The Snare

Rafael Sabatini

Chapter 1 THE AFFAIR AT TAVORA

It is established beyond doubt that Mr. Butler was drunk at the time. This rests upon the evidence of Sergeant Flanagan and the troopers who accompanied him, and it rests upon Mr. Butler's own word, as we shall see. And let me add here and now that however wild and irresponsible a rascal he may have been, yet by his own lights he was a man of honour, incapable of falsehood, even though it were calculated to save his skin. I do not deny that Sir Thomas Picton has described him as a "thieving blackguard." But I am sure that this was merely the downright, rather extravagant manner, of censure peculiar to that distinguished general, and that those who have taken the expression at its purely literal value have been lacking at once in charity and in knowledge of the caustic, uncompromising terms of speech of General Picton whom Lord Wellington, you will remember, called a rough, foulmouthed devil.

In further extenuation it may truthfully be urged that the whole hideous and odious affair was the result of a misapprehension; although I cannot go so far as one of Lieutenant Butler's apologists and accept the view that he was the victim of a deliberate plot on the part of his too-genial host at Regoa. That is a misconception easily explained. This host's name happened to be Souza, and the apologist in question has very rashly leapt at the conclusion that he was a member of that notoriously intriguing family, of which the chief members were the Principal Souza, of the Council of Regency at Lisbon, and the Chevalier Souza, Portuguese minister to the Court of St. James's. Unacquainted with Portugal, our apologist was evidently in ignorance of the fact that the name of Souza is almost as common in that country as the name of Smith in this. He may also have been misled by the fact that Principal Souza did not neglect to make the utmost capital out of the affair, thereby increasing the difficulties with which Lord Wellington was already contending as a result of incompetence and deliberate malice on the part both of the ministry at home and of the administration in Lisbon.

Indeed, but for these factors it is unlikely that the affair could ever have taken place at all. If there had been more energy on the part of Mr. Perceval and the members of the Cabinet, if there had been less bad faith and self-seeking on the part of the Opposition, Lord Wellington's campaign would not have been starved as it was; and if there had been less bad faith and self-seeking of an even more stupid and flagrant kind on the part of the Portuguese Council of Regency, the British Expeditionary Force would not have been left without the stipulated supplies and otherwise hindered at every step.

Lord Wellington might have experienced the mental agony of Sir John Moore under similar circumstances fifteen months earlier. That he did suffer, and was to suffer yet more, his correspondence shows. But his iron will prevented that suffering from disturbing the equanimity of his mind. The Council of Regency, in its concern to court popularity with the aristocracy of Portugal, might balk his measures by its deliberate supineness; echoes might reach him of the voices at St. Stephen's that loudly dubbed his dispositions rash, presumptuous and silly; catch-halfpenny journalists at home and men of the stamp of Lord Grey might exploit their abysmal military ignorance in reckless criticism and censure of his operations; he knew what a passionate storm of anger and denunciation had arisen from the Opposition when he had been raised to the peerage some months earlier, after the glorious victory of Talavera, and how, that victory notwithstanding, it had been proclaimed that his conduct of the campaign was so incompetent as to deserve, not reward, but punishment; and he was aware of the growing unpopularity of the war in England, knew that the Government - ignorant of what he was so laboriously preparing - was chafing at his inactivity of the past few months, so that a member of the Cabinet wrote to him exasperatedly, incredibly and fatuously — "for God's sake do something — anything so that blood be spilt."

A heart less stout might have been broken, a genius less mighty stifled in this evil tangle of stupidity, incompetence and malignity that sprang up and flourished about him can every hand. A man less single-minded must have succumbed to exasperation, thrown up his command and taken ship for home, inviting some of his innumerable critics to take his place at the head of the troops, and give free rein to the military genius that inspired their critical dissertations. Wellington, however, has been rightly termed of iron, and never did he show himself more of iron than in those trying days of 1810. Stern, but with a passionless sternness, he pursued his way towards the goal he had set himself, allowing no criticism, no censure, no invective so much as to give him pause in his majestic progress.

Unfortunately the lofty calm of the Commander-in-Chief was not shared by his lieutenants. The Light Division was quartered along the River Agueda, watching the Spanish frontier, beyond which Marshal Ney was demonstrating against Ciudad Rodrigo, and for lack of funds its fiery-tempered commander, Sir Robert Craufurd, found himself at last unable to feed his troops. Exasperated by these circumstances, Sir Robert was betrayed into an act of rashness. He seized some church plate at Pinhel that he might convert it into rations. It was an act which, considering the general state of public feeling in the country at the time, might have had the gravest consequences, and Sir Robert was subsequently forced to do penance and afford redress. That, however, is another story. I but mention the incident here because the affair of Tavora with which I am concerned may be taken to have arisen directly out of it, and Sir Robert's behaviour may be construed as setting an example and thus as affording yet another extenuation of Lieutenant Butler's offence.

Our lieutenant was sent upon a foraging expedition into the valley of the Upper Douro, at the head of a half-troop of the 8th Dragoons, two squadrons of which were attached at the time to the Light Division. To be more precise, he was to purchase and bring into Pinhel a hundred head of cattle, intended some for slaughter and some for draught. His instructions were to proceed as far as Regoa and there report himself to one Bartholomew Bearsley, a prosperous and influential English wine-grower, whose father had acquired considerable vineyards in the Douro. He was reminded of the almost hostile disposition of the peasantry in certain districts; warned to handle them with tact and to suffer no straggling on the part of his troopers; and advised to place himself in the hands of Mr. Bearsley for all that related to the purchase of the cattle. Let it be admitted at once that had Sir Robert Craufurd been acquainted with Mr. Butler's feather-brained, irresponsible nature, he would have selected any officer rather than our lieutenant to command that expedition. But the Irish Dragoons had only lately come to Pinhel, and the general himself was not immediately concerned.

Lieutenant Butler set out on a blustering day of March at the head of his troopers, accompanied by Cornet O.'Rourke and two sergeants, and at Pesqueira he was further reinforced by a Portuguese guide. They found quarters that night at Ervedoza, and early on the morrow they were in the saddle again, riding along the heights above the Cachao da Valleria, through which the yellow, swollen river swirled and foamed along its rocky way. The prospect, formidable even in the full bloom of fruitful and luxuriant summer, was forbidding and menacing now as some imagined gorge of the nether regions. The towering granite heights across the turgid stream were shrouded in mist and sweeping rain, and from the leaden heavens overhead the downpour was of a sullen and merciless steadiness, starting at every step a miniature torrent to go swell the roaring waters in the gorge, and drenching the troop alike in body and in spirit. Ahead, swathed to the chin in his blue cavalry cloak, the water streaming from his leather helmet, rode Lieutenant Butler, cursing the weather, the country; the Light Division, and everything else that occurred to him as contributing to his present discomfort. Beside him, astride of a mule, rode the Portuguese guide in a caped cloak of thatched straw, which made him look for all the world like a bottle of his native wine in its straw sheath. Conversation between the two was out of the question, for the guide spoke no English and the lieutenant's knowledge of Portuguese was very far from conversational.

Presently the ground sloped, and the troop descended from the heights by a road flanked with dripping pinewoods, black and melancholy, that for a while screened them off from the remainder of the sodden world. Thence they emerged near the head of the bridge that spanned the swollen river and led them directly into the town of Regoa. Through the mud and clay of the deserted, narrow, unpaved streets the dragoons squelched their way, under a super-deluge, for the rain was now reinforced by steady and overwhelming sheets of water descending on either side from the gutter-shaped tiles that roofed the houses.

Inquisitive faces showed here and there behind blurred windows; odd doors were opened that a peasant family might stare in questioning wonder - and perhaps in some concern - at the sodden pageant that was passing. But in the streets themselves the troopers met no living thing, all the world having scurried to shelter from the pitiless downpour.

Beyond the town they were brought by their guide to a walled garden, and halted at a gateway. Beyond this could be seen a fair white house set in the foreground of the vineyards that rose in terraces up the hillside until they were lost from sight in the lowering veils of mist. Carved on the granite lintel of that gateway, the lieutenant beheld the inscription, "BARTHOLOMEU BEARSLEY, 1744," and knew himself at his destination, at the gates of the son or grandson - he knew not which, nor cared - of the original tenant of that wine farm.

Mr. Bearsley, however, was from home. The lieutenant was informed of this by Mr. Bearsley's steward, a portly, genial, rather priestly gentleman in smooth black broadcloth, whose name was Souza - a name which, as I have said, has given rise to some misconceptions. Mr. Bearsley himself had lately left for England, there to wait until the disturbed state of Portugal should be happily repaired. He had been a considerable sufferer from the French invasion under Soult, and none may blame him for wishing to avoid a repetition of what already he had undergone, especially now that it was rumoured that the Emperor in person would lead the army gathering for conquest on the frontiers.

But had Mr. Bearsley been at home the dragoons could have received no warmer welcome than that which was extended to them by Fernando Souza. Greeting the lieutenant in intelligible English, he implored him, in the florid manner of the Peninsula, to count the house and all within it his own property, and to command whatever he might desire.

The troopers found accommodation in the kitchen and in the spacious hall, where great fires of pine logs were piled up for their comfort; and for the remainder of the day they abode there in various states of nakedness, relieved by blankets and straw capotes, what time the house was filled with the steam and stench of their drying garments. Rations had been short of late on the Agueda, and, in addition, their weary ride through the rain had made the men sharp-set. Abundance of food was placed before them by the solicitude of Fernando Souza, and they feasted, as they had not feasted for many months, upon roast kid, boiled rice and golden maize bread, washed down by a copious supply of a rough and not too heady wine that the discreet and discriminating steward judged appropriate to their palates and capable of supporting some abuse.

Akin to the treatment of the troopers in hall and kitchen, but on a nobler scale, was the treatment of Lieutenant Butler and Cornet O'Rourke in the dining-room. For them a well-roasted turkey took the place of kid, and Souza went down himself to explore the cellars for a well-sunned, time-ripened Douro table wine which he vowed - and our dragoons agreed with him - would put the noblest Burgundy to shame; and then with the dessert there was a Port the like of which Mr. Butler - who was always of a nice taste in wine, and who was coming into some knowledge of Port from his residence in the country - had never dreamed existed.

For four and twenty hours the dragoons abode at Mr. Bearsley's quinta, thanking God for the discomforts that had brought them to such comfort, feasting in this land of plenty as only those can feast who have kept a rigid Lent. Nor was this all. The benign Souza was determined that the sojourn there of these representatives of his country's deliverers should be a complete rest and holiday. Not for Mr. Butler to journey to the uplands in this matter of a herd of bullocks. Fernando Souza had at command a regiment of labourers, who were idle at this time of year, and whom his good nature would engage on behalf of his English guests. Let the lieutenant do no more than provide the necessary money for the cattle, and the rest should happen as by enchantment - and Souza himself would see to it that the price was fair and proper.

The lieutenant asked no better. He had no great opinion of himself either as cattle dealer or cattle drover, nor did his ambitions beget in him any desire to excel as one or the other. So he was well content that his host should have the bullocks fetched to Regoa for him. The herd was driven in on the following afternoon, by when the rain had ceased, and our lieutenant had every reason to be pleased when he beheld the solid beasts procured. Having disbursed the amount demanded - an amount more reasonable far than he had been prepared to pay - Mr. Butler would have set out forthwith to return to Pinhel, knowing how urgent was the need of the division and with what impatience the choleric General Craufurd would be awaiting him.

"Why, so you shall, so you shall," said the priestly, soothing Souza. "But first you'll dine. There is good dinner - ah, but what good dinner! - that I have order. And there is a wine - ah, but you shall give me news of that wine."

Lieutenant Butler hesitated. Cornet O'Rourke watched him anxiously, praying that he might succumb to the temptation, and attempted suasion in the form of a murmured blessing upon Souza's hospitality.

"Sir Robert will be impatient," demurred the lieutenant.

"But half-hour," protested Souza. "What is half-hour? And in half-hour you will have dine."

"True," ventured the cornet; "and it's the devil himself knows when we may dine again."

"And the dinner is ready. It can be serve this instant. It shall," said Souza with finality, and pulled the bell-rope.

Mr. Butler, never dreaming - as indeed how could he? - that Fate was taking a hand in this business, gave way, and they sat down to dinner. Henceforth you see him the sport of pitiless circumstance.

They dined within the half-hour, as Souza had promised, and they dined exceedingly well. If yesterday the steward had been able without warning of their coming to spread at short notice so excellent a feast, conceive what had been accomplished now by preparation. Emptying his fourth and final bumper of rich red Douro, Mr. Butler paid his host the compliment of a sigh and pushed back his chair.

But Souza detained him, waving a hand that trembled with anxiety, and with anxiety stamped upon his benignly rotund and shaven countenance.

"An instant yet," he implored. "Mr. Bearsley would never pardon me did I let you go without what he call a stirrup-cup to keep you from the ills that lurk in the wind of the Serra. A glass - but one - of that Port you tasted yesterday. I say but a glass, yet I hope you will do honour to the bottle. But a glass at least, at least!" He implored it almost with tears. Mr. Butler had reached that state of delicious torpor in which to take the road is the last agony; but duty was duty, and Sir Robert Craufurd had the fiend's own temper. Torn thus between consciousness of duty and the weakness of the flesh, he looked at O'Rourke. O'Rourke, a cherubic fellow, who had for his years a very pretty taste in wine, returned the glance with a moist eye, and licked his lips.

"In your place I should let myself be tempted," says he. "It's an elegant wine, and ten minutes more or less is no great matter."

The lieutenant discovered a middle way which permitted him to take a prompt decision creditable to his military instincts, but revealing a disgraceful though quite characteristic selfishness.

"Very well," he said. "Leave Sergeant Flanagan and ten men to wait for me, O'Rourke, and do you set out at once with the rest of the troop. And take the cattle with you. I shall overtake you before you have gone very far."

O'Rourke's crestfallen air stirred the sympathetic Souza's pity.

"But, Captain," he besought, "will you not allow the lieutenant - "

Mr. Butler cut him short. "Duty," said he sententiously, "is duty. Be off, O'Rourke."

And O'Rourke, clicking his heels viciously, saluted and departed.

Came presently the bottles in a basket - not one, as Souza had said, but three; and when the first was done Butler reflected that since O'Rourke and the cattle were already well upon the road there need no longer be any hurry about his own departure. A herd of bullocks does not travel very quickly, and even with a few hours' start in a forty-mile journey is easily over-taken by a troop of horse travelling without encumbrance.

You understand, then, how easily our lieutenant yielded himself to the luxurious circumstances, and disposed himself to savour the second bottle of that nectar distilled from the very sunshine of the Douro — the phrase is his own. The steward produced a box of very choice cigars, and although the lieutenant was not an habitual smoker, he permitted himself on this exceptional occasion to be further tempted. Stretched in a deep chair beside the roaring fire of pine logs, he sipped and smoked and drowsed away the greater par of that wintry afternoon. Soon the third bottle had gone the way of the second, and Mr. Bearsley's steward being a man of extremely temperate habit, it follow: that most of the wine had found its way down the lieutenant's thirsty gullet.

It was perhaps a more potent vintage than he had at first suspected, and as the torpor produced by the dinner and the earlier, fuller wine was wearing off, it was succeeded by an exhilaration that played havoc with the few wits that Mr. Butler could call his own.

The steward was deeply learned in wines and wine growing and in very little besides; consequently the talk was almost confined to that subject in its many branches, and he could be interesting enough, like all enthusiasts. To a fresh burst of praise from Butler of the ruby vintage to which he had been introduced, the steward presently responded with a sigh:

"Indeed, as you say, Captain, a great wine. But we had a greater."

"Impossible, by God," swore Butler, with a hiccup.

"You may say so; but it is the truth. We had a greater; a wonderful, clear vintage it was, of the year 1798 - a famous year on the Douro, the quite most famous year that we have ever known. Mr. Bearsley sell some pipes to the monks at Tavora, who have bottle it and keep it. I beg him at the time not to sell, knowing the value it must come to have one day. But he sell all the same. Ah, meu Deus!" The steward clasped his hands and raised rather prominent eyes to the ceiling, protesting to his Maker against his master's folly. "He say we have plenty, and now" - he spread fat hands in a gesture of despair - "and now we have none. Some sons of dogs of French who came with Marshal Soult happen this way on a forage they discover the wine and they guzzle it like pigs." He swore, and his benignity was eclipsed by wrathful memory. He heaved himself up in a passion.

"Think of that so priceless vintage drink like hogwash, as Mr. Bearsley say, by those god-dammed French swine. "not a drop - not a spoonful remain. But the monks at Tavora still have much of what they buy, I am told. They treasure it for they know good wine. All priests know good wine. Ah yes! Goddam!" He fell into deep reflection.

Lieutenant Butler stirred, and became sympathetic.

"'San infern'l shame," said he indignantly. "I'll no forgerrit when I … meet the French." Then he too fell into reflection.

He was a good Catholic, and, moreover, a Catholic who did not take things for granted. The sloth and self-indulgence of the clergy in Portugal, being his first glimpse of conventuals in Latin countries, had deeply shocked him. The vows of a monastic poverty that was kept carefully beyond the walls of the monastery offended his sense of propriety. That men who had vowed themselves to pauperism, who wore coarse garments and went barefoot, should batten upon rich food and store up wines that gold could not purchase, struck him as a hideous incongruity.

"And the monks drink this nectar?" he said aloud, and laughed sneeringly. " I know the breed - the fair found belly wi' fat capon lined. Tha's your poverty stricken Capuchin."

Souza looked at him in sudden alarm, bethinking himself that all Englishmen were heretics, and knowing nothing of subtle distinctions between English and Irish. In silence Butler finished the third and last bottle, and his thoughts fixed themselves with increasing insistence upon a wine reputed better than this of which there was great store in the cellars of the convent of Tavora.

Abruptly he asked: "Where's Tavora?" He was thinking perhaps of the comfort that such wine would bring to a company of war-worn soldiers in the valley of the Agueda.

"Some ten leagues from here," answered Souza, and pointed to a map that hung upon the wall.

The lieutenant rose, and rolled a thought unsteadily across the room. He was a tall, loose-limbed fellow, blue-eyed, fair-complexioned, with a thatch of fiery red hair excellently suited to his temperament. He halted before the map, and with legs wide apart, to afford him the steadying support of a broad basis, he traced with his finger the course of the Douro, fumbled about the district of Regoa, and finally hit upon the place he sought.

"Why," he said, "seems to me 'sif we should ha' come that way. I's shorrer road to Pesqueira than by the river."

"As the bird fly," said Souza. "But the roads be bad - just mule tracks, while by the river the road is tolerable good."

"Yet," said the lieutenant, "I think I shall go back tha' way."

The fumes of the wine were mounting steadily to addle his indifferent brains. Every moment he was seeing things in proportions more and more false. His resentment against priests who, sworn to self-abnegation, hoarded good wine, whilst soldiers sent to keep harm from priests' fat carcasses were left to suffer cold and even hunger, was increasing with every moment. He would sample that wine at Tavora; and he would bear some of it away that his brother officers at Pinhel might sample it. He would buy it. Oh yes! There should be no plundering, no irregularity, no disregard of general orders. He would buy the wine and pay for it - but himself he would fix the price, and see that the monks of Tavora made no profit out of their defenders.

Thus he thought as he considered the map. Presently, when having taken leave of Fernando Souza - that prince of hosts - Mr. Butler was riding down through the town with Sergeant Flanagan and ten troopers at his heels, his purpose deepened and became more fierce. I think the change of temperature must have been to blame. It was a chill, bleak evening. Overhead, across a background of faded blue, scudded ragged banks of clouds, the lingering flotsam of the shattered rainstorm of yesterday: and a cavalry cloak afforded but indifferent protection against the wind that blew hard and sharp from the Atlantic.

Coming from the genial warmth of Mr. Souza's parlour into this, the evaporation of the wine within him was quickened, its fumes mounted now overwhelmingly to his brain, and from comfortably intoxicated that he had been hitherto, the lieutenant now became furiously drunk; and the transition was a very rapid one. It was now that he looked upon the business he had in hand in the light of a crusade; a sort of religious fanaticism began to actuate him.

The souls of these wretched monks must be saved; the temptation to self-indulgence, which spelt perdition for them, must be removed from their midst. It was a Christian duty. He no longer though of buying the wine and paying for it. His one aim ow was to obtain possession of it not merely a part of it, but all of it - and carry it off, thereby accomplishing two equally praiseworthy ends: to rescue a conventful of monks from damnation, and to regale the much-enduring, half-starved campaigners of the Agueda.

