“A friend—a friend!” answered Leonard in Portuguese; “one who is a stranger and would pay his respects to your leader, Dom Antonio Pereira, with a view to business.”
“What is your name?” asked the guard suspiciously.
“Pierre is my name. Dog is the name of the dwarf my servant, and as for the old woman, you can call her anything you like.”
“The password,” said the sentry; “none come in here without the word.”
“The word—Ah! what did the Dom Xavier say it was in his letter? ‘Fiend!’ No, I have it, ‘Devil’ is the word.”
“Where do you hail from?”
“From Madagascar, where the goods you have to supply are in some demand just now. Come, let us in; we don’t want to sit here all night and miss the fun.”
The man began to unbar the door, and stopped, struck by a fresh doubt.
“You are not of our people,” he said; “you speak Portuguese like a cursed Englishman.”
“No, I should hope not; I am a ‘cursed Englishman,’ that is half—son of an English lord and a French creole, born in the Mauritius at your service, and let me ask you to be a little more civil, for cross-bred dogs are fierce.”