The Villa of the Peacock The Villa of the Peacock And Other Stories By Richard Dehan ; ; Author of " The Dop Doctor " Gr \ -f , ! y ^ T~ *- *w u> * . < ' New York George H. Doran Company Printed in Great Britain Annex TO THE MEMORY . OF WILLIAM HEINEMANN 2135626 CONTENTS PAGE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 13 THE FORMULA OF BRANTIN 79 DOROTEA ET CIE 123 THE SLUG'S COURTSHIP 168 THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF AN AUTOMOBILE 215 THE SILVER BIRCH 296 COUNTESS AND COUTURIERE 307 II THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK. I. IT stands in a fashionable suburb of the gayest and prettiest watering-place in all the Kingdom of Donda, San Silvestro on the Bahia, close to the northern frontier. Of cream-white stone, quaintly designed and beautifully built, its high-pitched roofs sheathed with the deep chocolate-brown tiles of Donda North -West, its shutters, casements, balconies, doors, verandahs, enamelled lizard-green, the sumptuous villa standing in carefully-tended grounds full of palms and tree-ferns, mimosa, syringa, magnolia, and the white-blossomed acacia, Persian lilac and jasmine, white, pink and yellow, embowered in its thickets of roses, its verdant lawns adorned with beds of seasonable flowers, seemed a fit setting for a mistress as handsome as the sardine- merchant's wife. On the level of the drawing-room balcony between the long windows, a ten-foot high plaque of magnificent majolica representing a pea- rock in all the glory of his displayed plumage had been built into the wall. The peacock has gone, leaving a long scar upon the masonry. The House of the Peacock stands J3 i 4 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK empty, its paint blistering, its woodwork warping under the savage rains and frosts and suns. Don Abramo Zabalza is dead; dead also is the lovely Donna Teresa who turned the heads of the dandies of the Plaza de Nautilo and the Avenida, and many persons of greater importance, and never suffered an admirer to kiss the tip of her little finger. " For am I not," she would demand of her female friends, making great eyes of indignation and folding her white arms upon her swelling bosom, " a virtuous married woman, the esposa of my Abramo and the mother of his child?" " And such a child !" the gossips would squawk in chorus. " ' Dios, que hermoso esl' To see the angel in his little goat-carriage upon the Paseo with his nurse and his aya, as splendid as a little king ! And the likeness ! Was ever anything so marvel- lous? Two chick-peas could not be more alike!" And innocent Donna Teresa would laugh and blush and shake her finger, plumper than of old, but a dainty little digit still, and if her infant angel happened to be near, whip him up and kiss the narrow oval cheeks and the bright brown eyes and pouting underlip of the urchin who so oddly re- sembled the youthful King of Donda, though senior to his sovereign by a year. One recalls how suddenly Aldobrando I. of Donda, a good churchman, a capable ruler, and a faithful husband to his Austrian wife, died upon a hunting expedition among the mountains. The receipt of the telegram precipitated an event eagerly THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 15 awaited by all monarchists. Vast crowds assembled outside the royal palace at the Dondese capital of Calamaria upon the night of the Queen's day of be- reavement, asking one another: "Will it be a King?" When the royal standard with its great rampant bulls was hauled down from half-mast to run up and break at the top of the flagstaff, a sustained 11 Th' th' th'!" of relief went up from all those lisping Latin palates. The guns of the fortress were dumb out of consideration. It was a hot spring night. The people dispersed to eat gazpacho and tortillas and drink the health of the new con- stitutional monarch in frothed chocolate, syrup of currants, or sorbos of aguardiente, whilst guitars and mandolins throbbed or vibrated accompani- ments to national and loyal songs, and shouts of " Viva el Rey!" rent the clouds of state-monopo- lised cigarette-smoke tangled amongst the branches of the oaks and cork-trees beneath which the tables of the revellers were set. For to the contented monarchists of San Silvestro, where so many million duros of the royal revenues were annually spent, a baby King a brace of hours old meant con- tinuance of the dynasty under which security and good order, piping peace and comfortable quiet had been enjoyed by classes and masses, who had reason to sicken at the memory of the years of confusion, intrigue, plot, and counter-plot pull devil, pull baker between a Pretender to the throne and an Heir-presumptive robbed by reversion of the Salic Law. 16 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK II. The resemblance of the sardine merchant's son to his young sovereign did not lessen with the boy's growth. It was marvellous, extraordinary, one of those strange and not unusual duplications of an individuality that have constituted the amusement, the provocation, very often the torment and the curse of the men or women thus played upon by jesting Nature since Shakespeare wrote A Comedy of Errors upon the theme. Abramo Zabalza, originally a fisherman of the Bahia, who had invested his wife's dowry in busi- ness and amassed a fortune as a sardine-merchant, became richer still, unluckily for his youngster, who was reared by fond and foolish parents in iuxury, and gratified in every whim. Twice in each year the King visited San Silvestro. One may be sure the attire, carriage, gait, mode of speech, habits, tastes, whims of the royal urchin were care- fully noted by the doting Teresa and her circle of gossips, nor was Zabalza himself innocent of vanity in this regard. Certain lackeys of the palace persons honest, responsible and trusted, but chatterers nevertheless one or two elderly duennas of the same type, were made welcome at the House of the Peacock, to be flattered, caressed, and cossetted on condition that they talked about the King. Don Enrique himself THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 17 the spoiled and pampered urchin learned that such and such tones, gestures and movements bore more fruit in the gratification of his wishes than others, and worked the oracle. When he was ten years old or so, his sailor-suits and costumes Ecossais were (privately) procured from the firm of haber- dashers who imported these garments for the youth- ful Aldobrando II. On his tenth birthday the King entered as a cadet of the Royal Infantry Training School, and since their idol's vulgar antecedents debarred him from sharing the studies of royalty, the infatuated parents must buy their cub a little uniform to strut in at festas, and engage a sergeant- instructor to drill him into shape. As might have been expected, as the boy became a youth and the youth a man, this fostered idiosyn- crasy became obsession. He framed himself labori- ously upon his model, reproducing characteristics until tricks of expression, gait, voice, became involuntary. Educated by a constantly changing succession of highly certificated private tutors, the finished product of their labours bore out, upon the attainment of his majority, the truth of the vulgar proverb connected with a multiplicity of cooks. A handsome person, agreeable and easy manners, a taking bonhomie, lavish generosity to those who humoured his whims, or aided in the gratification of his wishes, were counterbalanced by a fierce and jealous temper, a disdainful attitude towards those high things which have at all times commanded the 18 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK reverence of the noble-minded, and a most colossal vanity. Dressed for the part for which Nature had equipped him, the heir of the i ; ch sardine-merchant speedily became chief with a set of polyglot un- desirables, frequenters of the Gran' Casino and hangers-on of the Opera coulisses. These were tickled by the oddity ; even flaneurs of a better cfass took Don Enrique up and petted him, so that un- instructed