“I see,” I said meditatively. “You are afraid something might happen, some injudicious word of hers, some careless act, which might scare off some of the people we want to keep blind to our movements, eh?”
“Yes,” answered Casteno; “but that’s not all. You must recollect, too, that the people who are not for us are against us. It is not really to the Napier interest that your side should win. They are fighting, in my opinion, on the side of the authorities as represented by the Foreign Secretary and the earl. Well, let them, that’s all, and only when we’ve won let us put our heads above the hedge.”
Some other conversation followed, but in the end I agreed to do as José Casteno wished. As a consequence, we kept quite quiet in our rooms until we had got word from a friendly waiter that the hunchback, Miss Doris, and Captain Sparhawk had returned to the hotel, apparently on good terms again, and then in the darkness of night we slipped off and had a good tramp about the ancient streets and by-ways of Shrewsbury, rising next morning as fresh and as sturdy as ever. For a time, it is true, we feared that after his compact to help Lord Cyril Cuthbertson the hunchback might deem it prudent to avoid the excursion. As a matter of fact, I was the one who thought so. Casteno didn’t, because, in the first place, he was sure that his father would never in any circumstances help England against Spain; and in the second, the dwarf was too keen on flying machines and their commercial and military possibilities to let Sparhawk slip through his fingers when he had got hold of a really serviceable invention that would take seven or eight people careering through the air at will. And, as it turned out, Casteno was correct, and I wasn’t. The hunchback did turn up in the flying machine enclosure at the great floral fête, all prepared for the expedition, and, oddly enough, he brought with him as companion—he seemed to have quite forgiven all her previous day’s tricks—my own Doris, who looked as bright and gay as though a trip in a flying machine were one of the most enjoyable things in existence.
Captain Sparhawk himself, now that the critical day of trial had dawned, looked, I must confess, very nervous and overwrought. Attired in a costume that proved to be a compromise between what is usually adopted by the driver of a fast motor car and the captain of a penny steamboat, he flitted about from point to point in the enclosure, the personification of anxiety and restlessness.
“First we must think of the weather, Miss Doris,” we caught him saying as, disguised in the uniform of sergeants in the Royal Engineers, we showed our tickets which entitled us to the trip in his company and joined the mob of experts and committeemen who buzzed about him like so many noisy and curious bees. As for our features, they were works of art—the art of the painter and the art of the wig-maker—while our voices had developed a military bluffness and roughness, which left our throats lined with something like sandpaper every time we opened our mouths.
“It all depends on the wind,” he repeated, and he directed her gaze anxiously to the sky, as though she could see at a glance whether the wind were likely at the time of the ascent to blow forty miles an hour, or four. “You see, I have got the inflation well advanced,” he went on, pointing to the huge, slowly-swelling monster, which lay like a gigantic but quarter-filled balloon of fishlike shape on the greensward as men in mechanics’ clothes hastened here and there pulling a hose straight, slackening a rope, or dragging out the folds of the silk as if they were so many sheets of lead. “This particular machine is Number 9 of my series, two ahead of Santos-Dumont. As you are going with us to-day,” at which news both Casteno and I started, for we had not bargained for that, “I crave your permission to name it the ‘Doris.’”
“By all means,” said the girl, beaming with pleasure; “and I trust it will have the best of good luck, and bring all connected with it fame and fortune!” Whereat the little mob I have mentioned broke into a loud cheer, which was taken up by the thousands who lined the ropes that marked off the enclosures, and amongst whom the news of the machine’s informal christening passed like so much wildfire.
At this point somebody—I think it was the chairman of the fête—appeared bearing three or four magnums of champagne, which were opened, and the contents passed amongst the select coterie gathered around the inventor. Thus encouraged, the gallant captain went further.
“You need not really fear the trip, Miss Napier,” he said, raising the glass with a proud gesture to his lips. “Nor you two gentlemen,” he added, nodding in the direction of Casteno and myself, who had been pointed out to him by the gatekeeper as his two paying fellow-passengers. “As for Mr Zouche here,” now he included the hunchback, “he is a practical aeronaut like myself. I always say, where he would lead I would follow; but, for to-day, we have reversed things a bit, although my opinion of his skill and knowledge remains just the same.”
“Then you think the machine is perfectly safe?” said a voice in the crowd.