Thus reasoned Mr. Butler with admirable, if drunken, logic. And reasoning thus he led the way over the bridge, and kept straight on when he had crossed it, much to the dismay of Sergeant Flanagan, who, perceiving the lieutenant's condition, conceived that he was missing his way. This the sergeant ventured to point out, reminding his officer that they had come by the road along the river.

"So we did," said Butler shortly. "Bu' we go back by way of Tavora."

They had no guide. The one who had conducted them to Regoa had returned with O'Rourke, and although Souza had urged upon the lieutenant at parting that he should take one of the men from the quinta, Butler, with wit enough to see that this was not desirable under the circumstances, had preferred to find his way alone.

His confused mind strove now to revisualise the map which he had consulted in Souza's parlour. He discovered, naturally enough, that the task was altogether beyond his powers. Meanwhile night was descending. They were, however, upon the mule track, which went up and round the shoulder of a hill, and by this they came at dark upon a hamlet.

Sergeant Flanagan was a shrewd fellow and perhaps the most sober man in the troop - for the wine had run very freely in Souza's kitchen, too, and the men, whilst awaiting their commander's pleasure, had taken the fullest advantage of an opportunity that was all too rare upon that campaign. Now Sergeant Flanagan began to grow anxious. He knew the Peninsula from the days of Sir John Moore, and he knew as much of the ways of the peasantry of Portugal as any man. He knew of the brutal ferocity of which that peasantry was capable. He had seen evidence more than once of the unspeakable fate of French stragglers from the retreating army of Marshal Soult. He knew of crucifixions, mutilations and hideous abominations practised upon them in these remote hill districts by the merciless men into whose hands they happened to fall, and he knew that it was not upon French soldiers alone - that these abominations had been practised. Some of those fierce peasants had been unable to discriminate between invader and deliverer; to them a foreigner was a foreigner and no more. Others, who were capable of discriminating, were in the position of having come to look upon French and English with almost equal execration.

It is true that whilst the Emperor's troops made war on the maxim that an army must support itself upon the country it traverses, thereby achieving a greater mobility, since it was thus permitted to travel comparatively light, the British law was that all things requisitioned must be paid for. Wellington maintained this law in spite of all difficulties at all times with an unrelaxing rigidity, and punished with the utmost vigour those who offended against it. Nevertheless breaches were continual; men broke out here and there, often, be it said, under stress of circumstances for which the Portuguese were themselves responsible; plunder and outrage took place and provoked indiscriminating rancour with consequences at times as terrible to stragglers from the British army of deliverance as to those from the French army of oppressors. Then, too, there was the Portuguese Militia Act recently enforced by Wellington - acting through the Portuguese Government - deeply resented by the peasantry upon whom it bore, and rendering them disposed to avenge it upon such stray British soldiers as might fall into their hands.

Knowing all this, Sergeant Flanagan did not at all relish this night excursion into the hill fastnesses, where at any moment, as it seemed to him, they might miss their way. After all, they were but twelve men all told, and he accounted it a stupid thing to attempt to take a short cut across the hills for the purpose of overtaking an encumbered troop that must of necessity be moving at a very much slower pace. This was the way not to overtake but to outdistance. Yet since it was not for him to remonstrate with the lieutenant, he kept his peace and hoped anxiously for the best.

At the mean wine-shop of that hamlet Mr. Butler inquired his way by the simple expedient of shouting "Tavora?" with a strong interrogative inflection. The vintner made it plain by gestures - accompanied by a rattling musketry of incomprehensible speech that their way lay straight ahead. And straight ahead they went, following that mule track for some five or six miles until it began to slope gently towards the plain again. Below them they presently beheld a cluster of twinkling lights to advertise a township. They dropped swiftly down, and in the outskirts overtook a belated bullock-cart, whose ungreased axle was arousing the hillside echoes with its plangent wail.

Of the vigorous young woman who marched barefoot beside it, shouldering her goad as if it were a pikestaff, Mr. Butler inquired - by his usual method - if this were Tavora, to receive an answer which, though voluble, was unmistakably affirmative.

"Covento Dominicano? was his next inquiry, made after they had gone some little way.

The woman pointed with her goad to a massive, dark building, flanked by a little church, which stood just across the square they were entering.

A moment later the sergeant, by Mr. Butler's orders, was knocking upon the iron-studded main door. They waited awhile in vain. None came to answer the knock; no light showed anywhere upon the dark face of the convent. The sergeant knocked again, more vigorously than before. Presently came timid, shuffling steps; a shutter opened in the door, and the grille thus disclosed was pierced by a shaft of feeble yellow light. A quavering, aged voice demanded to know who knocked.

"English soldiers," answered the lieutenant in Portuguese. "Open!"

A faint exclamation suggestive of dismay was the answer, the shutter closed again with a snap, the shuffling steps retreated and unbroken silence followed.

"Now wharra devil may this mean?" growled Mr. Butler. Drugged wits, like stupid ones, are readily suspicious. "Wharra they hatching in here that they :are afraid of lerring Bri'ish soldiers see? Knock again, Flanagan. Louder, man!"

The sergeant beat the door with the butt of his carbine. The blows gave out a hollow echo, but evoked no more answer than if they had fallen upon the door of a mausoleum. Mr. Butler completely lost his temper. "Seems to me that we've stumbled upon a hotbed o' treason. Hotbed o' treason!" he repeated, as if pleased with the phrase. "That's wharrit is." And he added peremptorily: "Break down the door."

"But, sir," began the sergeant in protest, greatly daring.

"Break down the door," repeated Mr. Butler. Lerrus be after seeing wha' these monks are afraid of showing us. I've a notion they're hiding more'n their wine."

Some of the troopers carried axes precisely against such an emergency as this. Dismounting, they fell upon the door with a will. But the oak was stout, fortified by bands of iron and great iron studs; and it resisted long. The thud of the axes and the crash of rending timbers could be heard from one end of Tavora to the other, yet from the convent it evoked no slightest response. But presently, as the door began to yield to the onslaught, there came another sound to arouse the town. From the belfry of the little church a bell suddenly gave tongue upon a frantic, hurried note that spoke unmistakably of alarm. Ding-ding-ding-ding it went, a tocsin summoning the assistance of all true sons of Mother Church.

Mr. Butler, however, paid little heed to it. The door was down at last, and followed by his troopers he rode under the massive gateway into the spacious close. Dismounting there, and leaving the woefully anxious sergeant and a couple of men to guard the horses, the lieutenant led the way along the cloisters, faintly revealed by a new-risen moon, towards a gaping doorway whence a feeble light was gleaming. He stumbled over the step into a hall dimly lighted by a lantern swinging from the ceiling. He found a chair, mounted it, and cut the lantern down, then led the way again along an endless corridor, stone-flagged and flanked on either side by rows of cells. Many of the doors stood open, as if in silent token of the tenants' hurried flight, showing what a panic had been spread by the sudden advent of this troop.

Mr. Butler became more and more deeply intrigued, more and more deeply suspicious that here all was not well. Why should a community of loyal monks take flight in this fashion from British soldiers?

"Bad luck to them!" he growled, as he stumbled on. "They may hide as they will, but it's myself 'll run the shavelings to earth."

They were brought up short at the end of that long, chill gallery by closed double doors. Beyond these an organ was pealing, and overhead the clapper of the alarm bell was beating more furiously than ever. All realised that they stood upon the threshold of the chapel and that the conventuals had taken refuge there.

Mr. Butler checked upon a sudden suspicion. "Maybe, after all, they've taken us for French," said he.

A trooper ventured to answer him. "Best let them see we're not before we have the whole village about our ears."

"Damn that bell," said the lieutenant, and added: "Put your shoulders to the door."

Its fastenings were but crazy ones, and it yielded almost instantly to their pressure - yielded so suddenly that Mr. Butler, who himself had been foremost in straining against it, shot forward half-a-dozen yards into the chapel and measured his length upon its cold flags.

Simultaneously from the chancel came a great cry: "Libera nos, Domine! followed by a shuddering murmur of prayer.

The lieutenant picked himself up, recovered the lantern that had rolled from his grasp, and lurched forward round the angle that hid the chancel from his view. There, huddled before the main altar like a flock of scared and stupid sheep, he beheld the conventuals - some two score of them perhaps and in the dim light of the heavy altar lamp above them he could make out the black and white habit of the order of St. Dominic.

He came to a halt, raised his lantern aloft, and called to them peremptorily:

"Ho, there!"

The organ ceased abruptly, but the bell overhead went clattering on.

Mr. Butler addressed them in the best French he could command: "What do you fear? Why do you flee? We are friends - English soldiers, seeking quarters for the night."

A vague alarm was stirring in him. It began to penetrate his obfuscated mind that perhaps he had been rash, that this forcible rape of a convent was a serious matter. Therefore he attempted this peaceful explanation.

>

From that huddled group a figure rose, and advanced with a solemn, stately grace. There was a faint swish of robes, the faint rattle of rosary beads. Something about that figure caught the lieutenant's attention sharply. He craned forward, half sobered by the sudden fear that clutched him, his eyes bulging in his face.

"I had thought," said a gentle, melancholy woman's voice, "that the seals of a nunnery were sacred to British soldiers "

For a moment Mr. Butler seemed to be labouring for breath. Fully sobered now, understanding of his ghastly error reached him at the gallop.

"My God!" he gasped, and incontinently turned to flee.

But as he fled in horror of his sacrilege, he still kept his head turned, staring over his shoulder at the stately figure of the abbess, either in fascination or with some lingering doubt of what he had seen and heard. Running thus, he crashed headlong into a pillar, and, stunned by the blow, he reeled and sank unconscious to the ground.

This the troopers had not seen, for they had not lingered. Understanding on their own part the horrible blunder, they had turned even as their leader turned, and they had raced madly back the way they had come, conceiving that he followed. And there was reason for their haste other than their anxiety to set a term to the sacrilege of their presence. From the cloistered garden of the convent uproar reached them, and the metallic voice of Sergeant Flanagan calling loudly for help.

The alarm bell of the convent had done its work. The villagers were up, enraged by the outrage, and armed with sticks and scythes and bill-hooks, an army of them was charging to avenge this infamy. The troopers reached the close no more than in time. Sergeant Flanagan, only half understanding the reason for so much anger, but understanding that this anger was very real and very dangerous, was desperately defending the horses with his two companions against the vanguard of the assailants. There was a swift rush of the dragoons and in an instant they were in the saddle, all but the lieutenant, of whose absence they were suddenly made conscious. Flanagan would have gone back for him, and he had in fact begun to issue an order with that object when a sudden surge of the swelling, roaring crowd cut off the dragoons from the door through which they had emerged. Sitting their horses, the little troop came together, their sabres drawn, solid as a rock in that angry human sea that surged about them. The moon riding now clear overhead irradiated that scene of impending strife.

Flanagan, standing in his stirrups, attempted to harangue the mob. But he was at a loss what to say that would appease them, nor able to speak a language they could understand. An angry peasant made a slash at him with a billhook. He parried the blow on his sabre, and with the flat of it knocked his assailant senseless.

Then the storm burst, and the mob flung itself upon the dragoons.

"Bad cess to you!" cried Flanagan. "Will ye listen to me, ye murthering villains" Then in despair "Char-r-r-ge!" he roared, and headed for the gateway.

The troopers attempted in vain to reach it. The mob hemmed them about too closely, and then a horrid hand-to-hand fight began, under the cold light of the moon, in that garden consecrated to peace and piety. Two saddles had been emptied, and the exasperated troopers were slashing now at their assailants with the edge, intent upon cutting a way out of that murderous press. It is doubtful if a man of them would have survived, for the odds were fully ten to one against them. To their aid came now the abbess. She stood on a balcony above, and called upon the people to desist, and hear her. Thence she harangued them for some moments, commanding them to allow the soldiers to depart. They obeyed with obvious reluctance, and at last a lane was opened in that solid, seething mass of angry clods.

But Flanagan hesitated to pass down this lane and so depart. Three of his troopers were down by now, and his lieutenant was missing. He was exercised to resolve where his duty lay. Behind him the mob was solid, cutting off the dragoons from their fallen comrades. An attempt to go back might be misunderstood and resisted, leading to a renewal of the combat, and surely in vain, for he could not doubt but that the fallen troopers had been finished outright.

Similarly the mob stood as solid between him and the door that led to the interior of the convent, where Mr. Butler was lingering alive or dead. A number of peasants had already invaded the actual building, so that in that connection too the sergeant concluded that there was little reason to hope that the lieutenant should have escaped the fate his own rashness had invoked. He had his remaining seven men to think of, and he concluded that it was his duty under all the circumstances to bring these off alive, and not procure their massacre by attempting fruitless quixotries.

So "Forward!" roared the voice of Sergeant Flanagan, and forward went the seven through the passage that had opened out before them in that hooting, angry mob.

Beyond the convent walls they found fresh assailants awaiting them, enemies these, who had not been soothed by the gentle, reassuring voice of the abbess. But here there was more room to manoeuvre.

"Trot!" the sergeant commanded, and soon that trot became a gallop. A shower of stones followed them as they thundered out of Tavora, and the sergeant himself had a lump as large as a duck-egg on the middle of his head when next day he reported himself at Pesqueira to Cornet O'Rourke, whom he overtook there.

When eventually Sir Robert Craufurd heard the story of the affair, he was as angry as only Sir Robert could be. To have lost four dragoons and to have set a match to a train that might end in a conflagration was reason and to spare.

"How came such a mistake to be made?" he inquired, a scowl upon his full red countenance.

Mr. O'Rourke had been investigating and was primed with knowledge.

"It appears, sir, that at Tavora there is a convent of Dominican nuns as well as a monastery of Dominican friars. Mr. Butler will have used the word 'convento,' which more particularly applies to the nunnery, and so he was directed to the wrong house."

"And you say the sergeant has reason to believe that Mr. Butler did not survive his folly?"

"I am afraid there can be no hope, sir."

"It's perhaps just as well," said Sir Robert. "For Lord Wellington would certainly have had him shot."

And there you have the true account of the stupid affair of Tavora, which was to produce, as we shall see, such far-reaching effects upon persons nowise concerned in it.

Chapter 2 THE ULTIMATUM

News of the affair at Tavora reached Sir Terence O'Moy, the Adjutant-General at Lisbon, about a week later in dispatches from headquarters. These informed him that in the course of the humble apology and explanation of the regrettable occurrence offered by the Colonel of the 8th Dragoons in person to the Mother Abbess, it had transpired that Lieutenant Butler had left the convent alive, but that nevertheless he continued absent from his regiment.

Those dispatches contained other unpleasant matters of a totally different nature, with which Sir Terence must proceed to deal at once; but their gravity was completely outweighed in the adjutant's mind by this deplorable affair of Lieutenant Butler's. Without wishing to convey an impression that the blunt and downright O'Moy was gifted with any undue measure of shrewdness, it must nevertheless be said that he was quick to perceive what fresh thorns the occurrence was likely to throw in a path that was already thorny enough in all conscience, what a semblance of justification it must give to the hostility of the intriguers on the Council of Regency, what a formidable weapon it must place in the hands of Principal Souza and his partisans. In itself this was enough to trouble a man in O'Moy's position. But there was more. Lieutenant Butler happened to be his brother-in-law, own brother to O'Moy's lovely, frivolous wife. Irresponsibility ran strongly in that branch of the Butler family.

For the sake of the young wife whom he loved with a passionate and fearful jealousy such as is not uncommon in a man of O'Moy's temperament when at his age - he was approaching his forty-sixth birthday - he marries a girl of half his years, the adjutant had pulled his brother-in-law out of many a difficulty; shielded him on many an occasion from the proper consequences of his incurable rashness.

This affair of the convent, however, transcended anything that had gone before and proved altogether too much for O'Moy. It angered him as much as it afflicted him. Yet when he took his head in his hands and groaned, it was only his sorrow that he was expressing, and it was a sorrow entirely concerned with his wife.

The groan attracted the attention of his military secretary, Captain Tremayne, of Fletcher's Engineers, who sat at work at a littered writing-table placed in the window recess. He looked up sharply, sudden concern in the strong young face and the steady grey eyes he bent upon his chief. The sight of O'Moy's hunched attitude brought him instantly to his feet.

"Whatever is the matter, sir?"

"It's that damned fool Richard," growled O'Moy. "He's broken out again."

The captain looked relieved. "And is that all?"

O'Moy looked at him, white-faced, and in his blue eyes a blaze of that swift passion that had made his name a byword in the army.

"All?" he roared. "You'll say it's enough, by God, when you hear what the fool's been at this time. Violation of a nunnery, no less." And he brought his massive fist down with a crash upon the document that had conveyed the information. "With a detachment of dragoons he broke into the convent of the Dominican nuns at Tavora one night a week ago. The alarm bell was sounded, and the village turned out to avenge the outrage. Consequences: three troopers killed, five peasants sabred to death and seven other casualties, Dick himself missing and reported to have escaped from the convent, but understood to remain in hiding - so that he adds desertion to the other crime, as if that in itself were not enough to hang him. That's all, as you say, and I hope you consider it enough even for Dick Butler - bad luck to him."

"My God!" said Captain Tremayne.

"I'm glad that you agree with me."

Captain Tremayne stared at his chief, the utmost dismay upon his fine young face. "But surely, sir, surely - I mean, sir, if this report is correct some explanation -" He broke down, utterly at fault.

"To be sure, there's an explanation. You may always depend upon a most elegant explanation for anything that Dick Butler does. His life is made up of mistakes and explanations." He spoke bitterly, "He broke into the nunnery under a misapprehension, according to the account of the sergeant who accompanied him," and Sir Terence read out that part of the report. "But how is that to help him, and at such a time as this, with public feeling as it is, and Wellington in his present temper about it? The provost's men are beating the country for the blackguard. When they find him it's a firing party he'll have to face."

Tremayne turned slowly to the window and looked down the fair prospect of the hillside over a forest of cork oaks alive with fresh green shoots to the silver sheen of the river a mile away. The storms of the preceding week had spent their fury - the travail that had attended the birth of Spring - and the day was as fair as a day of June in England. Weaned forth by the generous sunshine, the burgeoning of vine and fig, of olive and cork went on apace, and the skeletons of trees which a fortnight since had stood gaunt and bare were already fleshed in tender green.

>

From the window of this fine conventual house on the heights of Monsanto, above the suburb of Alcantara, where the Adjutant-General had taken up his quarters, Captain Tremayne stood a moment considering the panorama spread to his gaze, from the red-brown roofs of Lisbon on his left - that city which boasted with Rome that it was built upon a cluster of seven hills - to the lines of embarkation that were building about the fort of St. Julian on his left. Then he turned, facing again the spacious, handsome room with its heavy, semi-ecclesiastical furniture, and Sir Terence, who, hunched in his chair at the ponderously carved black writing-table, scowled fiercely at nothing.

"What are you going to do, sir?" he inquired.

Sir Terence shrugged impatiently and heaved himself up in his chair.

"Nothing," he growled.

"Nothing?"

The interrogation, which seemed almost to cover a reproach, irritated the adjutant.

"And what the devil can I do?" he rapped.

"You've pulled Dick out of scrapes before now."

"I have. That seems to, have been my principal occupation ever since I married his sister. But this time he's gone too far. What can I do?"

"Lord Wellington is fond of you," suggested Captain Tremayne. He was your imperturbable young man, and he remained as calm now as O'Moy was excited. Although by some twenty years the adjutant's junior, there was between O'Moy and himself, as well as between Tremayne and the Butler family, with which he was remotely connected, a strong friendship, which was largely responsible for the captain's present appointment as Sir Terence's military secretary.

O'Moy looked at him, and looked away. "Yes," he agreed. "But he's still fonder of law and order and military discipline, and I should only be imperilling our friendship by pleading with him for this young blackguard."

"The young blackguard is your brother-in-law," Tremayne reminded him.

"Bad luck to you, Tremayne, don't I know it? Besides, what is there I can do?" he asked again, and ended testily: " Faith, man, I don't know what you're thinking of."

"I'm thinking of Una," said Captain Tremayne in that composed way of his, and the words fell like cold water upon the hot iron of O'Moy's anger.

The man who can receive with patience a reproach, implicit or explicit, of being wanting in consideration towards his wife is comparatively rare, and never a man of O'Moy's temperament and circumstances. Tremayne's reminder stung him sharply, and the more sharply because of the strong friendship that existed between Tremayne and Lady O'Moy. That friendship had in the past been a thorn in O'Moy's flesh. In the days of his courtship he had known a fierce jealousy of Tremayne, beholding in him for a time a rival who, with the strong advantage of youth, must in the end prevail. But when O'Moy, putting his fortunes to the test, had declared himself and been accepted by Una Butler, there had been an end to the jealousy, and the old relations of cordial friendship between the men had been resumed.

