"Damme, by your foresight we shall yet baffle Crawford, De Saldos, Trevino and Co.!"
"Hush, hush! You are rash."
It is almost needless to describe how the young French officer, after being duly sworn by the judge advocate, corroborated in every particular the statement made in Quentin's declaration—statements of which he could have had no previous cognisance, save as an actor in the episodes referred to. He described how Quentin had saved his life from a deliberate attempt at assassination on the part of De Saldos, and became strongly excited on referring to the infamous massacre of the prisoners by Trevino. He asserted that the moidores were taken by himself from the holsters of Raoul, a dead corporal of his troop, who found them amid the plunder of Coimbra. He asserted, on his oath and honour as an officer and chevalier of the Legion of Honour, that the movement made by the troops of his father, collaterally with those of General Hope and the guerillas of Baltasar, was not consequent to any information given him by the prisoner, but had been resolved on long before, as a printed order of the emperor, which he had the honour to lay on the table, would amply testify!
As for Donna Isidora, he freely and laughingly acknowledged that he had carried her away from the villa, and that she was now Madame de Marbœuf, wife of his friend Jules de Marbœuf, colonel of the 24th, as the Padre Florez, who, ignorant of that auspicious event, had come to effect her release from the French camp, could now substantiate, as he was now without the court, and ready to appear.
The long, thin figure of the padre, wearing his flowing soutan and shovel hat, next appeared to corroborate all this, and also to state the sickly condition in which he handed over Quentin to the muleteers at the Villa de Maciera.
"Every link is thus supplied beyond a doubt!" exclaimed Colonel Grant.
Quentin was acquitted amid a burst of applause that found an echo in the hearty hurrah given by the King's Own Borderers in the palace square without.
"And now, monsieur," said Ribeaupierre, presenting Quentin with a valuable diamond ring, "accept this as a present from madame my mother, who drew it from her finger as I left the camp, with the request that you will wear it for her sake, and in memory of the day on which you saved my life from that barbarous Spaniard among the mountains of Herreruela."
Within an hour after rendering service so valuable, and indeed so priceless, and after having some luncheon with Askerne, Grant, Conyers, and other officers who composed the court, the gallant and generous Ribeaupierre had mounted and ridden from Alva de Tormes, attended by a strong escort, in front of which rode a Polish lancer, with a white handkerchief in token of truce streaming from the head of his lance; and so ended—like a dream to Quentin—this episode, this chivalric intervention, which was dictated by a noble spirit worthy of the knightly days of the Chevalier Bayard, or of Bertrand du Guesclin.