Chapter XII Sarita’s Welcome
If brightening eyes, rising colour in the cheek, radiant looks, smiling lips and the cordial clasp of outstretched, eager hands spell pleasure, then assuredly was Sarita glad to see me.
“We got your message and I have been so impatient,” she said, holding both my hands in hers. “And yet so anxious.”
It was good to look on her again; to feel the subtle sweetness of her presence; to listen to her voice; to watch the play of feelings as each left its mark on her expressive features; to touch her hand and have it left all trustfully in mine; to have the sunlight of her smiling eyes warming my heart; to revel in the thousand essences of delight which spread around her. Ah me. Life is good, and youth and beauty are good, also; but love is best of all. And my heart told me as I gazed at her how intensely and deeply I loved her, and what a charm there was in the mere loving. But these thoughts do not help the tongue to frame common-places.
“It is good to be with you again, Sarita;” was all I said for some moments; and we just laughed and made believe that this was as good as the most sparkling and brilliant conversation that ever wisdom conceived and wit clothed in phrase.
And for all our silence I believe we understood one another better than ever before. To me I know that the moments of inarticulate nothingism were more eloquent in meaning than any words; for somehow by that subtle instinct or affinity, that strange other sense that has no physical attribute and is all alert and powerful at times in the best as in the worst of us, I felt I did not love in vain, but that this woman, peerless to me among women, who held my hands and smiled to me with all the witchery of loveliness, was swayed by some of the same weird, delightful, thrilling, tantalising emotions which bewildered me.
What stayed me I know not; but the swift, sudden, rushing temptation seized me to draw her to my heart and whisper some of the love thoughts that were whirling with mad ecstacy in my brain; and when I paused as though greatly daring and yet not daring enough, I think my heart must have spoken straight to hers, for with a vivid blush, she shrank, cried “No, no,” tore her hands from mine and, breaking away, ran swiftly to the end of the room, and stood, her flashing pride laid by, palpitating, trembling and glancing at me like a timid child.
A long hush fell upon us, and when it had passed, I had retaken control of my emotions and was myself again. But in that instant I know that our hearts spoke and were laid bare each to the other.
“I bring you some very strange news, Sarita. Perhaps the last you would expect.”
“From England?”
“No, it was waiting here in Madrid, though I brought out from London something that might have influenced it.”
“That is very clear,” she laughed.
“Sebastian Quesada has decided to make restitution of your fortune,” I said looking for some sign of surprise. But she gave none, and after reflecting an instant said:
“You have seen him before coming here?”
“I went to him to try and force the act of restitution on the strength of some news I had learned, and he forestalled me by announcing his intention to make it.”
“He is very shrewd; but how did he know that you had this news?”
“That occurred to me; but I don’t see how he could have known it.”
“You are no match for him, Ferdinand. But there is no merit in his act even if sincere. He did not say the matter was already completed and the papers executed, did he?”
“It will be made as soon as the formalities can be complied with.”
She laughed again and shook her head sceptically.
“It is a safe promise—for he knows.”
“Knows what?”
“What will happen—before the formalities will be complied with.” Her tone was thoughtful, and very serious; and she sighed.
“I think I know what you mean, and I am glad to be in time.” She was leaning her face on her hand, and lifted it to look up in surprise. “I want to warn you, too, Sarita—I know you are in danger—and to urge you to abandon this.”
“You think I am in danger? Ah, Ferdinand, you do not know the under-currents. What do you think my real danger is?”
“I know you are in danger of arrest; and I urge you to come to England and be free.”
“Would that be serving my country and my cause?”
“It would be serving your family.” She laughed, and the music of her laughter was indescribably sweet.
“Family,” she repeated, half-mischievously, half-earnestly. “I believe you are very much in earnest, Ferdinand, and I forgive you. I am not quite sure you are not foolish. But if anyone else said that, do you think I could hear another syllable from them? It is a counsel of treachery; and such counsel comes ill from the lips of a friend.”
“You allow now that I am a friend then?”
“How solemn you English are, when—when you are solemn!” she cried, smiling again. “Do I think you are a friend? Yes, I do, in all truth. I know it. We shall not quarrel again. I believe you are so much my friend that, if I would let you, you would ruin yourself for me. That is how you would read friendship and how I read you. But I will not let my family do that.”
“And how may I read you?” I said, quickly.
