"Eh?" said Taltavull.

"I mean, isn't this all a blind? Wasn't that letter written just to put us on the wrong track? Why should the man have taken the trouble to make all that long screed just for the sake of jeering, when he wouldn't be here to see what effect his smart sarcasms would have?

Besides, if he showed his route, he might think we could work the telegraph wires and get him and his blessed feluccre stopped in Soller Port till we came up. Now, here or Palma are the orthodox outlets to this island. What's the best way to Palma?"

"La Puebla, and rail from there."

"Bet any one an even ten pesetas that Mr. Pether has cleared by the early train from La Puebla."

"The same road leads out of here till it branches, whether one is going to Pollensa or La Puebla," exclaimed the anarchist, with a fresh access of excitement. "I can wire friends at both places, who can find out for me which way they have gone. I will go and do it at once."

He rushed away to the stairhead till Haigh shouted, "Put on your trousers, man, first!" and then he turned to his own bedroom.

"He don't take a whipping well," said I, as the gaunt figure disappeared.

"Ruffle a fanatic," said Haigh, "and you'll soon see that he's all superfluous nerves and useless springs."

[_There breaks in at this point an extract from the life-history of Mr. N. C. Pether, which bears upon the main narrative. It is told by himself._]

CHAPTER XV.

CAMARADERIE.

... Again I distinguished the Belgian drummer's steps coming aft along the deck planks. "They are all so sick below," said he, "that I could endure it no longer." He sat down on the saloon skylight beside me.

"You see that low hummocky island we are coming to, out yonder on the port hand? Cabrera, monsieur, where they say Hannibal was born, and where they hope and expect M. Blanc's successors will find a resting-place for their tables when France and Italy hound them out of Monte Carlo. I was over in Cabrera the other day. I ran across in the little packet from Palma. There's a lovely harbour there--almost as good as the one at Mahon; and the place holds two hundred people, who are planting vines and building fortifications. My faith, it will be a heavy change if they make that into the fashionable gambling h.e.l.l of Europe.

"You are regarding the island--you see its contours; now shut your eyes.

"'_Messieurs faites vo' jeu._'--There's the big fast Steamer that has just run over from Ma.r.s.eille in ten hours with a full pa.s.senger list of French, English, Russians, and Americans. Few have braved the sea-trip just to idle about the _casino_ as they used to do near Monaco. These are men and women who have come for hard business at the tables, and who for the most part expect to break or be broke.

"There is a gorgeous hotel awaiting them at the head of the harbour, where they dress and dine, and then out they go, down the avenues of rustling date-palms (which bear electric lamps amongst their ochre fruit-cl.u.s.ters), and so on, to the most sumptuous building in the world, the new Cabreran _casino_.

"It differs hugely from the old temple of chance on the edge of the Continent--that _enfer sur terre_ set amid a _paradis_. There is no ornate concert-room here, or theatre or opera house. There is not even a _salon_ for gossip and smoke and exercise. The whole is one enormous _salle de jeu_, and the clink of gold against yellow gold is the only instrumental music. The cartwheel five-franc piece is nowhere permissible now, and at the _rouge et noir_ tables hundred-franc notes are the smallest stake. There is a change in everything except in the croupiers and the chefs, and the actual tables and machinery over which they preside. Even the atmosphere is new. The old dry heat is no more. In its place is a moist warmth, heavy with the scent of heliotrope and tuba roses. It seems as if one of the scent factories at Hyeres had staved its vats somewhere close at hand. Change everywhere. Mesdemoiselles les cocottes----But I weary m'sieu' with my twaddle. '_Rien ne va plus._' The farce is over.

"Regard that brown promontory yonder, the easternmost horn of Palma Bay. With permission take my _lunette_. So; now you cannot fail to see. A ship of the Romans laden with pottery struck there in time past, filled, and went down in deep water. The fishermen often bring up in their nets unbroken pieces from her cargo, crocks and pipkins identical in shape and texture with those the islanders use to-day. Ah, m'sieu', but they are ignorant, these Mallorcans, and happy in their ignorance.

