Part 16

There was a moment's silence. "If it were anything else!" protested the girl. "If I could change places with father I would run to do it--you know that--but this"--with a gesture of repugnance the girl threw out her hands--"to pretend--to care! It is degrading, it makes me feel unclean."

"You will make an enemy," asked the mother coldly, "of the only person who can bring your father back to us? Sooner than let Pino think you care for him, you would let him turn against us? You and Pino," she pleaded, "are old friends. Your father is his friend. What more natural!" She broke forth hysterically. "I beg of you," she cried, "I command you not to make an enemy of Pino. Tell him to wait, tell him that now you can think of nothing but your father, but that when your father is free, that if he will only set him free--" The mother held the girl toward her, searching her eyes. "Promise me," she begged.

Inez regarded her mother unhappily, and turned away.

This, then, on the afternoon of Colonel Vega's arrival at Curaçao was the position toward him and toward each other of the three women of the Rojas household, and explains, perhaps, why, when that same afternoon Captain Codman told them the marvelous tale of Roddy's proposition, Señora Rojas and her daughter received the news each in a different manner.

Before she had fully understood, Señora Rojas exclaimed with gratitude:

"It is the hand of God. It is His hand working through this great company."

"Not at all," snapped Captain Codman. "The company has nothing to do with it. As far as I can see it is only the wild plan of a harum-scarum young man. He has no authority. He's doing it for excitement, for an adventure. He doesn't seem to know anything of--of what is going on--and, personally, I think he's mad. He and his friend are the two men who twice drove past your house this morning. What his friend is like I don't know; but Forrester seems quite capable of forcing his way in here. He wants what he calls 'credentials.' In fact, when I refused to help him, he as much as threatened to come here and get them for himself."

The voice of Señora Rojas was shaken with alarm. "He is coming here!" she cried. "But if he is seen here they will know at once at Caracas, and my husband will suffer. It may mean the end of everything." Her voice rose, trembling with indignation. "How dare he! How dare he, for the sake of an adventure, risk the life of my husband? How can he expect to succeed where our friends have failed, and now, when Pino has returned and there is hope."

"I told him that," said the Consul.

"You warned him," insisted the Señora; "you told him he must not come near us?"

Inez, who, with her sister, stood eagerly intent behind the chair in which their mother was seated, laid her hand soothingly upon the Señora's shoulder.

"Is it best," she asked, "to turn the young man away without learning what he wishes to do? Living in Porto Cabello, he may know something we could not know. Did you find out," she asked the Consul, "in what way Mr. Forrester wishes to help us?"

"No," confessed Captain Codman, "I did not. I was so taken aback," he explained; "he was so ignorant, so cocksure, that he made me mad. And I just ordered him out, and I told him, told him for his own good, of course," the Consul added hastily, "that he talked too much."

With critical eyes Inez regarded her old friend doubtfully, and shook her head at him.

"And how did he take that?" she asked.

"He told me," answered the Consul, painfully truthful, "that my parrot had said the same thing, and that we might both be wrong."

There was an instant's silence, and then Inez laughed. In shocked tones her mother exclaimed reprovingly.

"But he comes here," protested the girl, "to do us a service, the greatest service, and he is ordered away. Why should we refuse to let him help us, to let any one help us. We should make the most of every chance that offers."

Señora Rojas turned in her chair and looked steadily at her daughter.

"Your advice is good, Inez," she said, "but it comes strangely from you."

At the same moment, as though conjured by her thought, a servant announced Colonel Vega, and that gentleman, with several of those who had lunched with him at the Café Ducrot, entered the room. In alarm Captain Codman waited only to shake hands with the visitors and then precipitately departed. But in the meeting of the exiles there was nothing that would have compromised him. The reception of Colonel Vega by the three women was without outward significance. They greeted him, not as a leader of their conspiracy, but as they might have received any friend who, after an absence, had returned to them. When he bent over the hand of Inez he raised his liquid eyes to hers, but the girl welcomed him simply, without confusion.

He decided that her mother could not as yet have told her of his wishes. Had she done so he felt sure, in view of the honor he would pay her, her embarrassment at meeting him would have been apparent to all.

Vega himself elected to tell the ladies of the attack made upon him at the Café Ducrot. He made little of it. He let the ladies understand that his life, like that of all public men, was always at the mercy of assassins. To Roddy he gave full credit.

"Imagine this man reaching for his weapon," he related dramatically, "myself too far from him to fall upon him, and my arms resting upon the shoulders of my two good friends. Their safety, also, is in my mind. But I am helpless. I saw the villain smile confidently. He points the weapon. Then the young man springs upon him and the bullets pass us harmlessly. Believe me, but for Mr. Forrester all three of us, General Pulido, Colonel Ramon and myself, might now be dead."

The two gentlemen designated dismissed the thought with a negligent wave of the hand. It suggested that, to soldiers like themselves, being dead was an annoyance to which they had grown accustomed.

"Mr. Forrester!" exclaimed Inez, catching at the name.

"Mr. Forrester!" repeated her mother. "But I thought--I was told only just now that he knew nothing of our plans."

"That is quite true," Colonel Vega assured her. "He was not with us. He was there by accident."