Barosa had learnt this and naturally jumped at the chance of getting a man in such a position into his clutches. It was not difficult to lay a trap for him, and he found himself suddenly faced with the alternative of giving a little information of a comparatively harmless description, or of seeing the wife he loved denounced to the Government as a revolutionary.
Love for wife triumphed over fealty to employer, and the information was given. It concerned only some arrangements for the disposition of a body of troops and police on one occasion when the king was returning to the capital from a shooting party. But it was given in writing—Barosa took good care of that, of course—and from that hour Dagara was a bond-slave and had never known a minute’s peace of mind.
By degrees, cunningly progressive, information of increasing secrecy and importance had been extorted from him until even his wife was scared out of her senses and the man himself driven to regard suicide as offering the only prospect of relief from unbearable torture.
I was right in my guess that Miralda had been used lately as a go-between. She knew the wife, and Vasco had been dastard enough to induce his sister to fetch one or two communications from Dagara, without telling her their nature. She had then been allowed to discover their treasonable character, and had immediately refused to carry any more. Then the screw was turned. She was already compromised and her name as a suspect would be given up. She had resisted strenuously, answering threat with threat, but the thing had been done cleverly, and the only people she was at that time in a position to harm were the Dagaras, her friends, and her own brother. The latter’s prosecution for the theft he had confessed was the next menace, and this had driven her to yield, and so, like Dagara, she had become hopelessly entangled in the net.
This was almost all that Dagara could tell me. I put a guarded question about the Visconte de Linto, but he declared with the exception of Miralda, Henriques and a friend of his wife’s, he did not know the name of another person in the conspiracy. Henriques was the caretaker of the building in which the chess club met, and carried his letters to Vasco.
The reason for this caution on Barosa’s part was clear. He knew that Dagara had a very weak backbone and that at any moment a fit of remorse might seize him in which he would reveal all he knew to Volheno. He was therefore allowed to know as little as possible.
“But you know what use is made of the information you have given from time to time?” I asked him.
“So far as I can see, it has been of comparatively little use. I have told them from time to time the objects and plans of the police and have warned them when suspicion has fallen on certain individuals, or when raids have been planned. The threatened persons have disappeared and the raids have brought no result.”
“You warned them about me and gave them that letter?”
“Yes. But in regard to that a curious thing occurred. I received a communication in the cipher warning me to look out for it.”