foreigners, seeing the youth made much of in such company, conceived wild ideas of the democratic habits and easy-going abnegation of re- serve and dignity manifested or so it seemed to them by Donda's constitutional sovereign. Never by word or look or sign had the King showed him- self aware of the existence of the double who haunted public places where royalty drove or walked, dressed, as far as his tailor dared humour his idiosyncrasy, after the fashion of His Majesty; until, after a flying visit to a northern capital, the betrothal of Aldobrando II. was announced in the Court Gazette and such daily Press organs as were staunch in their advocacy of monarchist prin- ciples ; when, greatly to his consternation, Abramo Zabalza received a visit at his counting-house from an official of the palace, the Court being at the moment in residence at San Silvestro. The honest sardine -merchant had prospered greatly since the birth of his bantling. From a dealer in the raw commodity, he had become a manu- THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 19 facturer, exporter and purveyor on a huge scale of the sardine in oil, the sardine in oil with olives, tomatoes or pimiento. Two manufactories under the name of Zabalza ceaselessly turned out, except on Sundays and festas, a constant stream of the preserved delicacy in all its varieties, which, with various other cates and comestibles, Abramo Zabalza, Especerio to His Majesty, retailed at six large establishments in the town. The interview was short but effective. The Queen Mother's Chamberlain delivered his message. For years the presumption of Zabalza had been noted, tolerated, and pardoned in recognition of his spot- less character and in sympathy with the parent of an only son. Now, since presumption had over- leaped all barriers, since a young man whose plebeian features Heaven had designed to model in some degree of likeness to Heaven's own anointed, not only favoured the resemblance by unlawful means, but exhibited himself to the people of San Silvestro, at the Gran' Casino, the restaurants, ball- rooms, and other places of resort less reputable, in the company of undesirable persons, both male and female, at last the sword must fall. Behold Abramo Zabalza, who had thriven in royal patronage, de- prived of the royal warrant. Further action on the part of supreme authority could only be stayed by the summary exile of Zabalza's offending son. " Excellencia, mercy!" the unhappy tradesman stammered. " Never have I or the boy's mother 20 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK dreamed of offending Her Majesty. . . . From childhood to manhood . . ." Abramo was getting incoherent " the Holy Saints my witnesses . . . devotion to the Throne as to the Faith ! But to send away our son No, es impossibile! Por Dios, Ex- cellencia, plead with Their Majesties I" Thus the unlucky Abramo. But the Chamberlain was inexorable. Having been endured, the younger Zabalza could no longer be tolerated. " Her Majesty grieves at the necessity of inflict- ing so severe a punishment. Don Enrique must take up residence abroad, senor. The royal warrant must be taken down from the shops and the manu- factories and erased from all tins, boxes, bottles, and catalogues. Your son must live abroad in Paris a young man of his tastes would find a very agreeable pied a terre. Her Majesty particularly indicates Paris, pray remember : Paris is the con- dition of her continued leniency and Christian toler- ation towards yourself and your family ! For now now that the King is to take upon himself the responsibilities of a husband and a father, the in- violability of the royal reputation, the spotlessness of the royal character, the sacredness of the royal person, must not be tarnished by the constant presence upon the soil of Donda of an individual bearing so infernal ahem ! so compromising a likeness to royalty as your son. Accept these terms with gratitude for the clemency of Her Majesty. Obey at once, or the police will close your shops THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 21 and manufactories, the royal warrants will be taken down by the public executioner " a neat touch that " and burned at the municipal destruidor " another. "And so, senor, I leave you in the keeping of Heaven." Upon which, with the usual compliments, His Excellency took leave and was conducted to the door. And the unhappy Abramo, who had grown obese with his banking account, suffered an attack of vertigo and was taken home by his chief cashier in a cab to his terrified and bewildered wife. Upon being bled and cauterised, he recovered sufficiently to falter out the story, and expired, fortified by the rites of Holy Church, before noon of the follow- ing day. Before the tombstone recording his virtues as citizen, husband, and father had been completed and set up, his heartbroken Teresa followed him. Don Enrique found himself heir to a great fortune and without a friend in the world. His pious mother's religious director, a Canon Regular of the Cathedral of San Silvestro, a person- age of high principles and discretion, in favour with the Court and Society, and popular amongst financial circles in the town, assisted the young man to arrange the matter of turning the Zabalza business into a limited company. Thus, being possessed of a large fortune, besides something approximating to another half-million in fully-paid shares in the parental concern, the exiled son of Zabalza the sardine-merchant shut up the Villa of 22 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK the Peacock, quitted his native land of Donda, and betook himself to France. III. Don Enrique Zabalza, up to the age of thirty-six, when sublunary matters ceased to absorb him, was a familiar figure in the Gallic capital, as at Rome, Vienna, Hungary, Monte Carlo, Biarritz, and other pleasure-resorts of the world. The passage of years seemed but to intensify the resemblance that was at once his good fortune and his bane. Physically speaking, that is to say, for the high degree of personal courage displayed in the attitude of the monarch towards anarchists, for instance, would have been impossible to Don Enrique. To laugh when the revolver-bullet of a would-be assassin has grazed one's cheek, or when the coachman and wheelers of the State coach have been killed by the explosion of a bomb ; to change coolly over to a Minister's carriage and proceed upon the route; to have been exposed for one calendar month to risks and perils such as every day and every hour attend upon the pathway of the most Catholic and constitutional sovereign of a country seething with hatred of the Church and rotten with Rationalism, Positivism, and anti-Christianity, would have speedily whitened Don Enrique's hair and reduced him mentally and physically to a jelly. But he was a notable runner, leaper, and THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 23 swimmer, a fine swordsman, a master of horseman- ship, a keen automobilist, a matchless tennis- player, and a courageous gamester to boot; possessed, moreover, of a discriminating taste in wine, tobacco, masculine fashions, and feminine charms. And he took care to exhibit the more showy of these accomplishments upon all the famous world-arenas where kings compete with commoners, achieving successes duly recorded in the fashionable intelligence-columns of the news- papers to the immense amusement of Society, and the undisguised delight of his townsfellows, the brawny fisherfolk and the plump tradesmen of San Silvestro's old town. " El Mozo has won the Paris Grand Prix with Petardista, his caballo de carrera, and broken the bank again at Homburg " (or Monte Carlo, or Monaco). "He has carried off the Gold Cup at the trials of the Cercle de I'Escrime and disarmed Domenichio, the Italian maestro. And yesterday, on the Deauville raqueta-courts he won the first single in the Tobert cup tie after a battle of two hours in the blazing sun. It may be, amigos, that by the permission of the saints, we shall one day see him play for San Silvestro