His Unknown Wife by Louis Tracy (little readers .TXT) 📕

“PRISONER, attention! His excellency the President has permitted Señor Steinbaum to visit you.”

The “prisoner” was lying on his back on a plank bed, with his hands tucked beneath his head to obtain some measure of protection from the roll of rough fiber matting which formed a pillow. He did not pay the slightest heed to the half-caste Spanish jailer’s gruff command. But the visitor’s name stirred him. He turned his head, apparently to make sure that he was not being deceived, and rose on an elbow.

“Hello, Steinbaum!” he said in English. “What’s the swindle! Excuse this terseness, but I have to die in an hour, or even less, if a sunbeam hasn’t misled me.”

“There’s no swindle this time, Mr. Maseden,” came the guttural answer. “I’m sorry I cannot help you, but I want you to do a good turn for a lady.”

“A lady! What lady?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you don’t know the lady that is a recommendation in itself. At any rate, what sort of good turn can a man condemned to death do for any lady?”

“She wants to marry you.”

Then the man who, by his own showing, was rapidly nearing the close of his earthly career, sprang erect and looked so threatening that his visitor shrank back a pace, while the half-caste jailer’s right hand clutched the butt of a revolver.

“Whatever else I may have thought you, I never regarded you as a fool, Steinbaum,” he said sternly. “Go away, man! Have you no sense of decency! You and that skunk Enrico Suarez, have done your worst against me and succeeded. When I am dead the ‘state’ will collar my property—and I am well aware that in this instance the ‘state’ will be represented by Señor Enrico Suarez and Mr. Fritz Steinbaum. You are about to murder and rob me. Can’t you leave me in peace during the last few minutes of my life! Be off, or you may find that in coming here you have acted foolishly for once.”

“Ach, was!” sighed Steinbaum, nevertheless retreating another step towards the door and the watchful half-caste, who had been warned to shoot straight and quickly if the prisoner attacked the august person of the portly financier. “I tell you the truth, and you will not listen. It is as I say. A lady, a stranger, arrived in Cartagena last night. She heard of you this morning. She asked: ‘Is he married, this American?’ They said, ‘No.’ Then she came to me and begged me to use my influence with the President. She said: ‘If this American gentleman is to be shot, I am sorry; but it cannot matter to him if he is married, and it will oblige me very much.’ I told her—”

The speaker’s voice grew husky and he paused to clear his throat. Maseden smiled wanly at the mad absurdity of it, but he was beginning to believe some part of Steinbaum’s story.

“And what did you tell her?” he broke in.

“I told her that you were Quixotic in some things, and you might agree.”

“But what on earth does the lady gain by it? Suarez and you will take mighty good care she doesn’t get away with my ranch and money. Does she want my name?”

“Perhaps.”

Maseden took thought a moment.

“It has never been dishonored during my life,” he said quietly. “I would need to be assured that it will not be smirched after my death.”

Steinbaum was stout. A certain anxiety to succeed in an extraordinary mission, joined to the warm, moist atmosphere of the cell, had induced a copious perspiration.

“Ach, Gott!” he purred despairingly. “I know nothing. She told me nothing. She offered to pay me for the trouble—”

“Ah!”

“Why not? I run some risk in acting so. She is American, like yourself. She came to me—”

“American, you say! Is she young?”

“I think so. I have not seen her face. She wears a thick veil.”

Romance suddenly spread its fairy wings in that squalid South American prison-house. Maseden’s spirit was fired to perform a last act of chivalry, of mercy, it might be, in behalf of some unhappy girl of his own race. The sheer folly of this amazing marriage moved him to grim mirth.

“Very well,” he said with a half-hearted laugh. “I’ll do it! But, as you are mixing the cards, Steinbaum, there must be a joker in the pack somewhere. I’m a pretty quick thinker, you know, and I shall probably see through your proposition before I die, though I am damned if I can size it up right off.”

“Mr. Maseden, I assure you, on my—well, you and I never were friends and never will be, but I have told you the real facts this time.”

“When is the wedding to take place?”

“Now.”

“Great Scott! Did the lady come with you f”

“Yes. She is here with a priest and a notary.”

Maseden peered over the jailer’s shoulder into the whitewashed passage beyond the halfopen door, as though he expected to find a shrouded figure standing there. Steinbaum interpreted his glance.

“She is in the great hall,” he said. “The guard is waiting at the end of the corridor.”

“Oh, it’s to be a military wedding, then?”

“Yes, in a sense.”

The younger man appreciated the nice distinction Steinbaum was drawing. The waiting “guard” was the firing-party.

“What time is it?” he demanded, so sharply that the fat man started. For a skilled intriguer Steinbaum was ridiculously nervous.

“A quarter past seven.”

