s face. When I was a very little girl, I lived in a house which stood by a great river. It must have been Hudson River, I think; General Fordibras used to visit the house. I was very young then, and I wonder that I remember it.”

“You left this house,” I put it to her, “and then you went to school. Was that in America or London?”

“It was first in New York, then in London, and to finish in Paris. I left school three years ago, and we have been all over the world since. General Fordibras never stops long in one place. He says he is too restless. I don’t know, Dr. Fabos. I have given up trying to think about it.”

“And hate me accordingly for my questions. I will make them as brief as possible. How long is it since you knew Mr. Imroth, and where did you first meet him?”

This reference plainly embarrassed her. I saw that she answered my question with reluctance.

“Please do not speak of Mr. Imroth. I am afraid of him, Dr. Fabos; I do believe that I am more afraid of him than of anybody I have ever known. If evil comes to me, Mr. Imroth will send it.”

“A natural antipathy. Some day, Joan, you will look upon all this and thank God that a stranger came to your island. I shall have done with Mr. Valentine Imroth then. There will be no need at all to fear him.”

She did not understand me, and plied me with many questions, some exceedingly shrewd, all directed to one end, that she might know the best or the worst of the life that they had been living and what part the General had played in it. To this I responded that I could by no means judge until the case both for and against him were wholly known to me.

“He may be but a dupe,” I said; “time and opportunity will tell me. You owe much to him, you say, for many kindnesses received during childhood. I shall not forget that when the day of reckoning comes. Joan, I shall forget no one who has been kind to you.”

Her gratitude was pretty enough to see, and I witnessed it many times during the long hours of those hazardous days. From morn to night she was my little companion of the gardens. I came to know her as a man rarely knows a woman who is not a wife to him. Every bush, every path, every tree and shrub of our kingdom we named and numbered. Grown confident in my protection, her sweet laughter became the music of the valley, her voice the notes of its song, her presence its divinity. If I had discerned the secret of her fearlessness, that must be a secret to me also, locked away as a treasure that a distant day will reveal. My own anxieties were too heavy that I dared to share them with her. The yacht, my friends, my servant, where were they? What happened beyond that monstrous curtain of the mountains, that precipice which hid the island world from us? Had they done nothing, then, those comrades in whose loyalty I trusted? Was it possible that even the faithful Okyada had deserted me? I did not believe it for an instant. My eyes told me that it was not true. A voice spoke to me every day. I read it as a man reads a book of fate—an image cast upon the waters, a sign given which shall not be mistaken.

He who pits his life against the intelligence of criminals, must be equipped with many natural weapons. Nothing, certainly, is more necessary than the habit of observation. To watch every straw the winds of conspiracy may blow, to read every cryptic message the hand of crime may write, to be ever alert, vigilant, resourceful, is something more than mere equipment. It is very salvation to the investigator. Trained in all these qualities by long years of patient study, there were signs and omens of the valley for me which another might have passed by without remark. Strange footprints upon the darkest paths, shrubs disturbed, scraps of paper thrown down with little caution—not one of them escaped me. But beyond them all, the rampart of the foaming water enchained my attention and fascinated me as at some human call to action.Day by day the volume of the water in the boiling river was growing less.I first remarked it on the third day of our imprisonment; I made sure of it on the fifth day. Inch by inch, from ledge to ledge, it sank in its channel. Another, perhaps, would have attributed this to some natural phenomenon. I had too much faith in the man who served me to believe any such thing. Okyada was at work, I said. The hour of my liberty was at hand.

You may imagine how this discovery affected me, and how much it was in my mind when I spoke to Joan of our approaching days of freedom. To my question, whether she would visit me again at my house in Suffolk, she replied chiefly by a flushing of her clear cheeks and a quick look from those eyes which could be so eloquent.

“Your sister did not like me,” she rejoined evasively; “the dear old thing, I could see her watching me just as though I had come to steal you from her.”

“Would you have felt very guilty if you had done so, Joan?”

“Yes,” she said, and this so seriously that I regretted the question; “guilty to my life’s end, Dr. Fabos.”