O'Moy had conceived that jealousy of his to have been slain. But there had been times when from its faint, uneasy stirrings he should have taken warning that it did no more than slumber. Like most warm hearted, generous, big-natured men, O'Moy was of a singular humility where women were concerned, and this humility of his would often breathe a doubt lest in choosing between himself and Tremayne Una might have been guided by her head rather than her heart, by ambition rather than affection, and that in taking himself she had taken the man who could give her by far the more assured and affluent position.

He had crushed down such thoughts as disloyal to his young wife, as ungrateful and unworthy; and at such times he would fall into self-contempt for having entertained them. Then Una herself had revived those doubts three months ago, when she had suggested that Ned Tremayne, who was then at Torres Vedras with Colonel Fletcher, was the very man to fill the vacant place of military secretary to the adjutant, if he would accept it. In the reaction of self-contempt, and in a curious surge of pride almost as perverse s his humility, O'Moy had adopted her suggestion, and thereafter - in the past-three months, that is to say - the unreasonable devil of O'Moy's jealousy had slept, almost forgotten. Now, by a chance remark whose indiscretion Tremayne could not realise, since he did not so much as suspect the existence of that devil, he had suddenly prodded him into wakefulness. That Tremayne should show himself tender of Lady O'Moy's feelings in a matter in which O'Moy himself must seem neglectful of them was gall and wormwood to the adjutant. He dissembled it, however, out of a natural disinclination to appear in the ridiculous role of the jealous husband.

"That," he said, "is a matter that you may safely leave to me," and his lips closed tightly upon the words when they were uttered.

"Oh, quite so," said Tremayne, no whit abashed. He persisted nevertheless. "You know Una's feelings for Dick."

"When I married Una," the adjutant cut in sharply, "I did not marry the entire Butler family." It hardened him unreasonably against Dick to have the family cause pleaded in this way. "It's sick to death I am of Master Richard and his escapades. He can get himself out of this mess, or he can stay in it."

"You mean that you'll not lift a hand to help him."

"Devil a finger," said O'Moy.

And Tremayne, looking straight into the adjutant's faintly smouldering blue eyes, beheld there a fierce and rancorous determination which he was at a loss to understand, but which he attributed to something outside his own knowledge that must lie between O'Moy and his brother-in-law.

"I am sorry," he said gravely. "Since that is how you feel, it is to be hoped that Dick Butler may not survive to be taken. The alternative would weigh so cruelly upon Una that I do not care to contemplate it."

"And who the devil asks you to contemplate it?" snapped O'Moy. "I am not aware that it is any concern of yours at all."

"My dear O'Moy!" It was an exclamation of protest, something between pain and indignation, under the stress of which Tremayne stepped entirely outside of the official relations that prevailed between himself and the adjutant. And the exclamation was accompanied by such a look of dismay and wounded sensibilities that O'Moy, meeting this, and noting the honest manliness of Tremayne's bearing and countenance; was there and then the victim of reaction. His warm-hearted and impulsive nature made him at once profoundly ashamed of himself. He stood up, a tall, martial figure, and his ruggedly handsome, shaven countenance reddened under its tan. He held out a hand to Tremayne.

"My dear boy, I beg your pardon. It's so utterly annoyed I am that the savage in me will be breaking out. Sure, it isn't as if it were only this affair of Dick's. That is almost the least part of the unpleasantness contained in this dispatch. Here! In God's name, read it for yourself, and judge for yourself whether it's in human nature to be patient under so much."

With a shrug and a smile to show that he was entirely mollified, Captain Tremayne took the papers to his desk and sat down to con them. As he did so his face grew more and more grave. Before he had reached the end there was a tap at the door. An orderly entered with the announcement that Dom Miguel Forjas had just driven up to Monsanto to wait upon the adjutant-general.

"Ha!" said O'Moy shortly, and exchanged a glance with his secretary. "Show the gentleman up."

As the orderly withdrew, Tremayne came over and placed the dispatch on the adjutant's desk. "He arrives very opportunely," he said.

"So opportunely as to be suspicious, bedad!" said O'Moy. He had brightened suddenly, his Irish blood quickening at the immediate prospect of strife which this visit boded. "May the devil admire me, but there's a warm morning in store for Mr. Forjas, Ned."

"Shall I leave you?"

"By no means."

The door opened, and the orderly admitted Miguel Forjas, the Portuguese Secretary of State. He was a slight, dapper gentleman, all in black, from his silk stockings and steel-buckled shoes to his satin stock. His keen aquiline face was swarthy, and the razor had left his chin and cheeks blue-black. His sleek hair was iron-grey. A portentous gravity invested him this morning as he bowed with profound deference first to the adjutant and then to the secretary.

"Your Excellencies," he said - he spoke an English that was smooth and fluent for all its foreign accent "Your Excellencies, this is a terrible affair."

"To what affair will your Excellency be alluding?" wondered O'Moy.

"Have you not received news of what has happened at Tavora? Of the violation of a convent by a party of British soldiers? Of the fight that took place between these soldiers and the peasants who went to succour the nuns?"

"Oh, and is that all?" said O'Moy. "For a moment I imagined your Excellency referred to other matters. I have news of more terrible affairs than the convent business with which to entertain you this morning."

"That, if you will pardon me, Sir Terence, is quite impossible."

"You may think so. But you shall judge, bedad. A chair, Dom Miguel."

The Secretary of State sat down, crossed his knees and placed his hat in his lap. The other two resumed their seats, O'Moy leaning forward, his elbows on the writing-table, immediately facing Senhor Forjas.

"First, however," he said, "to deal with this affair of Tavora. The Council of Regency will, no doubt, have been informed of all the circumstances. You will be aware, therefore, that this very deplorable business was the result of a misapprehension, and that the nuns of Tavora might very well have avoided all this trouble had they behaved in a sensible, reasonable manner. If instead of shutting themselves up in the chapel and ringing the alarm bell the Mother-Abbess or one of the sisters had gone to the wicket and answered the demand of admittance from the officer commanding the detachment, he would instantly have realised his mistake and withdrawn."

"What does your Excellency suggest was this mistake?" inquired the Secretary.

"You have had your report, sir, and surely it was complete. You must know that he conceived himself to be knocking at the gates of the monastery of the Dominican fathers."

"Can your Excellency tell me what was this officer's business at the monastery of the Dominican fathers?" quoth the Secretary, his manner frostily hostile.

"I am without information on that point," O'Moy admitted; "no doubt because the officer in question is missing, as you will also have been informed. But I have no reason to doubt that, whatever his business may have been, it was concerned with the interests which are common alike to the British and the Portuguese nation."

"That is a charitable assumption, Sir Terence."

"Perhaps you will inform me, Dom Miguel, of the uncharitable assumption which the Principal Souza prefers," snapped O'Moy, whose temper began to simmer.

A faint colour kindled in the cheeks of the Portuguese minister, but is manner remained unruffled.

"I speak, sir, not with the voice of Principal Souza, but with that of the entire Council of Regency; and the Council has formed the opinion, which your own words confirm, that his Excellency Lord Wellington is skilled in finding excuses for the misdemeanours of the troops under his command."

"That," said O'Moy, who would never have kept his temper in control but for the pleasant consciousness that he held a hand of trumps with which he would' presently overwhelm this representative of the Portuguese Government, "that is an opinion for which the Council may presently like to apologise, admitting its entire falsehood."

Senhor Forjas started as if he had been stung. He uncrossed his black silk legs and made as if to rise.

"Falsehood, sir?" he cried in a scandalised voice.

"It is as well that we should be plain, so as to be avoiding all misconceptions," said O'Moy. "You must know, sir, and your Council must know, that wherever armies move there must be reason for complaint. The British army does not claim in this respect to be superior to others - although I don't say, mark me, that it might not claim it with perfect justice. But we do claim for ourselves that our laws against plunder and outrage are as strict as they well can be, and that where these things take place punishment inevitably follows. Out of your own knowledge, sir, you must admit that what I say is true."

"True, certainly, where the offenders are men from the ranks. But in this case, where the offender is an officer, it does not transpire that justice has been administered with the same impartial hand." "That, sir," answered O'Moy sharply, testily, "is because he is

missing."

The Secretary's thin lips permitted themselves to curve into the faintest ghost of a smile. "Precisely," he said.

For answer O'Moy, red in the face, thrust forward the dispatch he had received relating to the affair.

"Read, sir - read for yourself, that you may report exactly to the Council of Regency the terms of the report that has just reached me from headquarters. You will be able to announce that diligent search is being made for the offender."

Forjas perused the document carefully, and returned it.

"That is very good," he said, "and the Council will be glad to hear of it. It will enable us to appease the popular resentment in some degree. But it does not say here that when taken this officer will not be excused upon the grounds which yourself you have urged to me."

"It does not. But considering that he has since been guilty of desertion, there can be no doubt - all else apart - that the finding of a court martial will result in his being shot."

"Very well," said Forjas. "I will accept your assurance, and the Council will be relieved to hear of it." He rose to take his leave. "I am desired by the Council to express to Lord Wellington the hope that he will take measures to preserve better order among his troops and to avoid the recurrence of such extremely painful incidents."

"A moment," said O'Moy, and rising waved his guest back into his chair, then resumed his own seat. Under a more or less calm exterior he was a seething cauldron of passion. "The matter is not quite at an end, as your Excellency supposes. From your last observation, and from a variety of other evidence, I infer that the Council is far from satisfied with Lord Wellington's conduct of the campaign."

"That is an inference which I cannot venture to contradict. You will understand, General, that I do not speak for myself, but for the Council, when I say that many of his measures seem to us not merely unnecessary, but detrimental. The power having been placed in the hands of Lord Wellington, the Council hardly feels itself able to interfere with his dispositions. But it nevertheless deplores the destruction of the mills and the devastation of the country recommended and insisted upon by his lordship. It feels that this is not warfare as the Council understands warfare, and the people share the feelings of the Council. It is felt that it would be worthier and more commendable if Lord Wellington were to measure himself in battle with the French, making a definite attempt to stem the tide of invasion on the frontiers."

"Quite so," said O'Moy, his hand clenching and unclenching, and Tremayne, who watched him, wondered how long it would be before the storm burst. "Quite so. And because the Council disapproves of the very measures which at Lord Wellington's instigation it has publicly recommended, it does not trouble to see that those measures are carried out. As you say, it does not feel itself able to interfere with his dispositions. But it does not scruple to mark its disapproval by passively hindering him at every turn. Magistrates are left to neglect these enactments, and because," he added with bitter sarcasm, "Portuguese valour is so red-hot and so devilish set on battle the Militia Acts calling all men to the colours are forgotten as soon as published. There is no one either to compel the recalcitrant to take up arms, or to punish the desertions of those who have been driven into taking them up. Yet you want battles, you want your frontiers defended. A moment, sir! there is no need for heat, no need for any words. The matter may be said to be at an end." He smiled - a thought viciously, be it confessed - and then played his trump card, hurled his bombshell. "Since the views of your Council are in such utter opposition to the views of the Commander-in-Chief, you will no doubt welcome Lord Wellington's proposal to withdraw from this country and to advise his Majesty's Government to withdraw the assistance which it is affording you."

There followed a long spell of silence, O'Moy sitting back in his chair, his chin in his hand, to observe the result of his words. Nor was he in the least disappointed. Dom Miguel's mouth fell open; the colour slowly ebbed from his cheeks, leaving them an ivory-yellow; his eyes dilated and protruded. He was consternation incarnate.

"My God!" he contrived to gasp at last, and his shaking hands clutched at the carved arms of his chair.

"Ye don't seem as pleased as I expected," ventured O'Moy.

"But, General, surely … surely his Excellency cannot mean to take so … so terrible a step?"

"Terrible to whom, sir?" wondered O'Moy.

"Terrible to us all." Forjas rose in his agitation. He came to lean upon O'Moy's writing-table, facing the adjutant. "Surely, sir, our interests - England's interests and Portugal's - are one in this."

"To be sure. But England's interests can be defended elsewhere than in Portugal, and it is Lord Wellington's view that they shall be. He has already warned the Council of Regency that, since his Majesty and the Prince Regent have entrusted him with the command of the British and Portuguese armies, he will not suffer the Council or any of its members to interfere with his conduct of the military operations, or suffer any criticism or suggestion of theirs to alter system formed upon mature consideration. But when, finding their criticisms fail, the members of the Council, in their wrongheadedness, in their anxiety to allow private interest to triumph over public duty, go the length of thwarting the measures of which they do not approve, the end of Lord Wellington's patience has been reached. I am giving your Excellency his own words. He feels that it is futile to remain in a country whose Government is determined to undermine his every endeavour to bring this campaign to a successful issue.

"Yourself, sir, you appear to be distressed. But the Council of Regency will no doubt take a different view. It will rejoice in the departure of a man whose military operations it finds so detestable. You will no doubt discover this when you come to lay Lord Wellington's decision before the Council, as I now invite you to do."

Bewildered and undecided, Forjas stood there for a moment, vainly seeking words. Finally:

"Is this really Lord Wellington's last word?" he asked in tones of profoundest consternation.

"There is one alternative - one only," said O'Moy slowly.

"And that?" Instantly Forjas was all eagerness.

O'Moy considered him. "Faith, I hesitate to state it."

"No, no. Please, please."

"I feel that it is idle."

"Let the Council judge. I implore you, General, let the Council judge."

"Very well." O'Moy shrugged, and took up a sheet of the dispatch which lay before him. "You will admit, sir, I think, that the beginning of these troubles coincided with the advent of the Principal Souza upon the Council of Regency." He waited in vain for a reply. Forjas, the diplomat, preserved an uncompromising silence, in which presently O'Moy proceeded: "From this, and from other evidence, of which indeed there is no lack, Lord Wellington has come to the conclusion that all the resistance, passive and active, which he has encountered, results from the Principal Souza's influence upon the Council. You will not, I think, trouble to deny it, sir."

Forjas spread his hands. "You will remember, General," he answered, in tones of conciliatory regret, "that the Principal Souza represents a class upon whom Lord Wellington's measures bear in a manner peculiarly hard."

"You mean that he represents the Portuguese nobility and landed gentry, who, putting their own interests above those of the State, have determined to oppose and resist the devastation of the country which Lord Wellington recommends."

"You put it very bluntly," Forjas admitted.

"You will find Lord Wellington's own words even more blunt," said O'Moy, with a grim smile, and turned to the dispatch he held. "Let me read you exactly what he writes:

"'As for Principal Souza, I beg you to tell him from me that as I have had no satisfaction in transacting the business of this country since he has become a member of the Government, no power on earth shall induce me to remain in the Peninsula if he is either to remain a member of the Government or to continue in Lisbon. Either he must quit the country, or I will do so, and this immediately after I have obtained his Majesty's permission to resign my charge.'"

The adjutant put down the letter and looked expectantly at the Secretary of State, who returned the look with one of utter dismay. Never in all his career had the diplomat been so completely dumbfounded as he was now by the simple directness of the man of action. In himself Dom Miguel Forjas was both shrewd and honest. He was shrewd enough to apprehend to the full the military genius of the British Commander-in-Chief, fruits of which he had already witnessed. He knew that the withdrawal of Junot's army from Lisbon two years ago resulted mainly from the operations of Sir Arthur Wellesley - as he was then - before his supersession in the supreme command of that first expedition, and he more than suspected that but for that supersession the defeat of the first French army of invasion might have been even more signal. He had witnessed the masterly campaign of 1809, the battle of the Douro and the relentless operations which had culminated in hurling the shattered fragments of Soult's magnificent army over the Portuguese frontier, thus liberating that country for the second time from the thrall of the mighty French invader. And he knew that unless this man and the troops under his command remained in Portugal and enjoyed complete liberty of action there could be no hope of stemming the third invasion for which Massena - the ablest of all the Emperor's marshals was now gathering his divisions in the north. If Wellington were to execute his threat and withdraw with his army, Forjas beheld nothing but ruin for his country. The irresistible French would sweep forward in devastating conquest, and Portuguese independence would be ground to dust under the heel of the terrible Emperor.

All this the clear-sighted Dom Miguel Forjas now perceived. To do him full justice, he had feared for some time that the unreasonable conduct of his Government might ultimately bring about some such desperate situation. But it was not for him to voice those fears. He was the servant of that Government, the "mere instrument and mouthpiece of the Council of Regency.

"This," he said at length in a voice that was awed, "is an ultimatum."

"It is that," O'Moy admitted readily.

Forjas sighed, shook his dark head and drew himself up like a man who has chosen his part. Being shrewd, he saw the immediate necessity of choosing, and, being honest, he chose honestly.

"Perhaps it is as well," he said.

"That Lord Wellington should go?" cried O'Moy.

"That Lord Wellington should announce intentions of going," Forjas explained. And having admitted so much, he now stripped off the official mask completely. He spoke with his own voice and not with that of the Council whose mouthpiece he was. "Of course it will never be permitted. Lord Wellington has been entrusted with the defence of the country by the Prince Regent; consequently it is the duty of every Portuguese to ensure that at all costs he shall continue in that office."

O'Moy was mystified. Only a knowledge of the minister's inmost thoughts could have explained this oddly sudden change of manner.

"But your Excellency understands the terms - the only terms upon which his lordship will so continue?"

"Perfectly. I shall hasten to convey those terms to the Council. It is also quite clear - is it not? - that I may convey to my Government and indeed publish your complete assurance that the officer responsible for the raid on the convent at Tavora will be shot when taken?

Looking intently into O'Moy's face, Dom Miguel saw the clear blue eyes flicker under his gaze, he beheld a grey shadow slowly overspreading the adjutant's ,ruddy cheek. Knowing nothing of the relationship between O'Moy and the offender, unable to guess the sources of the hesitation of which he now beheld such unmistakable signs, the minister naturally misunderstood it.

"There must be no flinching in this, General," he cried. "Let me speak to you for a moment quite frankly and in confidence, not as the Secretary of State of the Council of Regency, but as a Portuguese patriot who places his country and his country's welfare above every other consideration. You have issued your ultimatum. It may be harsh, it may be arbitrary; with that I have no concern. The interests, the feelings of Principal Souza or of any other individual, however high-placed, are without weight when the interests of the nation hang against them in the balance. Better that an injustice be done to one man than that the whole country should suffer. Therefore I do not argue with you upon the rights and wrongs of Lord Wellington's ultimatum. That is a matter apart. Lord Wellington demands the removal of Principal Souza from the Government, or, in the alternative, proposes himself to withdraw from Portugal. In the national interest the Government can come to only one decision. I am frank with you, General. Myself I shall stand ranged on the side of the national interest, and what my influence in the Council can do it shall do. But if you know Principal Souza at all, you must know that he will not relinquish his position without a fight. He has friends and influence - the Patriarch of Lisbon and many of the nobility will be on his side. I warn you solemnly against leaving any weapon in his hands."

He paused impressively. But O'Moy, grey-faced now and haggard, waited in silence for him to continue.

"From the message I brought you," Forjas resumed, "you will have perceived how Principal Souza has fastened upon this business at Tavora to support his general censure of Lord Wellington's conduct of the campaign. That is the weapon to which my warning refers. You must - if we who place the national interest supreme are to prevail - you must disarm him by the assurance that I ask for. You will perceive that I am disloyal to a member of my Council so that I may be loyal to my country. But I repeat, I speak to you in confidence. This officer has committed a gross outrage, which must bring the British army into odium with the people, unless we have your assurance that the British army is the first to censure and to punish the offender with the utmost rigour. Give me now, that I may publish everywhere, your official assurance that this man will be shot, and on my side I assure you that Principal Souza, thus deprived of his stoutest weapon, must succumb in the struggle that awaits us."

"I hope," said O'Moy slowly, his head bowed, his voice dull and even unsteady, "I hope that I am not behind you in placing public duty above private consideration. You may publish my official assurance that the officer in question will be … shot when taken."

"General, I thank you. My country thanks you. You may be confident of this issue." He bowed gravely to O'Moy and then to Tremayne. "Your Excellencies, I have the honour to wish you good-day." He was shown out by the orderly who had admitted him, and he departed well satisfied in his patriotic heart that the crisis which he had always known to be inevitable should have been reached at last. Yet, as he went, he wondered why the Adjutant-General had looked so downcast, why his voice had broken when he pledged his word that justice should be done upon the offending British officer. That, however, was no concern of Dom Miguel's, and there was more than enough to engage his thoughts when he came to consider the ultimatum to his Government with which he was charged.

Chapter 3 LADY O'MOY

Across the frontier in the northwest was gathering the third army of invasion, some sixty thousand strong, commanded by Marshal Massena, Prince of Esslingen, the most skilful and fortunate of all Napoleon's generals, a leader who, because he had never known defeat, had come to be surnamed by his Emperor "the dear child of Victory."

