the nine days of silence.
dr. fabos comes to certain conclusions.
we were nine days together at the valley house without any word or sign from those without. the evil of this conspiracy i found almost less to be condemned than the childish folly of it. there is nothing more remarkable in the story of crime than the senile mistakes of some of its masters—men, shrewd to the point of wonder in all other affairs, but betraying their mental aberration in some one act at which even the very ignorant might smile. so it was with this sham story of the valley and the pretended accident which kept me from the ship. every day, with a punctuality as amusing as the tale was plausible, the old negro and the servants below apologised for the accident which alone, they declared, prevented my return to the ship.
a disaster had overtaken the valley bridge; the passage by the mountains was never used but by general fordibras alone! that was their tale. as for the general, his desolation would be beyond words when he heard of it. unfortunately he had been detained at st. michael’s, and they could only imagine that the rough seas of the last few days were answerable for it. all that was humanly possible, they felt sure, was being done by the engineers below. fortunate that the mining operations in the mountains had brought so many workmen to the island. my release, they said, and that of their young mistress could be but a matter of a few hours.
now, i have turned up my diary for those nine days, and i find that upon the first of them i came to certain definite conclusions which may be of interest to my readers. they were these:
(1) the criminals feared nothing from the presence of my yacht. either the island was watched by some powerful and speedy armed ship of their own, or they had convinced captain larry that all was well with me.
(2) they were in league with the local portuguese officials of villa do porto, who, i did not doubt, had been richly rewarded for a little diligent blindness.
(3) they believed that i had fallen in love with joan fordibras, and for her sake would either hold my peace for ever or join them. this was their master stroke. it was also the apotheosis of their folly.
imagine, at the same time, my own difficulties. save for two ancient servants, a maid and a negro, this young girl and i were alone at the chalet and seemingly as remote from the world as though we had been prisoners of an eastern despotism. she knew and i knew with what hopes and designs this clumsy trap had been contrived. let us find solace in each other’s society, and our human passion must prove stronger than any merely moral impulse directed against valentine imroth and his confederates. such was the argument employed by our enemies. they would expose me to the condemnation of the world if i withstood them, or secure my silence if i assented to their plans. the thing was so daring, so utterly unexpected, that i do believe it would have succeeded but for one plain fact these men had overlooked. and that was nothing less than the good commonsense and real womanly courage which my little companion brought to our assistance, and offered me unflinchingly in that amazing hour.
for you must understand that we had talked but in enigmas hitherto, both at dieppe and at the villa san jorge, where i went upon landing from my yacht. now, it fell upon me to speak to her as to one who must share my secrets and be the confidante of them. cost me what it might, let there be a great love for her growing in my heart, i resolved that not one word of it should be uttered at santa maria. so much i owed both to myself and her. there were subjects enough, god knows, upon which a man might be eloquent. i chose the story of her own life to begin with, and heard her story as no other lips could have told it so sweetly.
this was upon the second day of our captivity, a warm, sunny day with a fresh breeze blowing in from west by north and a glorious heaven of blue sky above us. i remember that she wore a gown of lace and had a turquoise chain about her throat. we had breakfasted together and heard the servants’ familiar apologies. the general would certainly return from st. michael’s to-day, they said; the engineers could not fail to restore the bridge by sunset. joan heard them with ears that tingled. i did not hear them at all, but going out with her to the gardens, i asked her if she had always known general fordibras, and what her recollections of that association were. to which she replied that she remembered him as long as she remembered anyone at all.
“there was another face—so long ago, so very long ago,” she said, almost wearily. “i have always hoped and believed that it was my mother’s face. when i was a very little girl, i lived in a house which stood by a great river. it must have been hudson river, i think; general fordibras used to visit the house. i was very young then, and i wonder that i remember it.”
“you left this house,” i put it to her, “and then you went to school. was that in america or london?”
“it was first in new york, then in london, and to finish in paris. i left school three years ago, and we have been all over the world since. general fordibras never stops long in one place. he says he is too restless. i don’t know, dr. fabos. i have given up trying to think about it.”
“and hate me accordingly for my questions. i will make them as brief as possible. how long is it since you knew mr. imroth, and where did you first meet him?”
this reference plainly embarrassed her. i saw that she answered my question with reluctance.
“please do not speak of mr. imroth. i am afraid of him, dr. fabos; i do believe that i am more afraid of him than of anybody i have ever known. if evil comes to me, mr. imroth will send it.”
“a natural antipathy. some day, joan, you will look upon all this and thank god that a stranger came to your island. i shall have done with mr. valentine imroth then. there will be no need at all to fear him.”
she did not understand me, and plied me with many questions, some exceedingly shrewd, all directed to one end, that she might know the best or the worst of the life that they had been living and what part the general had played in it. to this i responded that i could by no means judge until the case both for and against him were wholly known to me.
“he may be but a dupe,” i said; “time and opportunity will tell me. you owe much to him, you say, for many kindnesses received during childhood. i shall not forget that when the day of reckoning comes. joan, i shall forget no one who has been kind to you.”
her gratitude was pretty enough to see, and i witnessed it many times during the long hours of those hazardous days. from morn to night she was my little companion of the gardens. i came to know her as a man rarely knows a woman who is not a wife to him. every bush, every path, every tree and shrub of our kingdom we named and numbered. grown confident in my protection, her sweet laughter became the music of the valley, her voice the notes of its song, her presence its divinity. if i had discerned the secret of her fearlessness, that must be a secret to me also, locked away as a treasure that a distant day will reveal. my own anxieties were too heavy that i dared to share them with her. the yacht, my friends, my servant, where were they? what happened beyond that monstrous curtain of the mountains, that precipice which hid the island world from us? had they done nothing, then, those comrades in whose loyalty i trusted? was it possible that even the faithful okyada had deserted me? i did not believe it for an instant. my eyes told me that it was not true. a voice spoke to me every day. i read it as a man reads a book of fate—an image cast upon the waters, a sign given which shall not be mistaken.
