Читать книгу Sarita, the Carlist - Arthur W. Marchmont - Страница 10

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There was indeed plenty of food for serious thought in the interview with Vidal de Pelayo. If the man was really one of the provincial leaders of the Carlists, I had stumbled across the track of an intended attempt to abduct the young King, and such knowledge could scarcely fail to place me in a particularly awkward position in regard to my cousin Sarita.

She would as a matter of course be cognisant of the scheme, while it was more than probable that it had sprung from her own nimble and daring wits. My visitor had described it as the proposal of Ferdinand Carbonnell; Sarita herself had said that Ferdinand Carbonnell was the compound of her brother's and her own Carlism; and there was an imagination, a daring, and a reckless disregard of risks in the scheme which all pointed to Sarita as its originator.

But there was also my position as a member of the British Embassy staff to consider. If the thing were done, even if it were attempted and failed, there would be frantic excitement everywhere; Carlists known and suspected would be flung into prison, and questioned with that suggestive and forceful ingenuity which was generally successful in extracting information from the unfortunate prisoners; the name of Ferdinand Carbonnell was sure to come out; and if this Pelayo himself should chance to be among the questioned—not at all an improbable contingency—he would go a step further than anyone else and point me out to the authorities as the actual head and front of the conspiracy.

That was a very awkward position to face. Apart from the decidedly unpleasant results to myself personally, it was very certain that the consequences to the British interests in Spain at such a moment might be gravely embarrassing. It would be argued with much plausibility that the staff of the Embassy could scarcely have failed to know what was going on; and a charge of connivance in an abduction plot might fire a mine that would blow up Heaven only knew what.

All these things I saw as I smoked a pipe of meditation in my room that night; but I saw also something more. I was a soldier of fortune with my way to make. My father's letter had shown me that too plainly for me to misread. What, then, would be my position if I could use this plot, the knowledge of which had been thrust upon me, to my own advantage, while at the same moment saving Sarita from the results of her own wild scheming?

What would be the standing of the Englishman in Madrid who should cut in at the critical moment when the young King had been carried off, and rescue him and restore him to the Queen-mother at the instant of her agonised bereavement? It was a dizzying thought, and I am free to confess the prospect fascinated me. I sat turning it over and over as I smoked pipe after pipe, and the longer I thought the brighter glowed the one picture—the position of the man who saved King—and the colder grew the other—the duty of informing the Embassy of what I had learned.

When I knocked the ashes out of my last pipe in the hour of dawn—for I sat thinking all through the night—I had made my decision. I would fight for my own hand. So far as Sarita was concerned, I would warn her of what I knew, and that the project must be abandoned from her side. If she persisted, then I would take my own measures to save her.

In pursuance of this, I went to Madame Chansette's on the following afternoon to see Sarita. She was frankly pleased to see me, and after a few minutes gave me herself the opening I wished.

"I have made up my mind in regard to you, Ferdinand." She used my Christian name with the unconstrained freedom of relationship. "I will not have your help. You shall not be involved through me in any of these matters. If you can prevail in your way upon Sebastian Quesada to give up what he has taken from us, do so; but you shall not have him for an enemy on my account."

"That is very nice and commonplace of you, Sarita," said I, with a smile.

"I was not quite myself when you were here yesterday. You surprised me out of myself. I was excited, and talked wildly, and you must forget it all."

"What a very charming day it is. Did you notice how blue the sky was at about ten o'clock?"

"What do you mean?" she cried, looking at me in quick surprise.

"Are you going to the Opera to-morrow? I hear that Vestacchia's ballet is wonderfully good," I continued, in a dull, everyday tone. "By the way, I hear that the young Duke of Sempelona is likely to make a mesalliance."

"What is all this rubbish?"

"I thought we were to be commonplace, that's all. I hear, too——" but she interrupted me now with a burst of laughter.

"Ridiculous!" she cried. "As if you and I need talk of such things. I tell you I will not have your help."

"Very well. I'll pack it up and put it away in my trunks against the day it is needed. That is settled."

"So you can be provoking, can you? I thought you were a serious Englishman, with a good deal of the man in you."

"But you don't want the man; and as I can play many parts, I brought with me the society dude in case he should be handy."

"You are angry because I won't let you interfere with my affairs, eh? So you have your pet little weaknesses, too."