Wellington, at the head of a British force of little more than one third of the French host, watched and waited, maturing his stupendous strategic plan, which those in whose interests it had been conceived had done so much to thwart. That plan was inspired by and based upon the Emperor's maxim that war should support itself; that an army on the march must not be hampered and immobilised by its commissariat, but that it must draw its supplies from the country it is invading; that it must, in short, live upon that country.

Behind the British army and immediately to the north of Lisbon, in an arc some thirty miles long, following the inflection of the hills from the sea at the mouth of the Zizandre to the broad waters of the Tagus at Alhandra, the lines of Torres Vedras were being constructed under the direction of Colonel Fletcher and this so secretly and with such careful measures as to remain unknown to British and Portuguese alike. Even those employed upon the works knew of nothing save the section upon which they happened to be engaged, and had no conception of the stupendous and impregnable whole that was preparing.

To these lines it was the British commander's plan to effect a slow retreat before the French flood when it should sweep forward, thus luring the enemy onward into a country which he had commanded should be laid relentlessly waste, that there that enemy might fast be starved and afterwards destroyed. To this end had his proclamations gone forth, commanding that all the land lying between the rivers Tagus and Mondego, in short, the whole of the country between Beira and Torres Vedras, should be stripped naked, converted into a desert as stark and empty as the Sahara. Not a head of cattle, not a grain of corn, not a skin of vine, not a flask of oil, not a crumb of anything affording nourishment should be left behind. The very mills were to be rendered useless, bridges were to be broken down, the houses emptied of all property, which the refugees were to carry away with them from the line of invasion.

Such was his terrible demand upon the country for its own salvation. But such, as we have seen, was not war as Principal Souza and some of his adherents understood it. They had not the foresight to perceive the inevitable result of this strategic plan if effectively and thoroughly executed. They did not even realise that the devastation had better be effected by the British in this defensive - and in its results at the same time overwhelmingly offensive - manner than by the French in the course of a conquering onslaught. They did not realise these things partly because they did not enjoy Wellington's full confidence, and in a greater measure because they were blinded by self-interest, because, as O'Moy told Forjas, they placed private considerations above public duty. The northern nobles whose lands must suffer opposed the measure violently; they even opposed the withdrawal of labour from those lands which the Militia Act had rendered necessary. And Antonio de Souza made himself their champion until he was broken by Wellington's ultimatum to the Council. For broken he was. The nation had come to a parting of the ways. It had been brought to the necessity of choosing, and however much the Principal, voicing the outcry of his party, might argue that the British plan was as detestable and ruinous as a French invasion, the nation preferred to place its confidence in the conqueror of Vimeiro and the Douro.

Souza quitted the Government and the capital as had been demanded. But if Wellington hoped that he would quit intriguing, he misjudged his man. He was a fellow of monstrous vanity, pride and self-sufficiency, of the sort than which there is none more dangerous to offend. His wounded pride demanded a salve to be procured at any cost. The wound had been administered by Wellington, and must be returned with interest. So that he ruined Wellington it mattered nothing to Antonio de Souza that he should ruin himself and his own country at the same time. He was like some blinded, ferocious and unreasoning beast, ready, even eager, to sacrifice its own life so that in dying it can destroy its enemy and slake its blood-thirst.

In that mood he passes out of the councils of the Portuguese Government into a brooding and secretly active retirement, of which the fruits shall presently be shown. With his departure the Council of Regency, rudely shaken by the ultimatum which had driven him forth, became more docile and active, and for a season the measures enjoined by the Commander-in-Chief were pursued with some show of earnestness.

As a result of all this life at Monsanto became easier, ,and O'Moy was able to breathe more freely, and to devote more of his time to matters concerning the fortifications which Wellington had left largely in his charge. Then, too, as the weeks passed, the shadow overhanging him with regard to Richard Butler gradually lifted. No further word had there been of the missing lieutenant, and by the end of May both O'Moy and Tremayne had come to the conclusion that he must have fallen into the hands of some of the ferocious mountaineers to whom a soldier - whether his uniform were British or French - was a thing to be done to death.

For his wife's sake O'Moy came thankfully to that conclusion. Under the circumstances it was the best possible termination to the episode. She must be told of her brother's death presently, when evidence of it was forthcoming; she would mourn him passionately, no doubt, for her attachment to him was deep - extraordinarily deep for so shallow a woman - but at least she would be spared the pain and shame she must inevitably have felt had he been taken and, shot.

Meanwhile, however, the lack of news from him, in another sense, would have to be explained to Una sooner or later for a fitful correspondence was maintained between brother and sister - and O'Moy dreaded the moment when this explanation must be made. Lacking invention, he applied to Tremayne for assistance, and Tremayne glumly supplied him with the necessary lie that should meet Lady O'Moy's inquiries when they came.

In the end, however, he was spared the necessity of falsehood. For the truth itself reached Lady O'Moy in an unexpected manner. It came about a month after that day when O'Moy had first received news of the escapade at Tavora. It was a resplendent morning of early June, and the adjutant was detained a few moments from breakfast by the arrival of a mail-bag from headquarters, now established at Vizeu. Leaving Captain Tremayne to deal with it, Sir Terence went down to breakfast, bearing with him only a few letters of a personal character which had reached him from friends on the frontier.

The architecture of the house at Monsanto was of a semiclaustral character; three sides of it enclosed a sheltered luxuriant garden, whilst on the fourth side a connecting corridor, completing the quadrangle, spanned bridgewise the spacious archway through which admittance was gained directly from the parklands that sloped gently to Alcantara. This archway, closed at night by enormous wooden doors, opened wide during the day upon a grassy terrace bounded by a baluster of white marble that gleamed now in the brilliant sunshine. It was O'Moy's practice to breakfast out-of-doors in that genial climate, and during April, before the sun had reached its present intensity, the table had been spread out there upon the terrace. Now, however, it was wiser, even in the early morning, to seek the shade, and breakfast was served within the quadrangle, under a trellis of vine supported in the Portuguese manner by rough-hewn granite columns. It was a delicious spot, cool and fragrant, secluded without being enclosed, since through the broad archway it commanded a view of the Tagus and the hills of Alemtejo.

Here O'Moy found himself impatiently awaited that morning by his wife and her cousin, Sylvia Armytage, more recently arrived from England.

"You are very late," Lady O'Moy greeted him petulantly. Since she spent her life in keeping other people waiting, it naturally fretted her to discover unpunctuality in others.

Her portrait, by Raeburn, which now adorns the National Gallery, had been painted in the previous year. You will have seen it, or at least you will have seen one of its numerous replicas, and you will have remarked its singular, delicate, rose-petal loveliness - the gleaming golden head, the flawless outline of face and feature, the immaculate skin, the dark blue eyes with their look of innocence awakening.

Thus was she now in her artfully simple gown of flowered muslin with its white fichu folded across her neck that was but a shade less white; thus was she, just as Raeburn had painted her, saving, of course, that her expression, matching her words, was petulant.

"I was detained by the arrival of a mail-bag from Vizeu," Sir Terence excused himself, as he took the chair which Mullins, the elderly, pontifical butler, drew out for him. "Ned is attending to it, and will be kept for a few moments yet."

Lady O'Moy's expression quickened. "Are there no letters for me?"

"None, my dear, I believe."

"No word from Dick?" Again there was that note of ever ready petulance. "It is too provoking. He should know that he must make me anxious by his silence. Dick is so thoughtless - so careless of other people's feelings. I shall write to him severely."

The adjutant paused in the act of unfolding his napkin. The prepared explanation trembled on his lips; but its falsehood, repellent to him, was not uttered.

"I should certainly do so, my dear," was all he said, and addressed himself to his breakfast.

"What news from headquarters?" Miss Armytage asked him. "Are things going well?"

"Much better now that Principal Souza's influence is at an end. Cotton reports that the destruction of the mills in the Mondego valley is being carried out systematically."

Miss Armytage's dark, thoughtful eyes became wistful.

"Do you know, Terence," she said, "that I am not without some sympathy for the Portuguese resistance to Lord Wellington's decrees. They must bear so terribly hard upon the people. To be compelled with their own hands to destroy their homes and lay waste the lands upon which they have laboured - what could be more cruel?"

"War can never be anything but cruel," he answered gravely. "God help the people over whose lands it sweeps. Devastation is often the least of the horrors marching in its train."

"Why must war be?" she asked him, in intelligent rebellion against that most monstrous and infamous of all human madnesses.

O'Moy proceeded to do his best to explain the unexplainable, and since, himself a professional soldier, he could not take the sane view of his sane young questioner, hot argument ensued between them, to the infinite weariness of Lady O'Moy, who out of self-protection gave herself to the study of the latest fashion plates from London and the consideration of a gown for the ball which the Count of Redondo was giving in the following week.

It was thus in all things, for these cousins represented the two poles of womanhood. Miss Armytage without any of Lady O'Moy's insistent and excessive femininity, was nevertheless feminine to the core. But hers was the Diana type of womanliness. She was tall and of a clean-limbed, supple grace, now emphasised by the riding-habit which she was wearing - for she had been in the saddle during the hour which Lady, O'Moy had consecrated to the rites of toilet and devotions done before her mirror. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, vivacity and intelligence lent her countenance an attraction very different from the allurement of her cousin's delicate loveliness. And because her countenance was a true mirror of her mind, she argued shrewdly now, so shrewdly that she drove O'Moy to entrench himself behind generalisations.

"My dear Sylvia, war is most merciful where it is most merciless," he assured her with the Irish gift for paradox. "At home in the Government itself there are plenty who argue as you argue, and who are wondering when we shall embark for England. That is because they are intellectuals, and war is a thing beyond the understanding of intellectuals. It is not intellect but brute instinct and brute force that will help humanity in such a crisis as the present. Therefore, let me tell you, my child, that a government of intellectual men is the worst possible government for a nation engaged in a war."

This was far from satisfying Miss Armytage. Lord Wellington himself was an intellectual, she objected. Nobody could deny it. There was the work he had done as Irish Secretary, and there was the calculating genius he had displayed at Vimeiro, at Oporto, at Talavera.

And then, observing her husband to be in distress, Lady O'Moy put down her fashion plate and brought up her heavy artillery to relieve him.

"Sylvia, dear," she interpolated, "I wonder that you will for ever be arguing about things you don't understand."

Miss Armytage laughed good-humouredly. She was not easily put out of countenance. "What woman doesn't?" she asked.

"I don't, and I am a woman, surely."

"Ah, but an exceptional woman," her cousin rallied her affectionately, tapping the shapely white arm that protruded from a foam of lace. And Lady O'Moy, to whom words never had any but a literal meaning, set herself to purr precisely as one would have expected. Complacently she discoursed upon the perfection of her own endowments, appealing ever and anon to her husband for confirmation, and O'Moy, who loved her with all the passionate reverence which Nature working inscrutably to her ends so often inspires in just such strong, essentially masculine men for just such fragile and excessively feminine women, afforded this confirmation with all the enthusiasm of sincere conviction.

Thus until Mullins broke in upon them with the announcement of a visit from Count Samoval, an announcement more welcome to Lady O'Moy than to either of her companions.

The Portuguese nobleman was introduced. He had attained to a degree of familiarity in the adjutant's household that permitted of his being received without ceremony there at that breakfast-table spread in the open. He was a slender, handsome, swarthy man of thirty, scrupulously dressed, as graceful and elegant in his movements as a fencing master, which indeed he might have been; for his skill with the foils was, a matter of pride to himself and notoriety to all the world. Nor was it by any means the only skill he might have boasted, for Jeronymo de Samoval was in many things,, a very subtle, supple gentleman. His friendship with the O'Moys, now some three months old, had been considerably strengthened of late by the fact that he had unexpectedly become one of the most hostile critics of the Council of Regency as lately constituted, and one of the most ardent supporters of the Wellingtonian policy.

He bowed with supremest grace to the ladies, ventured to kiss the fair, smooth hand of his hostess, undeterred by the frosty stare of O'Moy's blue eyes whose approval of all men was in inverse proportion to their approval of his wife - and finally proffered her the armful of early roses that he brought.

"These poor roses of Portugal to their sister from England," said his softly caressing tenor voice.

Ye're a poet," said O'Moy tartly.

"Having found Castalia here," said, the Count, "shall I not drink its limpid waters?"

"Not, I hope, while there's an agreeable vintage of Port on the table. A morning whet, Samoval?" O'Moy invited him, taking up the decanter.

"Two fingers, then - no more. It is not my custom in the morning. But here - to drink your lady's health, and yours, Miss Armytage." With a graceful flourish of his glass he pledged them both and sipped delicately, then took the chair that O'Moy was proffering.

"Good news, I hear, General. Antonio de Souza's removal from the Government is already bearing fruit. The mills in the valley of the Mondego are being effectively destroyed at last."

"Ye're very well informed," grunted O'Moy, who himself had but received the news. "As well informed, indeed, as I am myself." There was a note almost of suspicion in the words, and he was vexed that matters which it was desirable be kept screened as much as possible from general knowledge should so soon be put abroad.

"Naturally, and with reason," was the answer, delivered with a rueful smile. "Am I not interested? Is not some of my property in question?" Samoval sighed. "But I bow to the necessities of war. At least it cannot be said of me, as was said of those whose interests Souza represented, that I put private considerations above public duty - that is the phrase, I think. The individual must suffer that the nation may triumph. A Roman maxim, my dear General."

"And a British one," said O'Moy, to whom Britain was a second Rome.

"Oh, admitted," replied the amiable Samoval. "You proved it by your uncompromising firmness in the affair of Tavora."

"What was that?" inquired Miss Armytage.

"Have you not heard?" cried Samoval in astonishment.

"Of course not," snapped O'Moy, who had broken into a cold perspiration. "Hardly a subject for the ladies, Count."

Rebuked for his intention, Samoval submitted instantly.

"Perhaps not; perhaps not," he agreed, as if dismissing it, whereupon O'Moy recovered from his momentary breathlessness. "But in your own interests, my dear General, I trust there will be no weakening when this Lieutenant Butler is caught, and - "

"Who?"

Sharp and stridently came that single word from her ladyship.

Desperately O'Moy sought to defend the breach.

"Nothing to do with Dick, my dear. A fellow named Philip Butler, who - "

But the too-well-informed Samoval corrected him. "Not Philip, General - Richard Butler. I had the name but yesterday from Forjas."

In the scared hush that followed the Count perceived that he had stumbled headlong into a mystery. He saw Lady O'Moy's face turn whiter and whiter, saw her sapphire eyes dilating as they regarded him.

"Richard Butler!" she echoed. "What of Richard Butler? Tell me. Tell me at once."

Hesitating before such signs of distress, Samoval looked at O'Moy, to meet a dejected scowl.

Lady O'Moy turned to her husband. "What is it?" she demanded. "You know something about Dick and you are keeping it from me. Dick is in trouble?"

"He is," O'Moy admitted. "In great trouble."

"What has he done? You spoke of an affair at Evora or Tavora, which is not to be mentioned before ladies. I demand to know." Her affection and anxiety for her brother invested her for a moment with a certain dignity, lent her a force that was but rarely displayed by her.

Seeing the men stricken speechless, Samoval from bewildered astonishment, O'Moy from distress, she jumped to the conclusion, after what had been said, that motives of modesty accounted for their silence.

"Leave us, Sylvia, please," she said. "Forgive me, dear. But you see they will not mention these things while you are present." She made a piteous little figure as she stood trembling there, her fingers tearing in agitation at one of Samoval's roses.

She waited until the obedient and discreet Miss Armytage had passed from view into the wing that contained the adjutant's private quarters, then sinking limp and nerveless to her chair:

"Now," she bade them, "please tell me."

And O'Moy, with a sigh of regret for the lie so laboriously concocted which would never now be uttered, delivered himself huskily of the hideous truth.

Chapter 4 COUNT SAMOVAL

Miss Armytage's own notions of what might be fit and proper for her virginal ears were by no means coincident with Lady O'Moy's. Thus, although you have seen her pass into the private quarters of the adjutant's establishment, and although, in fact, she did withdraw to her own room, she found it impossible to abide there a prey to doubt and misgivings as to what Dick Butler might have done - doubt and misgivings, be it understood, entertained purely on Una's account and not at all on Dick's.

By the corridor spanning the archway on the southern side of the quadrangle, and serving as a connecting bridge between the adjutant's private and official quarters, Miss Armytage took her way to Sir Terence's work-room, knowing that she would find Captain Tremayne there, and assuming that he would be alone.

"May I come in?" she asked him from the doorway.

He sprang to his feet. "Why, certainly, Miss Armytage." For so imperturbable a young man he seemed oddly breathless in his eagerness to welcome her. "Are you looking for O'Moy? He left me nearly half-an-hour ago to go to breakfast, and I was just about to follow."

"I scarcely dare detain you, then."

"On the contrary. I mean … not at all. But … were you wanting me?"

She closed the door, and came forward into the room, moving with that supple grace peculiarly her own.

"I want you to tell me something, Captain Tremayne, and I want you to be frank with me."

"I hope I could never be anything else."

"I want you to treat me as you would treat a man, a friend of your own sex."

Tremayne sighed. He had recovered from the surprise of her coming and was again his imperturbable self.

"I assure you that is the last way in which I desire to treat you. But if you insist - "

"I do." She had frowned slightly at the earlier part of his speech, with its subtle, half-jesting gallantry, and she spoke sharply now.

"I bow to your will," said Captain Tremayne.

"What has Dick Butler been doing?"

He looked into her face with sharply questioning eyes.

"What was it that happened at Tavora?"

He continued to look at her. "What have you heard?" he asked at last.

"Only that he has done something at Tavora for which the consequences, I gather, may be grave. I am anxious for Una's sake to know what it is."

"Does Una know?"

"She is being told now. Count Samoval let slip just what I have outlined. And she has insisted upon being told everything."

"Then why did you not remain to hear?"

"Because they sent me away on the plea that - oh, on the silly plea of my youth and innocence, which were not to be offended."

"But which you expect me to offend?"

"No. Because I can trust you to tell me without offending."

"Sylvia!" It was a curious exclamation of satisfaction and of gratitude for the implied confidence. We must admit that it betrayed a selfish forgetfulness of Dick Butler and his troubles, but it is by no means clear that it was upon such grounds that it offended her.

She stiffened perceptibly. "Really, Captain Tremayne!"

"I beg your pardon," said he. "But you seemed to imply - " He checked, at a loss.

Her colour rose. "Well, sir? What do you suggest that I implied or seemed to imply?" But as suddenly her manner changed. "I think we are too concerned with trifles where the matter on which I have sought you is a serious one."

"It is of the utmost seriousness," he admitted gravely.

"Won't you tell me what it is?"

He told her quite simply the whole story, not forgetting to give prominence to the circumstances extenuating it in Butler's favour. She listened with a deepening frown, rather pale, her head bowed.

"And when he is taken," she asked, "what - what will happen to him?"

"Let us hope that he will not be taken."

"But if he is - if he is?" she insisted almost impatiently.

Captain Tremayne turned aside and looked out of the window. "I should welcome the news that he is dead," he said softly. "For if he is taken he will find no mercy at the hands of his own people."

"You mean that he will be shot?" Horror charged her voice, dilated her eyes.

"Inevitably."

A shudder ran through her, and she covered her face with her halls. When she withdrew then Tremayne beheld the lovely countenance transformed. It was white and drawn.

"But surely Terence can save him!" she cried piteously.

He shook his head, his lips tight pressed. "'There is no man less able to do so."

"What do you mean? Why do you say that?"

He looked at her, hesitating for a, moment, then answered her: "'O'Moy has pledged his word to the Portuguese Government that Dick Butler shall be shot when taken."

"Terence did that?"

"He was compelled to it. Honour and duty demanded no less of him. I alone, who was present and witnessed the undertaking, know what it cost him and what he suffered. But he was forced to sink all private considerations. It was a sacrifice rendered necessary, inevitable for the success of this campaign." And he proceeded to explain to her all the circumstances that were interwoven with Lieutenant Butler's ill-timed offence. "Thus you see that from Terence you can hope for nothing. His honour will not admit of his wavering in this matter."

"Honour?" She uttered the word almost with contempt. "And what of Una?"

"I was thinking of Una when I said I should welcome the news of Dick's death somewhere in the hills. It is the best that can be hoped for."

"I thought you were Dick's friend, Captain Tremayne."

"Why, so I have been; so I am. Perhaps that is another reason why I should hope that he is dead."

"Is it no reason why you should do what you to save him?"

He looked at her steadily for an instant, calm under the reproach of her eyes.