Food is so easily gained that none need starve; they have the best climate imaginable, free from the sirocco which plagues Algeria, and from the mistral which kills one on the Riviera; they are too indolent to meddle with politics; they live in a lotus-land of beauty and ease.

We should despise them, monsieur, but I fear many of us will envy their lot."

The _Antiguo Mahones_ was threading her way through a fleet of small fishing-boats, as I could tell by the reduced speed, the hooting of the siren, and the constant and prolonged rattle of the steering rods. Soon she would bring up to the quay in Palma harbour. Why should I not get ash.o.r.e there and work out the hard problem that was engaging me?

So far I had made no scheme of ultimate route. The meeting at the Mahon hotel with that cheery _chevalier d'industrie_ Haigh, and the knowledge that that more robust brigand, his bl.u.s.tering, heavy-fisted partner Cospatric, was close at hand, had given me little leisure to plan far ahead. All my time was occupied in thinking how to fool the one and keep out of sight of the other till I could make escape from their immediate vicinage.

But having once cleared from the island, it seemed to me that all probable danger of our future meeting was pa.s.sed; at any rate, Mallorca would be the most unlikely spot to run foul of them in. So when the commercial traveller had turned away to look after his own affairs again, I got hold of Sadi, and told him to pull our traps together and pay up what we owed.

Sadi turned and set about fulfilling the order without a question. That is the best of Sadi. He never wants to know the why or wherefore of anything. Within limits he is the perfection of a servant for a man such as me.

I had trusted Sadi with many things, and so far he had never failed me.

I felt sure that he liked me, which was more than I would have said for any other member of the human race. But all the same, if he had seen it worth his while to rob or betray, I'd a pretty strong notion that blood instinct would prove too strong, and he'd do it. You see, Sadi's mother was half Arab, half Portuguese; his father was all Portuguese--jail-bird Portuguese; his youth had been spent in Marquez, which is on Delagoa Bay; and these things do not breed immaculate honesty calculated to stand every strain.

I may have wronged Sadi. As I say, he never failed me. But I felt that there might reasonably be a limit to his faithfulness, and to let him have the solving of that inscription which I carried about my person locked in a fleckless photographic plate might very well have outstepped that limit. It would have been a heavy test on an archbishop's honesty.

So I did not intend to employ Sadi about this matter except as a last resort. I wished to let this, the most valuable secret the world contained, be known to no one except myself, if it could be so contrived. I desired to get it stored within my brain alone, and then to destroy the only other trace of it that was existent.

Yet labouring under my peculiar disadvantage, the task appeared a hopelessly impossible one.

As I went down the gang-plank and ranged up against Sadi's elbow, walking with him past the wine casks and other litter on Palma quay, it seemed to me that after all I should have to accept the risk and recruit this companion's aid. But such a decision was far too momentous to be hurriedly jumped at. The Recipe was safely locked in the yellow-green film. To most of the world its very existence was unknown, and I did not think that either Haigh or Weems or Cospatric would ever guess the manner in which it had been carried off and transferred to an invisible shape. Yes, the dark slide and its contents seemed safe in my possession, and as we entered the sacking-floored carriage that was to take us up to our _Fonda_, I registered a resolve concerning it.

_Pace_ accidents, I would cudgel my own resources for one entire year before I gave in and sought external aid.

At the Fonda de Mallorca I took, in Spanish fashion, a three-roomed suite, and for one entire day did not move out of their whitewashed fastnesses.

I sat thinking, thinking, and thinking, and felt my brain grow duller with every effort.

"This will not do," I told myself. "I am used to fresh air, and sunshine, and the sound of voices, and I must live amongst all these as usual if I am to puzzle out this riddle. The answer, the key, if it comes at all, will arrive in a snap and a sudden, and won't be got at by tedious pondering in an uncomfortable hermitage."

So the next morning I spent on the roof chatting with a girl who was hanging out clothes to dry on the roof adjoining, sniffing the scent of the oranges which came from a roof-garden across the street, toasting myself under the hot sun, and getting fanned by the sweet sea-air that poured up over the housetops from the curved bay beyond.

