The Saturday Evening Post/The Palace of His Fathers

by Alice Duer Miller

 

The Palace of His Fathers

By ALICE DUER MILLER

ILLUSTRATED BY ARTHUR D. FULLER

MISS BRIXBY, the rather emotional girl at the telephone, had not been able to keep the news to herself; and so the whole outer office was watching when Burke, the bank detective, came through with Lopez. The exchange expert, the two office boys and Mr. Shelton's private secretary—even the man who was washing the windows unhooked himself and, stepping inside, took a good look at the greatest of modern forgers.

Yet to most people the figure of Burke—his great size, his square head, his rolling, truculent walk, his fresh red face, would have been the more alarming of the two. The outer office hardly noticed his honest and familiar figure. Fearful and admiring of successful crime, they fixed their eyes on the small person who moved with short quick steps beside him. Lopez was black-haired and clean-shaved. His skin did not seem dark until you saw his eyes, which were such a light gray that they startled you, almost as if the eye sockets had been without eyeballs. His eyebrows were fine and black and tremendously slanted in the opposite angle from the Chinese slant. The curve of his nostrils suggested the Moor. He was slender, active, alive.

Miss Brixby, who never saw him again, read all the newspaper accounts of forgeries from that day forward, with personal interest and a forgiving heart. Forgers henceforth presented themselves to her imagination as black-haired, gray-eyed youths; yet her vision of him was limited to seconds—just until the door of Mr, Shelton's office shut him out of her sight.

“I wonder whether he's frightened,” she thought.

She herself was always a little frightened whenever Mr. Shelton spoke to her, though he spoke most courteously, and usually only to ask her to get him some out-of-town number; but it was a convention in the bank to be a little afraid of the chairman of the board, and Miss Brixby was nothing if not conventional.

She would have felt surprised to know that Lopez was not a bit nervous, but she would have been like Daniel, astonished for one hour, to know that the great Mr. Shelton was as nervous as he could be; so nervous that he hadn't been able to do a bit of real work ail the morning. He had kept up the appearance of work—dictating routine letters, making and breaking appointments over the telephone; but, with this interview hanging over him, he had not been able to put his mind on anything else.

He was nervous—not like Miss Brixby, because crime seemed romantic and terrible and somehow superior, but because he was about to put his whole judgment and philosophy to the test. He had formed an opinion, by the cold process of pure reason, end was now about to act upon it; but he had no warm, emotional belief in it. Something had to be done. He and Burke had worked out a plan, which was more than any other member of the board had done. The plan was not exactly legal, and the board had given a formal, incredulous assent to it. His relation to them, as well as his opinion of himself, would be involved in its failure.

Shelton was a man under forty—rendered acutely uncomfortable when he was pointed out by classmates and early friends as a fellow who had succeeded without backing, entirely on his own. He felt that he had succeeded through luck, through unknown currents of fate, through other men's kindness or failure, through a total misapprehension of his own abilities on the part of people who ought to know better. Ten years from now he would probably be feeling that his success was as much his inherent right as his family property, but at the moment he was still guiltily wondering at it.

He had thought ever exactly what he was going to say; he had even rehearsed it a little, as he rehearsed his speech at the banker's convention, and this had added to his sense of anticipation; so that when he said “Come in,” in answer to Burke's knock, his heart gave a distinct thump.

What Lopez saw was a severe blond man with an eye like a clear turquoise bead and a manner erring a little on the side of the sphinxlike. The Spaniard did not like Anglo-Saxons and pure Anglo-Saxon was before him—but he did like handsome rooms, and he let his eye rove approvingly over the paneled walls and long orange velvet curtains.

“Sit down, Mr. Lopez,” said the chairman, and he held out his open cigarette case.

Lopez sat down with a sudden bending of the knees, as he might have bowed to the altar in the cathedral of his native Granada. He dropped his hat on the floor and extracted a cigarette with some difficulty from under the gold-filigree band of Shelton's case.