"Why don't you care to speak of fashionable marriages? You mentioned one that was in the making when I was here last."

"You think it a pleasant subject for a jest?" she cried, resentfully.

"Scarcely a fair hit. You have just told me you were not yourself then—and I thought and hoped it had been abandoned, and was to be forgotten like the rest of what you said."

To this she made no immediate reply, but after a pause, asked slowly and earnestly—

"And do you take enough interest in my future to feel serious about such a project?"

"There would not be much of the man in me and far less of the cousin, and none of the friend, if I did not," I returned.

"You have seen me once and known me three days."

"You forget the first time I saw you, Sarita. I do not. I never shall—and never wish to. There are some wounds that are long in the making; others that are made in a flash: and the latter may endure longer than the former." She threw a penetrating glance at me, sighed, and turned away again.

"I wonder if you will ever understand me," she said, half wistfully. "I will not have your help. I have told you."

"It is already packed away—waiting," I returned, lightly. But the light tone jarred, and she tapped her foot and frowned in impatient protest. I smiled. "Why play at this game of pretences?" I asked. "I am going to help you, whether you will or no; and you are going to take my help, whether you will or no. And you are going to give up that—well, the need for us to talk about projected marriages, fashionable or otherwise. You know quite well that I am just as much in earnest as you are; and already you have read me well enough to be perfectly aware that having made that use of my name, you have given me the opportunity to help you which I shall not fail to use. Why then pretend? Let us be frank. I'll set the example. I have come to tell you of something that you must abandon—a plan that originated with you: the part of you, that is, that goes to make up half of the mythical Ferdinand Carbonnell. A plan that the real Ferdinand Carbonnell will not sanction."

"You have come to dictate to me, you say? You to me?" she cried, at first half indignantly, but then laughing. "But what is it?" she asked, with a change to curiosity.

"Tell me first the answer to this puzzle phrase, or charade: 'Counting all renegades lovers of Satan.'" I put the question with a smile, but the sudden, intense dismay on her face startled me.

"Where did you hear that?" she asked. "How could it come to you? You must tell me. I must know."

"Tell me first what it means; that is, if it means anything more than a jingle."

"You don't know?" and her eyes lighted quickly.

"No, I don't know—but I suspect. Tell me, however."

"What do you suspect?"

"To question is scarcely to trust, Sarita. I suspect that it is some secret password among you Carlists."

"But how could it come to your ears?" she cried, anxiously.

"Should not Ferdinand Carbonnell be trusted by his followers?"

"Someone has heard your name, has seen you and has mistaken you—oh, Ferdinand, I might have expected it, but scarcely yet. Wait; yes, I know. It will have been Vidal de Pelayo. He has been here from Saragossa: he may have heard your name—ah, I see it was he. And did he come to you—where? Tell me everything." Her speech was as rapid as her deductions were quick and shrewd.

"Yes, it was Vidal de Pelayo;" and I told her generally what had passed at the interview, keeping back for the moment that part of it which referred to the abduction plot. She listened with rapt attention, viewing it much more seriously than I did; as was not, perhaps, unreasonable. "And now, what does that absurdly-sounding phrase mean?"

"You have only half of it."

"You mean, 'By the grace of God;' but that only makes it all the odder."

"If you take the initials of the first sentence you will see the meaning of the second."

"Of course, Carlos, by the grace of God," I exclaimed.

"It is a phrase that Spain will learn to know one day," she said. "It will be the watchword of the New Liberty," and her face lighted with enthusiasm.

"The 'New Liberty,' Sarita; what do you mean by that?"

"The liberty, the greatness that our rightful King will bring back to us. Where do we stand now, but at the very bottom of the scale of contempt? What is Spain, but the doormat on which every upstart country, even this America, wipes her feet? And what were we once—the leaders of the world; the possessors of half the earth, rulers holding sway on sea as well as land? Are we not the same Spaniards to-day as then? What we did once can we not do again? Aye, and Don Carlos will lift from us the shame of our sloth, put blood and fire once more into the veins of apathy, restore us to our ancient standing, and once again give us the strength to show the face of pride to our enemies. Is not that a day for Spaniards to pray for; and to work, scheme, plot, and toil unceasingly; to shed our blood for, if the need demands it? I will give mine freely and without stint;" and her face glowed like the face of a martyr.