Old Town on our own juego de pelota, for it is a shame a Dondese of Donda should do no honour to his native city, and the boy is an angel and a wonder at the game." "El Mozo" ("The Boy") that was the old town's nickname for the exiled scapegoat and 24 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK scapegrace. As nicknames will, it stuck to him and followed him. Did not Miss Jeanette K. O'Geogehan-Sculpin, the distinguished American journalist, in one of her sparkling " Society Snap- shots," regularly cabled from Paris to the Edi- torial Bureau of the Fortnightly Female Com- pendium of Social Doings, published at Potts- town, Penn., U.S.A., communicate, that, at an afternoon reception at the exquisite hotel of Madame la Comtesse Chiquet de Petit-Bleu (not far from the Fauberg St. Honors') she (Miss O'Geogehan-Sculpin) had enjoyed the distin- guished honour of meeting the Marquis of Almozo, brother (upon the ringless hand, be it whispered) to His Majesty the K. of This item of aristocratic intelligence, imported from Paris and bruited in New York, recrossed the herring streak. London society periodicals of the less illuminated, served up the Marquis de Almozo anew. Ere long the use of the title, ingenuously conferred upon Don Enrique by Miss O'Geogehan- Sculpin, became general. Some pretty lady at the Court of Donda tittered it into the ear of Aldo- brando II. from behind the shelter of her fan; some pompous minister, at the close of a political or diplomatic conference, may have unbent in the frank atmosphere of the King's study sufficiently to broach the jest. Aldobrando II. laughed heartily, suggesting that the Archivista Real should be directed to draw up the patent, and that THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 25 the Heralds' College of Donda should be com- missioned to design a coat-of-arms for the new peer, quarterly of four, blazoning three sardines, argent, naiant on a blue field, waved, a tomato proper, a tin-opener erect, gules, and a peacock in its pride. A poor piece of wit, possibly, but sharp enough to pierce to the very quick of its object. Zabalza's mistress, a dancer of the Opera, who had been refused some costly bibelot she coveted, had gathered the story from an attache 1 of the Dondese Ministry at Paris, and half in anger, half in jest, repeated it to Don Enrique. The result took away her breath. Ten first-class devils were unchained in her Futurist flat in the Rue Kleber by her own indiscretion. She gained the sensation of her life, and hopelessly lost her heart to a man whom, until that moment, she had tolerated and betrayed. "Ah'h! Infamous 1 Vile wretch! Is it thus you stab me? Me who have cherished you as the ball of my eye ! . . . Has Heaven given you no more wit than serves you to leap to your ruin ? Qu& desgrdcia! that I should have wasted my thousands on you. . . . What am I doing? . . . See what I am doing ! ... Y pues! are not the accursed things my own? . . . Pu&cal Sucia! Thrice abominable I There ! there 1 and there I . . . Behold!" Thus Don Enrique juriosame'nte', whilst darting hither and thither, from the big glass-topped toilet 2 6 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK table to the vast wardrobe, from the boudoir to the salon and back again, he stuffed his pockets with the jewels, his gifts, which the imprudent fair one had worn at supper on the previous night, tore up laces, jumped upon marvellous hats, reducing them to ruins, swept price- less china-ware and valuable bric-a-brac from dtageres and tables, starred costly mirrors with stabs of the poker, slashed oil-paintings by cele- brated masters to ribbons of canvas, and did not desist from his self-imposed labours until the con- cierge of the Avenue Kleber flat, accompanied by a policeman, appeared upon the scene. Don Enrique was more than gracious in his reception of these visitors. He greased the palm of the sergent de ville with a billet of 50 francs, told the concierge to sweep up and chuck into the dustbin all that rubbish, including the prostrate form of the swooning diva in the contemptuous southern gesture which accompanied the words. Then Don Enrique looked for and found his hat, set it at a defiant angle, rang up his car, descended to the vestibule, and quitted the flat and its mistress for ever, not without protestations upon the lady's part. She had never been so vilely treated, she vowed in a whole series of letters, written on rose-tinted paper with passionate purple ink. The man was a human monster a being incapable of remorse, dead to honour, deaf to sentiment, adamant to the THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 27 assaults of love ! She would forgive everything if Don Enrique would return. That was the re- frain. But Don Enrique never did. He had lived gaily and enjoyed life, but he was a Dondese of Donda, who had been rendered fatherless and motherless and exiled from his native land for no reason other thus Zabalza phrased it than an accidental resemblance to his sovereign lord the King. Now the King had jeered at the man whom he had injured. Thenceforward, above the attrac- tions of sport, the charms of the green table, the allurements of sensuous pleasure, the desire of vengeance reigned paramount in the heart of Abramo's son. To the attainment of his end he now sought and obtained the entry into circles composed of units instead of individuals, who owned groups instead of families, and answered to numbers instead of names. IV. What is anarchy ? Anarchy is the negation of order, produced by the fevered revolt of the degenerate human unit against those governing institutions, monarchical or republican, which are accepted by the sane majority as indispensable to the maintenance of order and the resulting welfare of mankind. The social revolutionary, while professing to despise power and the employment of organised force, 28 THE VILUA OF THE PEACOCK which men term militarism, aims at the acquire- ment and monopoly of unlimited power by terrorism, which is force applied without humanity. To-day, in Bolshevism, we have example of what wanton wreck and ruin, degradation, brutality, and filth must inevitably follow the unscrupulous use of terrorism. In the spring of 1914, when the catastrophe of world-war was close upon us, we were less wise than we are to-day. Civilisation wavered on the edge of Armageddon, the aerials of great wireless installations thrilled with intrigue and warning, the tuned spark sang of the coming life-and-death struggle in the ears of many men in many quarters of the globe. Upon a night in the May of 1914, in a long, bare, ugly basement room in Soho, only illuminated by a grated pavement-light, through which the muni- cipal standards in the street above threw a bluish glimmer, rendered stuffy by an anthracite stove at which many papers were continually burned, a gathering of men and women of all nationalities and types, some haggard and half-starved, some sleek and well-dressed, were assembled on rows of chairs, or benches ranged two or three deep about the plastered walls. They were delegates repre- senting various centres of anarchical activity at this, the London Congress of Social Revolutionaries, held in the spring of 1914 to discuss forthcoming propaganda. In the centre of the room, under an incandescent-gas standard of the inverted T-type, THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 29 eight men and two women sat in the semi-gloom about a table of ink-stained deal. A Windsor arm- chair was at the table's upper end, where were writ- ing materials, a small auctioneer's hammer, a telephone standard, a kind of ballot-box, a wine glass containing a few fresh green grass-blades and a little brass bell. Presently a trap-door in the floor lifted. A shaggy head butted it up, and the thick- set person to whom the head belonged, moved to the chair at the table-head and sat heavily down in it. As he did so, every other person in the room rose up. The man now occupying the Windsor chair was known to everybody present, and to nobody. He had no name amongst Social Revolutionaries other than "The Bell." "The Bat" would have been a more appropriate pseudonym for the mysterious shaggy man in the shabby clothing. Possessed by the colossal ambition of seeing the world's exist- ing social fabric overthrown and replaced by anarchical conditions, this individual passed his life in strenuous movement, ceaseless agitation, un- sleeping toil, unremitting vigilance. Constantly disappearing, to reappear suddenly in some un- expected quarter, he flitted from Paris to London, from London to Berlin, thence to the Russian capital or Vienna or Prague, thence to Rome, Madrid, or Calamaria, the torment of the espions of the world's secret services, the despair of the police. 