Illustration: “I Believe the City Itself is Very Beautiful,” He Said—“the Snow Mountains Behind, You Know, and the Vega, as They Call it, in Front”

Burke rejected a cigarette and remained standing, with his arms folded and his soft hat dangling from the neighborhood of his shoulder blades—he had long arms.

The chairman began his speech: “I shan't attempt to deceive you; I shan't pretend that we—as yet—have any proof that would hold in a court; but we have complete moral conviction that you are responsible for the raising of this series of checks. Here is one of them.” The dark polished surface of the brass-bound desk was clear of all papers except a little pile of checks; they were of an ugly muddy pink.

The chairman reached for the top one.

“That check was originally drawn for ten dollars.”

Lopez took the check, handling it delicately with the tips of his long fine fingers. He bent his head over it. His hair grew in a point at the back of his neck. He held it up to the light and studied it with one eye, the smoke from his cigarette curling up into the other one. He spoke with a strong accent, rolling his r's.

“It is a very pretty piece of work,” he said.

“That's right—praise yourself,” observed Burke jovially.

“It is the work of an artist,” answered Shelton. Lopez bowed, but no one could say whether in acknowledgment of the compliment or in assent to the fact, and Shelton continued: “My bank, in combination with some others, would be willing to spend a good deal of money to put a stop to your activities, Mr. Lopez. We should like to do this by sending you to prison, but that having proved more difficult than we expected—more tedious and expensive—we have decided instead to offer you a fixed sum monthly, as long as you stay at a definite spot on the other side of the Atlantic and refrain from producing any of these artistic triumphs. Do I make myself clear? The first time one of these appeared, without any proof as to who did it, your income would stop.”

“You might attribute anybody's work to me,” said Lopez; “any clumsy forger——”

“Not a chance,” said Burke.

“No one's work is like yours,” said the chairman.

Lopez smiled a flattered smile. “I do not admit any work,” he answered. “What is the sum you offer?”

Shelton replied immediately, “Two hundred and fifty dollars a month.”

He knew that the critical moment of the interview had arrived. His tone was excellent; there was no bluster about it, and yet there was nothing tentative, either—nothing that opened the door to bargaining. Burke, too, knowing that the next few seconds would decide the event, leaned over and examined the small figure below him, as a cook looks at a boiling pot.

“It is a fair sum,” said Lopez.

The chairman and Burke exchanged a discouraged glance over the black head of the forger. Their thought was that this ready agreement was a bad sign. If he had meant to accept he would have tried to run them up. Obviously it was the exile from New York to which he objected. The chairman could understand that; he never left his native city without regret—never at all if he could help it. “I can't drag Joe away from business,” his wife was always saying, but it was really New York that she couldn't drag him away from. He liked everything about it—its hard bright sun and its occasionally torrential rains; he liked the snowstorms of winter, when a sudden silence would fall on the city except for the shouts and yells of revivified foot passengers; he liked the smell of dust and hot asphalt in August; he liked the glitter and crowd of Broadway, and he liked the deathlike loneliness of downtown on a Sunday morning; he liked all the sense of crowded opportunity; but most of all he liked—what the dweller in the small town so immensely hates—the sense of isolation, of complete disappearance when he went into his own house and shut the door behind him, knowing that he could dance or die without his next-door neighbor hearing anything about it, that he was as secure from observation as an insect which crawls into its hole under the grass. This was what he was asking the unfortunate forger to forgo—this great pattern of luxury and squalor, of crime and philanthropy, of amusement and work. Ah, he had been prepared for a difficulty here! something faintly kind came into his hard turquoise-colored eyes.

“You don't want to leave New York,” he said. “I don't so much blame you, and yet——”

He launched into the second part of his speech—the advantages of an honest, regular life, the hostility of an alien city, a man's relation to the country of his birth.

It was not easy for Lopez to follow this flood of eloquence. He contracted his brows, narrowed his light eyes to do it; but about the middle he caught the drift and stopped Shelton short, shaking his forefinger in front of his nose with that gesture of negation so characteristic of the Spaniard.

The words died away on the chairman's lips, and Burke said, “They're all the same—you can't pry them out of New York.”