I knew that she referred to the story of her own life and the men among whom destiny had sent her. Here was a barrier of the past which must stand between us to all time, she would have said. The same thought had disquieted me often, not for my sake but for her own.

“I would to God, Joan,” said I, “there were no greater guilt in the world than this you speak of. You forbid me to say so. Shall I tell you why?”

She nodded her head, looking away to the patch of blue water revealed by the gorge of the mountains. I lay at her side and had all a man’s impulse to take her in my arms and tell her that which my heart had prompted me to say so many days. God knows, I had come to love this fragile, sweet-willed child of fortune beyond any other hope of my life or ambition of the years. Day by day, her eyes looked into my very soul, awakening there a spirit and a knowledge of whose existence I had been wholly ignorant. I loved her, and thus had fallen into the snare my enemies had set upon me. How little they understood me, I thought.

“You forbid me to say so, Joan,” I ran on, “because you do not trust me.”

“Do not trust you, Dr. Fabos?”

“Not sufficiently to say that I am about to save you from all dangers—even the danger of past years.”

“You cannot do that—oh, you cannot do it, Dr. Fabos.”

I covered her hand with my own, and tried to compel her to look me in the face.

“When a woman learns to love and is loved she has no past,” I said. “All that should concern her is the happiness of the man to whom she has given her life. In your own case, I believe that we shall read the story of bygone years together and find it a sweet story. I do not know, Joan; I am only guessing; but I think it will be a story of a woman’s love and a father’s suffering, and of an innocent man upon whom the gates of prison were long closed. Say that the child of these two, entitled to a fortune in her own right, became the prey of a villain, and we shall be far upon our way. That’s the thought of your prophet. He would give much, Joan, if the facts were as he believes them to be.”

Be sure she turned her head at this and looked me full in the face. I have never seen so many emotions expressed upon a childish face—joy, doubt, love, fear. Quick as all her race to read an enigma, she understood me almost as soon as I had spoken. A light of wondrous thankfulness shone in her eyes. There were long minutes together when we sat there in silence, and the only sound was that of her heart beating.

“Oh,” she cried, “if it were true, Dr. Fabos, if it were true!”

“I will prove it true before we have been in England a month.”

She laughed a little sadly.

“England—England. How far is England away? And my own dear America?”

“Seven days in my yacht,White Wings.”

“If we were birds to fly over the hills!”

“The hills will be kind to us. To-day, to-morrow, whenever it is, Joan, will you cross the hills with me?”

She promised me with a warmth that betrayed her desire. Fearing longer to dwell upon it, I left and went again to the little river to see what message it had for me. Did the waters still ebb away or had my fancy been an hallucination?

Standing this day upon the very brink of the chasm through which the river flowed, I knew I was not mistaken. The stream had subsided by another foot at the least; it no longer raced and tumbled through the gorge; it was scarcely more than warm to the hand. Someone without had diverted its course and would dam it altogether when the good hour came. When that hour might be I had no means of knowing. But my course was clear. I must rest neither night nor day while deliverance was at hand; there must be neither sleeping nor waking for me until Okyada called me and the gate stood open.

And what of Joan, what of my promise to her? Should I leave her the prisoner of the valley or take her over the hills as I had promised? The responsibility was greater than any I had ever faced. Let her go with me, and what a tale these villains would have to tell the world! Let her remain, and what cruelty, what persecution might she not suffer at the Valley House! I knew not what to do. It may be that Fortune wished well to me when she took the matter out of my hands and left me no alternative but to go alone. However it be, I shall relate in a word the simple fact that Okyada, my servant, entered my bedroom at ten o’clock that very night, and that, when I crossed the landing to wake Joan, she did not answer me, nor could my diligent search discover her to be in the house at all.

And the minutes of my opportunity were precious beyond all reckoning.

“Good God!” I cried, “that I must leave her to such men and to such a judgment!”

For I knew that it must be so, and that by flight alone, and the perils of flight, would our salvation be won.

CHAPTER XVIII.

DOWN TO THE SEA.