A bell clanged below, and I went down the steps to luncheon. The landlord, according to his wont with strangers who were entered as _Senor_ and not as _Don_, intended that I should join the drummers' mess; but I was in no particular mood for that racy a.s.sembly just then, and bade Sadi take me to the dining-room at the other end of the house, where I sat down amongst garrison officers, proprietors come in from the country, and members of that bachelor fraternity which lived at the club opposite, and had their two princ.i.p.al daily meals here. They all knew one another, and had their well-worn cycle of conversation. They were tolerably cultured men, who rose superior to patois, and spoke pure and beautiful Castilian.

No one addressed me, and I did not open my mouth for speech. Probably it never dawned upon them that I understood a word of their tongue. We Anglo-Saxons abroad have not a reputation for being polyglot, and I never advertise my own small linguistic attainments unless specially called upon to do so. I do not care particularly for the trouble of talking myself, and one scores sometimes by a taste for silence. I made rather a good point that way once in a certain Genovese _caffe_.

When that _desayuno_ had progressed as far as cold pickled tunny, which came as a fourth course, we had an addition to the party. There was a light pattering of feet along the tiles to the doorway, and I felt the men around me bow--as they bowed to each newcomer. I joined them in the salute, and heard with surprise, as the fresh arrival went round by the table-head, the rustle of skirts--of tweed skirts, or else of rough serge, I could not be certain which.

She took a seat opposite to me. The waiter placed before her a basin of soup. It was a Mallorquin soup, which consisted for the most part of slices of bread and a few slips of greens soaked in a very thin stock, with an egg broken over the whole so that the boiling mixture poached it lightly. Also there was a little oil added--native rancid oil. This sounds very nasty, but like the taste for olives, if a taste for that soup is once developed, it fascinates. Myself, I like this soup. The woman opposite did not. She told the waiter to take it away, naming it by its proper Mallorquin name.

"The _arte de cocina_ of our island is not for every one's palate, I fear, senora," observed one of the men beside her. "It is not every foreigner who takes to it like your countryman _vis-a-vis_."

Till then I had been uncertain of her nationality, though I had had my suspicions of it, for the Anglo-Saxon walk differs from the gait of the southern nations; but on this slender introduction we dropped into conversation, and spoke in English of those desultory matters which one does chat upon to a casual hotel acquaintance.

We others had ended our meal before she was midway, and the Spaniards had finished their cigarettes and coffee before she rose.

"You say, sir," said she, when she pushed the dish of burnt almonds finally away and rolled her napkin into its ring--"you say, sir, that you are staying here some time. So am I. It is my happiness to know the island well. If I can be of any use to you, command me. I see, with regret, that you are blind."

I'm afraid I frowned angrily. She had touched me on my only sore point.

"Madame," I said, "I congratulate you on your clear-sightedness. I flatter myself that I conceal my blindness from most people. I dare lay a heavy wager that none of the others who have been sitting round this table has so much as guessed at it."

"I had--that is, I knew some one intimately, sir, whose eyesight had been destroyed. So you see I naturally noticed trifles about you which would escape others. But you may trust me not to mention a word about it. _Adios, senor, y diez mil perdons._"

She rose and bowed. I did the same. I was angry with the woman and yet attracted by her, and at the same time ashamed of being so. I suppose these three conflicting emotions combined to make me careless. Anyway, the next thing that happened was that I, who never stumbled, found myself blundering over a rush-seated chair, and sweeping two dessert-plates from the table as I clutched out to preserve my balance.

The waiter, who was in the room, rapped out a good round obscene oath of surprise. Nothing but the woman's action could have prevented his discovering my infirmity. She laughed amusedly, and said in Spanish, "Why, senor, one might think you were blind. You should look to your path even when you are very polite." And then she drew near me at the corner of the table, and rested her elbow against mine as skilfully and un.o.btrusively as Sadi himself could have done it.

"You see, I know better than to grip you by the arm," she said, dropping into English again.

"You have a skill and tact that not one in a million possesses. I am deeply grateful." We were at the foot of the stone stairs. I had my hand on the slim iron rail.

"You will be able to get back to your rooms now?"