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                       BOOKS BY A. E. W. MASON

                Published By CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

                          *   *   *   *   *

THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE WORLD.    _net_ $1.50
THE BROKEN ROAD.                  _net_ $1.35
AT THE VILLA ROSE. Illustrated.   _net_ $1.35
THE TURNSTILE.                    _net_ $1.35
THE WITNESS FOR THE DEFENCE.      _net_ $1.35

                           THE FOUR CORNERS

                             OF THE WORLD

                           THE FOUR CORNERS

                             OF THE WORLD

                                  BY

                            A. E. W. MASON

                        CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS
                        NEW YORK :: :: :: 1917

                         Copyright, 1917, by
                       CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

                              *   *   *

                       Published October, 1917

            Copyright, 1909, by THE CURTIS PUBLISHING CO.
         Copyright, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1917, By A. E. W. MASON
    Copyright, 1914, 1915, 1917, By THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE CO.

                               CONTENTS

The Clock.

Green Paint.

North of the Tropic of Capricorn.

One of Them.

Raymond Byatt.

The Crystal Trench.

The House of Terror.

The Brown Book.

The Refuge.

Peiffer.

The Ebony Box.

The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel.

Under Bignor Hill.

                              THE CLOCK

                              THE CLOCK

Mr. Twiss was a great walker, and it was his habit, after his day's
work was done, to walk from his pleasant office in the Adelphi to his
home at Hampstead. On an afternoon he was detained to a later hour
than usual by one of his clients, a Captain Brayton, over some matter
of a mortgage. Mr. Twiss looked at his office clock.

"You are going west, I suppose?" he said. "I wonder if you would walk
with me as far as Piccadilly? It will not be very much out of your
way, and I have a reason for wishing your company."

"By all means," replied Captain Brayton, and the two men set forth.

Mr. Twiss, however, seemed in a difficulty as to how he should broach
his subject, and for a while the pair walked in silence. They, indeed,
reached Pall Mall, and were walking down that broad thoroughfare,
before a word of any importance was uttered. And even then it was
chance which furnished the occasion. A young man of Captain Brayton's
age came down from the steps of a club and walked towards them. As he
passed beneath a street lamp, Mr. Twiss noticed his face, and ever so
slightly started with surprise. At almost the same moment, the young
man swerved across the road at a run, as though suddenly he remembered
a very pressing appointment. The two men walked on again for a few
paces, and then Captain Brayton observed: "There is a screw loose
there, I am afraid."

Mr. Twiss shook his head.

"I am sorry to hear you say so," he replied. "It was, indeed, about
Archie Cranfield that I was anxious to speak to you. I promised his
father that I would be something more than Archie's mere man of
affairs, if I were allowed, and I confess that I am troubled by him.
You know him well?"

Captain Brayton nodded his head.

"Perhaps I should say that I did know him well," he returned. "We were
at the same school, we passed through Chatham together, but since he
has relinquished actual service we have seen very little of one
another." Here he hesitated, but eventually made up his mind to
continue in a guarded fashion. "Also, I am bound to admit that there
has been cause for disagreement. We quarrelled."

Mr. Twiss was disappointed. "Then you can tell me nothing of him
recently?" he asked, and Captain Brayton shrugged his shoulders.

"Nothing but what all the little world of his acquaintances already
knows. He has grown solitary, forbidding in his manner, and, what is
most noticeable, sly--extraordinarily sly. While he is speaking with
you, he will smile at some secret thought of his; the affairs of the
world have lost their interest for him; he hardly listens and seldom
speaks. He is concerned with some private matter, and he hides it
cunningly. That is the character, at all events, which his friends
give of him."

They had now reached the corner of St. James's Street, and as they
turned up the hill, Mr. Twiss took up the tale.

"I am not surprised at what you tell me. It is a great pity, for we
both remember him ambitious and a good soldier. I am inclined to blame
the house in the country for the change in him."

Captain Brayton, however, did not agree.

"It goes deeper than that," he said. "Men who live alone in the
country may show furtive ways in towns, no doubt. But why does he live
alone in the country? No, that will not do"; and at the top of St.
James's Street the two men parted.

Mr. Twiss walked up Bond Street, and the memory of that house in the
country in which Archie Cranfield chose to bury himself kept him
company. Mr. Twiss had travelled down into the eastern counties to see
it for himself one Saturday afternoon when Cranfield was away from
home, and a walk of six miles from the station had taken him to its
door. It stood upon the borders of Essex and Suffolk, a small
Elizabethan house backed upon the Stour, a place of black beams and
low ceilings and great fireplaces. It had been buttressed behind,
where the ground ran down to the river-bank, and hardly a window was
on a level with its neighbour. A picturesque place enough, but Mr.
Twiss was a lover of towns and of paved footways and illuminated
streets. He imagined it on such an evening as this, dark, and the rain
dripping cheerlessly from the trees. He imagined its inmate crouching
over the fire with his sly smile upon his face, and of a sudden the
picture took on a sinister look, and a strong sense of discomfort made
Mr. Twiss cast an uneasy glance behind him. He had in his pocket a
letter of instructions from Archie Cranfield, bidding him buy the
house outright with its furniture, since it had now all come into the
market.

It was a week after this when next Captain Brayton came to Mr. Twiss's
office, and, their business done, he spoke of his own accord of Archie
Cranfield.

"I am going to stay with him," he said. "He wrote to me on the night
of the day when we passed him in Pall Mall. He told me that he would
make up a small bachelor party. I am very glad, for, to tell the
truth, our quarrel was a sufficiently serious one, and here, it seems,
is the end to it."

Mr. Twiss was delighted, and shook his client warmly by the hand.

"You shall bring me news of Archie Cranfield," he said--"better news
than I have," he added, with a sudden gravity upon his face. For in
making the arrangements for the purchase of the house, he had come
into contact with various neighbours of Archie Cranfield, and from all
of them he had had but one report. Cranfield had a bad name in those
parts. There were no particular facts given to account for his
reputation. It was all elusive and vague, an impression conveyed by
Archie Cranfield himself, by something strange and sly in his
demeanour. He would sit chuckling in a sort of triumph, to which no
one had the clue, or, on the other hand, he fell into deep silences
like a man with a trouble on his mind.

"Be sure you come to see me when you return," said Mr. Twiss, and
Captain Brayton replied heartily: "Surely I will." But he never did.
For in a few days the newspapers were busy with the strange enigma of
his death.

                                  II

The first hint of this enigma was conveyed to Mr. Twiss late one night
at his private address. It came in the shape of a telegram from Archie
Cranfield, which seemed to the agitated solicitor rather a cry of
distress than a message sent across the wires.

"Come at once. I am in terrible need.--Cranfield."

There were no trains at so late an hour by which Mr. Twiss could reach
his client; he must needs wait until the morning. He travelled,
however, by the first train from Liverpool Street. Although the
newspapers were set out upon the bookstall, not one of them contained
a word of anything amiss at Archie Cranfield's house, and Mr. Twiss
began to breathe more freely. It was too early for a cab to be in
waiting at the station, and Mr. Twiss set out to walk the six miles.
It was a fine, clear morning of November; but for the want of leaves
and birds, and the dull look of the countryside, Mr. Twiss might have
believed the season to be June. His spirits rose as he walked, his
blood warmed to a comfortable glow, and by the time he came to the
gates of the house, Cranfield's summons had become a trifling thing.
As he walked up to the door, however, his mood changed, for every
blind in the house was drawn. The door was opened before he could
touch the bell, and it was opened by Cranfield himself. His face was
pale and disordered, his manner that of a man at his wits' end.

"What has happened?" asked Mr. Twiss as he entered the hall.

"A terrible thing!" replied Cranfield. "It's Brayton. Have you
breakfasted? I suppose not. Come, and I will tell you while you eat."

He walked up and down the room while Mr. Twiss ate his breakfast, and
gradually, by question and by answer, the story took shape.
Corroboration was easy and was secured. There was no real dispute
about the facts; they were simple and clear.

There were two other visitors in the house besides Captain Brayton,
one a barrister named Henry Chalmers, and the second, William
Linfield, a man about town as the phrase goes. Both men stood in much
the same relationship to Archie Cranfield as Captain Brayton did--that
is to say, they were old friends who had seen little of their host of
late, and were somewhat surprised to receive his invitation after so
long an interval. They had accepted it in the same spirit as Brayton,
and the three men arrived together on Wednesday evening. On Thursday
the party of four shot over some turnip fields and a few clumps of
wood which belonged to the house, and played a game of bridge in the
evening. In the opinion of all, Brayton was never in better spirits.
On Friday the four men shot again and returned to the house as
darkness was coming on. They took tea in the smoking-room, and after
tea Brayton declared his intention to write some letters before
dinner. He went upstairs to his room for that purpose.

The other three men remained in the smoking-room. Of that there was no
doubt. Both Chalmers and Linfield were emphatic upon the point.
Chalmers, in particular, said:

"We sat talking on a well-worn theme, I in a chair on one side of the
fireplace, Archie Cranfield in another opposite to me, and Linfield
sitting on the edge of the billiard-table between us. How the subject
cropped up I cannot remember, but I found myself arguing that most men
hid their real selves all their lives even from their most intimate
friends, that there were secret chambers in a man's consciousness
wherein he lived a different life from that which the world saw and
knew, and that it was only by some rare mistake the portals of that
chamber were ever passed by any other man. Linfield would not hear of
it. If this hidden man were the real man, he held, in some way or
another the reality would triumph, and some vague suspicion of the
truth would in the end be felt by all his intimates. I upheld my view
by instances from the courts of law, Linfield his by the aid of a
generous imagination, while Cranfield looked from one to the other of
us with his sly, mocking smile. I turned to him, indeed, in some heat.

"'Well, since you appear to know, Cranfield, tell me which of us is
right,' and his pipe fell from his fingers and broke upon the hearth.
He stood up, with his face grown white and his lips drawn back from
his teeth in a kind of snarl.

"'What do you mean by that?' he asked; and before I could answer, the
door was thrown violently open, and Cranfield's man-servant burst into
the room. He mastered himself enough to say:

"'May I speak to you, sir?'

"Cranfield went outside the door with him. He could not have moved six
paces from the door, for though he closed it behind him, we heard the
sound of his voice and of his servant's speaking in low tones.
Moreover, there was no appreciable moment of time between the
cessation of the voices and Cranfield's reappearance in the room. He
came back to the fireplace and said very quietly:

"'I have something terrible to tell you. Brayton has shot himself.'

"He then glanced from Linfield's face to mine, and sat down in a chair
heavily. Then he crouched over the fire shivering. Both Linfield and
myself were too shocked by the news to say a word for a moment or two.
Then Linfield asked:

"'But is he dead?'

"'Humphreys says so,' Cranfield returned. 'I have telephoned to the
police and to the doctor.'

"'But we had better go upstairs ourselves and see,' said I. And we
did."