Dr. Fabos Leaves the Valley House.

There was not a sound within the house, nor did an open window upon the landing admit any signal of alarm from the gardens. I could but hazard that the little Jap had crossed the gully of the river and come by such a road into the valley. To question him would have been as absurd as to delay. Here he was, and there stood the open door. When he thrust a revolver into my hand and bade me follow him by the low verandah to the gardens below, I obeyed without further hesitation. The mystery of Joan’s disappearance asked for no clever solution. This night, I said, the Jew had meant to kill me. And for the first time, it may be, I realised the deadly peril I had lived through at the Valley House.

Okyada has never been a man of many words. I think he uttered but two that night as we crossed the valley garden and made for the river bank. “Shoot, master,” he said, meaning that if any barred the way, the time for passive flight had passed. I nodded my head in answer, and pressed closer upon his heels as he entered the maze of shrubs which defended the gully. The silence about us had become a burden to the nerves. Was it possible that none of the Jew’s men watched the garden? Indeed, for a moment, that appeared to be the truth.

We gained the bank of the whirlpool of yesterday, and for a few minutes lay flat in the shadow of the great border of the rock which rises up above the gully. Behind us we could espy the lighted windows of the bedroom I had just left and the clear shape of the silent châlet. The gardens and the woods were so many patches of black against an azure sky of night. The water below us flowed, in colour a deep indigo, between walls of lightless rock, in a bed of polished stone. Not a breath of wind stirred the pines upon the hill side. We could no longer see the ocean without or the friendly lights it showed to us. We might have been fugitives upon a desert island; and this deception would have continued possible until the sound of a distant rifle-shot awoke a thousand echoes in the hills and shattered in a single instant the dream of security we had found so pleasing.

Okyada sprang up at the sound and began to speak with an earnestness of which he was rarely guilty.

“They have found the honourable Captain—quick, master, we must go to him,” he said.

My answer was to point up to the sloping lawn of the garden we had left. There, in single file, the figures of seven men, crossing the grass boldly toward the châlet, were clearly to be discerned. I had scarcely observed them when a movement in the shrubbery immediately behind us betrayed the presence of others—three in all—who came out to the water’s edge at a place not ten yards from where we stood, and halting there a little while to inspect the gully, afterwards made off through the woods as though to join the others above.

“Old Val gets such notions into his woolly cranium,” said one of them as he went. “If there’s any lousy Englishman going across there to-night, I’m derned if he ain’t a flip-flop mermaid.”

A second ventured that the water was lower than he had ever seen it, while the third added the opinion that, low or high, it was hot enough to warm the grog of a Congo nigger, and a —— sight too hot for any police nark to try it.

We listened to them, crouching low on the rock and with our revolvers ready to our hands. Had the most trifling accident occurred, a falling pebble or a clumsy movement betrayed us, that, I am convinced, would have been the whole story of the night. But we lay as men long practised in the arts of silence, and not until the trees hid the men from our sight did Okyada stand up again and prepare to cross the gully.

“Go first, master,” he said. “Here is the rope. Our friends with the honourable Captain wait yonder above. Let us bring them the good news.”

Now, I saw that, as he spoke, he had caught up a rope which had been dexterously fixed to a boulder upon the opposite bank of the stream and allowed to trail in the water while he went to fetch me from the house. Fixing this as cleverly to the rock upon our side, he made a bridge by which any strong lad could have crossed, the pool being as low as it then was; and no sooner had he given me the signal than I swung myself out and almost immediately found a footing upon the further shore. His own passage, when first he crossed, must have been very perilous, I thought; and I could but imagine that he had thrown the rope over first and trusted to the grappling iron affixed to the end upon the garden side. This, however, was but a speculation. He crossed now as I had done, and together we cast the knot from the boulder and drew the rope in. If all our acts were cool and collected, I set the fact down to the knowledge that we were prisoners of the valley no longer, and that the hills were before us. What mattered the alarm now sounding through the gardens, the hoarse cry of voices, the blowing of whistles, the running to and fro of excited men? More ominous by far was a second rifle-shot, awakening crashing echoes in the mountains. This, I believed, one of my own yacht’s company had fired. Plainly our men had either stumbled upon an ambush or fallen into some snare set upon the road we must follow. The truth of the issue could not but be momentous to us all. Either we must find them prisoners or free men who stood in instant danger. There could be no moment of delay which was not hazardous, and we permitted none directly our foothold had been secured and the rope drawn in.

