"Let me kill him! monseigneur! Let me kill him!" cried he. "Don't you see he moves? look, look!"
And, with straining eyes, he struggled forward to make quite sure that his victory wanted nothing of completion, by adding another blow to those he had already given.
"He will never move again, Achilles," replied I; "spare your blows, for you bestow them on a dead man, and well has he merited his fate----"
"Had we not better tie his hands, at least?" cried the little player. "He lies still enough too. Only think of my having killed a man--I shall be a brave man for all the rest of my life. But if I had not killed him, you would have been lying there as still as he is."
I expressed my gratitude as fully as I could, but objected to the proposal of tying a dead man's hands. No doubt, indeed, could remain of his being no longer in a state to endanger any one; for having no helmet on at the time he entered, the very first blow of the musketoon must have nearly stunned him, and several of the after ones had driven in his skull in various places. It is probable, that, having been kept in confinement by the order of the viceroy, he had been liberated at the moment the danger became pressing, and that, instead of presenting himself where he might do his duty, his first care had been to seek the means of gratifying his revenge, no doubt attributing to me the punishment he had received. Such an event as my death, in the confusion and danger of the circumstances, he most probably imagined, would pass unnoticed; and no one, at all events, could prove that it had been committed by his hands. Whether his comrade, who had been placed as sentinel at the door where we were confined, had been removed for the more active defence of the place, or whether he had connived at the entrance of the assassin, I know not; but at all events, if he was there, he must have been an accomplice, and consequently would not have betrayed his fellow.
Such, however, was a strange fate for a daring and ferocious man--to fall by the hands of one of the meekest cowards that ever crept quietly through existence! and yet I have often remarked that bad actions, the most boldly undertaken, and the best designed, often--nay, most frequently--fall back upon the head of their projectors, repelled from their intended course by something petty, unexpected, or despised.
CHAPTER XXV.
While this was taking place within, the tumult without had increased a thousand-fold; and the din of cries, and screams, and blows, and groans, mingled in one wild shriek of human passion, hellish, as if they rose from Phlegethon. But to my surprise, the roar of the cannon no longer drowned the rest, and looking again from the window, I saw all the outward defences in the hands of the populace. The fortifications of the arsenal had only been completed, so far as regarded the mere external works; but even had they been as perfect as human ingenuity could have devised, the small number of soldiers which were now within the gates would never have sufficed to defend so great a space from a multitude like that of the insurgents. At the moment that I returned to my loophole, the peasantry were pouring on every side into the inner court; and the Viceroy, with not more than a hundred Castilians, was endeavouring in vain to repel them. If ever what are commonly called prodigies of valour were really wrought, that unhappy nobleman certainly did perform them, fighting in the very front, and making good even the open court of the arsenal against the immense body of populace which attacked it, for nearly a quarter of an hour.
At length, mere fatigue from such unwonted exertions seemed to overcome him, and, in making a blow at one of the peasants, he fell upon his knees. A dozen hands were raised to despatch him; but at the sight of his danger the Castilians rallied, and closing in, saved him from the fury of the people; while his faithful negro, catching him in his arms, bore him into the body of the building.
Though certainly but ill-disposed towards the soldiery, there was something in the chivalrous valour which the viceroy had displayed in these last scenes, combined with the lenity he had shown to myself when brought before him, which created an interest in my bosom that I will own greatly divided my wishes for the success of the oppressed Catalonians. The idea, too, entered my mind, that by exerting my influence with Garcias, whom I still saw in the front of the insurgents, I might obtain for the viceroy some terms of capitulation.