Lopez flashed a glance upward and flung up his hand with all the fingers open as if he flung the city to the clouds.

“New York!” he cried with contempt. “I come from Granada!” And he made the consonants sound like the fire of musketry.

“From where?” asked Shelton, whose ear was not attuned to foreign tongues. “Oh, yes, of course. I've never been there.”

Lopez quoted a Spanish proverb to the effect that he who has not seen Granada has seen practically nothing; but as he quoted it in Spanish, it did no harm. He leaned forward, his forefinger pointing at Shelton.

“Mira, hombre,” he said, and tried in his poor English to make the chairman understand what Granada was like. He waved his left hand high in a circle—the snow-covered sierras. He moved his right hand flat to the ground—the green vega stretching far away. He vibrated his hanging fingers—the Darro flowing down from the icy mountains—the fruits, the orchards, the flowers, the cathedral, the Alhambra ——

“I presume every man likes his own home town,” said Burke, with a smile at anyone who preferred anything to New York.

“Ah, Nueva York!” cried Lopez, growing more Spanish as his mind turned to Spain. He drew his shoulders up in horror. “See, sir, it is this way—I cannot live without beauty.”

He struck a deeper chord in the chairman's breast than he knew when he said this, for it was one of the secret anxieties of his life that he did not really love beauty. He was conscientious about art and had a good memory, but the pleasure he derived from it was of the mildest description. He saw about him constantly people whose greatest pleasure was an artistic emotion. They always gave him a wretched sense of inferiority. Even his much-loved Margaret gave it to him. She would say, “I simply can't live in a room with black walnut,” in a tone that made him feel guiltily conscious that he could have been just as happy in that as in any other. He felt inferior now, as he listened to Lopez explaining how the ugliness of New York depressed his spirits—the crowd, the absence of flowers, the music—ah, the music was good—he should miss the music.

“Miss?” Shelton caught the meaning of that word.

“You accept our offer,” he said. He managed to say it as if he had always expected an acceptance.

“Betja la-if,” said Lopez.

Nothing had ever so utterly sunk Shelton's self-esteem as the realization that this common forger was willing to give up New York and all its opportunity for the sake of the beauty of his native town. The sudden acceptance was a surprise. He had intended to argue a long time with him. He had even considered presenting the fellow in some way for Margaret's opinion. He had great confidence in his wife's intuitions. But Margaret, for all her artistic perceptions, was rather rigid on moral questions. She would not have approved of this trafficking with evil; she would not think it right to pension a forger. It would remain one of a number of things he did not tell her.

The final arrangements took some time—how the money was to be paid through the Granada bank, the correspondent of Shelton's bank; how Lopez was to come for it personally, so that his presence could be reported monthly; how the payments were not to begin until he was actually settled in his native city.

Shelton and Burke tied it up as much as they could, but in the final analysis it was a question of Lopez' own wish to abide by the agreement. They had no other security. Shelton pointed this out in parting.

“This has been my own plan, Lopez,” he said. “My directors don't particularly like it; they won't give you the benefit of any doubt. They are relying on my report of you, and I am relying on your word of honor.”

Burke let his mouth droop comically at the word “honor” applied to a notorious criminal; but Lopez made a rapid gesture with both hands, as if he were patting down an invisible cake. It took the place of an oath—it was an oath.

Shelton reported the interview at the next meeting of the board. Wilkinson, the former chairman, who disliked Shelton and all his policies, found a subject made to his hand.

“May I ask the chairman,” he said, “why if this fellow Lopez has been making twenty thousand a year out of us—those were the chairman's own figures, I think—he should be willing to stop doing it for such a paltry sum as three thousand. Why isn't he going to take this three thousand and all the rest too?”

“It's something to be safe from the law,” said Shelton.

“I can't see that this fellow has ever been in danger—not from us, certainly.”

“And he wants to go home.”

“A crook wants to leave New York? About as much as a bee wants to leave honey,” said Wilkinson, and everybody smiled and shook their heads.

Shelton was a little angry.