“Did you come alone, Okyada?” I asked my servant presently.

He dissented as he folded the coils of rope.

“The honourable Scotchman—he is waiting with the lantern, excellency.”

I smiled, but did not offend his sense of that which was due to so great a person as Balaam, the Scotch boatswain.

“Would it be far from here, Okyada?”

“That which your excellency could walk in a minute.”

I said no more, but followed him up the cliff side, scrambling and slipping like a boy upon a holiday jaunt, and no less eager for the heights. To the darkness of the night and the quickness of our movements, my faithful servant and I undoubtedly owed our lives. Remember that the valley now raised the cry of alarm from one end to the other. Whistles were blown, bells were rung, rifles fired wildly. That the bullets struck the rocks both above and below us, my ears told me unmistakably. Had we been an open mark moving in the clear light of day, the suspense of this flight, the doubt and the hazard of it had been easier to support. As it was, we went on blindly, our hands clasping the rough boulders, our feet scattering the pebbles of the path; and conscious through it all that a wild bullet might find a lucky billet and grass either or both of us as though we had been hares in a tricky covert. Never was a man more thankful than I when a vast fissure in the cliff side appeared before us suddenly as a sanctuary door opened by an unknown friend’s hand. By it we passed gladly, and were instantly lost to the view of those in the valley; while a profound silence of ultimate night enveloped us. There was no longer the need to pant and toil upon a crazy slope. Nature herself had here cut a path, and it appeared to lead into the very heart of the mountain.

Now, this path we followed, it may have been for some two hundred yards in a direction parallel to that of the valley we had quitted. Its gentle declivity brought us in the end to a low cavern of the rock, and here we found the boatswain, Balaam, sitting with his back to the cliff, smoking his pipe and guarding his ship’s lantern as calmly as though the scene had been Rotherhithe and the day a seaman’s Saturday. Hearing our approach, he bestirred himself sufficiently to fend the light and to ask a question.

“Would it be the Doctor and the wild man?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer he ran on, “I kenned your step, Doctor, and said you were doing finely. There’s firing on the hills, sir, and ye would be wise not to bide. I’m no gleg at the running myself, but yon manny can take the licht, and I’ll make shift for myself. Ay, Doctor, but if I had that bit of an ass the boys go daft upon⁠——”

I told him to show the way and not to talk, though I was glad enough to hear the good fellow’s voice. His name was Machie, but a donkey ride at Cowes christened him Balaam for good and all aboard theWhite Wings. Very methodically now, and with a seaman’s widening lurch, he set out to cross the cavern, Okyada and I upon his heels and all the mesh of subterranean wonder about us. Here, for a truth, a man might have feared to go at all, lantern or no lantern in his hand; for the cavern revealed the source of the boiling springs, and there was one great chamber of the rock so dreadful to breathe in, so white with steam and scalding spray, that my own courage would have recoiled from it but for the example set me by these brave fellows. They, however, held straight on without a word spoken, and coming to a clearer air presently they indicated to me that we were approaching some place of danger, and must now go with circumspection. Then I saw that the cavern roof narrowed rapidly until we stood in a passage so regularly moulded that the hand of man might have excavated it. And beyond this lay the Atlantic, plainly visible though the night was moonless. Never did a glimpse of the open water cheer my heart so bravely. Liberty, home, my friends! A man is a man upon the sea, though every port but one be shut against him. And the breath of life is in his lungs, and the desire of life at his heart. Nay, who shall deny it?