"It is a dream, no more. Look at your countrymen, Sarita, and ask yourself where is to be found the power to work this miracle; where the men, the resources, the brains, the energy, everything that is of the very essence of success?"

"Do you think we do not know that? But it is just all that which Don Carlos will alter? What are we now but a people in whose lives the very salt and marrow are withering? I know it; but I know also what will stop the decay; and Don Carlos will give it us. We must free ourselves from the corroding blight of the misgovernment which those who have usurped the throne have forced on us that they might buttress up their own wrongful claims. While we are weak, divided, torn by dissension and undone by mistrust, they can continue to force on us the oppression which they miscall government. They sap the nation's very life that they may pluck for themselves the ever-dwindling fruits from such branches as have not yet been destroyed. But do we not know the cure? Can you yourself not see it? If the forceful blood of true liberty was once again set flowing in the veins of our nation, the change would soon tell. You know, for you are an Englishman. You have the liberty denied to us, and craved by us. You and these Americans, who would now put this last dire shame upon us. You are increasing, we are dwindling. You enjoy the splendours of the achievements of liberty; we are pining on the undigested meal of past greatness. You are what we were once, the very opposite of what we are now; and what you are, Don Carlos would make us—aye, and by the grace of God, he shall yet do it; and if my little life can help him, I shall not have lived it in vain."

So absorbing, so thrilling was her enthusiasm, that I did not wonder at others yielding to her whirlwind influence. I sought to argue with her, to show her the fallacy of her dreams, to convince her that Don Carlos at best was merely struggling to get back the throne from anything but self-less motives, that the destiny of a nation lay not with the leadership of one man, but in the nature of the people themselves—but argument broke itself in vain against her passion and enthusiasm.

"There is nothing before you but disillusion, Sarita," I said at length; "whether it comes in the form of failure to rouse your countrymen—for men more easily fit themselves with a new skin than with a new nature; or in the more tragic form of passing success in the Carlist movement, to be followed by a knowledge that after all your Don Carlos is no more than a man, and a Spaniard."

"I do not expect you to see things with my eyes," she said; then, after a long pause, "If I dream, well, I dream. But I would rather live a dreamer of dreams, and die in striving to realise them, than live and die a drone among drones. But I have told you I will not have your help."

"And I have shown you that you cannot avoid it. For good or ill, the use of my name before I arrived has made it inevitable. You are doing things in my name, and whether you wish it or not, that fact brings us together in close association. What has happened with Vidal de Pelayo may happen at any moment with another; and how can we escape the consequences? But I must make terms, even with you. For instance, you have in the making a plan to carry off the young King——"

"What?" she cried, in a tone of profound astonishment.

"Is it not so?"

"Did Pelayo tell you anything of the kind?"

"Can the followers of Ferdinand Carbonnell have any secrets from him—when they find him in the flesh? He told me no more than he knew—that he was to procure a safe place for a little guest; the rest is surmise; but surmise made easy. And I have come to tell you that the project must be stopped."

"Must?" she cried, angrily.

"Must," I answered, firmly. "Stopped either by you or else go on to be checkmated by me."

"That is a word I have never yet heard from anyone," she exclaimed.

"Then it is quite time somebody used it," said I, as firmly and masterfully as I could make my manner. "I mean it."

"I will not listen to you. I won't bear it," and she got up and stared at me with resentment, surprise and rebellion in every feature of her face.

"I am not going because you are angry, Sarita. I care for you far too much to let a passing mood like that ruffle my purpose. I will not let you commit this crime."

"This is ridiculous—monstrous;" and she tossed her head disdainfully. "You are presuming on what passed when you were here yesterday."

"I am doing nothing of the kind, and only your anger would lead you to make so unjust an accusation. What I am doing is to use some of the privileges which you have given to Ferdinand Carbonnell. I have been within an ace of losing my life through the use of the name; I have been recognised by one of your chief agents as the leader himself—and now I intend to use that leadership to save you from the consequences of your own blindness. A moment's reflection will convince you that I am not speaking at random."

"You would make me your enemy?" she asked.

"It would not be the first time that enmity has followed acts which should have generated sincere friendship. Would the Ferdinand Carbonnell of your making be deterred from doing what he deemed right by such a motive? No; and neither will the real man."

"It is the very key-note of our plans," she cried.

"Then you must arrange a different harmony."

