“God bless you!” mutters Guy. [[107]]
And though they speak it not, as their hands clasp they mean friendship and brotherhood.
A few minutes after Chester and De Busaco are at the Citadel, where, passing over the drawbridge and through the great gateway, Guy learns that the word of the night has been changed and is now “San Sebastian,” countersign “Corpus Christi.”
From here they pass through the enceinte right by the statue of Alva, De Busaco remarking parenthetically: “They’ve got his arm up to-day. They’ll be all ready to show him off next week. Caramba! that means the trouble of a dress parade. And no pay day yet. Some day we may dig out our arrears from this hollow pedestal. Alva is cunning, but his troops have their eyes open also!”
Going across this great fortification, they come out at the little sally-port in the moat where Guy had landed the night before. Here they have no difficulty of exit. The same galley that the Englishman brought up is waiting for them; the rowers in place with a new crew, to whom De Busaco introduces him as the officer who will take charge of the boat to Sandvliet; then goes on his way with a hasty “Adios, Señor!” for the little ensign is behind in his appointment with some young lady of the city.
Just as the boat is casting off, for Guy does not waste much time about this matter, a waiting maid, one of the Moorish handmaidens of the night before, comes running over the little drawbridge crying: “Stay!—one moment—stay!”
Then, as Guy stands up in the barge, she whispers to him, holding out a belt of heavy leather: “Buckle this round your waist, Señor Capitan, my mistress charges me to tell you to be careful of it. It is the one you left in the boat so carelessly last night.”
“Oh—ah, yes,” says the Englishman, to whom lies this day have become easy. “I was looking for it. I didn’t know where I’d left it,” and buckling it about him, wonders what the deuce is in it.
“Egad, it’s not a life preserver,” he thinks. “It would send me to the bottom like a shot.”
Anyway, whatever it is, he is enraptured to get it from the hands of Hermoine de Alva. [[108]]