A sharp exclamation from the Scotchman, a sudden halt upon my servant’s part, quickly tempered these reflections upon liberty and brought me back to a sense of our situation and its dangers. That which they had seen, I now perceived to be nothing less than the figure of a man standing with his back to the rock as though guarding the entrance to the tunnel and there keeping watch, not only upon the path, but upon another figure which lay prone in the fair way and was, I had no doubt whatever, a figure of the dead. To come instantly to the conclusion that the dead was one of our own, and that he had been killed by one of the rifles whose report we had so recently heard, I found natural enough. Not only was it my thought, but that of the others with me, and together we halted in the cavern and asked what we should do. To be sure, we were not to be affrighted by a single sentry, though he carried a rifle in his hand; but the certainty that others would be within call, and that a single cry might bring them upon us, robbed us for a moment of any clear idea, and held us prisoners of the cave.

“’Twould have been the firing that I heard syne,” the boatswain whispered.

I turned to Okyada and asked him what we should do. His own uncertainty was reflected in his attitude. He stood as still as a figure of marble.

“The master wait,” he said presently. “I think that I shall know if the master wait. Let the lantern be covered. I shall see by the darkness.”

I told him that I forbade him to go, and that it was madness to suppose that the sentry would stand there alone. He did not hear me, disappearing immediately upon his words, and being lost to our view as completely as though the earth had opened and swallowed him up. I shall always say that a quicker, surer-footed, or more faithful fellow never lived to earn the gratitude of an unemotional master. My own confidence in him found its best expression in the complacency with which I waited for his news. He would kill the sentry if need be—of that I felt sure—and there was something horrible in the thought that a living man, whose figure we could see in the dim light beyond the cavern, stood upon the very brink of eternity and might have spoken his last word on earth. This reflection was my own. The stolid boatswain made nothing of it. He covered the lantern methodically and squatted back against the rock.

“Yon yellow laddie’s fine,” he whispered. “’Twould be as good as dead the man were. Has your honour such a thing as a bit of baccy upon ye? No; well, I’ll do well wanting it.”

I smiled, but did not answer him. In truth, I had begun to find the minutes of waiting intolerable. What with the oppressive atmosphere of the tunnel, the heated, steam-laden air, and upon this the ghostly fascination of the spectre at the cavern’s mouth, it came to me that my own strength might not carry me safely through the ordeal. What kept Okyada? The sentry, on his part, did not appear to have moved since I had first seen him. There was no sound in the cave save that of the hissing steam behind us. I could not discover the little figure of my servant, though I was looking from the darkness toward the light. Had he come to the conclusion that it was dangerous to go on? This seemed possible, and I had already taken a few steps towards the tunnel’s mouth when his figure suddenly emerged into the light, and standing side by side with the sentry, he uttered that soft, purring whistle which called to us to come on.

“Yon’s one of our own, then,” the boatswain said, starting to his feet clumsily.

“Then someone has gone under, and he is keeping watch over him,” I replied. “God send that it is not one of our crew.”

“Amen to that, sir, though ’twere in a Christian man to say that we maun all die when the day comes.”

“But not in this cursed island or at the hands of a rascally Jew. The day will be an unlucky one if it comes here, my man. Put your best foot foremost, and say that it shall not.”

My words were Greek to him, of course; and he answered me with a strange oath and an expression of opinion upon Portuguese and others which was quite valueless. My own curiosity now turned, however, to consider the odd fact that the sentry remained motionless, and that Okyada did not appear to have exchanged a single word with him. Who, then, was the man, and what kept him in that grotesque attitude? At a distance of fifty yards from the light I could not have told you, but at twenty yards I understood. The wretched man was as stone dead as his comrade who lay upon the path. A bullet from an unknown rifle had shot him through the heart as he stood in ambush waiting for me. So much I hazarded on the instant. The truth must be made known to me upon the yacht’s deck.

I name the yacht, and this is to tell you in a word that, coming out of the pit, we espied her, lying off the headland—a picture of life and light upon the still water. There below, upon the shore, stood the friends who had known so many anxieties, suffered upon my account such weary days of waiting, such long hours of strenuous labour since I had left them. And now I had but to scramble down the rugged cliff side and clasp their hands, and to tell them that all was well with me. But nine days away from them, I seemed to have lived a year apart, to have changed my very self, to be a new man coming into a living world of action from a grave of dreams.

