Glancing my eyes in the direction whence those words came, they fell upon a man of rude though picturesque appearance, whose voice I thought it was; a fellow bearded and bronzed, with, in his ears, great rings of gold; a man whom, I scarce know why, I instantly deemed a sailor. Perhaps, one of the many who had fled from the galleons or the French ships of war.
"I am about to ask him that!" exclaimed Morales, though he cast an angry glance toward the crowd. "It is his answer to that which I require."
Then all eyes were instantly directed toward Eaton, one pair flaming like burning coals from beneath their bushy brows--the eyes of Gramont.
Looking myself at him, noticing the ashy colour of his face as he heard that unknown voice uprise amidst the people gathered in the court--as also he heard in reply the words of Morales--noticing, too, the quivering of his white lips and the look as of a hunted rat that came into his eyes--I found myself wondering if he had not thought of how his denunciation of the man by my side was his own accusation also.
"I ask you," went on Morales, "how you know all these things. None but an eye-witness, a participator, could have told as much!"
Upon that muttering and gesticulating crowd, upon the shaggy, black-bearded Asturians and Biscayans--some of them rude mountaineers from the Gaviara and some even ruder sailors from the wild and tempest-beaten shores of Galicia--upon the swarthy Spanish women with knives in their girdles and babes at their bare breasts, there fell a hush as all listened for his answer--a hush, broken only by his own halting attempt to find an answer that should be believed--gain credence not only with the judges, but the people.
"I have--heard--it said--heard it told," he whispered, in quavering tones. "'Twas common talk in all the Indies--his name hated--dreaded. Used as a means to fright the timid--to----"
He paused. For, like a storm that howls across the seas, sweeping all before it in its course, another voice, a deeper, fuller, more sonorous one, swept through that court and drowned his; the voice of the lost man by my side.
"Hear me, you judges," he cried, confronting all--standing there with his manacled hands in front of him, yet his form erect, his glance contemptuous, his eyes fire. "Hear me. Let me tell all. I have the right--the last on earth granted to one such as I--for one who sees and reads his doom in all your faces. Give me your leave to speak."
"Speak!" the Bishop murmured, his tones almost inaudible. "Speak--yet hope nothing."