He stopped, and from his fine height looked down upon her with a curious smile. Slowly he disengaged his arm from the clasp of her own. “I am afraid I must,” he answered coldly. “I have a great deal to do, and I am short of a secretary. When this inquiry is over I shall have more time to myself, perhaps.” There was something so repellent in his voice, in his manner of uttering those last words, that she stood rebuffed and watched him vanish into the building.
Then she stamped her foot and her pretty mouth trembled.
“Oaf!” she said aloud.
CHAPTER XVI. THE EVIDENCE
The board of officers convened by Marshal Beresford to form the court that was to try Captain Tremayne, was presided over by General Sir Harry Stapleton, who was in command of the British troops quartered in Lisbon. It included, amongst others, the adjutant-general, Sir Terence O’Moy; Colonel Fletcher of the Engineers, who had come in haste from Torres Vedras, having first desired to be included in the board chiefly on account of his friendship for Tremayne; and Major Carruthers. The judge-advocate’s task of conducting the case against the prisoner was deputed to the quartermaster of Tremayne’s own regiment, Major Swan.
The court sat in a long, cheerless hall, once the refectory of the Franciscans, who had been the first tenants of Monsanto. It was stone-flagged, the windows set at a height of some ten feet from the ground, the bare, whitewashed walls hung with very wooden portraits of long-departed kings and princes of Portugal who had been benefactors of the order.
The court occupied the abbot’s table, which was set on a shallow dais at the end of the room—a table of stone with a covering of oak, over which a green cloth had been spread; the officers—twelve in number, besides the president—sat with their backs to the wall, immediately under the inevitable picture of the Last Supper.
The court being sworn, Captain Tremayne was brought in by the provost-marshal’s guard and given a stool placed immediately before and a few paces from the table. Perfectly calm and imperturbable, he saluted the court, and sat down, his guards remaining some paces behind him.
He had declined all offers of a friend to represent him, on the grounds that the court could not possibly afford him a case to answer.