“I know it will sound strange to New Yorkers,” he said, and glancing round the board he saw that all of them were men who had come recently from the South, the Middle West and Canada; “but Lopez wishes to leave New York because he finds it ugly, and I have decided that we may as well cash in on his sense of beauty.”

Everybody laughed again, now on Shelton's side, except Wilkinson, who said, “Oh, I understand that we committed ourselves to this plan at our last meeting, but I wish to register my opinion again that it is unwise and unethical.”

“If you had had a better one to suggest, the board would have been glad to accept it,” said Shelton.

It was thus that his own ego became involved in the question of Lopez' honor. He worried over it a good deal—all the more because he could not confide it to Margaret. It was not only that he would look like a fool in the eyes of the board, and give Wilkinson an opportunity to make himself disagreeable—possibly even to get back into the saddle—but Shelton's own judgment of himself was involved—a sane, conservative man like himself pensioning a forger.

He was the more unprepared when the blow fell, as it did without delay. The very first draft came back having been paid for exactly ten times the amount. Drawn for two hundred and fifty dollars it had been raised to twenty-five hundred.

Wilkinson did everything with the situation that could be done with it; he taunted and laughed when the others looked grave, and looked grave when the others were inclined to laugh. He spoke of the chairman's romantic trend, the new influence of the moving picture in banking; he was old-fashioned—he still believed that prison was a more efficacious method of dealing with criminals than sight-seeing trips to the more attractive European cities.

Irritating as he was, he could hardly depress Shelton more than he was already depressed. He pointed out to the board that whether his own judgment had been bad or not, there was this advantage in the present situation: They now had proof, perfectly definite proof, that Lopez was the man they were after. He felt all the bitterness of a disappointed idealist. No one is more relentlessly cruel He offered to resign his position, go to Granada and begin a chase to bring Lopez to justice. The board refused to accept his resignation, but did not discourage his trip.

Illustration: Shelton, Still Sitting in the Shadow of the White Arcade, Heard Margaret Say, “I Understand From Madame Detasierras That We Owe All This to You”

He came home that evening and asked Margaret if she could be ready to sail to Havre in five days—the bank had business which was taking him to Spain. Margaret was so delighted at the prospect that in spite of her famous intuition she did not notice her husband's depression. Spain Granada—the Alhambra—all the places in the world she wanted most to see.

“Even you will enjoy the Alhambra, Joe,” she said.

The 'even' wounded him deeply.

“I believe the city itself is very beautiful,” he said, and using rather more gesture than was natural to him he added, “the snow mountains behind, you know and the vega, as they call it, in front.”

Margaret looked at him with the stupefaction that every woman feels on discovering that her husband knows something about which she had supposed him completely ignorant. Then she smiled with understanding.

“Ah, you've been getting up Spain in a guidebook,” she said.

“No,” he answered, “I happened to be talking to a fellow who had been there.”

They sailed for Havre, and eight days later took the Sud-Express from Paris—were at the frontier late that evening, and in Madrid in the course of the next morning. The next day, fortunately, happened to be one of the three days a week on which there was a train to Granada.

It was a journey full of interest. They rushed across the red plains of Don Quixote, then up and up through a slate defile in the mountains, the celebrated Precipice of the Dogs. Soon after this the passengers for Granada alighted, and saw with some apprehension the train speed away to Cordova, while they ascended the high steps of another train, the little carriages of which had been built in an age still reminiscent of the stagecoach, It was getting late and dark, and as they had had no dinner, they began to comment with the strained politeness of travelers on the fact that it might have been wiser to bring something with them, as one of them had suggested—and of course it was the one who had previously made the suggestion who now recalled it. Then suddenly they stopped at a deserted station, and getting out found themselves served rapidly with an excellent dinner in courses, beginning with hors d'œuvres and ending with coffee. Spain is a country of surprises. Then, after dinner, they rocked onwards in their little carriage, into mountains so high and wild, so adapted to brigandage that Margaret was immensely comforted by the sight at each station of two of the civil guard with their patent leather hats and their rifles on their backs; and when a man jumped on the step and opened the door with no more hostile intention than to change the tin foot warmer, Margaret gave a distinct scream, so ready was she for a bandit.

