CHAPTER XIII

OLD ACQUAINTANCE

At six o’clock on the second morning after Hillyard’s visit to Barcelona, the steam-yacht Dragonfly swept round the point of La Dragonera and changed her course to the south-east.  She steamed with a following breeze over a sea of darkest sapphire which broke in sparkling cascades of white and gold against the rocky creeks and promontories on the ship’s port side.  Peasants working on the green terraces above the rocks stopped their work and stared as the blue ensign with the Union Jack in the corner broke out from the flagstaff at the stern.

“But it’s impossible,” cried one.  “Only yesterday a French mail-steamer was chased in the passage between Mallorca and Minorca.  It’s impossible.”

Another shaded his eyes with his hand and looked upon the neat yacht with its white deck and shining brass in contemptuous pity.

“Loco Ingles,” said he.

The tradition of the mad Englishman has passed away from France, but it has only leaped the Pyrenees.  Some crazy multi-millionaire was just running his head into the German noose.  They gave up their work and settled down contentedly to watch the yacht, multi-millionaire, captain and crew and all go up into the sky.  But the Dragonfly passed from their sight with the foam curling from her bows and broadening out into a pale fan behind her; and over the headlands for a long time they saw the streamer of her smoke as she drove in to Palma Bay.

Hillyard, standing by the captain’s side upon the bridge, watched the great cathedral rise from out of the water at the end of the bay, towers and flying buttresses and the mass of brown stone, before even a house was visible.  The Dragonfly passed a German cargo steamer which had sought refuge here at the outbreak of war.  She was a large ship, full of oil, and she had been moved from the quay-side to an anchorage in the bay by the captain of the port, lest by design or inadvertence she should take fire and set the town aflame.  There she lay, a source of endless misgiving to every allied ship which sailed these waters, kept clean and trim as a yacht, her full crew on board, her dangerous cargo below, in the very fairway of the submarine; and there the scruples of the Allies allowed her to remain while month followed month.  Historians in later years will come across in this or that Government office in Paris, in London and in Rome, warnings, appeals, and accounts of the presence of this ship; and those anxious for a picturesque contrast may set against the violation of Belgium and all the “scrap of paper” philosophy, the fact that for years in the very centre of the German submarine effort in the Western Mediterranean, the German steamer Fangturm, with her priceless cargo of oil, was allowed by the scrupulous honour of the Allies to swing unmolested at her anchor in Palma Bay.  Hillyard could never pass that great