"Believe me, Miss Armytage, if I saw a way to save him, to do anything to help him, I should seize it, both for the sake of my friendship for himself and because of my affection for Una. Since you yourself are interested in him, that is an added reason for me. But it is one thing to admit willingness to help and another thing actually to afford help. What is there that I can do? I assure you that I have thought of the matter. Indeed for days I have thought of little else. But I can see no light. I await events. Perhaps a chance may come."

Her expression had softened. "I see." She put out a hand generously to ask forgiveness. "I was presumptuous, and I had no right to speak as I did."

He took the hand. "I should never question your right to speak to me in any way that seemed good to you," he assured her.

"I had better go to Una. She will be needing me, poor child. I am grateful to you, Captain Tremayne, for your confidence and for telling me." And thus she left him very thoughtful, as concerned for Una as she was herself.

Now Una O'Moy was the natural product of such treatment. There had ever been something so appealing in her lovely helplessness and fragility that all her life others had been concerned to shelter her from every wind that blew. Because it was so she was what she was; and because she was what she was it would continue to be so.

But Lady O'Moy at the moment did not stand in such urgent need of Miss Armytage as Miss Armytage imagined. She had heard the appalling story of her brother's escapade, but she had been unable to perceive in what it was so terrible as it was declared. He had made a mistake. He had invaded the convent under a misapprehension, for which it was ridiculous to blame him. It was a mistake which any man might have made in a foreign country. Lives had been lost, it is true; but that was owing to the stupidity of other people - of the nuns who had run for shelter when no danger threatened save in their own silly imaginations, and of the peasants who had come blundering to their assistance where no assistance was required; the latter were the people responsible for the bloodshed, since they had attacked the dragoons. Could it be expected of the dragoons that they should tamely suffer themselves to be massacred?

Thus Lady O'Moy upon the affair of Tavora. The whole thing appeared to her to be rather silly, and she refused seriously to consider that it could have any rave consequences for Dick. His continued absence made her anxious. But if he should come to be taken, surely his punishment would be merely a formal matter; at the worst he might be sent home, which would a very good thing, for after all the climate of the Peninsula had never quite suited him.

In this fashion she nimbly pursued a train of vitiated logic, passing from inconsequence to inconsequence. And O'Moy, thankful that she should take such a view this - mercifully hopeful that the last had been heard of his peccant and vexatious brother-in-law - content, more than content, to leave her comforted such illusions.

And then, while she was still discussing the matter terms of comparative calm, came an orderly to summon him away, so that he left her in the company of Samoval.

The Count had been deeply shocked by the discover that Dick Butler was Lady O'Moy's brother, and a little confused that he himself in his ignorance should have been the means of bringing to her knowledge a painful matter that touched her so closely and that hitherto had been so carefully concealed from her by her husband. He was thankful that she should take so op optimistic a view, and quick to perceive O'Moy's charitable desire to leave her optimism undispelled. But he was no less quick to perceive the opportunities which the circumstances afforded him to further a certain deep intrigue upon which he was engaged.

Therefore he did not take his leave just yet. He sauntered with Lady O'Moy on the terrace above the wooded slopes that screened the village of Alcantara, and there discovered her mind to be even more frivolous and unstable than his perspicuity had hitherto suspected. Under stress Lady O'Moy could convey the sense that she felt deeply. She could be almost theatrical in her displays of emotion. But these were as transient as they were intense. Nothing that was not immediately present to her senses was ever capable of a deep impression upon her spirit, and she had the facility characteristic of the self-loving and self-indulgent of putting aside any matter that was unpleasant. Thus, easily self-persuaded, as we have seen, that this escapade of Richard's was not to be regarded too seriously, and that its consequences were not likely to be gave, she chattered with gay inconsequence of other things - of the dinner-party last week at the house of the Marquis of Minas, that prominent member of the council of Regency, of the forthcoming ball to be given by the Count of Redondo, of the latest news from home, the latest fashion and the latest scandal, the amours of the Duke of York and the shortcomings of Mr. Perceval.

Samoval, however, did not intend that the matter of her brother should be so entirely forgotten, so lightly treated. Deliberately at last he revived it.

Considering her as she leant upon the granite balustrade, her pink sunshade aslant over her shoulder, her flimsy lace shawl festooned from the crook of either arm and floating behind her, a wisp of cloudy vapour, Samoval permitted himself a sigh.

She flashed him a sidelong glance, arch and rallying.

"You are melancholy, sir - a poor compliment," she told him.

But do not misunderstand her. Hers was an almost childish coquetry, inevitable fruit of her intense femininity, craving ever the worship of the sterner sex and the incense of its flattery. And Samoval, after all, young, noble, handsome, with a half-sinister reputation, was something of a figure of romance, as a good many women had discovered to their cost.

He fingered his snowy stock, and bent upon her eyes of glowing adoration. "Dear Lady O'Moy," his tenor voice was soft and soothing as a caress, "I sigh to think that one so adorable, so entirely made for life's sunshine and gladness, should have cause for a moment's uneasiness, perhaps for secret grief, at the thought of the peril of her brother."

Her glance clouded under this reminder. Then she pouted and made a little gesture of impatience. "Dick is not in peril," she answered. "He is foolish to remain so long in hiding, and of course he will have to face unpleasantness when he is found. But to say that he is in peril is … just nonsense. Terence said nothing of peril. He agreed with me that Dick will probably be sent home. Surely you don't think - "

"No, no." He looked down, studying his hessians for a moment, then his dark eyes returned to meet her own. "I shall see to it that he is in no danger. You may depend upon me, who ask but the happy chance to serve you. Should there be any trouble, let me know at once, and I will see to it that all is well. Your brother must not suffer, since he is your brother. He is very blessed and enviable in that."

She stared at him, her brows knitting. "But I don't understand."

"Is it not plain? Whatever happens, you must not suffer, Lady O'Moy. No man of feeling, and I least of any, could endure it. And since if your brother were to suffer that must bring suffering to you, you may count upon me to shield him."

"You are very good, Count. But shield him from what?"

"From whatever may threaten. The Portuguese Government may demand in self-protection, to appease the clamour of the people stupidly outraged by this affair, that an example shall be made of the offender."

"Oh, but how could they? With what reason?" She displayed a vague alarm, and a less vague impatience of such hypotheses.

He shrugged. "The people are like that - a fierce, vengeful god to whom appeasing sacrifices must be offered from time to time. If the people demand a scapegoat, governments usually provide one. But be comforted." In his eagerness of reassurance he caught her delicate mittened hand in his own, and her anxiety rendering her heedless, she allowed it to lie there gently imprisoned. "Be comforted. I shall be here to guard him. There is much that I can do and you may depend upon me to do it - for your sake, dear lady. The Government will listen to me. I would not have you imagine me capable of boasting. I have influence with the Government, that is all; and I give you my word that so far as the Portuguese Government is concerned your brother shall take no harm."

She looked at him for a long moment with moist eyes, moved and flattered by his earnestness and intensity of homage. "I take this very kindly in you, sir. I have no thanks that are worthy," she said, her voice trembling a little. "I have no means of repaying you. You have made me very happy, Count."

He bent low over the frail hand he was holding.

"Your assurance that I have made you happy repays me very fully, since your happiness is my tenderest concern. Believe me, dear lady, you may ever count Jeronymo de Samoval your most devoted and obedient slave."

He bore the hand to his lips and held it to them for a long moment, whilst with heightened colour and eyes that sparkled, more, be it confessed, from excitement than from gratitude, she stood passively considering his bowed dark head.

As he came erect again a movement under the archway caught his eye, and turning he found himself confronting Sir Terence and Miss Armytage, who were approaching. If it vexed him to have been caught by a husband notoriously jealous in an attitude not altogether uncompromising, Samoval betrayed no sign of it.

With smooth self-possession he hailed O'Moy:

"General, you come in time to enable me to take my leave of you. I was on the point of going."

"So I perceived," said O'Moy tartly. He had almost said: "So I had hoped."

His frosty manner would have imposed constraint upon any man less master of himself than Samoval. But the Count ignored it, and ignoring it delayed a moment to exchange amiabilities politely with Miss Armytage, before taking at last an unhurried and unperturbed departure.

But no sooner was he gone than O'Moy expressed himself full frankly to his wife.

"I think Samoval is becoming too attentive and too assiduous."

"He is a dear," said Lady O'Moy.

"That is what I mean," replied Sir Terence grimly.

"He has undertaken that if there should be any trouble with the Portuguese Government about Dick's silly affair he will put it right."

"Oh!" said O'Moy, "that was it?" And out of his tender consideration for her said no more.

But Sylvia Armytage, knowing what she knew from Captain Tremayne, was not content to leave the matter there. She reverted to it presently as she was going indoors alone with her cousin.

"Una," she said gently, "I should not place too much faith in Count Samoval and his promises."

"What do you mean?" Lady O'Moy was never very tolerant of advice, especially from an inexperienced young girl.

"I do not altogether trust him. Nor does Terence."

"Pooh! Terence mistrusts every man who looks at me. My dear, never marry a jealous man," she added with her inevitable inconsequence.

"He is the last man - the Count, I mean - to whom, in your place, I should go for assistance if there is trouble about Dick." She was thinking of what Tremayne had told her of the attitude of the Portuguese Government, and her clear-sighted mind perceived an obvious peril in permitting Count Samoval to become aware of Dick's whereabouts should they ever be discovered.

"What nonsense, Sylvia! You conceive the oddest and most foolish notions sometimes. But of course you have no experience of the world." And beyond that she refused to discuss the matter, nor did the wise Sylvia insist.

Chapter 5 THE FUGITIVE

Although Dick Butler might continue missing in the flesh, in the spirit he and his miserable affair seem to have been ever present and ubiquitous, and a most fruitful source of trouble.

It would be at about this time that there befell in Lisbon the deplorable event that nipped in the bud the career of that most promising young officer, Major Berkeley of the famous Die-Hards, the 29th Foot.

Coming into Lisbon on leave from his regiment, which was stationed at Abrantes, and formed part of the division under Sir Rowland Hill, the major happened into a company that contained at least one member who was hostile to Lord Wellington's conduct of the campaign, or rather to the measures which it entailed. As in the case of the Principal Souza, prejudice drove him to take up any weapon that came to his hand by means of which he could strike a blow at a system he deplored.

Since we are concerned only indirectly with the affair, it may be stated very briefly. The young gentleman in question was a Portuguese officer and a nephew of the Patriarch of Lisbon, and the particular criticism to which Major Berkeley took such just exception concerned the very troublesome Dick Butler. Our patrician ventured to comment with sneers and innuendoes upon the fact that the lieutenant of dragoons continued missing, and he went so far as to indulge in a sarcastic prophecy that he never would be found.

Major Berkeley, stung by the slur thus slyly cast upon British honour, invited the young gentleman to make himself more explicit.

"I had thought that I was explicit enough," says young impudence, leering at the stalwart red-coat. "But if you want it more clearly still, then I mean that the undertaking to punish this ravisher of nunneries is one that you English have never intended to carry out. To save your faces you will take good care that Lieutenant Butler is never found. Indeed I doubt if he was ever really missing."

Major Berkeley was quite uncompromising and downright. I am afraid he had none of the graces that can exalt one of these affairs.

Ye're just a very foolish liar, sir, and you deserve a good caning," was all he said, but the way in which he took his cane from under his arm was so suggestive of more to follow there and then that several of the company laid preventive hands upon him instantly.

The Patriarch's nephew, very white and very fierce to hear himself addressed in terms which - out of respect for his august and powerful uncle - had never been used to him before, demanded instant satisfaction. He got it next morning in the shape of half-an-ounce of lead through his foolish brain, and a terrible uproar ensued. To appease it a scapegoat was necessary. As Samoval so truly said, the mob is a ferocious god to whom sacrifices must be made. In this instance the sacrifice, of course, was Major Berkeley. He was broken and sent home to cut his pigtail (the adornment still clung to by the 29th) and retire into private life, whereby the British army was deprived of an officer of singularly brilliant promise. Thus, you see, the score against poor Richard Butler - that foolish victim of wine and circumstance - went on increasing.

But in my haste to usher Major Berkeley out of a narrative which he touches merely at a tangent, I am guilty of violating the chronological order of the events. The ship in which Major Berkeley went home to England and the rural life was the frigate Telemachus, and the Telemachus had but dropped anchor in the Tagus at the date with which I am immediately concerned. She came with certain stores and a heavy load of mails for the troops, and it would be a full fortnight before she would sail again for home. Her officers would be ashore during the time, the welcome guests of the officers of the garrison, bearing their share in the gaieties with which the latter strove to kill the time of waiting for events, and Marcus Glennie, the captain of the frigate, an old friend of Tremayne's, was by virtue of that friendship an almost daily visitor at the adjutant's quarters.

But there again I am anticipating. The Telemachus came to her moorings in the Tagus, at which for the present we may leave her, on the morning of the day that was to close with Count Redondo's semi-official ball. Lady O'Moy had risen late, taking from one end of the day what she must relinquish to the other, that thus fully rested she might look her best that night. The greater part of the afternoon was devoted to preparation. It was amazing even to herself what an amount of detail there was to be considered, and from Sylvia she received but very indifferent assistance. There were times when she regretfully suspected in Sylvia a lack of proper womanliness, a taint almost of masculinity. There was to Lady O'Moy's mind something very wrong about a woman who preferred a canter to a waltz. It was unnatural; it was suspicious; she was not quite sure that it wasn't vaguely immoral.

At last there had been dinner - to which she came a full half-hour late, but of so ravishing and angelic an appearance that the sight of her was sufficient to mollify Sir Terence's impatience and stifle the withering sarcasms he had been laboriously preparing. After dinner - which was taken at six o'clock - there was still an hour to spare before the carriage would come to take them into Lisbon.

Sir Terence pleaded stress of work, occasioned by the arrival of the Telemachus that morning, and withdrew with Tremayne to the official quarters, to spend that hour in disposing of some of the many matters awaiting his attention. Sylvia, who to Lady O'Moy's exasperation seemed now for the first time to give a thought to what she should wear that night, went off in haste to gown herself, and so Lady O'Moy was left to her own resources - which I assure you were few indeed.

The evening being calm and warm, she sauntered out into the open. She was more or less annoyed with everybody - with Sir Terence and Tremayne for their assiduity to duty, and with Sylvia for postponing all thought of dressing until this eleventh hour, when she might have been better employed in beguiling her ladyship's loneliness. In this petulant mood, Lady O'Moy crossed the quadrangle, loitered a moment by the table and chairs placed under the trellis, and considered sitting there to await the others. Finally, however, attracted by the glory of the sunset behind the hills towards Abrantes, she sauntered out on to the terrace, to the intense thankfulness of a poor wretch who had waited there for the past ten hours in the almost despairing hope that precisely such a thing might happen.

She was leaning upon the balustrade when a rustle in the pines below drew her attention. The rustle worked swiftly upwards and round to the bushes on her right, and her eyes, faintly startled, followed its career, what time she stood tense and vaguely frightened.

Then the bushes parted and a limping figure that leaned heavily upon a stick disclosed itself; a shaggy, red-bearded man in the garb of a peasant; and marvel of marvels! - this figure spoke her name sharply, warningly almost, before she had time to think of screaming.

"Una! Una! Don't move!"

The voice was certainly the voice of Mr. Butler. But how came that voice into the body of this peasant? Terrified, with drumming pulses, yet obedient to the injunction, she remained without speech or movement, whilst crouching so as to keep below the level of the balustrade the man crept forward until he was immediately before and below her.

She stared into that haggard face, and through the half-mask of stubbly beard gradually made out the features of her brother.

"Richard!" The name broke from her in a scream.

"'Sh!" He waved his hands in wild alarm to repress her. "For God's sake, be quiet! It's a ruined man I am they find me here. You'll have heard what's happened to me?"

She nodded, and uttered a half-strangled "Yes."

"Is there anywhere you can hide me? Can you get me into the house without being seen? I am almost starving, and my leg is on fire. I was wounded three days ago to make matters worse than they were already. I have been lying in the woods there watching for the chance to find you alone since sunrise this morning, and it's devil a bite or sup I've had since this time yesterday."

"Poor, poor Richard!" She leaned down towards him in an attitude of compassionate, ministering grace. "But why? Why did you not come up to the house and ask for me? No one would have recognised you."

"Terence would if he had seen me."

"But Terence wouldn't have mattered. Terence will help you."

"Terence!" He almost laughed from excess of bitterness, labouring under an egotistical sense of wrong. "He's the last man I should wish to meet, as I have good reason to know. If it hadn't been for that I should have come to you a month ago - immediately after this trouble of mine. As it is, I kept away until despair left me no other choice. Una, on no account a word of my presence to Terence."

"But … he's my husband!"

"Sure, and he's also adjutant-general, and if I know him at all he's the very man to place official duty and honour and all the rest of it above family considerations."

"Oh, Richard, how little you know Terence! How wrong you are to misjudge him like this!"

"Right or wrong, I'd prefer not to take the risk. It might end in my being shot one fine morning before long."

" Richard!"

"For God's sake, less of your Richard! It's all the world will be hearing you. Can you hide me, do you think, for a day or two? If you can't, I'll be after shifting for myself as best I can. I've been playing the part of an English overseer from Bearsley's wine farm, and it has brought me all the way from the Douro in safety. But the strain of it and the eternal fear of discovery are beginning to break me. And now there's this infernal wound. I was assaulted by a footpad near Abrantes, as if I was worth robbing. Anyhow I gave the fellow more than I took. Unless I have rest I think I shall go mad and give myself up to the provost-marshal to be shot and done with."

"Why do you talk of being shot? You have done nothing to deserve that. Why should you fear it?"

Now Mr. Butler was aware - having gathered the information lately on his travels - of the undertaking given by the British to the Council of Regency with regard to himself. But irresponsible egotist though he might be, yet in common with others he was actuated by the desire which his sister's fragile loveliness inspired in every one to spare her unnecessary pain or anxiety.

"It's not myself will take any risks," he said again. "We are at war, and when men are at war killing becomes a sort of habit, and one life more or less is neither here nor there." And upon that he renewed his plea that she should hide him if she could and that on no account should she tell a single soul - and Sir Terence least of any - of his presence.

Having driven him to the verge of frenzy by the waste of precious moments in vain argument, she gave him at last the promise he required. "Go back to the bushes there," she bade him, "and wait until I come for you. I will make sure that the coast is clear."

Contiguous to her dressing-room, which overlooked the quadrangle, there was a small alcove which had been converted into a storeroom for the array of trunks and dress boxes that Lady O'Moy had brought from England. A door opening directly from her dressing room communicated with this alcove, and of that door Bridget, her maid, was in possession of the key.

As she hurried now indoors she happened to meet Bridget on the stairs. The maid announced herself on her way to supper in the servants' quarters, and apologised for her presumption in assuming that her ladyship would no further require her services that evening. But since it fell in so admirably with her ladyship's own wishes, she insisted with quite unusual solicitude, with vehemence almost, that Bridget should proceed upon her way.

"Just give me the key of the alcove," she said. "There are one or two things I want to get."

"Can't I get them, your ladyship?"

"Thank you, Bridget. I prefer to get them, myself."

There was no more to be said. Bridget produced a bunch of keys, which she surrendered to her mistress, having picked out for her the one required.

Lady O'Moy went up, to come down again the moment that Bridget had disappeared. The quadrangle was deserted, the household disposed of, and it wanted yet half-an-hour to the time for which the carriage was ordered. No moment could have been more propitious. But in any case no concealment was attempted - since, if detected it must have provoked suspicions hardly likely to be aroused in any other way.

When Lady O'Moy returned indoors in the gathering dusk she was followed at a respectful distance by the limping fugitive, who might, had he been seen, have been supposed some messenger, or perhaps some person employed about the house or gardens coming to her ladyship for instructions. No one saw them, however, and they gained the dressing-room and thence the alcove in complete safety.

There, whilst Richard, allowing his exhaustion at last to conquer him, sank heavily down upon one of his sister's many trunks, recking nothing of the havoc wrought in its priceless contents, her ladyship all a-tremble collapsed limply upon another.

But there was no rest for her. Richard's wound required attention, and he was faint for want of meat and drink. So having procured him the wherewithal to wash and dress his hurt - a nasty knife-slash which had penetrated to the bone of his thigh, the very sight of which turned her ladyship sick and faint - she went to forage for him in a haste increased by the fact that time was growing short.

On the dining-room sideboard, from the remains of dinner, she found and furtively abstracted what she needed - best part of a roast chicken, a small loaf and a half-flask of Collares. Mullins, the butler, would no doubt be exercised presently when he discovered the abstraction. Let him blame one of the footmen, Sir Terence's orderly, or the cat. It mattered nothing to Lady O'Moy.