They reached Granada, without the smallest adventure, about eleven at night, and went straight to the hotel, too tired even to look out of their windows. Early in the morning, however, Shelton was dragged out of bed by his excited wife, to see the view—the most beautiful, Margaret asserted rashly, in the whole world.

Yes, there they were, Lopez' sierras, rolling fields of snow, high up against the sky, with a large trembling star shining above them.

“'Hast thoua charm to stay the morning star in his steep course?'” Margaret quoted.

They stood on their narrow balcony and watched the shadows slide back from the plain, as if the rotation of the earth was suddenly made visible. The hotel was built on a steep hill, so that from their balcony on the third floor they looked straight down, as if from heaven, into the courts and gardens of the little houses below them. From these, strange animals began to emerge—strange for house pets, at least—a herd of goats from one, a pig from another. A thin black cat came out, stretching, to walk along the walls. Margaret discovered a pair of rabbits, and Shelton himself was the first to see a pair of small donkeys stabled in the ruined foundations of what had been once a Moorish palace. Then the bells began to boom or jingle as their habit was, a trolley car came grinding up the steep street, and Granada was awake for the day.

“Oh, let's get breakfast at once, and go and see everything,” said Margaret.

But her husband reminded her that he had not come to Spain for pleasure. He must go straight to the bank. He had not notified anyone of his coming. He had not, of course, much hope of finding Lopez, who was probably on his way back to New York; but he hoped to get information that would lead to his discovery and arrest. In one of those absurd symbolic pictures that our unconscious mind paints for us, he saw himself returning, leading Lopez in chains.

He had some difficulty in finding the bank, for its whole front was obscured by an erection of scaffolding and straw. When he did identify it he was annoyed beyond words to discover that a combination of necessities—a saint's day and repairs—had closed it for four days. All the officials had taken this opportunity to leave town. There was nothing for Shelton to do but to hurry back to the hotel and join Margaret on her sight-seeing expedition.

They did the cathedral that morning. Shelton was in no mood to enjoy anything. Margaret found him more unsympathetic than she had expected. In the afternoon they went to the Alhambra, and here she insisted on buying a form of ticket that not only admitted them for five days but admitted them to many additional sights. The fate of the whole expedition was changed by the purchase of those round blue tickets, for it brought them the friendship of a wise and cultivated gentleman who knew the Alhambra as Shelton knew the bond market.

Margaret had noticed him first. She always had an insatiable curiosity to know what people were reading. She had seen him sitting on a camp stool in the Hall of the Ambassadors; and when they had passed him without his looking up, she had whispered to her husband that he was reading Prescott in English. They supposed him to be a visitor like themselves, and they were surprised to find that on the presentation of their blue tickets they were turned over to him. It was he who took them to the upper gallery of the Charles V Palace, “the only fault of which,” he said, “is in lying too near to the Alhambra.” He was a discriminating skeptic, destroying with a smile a dozen of Margaret's inaccurate myths.

“Jamais de la vie,” was his answer to almost all the information Margaret had acquired, and it is to be feared that Shelton derived some pleasure from seeing her so much and so constantly put in the wrong.

Their guide had the most expert knowledge of beautiful vistas and becoming lights.

“Such a real sense of beauty,” Margaret whispered to her husband.

By the time they sat down in the former zenana of the palace to watch the sunset light the three were fast friends. Sinking on the wide low window, Margaret remarked that it was the most beautiful sight in the world. Shelton had let this observation pass without contradiction, but their guide was more exact.

“No, madame,” said Señor Rosas; “if you will permit me to differ with you, it is not even the most beautiful sight in Granada.”

Shelton glanced wistfully at him. How definitely he spoke of beauty! How right he had been about it! The man made him feel utterly blind.

Rosas preferred Margaret of the two; and addressing her, he launched into a description of the most beautiful sight in Granada—a little Moorish palace, privately owned, in the mountains, high up, above even the Generalife—a gem—the stone work—you would say lace—and the pools and the orange trees. It had been in the family of the Condesa Delasierras for centuries, and was now owned by the old condesa—the last. There, when the moon was full, a string quartet played—“and look you, madame, that night one does not sleep.”

