'If I told you the truth you would never believe me,' replied de Richleau bitterly.
'No harm in trying me,' remarked the lieutenant with calm indifference.
'Very well then. My proper style and title is His Excellency Major-General the Duke de Richleau, Count de Quesnoy, Count Konigstein, Knight of the Most Exalted Order of the Golden Fleece. I am a British subject and a personal friend of your King, with whom I have sat at table three times during the past month. I arrived in Barcelona . . .'
'That's enough!' snapped Navarez. 'What sort of a fool do you take me for? But perhaps you're trying to be funny. If so, let me tell you this is no time for joking.'
'As it is I who look like shortly facing a firing squad, and not you, it is unnecessary to remind me of that.'
'Let's have the truth then.'
'Apart from sparing you some of my lesser titles and honours I have told it; but I also told you first that you would not believe me. I don't suppose you will believe either that for the two nights preceding this last one, I was staying up at Montjuich as General Quiroga's guest.' *
'Of course I don't,' the young officer's voice had become impatient. 'Is it likely that the Captain-General would entertain a nihilist?'
'You have no shadow of proof that I am a nihilist,' retorted de Richleau angrily. 'Do I look or speak like one?'
The Lieutenant shrugged. 'I am told that some of them are educated men who have become mentally deranged. One of the most famous is a Russian Prince. I forget his name but it begins with K.'
'Kropotkin,' supplied the Duke. 'All right. You have me there. But at least I ask you to believe that for most of my life I have been a soldier. You are a soldier, too, so we both know that the quickest way to earn promotion is to display courage.'
'What has this to do with your case?'
'That it gives you a chance to display your courage. Go and see General Quiroga for me,* or even telephone to him. He cannot eat you. On the contrary he will think the better of you for having bearded him rather than see a man condemned who may be innocent. I swear to you by all I hold sacred . . .'
'What? That you did not kill this detective?'
'No. I do not deny that I shot him, but. . .'
'Since you admit your guilt I'll be damned if I'll beard the Captain-General on your account.'
De Richleau sat down on the truckle bed and put his head between his hands. He had been in many a tight corner before but in nearly all of them he had at least had the chance to fight his way out. This time there was no such chance. He had been trapped under a false identity and caught up in a swift-moving judicial process designed only as an emergency measure to crush a serious revolt. It really began to look as though, should he fail to get word of his plight to Quiroga, he would find himself facing a firing squad before the morning was out. For a minute or more he racked his brains for a way to persuade or bully Navarez into acting as his messenger. Then a new idea occurred to him. Springing to his feet, he cried:
'I am a British subject. I demand to see the British Consul.'
'You told me you were when you made all those other damn fool claims about yourself,' the Lieutenant replied coldly. 'Have you any papers to prove it?'
'No. But as a British national I demand to see my Consul.'
'You are in no position to demand anything.'
'All right then. I request, beg if you will, that he should be brought here.'
Navarez shook his head. 'We've had dozens of foreign nationals through our hands: Frenchmen, Italians, Greeks; mostly seamen from ships in the docks who joined the revolutionaries. With the city under Martial Law they were treated like the rest. In an emergency formalities such as notifying Consuls have to be waived, and the emergency is still on.'
Again they remained silent for a minute while the Duke strove desperately to think of a way out. Then the Lieutenant said, 'Your best plan is to cut out the fireworks about your being the King of Siam and plead that you shot this fellow in self-defence.'
T did. If I hadn't shot him he would have shot me. But do you think the Court will believe that?'
T doubt it,' again the young man fingered his moustache, 'still, it's about your only chance.'
As he was speaking a key grated in the lock, and the door was thrown open. Navarez stepped out into the corridor and two warders entered the cell. One of them snapped a handcuff on to the Duke's right wrist and snapped the other on to his own left wrist. Then they filed out and up to the ground floor of the building.
In front of it a prison van was waiting. As the Duke stepped out into the bright morning sunshine, he cast a swift look up and down the street. There were plenty of people in it going about their morning's business. If he could have cut and run for it he might have got away in the crowd. But as he was handcuffed to the warder such an attempt was out of the question. Filled now with such apprehension that he had broken out into a slight sweat, he allowed himself to be hustled into the van.
It set off at a trot, then as its pace slowed he knew that the horses were drawing it up the long hill of Montjuich. All the time his brain was working furiously, but it had now become sterile of ideas by which he might attempt to save himself. His one hope lay in the chance that when it reached the fortress some member of the General's staff who knew him by sight might be about, so that he could shout to them for help. But when the van pulled up and he was pushed out of it he saw that it had halted on the far side of the fortress from the General's quarters. Two minutes later his warders had marched him through a door and down a passage into a small bleak waiting-room.
Navarez left them, and for ten minutes de Richleau remained there, still cudgelling his wits without avail. Now that he was alone with the two warders he contemplated the desperate step of attempting to overcome them. Had he been free he might have succeeded, but he was still handcuffed to one of them. He knew that even if he had knocked the man unconscious, he would never be able to get the key and unlock the steel bracelet while the other attacked him, before shouts brought some of the soldiers he had seen at the entrance to the fortress.
An N.C.O. appeared at the door of the room and beckoned to them. Turning, he led the way down the passage, the Duke and the warders following closely on his heels. They went out through a door and crossed a small courtyard.
Twelve soldiers and a sergeant were lounging near their stacked rifles. De Richleau needed no telling that they were the firing squad that Navarez had mentioned as always being kept in a state of readiness.
The north wall of the courtyard was blank, without doors or windows. Half-way along it and about four feet from the ground there showed a long, irregular patch where the stone-work had been pitted by innumerable bullets. Obviously it was there, with their backs to that stretch of wall, that during the past six weeks hundreds of mob-leaders, anarchists, syndicalists, Communists, and probably quite a number of honest but unlucky workers, had met their death. The Duke lowered his eyes and could not prevent a shudder running through him.
They passed through another door, turned right and entered a largish room furnished only with a number of deal tables, chairs and benches. In the middle of a long table at the far end of the room three officers were seated close together: a Major, a Captain and a Lieutenant. Anxiously the Duke scrutinized their faces in an endeavour to assess the characters of the three men who were about to try him. The Major was elderly, square-headed and somewhat morose-looking. De Richleau judged him to be past further promotion at his age, so probably disappointed in his career and a harsh disciplinarian. The Captain was about twenty-six, a dark, handsome fellow with a fine upturned moustache. The Lieutenant was a vapid-looking youth wearing a monocle.