Thus Chalmers. Humphreys, the man-servant, gave the following account:

"The bell rang from Captain Brayton's room at half-past five. I
answered it at once myself, and Captain Brayton asked me at what hour
the post left. I replied that we sent the letters from the house to
the post-office in the village at six. He then asked me to return at
that hour and fetch those of his which would be ready. I returned
precisely at six, and I saw Captain Brayton lying in a heap upon the
rug in front of the fire. He was dead, and he held a revolver tightly
clenched in his hand. As I stepped over him, I smelt that something
was burning. He had shot himself through the heart, and his clothes
were singed, as if he had held the revolver close to his side."

These stories were repeated at the inquest, and at this particular
point in Humphreys' evidence the coroner asked a question:

"Did you recognise the revolver?"

"Not until Captain Brayton's hand was unclenched."

"But then you did?"

"Yes," said Humphreys.

The coroner pointed to the table on which a revolver lay.

"Is that the weapon?"

Humphreys took it up and looked at the handle, on which two initials
were engraved--"A. C."

"Yes," said the man. "I recognised it as Mr. Cranfield's. He kept it
in a drawer by his bedside."

No revolver was found amongst Captain Brayton's possessions.

It became clear that, while the three men were talking in the
billiard-room, Captain Brayton had gone to Cranfield's room, taken his
revolver, and killed himself with it. No evidence, however, was
produced which supplied a reason for Brayton's suicide. His affairs
were in good order, his means sufficient, his prospects of advancement
in his career sound. Nor was there a suggestion of any private
unhappiness. The tragedy, therefore, was entered in that list of
mysteries which are held insoluble.

"I might," said Chalmers, "perhaps resume the argument which Humphreys
interrupted in the billiard-room, with a better instance than any
which I induced--the instance of Captain Brayton."

"You won't go?" Archie Cranfield pleaded with Mr. Twiss. "Linfield and
Chalmers leave to-day. If you go too, I shall be entirely alone."

"But why should you stay?" the lawyer returned.

"Surely you hardly propose to remain through the winter in this
house?"

"No, but I must stay on for a few days; I have to make arrangements
before I can go," said Cranfield; and seeing that he was in earnest in
his intention to go, Mr. Twiss was persuaded. He stayed on, and
recognised, in consequence, that the death of Captain Brayton had
amongst its consequences one which he had not expected. The feeling in
the neighbourhood changed towards Archie Cranfield. It cannot be said
that he became popular--he wore too sad and joyless an air--but
sympathy was shown to him in many acts of courtesy and in a greater
charity of language.

A retired admiral, of a strong political complexion, who had been one
of the foremost to dislike Archie Cranfield, called, indeed, to offer
his condolences. Archie Cranfield did not see him, but Mr. Twiss
walked down the drive with him to the gate.

"It's hard on Cranfield," said the admiral. "We all admit it. It
wasn't fair of Brayton to take his host's revolver. But for the
accident that Cranfield was in the billiard-room with Linfield and
Chalmers, the affair might have taken on quite an ugly look. We all
feel that in the neighbourhood, and we shall make it up to Cranfield.
Just tell him that, Mr. Twiss, if you will."

"It is very kind of you all, I am sure," replied Mr. Twiss, "but I
think Cranfield will not continue to live here. The death of Captain
Brayton has been too much of a shock for him."

Mr. Twiss said "Good-bye" to the admiral at the gate, and returned to
the house. He was not easy in his mind, and as he walked round the
lawn under the great trees, he cried to himself:

"It is lucky, indeed, that Archie Cranfield was in the billiard-room
with Linfield and Chalmers; otherwise, Heaven knows what I might have
been brought to believe myself."

The two men had quarrelled; Brayton himself had imparted that piece of
knowledge to Mr. Twiss. Then there was the queer change in Archie
Cranfield's character, which had made for him enemies of strangers,
and strangers of his friends--the slyness, the love of solitude, the
indifference to the world, the furtive smile as of a man conscious of
secret powers, the whole indescribable uncanniness of him. Mr. Twiss
marshalled his impressions and stopped in the avenue.

"I should have had no just grounds for any suspicion," he concluded,
"but I cannot say that I should not have suspected," and slowly he
went on to the door.

He walked through the house into the billiard-room, and so became the
witness of an incident which caused him an extraordinary disquiet. The
room was empty. Mr. Twiss lit his pipe and took down a book from one,
of the shelves. A bright fire glowed upon the hearth, and drawing up a
chair to the fender, he settled down to read. But the day was dull,
and the fireplace stood at the dark end of the room. Mr. Twiss carried
his book over to the window, which was a bay window with a broad seat.
Now, the curtains were hung at the embrasure of the window, so that,
when they were drawn, they shut the bay off altogether from the room,
and when they were open, as now, they still concealed the corners of
the window-seats. It was in one of these corners that Mr. Twiss took
his seat, and there he read quietly for the space of five minutes.

At the end of that time he heard the latch of the door click, and
looking out from his position behind the curtain, he saw the door
slowly open. Archie Cranfield came through the doorway into the room,
and shut the door behind him. Then he stood for a while by the door,
very still, but breathing heavily. Mr. Twiss was on the point of
coming forward and announcing his presence, but there was something so
strange and secret in Cranfield's behaviour that, in spite of certain
twinges of conscience, he remained hidden in his seat. He did more
than remain hidden. He made a chink between the curtain and the wall,
and watched. He saw Cranfield move swiftly over to the fireplace,
seize a little old-fashioned clock in a case of satinwood which stood
upon the mantelshelf, raise it in the air, and dash it with an
ungovernable fury on to the stone hearth. Having done this
unaccountable thing, Cranfield dropped into the chair which Mr. Twiss
had drawn up. He covered his face with his hands and suddenly began to
sob and wail in the most dreadful fashion, rocking his body from side
to side in a very paroxysm of grief. Mr. Twiss was at his wits' end to
know what to do. He felt that to catch a man sobbing would be to earn
his undying resentment. Yet the sound was so horrible, and produced in
him so sharp a discomfort and distress, that, on the other hand, he
could hardly keep still. The paroxysm passed, however, almost as
quickly as it had come, and Cranfield, springing to his feet, rang the
bell. Humphreys answered it.

"I have knocked the clock off the mantelshelf with my elbow,
Humphreys," he said. "I am afraid that it is broken, and the glass
might cut somebody's hand. Would you mind clearing the pieces away?"

He went out of the room, and Humphreys went off for a dustpan. Mr.
Twiss was able to escape from the billiard-room unnoticed. But it was
a long time before he recovered from the uneasiness which the incident
aroused in him.

Four days later the two men left the house together. The servants had
been paid off. Humphreys had gone with the luggage to London by an
earlier train. Mr. Twiss and Archie Cranfield were the last to go.
Cranfield turned the key in the lock of the front door as they stood
upon the steps.

"I shall never see the inside of that house again," he said with a
gusty violence.

"Will you allow me to get rid of it for you?" asked Mr. Twiss; and for
a moment Cranfield looked at him with knotted brows, blowing the while
into the wards of the key.

"No," he said at length, and, running down to the stream at the back
of the house, he tossed the key into the water. "No," he repeated
sharply; "let the house rot empty as it stands. The rats shall have
their will of it, and the sooner the better."

He walked quickly to the gate, with Mr. Twiss at his heels, and as
they covered the six miles to the railway station, very little was
said between them.

                                  IV

Time ran on, and Mr. Twiss was a busy man. The old house by the Stour
began to vanish from his memory amongst the mists and the veils of
rain which so often enshrouded it. Even the enigma of Captain
Brayton's death was ceasing to perplex him, when the whole affair was
revived in the most startling fashion. A labourer, making a short cut
to his work one summer morning, passed through the grounds of
Cranfield's closed and shuttered house. His way led him round the back
of the building, and as he came to that corner where the great brick
buttresses kept the house from slipping down into the river, he saw
below him, at the edge of the water, a man sleeping. The man's back
was turned towards him; he was lying half upon his side, half upon his
face. The labourer, wondering who it was, went down to the river-bank,
and the first thing he noticed was a revolver lying upon the grass,
its black barrel and handle shining in the morning sunlight. The
labourer turned the sleeper over on his back. There was some blood
upon the left breast of his waistcoat. The sleeper was dead, and from
the rigidity of the body had been dead for some hours. The labourer
ran back to the village with the astounding news that he had found Mr.
Cranfield shot through the heart at the back of his own empty house.
People at first jumped naturally to the belief that murder had been
done. The more judicious, however, shook their heads. Not a door nor a
window was open in the house. When the locks were forced, it was seen
that the dust lay deep on floor and chair and table, and nowhere was
there any mark of a hand or a foot. Outside the house, too, in the
long neglected grass, there were but two sets of footsteps visible,
one set leading round the house--the marks made by the labourer on his
way to his work--the other set leading directly to the spot where
Archie Cranfield's body was found lying. Rumours, each contradicting
the other, flew from cottage to cottage, and the men gathered about
the police-station and in the street waiting for the next. In an hour
or two, however, the mystery was at an end. It leaked out that upon
Archie Cranfield's body a paper had been discovered, signed in his
hand and by his name, with these words:

"I have shot myself with the same revolver with which I murdered
Captain Brayton."

The statement created some stir when it was read out in the
billiard-room, where the coroner held his inquest. But the coroner who
presided now was the man who had held the court when Captain Brayton
had been shot. He was quite clear in his recollection of that case.

"Mr. Cranfield's alibi on that occasion," he said, "was
incontrovertible. Mr. Cranfield was with two friends in this very room
when Captain Brayton shot himself in his bedroom. There can be no
doubt of that." And under his direction the jury returned a verdict of
"Suicide while of unsound mind."

Mr. Twiss attended the inquest and the funeral. But though he welcomed
the verdict, at the bottom of his mind he was uneasy. He remembered
vividly that extraordinary moment when he had seen Cranfield creep
into the billiard-room, lift the little clock in its case of satinwood
high above his head, and dash it down upon the hearth in a wild gust
of fury. He recollected how the fury had given way to despair--if it
were despair and not remorse. He saw again Archie Cranfield dropping
into the chair, holding his head and rocking his body in a paroxysm of
sobs. The sound of his wailing rang horribly once more in the ears of
Mr. Twiss. He was not satisfied.

"What should take Cranfield back to that deserted house, there to end
his life, if not remorse," he asked himself--"remorse for some evil
done there"?

Over that question for some days he shook his head, finding it waiting
for him at his fireside and lurking for him at the corner of the
roads, as he took his daily walk between Hampstead and his office. It
began to poison his life, a life of sane and customary ways, with
eerie suggestions. There was an oppression upon his heart of which he
could not rid it. On the outskirts of his pleasant world dim horrors
loomed; he seemed to walk upon a frail crust, fearful of what lay
beneath. The sly smile, the furtive triumph, the apparent
consciousness of secret power--did they point to some corruption of
the soul in Cranfield, of which none knew but he himself?