“How do you read me?” she retorted, with unwonted eagerness.
“How would you have me read you?”
“How would I have you read me?” She paused, glanced away, and then, looking me straight in the eyes, answered seriously and meaningly. “As what I am, not as what I might have been. You of all the world must not make the mistake of confusing the two.”
“I do not mistake. What you might have been is what you shall be, Sarita,” I said, earnestly—so earnestly that the expression in her eyes changed slightly, and she turned them away and started, and I thought she trembled. She knew my meaning; and after a moment or two, in which she had forced under the feelings that seemed to have surprised herself, she said calmly and almost formally—
“I will tell you what I think you do not know. I am in no real danger, for I am all but pledged to marry—Sebastian Quesada!” Her firmness scarcely lasted to the end of the sentence, and she uttered the last words as if looking for some expostulation from me; but I made none. Instead, I laughed and shook my head. I would not take it seriously.
“There is much virtue in that ‘all but.’” She seemed surprised and in a sense disappointed at my reception of the news.
“It is true. I have three days left to give my answer. He gave me a week.”
“He might as well have given you an hour—or a year. It’s all the same. It will never be more than ‘all but.’ There are those who will never allow it.”
“Allow?” she cried with a start, the glance of surprise ending in a smile.
“For one thing your family would bring pressure upon you,” I answered, gravely.
“Family, again,” and the smile deepened, and then died away, as she added, “But do you know what the marriage would mean to me?”
“I know what it would mean to Quesada. He would never live to lead you to the altar, Sarita.”
“You would not do anything so mad?”
“I am not the only man in Madrid who would stop such a marriage. You have sown passion, the harvest may be death.” For a moment she looked troubled, then her face cleared and grew very serious.
“You mean Juan Livenza. Yes, he is dangerous; but he is only a man; and after all Sebastian Quesada’s man.”
“Is Quesada more than a man, and proof against revenge?”
“I cannot tell you all there is in this; nor all that the marriage would mean to me.” This perplexed me. Her face was almost stern as she spoke, and after a moment’s pause, she exclaimed with a gesture of impatience and irresolution: “Don’t question me. It must be.”
“You have seen Quesada while I have been away.” It was really a question, but I said it as though stating a fact.
“I told you he had given me a week for my reply.”
“And you would marry him—loving another?” The colour that rushed to her cheeks was as much a flush of pain as of surprise. For an instant her burning eyes met mine in indignant protest and repudiation, but they fell before my steady gaze. I think she read the resolve that ruled me now, and feared it.
“You have no right to speak like this to me,” she said; but there was neither life nor force in her words, and her voice faltered.
“On the contrary, I have the best of all rights. And you know this.” She made an effort to assert herself then. Drawing herself up, she met my gaze steadily, and said in a tone she sought to make indignant:
“What right do you mean?”
For the space of a dozen quickened heart-beats we faced each other thus, and then I said, in a tone that thrilled with the passion in me:
“I love you, and I am the man you love, Sarita, and by the God that made us both, I swear no other man shall call you wife.”
The masterfulness of my love conquered her, and with a low cry she broke away, sank into a seat near, and sat trembling, her face hidden in her hands. Love’s instinct prompted me then to act, while my passion mastered her. I placed my arms about her, lifted her to her feet, took her hands from her face and kissed her.
“Do you think I will lose you, Sarita, in the very moment our love has spoken.” At the touch of my lips she trembled violently, and with a cry of love, she wound her arms round my neck. As her head found love’s shelter on my shoulder, my passion burst all control and found expression in a lava of words, hot, burning, incoherent, tumultuous and vehement, poured forth in the delirious madness of the moment of love’s triumph.
We were standing there, still passion-locked, when a most unwelcome interruption came. The door was opened, and Colonel Juan Livenza was shown into the room.
He stopped on the threshold, his face livid with the rage that blazed up in his eyes at what he saw, and struggling for an instant to regain sufficient self-control to trust himself to speak, he said in a voice husky and hoarse with rage:
“Your pardon; my arrival is inopportune;” and with a bow and a look of deadly hate and menace at me, he went out and closed the door behind him.
Sarita, who had drawn herself hurriedly from my arms, turned pale and gazed at the shut door, trembling with agitation and distress.
“I have sown passion, and the harvest will be death,” she murmured, repeating my words. “Heaven have mercy upon us.”
