Sarita, the Carlist

by Arthur W. Marchmont

With that I left her, and hurried from the house a prey to innumerable harassing fears, the stings and darts of which sent me plunging headlong through the streets to go I did not think where, and to do I did not know what.

Sarita was in imminent peril from that reckless, desperate man, and I alone had to save her. More than once I halted undecided whether to return and take up the challenge he had thrown down, and trust to my own strength and skill to render him powerless to harm her. And in this bewildered state of mind I found myself at the door of my old dwelling, half crazed by the thought that hours at least must elapse before I could use hand or tongue for her protection, and that for all those hours she would be absolutely at his mercy.

CHAPTER XXX

SUSPENSE

The moment I entered my rooms I perceived that they had been ransacked. The trail of the police searchers lay over everything. In his eagerness to regain possession of that compromising document which he feared so acutely, Quesada had turned his agents loose in my rooms; and they had done their work so thoroughly that the condition of the place was a silent but most impressive tribute to their skill and his alarm. The rooms had been searched from wall to wall; my trunks had been broken and overhauled; drawers and cupboards had been forced, and the contents diligently scrutinised; not a thing had been left in its proper place; and I smiled with a feeling of grim pleasure that I had had the forethought to put the papers in the safe hands of my friend Mayhew.

For the action of the police I cared nothing, and I stayed in the place only long enough to get such clothes as I might need; and I threw them into a Gladstone bag, and carried them over to Mayhew's rooms.

I had too stern a task before me in procuring Sarita's release to give serious thought to much else. My friend was out, and I guessed I should find him at the Hotel de l'Opera; but, having changed my clothes, I sat down to think over matters before going in search of him.

Affairs were in all truth in an inextricable tangle, and very little reflection convinced me that instead of unravelling them I had made them worse by the course I had adopted with Sebastian Quesada. I had committed the fatal blunder of driving him into a corner, and rendering him desperate enough to resort to any of those violent methods which Dolores had said he would certainly adopt when once his back was to the wall.

It was easy to see now what I ought to have done. Belated wisdom is the curse of a fool, I thought bitterly, as I realised what my clumsy shortsighted tactlessness had achieved. What I ought to have done was to have convinced him of my power to ruin him; have told him even of my influence at the Palace; and have driven in upon him with irresistible force that it was in my power to thwart the ambition and ruin the career that were as the very breath of his nostrils to him. Having done that, I ought to have opened the door of escape by a pledge to do nothing if he would but give up Sarita.

Instead of this I had driven him to desperation. I had left him under the conviction that not only could I ruin him, but that I most assuredly should do so; and had thus given him no alternative but to set his vigorous energies to work to retrieve so much of his position as was possible, and to keep for himself what he prized scarcely less than his position, and what it was already in his power to secure—the woman he loved.