Having devoured the food and consumed the wine, Richard's exhaustion assumed the form of a lethargic torpor. To sleep was now his overmastering desire. She fetched him rugs and pillows, and he made himself a couch upon the floor. She had demurred, of course, when he himself had suggested this. She could not conceive of any one sleeping anywhere but in a bed. But Dick made short work of that illusion.

"Haven't I been in hiding for the last six weeks?" he asked her. "And haven't I been thankful to sleep in a ditch? And wasn't I campaigning before that? I tell you I couldn't sleep in a bed. It's a habit I've lost entirely."

Convinced, she gave way.

"We'll talk to-morrow, Una," he promised her, as he stretched himself luxuriously upon that hard couch. "But meanwhile, on your life, not a word to any one. You understand?"

"Of course I understand, my poor Dick."

She stooped to kiss him. But he was fast asleep already.

She went out and locked the door, and when, on the point of setting out for Count Redondo's, she returned the bunch of keys to Bridget the key of the alcove was missing.

"I shall require it again in the morning, Bridget," she explained lightly. And then added kindly, as it seemed: "Don't wait for me, child. Get to bed. I shall be late in coming home, and I shall not want you."

Chapter 6 MISS ARMYTAGE'S PEARLS

Lady O'Moy and Miss Armytage drove alone together into Lisbon. The adjutant, still occupied, would follow as soon as he possibly could, whilst Captain Tremayne would go on directly from the lodgings which he shared in Alcantara with Major Carruthers - also of the adjutant's staff - whither he had ridden to dress some twenty minutes earlier.

"Are you ill, Una?" had been Sylvia's concerned greeting of her cousin when she came within the range of the carriage lamps. "You are pale as a ghost." To this her ladyship had replied mechanically that a slight headache troubled her.

But now that they sat side by side in the well upholstered carriage Miss Armytage became aware hat her companion was trembling.

"Una, dear, whatever is the matter?"

Had it not been for the dominant fear that the shedding of tears would render her countenance unsightly, Lady O'Moy would have yielded to her feelings and wept. Heroically in the cause of her own flawless beauty she conquered the almost overmastering inclination.

"I - I have been so troubled about Richard," she faltered. "It is preying upon my mind."

"Poor dear!" In sheer motherliness Miss Armytage put an arm about her cousin and drew her close. "We must hope for the best."

Now if you have understood anything of the character of Lady O'Moy you will have understood that the burden of a secret was the last burden that such a nature was capable of carrying,. It was because Dick was fully aware of this that he had so emphatically and repeatedly impressed upon her the necessity for saying not a word to any one of his presence. She realised in her vague way - or rather she believed it since he had assured her - that there would be grave danger to him if he were discovered. But discovery was one thing, and the sharing of a confidence as to his presence another. That confidence must certainly be shared.

Lady O'Moy was in an emotional maelstrom that swept her towards a cataract. The cataract might inspire her with dread, standing as it did for death and disaster, but the maelstrom was not to be resisted. She was helpless in it, unequal to breasting such strong waters, she who in all her futile, charming life had been borne snugly in safe crafts that were steered by others.

Remained but to choose her confidant. Nature suggested Terence. But it was against Terence in particular that she had been warned. Circumstance now offered Sylvia Armytage. But pride, or vanity if you prefer it, denied her here. Sylvia was an inexperienced young girl, as she herself had so often found occasion to remind her cousin. Moreover, she fostered the fond illusion that Sylvia looked to her for precept, that upon Sylvia's life she exercised a precious guiding influence. How, then, should the supporting lean upon the supported? Yet since she must, there and then, lean upon something or succumb instantly and completely, she chose a middle course, a sort of temporary assistance.

"I have been imagining things," she said. "It may be a premonition, I don't know. Do you believe in premonitions, Sylvia?"

"Sometimes," Sylvia humoured her.

"I have been imagining that if Dick is hiding, a fugitive, he might naturally come to me for help. I am fanciful, perhaps," she added hastily, lest she should have said too much. "But there it is. All day the notion has clung to me, and I have been asking myself desperately what I should do in such a case."

"Time enough to consider it when it happens, Una. After all - "

"I know," her ladyship interrupted on that ever-ready note of petulance of hers. "I know, of course. But I think I should be easier in my mind if I could find an answer to my doubt. If I knew what to do, to whom to appeal for assistance, for I am afraid that I should be very helpless myself. There is Terence, of course. But I am a little afraid of Terence. He has got Dick out of so many scrapes, and he is so impatient of poor Dick. I am afraid he doesn't understand him, and so I should be a little frightened of appealing to Terence again."

"No," said Sylvia gravely, "I shouldn't go to Terence. Indeed he is the last man to whom I should go."

"You say that too!" exclaimed her ladyship.

"Why?" quoth Sylvia sharply. "Who else has said it?"

There was a brief pause in which Lady O'Moy shuddered. She had been so near to betraying herself. How very quick and shrewd Sylvia was! She made, however, a good recovery.

"Myself, of course. It is what I have thought myself. There is Count Samoval. He promised that if ever any such thing happened he would help me. And he assured me I could count upon him. I think it may have been his offer that made me fanciful."

"I should go to Sir Terence before I went to Count Samoval. By which I mean that I should not go to Count Samoval at all under any circumstances. I do not trust him."

"You said so once before, dear," said Lady O'Moy.

"And you assured me that I spoke out of the fullness of my ignorance and inexperience."

"Ah, forgive me."

"There is nothing to forgive. No doubt you were right. But remember that instinct is most alive in the ignorant and inexperienced, and that instinct is often a surer guide than reason. Yet if you want reason, I can supply that too. Count Samoval is the intimate friend of the Marquis of Minas, who remains a member of the Government, and who next to the Principal Souza was, and no doubt is, the most bitter opponent of the British policy in Portugal. Yet Count Samoval, one of the largest landowners in the north, and the nobleman who has perhaps suffered most severely from that policy, represents himself as its most vigorous supporter."

Lady O'Moy listened in growing amazement. Also she was a little shocked. It seemed to her almost indecent that a young girl should know so much about politics - so much of which she herself, a married woman, and the wife of the adjutant-general, was completely in ignorance.

"Save us, child!" she ejaculated. "You are so extraordinarily informed."

"I have talked to Captain Tremayne," said Sylvia. "He has explained all this."

"Extraordinary conversation for a young man to hold with a young girl," pronounced her ladyship. "Terence never talked of such things to me."

"Terence was too busy making love to you," said Sylvia, and there was the least suspicion of regret in her almost boyish voice.

"That may account for it," her ladyship confessed, and fell for a moment into consideration of that delicious and rather amusing past, when O'Moy's ferocious hesitancy and flaming jealousy had delighted her with the full perception of her beauty's power. With a rush, however, the present forced itself back upon her notice. "But I still don't see why Count Samoval should have offered me assistance if he did not intend to grant it when the time came."

Sylvia explained that it was from the Portuguese Government that the demand for justice upon the violator of the nunnery at Tavora emanated, and that Samoval's offer might be calculated to obtain him information of Butler's whereabouts when they became known, so that he might surrender him to the Government.

"My dear!" Lady O'Moy was shocked almost beyond expression. "How you must dislike the man to suggest that he could be such a - such a Judas."

"I do not suggest that he could be. I warn you never to run the risk of testing him. He maybe as honest in this matter as he pretends. But if ever Dick were to come to you for help, you must take no risk."

The phrase was a happier one than Sylvia could suppose. It was almost the very phrase that Dick himself had used; and its reiteration by another bore conviction to her ladyship.

"To whom then should I go?" she demanded plaintively. And Sylvia, speaking with knowledge, remembering the promise that Tremayne had given her, answered readily: "There is but one man whose assistance you could safely seek. Indeed I wonder you should not have thought of him in the first instance, since he is your own, as well as Dick's lifelong friend."

"Ned Tremayne?" Her ladyship fell into thought. "Do you know, I am a little afraid of Ned. He is so very sober and cold. You do mean Ned - don't you?"

"Whom else should I mean?"

"But what could he do?"

"My dear, how should I know? But at least I know - for I think I can be sure of this - that he will not lack the will to help you; and to have the will, in a man like Captain Tremayne, is to find a way."

The confident, almost respectful, tone in which she spoke arrested her ladyship's attention. It promptly sent her off at a tangent:

"You like Ned, don't you, dear?"

"I think everybody likes him." Sylvia's voice was now studiously cold.

"Yes; but I don't mean quite in that way." And then before the subject could be further pursued the carriage rolled to a standstill in a flood of light from gaping portals, scattering a mob of curious sight-seers intersprinkled with chairmen, footmen, linkmen and all the valetaille that hovers about the functions of the great world.

The carriage door was flung open and the steps let down. A brace of footmen, plump as capons, in gorgeous liveries, bowed powdered heads and proffered scarlet arms to assist the ladies to alight.

Above in the crowded, spacious, colonnaded vestibule at the foot of the great staircase they were met-by Captain Tremayne, who had just arrived with Major Carruthers, both resplendent in full dress, and Captain Marcus Glennie of the Telemachus in blue and gold. "Together they ascended the great staircase, lined with chatting groups, and ablaze with uniforms, military, naval and diplomatic, British and Portuguese, to be welcomed above by the Count and Countess of Redondo.

Lady O'Moy's entrance of the ballroom produced the effect to which custom had by now inured her. Soon she found herself the centre of assiduous attentions. Cavalrymen in blue, riflemen in green, scarlet officers of the line regiments, winged light-infantrymen, rakishly pelissed, gold-braided hussars and all the smaller fry of court and camp fluttered insistently about her. It was no novelty to her who had been the recipient of such homage since her first ball five years ago at Dublin Castle, and yet the wine of it had gone ever to her head a little. But to-night she was rather pale and listless, her rose-petal loveliness emphasised thereby perhaps. An unusual air of indifference hung about her as she stood there amid this throng of martial jostlers who craved the honour of a dance and at whom she smiled a thought mechanically over the top of her slowly moving fan.

The first quadrille impended, and the senior service had carried off the prize from under the noses of the landsmen. As she was swept away by Captain Glennie, she came face to face with Tremayne, who was passing with Sylvia on his arm. She stopped and tapped his arm with her fan.

"You haven't asked to dance, Ned," she reproached him.

"With reluctance I abstained."

"But I don't intend that you shall. I have something to say to you." He met her glance, and found it oddly serious - most oddly serious for her. Responding to its entreaty, he murmured a promise in courteous terms of delight at so much honour.

But either he forgot the promise or did not conceive its redemption to be an urgent matter, for the quadrille being done he sauntered through one of the crowded ante-rooms with Miss Armytage and brought her to the cool of a deserted balcony above the garden. Beyond this was the river, agleam with the lights of the British fleet that rode at anchor on its placid bosom.

"Una will be waiting for you," Miss Armytage reminded him. She was leaning on the sill of the balcony. Standing erect beside her, he considered the graceful profile sharply outlined against a background of gloom by the light from the windows behind them. A heavy curl of her dark hair lay upon a neck as flawlessly white as the rope of pearls that swung from it, with which her fingers were now idly toying. It were difficult to say which most engaged his thoughts: the profile; the lovely line of neck; or the rope of pearls. These latter were of price, such things as it might seldom - and then only by sacrifice - lie within the means of Captain Tremayne to offer to the woman whom he took to wife.

He so lost himself upon that train of thought that she was forced to repeat her reminder.

"Una will be waiting for you, Captain Tremayne."

"Scarcely as eagerly," he answered, "as others will be waiting for you."

She laughed amusedly, a frank, boyish laugh. "I thank you for not saying as eagerly as I am waiting for others."

"Miss Armytage, I have ever cultivated truth."

"But we are dealing with surmise."

"Oh, no surmise at all. I speak of what I know."

"And so do I" And yet again she repeated: "Una will be waiting for you."

He sighed, and stiffened slightly. "Of course if you insist," said he, and made ready to reconduct her.

She swung round as if to go, but checked, and looked him frankly in the eyes.

"Why will you for ever be misunderstanding me?" she challenged him.

"Perhaps it is the inevitable result of my overanxiety to understand."

"Then begin by taking me more literally, and do not read into my words more meaning than I intend to give them. When I say Una is waiting for you, I state a simple fact, not a command that you shall go to her. Indeed I want first to talk to you."

"If I might take you literally now - "

"Should I have suffered you to bring me here if I did not?"

"I beg your pardon," he said, contrite, and something shaken out of his imperturbability. "Sylvia," he ventured very boldly, and there checked, so terrified as to be a shame to his brave scarlet, gold-laced uniform.

"Yes?" she said. She was leaning upon the balcony again, and in such a way now that he could no longer see her profile. But her fingers were busy at the pearls once more, and this he saw, and seeing, recovered himself.

"You have something to say to me?" he questioned in his smooth, level voice.

Had he not looked away as he spoke he might have observed that her fingers tightened their grip of the pearls almost convulsively, as if to break the rope. It was a gesture slight and trivial, yet arguing perhaps vexation. But Tremayne did not see it, and had he seen it, it is odds it would have conveyed no message to him.

There fell a long pause, which he did not venture to break. At last she spoke, her voice quiet and level as his own had been.

"It is about Una."

"I had hoped," he spoke very softly, "that it was about yourself."

She flashed round upon him almost angrily. "Why do you utter these set speeches to me?" she demanded. And then before he could recover from his astonishment to make any answer she had resumed a normal manner, and was talking quickly.

She told him of Una's premonitions about Dick. Told him, in short, what it was that Una desired to talk to him about.

"You bade her come to me?" he said.

"Of course. After your promise to me."

He was silent and very thoughtful for a moment. "I wonder that Una needed to be told that she had in me a friend," he said slowly.

"I wonder to whom she would have gone on her own impulse?"

"To Count Samoval," Miss Armytage informed him.

"Samoval!" he rapped the name out sharply. He was clearly angry. "That man! I can't understand why O'Moy should suffer him about the house so much."

"Terence, like everybody else, will suffer anything that Una wishes."

"Then Terence is more of a fool than I ever suspected."

There was a brief pause. "If you were to fail Una in this," said Miss Armytage presently, "I mean that unless you yourself give her the assurance that you are ready to do what you can for Dick, should the occasion arise, I am afraid that in her present foolish mood she may still avail herself of Count Samoval. That would be to give Samoval a hold upon her; and I tremble to think what the consequences might be. That man is a snake - a horror."

The frankness with which she spoke was to Tremayne full evidence of her anxiety. He was prompt to allay it.

"She shall have that assurance this very evening," he promised.

"I at least have not pledged my word to anything or to any one. Even so," he added slowly, "the chances of my services being ever required grow more slender every day. Una may be full of premonitions about Dick. But between premonition and event there is something of a gap."

Again a pause, and then: "I am glad," said Miss Armytage, "to think that Una has a friend, a trustworthy friend, upon whom she can depend. She is so incapable of depending upon herself. All her life there has been some one at hand to guide her and screen her from unpleasantness until she has remained just a sweet, dear child to be taken by the hand in every dark lane of life."

"But she has you, Miss Armytage."

"Me?" Miss Armytage spoke deprecatingly. "I don't think I am a very able or experienced guide. Besides, even such as I am, she may not have me very long now. I had letters from home this morning. Father is not very well, and mother writes that he misses me. I am thinking of returning soon."

"But - but you have only just come!"

She brightened and laughed at the dismay in his voice. "Indeed, I have been here six weeks." She looked out over the shimmering moonlit waters of the Tagus and the shadowy, ghostly ships of the British fleet that rode at anchor there, and her eyes were wistful. Her fingers, with that little gesture peculiar to her in moments of constraint, were again entwining themselves in her rope of pearls. "Yes," she said almost musingly, "I think I must be going soon."

He was dismayed. He realised that the moment for action had come. His heart was sounding the charge within him. And then that cursed rope of pearls, emblem of the wealth and luxury in which she had been nurtured, stood like an impassable abattis across his path.

"You - you will be glad to go, of course?" he suggested.

"Hardly that. It has been very pleasant here." She sighed.

"We shall miss you very much," he said gloomily. "The house at Monsanto will not be the same when you are gone. Una will be lost and desolate without you."

"It occurs to me sometimes," she said slowly, "that the people about Una think too much of Una and too little of themselves."

It was a cryptic speech. In another it might have signified a spitefulness unthinkable in Sylvia Armytage; therefore it puzzled him very deeply. He stood silent, wondering what precisely she might mean, and thus in silence they continued for a spell. Then slowly she turned and the blaze of light from the windows fell about her irradiantly. She was rather pale, and her eyes were of a suspiciously excessive brightness. And again she made use of the phrase:

"Una will be waiting for you."

Yet, as before, he stood silent and immovable, considering her, questioning himself, searching her face and his own soul. All he saw was that rope of shimmering pearls.

"And after all, as yourself suggested, it is possible that others may be waiting for me," she added presently.

Instantly he was crestfallen and contrite. "I sincerely beg your pardon, Miss Armytage," and with a pang of which his imperturbable exterior gave no hint he proffered her his arm.

She took it, barely touching it with her finger-tips, and they re-entered the ante-room.

"When do you think that you will be leaving?" he asked her gently.

There was a note of harshness in the voice that answered him.

"I don't know yet. But very soon. The sooner the better, I think."

And then the sleek and courtly Samoval, detaching from, seeming to materialise out of, the glittering throng they had entered, was bowing low before her, claiming her attention. Knowing her feelings, Tremayne would not have relinquished her, but to his infinite amazement she herself slipped her fingers from his scarlet sleeve, to place them upon the black one that Samoval was gracefully proffering, and greeted Samoval with a gay raillery as oddly in contrast with her grave demeanour towards the captain as with her recent avowal of detestation for the Count.

Stricken and half angry, Tremayne stood looking after them as they receded towards the ballroom. To increase his chagrin came a laugh from Miss Armytage, sharp and rather strident, floating towards him, and Miss Armytage's laugh was wont to be low and restrained. Samoval, no doubt, had resources to amuse a woman - even a woman who instinctively, disliked him - resources of which Captain Tremayne himself knew nothing.

And then some one tapped him on the shoulder. A very tall, hawk-faced man in a scarlet coat and tightly strapped blue trousers stood beside him. It was Colquhoun Grant, the ablest intelligence officer in Wellington's service.

"Why, Colonel!" cried Tremayne, holding out his hand. "I didn't know you were in Lisbon."

"I arrived only this afternoon." The keen eyes flashed after the disappearing figures of Sylvia and her cavalier. "Tell me, what is the name of the irresistible gallant who has so lightly ravished you of your quite delicious companion?"

"Count Samoval," said Tremayne shortly.

Grant's face remained inscrutable. "Really!" he said softly. "So that is Jeronymo de Samoval, eh? How very interesting. A great supporter of the British policy; therefore an altruist, since himself he is a sufferer by it; and I hear that he has become a great friend of O'Moy's."

"He is at Monsanto a good deal certainly," Tremayne admitted.

"Most interesting." Grant was slowly nodding, and a faint smile curled his thin, sensitive lips. "But I'm keeping you, Tremayne, and no doubt you would be dancing. I shall perhaps see you to-morrow. I shall be coming up to Monsanto."

And with a wave of the hand he passed on and was gone.

Chapter 7 THE ALLY

Tremayne elbowed his way through the gorgeous crowd, exchanging greetings here and there as he went, and so reached the ballroom during a pause in the dancing. He looked round for Lady O'Moy, but he could see her nowhere, and would never have found her had not Carruthers pointed out a knot of officers and assured him that the lady was in the heart of it and in imminent peril of being suffocated.

Thither the captain bent his steps, looking neither to right nor left in his singleness of purpose. Thus it happened that he saw neither O'Moy, who had just arrived, nor the massive, decorated bulk of Marshal Beresford, with whom the adjutant stood in conversation on the skirts of the throng that so assiduously worshipped at her ladyship's shrine.

Captain Tremayne went through the group with all a sapper's skill at piercing obstacles, and so came face to face with the lady of his quest. Seeing her so radiant now, with sparkling eyes and ready laugh, it was difficult to conceive her haunted by any such anxieties as Miss Armytage had mentioned. Yet the moment she perceived him, as if his presence acted as a reminder to lift her out of the delicious present, something of her gaiety underwent eclipse.

Child of impulse that she was, she gave no thought to her action and the construction it might possibly bear in the minds of men chagrined and slighted.

"Why, Ned," she cried, "you have kept me waiting." And with a complete and charming ignoring of the claims of all who had been before him, and who were warring there for precedence of one another, she took his arm in token that she yielded herself to him before even the honour was so much as solicited.

With nods and smiles to right and left - a queen dismissing her court - she passed on the captain's arm through the little crowd that gave way before her dismayed and intrigued, and so away.

O'Moy, who had been awaiting a favourable moment to present the marshal by the marshal's own request, attempted to thrust forward now with Beresford at his side. But the bowing line of officers whose backs were towards him effectively barred his progress, and before they had broken up that formation her ladyship and her cavalier were out of sight, lost in the moving crowd.