"At all events, he paid for it," Mr. Twiss would insist, and from that
reflection drew, after all, but little comfort. The riddle began even
to invade his business hours, and take a seat within his private
office, silently clamouring for his attention. So that it was with a
veritable relief that he heard one morning from his clerk that a man
called Humphreys wished particularly to see him.

"Show him in," cried Mr. Twiss, and for his own ear he added: "Now I
shall know."

Humphreys entered the room with a letter in his hand. He laid the
letter on the office table. Mr. Twiss saw at a glance that it was
addressed in Archie Cranfield's hand. He flung himself upon it and
snatched it up. It was sealed by Cranfield's seal. It was addressed to
himself, with a note upon the left-hand corner of the envelope:

"To be delivered after my death."

Mr. Twiss turned sternly to the man.

"Why did you not bring it before?"

"Mr. Cranfield told me to wait a month," Humphreys replied.

Mr. Twiss took a turn across the room with the letter in his hand.

"Then you knew," he cried, "that your master meant to kill himself?
You knew, and remained silent?"

"No, sir, I did not know," Humphreys replied firmly. "Mr. Cranfield
gave me the letter, saying that he had a long railway journey in front
of him. He was smiling when he gave it me. I can remember the words
with which he gave it: 'They offer you an insurance ticket at the
booking-office, when they sell you your travelling ticket, so there is
always, I suppose, a little risk. And it is of the utmost importance
to me that, in the event of my death, this should reach Mr. Twiss.' He
spoke so lightly that I could not have guessed what was on his mind,
nor, do I think, sir, could you."

Mr. Twiss dismissed the man and summoned his clerk. "I shall not be in
to anyone this afternoon," he said. He broke the seal and drew some
closely written sheets of note-paper from the envelope. He spread the
sheets in front of him with a trembling hand.

"Heaven knows in what spirit and with what knowledge I shall rise from
my reading," he thought; and looking out of his pleasant window upon
the barges swinging down the river on the tide, he was in half a mind
to fling the sheets of paper into the fire. "But I shall be plagued
with that question all my life," he added, and he bent his head over
his desk and read.

                                  V

"My dear Friend,--I am writing down for you the facts. I am not
offering any explanation, for I have none to give. You will probably
rise up, after reading this letter, quite incredulous, and with the
conviction in your mind that you have been reading the extravagancies
of a madman. And I wish with all my heart that you could be right. But
you are not. I have come to the end to-day. I am writing the last
words I ever shall write, and therefore I am not likely to write a
lie.

"You will remember the little manor-house on the borders of Essex, for
you were always opposed to my purchase of it. You were like the
British jury, my friend. Your conclusion was sound, but your reason
for it very far from the mark. You disliked it for its isolation and
the melancholy of its dripping trees, and I know not what other
town-bred reasonings. I will give you a more solid cause. Picture to
yourself the billiard-room and how it was furnished when I first took
the house--the raised settee against the wall, the deep leather chairs
by the fire, the high fender, and on the mantelshelf--what?--a little
old-fashioned clock in a case of satinwood. You probably never noticed
it. I did from the first evenings which I passed in the house. For I
spent those evenings alone, smoking my pipe by the fire. It had a
queer trick. For a while it would tick almost imperceptibly, and then,
without reason, quite suddenly, the noise would become loud and
hollow, as though the pendulum in its swing struck against the wooden
case. To anyone sitting alone for hours in the room, as I did, this
tick had the queerest effect. The clock almost became endowed with
human qualities. At one time it seemed to wish to attract one's
attention, at another time to avoid it. For more than once, disturbed
by the louder knocking, I rose and moved the clock. At once the
knocking would cease, to begin again when I had settled afresh to my
book, in a kind of tentative, secret way, as though it would accustom
my ears to the sound, and so pass unnoticed. And often it did so pass,
until one knock louder and more insistent than the rest would drag me
in annoyance on to my feet once more. In a week, however, I got used
to it, and then followed the strange incident which set in motion that
chain of events of which tomorrow will see the end.

"It happened that a couple of my neighbours were calling on me. One of
them you have met--Admiral Palkin, a prolix old gentleman, with a
habit of saying nothing at remarkable length. The other was a Mr.
Stiles, a country gentleman who had a thought of putting up for
that division of the county. I led these two gentlemen into the
billiard-room, and composed myself to listen while the admiral
monologued. But the clock seemed to me to tick louder than ever,
until, with one sharp and almost metallic thump, the sound ceased
altogether. At exactly the same moment. Admiral Palkin stopped dead in
the middle of a sentence. It was nothing of any consequence that he
was saying, but I remember the words at which he stopped. 'I have
often----' he said, and then he broke off, not with any abrupt start,
or for any lack of words, but just as if he had completed all that he
had meant to say. I looked at him across the fireplace, but his face
wore its usual expression of complacent calm. He was in no way put
out. Nor did it seem that any new train of thought had flashed into
his mind and diverted it. I turned my eyes from him to Mr. Stiles. Mr.
Stiles seemed actually to be unaware that the admiral had stopped
talking at all. Admiral Palkin, you will remember, was a person of
consequence in the district, and Mr. Stiles, who would subsequently
need his vote and influence and motorcar, had thought fit to assume an
air of great deference. From the beginning he had leaned towards the
admiral, his elbow upon his knee, his chin propped upon his hand, and
his head now and again nodding a thoughtful assent to the admiral's
nothings. In this attitude he still remained, not surprised, not even
patiently waiting for the renewal of wisdom, but simply attentive.

"Nor did I move, for I was amused. The two men looked just like a
couple of wax figures in Madame Tussaud's, fixed in a stiff attitude
and condemned so to remain until the building should take fire and the
wax run. I sat watching them for minutes, and still neither moved nor
spoke. I never saw in my life a couple of people so entirely
ridiculous. I tried hard to keep my countenance--for to laugh at these
great little men in my own house would not only be bad manners, but
would certainly do for me in the neighbourhood--but I could not help
it. I began to smile, and the smile became a laugh. Yet not a muscle
on the faces of my visitors changed. Not a frown overshadowed the
admiral's complacency; not a glance diverted the admiring eyes of Mr.
Stiles. And then the clock began to tick again, and, to my infinite
astonishment, at the very same moment the admiral continued.

"'--said to myself in my lighter moments---- And pray, sir, at what
are you laughing?'

"Mr. Stiles turned with an angry glance towards me. Admiral Palkin had
resumed his conversation, apparently unaware that there had been any
interval at all. My laughter, on the other hand, had extended beyond
the interval, had played an accompaniment to the words just spoken. I
made my excuses as well as I could, but I recognised that they were
deemed insufficient. The two gentlemen left my house with the coldest
farewells you can imagine.

"The same extraordinary incident was repeated with other visitors, but
I was on my guard against any injudicious merriment. Moreover, I had
no longer any desire to laugh. I was too perplexed. My visitors never
seemed to notice that there had been a lengthy interval or indeed any
interval at all, while I, for my part, hesitated to ask them what had
so completely hypnotised them.

"The next development took place when I was alone in the room. It was
five o'clock in the afternoon. I had been out shooting a covert close
to the house, and a few minutes after I had rung the bell, I
remembered that I had forgotten some instructions which I had meant to
give to the keeper. So I got up at once, thinking to catch him in the
gun-room before he went home. As I rose from my chair, the clock,
which had been ticking loudly--though, as I have said, it was rather a
hollow, booming sound, as though the pendulum struck the wood of the
case, than a mere ticking of the clock-work--ceased its noise with the
abruptness to which I was growing used. I went out of the room into
the hall, and I saw Humphreys with the tea-tray in his hands in the
hall. He was turned towards the billiard-room door, but to my
astonishment he was not moving. He was poised with one foot in the
air, as though he had been struck, as the saying is, with a step half
taken. You have seen, no doubt, instantaneous photographs of people in
the act of walking. Well, Humphreys was exactly like one of those
photographs. He had just the same stiff, ungainly look. I should have
spoken to him, but I was anxious to catch my keeper before he went
away. So I took no notice of him. I crossed the hall quickly and went
out by the front door, leaving it open. The gun-room was really a
small building of corrugated iron, standing apart at the back of the
house. I went to it and tried the door. It was locked. I called aloud:
'Martin! Martin!'

"But I received no answer. I ran round the house again, thinking that
he might just have started home, but I saw no signs of him. There were
some outhouses which it was his business to look after, and I visited
them, opening the door of each of them and calling him by name. Then I
went down the drive to the gate, thinking that I might perhaps catch a
glimpse of him upon the road, but again I was disappointed. I then
returned to the house, shut the front door, and there in the hall
still stood Humphreys in his ridiculous attitude with the tea-tray in
his hands. I passed him and went back into the billiard-room. He took
no notice of me whatever. I looked at the clock upon the mantelshelf,
and I saw that I had been away just fourteen minutes. For fourteen
minutes Humphreys had been standing on one leg in the hall. It seemed
as incredible as it was ludicrous. Yet there was the clock to bear me
out. I sat down on my chair with my hands trembling, my mind in a
maze. The strangest thought had come to me, and while I revolved it in
my mind, the clock resumed its ticking, the door opened, and Humphreys
appeared with the tea-tray in his hand.

"'You have been a long time, Humphreys,' I said, and the man looked at
me quickly. My voice was shaking with excitement, my face, no doubt,
had a disordered look.

"'I prepared the tea at once, sir,' he answered.

"'It is twenty minutes by the clock since I rang the bell,' I said.

"Humphreys placed the tea on a small table at my side and then looked
at the clock. An expression of surprise came over his face. He
compared it with the dial of his own watch.

"'The clock wants regulating, sir,' he said. 'I set it by the kitchen
clock this morning, and it has gained fourteen minutes.'

"I whipped my own watch out of my pocket and stared at it. Humphreys
was quite right; the clock upon the mantelshelf had gained fourteen
minutes upon all our watches. Yes, but it had gained those fourteen
minutes in a second, and that was the least part of the marvel. I
myself had had the benefit of those fourteen minutes. I had snatched
them, as it were, from Time itself. I had looked at my watch when I
rang the bell. It had marked five minutes to five. I had remained yet
another four minutes in the room before I had remembered my forgotten
instructions to the keeper. I had then gone out. I had visited the
gun-room and the outhouses, I had walked to the front gate, I had
returned. I had taken fourteen minutes over my search--I could not
have taken less--and here were the hands of my watch now still
pointing towards five, still short of the hour. Indeed, as I replaced
my watch in my pocket, the clock in the hall outside struck five.

"'As you passed through the hall, Humphreys, you saw no one, I
suppose?' I said.

"Humphreys raised his eyebrows with a look of perplexity. 'No, sir, I
saw no one,' he returned, 'but it seemed to me that the front door
banged. I think it must have been left open.'

"'Very likely,' said I. 'That will do,' and Humphreys went out of the
room.

