Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  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 II. 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 Coun
cil 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 as his humility, O’Moy had adopted her suggestion, and thereafter — in the past-three mon
ths, 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.”