The marshal laughed good-humouredly. "The infallible reward of patience," said he. And O'Moy laughed with him. But the next moment he was scowling at what he overheard.

"On my soul, that was impudence!" an Irish infantryman had protested.

"Have you ever heard," quoth a heavy dragoon, who was also a heavy jester, "that in heaven the last shall be first? If you pay court to an angel you must submit to celestial customs."

"And bedad," rejoined the infantryman, "as there's no marryin' in heaven ye've got to make the best of it with other men's wives. Sure it's a great success that fellow should be in paradise. Did ye remark the way she melted to him beauty swooning at the sight of temptation! Bad luck to him! Who is he at all?"

They dispersed laughing and followed by O'Moy's scowling eyes. It annoyed him that his wife's thoughtless conduct should render her the butt of such jests as these, and perhaps a subject for lewd gossip. He would speak to her about it later. Meanwhile the marshal had linked arms with him.

"Since the privilege must be postponed," said he, "suppose that we seek supper. I have always found that a man can best heal in his stomach the wounds taken by his heart." His fleshy bulk afforded a certain prima-facie confirmation of the dictum.

With a roll more suggestive of the quarter-deck than the saddle, the great man bore off O'Moy in quest of material consolation. Yet as they went the adjutant's eyes raked the ballroom in quest of his wife. That quest, however, was unsuccessful, for his wife was already in the garden.

"I want to talk to you most urgently, Ned. Take me somewhere where we can be quite private," she had begged the captain. "Somewhere where there is no danger of being overheard."

Her agitation, now uncontrolled, suggested to Tremayne that the matter might be far more serious and urgent than Miss Armytage had represented it. He thought first of the balcony where he had lately been. But then the balcony opened immediately from the ante-room and was likely at any moment to be invaded. So, since the night was soft and warm, he preferred the garden. Her ladyship went to find a wrap, then arm in arm they passed out, and were lost in the shadows of an avenue of palm-trees.

"It is about Dick," she said breathlessly.

"I know - Miss Armytage told me."

"What did she tell you?"

"That you had a premonition that he might come to you for assistance."

"A premonition!" Her ladyship laughed nervously. "It is more than a premonition, Ned. He has come."

The captain stopped in his stride, and stood quite still.

"Come?" he echoed. "Dick?"

"Sh!" she warned him, and sank her voice from very instinct. "He came to me this evening, half an hour before we left home. I have put him in an alcove adjacent to my dressing-room for the present."

"You have left him there?" He was alarmed.

"Oh, there's no fear. No one ever goes there except Bridget. And I have locked the alcove. He's fast asleep. He was asleep before I left. The poor fellow was so worn and weary." Followed details of his appearance and a recital of his wanderings so far as he had made them known to her. "And he was so insistent that no one should know, not even Terence."

"Terence must not know," he said gravely.

"You think that too!"

"If Terence knows - well, you will regret it all the days of your life, Una."

He was so stern, so impressive, that she begged for explanation. He afforded it. "You would be doing Terence the utmost cruelty if you told him. You would be compelling him to choose between his honour and his concern for you. And since he is the very soul of honour, he must sacrifice you and himself, your happiness and his own, everything that makes life good for you both, to his duty."

She was aghast, for all that she was far from understanding. But he went on relentlessly to make his meaning clear, for the sake of O'Moy as much as for her own - for the sake of the future of these two people who were perhaps his dearest friends. He saw in what danger of shipwreck their happiness now stood, and he took the determination of clearly pointing out to her every shoal in the water through which she must steer her course.

"Since this has happened, Una, you must be told the whole truth; you must listen, and, above all, be reasonable. I am Dick's friend, as I am your own and Terence's. Your father was my best friend, perhaps, and my gratitude to him is unbounded, as I hope you know. You and Dick are almost as brother and sister to me. In spite of this - indeed, because of this, I have prayed for news that Dick was dead."

Her grasp interrupted him, and he felt the tightening clutch of her hands upon his arm in the gloom.

"I have prayed this for Dick's sake, and more than all for the sake of your happiness and Terence's. If Dick is taken the choice before Terence is a tragic one. You will realise it when I tell you that duty forced him to pledge his word to the Portuguese Government that Dick should be shot when found."

"Oh!" It was a gasp of horror, of incredulity. She loosed his arm and drew away from him. "It is infamous! I can't believe it. I can't."

"It is true. I swear it to you. I was present, and I heard."

"And you allowed it?"

"What could I do? How could I interfere? Besides, the minister who demanded that undertaking knew nothing of the relationship between O'Moy and this missing officer."

"But - but he could have been told."

"That would have made no difference - unless it were to create fresh difficulties."

She stood there ghostly white against the gloom. A dry sob broke from her. "Terence did that! Terence did that!" she moaned. And then in a surge of anger: "I shall never speak to Terence again. I shall not live with him another day. It was infamous! Infamous!"

"It was not infamous. It was almost noble, almost heroic," he amazed her. "Listen, Una, and try to understand." He took her arm again and drew her gently on down that avenue of moonlight-fretted darkness.

"Oh, I understand," she cried bitterly. "I understand perfectly. He has always been hard on Dick! He has always made mountains out of molehills where Dick was concerned. He forgets that Dick is young a mere boy. He judges Dick from the standpoint of his own sober middle age. Why, he's an old man - a wicked old man!"

Thus her rage, hurling at O'Moy what in the insolence of her youth seemed the last insult.

"You are very unjust, Una. You are even a little stupid," he said, deeming the punishment necessary and salutary.

"Stupid! I stupid! I have never been called stupid before."

"But you have undoubtedly deserved to be," he assured her with perfect calm.

It took her aback by its directness, and for a moment left her without an answer. Then: "I think you had better leave me," she told him frostily. "You forget yourself."

"Perhaps I do," he admitted. "That is because I am more concerned to think of Dick and Terence and yourself. Sit down, Una."

They had reached a little circle by a piece of ornamental water, facing which a granite-hewn seat had been placed. She sank to it obediently, if sulkily.

"It may perhaps help you to understand what Terence has done when I tell you that in his place, loving Dick as I do, I must have pledged myself precisely as he did or else despised myself for ever. And being pledged, I must keep my word or go in the same self-contempt." He elaborated his argument by explaining the full circumstances under which the pledge had been exacted. " But be in no doubt about it," he concluded. "If Terence knows of Dick's presence at Monsanto he has no choice. He must deliver him up to a firing party - or to a court-martial which will inevitably sentence him to death, no matter what the defence that Dick may urge. He is a man prejudged, foredoomed by the necessities of war. And Terence will do this although it will break his heart and ruin all his life. Understand me, then, that in enjoining you never to allow Terence to suspect that Dick is present, I am pleading not so much for you or for Dick, but for Terence himself - for it is upon Terence that the hardest and most tragic suffering must fall. Now do you understand?"

"I understand that men are very stupid," was her way of admitting it.

"And you see that you were wrong in judging Terence as you did?"

"I - I suppose so."

She didn't understand it all. But since Tremayne was so insistent she supposed there must be something in his point of view. She had been brought up in the belief that Ned Tremayne was common sense incarnate; and although she often doubted it - as you may doubt the dogmas of a religion in which you have been bred - yet she never openly rebelled against that inculcated faith. Above all she wanted to cry. She knew that it would be very good for her. She had often found a singular relief in tears when vexed by things beyond her understanding. But she had to think of that flock of gallants in the ballroom waiting to pay court to her and of her duty towards them of preserving her beauty unimpaired by the ravages of a vented sorrow.

Tremayne sat down beside her. "So now that we understand each other on that score, let us consider ways and means to dispose of Dick."

At once she was uplifted and became all eagerness.

"Yes, Yes. You will help me, Ned?"

"You can depend upon me to do all in human power."

He thought rapidly, and gave voice to some of his thoughts. "If I could I would take him to my lodgings at Alcantara. But Carruthers knows him and would see him there. So that is out of the question. Then again it is dangerous to move him about. At any moment he might be seen and recognised."

"Hardly recognised," she said. "His beard disguises him, and his dress - " She shuddered at the very thought of the figure he had cut, he, the jaunty, dandy Richard Butler.

"That is something, of course," he agreed. And then asked: "How long do you think that you could keep him hidden?"

"I don't know. You see, there's Bridget. She is the only danger, as she has charge of my dressing-room."

"It may be desperate, but - Can you trust her?"

"Oh, I am sure I can. She is devoted to me; she would do anything - "

"She must be bought as well. Devotion and gain when linked together will form an unbreakable bond. Don't let us be stingy, Una. Take her into your confidence boldly, and promise her a hundred guineas for her silence - payable on the day that Dick leaves the country."

"But how are we to get him out of the country?"

"I think I know a way. I can depend on Marcus Glennie. I may tell him the whole truth and the identity of our man, or I may not. I must think about that. But, whatever I decide, I am sure I can induce Glennie to take our fugitive home in the Telemachus and land him safely somewhere in Ireland, where he will have to lose himself for awhile. Perhaps for Glennie's sake it will be safer not to disclose Dick's identity. Then if there should be trouble later, Glennie, having known nothing of the real facts, will not be held responsible. I will talk to him to-night."

"Do you think he will consent?" she asked in strained anxiety - anxiety to have her anxieties dispelled.

"I am sure he will. I can almost pledge my word on it. Marcus would do anything to serve me. Oh, set your mind at rest. Consider the thing done. Keep Dick safely hidden for a week or so until the Telemachus is ready to sail - he mustn't go on board until the last moment, for several reasons - and I will see to the rest."

Under that confident promise her troubles fell from her, as lightly as they ever did.

"You are very good to me, Ned. Forgive me what I said just now. And I think I understand about Terence - poor dear old Terence."

"Of course you do." Moved to comfort her as he might have been moved to comfort a child, he flung his arm along the seat behind her, and patted her shoulder soothingly. "I knew you would understand. And not a word to Terence, not a word that could so much as awaken his suspicions. Remember that."

"Oh, I shall."

Fell a step upon the patch behind them crunching the gravel. Captain Tremayne, his arm still along the back of the seat, and seeming to envelop her ladyship, looked over her shoulder. A tall figure was advancing briskly. He recognised it even in the gloom by its height and gait and swing for O'Moy's.

"Why, here is Terence," he said easily - so easily, with such frank and obvious honesty of welcome, that the anger in which O'Moy came wrapped fell from him on the instant, to be replaced by shame.

"I have been looking for you everywhere, my dear," he said to Una. "Marshal Beresford is anxious to pay you his respects before he leaves, and you have been so hedged about by gallants all the evening that it's devil a chance he's had of approaching you." There was a certain constraint in his voice, for a man may not recover instantly from such feelings as those which had fetched him hot-foot down that path at sight of those two figures sitting so close and intimate, the young man's arm so proprietorialy about the lady's shoulders - as it seemed.

Lady O'Moy sprang up at once, with a little silvery laugh that was singularly care-free; for had not Tremayne lifted the burden entirely from her shoulders?

"You should have married a dowd," she mocked him. "Then you'd have found her more easily accessible."

"Instead of finding her dallying in the moonlight with my secretary," he rallied back between good and ill humour. And he turned to Tremayne: "Damned indiscreet of you, Ned," he added more severely. "Suppose you had been seen by any of the scandalmongering old wives of the garrison? A nice thing for Una and a nice thing for me, begad, to be made the subject of fly-blown talk over the tea-cups."

Tremayne accepted the rebuke in the friendly spirit in which it appeared to be conveyed. "Sorry, O'Moy," he said. "You're quite right. We should have thought of it. Everybody isn't to know what our relations are." And again he was so manifestly honest and so completely at his ease that it was impossible to harbour any thought of evil, and O'Moy felt again the glow of shame of suspicions so utterly unworthy and dishonouring.

Chapter 8 THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICER

In a small room of Count Redondo's palace, a room that had been set apart for cards, sat three men about a card-table. They were Count Samoval, the elderly Marquis of Minas, lean, bald and vulturine of aspect, with a deep-set eye that glared fiercely through a single eyeglass rimmed in tortoise-shell, and a gentleman still on the fair side of middle age, with a clear-cut face and iron-grey hair, who wore the dark green uniform of a major of Cacadores.

Considering his Portuguese uniform, it is odd that the low-toned, earnest conversation amongst them should have been conducted in French.

There were cards on the table; but there was no pretence of play. You might have conceived them a group of players who, wearied of their game, had relinquished it for conversation. They were the only tenants of the room, which was small, cedar-panelled and lighted by a girandole of sparkling crystal. Through the closed door came faintly from the distant ballroom the strains of the dance music.

With perhaps the single exception of the Principal Souza, the British policy had no more bitter opponent in Portugal than the Marquis of Minas. Once a member of the Council of Regency - before Souza had been elected to that body - he had quitted it in disgust at the British measures. His chief ground of umbrage had been the appointment of British officers to the command of the Portuguese regiments which formed the division under Marshal Beresford. In this he saw a deliberate insult and slight to his country and his countrymen. He was a man of burning and blinded patriotism, to whom Portugal was the most glorious nation in the world. He lived in his country's splendid past, refusing to recognise that the days of Henry the Navigator, of Vasco da Gama, of Manuel the Fortunate - days in which Portugal had been great indeed among the nations of the Old World were gone and done with. He respected Britons as great merchants and industrious traders; but, after all, merchants and traders are not the peers of fighters on land and sea, of navigators, conquerors and civilisers, such as his countrymen had been, such as he believed them still to be. That the descendants of Gamas, Cunhas, Magalhaes and Albuquerques - men whose names were indelibly written upon the very face of the world - should be passed over, whilst alien officers lead been brought in to train and command the Portuguese legions, was an affront to Portugal which Minas could never forgive.

It was thus that he had become a rebel, withdrawing from a government whose supineness he could not condone. For a while his rebellion had been passive, until the Principal Souza had heated him in the fire of his own rage and fashioned him into an intriguing instrument of the first power. He was listening intently now to the soft, rapid speech of the gentleman in the major's uniform.

"Of course, rumours had reached the Prince of this policy of devastation," he was saying, "but his Highness has been disposed to treat these rumours lightly, unable to see, as indeed are we all, what useful purpose such a policy could finally serve. He does not underrate the talents of milord Wellington as a commander. He does not imagine that he would pursue such operations out of pure wantonness; yet if such operations are indeed being pursued, what can they be but wanton? A moment, Count," he stayed Samoval, who was about to interrupt. His mind and manner were authoritative. "We know most positively from the Emperor's London agents that the war is unpopular in England; we know that public opinion is being prepared for a British retreat, for the driving of the British into the sea, as must inevitably happen once Monsieur le Prince decides to launch his bolt. Here in the Tagus the British fleet lies ready to embark the troops, and the British Cabinet itself" (he spoke more slowly and emphatically) "expects that embarkation to take place at latest in September, which is just about the time that the French offensive should be at its height and the French troops under the very walls of Lisbon. I admit that by this policy of devastation if, indeed, it be true - added to a stubborn contesting of every foot of ground, the French advance may be retarded. But the process will be costly to Britain in lives and money."

"And more costly still to Portugal," croaked the Marquis of Minas.

"And, as you, say, Monsieur le Marquis, more costly still to Portugal. Let me for a moment show you another side of the picture. The French administration, so sane, so cherishing, animated purely by ideas of progress, enforcing wise and beneficial laws, making ever for the prosperity and well-being of conquered nations, knows how to render itself popular wherever it is established. This Portugal knows already - or at least some part of it. There was the administration of Soult in Oporto, so entirely satisfactory to the people that it was no inconsiderable party was prepared, subject to the Emperor's consent, to offer him the crown and settle down peacefully under his rule. There was the administration of Junot in Lisbon. I ask you: when was Lisbon better governed?

"Contrast, for a moment, with these the present British administration - for it amounts to an administration. Consider the burning grievances that must be left behind by this policy of laying the country waste, of pauperising a million people of all degrees, driving them homeless from the lands on which they were born, after compelling them to lend a hand in the destruction of all that their labour has built up through long years. If any policy could better serve the purposes of France, I know it not. The people from here to Beira should be ready to receive the French with open arms, and to welcome their deliverance from this most costly and bitter British protection.

"Do you, Messieurs, detect a flaw in these arguments?"

Both shook their heads.

"Bien!" said the major of Portuguese Cacadores. "Then we reach one or two only possible conclusions: either these rumours of a policy of devastation which have reached the Prince of Esslingen are as utterly false as he believes them to be, or - "

"To my cost I know them to be true, as I have already told you," Samoval interrupted bitterly.

"Or," the major persisted, raising a hand to restrain the Count, "or there is something further that has not been yet discovered - a mystery the enucleation of which will shed light upon all the rest. Since you assure me, Monsieur le Comte, that milord Wellington's policy is beyond doubt, as reported to Monsieur, le Marechal, it but remains to address ourselves to the discovery of the mystery underlying it. What conclusions have you reached? You, Monsieur de Samoval, have had exceptional opportunities of observation, I understand."

"I am afraid my opportunities have been none so exceptional as you suppose," replied Samoval, with a dubious shake of his sleek, dark head. "At one tine I founded great hopes in Lady O'Moy. But Lady O'Moy is a fool, and does not enjoy her husband's confidence in official matters. What she knows I know. Unfortunately it does not amount to very much. One conclusion, however, I have reached: Wellington is preparing in Portugal a snare for Massena's army."

"A snare? Hum!" The major pursed his full lips into a smile of scorn. "There cannot be a trap with two exits, my friend. Massena enters Portugal at Almeida and marches to Lisbon and the open sea. He may be inconvenienced or hampered in his march; but its goal is certain. Where, then, can lie the snare? Your theory presupposes an impassable barrier to arrest the French when they are deep in the country and an overwhelming force to cut off their retreat when that barrier is reached. The overwhelming force does not exist and cannot be manufactured; as for the barrier, no barrier that it lies within human power to construct lies beyond French power to over-stride."

"I should not make too sure of that," Samoval warned him. "And you have overlooked something."

The major glanced at the Count sharply and without satisfaction. He accounted himself - trained as he had been under the very eye of the great Emperor - of some force in strategy and tactics, a player too well versed in the game to overlook the possible moves of an opponent.

"Ha!" he said, with the ghost of a sneer. "Far instance, Monsieur le Comte?"

"The overwhelming force exists," said Samoval.

"Where is it then? Whence has it been created? If you refer to the united British and Portuguese troops, you will be good enough to bear in mind that they will be retreating before the Prince. They cannot at once be before and behind him."

The man's cool assurance and cooler contempt of Samoval's views stung the Count into some sharpness

"Are you seeking information, sir, or are you bestowing it?" he inquired.

"Ah! Your pardon, Monsieur le Comte. I inquire of course. I put forward arguments to anticipate conditions that may possibly be erroneous."

Samoval waived the point. "There is another force besides the British and Portuguese troops that you have left out of your calculations."

"And that?" The major was still faintly incredulous.

"You should remember what Wellington obviously remembers: that a French army depends for its sustenance upon the country it is invading. That is why Wellington is stripping the French line of penetration as bare of sustenance as this card-table. If we assume the existence of the barrier - an impassable line of fortifications encountered within many marches of the frontier - we may also assume that starvation will be the overwhelming force that will cut off the French retreat."

The other's keen eyes flickered. For a moment his face lost its assurance, and it was Samoval's turn to smile. But the major made a sharp recovery. He slowly shook his iron-grey head.

"You have no right to assume an impassable barrier. That is an inadmissible hypothesis. There is no such thing as a line of fortifications impassable to the French."

"You will pardon me, Major, but it is yourself have no right to your own assumptions. Again you overlook something. I will grant that technically what you say is true. No fortifications can be built that cannot be destroyed - given adequate power, with which it is yet to prove that Massena not knowing what may await him, will be equipped.

"But let us for a moment take so much for granted, and now consider this: fortifications are unquestionably building in the region of Torres Vedras, and Wellington guards the secret so jealously that not even the British - either here or in England - are aware of their nature. That is why the Cabinet in London takes for granted an embarkation in September. Wellington has not even taken his Government into his confidence. That is the sort of man he is. Now these fortifications have been building since last October. Best part of eight months have already gone in their construction. It may be another two or three months before the French army reaches them. I do not say that the French cannot pass them, given time. But how long will it take the French to pull down what it will have taken ten or eleven months to construct? And if they are unable to draw sustenance from a desolate, wasted country, what time will they have at their disposal? It will be with them a matter of life or death. Having come so far they must reach Lisbon or perish; and if the fortifications can delay them by a single month, then, granted that all Lord Wellington's other dispositions have been duly carried out, perish they must. It remains, Monsieur le Major, for you to determine whether, with all their energy, with all their genius and all their valour, the French can - in an ill-nourished condition - destroy in a few weeks the considered labour of nearly a year."