"Imagine my feelings. Time is relative, it is a condition of our
senses, it is nothing more--that we know. But its relation to me was
different from its relation to others. The clock had given me fourteen
minutes, which it denied to all the world besides. Fourteen full
minutes for me, yet they passed for others in less than the fraction
of a second. And not once only had it made me this gift, but many
times. The admiral's pause, unnoticed by Mr. Stiles, was now explained
to me. He had not paused; he had gone straight on with his flow of
talk, and Mr. Stiles had gone straight on listening. But between two
of Admiral Palkin's words. Time had stood still for me. Similarly,
Humphreys had not poised himself upon one ridiculous leg in the hall.
He had taken a step in the usual way, but while his leg was raised,
fourteen minutes were given to me. I had walked through the hall, I
had walked back through the hall, yet Humphreys had not seen me. He
could not have seen me, for there had been no interval of time for him
to use his eyes. I had gone and come quicker than any flash, for even
a flash is appreciable as some fraction of a second.

"I asked you to imagine my feelings. Only with those which I first
experienced would you, from your sane and comfortable outlook upon
life, have any sympathy, for at the beginning I was shocked. I had
more than an inclination then to dash that clock upon the hearth and
deny myself its bizarre and unnatural gift. Would that I had done so!
But the inclination was passed, and was succeeded by an incredible
lightness of spirit. I had a gift which raised me above kings, which
fanned into a flame every spark of vanity within me. I had so much
more of time than any other man. I amused myself by making plans to
use it, and thereupon I suffered a disappointment. For there was so
little one could do in fourteen minutes, and the more I realised how
little there was which I could do in my own private special stretch of
time, the more I wanted to do, the more completely I wished to live in
it, the more I wished to pluck power and advantage from it. Thus I
began to look forward to the sudden cessation of the ticking of the
clock; I began to wait for it, to live for it, and when it came, I
could make no use of it. I gained fourteen minutes now and then, but I
lost more and more of the hours which I shared with other men. They
lost their salt for me. I became tortured with the waste of those
minutes of my own. I had the power; what I wanted now was to employ
it. The desire became an obsession occupying my thoughts, harassing my
dreams.

"I was in this mood when I passed Brayton and yourself one evening in
Pall Mall. I wrote to him that night, and I swear to you upon my
conscience that I had no thought in writing but to put an end to an
old disagreement, and re-establish, if possible, an old friendship. I
wrote in a sudden revulsion of feeling. The waste of my days was
brought home to me. I recognised that the great gift was no more than
a perpetual injury. I proposed to gather my acquaintances about me,
discard my ambition for some striking illustration of my power, and
take up once more the threads of customary life. Yet my determination
lasted no longer than the time it took me to write the letter and run
out with it to the post. I regretted its despatch even as I heard it
fall to the bottom of the pillar-box.

"Of my quarrel with Brayton I need not write at length. It sprang from
a rancorous jealousy. We had been friends and class-mates in the
beginning. But as step by step he rose just a little above me, the
friendship I had turned to gall and anger. I was never more than the
second, he always the first. Had I been fourth or fifth, I think I
should not have minded; but there was so little to separate us in
merit or advancement. Yet there was always that little, and I dreaded
the moment when he should take a bound and leave me far behind. The
jealousy grew to a real hatred, made still more bitter to me by the
knowledge that Brayton himself was unaware of it, and need not have
been troubled had he been aware.

"After I left the Army and lost sight of him, the flame burnt low. I
believed it was extinguished when I invited him to stay with me; but
he had not been an hour in the house when it blazed up within me. His
success, the confidence which it had given him, his easy friendliness
with strangers, the talk of him as a coming man, bit into my soul. The
very sound of his footstep sickened me. I was in this mood when the
clock began to boom louder and louder in the billiard-room. Chalmers
and Linfield were talking. I did not listen to them. My heart beat
louder and louder within my breast, keeping pace with the clock. I
knew that in a moment or two the sound would cease, and the doors of
my private kingdom would be open for me to pass through. I sat back in
my chair waiting while the devilish inspiration had birth and grew
strong. Here was the great chance to use the power I had--the only
chance which had ever come to me. Brayton was writing letters in his
room. The room was in a wing of the house. The sound of a shot would
not be heard. There would be an end of his success; there would be for
me such a triumphant use of my great privilege as I had never dreamed
of. The clock suddenly ceased. I slipped from the room and went
upstairs. I was quite leisurely. I had time. I was back in my chair
again before seven minutes had passed.

                                         "Archie Cranfield."

                             GREEN PAINT

                             GREEN PAINT

I came up by the lift from the lower town, Harry Vandeleur strolled
from his more respectable lodging in the upper quarter, and we met
unexpectedly in Government Square. It was ten o'clock in the morning,
and the Square, a floor of white within a ragged border of trees,
glared blindingly under the tropical sun. On each side of the
President's door a diminutive soldier rattled a rifle from time to
time.

"What? Has he sent for you too?" said Harry, pointing to the
President's house.

"Juan Ballester. Yes," said I, and Harry Vandeleur stopped with a
sudden suspicion on his face.

"What does he want with us?" he asked.

"We volunteered in the war," said I. "We were both useful to him."

Harry Vandeleur shook his head.

"He is at the top of his power. He has won his three-weeks war. The
Army has made him President for the second time. He has so skilfully
organised his elections that he has a Parliament, not merely without
an Opposition, but without a single man of any note in it except
Santiago Calavera. It is not from such that humble people like us can
expect gratitude."

Juan Ballester was, in fact, a very remarkable person. Very few people
who had dealings with him ever forgot him. There was the affair of the
Opera House, for instance, and a hundred instances. Who he really was
I should think no one knew. He used to say that he was born in Mexico
City, and when he wished to get the better of anyone with a
sentimental turn, he would speak of his old mother in a broken voice.
But since he never wrote to his old mother, nor she to him, I doubt
very much whether she existed. The only certain fact known about him
was that some thirteen years before, when he was crossing on foot a
high pass of the Cordilleras without a dollar in his pocket, he met a
stranger--but no! I have heard him attribute so many different
nationalities to that stranger that I wouldn't kiss the Bible even on
that story. Probably he _was_ a Mexican and of a good stock. Certainly
no Indian blood made a flaw in him. For though his hair was black and
a pencil-line of black moustache decorated his lip, his skin was fair
like any Englishman's. He was thirty-eight years old, five feet eleven
in height, strongly but not thickly built, and he had a pleasant,
good-humoured face which attracted and deceived by its look of
frankness. For the rest of him the story must speak.

He received us in a great room on the first floor overlooking the
Square; and at once he advanced and laid a hand impressively upon my
shoulder. He looked into my face silently. Then he said:

"Carlyon, I want you."

I did not believe him for a moment. But from time to time Juan
Ballester did magnanimous things; not from magnanimity, of which
quality he was entirely devoid, but from a passion for the _bran
geste_. He would see himself a shining figure before men's eyes, the
perfect cavalier; and the illusion would dazzle him into generosity.
Accordingly, my hopes rose. I was living on credit in a very inferior
hotel. "I had thought my work was done," he continued. "I had hoped to
retire, like Cincinnatus, to my plough," and he gazed sentimentally
out of the window across the city to the wooded hills of Santa Paula.
"But since my country calls me, I must have someone about me whom I
can trust." He broke off to ask: "I suppose your police are no longer
searching for you?"

"They never were, your Excellency," I protested hotly.

"Well, perhaps not," he said indulgently. "No doubt the natural
attractions of Maldivia brought you here. You did me some service in
the war. I am not ungrateful. I appoint you my private secretary."

"Your Excellency!" I cried.

He shook hands with me and added carelessly:

"There is no salary attached to the post, but there are
opportunities."

And there were. That is why I now live in a neat little villa at
Sorrento.

Ballester turned to Harry Vandeleur and took him by the arm. He looked
from one to the other of us.

"Ever since the day when I walked over a high pass of the Cordilleras
with nothing but the clothes I stood up in, and an unknown Englishman
gave me the railway fare to this city, I have made what return I could
to your nation. You, too, have served me, Señor Vandeleur. I pay some
small portion of my debt. Money! I have none to give you"; and he
uttered the words without a blush, although the half a million pounds
sterling received as war indemnity had already been paid into his
private account.

"Nor would you take it if I had," Juan resumed. "But I will give you
something of equal value."

He led Vandeleur to the window, and waving his hand impressively over
the city, he said:

"I will give you the monopoly of green paint in the city of Santa
Paula."

I stifled a laugh. Harry Vandeleur got red in the face. For, after
all, no man likes to look a greater fool than he naturally is. He had,
moreover, a special reason for disappointment.

"I don't suppose that there are twenty bucketsful used in Santa Paula
in the year," he exclaimed bitterly.

"Wait, my friend," said Ballester; "there will be."

And a week afterwards the following proclamation appeared upon the
walls of the public buildings:

"Owing to the numerous complaints which have been received of the
discomfort produced by the glare of a tropical sun, the Government of
the day, ever solicitous to further the wishes of its citizens, now
orders that every house in Santa Paula, with the exception of the
Government buildings, be painted in green paint within two months of
the issue of this proclamation, and any resident who fails to obey
this enactment shall be liable to a fine of fifty dollars for every
day after the two months have elapsed until the order is carried out."

Juan Ballester was, no doubt, a very great man, but I cannot deny that
he strained the loyalty of his friends by this proclamation.
Grumblings were loud. No one could discover who had complained of the
glare of the streets--for the simple reason that no one had complained
at all. However, the order was carried out. Daily the streets of Santa
Paula grew greener and greener, until the town had quite a restful
look, and sank into its background and became a piece with its
surroundings. Meanwhile, Harry Vandeleur sat in an office, rubbed his
hands, and put up the price of green paint. But, like most men upon
whom good fortune has suddenly shone, he was not quite contented. He
found his crumpled rose-leaf in the dingy aspect of the Government
buildings and the President's house. They alone now reared fronts of
dirty plaster and cracked stucco. I remember him leaning out of Juan
Ballester's window and looking up and down with a discontented eye.

"Wants a coat of green paint, doesn't it?" he said with a sort of
jocular eagerness.

Juan never even winked.

"There ought to be a distinction between this house and all the
others," he said gravely. "The President is merely the butler of the
citizens. They ought to know at a glance where they can find him."

Harry Vandeleur burst suddenly into a laugh. He was an impulsive
youth, a regular bubble of high spirits.

"I am an ungrateful beast, and that's the truth," he said. "You have
done a great deal for me, more than you know."

"Have I?" asked Juan Ballester drily.

"Yes," cried Harry Vandeleur, and out the story tumbled.

He was very anxious to marry Olivia Calavera--daughter, by the way, of
Santiago Calavera, Ballester's Minister of the Interior--and Olivia
Calavera was very anxious to marry him. Olivia was a dream. He, Harry
Vandeleur, was a planter in a small way in Trinidad. Olivia and her
father came from Trinidad. He had followed her from Trinidad, but Don
Santiago, with a father's eye for worldly goods, had been obdurate. It
was all very foolish and very young, and rather pleasant to listen to.

"Now, thanks to your Excellency," cried Harry, "I am an eligible
suitor. I shall marry the Señorita Olivia."