"You shall not interfere with it. You shall not, I say," she exclaimed, tempestuously.

"I am absolutely resolved. You shall either abandon the mad project, or I myself will thwart it."

"Would you quarrel with me?"

"If you force a quarrel on me because of it; yes." This reply seemed to amaze her more than anything I had said, and her gaze was full of reproach and consternation.

"And you said just now you cared for me," she said, softly.

"How deeply it may never be in my power to tell you, for all said and done, I am only a poor devil with all his way in the world yet to make. But for this you have made me rich in power, and I will use the power you have given me to the uttermost—to save you."

Then she came and stood close before me and putting her hands on my shoulders, as she had done once before, looked pleadingly into my eyes.

"Will nothing move you, Ferdinand?"

"Nothing," I returned, meeting her eyes firmly.

"Not if I tell you——" she hesitated and bit her lip in disconcerting agitation. My heart gave a wild leap at the thought of how the broken sentence might have been finished. I loved her, Heaven knows how deeply, and for an instant I cheated myself with the wild fancy that a confession of answering love was halting on her trembling lips. "Not if I do what I have never yet done to any man—beg and implore you to leave this thing alone?"

Moved though I was I would not let her see anything of my feeling; I changed no muscle of my face, and met her eyes with the same calm, resolute look as I answered slowly and earnestly—

"Sarita, if such a thing were possible as that you love me and that the words which faltered on your lips just now had been a confession of that love, I should still answer you that nothing would move me from my purpose."

She started violently, listened to me at first with such a look as one might give whose heart has suddenly been bared, and then with an expression of dismay which changed at last to almost passionate reproach her hands slipped from my shoulders and she fell into a chair and covered her face to hide her emotion.

But the weakness passed in an instant and she rose and faced me, once again calm, confident, and self-reliant.

"It shall not be abandoned. You have no right to do this. It shall go on, do what you will. You shall not come between me and my duty; between me and my country. I have urged and entreated you, and you have scorned me. It is not in your power to bend me—cold and hard and strong as you may think yourself. I can be cold and hard and strong, too, as you will find. What if I tell you, as I do, that you shall never set eyes on me again if you do not give way?" and she drew herself to her full height, splendid in her flashing, gleaming anger. But I did not yield a jot from my purpose.

"That must be as you will, Sarita," I said, calmly. "Nothing can change my resolve. Because I will not see or say that all you do is right, you are angry. Well, leave it there. Believe me, I will stop this and save you from yourself."

"I do not want your help; and I will not have it. An enemy of Spain can be no friend of mine," she cried, passionately, and was going from the room with all the signs of her anger and emotion flaming in her face when the door was opened and a servant ushered in Colonel Livenza.

"AN ENEMY OF SPAIN CAN BE NO FRIEND OF MINE, SHE CRIED."—Page 87.

As soon as he saw me, his face lowered ominously and the anger deepened and darkened when he perceived by Sarita's face that our interview had been no mere conventional one.

Sarita was for the moment too agitated to stay and speak with him, and with a hasty word of greeting and excuse she hurried past him and left us alone.

He looked after her in surprise and deep annoyance, and then turned with a scowl to me as if for an explanation; looking on me as an intruder.

"I did not expect to meet you here, senor," he said, angrily; but the scene with Sarita had left me in no pleasant mood, and I was glad enough to have someone on whom to vent the temper which I had been keeping under such restraint.

"I am not aware that I am in any way called upon either to anticipate or consider your expectations," I returned, pretty curtly.

"That's a very strange reply."

"To a very impertinent remark," I retorted. I hated the fellow, and was not in the least concerned to conceal the feeling. In my then mood, guessing the object of his visit, nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to have kicked him downstairs and out of the house. I believe he guessed something of this, for he turned aside, pretended not to hear my answer, and made way for me to pass.

As I reached the door, going very slowly and keeping my eyes upon him in that melodramatic manner into which a bad temper will lead the mildest of us, Sarita came hurrying back, and her glance of alarm at us both showed she feared some sort of a quarrel.

"I will see you again, Sarita," I said, with a warmth in my manner which was intended more to displease Livenza than to please her. But she was still very angry, and drawing back, said—

"After what has passed that will scarcely be necessary or desirable." At which the man smiled and shrugged his shoulders contemptuously and with a suggestion of triumph which galled me. And, smarting under the sense of my defeat, I left the house.