Louis turned to her voice, and put her hand to his lips. The Marquis and Ferdinand embraced him. Marcella had raised herself from her knees, and held by the rails of the altar. Louis did not see her face, for the veil yet hung before it; but the other hand that was laid upon her breast trembled; and he thought he saw he was not less in her thoughts, than in those of her parents. He wished, yet hesitated to approach her. Santa Cruz observed the direction of his eyes, and his doubting movement, but he did not speak. Louis's heart failed him; and blessing her in its inward recesses, he turned away, and followed the abbot out of the chapel.
Having received his credentials from the superior at Ceuta, to the fraternity of the same order at Tetuan, who resided there for the ransom of Christian slaves; Louis took his station in the open boat, that was to convey him, through the dangers of the counter-current at that season of the year, to the Moorish strong hold of the province of Hadad.
CHAP. XV.
The river of Tetuan meets the sea, little more than a league from the town. All was quiet on its banks; and the boat which conveyed Louis to the Christian convent on the city walls, threw out its grappling irons under the deep excavation of a rock, at the base of an old tower.
Through a kind of lantern staircase in the hollow of the wall, Louis was conducted to an iron grating. The man who had been his pilot in this midnight voyage, pulled a bell which hung within the grating; and crossing himself at the same instant, muttered the Moorish benedicite, "Sta fer Lah!" and hastened to his comrades in the boat. Louis had been warned by the brethren at Ceuta, not to ask his navigators any question; and when he witnessed this monstrous association of Mussulmen, with Christian devotion, he did not doubt that he had been rowed to Tetuan by characters of as little principle, as those which at first brought him from Spain to the Ottoman shore.
Before any person answered to the pull of the bell, which had ceased ringing, he heard the boat splashing away with its crew from under the caverned passage; and shortly after, the dead silence assured him he was left quite alone.
The mariner had given him a dark lantern, which shewed him the gloom of his situation. A short flight of steps; a fathomless abyss of waters at his feet. Before him a strong grated door, through which no human nerve could force an entrance; and immediately beyond it, a rough dark wall, which did not appear more than a foot distant from its impassable portcullis.
Louis had just raised his arm to the bell, to make it sound a second time, when a figure appeared at the grate with the suddenness of an apparition. Without a word being uttered on either side, the massy bars were drawn; and Louis found himself following this silent conductor, through a long narrow stone passage, to another iron door. The mute friar made its bolts yield before him; and the chamber, to which its porch was a vestibule, presented to the eye of de Montemar, the assembled body of the holy brotherhood at Tetuan.