"Is that so?" said Juan Ballester, with a polite congratulation. But
there was just a suspicion of a note in his voice which made me lift
my head sharply from the papers over which I was bending. It was
impossible, of course--and yet he had drawled the words out in a slow,
hard, quiet way which had startled me. I waited for developments, and
they were not slow in coming.

"But before you marry," said Juan Ballester, "I want you to do me a
service. I want you to go to London and negotiate a loan. I can trust
you. Moreover, you will do the work more speedily than another, for
you will be anxious to return."

With a friendly smile he took Harry Vandeleur by the arm and led him
into his private study. Harry could not refuse. The mission was one of
honour, and would heighten his importance in Don Santiago's eyes. He
was, besides, under a considerable obligation to Ballester. He
embarked accordingly at Las Cuevas, the port of call half an hour away
from the city.

"Look after Olivia for me," he said, as we shook hands upon the deck
of the steamer.

"I will do the best I can," I said, and I went down the gangway.

Harry Vandeleur travelled off to England. He was out of the way.
Meanwhile, I stayed in Maldivia and waited for more developments. But
this time they were not so quick in coming.

                                  II

Ballester, like greater and lesser men, had his inconsistencies.
Although he paid his private secretary with "opportunities" and bribed
his friends with monopolies; although he had shamelessly rigged the
elections, and paid as much of the country's finances as he dared into
his private banking account; and although there was that little affair
of the Opera House, he was genuinely and sincerely determined to give
to the Republic a cast-iron Constitution. He had an overpowering faith
in law and order--for other people.

We hammered out the Constitution day and night for another fortnight,
and then Ballester gabbled it over to a Council of his Ministers. Not
one of them could make head or tail of what he was reading, with the
exception of Santiago Calavera, a foxy-faced old rascal with a white
moustache, who sat with a hand curved about his ear and listened to
every word. I had always wondered why Ballester had given him office
at all. At one point he interrupted in a smooth, smiling voice:

"But, your Excellency, that is not legal."

"Legal or not legal," said the President with a snap, "it is going
through, Señor Santiago"; and the Constitution was duly passed by a
unanimous vote, and became the law of Maldivia.

That event took place a couple of months after Harry Vandeleur had
sailed for England. I stretched my arms and looked about for
relaxation. The Constitution was passed at six o'clock in the evening.
There was to be a ball that night at the house of the British
Minister. I made up my mind to go. For a certainty I should find
Olivia there; and I was seized with remorse. For, in spite of my
promise to Harry Vandeleur, I had hardly set eyes upon her during the
last two months.

I saw her at ten o'clock. She was dancing--a thing she loved. She was
dressed in a white frock of satin and lace, with a single rope of
pearls about her throat, and she looked divinely happy. She was a girl
of nineteen years, fairly tall, with black hair, a beautiful white
face, and big, dark eyes which shone with kindness. She had the hand
and foot of her race, and her dancing was rather a liquid movement of
her whole supple body than a matter of her limbs. I watched her for a
few moments from a corner. She had brains as well as beauty, and
though she spoke with a pleading graciousness, at the back of it one
was aware of a pride which would crack the moon. She worked, too, as
few girls of her station work in the Republics of South America. For
her father, from what I then thought to be no better than parsimony,
used her as his secretary. As she swung by my corner for the second
time she saw me and stopped.

"Señor Carlyon, it is two months since I have seen you," she said
reproachfully.

"Señorita, it is only four hours since our brand new Constitution was
passed into law, and already I am looking for you."

She shook her head.

"You have neglected me."

"I regret to notice," said I, "that my neglect has in no way impaired
your health."

Olivia laughed. She had a taking laugh, and the blood mounted very
prettily into her cheeks.

"I could hardly be ill," she said. "I had a letter to-day."

"Lucky man to write you letters," said I. "Let me read it, Señorita."

She drew back swiftly and her hand went to her bosom.

"Oh, it is there!" said I.

Again she laughed, but this time with a certain shyness, and the
colour deepened on her cheeks.

"He sails to-day," said she.

"Then I have still three weeks," said I lightly. "Will you dance with
me for the rest of the evening?"

"Certainly not," she answered with decision. "But after the fifth
dance from now, you will find me, Señor Carlyon, here"; and turning
again to her partner, she was caught up into the whirl of dancers.

After the fifth dance I returned to that corner of the ballroom. I
found Olivia waiting. But it was an Olivia whom I did not know. The
sparkle and the freshness had gone out of her; fear and not kindness
shone in her eyes.

Her face lit up for a moment when she saw me, and she stepped eagerly
forward.

"Quick!" she said. "Somewhere where we shall be alone!"

Her hand trembled upon my arm. She walked quickly from the room,
smiling as she went. She led me along a corridor into the garden of
the house, a place of palms and white magnolias on the very edge of
the upper town. She went without a word to the railings at the end of
the garden, whence one looks straight down upon the lights of the
lower town along the river bank. Then she turned. A beam of light from
the windows shone upon her face. The smile had gone from it. Her lips
shook.

"What has happened?" I asked.

She spoke in jerks.

"He came to me to-night.... He danced with me...."

"Who?" I asked.

"Juan Ballester," said she.

I had half expected the name.

"He spoke of himself," she resumed. "Sometimes it is not easy to tell
whether he is acting or whether he is serious. It was easy to-night.
He was serious."

"What did he say?"

"That up till to-night all had been work with him.... That to-night
had set the crown upon his work.... That now for the first time he
could let other hopes, other thoughts, have play...."

"Yes, I see," I replied slowly. "Having done his work, he wants his
prize. He would."

Ballester had toiled untiringly for thirteen years in both open and
devious ways, and, as the consequence of his toil, he had lifted his
Republic into an importance which it had never possessed before. He
had succeeded because what he wanted, he wanted very much. It
certainly looked as if there were considerable trouble in front of
Olivia and Harry Vandeleur--especially Harry Vandeleur.

"So he wants you to marry him," I said; and Olivia gave me one swift
look and turned her head away.

"No," she answered in a whisper. "He wants his revenge, too."

"Revenge?" I exclaimed.

Olivia nodded her head.

"He told me that I must go up to Benandalla"; and the remark took my
breath away. Benandalla was the name of a farm which Ballester owned,
up in the hills two hours away from Santa Paula; and the less said
about it the better. Ballester was accustomed to retreat thither after
any spell of unusually arduous work; and the great feastings which
went on, the babel of laughter, the noise of music and castanets and
the bright lights blazing upon the quiet night till dawn had made the
farm notorious. Even at this moment, I knew, it was not nearly
uninhabited.

"At Benandalla ... you?" I cried; and, indeed, it seemed to me that
the mere presence of Olivia must have brought discomfort into those
coarse orgies, so set apart was she by her distinction. "And he tells
you to go," I continued, "as if you were his maidservant!"

Olivia clenched her small hands together and leaned upon the railings.
Her eyes travelled along the river below and sought a brightness in
the distant sky--the loom of the lights of Las Cuevas. For a little
while, she was strengthened by thoughts of escape, and then once more
she drooped.

"I am frightened," she said, and coming from her, the whispered and
childish cry filled me with consternation. It was her manner and what
she left unsaid rather than her words, which alarmed me. Where I
should have expected pride and a flame of high anger, I found sheer
terror, and the reason of that terror she had not yet given me.

"He spoke of Harry," she resumed. "He said that Harry must not
interfere.... He used threats."

Yes, I thought, Juan Ballester would do that. It was not the usual way
of conducting a courtship; but Juan Ballester's way was not the usual
way of governing a country.

"What kind of threats?"

"Prisons," she answered with a break in her voice.

"What?" I exclaimed.

"Yes," she said. "Prisons--especially in the Northern Republics
of South America.... He explained that, though you have more liberty
here than anywhere else so long as you are free, you are more
completely--destroyed--here than anywhere else if you once get into
prison." From her hesitation I could guess that "destroyed" was a
milder word than Juan Ballester had used.

"He described them to me," she went on. "Hovels where you sleep in the
mud at night, and whence you are leased out by day to work in the
fields without a hat--until, in a month or so, the sun puts an end to
your misery."

I knew there was truth in that description. But it was not possible
that Ballester could put his threat into force. It was anger now, not
consternation, which filled me.

"Señorita, reflect!" I cried. "In whose garden are you standing now?
The British Minister's--and Harry Vandeleur is an Englishman. It was
no more than a brutal piece of bullying by Ballester. See! I am his
secretary"--and she suddenly turned round towards me with a gleam in
her eyes.

"Yes," she interrupted. "You are his secretary and Harry's friend.
Will you help us, I wonder?"

"Show me how!" said I.

"It is not Harry whom he threatens, but my father"; and she lowered
her eyes from mine and was silent.

"My father"; and her answer made my protestations mere vapourings and
foolishness.

The danger was real. The British Minister could hold no shield in
front of Santiago Calavera, even if there were no guilt upon him for
which he could be properly imprisoned. But Olivia's extremity of
terror and my knowledge of Santiago warned me that this condition was
little likely to exist. I took Olivia's hands. They clung to mine in a
desperate appeal for help.

"Come, Señorita," I said gravely. "If I am to help you, I must have
the truth. What grounds had Ballester for his threat?"

She raised her head suddenly with a spurt of her old pride.

"My father is a good man," she said, challenging me to deny it. "What
he did, he thought right to do. I am not ashamed of him. No!"--and
then she would have stopped. But I would not let her. I dared not let
her.

"Go on, please!" I insisted, and the pride died out of her face, and
she turned in a second to pleading.

"But perhaps he was indiscreet--in what he wrote. He thought, perhaps,
too much of his country, too little of those who governed it."

I dropped her hands. I had enough of the truth now. Rumour had always
spoken of Santiago Calavera as an intriguer. His daughter was now
telling me he was a traitor, too.

"We must find your father," I cried. "He brought you to the ball."

"Yes," said she. "He will be waiting to take me home."

We hurried back to the house and searched the rooms. Calavera was
nowhere to be found.

"He cannot have gone!" cried Olivia, wringing her hands. In both of
our minds the same question was urgent.

"Has he been taken away?"

I questioned the servants, and the door-keeper replied. A messenger
had come for Don Santiago early in the evening. I found the British
Minister at Olivia's side when I returned, and a smile of relief upon
her face.

"My father made his excuses and went home," she said. "Important
business came. He has sent the carriage back."

"May I take you home?" I asked.

"Thank you," said she.

It was getting near to dawn when we drove away. The streets were
empty, the houses dark. Olivia kept her face close to the window, and
never stirred until we turned the corner into the Calle Madrid. Then
she drew back with a low cry of joy. The windows of the great house
were ablaze with light. I helped her out of the carriage and rang the
bell. We stood in front of the door talking while the coachman drove
away to his stables.

"Say nothing to my father," Olivia pleaded. "Promise me, Señor."

I promised readily enough.

"I will come in with you, Señorita," I said. "I must talk with your
father"; and I turned impatiently to the door and rang the bell again.