The next night the moon would be full. Nothing would suit Margaret but that she must see that garden, hear that quartet. Shelton was not so eager. Margaret seemed so far from him when she was caught up into the enjoyment of an emotion he could not share. He felt jealous and lonely, and of course a little inferior. But he did not oppose her.

And so the next evening, after an early dinner—early for Spain, that is, for it was after eight o'clock when they sat down—they walked up the road as if they were going to the cemetery; and then, turning sharply to the left, across gullies in the bare hills, and past the black mouths of many eaves, to where in a fold of the mountains a small palace looked down on the Alhambra itself.

Well, Shelton said to himself, the supreme emotions were universal—fear, love, beauty. The trouble had been that before this beauty had not come to him rich and solid enough. This night was his initiation—now he knew.

They had sat for two hours or more in the garden of the Delasierras palace, under an arcade of carved white stone in which each detail stood out, jet-black or ivory-white, in the moonlight. At their feet a long narrow pool reflected the orange trees, which, just at the climax of their blossoming, gave out a perfume almost stupefying. The dark tips of cedars rose above an adjacent wall, hiding another court, where a fountain was playing, for when the orchestra was silent he could hear water spouting and falling and trickling away.

The orchestra had been playing at the other end of the pool, more or less hidden under the shadows of the orange trees. He and Margaret and the condesa were alone. Behind him, through the double arch of a window, he could catch a glimpse of the pale sky and the lights of Granada far below them.

It was probably the scent of the orange blossoms that did it. Before this, when confronted with any problem, commercial or æsthetic, Shelton had tried to use his intelligence—a good one, but not universal. Now the perfume, so pure and rich and penetrating, seemed to act like a drug on his mind, putting it to sleep, so that his emotions were defenseless against the assaults of the moon and the music. He was extraordinarily happy; it was as if he had fallen in love with the entire universe.

It was time to go—more than time. The other guests—there had never been more than a handful of them—had already gone. The countess, in deference to the appreciation of the strangers, had already asked the musicians to repeat the last selection—a Spanish dance composed there in Granada itself. And now, this being finished, she allowed a suggestive silence to fall. Margaret touched her husband's arm.

“I think we ought to be going, dear,” she said.

He looked up at her like a drunken man.

“Go?” he said, as if he heard the word for the first time.

He had power to break the spell. His muscles would not respond to his will. Margaret turned back to the countess and began to thank her in French. It was Margaret's belief, founded on a short experience, that Spanish women had more character in their faces than any other women in the world. The countess was nearly seventy, and could never have been beautiful; but there was power in her face, fine and yet brows, its deeply indented chin, its black eyes and strong white hair; her figure in its black shawl, not at all slim, but a straight line from heels to head.

Across the court the musicians were now putting their instruments back into the cases, and yet Shelton had not moved. The conversation between Margaret and the countess suddenly took a more intimate turn. He heard his wife exclaiming, “How wonderful! How perfect!” She came and laid her hand on his shoulder. “Only think, Joe, these musicians give their services night after night, and they are all poor men. They regard it as a great privilege to be allowed to play here; and one of them gave the savings of his life to save the palace to the countess when—when it was in danger of being taken away from her. I mean to say he lent them to her.”

She was speaking in French, so as not to have the effect of saying anything to her husband which the countess could not understand. The countess shrugged her shoulders.

“He gave,” she said. “We call it a loan; but there is no chance that I shall repay it in my lifetime. I am the last of the family. After my death—the palace itself will repay him—he will have the palace. The son of my husband's gardener will own the palace of the Delasierras.” She sighed and then seemed to come proudly to life. “And no one will cherish it more than he will—no one.”

Margaret's eyes were shining. Her husband could see them gleam in the moonlight with something like tears.

“I think that's wonderful,” she murmured, and added aloud, “Could I speak to him?”

