The Four Corners of the World. A. E. W. Mason

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

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      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