“Or upon him,” I answered. “But we need not take it quite so seriously. Come, sweetheart,” and I held out my arms to her.
“No, no, no. It can never be, Ferdinand. I was mad,” she cried distractedly.
“It was a very sweet madness, and shall last our lifetime,” I answered, but she would not let me place my arm round her again. “As you will,” I said, gently. “The knowledge of your love is all in all to me. The rest I can trustfully leave to time.”
“You must go, Ferdinand. I forgot that he was coming this afternoon. You have made me forget everything. Oh, I am mad. Now, all may be lost.” The words jarred.
“Lost,” I cried; and then a sudden divination of her meaning and of Livenza’s visit flashed into my mind. “He was coming, of course, for this business of the day after to-morrow—but you will abandon that now, Sarita?”
“How did you know? Is it guess or knowledge?” and her startled eyes and parted lips told of her surprise.
“I was with Quesada this morning,” I answered, the words coming in obedience to an impulse that I could neither account for nor resist.
“I am afraid of you, Ferdinand. How do you learn these things? How much do you know?”
“My dear one, you are playing with weapons of death, and with men who will but use and then fool you. Your one chance of safety and of happiness lies in trusting me. Leave all this seething maelstrom of intrigue, and come with me away from it all.” I pleaded with all the force at command and with all the power of love to back the appeal.
But my note was a wrong one. Sarita, my love, would have yielded, but Sarita, the Carlist, was still the stronger; and my appeal fell on ears deadened by the calls of her patriotism and the cause she loved so fanatically. She grew less and less in sympathy as I pleaded.
“You must not tempt me to treachery, Ferdinand, and I cannot, I dare not, I will not listen. I should despise myself. Remember what I told you when first we met. You came too late.”
“I will not hear that. I will not let you be sacrificed. You are mine, Sarita, bound to me by the bonds of our love! and, come what may, I will save you from this, despite yourself.”
“Do you think I heed myself in such a cause? Then you little know me. What you ask is impossible—the one thing in all the world you should ever ask of me in vain, Ferdinand. But this I cannot grant.”
“I will not take that answer. I know you to be in far deeper peril than you dream. If this scheme for abducting the King were to succeed, how would you profit? Can’t you see the master-craft that is directing all: the wires that make you all no more than the puppets of the man who does nothing without a purpose, and everything for the one purpose of his own good. If Spain were kingless to-morrow, who would gain? You Carlists? To the winds with such a dream. When has Quesada lent himself to a cause which was not for his own advantage? Have you asked yourself this? How would he stand to gain by any such change? What were his words to me to-day? By heaven, I begin to see his master-stroke now. You are his dupe, Sarita, nothing but his dupe. You told me once you knew his heart—aye, but you have not yet measured the height of his ambition? To ’overset one feeble family in order to set up another’—that was his phrase. Where, then, is his profit in this? He lets you think you have won him over through his love for you; that you know his heart; that he will help you for this coup if you in return will be his wife. Sarita, are you blind? What think you is the meaning of the careful network of preparations to strike at all you Carlists? What are those copious lists of names already in the hands of his agents? To help you Carlists, or to crush you? By God,” I cried, passionately, as a great light burst in on me—“I see the object. He would have the young King out of his path; and yours are the hands by which it shall be done. And when you have done it, do you dream that he will help to set up another King? What would be his chance? Picture it. Once the young King were away, who would be supreme in this Spain of yours? Who is the most powerful man to-day? To whom would the eyes of the people turn in the hour of kingless crisis? To him or to Don Carlos? No, no, I tell you his power in that moment would be all but supreme, and he would use it to crush relentlessly you very Carlists whom he had used to clear the way for him. Surely, surely, you can see now that you would be the dupe and naught else, and that he aims at securing power that shall be nothing less than supreme.”
Sarita listened to my rapid, excited speech with gradually paling cheek, and when I finished, her breath was coming fast and her eyes shining brightly.
“If I thought that, I’d—— But no, Ferdinand, he dare not, he dare not,” she exclaimed, in quick, bated tones.
“Dare not—Sebastian Quesada?” I cried, incredulously.
“Dare not. A hundred daggers would flash at his heart.”
“Aye, but the hundred hands that could thrust them would be rotting in his prisons.”