30 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK He rang his bell, and a screen was pulled over the street light. The jets of the T leaped hissing into brilliance, revealing a seated company. Proceedings began with a report of progress covering the active propaganda of the past five years. In breathless silence the revolutionaries listened as the deep-voiced " Bell " rose to read out the record. He grew livid as he proceeded. Great drops of perspiration started upon his bulging fore- head to course down his purple cheeks. His blood- shot eyes projected from their orbits, and he wrenched at the dirty red handkerchief fastened in a singular knot about his bull-throat as though he were suffocating. When the record ended "Oh, my children!" he groaned forth in tones of deep rumbling bass. "What a falling off is here ! Save a few petty acts of punishment, some isolated and unimpressive strikes, what has been achieved in the world during the last three years towards the attainment of the vast ideals of Social Revolution ? The propaganda by deed has dwindled into mere sabotage, anti-militarism, and the dis- semination of the articles of our great and glorious Neo-Ethical Code not by terrible and magnificent acts, which the ignorant term crimes, but by lecturers who refresh themselves between the clauses with sips from a glass of water. A little longer a few years more, unhappy children and all that I have endured, laboured, suffered, will have been in vain ! Social Revolution will be preached from pulpits with velvet cushions, enforced with squirts filled with rosewater, instead of bombs packed with projectiles and loaded with deadly fulminates. No Kings will tremble on their thrones ; no Presidents become prematurely white-haired for fear of the revolver, the stiletto, or the shattering bomb. Alas ! my children " Sobs choked the utterance of "The Bell," and a dull murmur filled the crowded basement room, intensifying until the mutterings of a storm seemed to beat upon the grimy whitewashed walls. Ringing for silence, their great leader continued, recapitulating in swift trenchant sentences the triumphs of the past. He described with impas- sioned eloquence the glorious death of the last sublime martyrs who perished for the Cause in January, 1910, in the conflagration in Sidney Street, Mile End, and to arrest whom a platoon of Scots Guards from the Tower, three detachments of City police, and half a battery of Royal Horse Artillery, with three guns, were called ineffectively to the spot. He shed tears of pure admiration and reverence upon the grave of Emile Landry, the Paris bomb-thrower, as upon the tomb of the noble Kotuku of Tokio and his mistress, San Amabashi, the parents of communistic anarchism in Japan, who had plotted the Mikado's death in 1908 and suffered capital punishment by being sawn asunder. He painted the stirring scenes of republican revolution in Portugal, and thrilled his hearers with 32 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK a fervently-expressed tribute to Manoel Buicci and Alfredo Costa, the assassins of the King and the Crown Prince. He went back to the Barcelona riots, strewed green laurels on the grave of Feuer, and described the outrage of the Calle Riosa, Donda, when Alejandro Mayor threw a bomb at the Crown coach on the occasion of the King's wedding, as a poetic and beautiful dream of revenge upon a tyrant, unhappily frustrated by Fate, for though fifteen unimportant persons had been killed and a score or so injured, the King and his bride had escaped with a scratch or so. His hearers wept with him as he described the suicide of Alejandro Mayor, who shot a rural guard who tried to arrest him fourteen miles from the scene of the outrage, and then turning his Browning pistol upon him- self, cried: "This for one who has failed!" and, pulling the lever, died. "Sleep, sleep for all time, oh, our brother!" "The Bell" concluded; "for the lesson of thy glorious endeavour and thy heroic exit is not lost. A man will arise who, guided by thy example and animated by thy spirit, will not fail us ! Were I younger in years I would unflinchingly take the duty upon myself. Even now I Shade of Caserio ! What's that?" Footsteps had thudded over the wired glass of the basement-light; there was a knocking at the outer door. Now the sound of trampling on the outer stair caused the venerable "Bell" to leap THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 33 from his chair, pocket his bell and sheaf of papers, and promptly vanish down the trap-door. Three heavy knocks upon the door threw the assembled delegates into horrible confusion. Some wrestled with the trap-door, which "The Bell" had bolted behind him, and which communicated via the cellars with an exit into Soho. Yet others slid back a sooty square of sheet-iron protecting the wall behind the stove-pipe, which, moving in grooves, disclosed a hiding-place large enough to conceal three or four men. While these fought to be first in, more unyielding spirits produced re- volvers, daggers, or stiletti, or pastilles of deadly poison contained in tubes and carried upon the person, thus providing the certain means of escape from the clutches of the Law. Nobody swallowed one of these bonbons, or pricked his bosom with a point, or drew a trigger, thus proving the love of life occa- sionally stronger than the tenets of the Neo-Ethical code. But when the pass- word of the night was harshly and repeatedly bellowed through the key- hole, the revolutionaries mustered courage to un- lock the door of ingress, which was of stout teak- wood strengthened with sheet-iron. "Hombre!" said a Southern voice as a man wrapped in a dark mantle entered the stuffy base- ment. " But you stink infernally here!" And discarding his black ca-pa somewhat theatri- cally, he folded his arms upon his bosom, and con- founded a majority among the anarchists, whose 3 34 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK black eyes and swarthy skins proclaimed them Dondese of the land of Donda, with the heartily- hated person of their own Most Catholic King. V. A moment of stupefaction ensued. Then a babel of shouts, curses, and execrations, the more appal- ling by being uttered in semi-stifled tones, broke out about the immovable intruder. " Himmelkreiitzbombenelement! It is he ! It is he of Donda!" " Death ! Death to Aldobrando II. !" " Kaput to the puppet of monarch ism !" " Kill the pupil of the priests ! Ab basso ! Male- dizione!" "Kill him here and now! Carajol Is he not already sentenced?" " Mori, mort aux rois! Conspuez le tyran!" A piercing voice made itself heard through the snarling of those wolves and jackals. A pale young woman, with brilliant grey eyes, one of the Heads of Centres distinguished by a seat at the President's table, thrust herself between Don Enrique and his assailants, crying, in a piercing tone : " Comrades, you are in error ! Do you not know that the King of Donda has a double ? This is not Aldobrando, but the sardine-seller's son !" At which "The Bell," who had reappeared un- noticed, pushing his way through the press of THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 35 bodies, thrust his bloated face near that of Don Enrique, and sternly regarding him with his fierce bloodshot eyes, said briefly : "Comrades, this comrade of ours is right. 