The major was aghast. He had changed colour, and through his eyes, wide and staring, his stupefaction glared forth at them.

Minas uttered a dry cough under cover of his hand, and screwed up his eyeglass to regard the major more attentively. "You do not appear to have considered all that," he said.

"But, my dear Marquis," was the half-indignant answer, "why was I not told all this to begin with? You represented yourself as but indifferently informed, Monsieur de Samoval. Whereas - "

"So I am, my dear Major, as far as information goes. If I did not use these arguments before, it was because it seemed to me an impertinence to offer what, after all, are no more than the conclusions of my own constructive and deductive reasoning to one so well versed in strategy as yourself."

The major was silenced for a moment. "I congratulate you, Count," he said. "Monsieur le Marechal shall have your views without delay. Tell me," he begged. "You say these fortifications lie in the region of Torres Vedras. Can you be more precise?"

"I think so. But again I warn you that I can tell you only what I infer. I judge they will run from the sea, somewhere near the mouth of the Zizandre, in a semicircle to the Tagus, somewhere to the south of Santarem. I know that they do not reach as far north as San, because the roads there are open, whereas all roads to the south, where I am assuming that the fortifications lie, are closed and closely guarded."

"Why do you suggest a semicircle?"

"Because that is the formation of the hills, and presumably the line of heights would be followed."

"Yes," the major approved slowly. "And the distance, then, would be some thirty or forty miles?"

"Fully."

The major's face relaxed its gravity. He even smiled. "You will agree, Count, that in a line of that extent a uniform strength is out of the question. It must perforce present many weak, many vulnerable, places."

"Oh, undoubtedly."

"Plans of these lines must be in existence."

"Again undoubtedly. Sir Terence O'Moy will have plans in his possession showing their projected extent. Colonel Fletcher, who is in charge of the construction, is in constant communication with the adjutant, himself an engineer; and - as I partly imagine, partly infer from odd phrases that I have overheard - especially entrusted by Lord Wellington with the supervision of the works."

"Two things, then, are necessary," said the major promptly. "The first is, that the devastation of the country should be retarded, and as far as possible hindered altogether."

"That," said Minas, "you may safely leave to myself and Souza's other friends, the northern noblemen who have no intention of becoming the victims of British disinclination to pitched battles."

"The second - and this is more difficult - is that we should obtain by hook or by crook a plan of the fortifications." And he looked directly at Samoval.

The Count nodded slowly, but his face expressed doubt.

"I am quite alive to the necessity. I always have been. But - "

"To a man of your resource and intelligence - an intelligence of which you have just given such veer signal proof - the matter should be possible." He paused a moment. Then: "If I understand you correctly, Monsieur de Samoval, your fortunes have suffered deeply, and you are almost ruined by this policy of Wellington's. You are offered the opportunity of making a magnificent recovery. The Emperor is the most generous paymaster in the world, and he is beyond measure impatient at the manner in which the campaign in the Peninsula is dragging on. He has spoken of it as an ulcer that is draining the Empire of its resources. For the man who could render him the service of disclosing the weak spot in this armour, the Achilles heel of the British, there would be a reward beyond all your possible dreams. Obtain the plans, then, and - "

He checked abruptly. The door had opened, and in a Venetian mirror facing him upon the wall the major caught the reflection of a British uniform, the stiff gold collar surmounted by a bronzed hawk face with which he was acquainted.

"I beg your pardon, gentlemen," said the officer in Portuguese, "I was looking for - "

His voice became indistinct, so that they never knew who it was that he had been seeking when he intruded upon their privacy. The door had closed again and the reflection had vanished from the mirror. But there were beads of perspiration on the major's brow.

"It is fortunate," he muttered breathlessly, "that my back was towards him. I would as soon meet the devil face to face. I didn't dream he was in Lisbon."

"Who is he?" asked Minas.

"Colonel Grant, the British Intelligence officer. Phew! Name of a Name! What an escape!" The major mopped his brow with a silk handkerchief. "Beware of him, Monsieur de Samoval."

He rose. He was obviously shaken by the meeting.

"If one of you will kindly make quite sure that he is not about I think that I had better go. If we should meet everything might be ruined." Then with a change of manner he stayed Samoval, who was already on his way to the door. "We understand each other, then?" he questioned them. "I have my papers, and at dawn I leave Lisbon. I shall report your conclusions to the Prince, and in anticipation I may already offer you the expression of his profoundest gratitude. Meanwhile, you know what is to do. Opposition to the policy, and the plans of the fortifications - above all the plans."

He shook hands with them, and having waited until Samoval assured him that the corridor outside was clear, he took his departure, and was soon afterwards driving home, congratulating himself upon his most fortunate escape from the hawk eye of Colquhoun Grant.

But when in the dead of that night he was awakened to find a British sergeant with a halbert and six redcoats with fixed bayonets surrounding his bed it occurred to him belatedly that what one man can see in a mirror is also visible to another, and that Marshal Massena, Prince of Esslingen, waiting for information beyond Ciudad Rodrigo, would never enjoy the advantages of a report of Count Samoval's masterly constructive and deductive reasoning.

Chapter 9 THE GENERAL ORDER

Sir Terence sat alone in his spacious, severely furnished private room in the official quarters at Monsanto. On the broad carved writing-table before him there was a mass of documents relating to the clothing and accoutrement of the forces, to leaves of absence, to staff appointments; there were returns from the various divisions of the sick and wounded in hospital, from which a complete list was to be prepared for the Secretary of State for War at home; there were plans of the lines at Torres Vedras just .received, indicating the progress of the works at various points; and there were documents and communications of all kinds concerned with the adjutant-general's multifarious and arduous duties, including an urgent letter from Colonel Fletcher suggesting that the Commander-in-Chief should take an early opportunity of inspecting in person the inner lines of fortification.

Sir Terence, however, sat back in his chair, his work neglected, his eyes dreamily gazing through the open window, but seeing nothing of the sun-drenched landscape beyond, a heavy frown darkening his bronzed and rugged face. His mind was very far from his official duties and the mass of reminders before him - this Augean stable of arrears. He was lost in thought of his wife and Tremayne.

Five days had elapsed since the ball at Count Redondo's, where Sir Terence had surprised the pair together in the garden and his suspicions had been fired by the compromising attitude in which he had discovered them. Tremayne's frank, easy bearing, so unassociable with guilt, had, as we know, gone far, to reassure him, and had even shamed him, so that he had trampled his suspicions underfoot. But other things had happened since to revive his bitter doubts. Daily, constantly, had he been coming upon Tremayne and Lady O'Moy alone together in intimate, confidential talk which was ever silenced on his approach. The two had taken to wandering by themselves in the gardens at all hours, a thing that had never been so before, and O'Moy detected, or imagined that he detected, a closer intimacy between them, a greater warmth towards the captain on the part of her ladyship.

Thus matters had reached a pass in which peace of mind was impossible to him. It was not merely what he saw, it was his knowledge of what was; it was his ever-present consciousness of his own age and his wife's youth; it was the memory of his ante-nuptial jealousy of Tremayne which had been awakened by the gossip of those days - a gossip that pronounced Tremayne Una Butler's poor suitor, too poor either to declare himself or to be accepted if he did. The old wound which that gossip had dealt him then was reopened now. He thought of Tremayne's manifest concern for Una; he remembered how in that very room some six weeks ago, when Butler's escapade had first been heard of, it was from avowed concern for Una that Tremayne had urged him to befriend and rescue his rascally brother-in-law. He remembered, too, with increasing bitterness that it was Una herself had induced him to appoint Tremayne to his staff.

There were moments when the conviction of Tremayne's honesty, the thought of Tremayne's unswerving friendship for himself, would surge up to combat and abate the fires of his devastating jealousy.

But evidence would kindle those fires anew until they flamed up to scorch his soul with shame and anger. He had been a fool in that he had married a woman of half his years; a fool in that he had suffered her former lover to be thrown into close association with her.

Thus he assured himself. But he would abide by his folly, and so must she. And he would see to it that whatever fruits that folly yielded, dishonour should not be one of them. Through all his darkening rage there beat the light of reason. To avert, he bethought him, was better than to avenge. Nor were such stains to be wiped out by vengeance. A cuckold remains a cuckold though he take the life of the man who has reduced him to that ignominy.

Tremayne must go before the evil transcended reparation. Let him return to his regiment and do his work of sapping and mining elsewhere than in O'Moy's household.

Eased by that resolve he rose, a tall, martial figure, youth and energy in every line of it for all his six and forty years. Awhile he paced the room in thought. Then, suddenly, with hands clenched behind his back, he checked by the window, checked on a horrible question that had flashed upon his tortured mind. What if already the evil should be irreparable? What proof had he that it was not so?

The door opened, and Tremayne himself came in quickly.

"Here's the very devil to pay, sir," he announced, with that odd mixture of familiarity towards his friend and deference to his chief.

O'Moy looked at him in silence with smouldering, questioning eyes, thinking of anything but the trouble which the captain's air and manner heralded.

"Captain Stanhope has just arrived from headquarters with messages for you. A terrible thing has happened, sir. The dispatches from home by the Thunderbolt which we forwarded from here three weeks ago reached Lord Wellington only the day before yesterday."

Sir Terence became instantly alert.

"Garfield, who carried them, came into collision at Penalva with an officer of Anson's Brigade. There was a meeting, and Garfield was shot through the lung. He lay between life and death for a fortnight, with the result that the dispatches were delayed until he recovered sufficiently to remember them and to have them forwarded by other hands. But you had better see Stanhope himself."

The aide-de-camp came in. He was splashed from head to foot in witness of the fury with which he had ridden, his hair was caked with dust and his face haggard. But he carried himself with soldierly uprightness, and his speech was brisk. He repeated what Tremayne had already stated, with some few additional details.

"This wretched fellow sent Lord Wellington a letter dictated from his bed, in which he swore that the duel was forced upon him, and that his honour allowed him no alternative. I don't think any feature of the case has so deeply angered Lord Wellington as this stupid plea. He mentioned that when Sir John Moore was at Herrerias, in the course of his retreat upon Corunna, he sent forward instructions for the leading division to halt at Lugo, where he designed to deliver battle if the enemy would accept it. That dispatch was carried to Sir David Baird by one of Sir John's aides, but Sir David forwarded it by the hand of a trooper who got drunk and lost it. That, says Lord Wellington, is the only parallel, so far as he is aware, of the present case, with this difference, that whilst a common trooper might so far fail to appreciate the importance of his mission, no such lack of appreciation can excuse Captain Garfield."

"I am glad of that," said Sir Terence, who had been bristling. "For a moment I imagined that it was to be implied I had been as indiscreet in my choice of a messenger as Sir David Baird."

"No, no, Sir Terence. I merely repeated Lord Wellington's words that you may realise how deeply angered he is. If Garfield recovers from his wound he will be tried by court-martial. He is under open arrest meanwhile, as is his opponent in the duel - a Major Sykes of the 23rd Dragoons. That they will both be broke is beyond doubt. But that is not all. This affair, which might have had such grave consequences, coming so soon upon the heels of Major Berkeley's business, has driven Lord Wellington to a step regarding which this letter will instruct you."

Sir Terence broke the seal. The letter, penned by a secretary, but bearing Wellington's own signature, ran as follows:

"The bearer, Captain Stanhope, will inform you of the particulars of this disgraceful business of Captain Garfield's. The affair following so soon upon that of Major Berkeley has determined me to make it clearly understood to the officers in his Majesty's service that they have been sent to the Peninsula to fight the French and not each other or members of the civilian population. While this campaign continues, and as long as I am in charge of it, I am determined not to suffer upon any plea whatever the abominable practice of duelling among those under my command. I desire you to publish this immediately in general orders, enjoining upon officers of all ranks without exception the necessity to postpone the settlement of private quarrels at least until the close of this campaign. And to add force to this injunction you will make it known that any infringement of this order will be considered as a capital offence; that any officer hereafter either sending or accepting a challenge will, if found guilty by a general court-martial, be immediately shot."

Sir Terence nodded slowly.

"Very well," he said. "The measure is most wise, although I doubt if it will be popular. But, then, unpopularity is the fate of wise measures. I am glad the matter has not ended more seriously. The dispatches in question, so far as I can recollect, were not of great urgency."

"There is something more," said Captain Stanhope. "The dispatches bore signs of having been tampered with."

"Tampered with?" It was a question from Tremayne, charged with incredulity. "But who would have tampered with them?"

"There were signs, that is all. Garfield was taken to the house of the parish priest, where he lay lost until he recovered sufficiently to realise his position for himself. No doubt you will have a schedule of the contents of the dispatch, Sir Terence?"

"Certainly. It is in your possession, I think, Tremayne."

Tremayne turned to his desk, and a brief search in one of its well-ordered drawers brought to light an oblong strip of paper folded and endorsed. He unfolded and spread it on Sir Terence's table, whilst Captain Stanhope, producing a note with which he came equipped, stooped to check off the items. Suddenly he stopped, frowned, and finally placed his finger under one of the lines of Tremayne's schedule, carefully studying his own note for a moment.

"Ha!" he said quietly at last. "What's this?" And he read: "'Note from Lord Liverpool of reinforcements to be embarked for Lisbon in June or July.'" He looked at the adjutant and the adjutant's secretary. "That would appear to be the most important document of all - indeed the only document of any vital importance. And it was not included in the dispatch as it reached Lord Wellington."

The three looked gravely at one another in silence.

"Have you a copy of the note, sir?" inquired the aide-de-camp.

"Not a copy - but a summary of its contents, the figures it contained, are pencilled there on the margin," Tremayne answered.

"Allow me, sir," said Stanhope, and taking up a quill from the adjutant's table he rapidly copied the figures. "Lord Wellington must have this memorandum as soon as possible. The rest, Sir Terence, is of course a matter for yourself. You will know what to do. Meanwhile I shall report to his lordship what has occurred. I had best set out at once."

"If you will rest for an hour, and give my wife the pleasure of your company at luncheon, I shall have a letter ready for Lord Wellington," replied Sir Terence. "Perhaps you'll see to it, Tremayne," he added, without waiting for Captain Stanhope's answer to an invitation which amounted to a command.

Thus Stanhope was led away, and Sir Terence, all other matters forgotten for the moment, sat down to write his letter.

Later in the day, after Captain Stanhope had taken his departure, the duty fell to Tremayne of framing the general order and seeing to the dispatch of a copy to each division.

"I wonder," he said to Sir Terence, "who will be the first to break it?"

"Why, the fool who's most anxious to be broke himself," answered Sir Terence.

There appeared to be reservations about it in Tremayne's mind.

"It's a devilish stringent regulation," he criticised.

"But very salutary and very necessary."

"Oh, quite." Tremayne's agreement was unhesitating. "But I shouldn't care to feel the restraint of it, and I thank heaven I have no enemy thirsting for my blood."

Sir Terence's brow darkened. His face was turned away from his secretary. "How can a man be confident of that?" he wondered.

"Oh, a clean conscience, I suppose," laughed Tremayne, and he gave his attention to his papers.

Frankness, honesty and light-heartedness rang so clear in the words that they sowed in Sir Terence's mind fresh doubts of the galling suspicion he had been harbouring.

"Do you boast a clean conscience, eh, Ned?" he asked, not without a lurking shame at this deliberate sly searching of the other's mind. Yet he strained his ears for the answer.

"Almost clean," said Tremayne. "Temptation doesn't stain when it's resisted, does it?"

Sir Terence trembled. But he controlled himself.

"Nay, now, that's a question for the casuists. They right answer you that it depends upon the temptation." And he asked point-blank: "What's tempting you?"

Tremayne was in a mood for confidences, and Sir Terence was his friend. But he hesitated. His answer to the question was an irrelevance.

"It's just hell to be poor, O'Moy," he said.

The adjutant turned to stare at him. Tremayne was sitting with his head resting on one hand, the fingers thrusting through the crisp fair hair, and there was gloom in his clear-cut face, a dullness in the usually keen grey eyes.

"Is there anything on your mind?" quoth Sir Terence.

"Temptation," was the answer. "It's an unpleasant thing to struggle against."

"But you spoke of poverty?"

"To be sure. If I weren't poor I could put my fortunes to the test, and make an end of the matter one way or the other."

There was a pause. "Sure I hope I am the last man to force a confidence, Ned," said O'Moy. "But you certainly seem as if it would do you good to confide."

Tremayne shook himself mentally. "I think we had better deal with the matter of this dispatch that was tampered with at Penalva."

"So we will, to be sure. But it can wait a minute." Sir Terence pushed back his chair, and rose. He crossed slowly to his secretary's side. "What's on your mind, Ned?" he asked with abrupt solicitude, and Ned could not suspect that it was the matter on Sir Terence's own mind that was urging him - but urging him hopefully.

Captain Tremayne looked up with a rueful smile. "I thought you boasted that you never forced a confidence." And then he looked away. "Sylvia Armytage tells me that she is thinking of returning to England,"

For a moment the words seemed to Sir Terence a fresh irrelevance; another attempt to change the subject. Then quite suddenly a light broke upon his mind, shedding a relief so great and joyous that he sought to check it almost in fear.

"It is more than she has told me," he answered steadily. "But then, no doubt, you enjoy her confidence."

Tremayne flashed him a wry glance and looked away again.

"Alas!" he said, and fetched a sigh.

"And is Sylvia the temptation, Ned?"

Tremayne was silent for a while, little dreaming how Sir Terence hung upon his answer, how impatiently he awaited it.

"Of course," he said at last. "Isn't it obvious to any one?" And he grew rhapsodical: "How can a man be daily in her company without succumbing to her loveliness, to her matchless grace of body and of mind, without perceiving that she is incomparable, peerless, as much above other women as an angel perhaps might be above herself?"

Before his glum solemnity, and before something else that Tremayne could not suspect, Sir Terence exploded into laughter. Of the immense and joyous relief in it his secretary caught no hint; all he heard was its sheer amusement, and this galled and shamed him. For no man cares to be laughed at for such feelings as Tremayne had been led into betraying.

"You think it something to laugh at?" he said tartly.

"Laugh, is it?" spluttered Sir Terence. "God grant I don't burst a blood-vessel."

Tremayne reddened. "When you've indulged your humour, sir," he said stiffly, "perhaps you'll consider the matter of this dispatch."

But Sir Terence laughed more uproariously than ever. He came to stand beside Tremayne, and slapped him heartily on the shoulder.

"Ye'll kill me, Ned!" he protested. "For God's sake, not so glum. It's that makes ye ridiculous."

"I am sorry you find me ridiculous."

"Nay, then, it's glad ye ought to be. By my soul, if Sylvia tempts you, man, why the devil don't ye just succumb and have done with it? She's handsome enough and well set up with her air of an Amazon, and she rides uncommon straight, begad! Indeed it's a broth of a girl she is in the hunting-field, the ballroom, or at the breakfast-table, although riper acquaintance may discover her not to be quite all that you imagine her at present. Let your temptation lead you then, entirely, and good luck to you, my boy."

"Didn't I tell you, O'Moy," answered the captain, mollified a little by the sympathy and good feeling peeping through the adjutant's boisterousness, "that poverty is just hell. It's my poverty that's in the way."

"And is that all? Then it's thankful you should be that Sylvia Armytage has got enough for two."

"That's just it."

"Just what?"

"The obstacle. I could marry a poor woman. But Sylvia - "

"Have you spoken to her?"

Tremayne was indignant. "How do you suppose I could?"

"It'll not have occurred to you that the lady may have feelings which having aroused you ought to be considering?"

A wry smile and a shake of the head was Tremayne only answer; and then Carruthers came in fresh from Lisbon, where he had been upon business connected with the commissariat, and to Tremayne's relief the subject was perforce abandoned.

Yet he marvelled several times that day that the hilarity he should have awakened in Sir Terence continued to cling to the adjutant, and that despite the many vexatious matters claiming attention he should preserve an irrepressible and almost boyish gaiety.

Meanwhile, however, the coming of Carruthers had brought the adjutant a moment's seriousness, and he reverted to the business of Captain Garfield. When he had mentioned the missing note, Carruthers very properly became grave. He was a short, stiffly built man with a round, good-humoured, rather florid face.

"The matter must be probed at once, sir," he ventured. "We know that we move in a tangle of intrigues and espionage. But such a thing as this has never happened before. Have you anything to go upon?"

"Captain Stanhope gave us nothing," said the adjutant.

"It would be best perhaps to get Grant to look into it," said Tremayne.

"If he is still in Lisbon," said Sir Terence.

"I passed him in the street an hour ago," replied Carruthers.

"Then by all means let a note be sent to him asking him if he will step up to Monsanto as soon as he conveniently can. You might see to it, Tremayne."