And what voice more earthly could I have heard than that of the unsurpassable Timothy McShanus crying, “Me bhoy!” in tones that might have been heard upon the mountain top?

No, indeed, and Timothy was the first to greet me, and I do believe there were tears of gladness in his eyes.

CHAPTER XIX.

IN THE MEANTIME.

Dr. Fabos Hears the News.

We rowed to the yacht without an instant’s delay and made known the good news to the crew. Their cheers must certainly have been heard by half the population of Villa do Porto. Quite convinced that the Jap would fetch me out of the trap, Captain Larry had ordered a supper to be prepared in the cabin, and hardly were we aboard when the corks were popping and the hot meats served. It was touching to witness the good fellows’ delight, expressed in twenty ways as seamen will—this man by loud oaths, another by stupefied silence, a third by incoherent roaring, a fourth by the exclamatory desire that he might not find salvation. A man learns by misfortune by what measure of love his friends estimate him. In my case I learned it upon the deck of theWhite Wings, and have never forgotten the lesson.

Okyada, be sure, was the hero of the hour, and we had him down to the cabin immediately, and there pledged him in our saki that comes to us by way of Rheims. So much there was to tell upon both sides that neither side knew where to begin. Strangely elated myself, and suffering from the reaction of the nerves which sets a man walking upon air, I told them very briefly that I had been trapped to the hills, not by stratagem, but by force, and that if they had come an hour later, it would have been to a sepulchre. On their side, the strident voice of Timothy related twenty circumstances in a breath, and unfailingly began in the middle of his story and concluded with the beginning.

“We presented ourselves to the authorities as ye ordered us to do, and bad cess to them, they had no English at all to speak of. That was after me friend, Larry, had hunted the innkeeper round the town for to keep him humble in spirit. I went to the Consul’s man and says I, ‘’Tis an Englishman I am upon the high seas though of another nation ashore, and treat us civilly,’ says I, ‘or be damned if I don’t wipe the floor with ye.’ ’Twas a mellow-faced party, and not to be made much of. The gendarmes were no better. There was wan av them that had a likeness to the Apostle John, but divil a word of a sane man’s gospel could I get out of the fellow. The tale went that ye had gone to St. Michael’s, and ’twas by your own will that ye went. I made my compliments to the man who said it, and told him he was a liar. Ean, me bhoy, your friend Fordibras and his friend the Hebrew Jew have bought this island body and soul. The very cable shakes hands with them. We had to go to St. Michael’s to send a bit of a message at all.”

I interrupted him sharply.

“Did you send the cables, then, Timothy?”

“Would I be after not sending them? And me friend in his grave! They went the day before yesterday. ’Twill be like new wine to Dr. Ean, says I, dead or alive. So we sailed to St. Michael’s. Your fine fellow of a Jap, he was alone twenty hours in the hills. Man, he has the eyes, the ears, the feet of a serpent, and if he’s not a match for the Jew divil, may I never drink champagne again.”

I assented a little gravely. His news meant very much to me. You must know that, before I landed at Villa do Porto at all, I had entrusted to Timothy and to Captain Larry certain messages which were to be cabled to Europe in the gravest emergency only. These messages would tell Scotland Yard; they would make known to the Government and to the Admiralty, and even more important than these, to the great diamond houses, that which I knew of the Jew, Val Imroth, and of his doings upon the high seas. From this time forth the warships of three nations would be scouring the ocean for such witnesses to my story as only the ocean could betray. If, from one point of view, I welcomed the thought, a shadow already lay upon my satisfaction. For if Imroth were arrested, and with him the man known as General Fordibras, what, then, of Joan and her fortunes? These men, I believed, were capable of any infamy. They might well sacrifice the child to their desire for vengeance upon the man who had discovered them. They might even bring her to the bar of a Court of Justice, charged as an accomplice in these gigantic thefts they had committed so many years. To this end they had put my stolen jewels about her neck, and so baited their devilish trap from the earliest hours. I am convinced now that their ultimate object was murder—when it could be safely done, and when the whole of my story was known to them.