'Tis only the mannequin!" And as a burst of jeering laughter cleared the air of electricity, he added, turning to the young woman : "You, comrade, will give us your number and group." The young woman confronted the speaker and answered boldly : "Number 11,339, Executive Centre 13, War- saw." An electrical shock of excitement volted through the assemblage, and "The Bell," opening his shaggy arms, said commandingly : " Embrace me, daughter of Theodor Levinski I" When the girl had obeyed, with palpable shrink- ing from the osculation, he returned to the Presi- dential chair and said, ringing for silence : "Now then, comrades, let us be getting on. Meanwhile, let this fellow be kept under observa- tion ; we will deal with him by and by." While Don Enrique's hand was lightly touched by warm lips in a swift kiss, and the pale girl, as she raised her head, whispered, barely audibly, meeting the man's flashing glance of thanks with a look of passionate regard : " Caballero, I have paid part of my debt. This 36 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK is the hand that saved myself and my dearest father from the burning railway-carriage a year ago. You cannot have forgotten that accident to the Bordeaux- Orleans express?" Don Enrique could not possibly have forgotten what he had never experienced. He bowed his head, gently looking in the face of the beautiful revolu- tionary, whose lustrous eyes were full of tears. "It was between Angouleme and Poitiers; the engine and eight carriages were derailed and burn- ing. But for you we should have perished horribly, ' ' continued the girl, "and the extremists of the Social Revolutionary party would have suffered frightful loss in the death of my father. He is Theodor Levinski, author of the 'Catechism of Anarchy ' and the chemist inventor of the new fulminate." Her grey eyes glowed as she con- tinued proudly: "The T.L. that has never been known to fail. No great deed of terrorism under- taken by its aid has fallen short of the expectations of its undertakers. The bomb of the Calle Riosa at Donda in 1906 was the first engine of revolu- tionary justice to testify to its marvellous powers. Since then the explosion at the Rue Fortune" in Paris in 1908, where thirteen persons suffered wounds and an enemy of Social Revolution suffered the extreme penalty, the execution of Signer Valli- clera outside the Italian Consulate at Zurich in 1910, the acts of justice performed at Vera Cruz, Montevideo, Santiago in Chile, and at Buenos THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 37 Ayres in 1912 and 1913, not mentioned to-night by our great President, but each attended by destruc- tion of property, loss of blood, and death of persons inimical to extremists, have testified to its superi- ority over fulminate of mercury and even picric acid; and, thanks to you, Senor Don Enrique, my father lives to improve, if possible, upon this great and marvellous discovery." Tears choked her voice as she added : " I shall never forget how you appeared in my eyes, when, with a cut upon your cheek, un- heeded though bleeding, your hands blistered and your clothes scorched by the fire, you broke the bar and the carriage-window and dragged us both out. Then, though it was cold that night, you stripped off your overcoat to cover my father, and divided with us your sandwiches and the brandy in your flask. Your wrist was badly burned, I remember, and I bandaged it for you with a handkerchief. Has the burn left a scar? One would " " Senorita," said Don Enrique rather awkwardly, "what I did was absolutely nothing!" And he spoke with complete veracity, because he had never in his life performed a deed of heroism. But his Southern quickness of perception warned him not to forfeit, at the expense of a slight terminological inexactitude, his hold upon the plank that had saved him from shipwreck, and he ended: "For the scar upon my wrist, it has healed so completely that you would say there had never been a burn. I cannot claim for my heart the same immunity, for 38 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK it has never recovered from the deep wound dealt by your beautiful eyes 1" He spoke the truth about the eyes of Mademoiselle Levinski, for they were lodestars that had quickened many a susceptible anarchist to death. They re- garded him now with an expression that could bear but one interpretation ; and the secret conviction that it was the King of Donda who had uncon- sciously furthered the aims of the extreme terrorists by preserving Theodor Levinski for the discovery of even more terrible chemical combinations than the T.L. fulminate, and in so doing had won the heart of Mademoiselle Levinski, whetted the blade of his hatred to a keener edge than of yore. But "The Bell" was addressing him, and in the crowded basement, full of fetid exhalations, while the incandescent burners purred and hissed under the dirty ceiling, and the eyes of the delegates were fastened upon the speaker, "El Mozo" told his tale of wrong and unfolded his plan of revenge. In that exhausted atmosphere his dullish brain seemed to quicken, his limited intellect to develop, his mind to grasp, his purpose to consolidate. What he suggested would be, if carried out, a coup of wonderful effectiveness, a triumph for Social Revolutionaries all the world over. A crowned anarchist, an extreme terrorist reigning as a consti- tutional monarch, that is what the consummation of Don Enrique's suddenly conceived plan would amount to, if it could be carried out. And its THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 39 astonishing simplicity made it possible to carry out. It was practicable in the extreme. When Don Enrique had finished, a spontaneous burst of applause betokened the approbation of the an- archists, and "The Bell," rising to his feet, pro- posed the immediate initiation of the neophyte, and the administration of the oath. Upon a blade of grass, taken frc .- the wine- glass that stood beside the president's h Vpot, that terrible formula was recited. "Acknowledging no Deity," said the deep muffled tones of "The Bell," "we, the Children of Social Revolution, take our great oath of obedi- ence to the sacred statutes of our rode upon the commonest and most insignificant work of Nature. Behold our emblem in this blade of grass. Tread it under an iron heel, it will spring up again ; eradi- cate it with salt, burn it with fire, it will be re-sown by the birds and the winds, and re-clothe the barren field. It flourishes upon the dung-heap ; it thrives upon the dust of peasants, soldiers, kings and statesmen ; it covers with its green carpet of forget- fulness the levelled ruins of empires and the scattered ashes of republics, blotting out with rank luxuriance the mounds that were once monuments of men who forged chains, and made scourges and burdens of laws and customs, tithes and penalties with which to fetter, cow, and crush their fellow- men into the slavery that is indifferently called constitution, monarchy, dominion, federation, 40 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK union, state. Take now, repeating after me, the oath of the Social Revolutionary upon this blade of grass." It was taken. Don Enrique Zabalza received his number and was affiliated to his group. VI. He was thenceforth, upon his own initiative, and at his own suggestion, committed to a strenuous mode of life. Social Revolutionaries, who were at the same time masters of science in all its branches chiefly moral, political, legal, mathematical, ethnological, chemical, military took him in hand and crammed him. His flesh was reduced by drilling and physical exercises; his somewhat vulgar accent corrected by skilled teachers of elocu- tion ; his dress and deportment, in like degree, underwent a painstaking and complete revision. Need it be hinted that the likeness of Don Enrique to the King of Donda grew even more remarkable under this regime? In the autumn of that year the cataclysm of War broke upon us. Front after front burst into flame. One saw the world on fire. Donda, being a