"To-night?" said she.

"Yes," said I. "I promised Harry Vandeleur to look after you."

"Did you?" said she, and though her anxieties were heavy upon her, a
tender smile parted her lips.

Still no one came to the door.

"They must have gone to bed," I said, pushing against the panels. To
my surprise the door yielded and quietly swung wide. We looked into a
hall silent and empty and brightly lit. We were both in a mood to
count each new phenomenon a disaster. To both of us there was
something eerie in the silent swinging-in of the door, in the
emptiness and bright illumination of the hall. We looked at one
another in dismay. Then Olivia swept in, and I followed. She walked
straight to a door at the back of the hall, hesitated with her hand
upon the knob for just the fraction of a second, and flung it open. We
went into a room furnished as a study. But the study, too, was empty
and brightly lit. There was a green-shaded reading-lamp beside an
armchair, as though but now the occupant had sat there and read.
Olivia stood in the centre of the room and in a clear and ringing
voice she cried:

"Father!"

Her voice echoed along the passages and up the stairs. And no answer
came. She turned abruptly, and, moving with a swift step, she opened
door after door. Each door opened upon a brightly lit and empty room.
She ran a few steps up the stairs and stood poised, holding up in her
white gloved hand the glistening skirt of her white frock. One by one
she called upon the servants by name, looking upwards. Not a door was
opened above our heads. Not a sound of any movement reached our ears.

Olivia ran lightly up the stairs. I heard the swift rustle of her gown
as she moved from room to room; and suddenly she was upon the stairs
again looking down at me, with her hand like a flake of snow upon the
bannister. She gleamed against the background of dark wood, a thing of
silver.

"There is no one in the house," she said simply, in a strange and
quiet voice. She moved down the stairs and held out her hand to me.

"Good night," she said.

Though her voice never shook, her eyes shone with tears. She was but
waiting until I went, to shed them.

"I will come to-morrow," I stammered; "in the morning. I may have news
for you," and I bent over her hand and kissed it.

"Good night," she said again, and she stood with her hand upon the
latch of the door. I went out. She closed the door behind me. I heard
the key turn in the lock, the bolt shoot into its socket. There was a
freshness in the air, a paling of the stars above my head. I waited
for a while in the street, but no figure appeared at any window, nor
was any light put out. I left her alone in that empty and illumined
house, its windows blazing on the dawn.

I walked back to the President's house and sat comfortably down in my
office to think the position over with the help of a pipe. But I had
hardly struck the match when the President himself came in. He had
changed his dress-coat for a smoking-jacket, and carried a few papers
in his hand.

"I am glad to see that you are not tired," he said, "for I have still
some work for you to do. I have been looking through some letters, and
there are half-a-dozen of so much importance that I should like copies
made of them before you go to bed."

He laid them on my writing-table with an intimation that he would
return for them in an hour. I rose up with alacrity. I was in no mood
for bed, and the mechanical work of copying a few letters appealed to
me at the moment. A glance at them, however, startled me into an even
greater wakefulness. They were letters, typewritten for the most part,
but undoubtedly signed by Santiago Calavera, and all of them dated
just before the outbreak of the war. They were addressed to the War
Minister of Esmeralda, and they gave details as to where Maldivia was
weak, where strong, what roads to the capital were unguarded, and for
how many troops provisions could be requisitioned on the way. There
was, besides, a memorandum, written, I rejoiced to see, from beginning
to end in Santiago's own hand--a deadly document naming some twenty
people in Santa Paula who would need attention when Juan Ballester had
been overthrown. It was impossible to misunderstand the phrase. Those
twenty citizens of Santa Paula were to be shot out of hand against the
nearest wall. I was appalled as I copied it out. There was enough
treachery here to convict a regiment. No wonder the great house in the
Calle Madrid stood empty! No wonder that Calavera---- But while I
argued, the picture of the daughter in her shining frock, alone amidst
the glitter and the silence, smote upon me as pitiful, and struck the
heart out of all my argument.

Juan Ballester was at my elbow the moment after I had finished.

"It is five o'clock," he said, as he gathered the letters and copies
together, "and no doubt you will want to be on foot early. You can
tell her that I sent her father in a special train last night to the
frontier. He is no doubt already with his friends in Esmeralda."

"Then the prisons----" I exclaimed.

"A lover's embroideries--nothing more," said Ballester, with a smile.
"But it is interesting to know that you are so thoroughly acquainted
with the position of affairs." And he took himself off to bed.

His last remark, however, forced me to consider my own position, and
reflection showed it to be delicate. On the one hand I was Ballester's
servant, on the other I was Harry Vandeleur's friend. I could not side
with both, and I must side with one. If I threw in my lot with Juan
Ballester, I became a scoundrel. If I helped Olivia, I might lose my
bread and butter. I hope that in any case I should have decided as I
did, but there was a good deal of virtue in the "might." For, after
all, Juan seemed to recognise that I should be against him and to bear
no malice. He had even bidden me relieve Olivia of her fears
concerning her father's disappearance. He was a brute, but a brute on
rather a grand scale, who took what he wanted but, in spite of Olivia,
disdained revenge. I decided to help Olivia, and before nine the next
morning I knocked upon her house-door. She opened it herself.

"You have news?" she asked, watching me with anxious eyes, and she
stood aside in the shadow of the door while I went in.

"Your father is safe. He was sent to the frontier last night on a
special train. He is free."

She had been steel to meet a blow. Now that it did not fall, her
strength for a moment failed her. She leaned against a table with her
hand to her heart; and her face suddenly told me that she had not
slept.

"I will follow him," she said, and she hurried up the stairs. I looked
out a train. One left Santa Paula in an hour's time. I went out,
leaving the door ajar, and fetched a carriage. Then I shouted up the
stairs to Olivia, and she came down in a travelling dress of light
grey and a big black hat. Excitement had kindled her. I could no
longer have guessed that she had not slept.

"You will see me off?" she said, as she handed me her bag; and she
stepped gaily into the carriage.

"I will," I answered, and I jumped in behind her.

The die was cast now.

"Drive down to the station!" I cried.

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.

"In that her own father wouldn't know her. It will be dark; the Quay
is ill-lighted, she has only to shuffle like an old woman; she will go
third-class, of course, in the train. Who is to see her off?"

"No one," I answered. "I dread that half-hour in the train for her
without a friend at her side. The Quay will be watched, too. She must
run the gauntlet alone. Luckily there will be a crowd of harvesters
returning to Spain. Luckily, also, she has courage. But it will be the
worst of her trials. My absence would be noticed. I can't go."

"No, but I can!" cried Mr. Crowninshield. "An old padre seeing off an
old nun to her new mission--eh? Juan will be gritting his teeth in the
morning because I am an American citizen."

Mr. Crowninshield was aflame with his project. He took a stick and
tottered about the room in the most comical fashion. "I will bring the
carriage myself to the garden door," said he. "I will be inside of it.
My property man--he comes from Poughkeepsie--shall be the driver. I
will dress the young lady as we drive slowly to the station, and
Sister Pepita and the Padre Antonio will direct their feeble steps to
the darkest corner of the worst-lit carriage in the train."

I thanked him with all my heart. It had seemed to me terrible that
Olivia should have to make her way alone on board the steamer. Now she
would have someone to enhearten and befriend her. I met Olivia once at
the house of Enrique Gimeno, and made her acquainted with the scheme,
and on the night of the sixteenth the steamship agent rang me up on
the telephone.

"The _Ariadne_ will arrive at nine to-morrow night. The passengers
will leave Santa Paula at half-past ten. Good luck!"

I went to the window and looked out over the garden. The marquee was
erected, the fairy lights strung upon the trees, a set piece with the
portrait of Juan Ballester and a Latin motto--_semper fidelis_--raised
its monstrous joinery against the moon. Twenty-four hours more and, if
all went well, Olivia would be out upon the high seas, on her way to
Trinidad. Surely all must go well. I went over in my mind every detail
of our preparations. I recognised only one chance of failure--the
chance that Mr. Crowninshield in his exuberance might over-act his
part. But I was wrong. It was, after all, Olivia who brought our fine
scheme to grief.

                                  V

There is no doubt about it. Women are not reasonable beings. Otherwise
Olivia would never have come to the President's party in a white lace
coat over a clinging gown of white satin. She looked beautiful, but I
was dismayed when I saw her. She had come with the Gimenos, and I took
her aside, and I am afraid that I scolded her.

"But you told me," she expostulated, "I was to spare no pains. There
must be nothing of the traveller about me"; and there was not. From
the heels of her satin slippers to the topmost tress of her hair she
was dressed as she alone could dress in Santa Paula.

"But of course I meant you to wear black," I whispered.

"Oh, I didn't think of it," Olivia exclaimed wearily. "Please don't
lecture"; and she dropped into a chair with such a lassitude upon her
face that I thought she was going to faint.

"It doesn't matter," I said hastily. "No doubt the disguise will cover
it. At ten o'clock, slip down into the garden. Until then, dance!"

"Dance!" she exclaimed, looking piteously up into my face.

"Yes," I insisted impatiently, and taking her hand, I raised her from
her chair.

She had no lack of partners, for the President himself singled her out
and danced in a quadrille with her. Others timorously followed his
example. But though she did dance, I was grievously disappointed--for
a time. It seemed that her soul was flickering out in her. Just when
she most needed her courage and her splendid spirit, she failed of
them.

There were only two more hours after a long fortnight of endurance.
Yet those two last hours, it seemed, she could not face. I know now
that I never acted with greater cruelty than on that night when I kept
her dancing. But even while she danced, there came to me some fear
that I had misjudged her. I watched her from a corner of the ballroom.
There was a great change in her. Her face seemed to me smaller, her
eyes bigger, darker even, and luminous with some haunting look. But
there was more. I could not define the change--at first. Then the word
came to me. There was a spirituality in her aspect which was new to
her, an unearthliness. Surely, I thought, the fruit of great
suffering; and blundering, with the truth under my very nose, I began
to ask myself a foolish question. Had Harry Vandeleur played her
false?

A movement of the company awakened me. A premonitory sputter of
rockets drew the guests to the cloak-room, from the cloak-room to the
garden. I saw Olivia fetch her lace coat and slip it over her
shoulders like the rest. It was close upon ten. The Fates were
favouring us, or perhaps I was favouring the Fates. For I had arranged
that the fireworks should begin just a few minutes before the hour
struck. In the darkness of the garden Olivia could slip away, and her
absence would not afterwards be noticed.

I waited at the garden door. I heard the clock strike. I saw Juan
Ballester's profile in fire against a dark blue sky of velvet and
stars. I shook hands with myself in that the moon would not rise till
one. And then a whiteness gleamed between the bushes, and Olivia was
at my side. Her hand sought mine and clung to it. I opened the postern
and looked out into a little street. The lamps of a closed carriage
shone twenty yards away, and but for the carriage the street was
empty.

"Now!" I whispered.