The countess nodded and called across the pool, “Ricardo!” And again the succession of consonants sounded in Shelton's ears like the rattle of muskets. Out of his mood of omniscient peace he was hardly at all surprised to see that the second violin, who hurried in white-slippered feet along the rim of the pool was Lopez, the man he had come so far to find.

The countess said in Spanish that the English lady—in Europe all who speak English are English until they are proved other—wished to talk to him, and added in French that this was her friend, Ricardo Lopez, a very good boy, who had been in America—in that part of America where they speak English, thus politely trying to help them out on a point which had always confused her—namely, what language was actually spoken in those remote continents beyond the Atlantic.

Shelton, still sitting in the shadow of the white arcade, heard Margaret say in her most winning tones, “I understand from Madame Delasierras that we owe all this to you.”

Lopez smiled and hunched his shoulders.

“I did not make Granada or Spain, Señora, but I gave what I had.”

“Why did you?” Margaret asked.

The Spaniards are not afraid of asking or of answering a direct questions.

Lopez answered: “Mira, señora, my father, he was gardener here. This was my home. I was brought up here. I planted some of these flowers. They were going to take it and make it into a tea house for foreigners! Nombre de Dios, a tea house! The most perfect Moorish palace left in all Spain! And look”—he seemed to draw her aside confidentially, although it was all a gesture, for he did not move; nor did they need to, since the countess did not understand a word—“it is well known in Granada that I have the blood of Delasierras in my veins. I gave all I had to save the palace of my father, and now it will be mine.”

“But how do you live?”

“I work on the fruit farm of the abbey.”

“Is that all you have in the world?”

“It is enough.”

It was then that Margaret, perhaps not perfectly sane, either, made her offer. Shelton heard her with a curious acquiescence. She couldn't bear it, she said, that a man should beggar himself so nobly. He must permit her and her husband to take a part of the loan—all of it—they, too, would love and cherish the palace.

Lopez stopped her short, wagging his forefinger across his face with that gesture of negation which Shelton already knew.

“No, no, señora. You do not understand. I have given more than money; I have given my honor in order that I, a Delasierras, may live and die in the palace of the Delasierras. I cannot share it.”

“I understand exactly,” said Margaret. “You are right. You ought not to share it. I was stupid. What I meant to say is this: Will you allow us—my husband and myself—in return for the great pleasure we have had this evening—will you let us contribute a certain sum—say, a hundred dollars a month—to the upkeep of the palace? What would that be in pesetas, Joe?”

“Lopez can reckon in dollars,” said Shelton, and at last he stepped out into the full moonlight.

“Dios!” said Lopez, and struck the back of his hand against his mouth. The countess was almost asleep in her chair, and he went on quickly: “We will walk down the hill together. The condesa—she must not know from where came the money.”

He made a salutation, with a long, courtly Spanish phrase in it, to the countess, who merely flickered her hand in a friendly, casual good night and seemed relieved to end a long evening by bolting the grille behind the three.

It was long after midnight as they came out on the bare side of the hills. The fields of snow above them were positively dazzling under the bright full moon.

Shelton thought, “He's probably armed, and I'm not.”

Margaret took her husband's right arm, so that even that wasn't free, as she said, “You knew Lopez in New York? You never told me—you keep the most interesting things from me, Joe.”

He had no further desire to keep it from her. He had no wish to frighten her, but he let her have it all.

“This is the man I came to Spain to find,” he said. “He is a notorious forger.” He told her the whole story.

Lopez was walking beside them, muttering and flinging his hands in the air, with all the fingers spread out.

“What could a man do?” he kept repeating. “Just as they would have taken the palace the draft arrived. What was my honor—one man's honor—a little crime against a big one—what could I do?”

“I think you were perfectly right,” said Margaret.

“Margaret!” exclaimed her husband.

“Nombre de Dios, a tea house!” said Lopez.

“A tea house!” echoed Margaret, as if it were Shelton himself who had intended the outrage.

