Max Pemberton - Murder Mysteries Boxed-Set - 40+ Books in One Edition

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.”