We ran out. I opened the carriage door. I caught a glimpse of horn
spectacles, a lantern-jawed, unshaven face, a shovel hat; and I heard
a stifled oath. Mr. Crowninshield, too, had noticed Olivia's white
gown. She jumped in, I shut the door, and the carriage rolled away. I
went back into the garden, where Juan Ballester's profile was growing
ragged.

Of the next hour or two I have only confused memories. I counted
stages in Olivia's progress as I passed from room to room among the
guests. Now she would have reached the station; now the train had
stopped on the Quay at Las Cuevas; now, perhaps, the gangway had been
withdrawn and the great ship was warping out into the river. At one
o'clock I smoked a cigarette in the garden. From the marquee came the
clatter of supper. In the sky the moon was rising. And somewhere
outside the three-mile limit a rippling path of silver struck across
the _Ariadne's_ dark bows. I was conscious of a swift exultation. I
heard the throb of the screw and saw the water flashing from the
ship's sides.

Then I remembered that I had left the garden door unlocked. I went to
it and by chance looked out into the street. I received a shock. For,
twenty yards away, the lights of a closed carriage shone quietly
beside the kerb. I wondered whether the last few hours had been really
the dream of a second. I even looked back into the garden, to make
sure that the profile of Juan Ballester was not still sputtering in
fire. Then a detail or two brought me relief. The carriage was clearly
a private carriage; the driver on the box wore livery--at all events,
I saw a flash of bright buttons on his coat. In my relief I walked
from the garden towards the carriage. The driver recognised me most
likely--recognised, at all events, that I came from the private door
of the President's garden. For he made some kind of salute.

I supposed that he had been told to wait at this spot, away from the
park of carriages, and I should have turned back but for a
circumstance which struck me as singular. It was a very hot night, and
yet not only were the windows of the carriage shut, but the blinds
were drawn close besides. I could not see into the carriage, but there
was light at the edges of the blinds. A lamp was burning inside. I
stood on the pavement, and a chill struck into my blood and made me
shiver. I listened. There was no sound of any movement within the
carriage. It must be empty. I assured myself and again doubted. The
little empty street, the closed carriage with the light upon the edges
of the blinds, the absolute quiet, daunted me. I stepped forward and
gently opened the door. I saw Olivia. There was no trace of the nun's
gown, nor the coif. But that her hair was ruffled she might this
moment have left Juan Ballester's drawing-room.

She turned her face to me, shook her head, and smiled.

"It was of no use, my friend," she said gently. "They were on the
watch at Las Cuevas. An officer brought me back. He has gone in to ask
Juan what he shall do with me."

Olivia had given up the struggle--that was clear.

"It was Crowninshield's fault!" I cried.

"No, it was mine," she answered.

And here is what had happened, as I learnt it afterwards. All had gone
well until the train reached Las Cuevas. There the police were on the
look-out for her. The Padre Antonio, however, excited no suspicion,
and very likely Sister Pepita would have passed unnoticed too. But as
she stepped down from the carriage on to the step, and from the step
to the ground, an officer was startled by the unexpected appearance of
a small foot in a white silk stocking and a white satin slipper. Now,
the officer had seen nuns before, old and young, but never had he seen
one in white satin shoes, to say nothing of the silk stockings. He
became more than curious. He pointed her out to his companions. Sister
Pepita was deftly separated in the crowd from the Padre Antonio--cut
out, to borrow the old nautical phrase--and arrested. She was
conducted towards a room in the station, but the steamer's siren
hooted its warning to the passengers, and despair seized upon Olivia.
She made a rush for the gangway, she was seized, she was carried
forcibly into the room and stripped of her nun's disguise and coif.
She was kept a prisoner in the room until the _Ariadne_ had left the
Quay. Then she was placed in a carriage and driven back, with an
officer of the police at her side, to the garden door of the
President's house.

Something of this Olivia told me at the time, but she was interrupted
by the return of the officer and a couple of Juan Ballester's
messengers.

"His Excellency will see you," said the officer to her. He conducted
her through the garden and by the private doorway into Ballester's
study. I had followed behind the servants and I remained in the room.
We waited for a few minutes, and Juan himself came in. He went quickly
over to Olivia's side. His voice was all gentleness. But that was his
way with her, and I set no hopes on it.

"I am grieved, Señorita, if you have suffered rougher treatment than
befits you. But you should not have tried to escape."

Olivia looked at him with a piteous helplessness in her eyes. "What am
I to do, then?" she seemed to ask, and, with the question, to lose the
last clutch upon her spirit. For her features quivered, she dropped
into a chair, laid her arms upon the table, and, burying her face in
them, burst into tears.

It was uncomfortable--even for Juan Ballester. There came a look of
trouble in his face, a shadow of compunction. For myself, the heaving
of her young shoulders hurt my eyes, the sound of her young voice
breaking in sobs tortured my ears. But this was not the worst of it,
for she suddenly threw herself back in her chair with the tears wet
upon her cheeks, and, beating the table piteously with the palms of
her hands, she cried:

"I am hungry--oh, so hungry!"

"Good Heavens!" cried Ballester. He started forward, staring into her
face.

"But you knew," said Olivia, and he turned away to one of the
messengers, and bade him bring some supper into the room.

"And be quick," said I.

"Yes, yes, be quick," said Juan.

At last I had the key to her. She had been starving, in that great,
empty house in the Calle Madrid. "A fortnight!" she had cried in
dismay. I understood now the reason of her terror. She had known that
she would have to starve. And she had held her head high, making no
complaint, patiently enduring. It was not her spirit which had failed
her. I cursed myself for a fool as once more I enthroned her. Her face
had grown smaller, her eyes bigger. There was a look of spirituality
which I had not seen before. I had noticed the signs, and I had
misread them. Her lassitude this evening, her vain struggle with the
police, her apathy under their treatment of her, were all explained.
Not her courage, but her body had failed her. She was starving.

A tray was brought in and placed before her. She dried her eyes and
with a sigh she drew her chair in to the table and ate, indifferent to
the presence of Ballester, of the officer who remained at the door,
and of myself. Ballester stood and watched her. "Good Heavens!" he
said again softly, and going to her side he filled her glass with
champagne.

She nodded her thanks and raised it to her lips almost before he had
finished pouring. A little colour came into her cheeks and she turned
again to her supper. She was a healthy girl. There never had been
anything of the drooping lily about Olivia. She had always taken an
interest in her meals, however dainty she might look. The knowledge of
that made her starvation doubly cruel--not only to her. Juan sat down
opposite to her. There was no doubt now about the remorse in his face.
He never took his eyes from her as she ate. Once she looked up and saw
him watching her.

"But you knew," she said. "I was alone in the house. How much money
did you leave there for me when you took my father away? A few dollars
which your men had not discovered."

"But you yourself----" he stammered.

"I was at a ball," said Olivia scornfully. "How much money does a girl
take with her to a ball? Where would she put it?"

There was no answer to that question.

"The next day I went to the bank," she continued. "My father's money
was impounded. You had seen to that. All the unpaid bills came in in a
stream. I couldn't pay them. I could get no credit. You had seen to
that. My friends left me alone. Of course I starved; you knew that I
should. You meant me to," and, with the air of one who has been
wasting time, she turned again to her supper.

"I never thought that you would hold out," stammered Ballester. I had
never seen him in an apologetic mood before, and he looked miserable.
"I hadn't _seen_ that you were starving."

Olivia looked up at him. It was not so much that her face relented, as
that it showed an interest in something beyond her supper.

"Yes," she said, nodding at him. "I think that's true. You hadn't seen
with your own eyes that I was starving. So my starving wasn't very
real to you."

Ballester changed her plate and filled her glass again.

"Ah!" said Olivia with satisfaction, hitching up her chair still
closer. She was really having a good square meal.

"But why didn't you tell me?" I asked.

"I told no one," said Olivia, shaking her head. "I thought that I
could manage till to-night. Once or twice I called on the Gimenos at
luncheon-time, and I had one or two dollars. No; I would tell no one."

"Yes," said Juan, "I understand that. It's the reason why I wanted
you." And at this sign of his comprehension of her, Olivia again
looked at him, and again the interest in her eyes was evident.

At last she pushed back her chair. The tray was removed. Ballester
offered her a cigarette. She smiled faintly as she took it. Certainly
her supper had done her a world of good. She lit her cigarette and
leaned her elbows on the table.

"And now," she said, "what do you mean to do with me?"

Ballester went to his bureau, wrote on a sheet of paper and brought
the paper to Olivia.

"You can show this at the railway-station to-morrow," he said, and he
laid the permit on the table and turned away.

Women are not reasonable people. For the second time that night Olivia
forced me to contemplate that trite reflection. For now that she had
got what she had suffered hunger and indignities to get, she merely
played with it with the tips of her fingers, looking now upon the
table, now at Juan Ballester's back, and now upon the table again.

"And you?" she said gently. "What will become of you?"

I suppose Ballester was the only one in the room who did not notice
the softness of her voice. To me it was extraordinary. He had tortured
her with hunger, exposed her to the gentle methods of his police, yet
the fact that he did these things because he wanted her seemed to make
him suddenly valuable to her now that she was free of him.

Ballester turned round and leaned against the wall with his hands in
his pockets.

"I?" he said. "I shall just stay on alone here until some day someone
gets stronger than I am, perhaps, and puts me up against the wall
outside----"

"Oh, no!" cried Olivia, interrupting him.

"Well, one never knows," said his Excellency, shrugging his shoulders.
He turned to the window and drew aside the curtains. The morning had
come. It was broad daylight outside.

"Unless, Olivia," he added, turning again towards her, "you will
reconsider your refusal to marry me. Together we could do great
things."

It was the most splendid performance of the grand gentleman which
Ballester ever gave. And he knew it. You could see him preening
himself as he spoke. His gesture was as noble as his words. From head
to foot he was the perfect cavalier, and consciousness of the
perfection of his chivalry shone out from him like a nimbus. I looked
quickly towards Olivia--in some alarm for Harry Vandeleur. She had
lowered her head, so that it was impossible to see how she had taken
Ballester's honourable amendment. But when she raised her head again a
smile of satisfaction was just disappearing from her face; and the
smile betrayed her. She had been playing for this revenge from the
moment when she had finished her supper.

"I am honoured, Señor Juan," she said sedately, "but I am already
promised."

Ballester turned abruptly away. Whether he had seen the smile,
whether, if he had seen it, he understood it, I never knew.

"You had better get the Señorita a carriage," he said to the officer
at the door. As the man went out, the music from the ballroom floated
in. Juan Ballester hesitated, and no shock which Olivia had given to
me came near the shock which his next words produced.

"Don Santiago shall have his money. You can draw on it, Señorita,
to-morrow, before you go."

"Thank you," she said.

The messenger reappeared. A carriage was waiting. Olivia rose and
looked at Juan timidly. He walked ceremoniously to the door and held
it open.

"Good night," she said.

He bowed and smiled in a friendly fashion enough, but he did not
answer. It seemed that he had spoken his last word to her. She
hesitated and went out. At once the President took a quick step
towards me.

