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, Senorita," 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, Senorita, 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, Senorita!"
"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.
"Senor, you have, no doubt, his Excellency"s permit for the Senorita 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 Senorita 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 unhara.s.sed. 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 pa.s.sage 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--pa.s.sionate. Underneath the pa.s.sion he was hard. He is the cruellest of men."
"I will see you this afternoon," said I; and she pa.s.sed 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 Senorita Olivia to the station, where we were stopped."
"I thought you would," he said, with a grin. "But it is impossible that the Senorita 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 Senorita 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 Senorita or in my private secretary."