neutral country, suffered nothing more severe than scarcity of salt-fish and other popular comestibles and com- modities customarily imported, and a superfluity of influenza bacilli imported from Northern Man- churia via France. Money also was scarce, though THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 41 that is nothing new in Donda. San Silvestro's two annual seasons were the pale ghosts of what they had been, and the Teatro without the Paris companies was undeniably dull. But with the victory of the Allies and the proclam- ation of peace, gaiety returned to San Silvestro. That summer season following the rigours and privations of War was of memorable, marvellous beauty, the sky at dawn and sunset, jade-green between its reefs and lagoons of glowing orange or fiery carnation ; the silver-surfed Bahia lipping on its snow-white sands; and roses, climbing every- where, covering the balconies of the elegant garden- villas, draping the pillars, smothering pergolas and hedges with beauty, and drenching the whole countryside with intoxicating perfume. One day towards the close of summer, the long- closed shutters of the Villa of the Peacock were thrown open. Whitewashers and painters reno- vated the exterior of the dwelling and departed, women with pattens and pails and scrubbing- brushes polished up the marble doorsteps and cleansed the floors of the loggias, and washed the swallow-droppings of years from the balconies. The winding avenues of cork-trees and live-oaks was scraped and regravelled ; the garden, a wild tangle of beauty and luxuriance, sparingly trimmed. New draperies and laces were hung at the gleam- ing windows, the great majolica peacock shone dazzling in the sun. Wicker chairs and lounges 42 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK appeared upon the lawns. A Mexican hammock was hung under the rose-pergola, the long-silent fountain in the midst of it now awakened from its sleep of years, and gambolled, sparkling in the sun. "The Villa is let," remarked people who did not know its story. " Or sold, possibly?" they added, shrugging. "It is neither sold nor let," said other people who were older residents, "because Don Enrique, whom the folk of the puerta call 'El Mozo,' is still alive. They say he swore upon his soul that the shutters should never again be opened, nor a chair stirred from its place on the floor until " Nobody finished the sentence save under their breath. It had a sinister tag. Presently San Silvestro was convulsed to the core through the posting of huge red-and-yellow anuncios outside the Raqueta Club grounds near the aerodrome. A tarja of steel, heavily dama- scened with gold, presented by the King, was to be played for by picked teams from the two local clubs, San Silvestro Old Town against The Nobles, for Dondese blue blood may hit a ball in emulation of a plebeian, with whom it may not engage in a bout of foils. A famous foreign champion, naturalised a Frenchman, but a Dondese and native of San Silvestro, was to play for the Old Town. Senor Don Enrique Zabalza y Cade"ra (Cade"ra having been the surname of dead Teresa) availed himeslf THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 43 with great pleasure, of the opportunity of renewing old relations, placed at his disposal by consent of the authorities under the high approval of H.M. the King. Judge if the liveliest city on the western seaboard did not buzz like a stirred-up beehive. That the King should have removed the ban of exile after all these years from his unlucky simulacrum was not so extraordinary. No ; but, by a thousand devils! "El Mozo's" acceptance of the royal olive-branch that was the unlikely, unexpected thing. With his characteristic shrinking from publicity the exile had elected to travel by air from Paris. The consent of the military and municipal authori- ties having been obtained, the military guards upon the frontier forts having been warned not to fire at the avion, a twin-engined " Gourdon " aerobus, piloted by no lesser star than Suiza, now demobilised from the French Service Aeronautique, descended one mellow evening upon the carefully- kept greensward of San Silvestro's aerodrome. And amidst the loud vivas of the Old Town and the discreeter greetings of the nobles, Don Enrique Zabalza, attired in the latest mode appropriate to air travel, his marvellous likeness to the King much tempered by a pointed beard, stepped down, con- gratulated his pilot with a cordial hand-grasp, and assisted a lady, as well-groomed as himself, to descend from the passenger-cabin. 44 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK Hearts were lost to Senora Zabalza before the arrivals entered the automobile that waited to convey them to the Villa of the Peacock. She was svelte, with marvellous eyes, hair, and hands, and attired in the latest Parisian combination of furs and gossamer. As for Don Enrique " H ombre!" said one man to another man. " He would be more like the King than the King is like himself, had he not that English naval officer's beard upon his chin. Shave it, and set them up together side-by-side, naked as their mothers bore them, and tell me who would distinguish between them? Not I for one!" Both were Pressmen attached to two of the local journals, one so mildly Liberal, the other so gently Conservative, that it was as difficult to distinguish the politics of one from another as it is to tell a green fig from a fig that is green. Both men were greasy about the collar and lapels, and shiny as to the cuffs ; both were married and had olive branches ; and both were naturally on the look-out for any fat worm that might be carried home to the family nest. Not finding admission to the Velodrome easy, they had elected to wait for Don Enrique on the door- steps of the Villa of the Peacock. " Caramba! I should have no difficulty," re- turned the second Pressman, "unless Don Enrique should bear upon the inner side of his right forearm the scar of a burn such as the King's. How do I know His Majesty has such a scar, covered always THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 45 by a broad gold bracelet of four rows of curb-chain, linked to an upright bar ? Perhaps the Queen gave it to him, quien sabe? But hombre! as regards the scar, a muneca derecho, two years ago, when Aldo- brando played polo on the Club ground of the Caza- deros, and was unhorsed you remember? the bracelet flew off and the Marque's Muntarian picked it up and gave it back to him. But not before I, standing outside the palizadas, had seen with these eyes !" Throughout this little colloquy Zabalza had been engaged as becomes an attentive husband. He had, after some brief directions to the chauffeur of the car, hired from the best garage in San Silvestro, assisted Madame de Zabalza to descend; he had led the lady up the doorsteps, upon which he had deposited their lightish travelling-valises ; and now was engaged in fitting a latch-key, bright with con- stant chain-wear, into the old and tarnished lock. He had not overheard the words, though they had been spoken loudly, and accompanied by vivacious gestures. But the Senora's beautiful jewelled ears had drunk in every sound. She was very pale as she bowed graciously in return for the salutations offered by the Pressmen, for whose retreat Don Enrique pointedly waited before opening the newly- painted hall-door. " Senors," thus he addressed them, in soft tones of deprecation and employing terms of almost Oriental politeness, " I could not consent to thrust 46 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK my miserable affairs more intrusively upon your notice by inviting you to cross the threshold of this unworthy house. Condescend to put in motion the extremities with which an all-wise Providence has endowed you. Deign to remove your distinguished individualities, for until you do so this dwelling is without a door!" A moment later, when the pressmen had de mala gana conveyed themselves down the cork-tree avenue in the wake of the re- treating auto, and were well out of sight, "Enter, Ilona, soul