he who pits his life against the intelligence of criminals, must be equipped with many natural weapons. nothing, certainly, is more necessary than the habit of observation. to watch every straw the winds of conspiracy may blow, to read every cryptic message the hand of crime may write, to be ever alert, vigilant, resourceful, is something more than mere equipment. it is very salvation to the investigator. trained in all these qualities by long years of patient study, there were signs and omens of the valley for me which another might have passed by without remark. strange footprints upon the darkest paths, shrubs disturbed, scraps of paper thrown down with little caution—not one of them escaped me. but beyond them all, the rampart of the foaming water enchained my attention and fascinated me as at some human call to action. day by day the volume of the water in the boiling river was growing less. i first remarked it on the third day of our imprisonment; i made sure of it on the fifth day. inch by inch, from ledge to ledge, it sank in its channel. another, perhaps, would have attributed this to some natural phenomenon. i had too much faith in the man who served me to believe any such thing. okyada was at work, i said. the hour of my liberty was at hand.
you may imagine how this discovery affected me, and how much it was in my mind when i spoke to joan of our approaching days of freedom. to my question, whether she would visit me again at my house in suffolk, she replied chiefly by a flushing of her clear cheeks and a quick look from those eyes which could be so eloquent.
“your sister did not like me,” she rejoined evasively; “the dear old thing, i could see her watching me just as though i had come to steal you from her.”
“would you have felt very guilty if you had done so, joan?”
“yes,” she said, and this so seriously that i regretted the question; “guilty to my life’s end, dr. fabos.”
i knew that she referred to the story of her own life and the men among whom destiny had sent her. here was a barrier of the past which must stand between us to all time, she would have said. the same thought had disquieted me often, not for my sake but for her own.
“i would to god, joan,” said i, “there were no greater guilt in the world than this you speak of. you forbid me to say so. shall i tell you why?”
she nodded her head, looking away to the patch of blue water revealed by the gorge of the mountains. i lay at her side and had all a man’s impulse to take her in my arms and tell her that which my heart had prompted me to say so many days. god knows, i had come to love this fragile, sweet-willed child of fortune beyond any other hope of my life or ambition of the years. day by day, her eyes looked into my very soul, awakening there a spirit and a knowledge of whose existence i had been wholly ignorant. i loved her, and thus had fallen into the snare my enemies had set upon me. how little they understood me, i thought.
“you forbid me to say so, joan,” i ran on, “because you do not trust me.”
“do not trust you, dr. fabos?”
“not sufficiently to say that i am about to save you from all dangers—even the danger of past years.”
“you cannot do that—oh, you cannot do it, dr. fabos.”
i covered her hand with my own, and tried to compel her to look me in the face.
“when a woman learns to love and is loved she has no past,” i said. “all that should concern her is the happiness of the man to whom she has given her life. in your own case, i believe that we shall read the story of bygone years together and find it a sweet story. i do not know, joan; i am only guessing; but i think it will be a story of a woman’s love and a father’s suffering, and of an innocent man upon whom the gates of prison were long closed. say that the child of these two, entitled to a fortune in her own right, became the prey of a villain, and we shall be far upon our way. that’s the thought of your prophet. he would give much, joan, if the facts were as he believes them to be.”
be sure she turned her head at this and looked me full in the face. i have never seen so many emotions expressed upon a childish face—joy, doubt, love, fear. quick as all her race to read an enigma, she understood me almost as soon as i had spoken. a light of wondrous thankfulness shone in her eyes. there were long minutes together when we sat there in silence, and the only sound was that of her heart beating.
“oh,” she cried, “if it were true, dr. fabos, if it were true!”
“i will prove it true before we have been in england a month.”
she laughed a little sadly.
“england—england. how far is england away? and my own dear america?”
“seven days in my yacht, white wings.”
“if we were birds to fly over the hills!”
“the hills will be kind to us. to-day, to-morrow, whenever it is, joan, will you cross the hills with me?”
she promised me with a warmth that betrayed her desire. fearing longer to dwell upon it, i left and went again to the little river to see what message it had for me. did the waters still ebb away or had my fancy been an hallucination?
standing this day upon the very brink of the chasm through which the river flowed, i knew i was not mistaken. the stream had subsided by another foot at the least; it no longer raced and tumbled through the gorge; it was scarcely more than warm to the hand. someone without had diverted its course and would dam it altogether when the good hour came. when that hour might be i had no means of knowing. but my course was clear. i must rest neither night nor day while deliverance was at hand; there must be neither sleeping nor waking for me until okyada called me and the gate stood open.
and what of joan, what of my promise to her? should i leave her the prisoner of the valley or take her over the hills as i had promised? the responsibility was greater than any i had ever faced. let her go with me, and what a tale these villains would have to tell the world! let her remain, and what cruelty, what persecution might she not suffer at the valley house! i knew not what to do. it may be that fortune wished well to me when she took the matter out of my hands and left me no alternative but to go alone. however it be, i shall relate in a word the simple fact that okyada, my servant, entered my bedroom at ten o’clock that very night, and that, when i crossed the landing to wake joan, she did not answer me, nor could my diligent search discover her to be in the house at all.
and the minutes of my opportunity were precious beyond all reckoning.
“good god!” i cried, “that i must leave her to such men and to such a judgment!”
for i knew that it must be so, and that by flight alone, and the perils of flight, would our salvation be won.