“It is impossible, impossible, impossible. I won’t believe it; but I must have time to think. You madden me. I am fevered and frozen in turns by the thoughts you kindle, I must have time.”
“Let me make a last appeal, Sarita. Marry me and come away. Leave all——”
“No, no,” she broke in, passionately. “I cannot. I cannot. This is no problem that a coward’s flight can solve.”
“Well then, postpone this attempt on the young King until you have had time to inquire and search and think.”
“I cannot think now. I will see you to-morrow—or better, will think over all and write you.”
“No, I will come to-morrow,” I said. “Promise you will see me.”
“If I am in Madrid, I promise,” she said; and with that, seeing how deeply she was agitated, I thought it best to leave.
“One word, not from counsellor this, but from your lover, Sarita. The knowledge we have gained of each other to-day, is knowledge for all our time. My love can never change; neither will yours, that I know. To-morrow, it will be the lover who will come to you, sweetheart. I shall have all in readiness for our departure. Till to-morrow, good-bye.” I took her hand and tried to kiss her, but she would not suffer me, and when I looked in her eyes, I saw, to my consternation, they were full of tears. Knowing how intensely she must be excited and agitated to shed tears, and that it would distress her still more for me to remain and see her weakness, I turned away and went out.
I was scarcely less excited than Sarita, and, driving at once to my rooms, sent a messenger with a note to Silas Mayhew, asking him to come to me without fail in two hours’ time, and sat down to try and clear the tangle of my thoughts. I had guessed much of the desperate intrigue that lay behind the abduction plot, and felt that I had guessed rightly the part which Sebastian Quesada was playing. But there was more that I did not know, and I had to learn it if the project was yet to be thwarted and his scheme exposed.
More instantly pressing than all, too, was the grave question of Juan Livenza’s intentions. The look he had cast at me had murder in it, and I must find him and let him do what he would at once. It was for this I needed my friend Mayhew’s help. I dined in my rooms, and sat pondering the puzzle and piecing together the ends until I began to see the meaning of it all.
While I was thus engaged, a note came from Quesada, couched in the usual informal, friendly terms, and pressing me, in his and his sister’s name, to go and see them that evening, and adding that he had something particular to tell me. I scribbled a reply that I had an engagement, and had just despatched it when Mayhew arrived.
He came in, smiling and whistling, with a light question on his lips; but, seeing the look on my face, he stopped abruptly, and his face grew serious as mine.
“What’s the matter? What has happened?”
“I can’t tell you everything, Silas, but I’m in the thick of a quarrel, I fancy, and may want you to see me through with it. The man is that Colonel Juan Livenza I have spoken to you about, and I want you to come with me this evening when I put myself in his way to see what follows.”
“I’ll come, of course; but I hope it’s not really serious.”
“I don’t know how serious; but I shall know within an hour or two. He goes a good deal to the Café de l’Europe, and I am going there now in the hope of meeting him.”
I was too sensible of the gravity of the matter in hand to have any mind for mere commonplace conversation, and Mayhew, seeing this, fell in with my mood. We walked in silence most of the way to the Café de l’Europe, but when the place came in sight I took my friend’s arm, and began to chat much in my usual manner. It occurred to me that Livenza might see us, and I was unwilling to let anything in my conduct display a marked difference from my usual demeanour.
We pushed up the broad steps and into the magnificent room that all Madrid knows and admires, but there was no sign of Livenza; and, having assured ourselves of that, we went on into the smaller saloon used by certain of the constant frequenters of the place. He was there, sitting at a table with a couple of friends, away to the right of the door.
I did not appear to notice him, but led Mayhew to a table at some distance from him, and called a waiter. It was not my cue to force any quarrel. I designed merely to give Livenza an opportunity of doing so if he wished. Acting on a hint from me, Mayhew placed his chair so that he could keep the three at the other table under observation, and, having given an order, we lighted our cigars and began to chat quietly.
“He has seen you,” said Mayhew, after a minute or two, “and is speaking of us to the men with him. They are getting up, and, I think, are coming over to us. His face is livid, Ferdinand, and his eyes are burning like those of a man with a fever. What’s he going to do? Yes, they are moving this way.”
I pulled myself together, continued to smoke calmly, and, leaning forward, went on chatting unconcernedly as I waited for the approach of the man whose heart, I knew, was a very furnace of rage and jealous hate of me. And I will confess it was a tense, exciting moment.