"Do you know what is said to-night?" he said violently.

I drew back. I could not think what he meant. To tell the truth, I
found him rather alarming.

"No," I answered.

"Why, that I have given this party as a farewell; that I am still
going to bolt from Maldivia. Do you see? I have spent all this money
for nothing."

I drew a breath of relief. His violence was not aimed against me.

"That's a pity," I said. "But the rumour can still be killed. I
thought of a way yesterday."

"Will it cost much?" he asked.

"Very little."

"What am I to do?"

"Paint the Presidential House," said I. "It wants it badly, and all
Santa Paula will be very sure that you wouldn't spend money in paint
if you meant to run away."

"That's a good idea," said he, and he sat down at once and began to
figure out the expense. "A couple of hundred dollars will do it."

"Not well," said I.

"We don't want it done well," said Juan. "Two men on a plank will, be
enough. A couple of hundred dollars is too much. Half that will be
quite sufficient. By the way"--and he sat with his pen poised--"just
run after--her--and tell her that Vandeleur is landing to-morrow at
Trinidad. I invented some business for him there."

He bent down over the desk. His back was towards the door. As I turned
the handle, someone was opening it from the other side. It was Olivia
Calavera.

"I came back," she said, with the colour mantling in her face. "You
see, I am going away to-morrow--and I hadn't said 'Good-bye.'"

Juan must have heard her voice.

"Please go and give that message," he said sharply. "And shut the
door! I don't want to be disturbed."

Olivia drew back quickly. I was amazed to see that she was hurt.

"His message is for you," I said severely. "Harry Vandeleur lands at
Trinidad to-morrow."

"Thank you," she said slowly; she turned away and walked as slowly
down the passage. "Goodbye," she said, with her back towards me.

"I will see you off to-morrow, Señorita," I said; and she turned back
to me.

"No," she said gently. "Don't do that! We will say 'Good-bye' here."

She gave me her hand--she had been on the point of going without even
doing that. "Thank you very much," she added, and she walked rather
listlessly away. She left me with an uneasy impression that her thanks
were not very sincere. I am bound to admit that Olivia puzzled me that
night. To extract the proposal of marriage from Ballester was within
the rules of the game and good play into the bargain. But to come back
again as she had done, was not quite fair. However, as I watched her
go, I thought that I would keep my bewilderment to myself. I have
never asked Harry Vandeleur, for instance, whether he could explain
it. I went back to the study.

"I think fifty dollars will be ample," said Ballester, still figuring
on his paper. "Has she gone?"

"She is going," said I. He rose from his chair, broke off a rose from
a bowl of flowers which, on this night only, decorated the room. Then
he opened the window and leaned out. Olivia, I reckoned, would be just
at this moment stepping into the carriage. He tossed the rose down and
drew back quickly out of sight.

"Shall it be green paint, your Excellency?" I asked.

His Excellency, I regret to say, swore loudly.

"Never in this world!" said he.

I had left the door open. The music of a languorous and melting waltz
filled the room.

"I do loathe music!" cried Juan Ballester violently. It was the
nearest approach to a sentimental remark that I had ever heard him
make.

                        NORTH OF THE TROPIC OF
                              CAPRICORN

                        NORTH OF THE TROPIC OF
                              CAPRICORN

The strong civic spirit of the Midlands makes them fertile in
reformers; and Mr. Endicott even in his early youth was plagued by the
divine discontent with things as they are. Neither a happy marriage,
nor a prosperous business, nor an engaging daughter appeased him. But
he was slow in discovering a remedy. The absence of any sense of
humour blunted his wits and he lived in a vague distress, out of which
it needed the death of his wife to quicken him. "Some result must come
out of all these years of pondering and discomfort, if only as a
memorial to her," he reflected, and he burrowed again amongst the
innumerable panaceas. Then at last he found it--on an afternoon walk
in June when the sharp contrast between the grime of the town and the
loveliness of green and leaf which embowered it so closely, smote upon
him almost with pain. The Minimum Wage. Like Childe Roland's Dark
Tower, it had lain within his vision for many a long mile of his
pilgrimage. His eyes had rested on it and had never taken it in; so
simple and clear it was to the view.

Thereafter he was quick to act. Time was running on. He was forty-two.
He disposed of his business, and a year later was elected to
Parliament. Once in the House he walked warily. He had no personal
ambition, but he was always afraid lest some indiscretion should set
the House against him and delay his cause. Mr. Endicott had his plan
quite clear in his mind. Samuel Plimsoll was his model. The great Bill
for the establishment of the Minimum Wage should be a private member's
Bill moved from the back benches session after session if need be, and
driven through Parliament into Law at last by the sheer weight of its
public value.

Accordingly for a year he felt his way, learning the rules and orders,
speaking now and then without subservience and without impertinence;
and after the prorogation of the House for the summer, he took his
daughter with him to a farm-house set apart in a dale of Cumberland.
In that solitary place, inspired by the brown fells and the tumbling
streams, and with the one person he loved as his companion, he
proposed finally to smooth and round his Bill.

Accident or destiny, however--whichever you like to call the beginning
of tragic things--put an Australian in the same compartment of the
railway-carriage; and the Australian was led to converse by the sight
of various cameras on the luggage rack.

"My father is very fond of photography," said Elsie Endicott. "It
amuses him, and the pictures which he takes if the day is clear, are
sometimes quite recognisable."

"My dear!" said Mr. Endicott.

Elsie turned to the window and shook hands with two young men who had
come to see her off. One of them, whom Mr. Endicott vaguely remembered
to have seen at meals in his house, climbed on the footboard.

"You will take care of Miss Endicott, sir," he said firmly. "She has
been overdoin' it a bit, dancin', you know, and that sort of thing,
while you were at the House of Commons."

Mr. Endicott chuckled.

"I'll tell you something about my daughter," he replied. "She may look
like china, but she is pretty solid earthenware really. And if there
are any others as anxious about her as you are you might spread the
good news."

The train moved off. "So you are in the House of Commons," said the
Australian, and he began to talk. "Our great trouble--yours and
mine--is----"

"I know it," Mr. Endicott interrupted with a smile of confidence.

"Of course you do," replied the Australian. "It's the overcrowding of
the East under the protective rule of the British."

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Endicott blankly.

"We could help a good deal," the Australian continued, "if only our
Government had got a ha'porth of common sense. North of the Tropic of
Capricorn, there's land and to spare which coloured labour could
cultivate and white labour can't."

This was strange talk to Mr. Endicott. He was aware, but not conscious
of great dominions and possessions outside the British Islands. He had
indeed avoided the whole subject. He was shy of the phrase which
described them, as a horse is shy of a newspaper blown about the
street. The British Empire! The very words had a post-prandial sound.
Instead of suggesting to him vast territories with myriads of men and
women groping amongst enormous problems, they evoked a picture of a
flamboyant gentleman in evening dress standing at the head of a table,
his face congested with too much dinner, a glass of wine in his one
hand, a fat cigar in the other, and talking vauntingly. This
particular sentence of the Australian stuck inconveniently in his mind
and smouldered there.

For instance. On the afternoon of their arrival Elsie was arranging
his developing dishes and his chemicals on a small rough table in a
corner of their one living-room. She put an old basket-chair by the
table and set around it a screen which she had discovered in one of
the bedrooms upstairs.

"There!" she said. "You can make all your messes here, father, and we
can keep the room looking habitable, and I shan't get all my frocks
stained."

"Very well, Elsie," said her father absently, and he spoke his own
thoughts. "That was a curious fear of the man in the train, Elsie. I
think there's no truth in it. No, the danger's here in this country;
here's what's to be done to avert it," and he slapped his hand down
upon his pile of statistics.

"No doubt, father," said Elsie, and she went on with her work.

The very next evening he returned again to the subject. It was after
dinner and about half-past nine o'clock. The blinds had not been
lowered and Endicott looked out through the open windows on to a great
flank of Scawfell which lay drenched in white moonlight a couple of
fields away.

"North of the Tropic of Capricorn," he said, "I wish we had an atlas,
Elsie."

"I'll write to London and buy one," said the girl. "We haven't got
more than a 'Handy Gazetteer' even at home. It'll be amusing to plan
out some long journeys which we can take together when you have passed
your Bill into law."

Endicott smiled grimly at his daughter.

"I reckon we won't take many journeys together, Elsie. Oh, you needn't
look surprised and hurt! I am not taken in by you a bit, my dear. That
young spark on the footboard who told me I didn't take enough care of
you"--and Elsie gurgled with laughter at the recollection--"threw a
dreadful light upon your character and gave me a clue besides to the
riddle of your vast correspondence. I hope you are telling them all
that my persistent unkindness is not driving you into a decline."

Elsie paused in the act of addressing an envelope--there was a
growing pile of letters in front of her--to reassure her father.

"I tell them all," she replied, "that you neither beat me nor starve
me, and that if you weren't so very messy with your chemicals in the
corner over there, I should have very little reason to change my
home."

"Thank you, my dear," said Mr. Endicott. He was very proud of his
daughter and especially of her health. With her dark rebellious hair,
the delicate colour in her cheeks, and her starry eyes, she had a
quite delusive look of fragility. But she could dance any youth of her
acquaintance to a standstill without ruffling her curls, as he very
well knew. He gazed at her lowered head with a smile.

"However, all this doesn't help me with the Minimum Wage," he
continued, and he turned again to the papers on his desk by the
window, while Elsie at the table in the middle of the big low-roofed
room, continued to write her letters.

They were still engaged in these pursuits when Mrs. Tyson, their
landlady, came into the room to lower the blinds.

"No, please leave them up," said Endicott, in an irritable voice.
"I'll draw them down myself before we go to bed."

Mrs. Tyson accordingly left the blinds alone.

"And you'll be careful of the Crown Derby," she said imperturbably,
nodding towards a china tea-set ranged in an open cabinet near to the
door. "Gentlemen from London have asked me to sell it over and over.
For it's of great value. But I won't, as I promised my mother. She,
poor woman----"

"Yes, yes," interposed Mr. Endicott, "we'll be very careful. You may
remember you told us all about it yesterday."

Mrs. Tyson turned down a little lower the one oil lamp which, with the
candles upon Endicott's desk, lighted the room, and went back to the
inner door.

"Will you be wanting anything more for a little while?" she asked.
"For my girl's away, and I must go down the valley. I am sending some
sheep away to market to-morrow morning."

"No, we want nothing at all," said Elsie, without paying much
attention to what the woman was saying. Mrs. Tyson was obviously
inclined to fuss, and would have to be suppressed. But she went out
now without another word. There were two doors to the room at opposite
ends, the inner one leading to a small hall, the kitchen and the
staircase, the other, and outer door, opening directly close by the
window on to a tiny garden with a flagged pathway. At the end of the
path there was a gate, and a low garden wall. Beyond the gate a narrow
lane and a brook separated the house from the fields and the great
flank of fell.