“And you have not seen it yet, señora,” Lopez went on to Margaret, as if only she and he were reasonable beings in the whole world. “Underground there are the baths—all the original tiles, and the vistas in the gardens, and the carved screens ——”

Shelton heard them talking as if he were in a dream. Not merely was Margaret not shocked by Lopez' crime; but here she was, a timid woman, talking without a shade of fear at the dead of night, on a deserted mountain side to a notorious criminal. Where was her moral sense? Where was his own? Where—an even more remarkable disappearance, perhaps—was his instinct of self-preservation; for unquestionably his position with his board was dependent on his bringing Lopez to book. He must make Lopez understand that either the money fraudulently obtained must be repayed, or else—prison.

Yet it was not easy to interrupt the conversation of Lopez and Margaret, who were talking like partners. What repairs the palace needed, what the necessary upkeep would be; whether, after the death of the condesa a small fee from sight-seers would pay the expenses of caring for the gardens. They were two practical people; they calculated it carefully. Yes, with Lopez to attend to the work and Margaret in New York arranging a little suitable publicity, the fees would certainly take care of the grounds.

Shelton had not spoken when, at the entrance to the hotel, Lopez bade them a most courteous good night. He was to come for Margaret the next evening at six o'clock to show her the rest of the palace.

As the Sheltons walked up the long flights to the third story, for the hotel elevator had as usual stopped running, Margaret was still talking of her plan—the number of sight-seers that would come, the amount of the fee to be charged. It was not until they were in their room that Shelton at last spoke.

“Margaret,” he said, “do you take in that I have come all this way to arrest this man, and that you are practically going into business with him?”

“Not exactly that,” she answered. “We are going to work together to preserve something infinitely beautiful.”

“But what you are doing is immoral,” he said gently.

They were standing on their balcony now, looking out over the scene of plain and mountains that Lopez had once described. Margaret laid her hand on his shoulder.

“Joe,” she said, “it seems to me that one of the great rewards of being good according to a code, day in and day out, as I have always tried to be, is that you keep your moral sense so keen that in a crisis you know whether it's right for you to do something like this, which most people would say was wicked. I know I'm right.”

It seemed so to him, too, with the crests of Sierra Nevada in full view. He was not sure how it would seem if he were standing at the corner of Wall Street and Nassau.

Presently Margaret moved away to get ready for bed, but before long another suggestion reached him.

“I do agree with you,” she said, “that you can't let the bank suffer. I think you will have to pay them back the money Lopez took, out of your own pocket.”

“And what shall I tell them?” he asked.

“Oh, we'll think of that on the steamer,” said Margaret, and she was soon sleeping the sleep that comes to those whose consciences are clear.

There was no meeting of the board scheduled for the first few days after the return of the chairman, but he made a report immediately to the president. Anyone who saw the two men come sauntering out of the president's private room could not have doubted that the report had been satisfactory to both of them. Burke, the bank's detective, who had been hanging about eager to hear the news, approached them.

“Glad to see you back, Mr. Shelton,” he said. “Did you get Lopez?”

It was the president who answered, “He did better than that, Burke. He got the money.”

“You don't say!” exclaimed Burke, sincerely surprised.

“Yes,” said the chairman, and his clear blue eye had never looked clearer and more honest. “I hardly thought, as long as Lopez gave the money back, it was worth while to go through the expense of extraditing him.”

“You were quite right,” said the president.

“But what will keep him from coming back and beginning operations all over again?” asked Burke.

“Why, don't you see?” said the president. “Now we have the evidence, if he shows his face in this country ——”

“He will never leave Granada,” said Shelton positively.

As the three men stood chatting—about business and Spain and whether Mrs. Shelton had enjoyed the trip—the head bookkeeper approached them.

“Mr. Shelton,” he said—he was holding an open letter in his hand—“I have a line here from Mrs. Shelton. She asks me to make as for a monthly payment of one hundred dollars to a party in Granada, Spain, but I can't quite make out the name.”

Shelton put out his hand with a quick, smooth motion and took the letter out of his bookkeeper's hand.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “I will attend to that.” And he added to the president, “One of my wife's charitable extravagances.”

“Ah, women!” said the president, who was a little sentimental. “They are made of finer clay than we, Shelton.”

Shelton did not answer. He was thinking that Margaret really might have chosen another bank through which to make those payments.