“You sent the cables two days ago, Timothy—and what then?” I asked him, not wishing to make too much of it before them. “Have you had any reply from Murray?”

Captain Larry intervened, pointing out that the cables had been sent from St. Michael’s.

“We had to get the ship back, sir,” he said. “I was determined not to leave this place without you if we waited here a twelvemonth. As for the authorities, it was, as Mr. McShanus says, all blubber and fingers, and the General’s money hot in their pockets. When we got back from St. Michael’s, the little Jap came down to the harbour with his story. You were up in the hills, he said, and there was a spring to be dammed to get you out. He had done what he could, rolling the rocks into the water with his own hands until he could hardly stand upright for fatigue, but we sent a boat’s crew up last night and another to-night, and they played bowls with the stones like the good men they are. I would have gone down with your servant, but he’d the conceit to go alone. It’s natural to such a man—no words, no fuss, just a coil of rope about his waist and a couple of revolvers in his hands. He took the Scotch boatswain because he says Scotchmen give nothing away—‘Honourable Englishmen too much tongue,’ he says. I left it with him, because I believe he spoke the straight truth. When he had gone up we posted a couple of men on the shore here, and Mr. McShanus and I took our stand at the cliff’s head. We hadn’t been there more than half an hour when the first of the rifle-shots was fired. We saw a number of men on the hill-side, and they had fired a rifle for a signal, as we supposed, to others on the shore below. By-and-by we heard another rifle-shot, but saw no one. A little while after that you came down.”

I told them that there were two men stone dead at the entrance to the tunnel, and this astonished them greatly. We could only surmise that the Jew’s sentinels had quarrelled amongst themselves, and that the second of the shots had been fired by a wounded man as his comrade emerged from the tunnel. Be it as it might, the hazardous nature of my escape became plainer every moment. It needed but Larry’s intimation that a steamer had left the island two hours ago to tell me that my life had been saved almost as by a miracle.

“They have heard from Europe that the game is up, and are running to another haven,” I said. “There was no longer anything to be got from me, so out came their pistols. If they touch at any port north of Tangier, the police will lay hands upon them. That is not likely. My own opinion is that they are running for the great ship which we saw drifting out there in mid-Atlantic. If it is correct, the game becomes exciting. We can leave no message which can be safely delivered. Should the Government send a cruiser, the officer of it will hardly set out for a blind-man’s bluff. If we had coal enough ourselves⁠——”

Captain Larry interrupted me with scarce an apology.

“That was one of my reasons for going to St. Michael’s, doctor. Mr. McShanus will tell you that we were lucky. We filled our bunkers—at a stiff price, but still we filled them. The yacht is ready to put to sea this instant if you so desire it.”

His news both amazed and troubled me. I will not deny that I had been much tempted to stand by the island until I had definite news of Joan Fordibras and her safety. And now the clear call came to embark without an instant’s delay upon a quest which I owed both to myself and to humanity. Undoubtedly I believed that the Jew had taken refuge upon the Diamond Ship. Behind that belief there stood the black fear that he might have carried the child with him to be a hostage for himself and his fellow rogues, and to stand between my justice and his punishment. This I knew to be possible. And if it were so, God help her amid that crew of cut-throats and rogues, hidden from justice upon the unfrequented waters of the Southern Ocean.

But it might not be so, and pursuit of them might leave her to perils as great, and insult as sure, in one or other of those criminal dens the rogues had built for themselves in the cities of Europe. Surely was it a memorable hour and manifest of destiny when it found the yacht ready to put to sea without delay.

“Captain,” said I, “do the men understand that this is a voyage from which none of us may return?”

“They so understand it, Dr. Fabos.”

“And do they consent willingly?”

“Turn back, and you are upon the brink of a mutiny.”

“Then let us go in God’s name,” said I; “now, this very hour, let us do that duty to which we are called.”

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