of me!" said Don Enrique, and, pick- ing up the travelling-valises, ushered Madame into the hall. VII. The broad carved leaves of the door of beautiful dappled grenadilla wood shut heavily behind the couple, and Zabalza securely bolted them before he spoke. And then it was with a changed and nasal tone, hard and harshly consonantal, from which with the first musty whiff of the odours of the long- sealed dwelling, the tripping graces of an acquired French accent had suddenly been blown away. "This hall typifies my heart," Don Enrique said to Madame. "The labours of painters, bricklayers and scrubb ing-women have begun and ended with the exterior. Within all is as death found and left it eighteen years before. See here" and he pointed to the altar without which no Catholic THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 47 house in Donda is held to be complete. The black frontal with the white Cross, that had been hung there for the funeral rites of Abramo by the tremb- ling hands of widowed Donna Teresa, had served less than a fortnight later for her own. The brown wax candles in the tall wooden candlesticks yet re- mained, though nibbled by mice, the brass thurible tarnished by years of neglect, lay on the right of the shallow wooden steps covered by a dusty black carpet, with a little pile of spilled grey ashes at its lip. The holy water had dried in the font on the left of the door, leaving a few crystals of salt in the dust at the bottom, the ruddy sunset filtering through the dusty hall skylight made a broad pool of crimson on the long-un waxed parquet. Through this the couple moved to the door at the far end of the vestibule. When it opened to the master's hand, the odour of a dwelling long-sealed was somewhat tempered by the aromatic odour of the tall cabinets of carved camphor-wood ranged about the tapestried walls of dead Teresa's drawing-room, where her work-table stood open, the rusty needle yet in the mildewed embroidery, dropped, it may have been, when Fate's knock sounded on the door. Her portrait and her husband's and that of their son, looked down from tarnished frames upon Zabalza's tragic entrance, and long French windows revealed the glory of the garden, full of tulip-trees and stately palms and rioting roses, and jasmine in prodigal opulence, wreathing the balcony with its 48 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK white-blossomed twisting branches, and climbing to the tops of the tallest trees. Here, at the end of a table, was spread a white cloth with covers for two, a decanter of Dondese wine, and some kind of a cold collation, which both sorely needed. " To the memory of my father and mother, whose portraits look down upon their son," said Zabalza as he filled the glasses. " At the very threshold of revenge upon their crowned murderer." He rose and emptied the glass, and broke it upon the marble hearthstone, where, in recognition of the chills of the evening, wood crackled aromatically in the silvered steel basket, and Ilona Levinski followed his example after touching the wine with her pale lips. " If you would prefer coffee, Mademoiselle," said Don Enrique, when the meal was finished, " it can be supplied you instantly. Empty as it appears, we are not alone in this house. I have had a guest-room prepared for your convenience, and there is a woman, the wife of one of the Revolu- tionary Brotherhood, who will attend you at your wish. I sleep with my memories, and my hopes, in the bed that was my mother's, where I made my first entrance upon the scene of this world." " I thank you, Senor Don Enrique, for the con- sideration you have shown me," said Mademoiselle Levinski as her host pulled a bell-rope, evoking a rusty tinkle in the basement of the house; "but I need no protection, who have braved so many perils side by side with my comrades, nor do I care for THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 49 comforts who have existed upon crusts. An Ex- tremist can bear extremes for a Terrorist there are no terrors." " You treat me as a neophyte still," said Zabalza, looking gloomily upon her, an enthralling vision in her transparent draperies, tinged with the rose of the dying sunset, illumined by the wax tapers burning in tarnished silver candelabra, whose radi- ance wakened the fires of her diamonds, and was reflected in her luminous bronze-coloured eyes. "Your tone is that of the teacher to the student. I am ready to admit that when I demanded of the Extreme Council that you should be my associate in this affair, the passion you inspired in me at the moment of our meeting was the real reason of the request." A slight noise behind Don Enrique made him glance over his shoulder towards the doorway. It was only the woman who had been detailed to wait on Mademoiselle, herself the comrade of an Anar- chist, who had entered the room with coffee on a tray, which she placed on the table. " Campanero," she said, nodding to Zabalza, " if you need the services of a valet, my Jos is at hand and will serve you at your need. For the pretty little comrade here I will act as camerdra. She will ring when she wants me." She nodded familiarly to Mademoiselle Levinski and went out of the room. If a significant glance had been interchanged 4 50 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK between the women, Don Enrique had not observed it. The waitress was to him a nonentity, a mere screw in the vast machine of Anarchical organisa- tion. That she would act as a spy, that within an incredibly short space of time "The Bell" would be made aware that he had sought to dupe the Extreme Council for the attainment of his private wishes, did not occur to him then or thenceafter, when execution of the sentence pronounced upon one who had thus incautiously borne testimony to his own faithlessness followed with such dramatic suddenness. He went on, folding his arms, and frowning upon Mademoiselle Levinski like a second-rate imitator of Le Bargy in a provincial company : "You smile, Mademoiselle, unmoved by my frank declaration. Is it because a woman in whose bosom sleeps an automatic revolver who coils her hair about a poisoned arrow, and carries in her ring a capsule of prussic acid, can have nothing to fear from the passions she provokes?" Mademoiselle Levinski said coldly : " A Terrorist has no passions. I quote once more from the Catechism of Anarchy." " Ah-h-h !" ejaculated Zabalza impatiently. The lips his eyes were fixed on were narrow and deeply scarlet. They curved a little in scorn or in amusement, and the faint depression of a dimple came and went below the carnation of an oval cheek. She was of that deceptive slenderness so distinctive THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 51 of Polish and Hungarian women, her throat and bosom, shoulders and arms and hips, modelled like those of some Tanagra Venus. And yet in her bodily perfection there was nothing sensuous. Rather she suggested a gleaming weapon, wrapped, for the preservation of its delicate, murderous edge, in embroidered silken gauze. Zabalza went on : "Have you forgotten the night of our meeting in London ? They were not passionless the lips that kissed my hand !" Her bronze eyes gleamed as she retorted : " It was the hand that had saved my father, to achieve fresh triumphs for the Cause. Or I believed so." A jewel on her bosom scintillated in the candle-light as though a sigh had lifted it, and dulled again as she resumed: "Though you have never yet shown me the scar left by the red-hot bar of iron upon your arm." Zabalza exclaimed with a wonderfully convinc- ing accent of relief and surprise mingled : " Caramba! If that is all you require " And he pulled up the left sleeve of his thin grey tweed coat, and slipped from a buttonhole of the shirt-cuff one of its shining jewelled buttons, show- ing a black silk band secured tightly by clip-studs about his wrist. He pulled a corner of the silk, and the studs left their slot-holes. He threw the wristlet into the corner, and thrust under Ilona Levinski's eyes his brown sinewy