“Allow me to put the question as delicately as possible, but—er—is there any extension of time beyond eight o’clock?”

“Señor Suarez would not give one minute.”

“He knows about the ceremony, of course?”

“Yes.”

“What a skunk the man is! How he must fear me! Such Spartan inflexibility is foreign to the Spanish nature…. By the way, Steinbaum, did you ever, in your innocent youth, hear the opera ‘Maritana,’ or see a play called ‘Don Cesar de Bazan’?”

“Why waste time, Mr. Maseden?” cried the other impatiently. He loathed the environment of that dim cell, with its slightly fetid air, suggestive of yellow jack and dysentery. He was so obviously ill at ease, so fearful lest he should fail in an extraordinary negotiation, that, given less strenuous conditions, the younger man must have read more into the proposal than appeared on the face of it.

But the sands of life were running short for Maseden. Outwardly cool and imperturbably American, his soul was in revolt. For all that he laughed cheerfully.

“Waste time, indeed!” he cried. “I, who have less than forty-five minutes to live!… Now, these are my terms.”

“There are no terms,” broke in Steinbaum harshly. “You oblige the lady, or you don’t. Please yourself.”

“Ah, that’s better. That sounds more like the hound that I know you are. Yet, I insist on my terms.

“I was dragged out of bed in my pajamas at four o’clock this morning, and not even permitted to dress. They hardly waited to get me a pair of boots. I haven’t a red cent in my pocket, which is a figure of speech, because I haven’t a pocket. If you think you can borrow from an old comedy just so much of the situation as suits your purpose and disregard the costume and appearance of the star actor, you’re mistaken.

“I gather from your furious grunts that you don’t understand me. Very well. I’ll come straight to the point. If I am to marry the lady of your choice, I demand the right to appear at the altar decently clad and with enough good money in my pocket to stand a few bottles of wine to the gallant blackguards who are about to shoot me.

“Those are my terms, Steinbaum. Take them or leave them! But don’t accuse me of wasting time. It’s up to you to arrange the stage setting. I might have insisted on a shave, but I won’t.

“The lady will not expect me to kiss her, I suppose?… By gad, she must be a person of strange tastes. Why any young woman should want to marry a man because he’s going to be shot half an hour later is one of those mysteries which the feminine mind may comprehend, but it’s beyond me. However, that’s her affair, not mine.

“Now, Steinbaum, hurry up! I’m talking for the mere sake of hearing my own voice, but you’re keeping the lady in suspense.”

Maseden had indeed correctly described his own attitude. He was wholly indifferent to the personal element in the bizarre compact proposed by his arch-enemy, on whom he had turned his back while speaking.

The sight of a bloated, angry, perplexed face of the coarsest type was mentally disturbing. He elected rather to watch the shaft of sunlight coming through the long, narrow slit in a four-foot wall which served as a window. He knew that his cell was on the northeast side of the prison, and the traveling sunbeam had already marked the flight of time with sufficient accuracy since he was thrust into that dismal place.

He had been sentenced to death just one hour and a half after being arrested. The evidence, like the trial, was a travesty of justice. His excellency Don Enrico Suarez, elected president of the Republic of San Juan at midnight, and confirmed in power by the bullet which removed his predecessor, wreaked vengeance speedily on the American intruder who had helped to mar his schemes twice in two years.

There would be a diplomatic squabble about the judicial murder of a citizen of the United States, of course. The American and British consuls would protest, and both countries would dispatch warships to Cartagena, which was at once the capital of the republic and its chief port. But of what avail such wrangling after one was dead?

Dead, at twenty-eight, when the world was bright and fortune was apparently smiling!Dead, because he supported dear old Domenico Valdes, the murdered president, and one of the few honest, God-fearing men in a rotten little South American state which would have been swept out of putrid existence long ago were it not for the policy of the Monroe Doctrine. Maseden knew that no power on earth would save him now, because Suarez and he could not exist in the same community, and Suarez was supreme in the Republic of San Juan-supreme, that is, until some other cut-throat climbed to the presidency over a rival’s corpse. Steinbaum, a crafty person who played the game of high politics with some ability and seldom failed to advance his own and his allies’ interests, had backed Suarez financially and would become his jackal for the time.

It was rather surprising that such a master plotter should have admitted a fore-knowledge of Maseden’s fate, and this element in the situation suddenly dawned on Maseden himself. The arrest, the trial, and the condemnation were alike kept secret.

The American consul, a Portuguese merchant, possessed enough backbone to demand the postponement of the execution until he had communicated with Washington, and in this action he would have been supported by the representative of Great Britain. But he would know nothing about the judicial crime until it was an accomplished fact.

How, then, had some enterprising young lady—

“By the way, Steinbaum, you might explain—”

Maseden swung