forearm, disfigured by the 52 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK redness of a transverse scar of about two-fingers' width. " Now I Now are you convinced ? Was doubt of me the barrier between us ?" " If it were, amigo," said Mademoiselle with a strange smile that did not melt the ice in her eyes, "the barrier is levelled. But let me hear no more of love at least until the fulfilment of my mission. I came here to personate your wife, and aid you to carry out your purpose. If I fail you, death by your hand or my own must expiate my fault." "Yet tell me," entreated Don Enrique, "had the Council been more explicit ? Had your instructions been, let us say, more precisely and clearly detailed " The tips of Mademoiselle's slender fingers touched his lips for silence : " Senor," she told him, " I am weary. We will talk to-morrow." To end his greedy kissing of the captured hand she rang the bell, summoned the woman, and followed her upstairs. Ilona Levinski had passed the night in many stranger lairs than the great carved four-post bed in the high guest-chamber of this long-shut house, with its tarnished mirrors and dusty oil-portraits, its cobwebbed china and moth-eaten drapery. But after an attempt to sleep, Mademoiselle abandoned the attempt as futile. She was haunted not by fears of the mice, or of the huge spiders inhabiting the fusty curtains, or by the strange THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 53 creaks and cracklings of wood suffering from dry rot or the attacks of the insatiable worm. But by the vision of a right arm. The right arm of a slender young man with a jutting underlip, a young moustache of sprightly black, a salient nose of the beaky kind, and widely set, brilliant, chestnut-brown eyes. Zabalza and not Zabalza in four words ; an hidalgo, whereas the son of Abramo was a tradesman ; a grandee of bluest blood, very different from the muddy fluid running in the veins of the King's double, the clown. This right hand had been thrust one day in the Spring of 1913 over the middle window-bar of a burning compartment of a locked carriage of the derailed fore-half of the Bordeaux-Orleans Express. An alert voice had called to Ilona through the smoke and smother: "Have courage, Mademoi- selle ! Help is coming. We shall save you ! Again have courage and do not despair!" And the slim young man in the unobtrusive brown tweeds had drawn back the arm in the scorched sleeve and sprung up lightly, had seized a crowbar from a bewildered platelayer, and broken out the iron bar that his hissing blood had cooled. And after Levinski and his daughter had been extricated from the carriage, fresh acts of chivalrous kindness to the forlorn pair poor Polish emigrants flying from Russian tyranny, to earn the bread of exile in the freer land of France had cast about that comfortless night at a wayside station between 54 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK AngouleTne and Poitiers the glamour that made its memory dangerously sweet. The dressing of the burn upon his arm with vaseline from her travel- ling-bag, which he had had the forethought to rescue when he extricated her from the carriage, the sacrifice of a cambric handkerchief, bearing the initial of her name embroidered by herself in her own hair. . . . The meeting of their hands and eyes at parting, the hurried words breathed in her ear : " Dear Mademoiselle, the world is round, our paths may cross once more. It has been the custom in my family for many generations to re- gard the saving of a human life as imposing a solemn obligation on the saviour. Therefore, if I can again aid or serve you, send me the fellow- handkerchief to this." Aldobrando had perhaps counted on her recogni- tion of him later as one of the crowned ones of the earth. Or the words had been spoken in mere flourish. . . . Oh, no ! she too well remembered their tone and his expression. . . . He was just thirty, and had been married since 1908. And the old man rescued by him from the burning carriage was the maker of the bomb thrown by Alejandro Mayor as the Royal Procession passed along the Calle Riosa, Donda, on his wedding-day. Were he ever to learn the truth, how would he take it? Probably jesting. Unlike his sullen double, Zabalza, Aldobrando of Donda took life gaily. Those bright brown eyes, those boldly- THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 55 curving lips were always smiling. Yes, he would laugh if ever he knew. But Theodor Levinski, even then toiling in his secret laboratory at Warsaw among vials of acids, and cylinders of poisonous gases, crucibles of picrate potash and tubes of fulminate how would he support the revelation of the truth ? He had not yet seen Zabalza, who had been rightly dubbed "The Mannequin." He believed him on his daughter's assurance to be the man who had saved his life. No suspicion of the fact had ever visited the chemist. But could the venerable Anarchist have known his saviour one of those men to whose removal from the world he dedicated his great faculties . . . had any voice whispered of the weakness of his daughter in hesitating for one moment in the execution of a duty to dwell upon the memory of a certain Spring night. . . . Ilona saw her father stricken, shattered, never again to recover from the overwhelming shock. By the light of the gnawed wax tapers on the ebony-and-ivory toilet-table, she looked at the woman reflected in the tarnished mirror, overcame her human weakness and renewed her dreadful vow. What had Number 11,339, Executive Centre 13, Warsaw, to do with sentimental memories, bonds of gratitude, words uttered, glances exchanged, pledges given or received? Was she not like thousands of comrades bound by the oath upon the 5 6 THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK Blade of Grass to the Wheel of Social Revolution- pledged to devote the last drop of blood, the ulti- mate volt of will-power, the final breath, to the service of the Cause ? She had no faith in Zabalza's ability or deter- mination. She had been disillusioned with regard to him wonderfully soon. Within a week of their meeting in London she had realised him as a nonentity. A man of straw, swayed by a personal hatred, compound of petty jealousy and vanity. As for his mental powers, she estimated them lightly. Would a man of brains had been guilty of the mistake Don Enrique had committed in the loca- tion of the burn upon the arm ? The left instead of the right. How fatuous ! An Extremist of the genuine type would never have blundered so. Don Enrique was neither a conspirator nor a lover. Were the King in his place, and he in Aldo- brando's, something really original in the way of a plot would have been conceived in the keen brain behind that bulging forehead and those brilliant eyes, and carried out with a smile on the bold curved mouth, so like and yet unlike. . . . Zabalza's plan, roughly, was as follows. To lure Aldobrando of Donda to the Villa of the Peacock, to intimidate him, once entrapped, by threats of torture or death. To be seized, apparently, with remorse for the crime contemplated; to prevail upon the Royal victim, with tears and prayers if THE VILLA OF THE PEACOCK 57 need be, to change clothes with him, the traitor, and thus disguised (in garments free from the tokens of a bloody struggle) to escape. At the moment of the King's leaving the house a signal was to be given on which Anarchists concealed in the avenue were to assassinate the King. Later, Zabalza was to return to the Palace in the Royal character, trusting to the marvellous re- semblance between himself and his murdered Sovereign to delay the moment of discovery as long as possible. The safes, cabinets and desks in Aldo- brando's private workroom were to be ransacked. State documents were to be torn up, others secured, with all the valuables obtainable, for theft, like murder, is laudable if it further and enrich the Cause. Having achieved this coup Zabalza was to escape under cover of a visit to a Royal shooting-box in the mountains, and by devious routes well-known rejoin