CHAPTER XXXV
THE EXECUTIONER OF SALAMANCA
But, indeed, the problem before Rollo was one difficult enough to cause him to postpone indefinitely all less immediate and pressing evils. As they lay hid among the reeds, and while Rollo endeavoured more completely to gain the good-will of the little Queen, they heard the bell of the Hermitage of San Ildefonso strike the hour sonorously.
Rollo could hardly believe his ears as the number lengthened itself out till he had counted twelve. He had supposed that it must be three or four in the morning at the least. But the night had worn slowly. Many things which take long to tell had happened in brief space, and, what to Rollo appeared worst of all, it would be yet some five hours till daylight.
As they crouched among the canes, the effect of his sudden discomfiture of the captors of the child Isabel became apparent. The whole palace was ringed with a sudden leaping fire of musketry. The angry fusillade was promptly answered from the balconies, and Rollo had the satisfaction of knowing, from the shouts and yells of pain and fury beneath, that not only were his folk on the alert, but that he had reason to be satisfied with the excellence of their marksmanship.
More than one rambling party of gipsies passed their hiding-place. But these for the most part searched in a perfunctory manner, their heads over their shoulders to listen to the progress of their comrades who were attacking the palace, and perhaps also no little afraid lest death should again leap out upon them from the darkness of the cane-brake. Rollo, immediately upon his return to the thicket, had recovered and recharged his pistols by touch, and presently, having made all ready, he caught up the little girl in his arms, urging her to be silent whatever happened, and to trust everything to him.
Isabel, who was of an affectionate and easy disposition, though ever quick to anger, put her arm readily about the young man's neck. He had a winsome and gracious manner with all children, which perhaps was the same quality that won him his way with women.
Rollo had an idea which had come to him with the chime of the Hermitage bell as it tolled the hour of midnight. There, if anywhere, he would find good men, interested in the welfare of the Princess, and with hearts large enough to remain calmly at the post of duty even in a deserted and plague-ruined town. For one of the chief glories of the Roman Church is this, that her clergy do not desert their people in the hour of any danger, however terrible. Nothing else, indeed, is thought of. As a military man would say, "It is the tradition of the service!"
Now if Rollo had been in his own Scottish land during the visitation of this first cholera, he would have had good grounds for hoping that he would find the ministers of his faith in the thick of the fight with death, undismayed, never weary. There were many, very many such—many, but very far from all. The difference was that here in ignorant Spain Rollo knew without deduction that of a certainty the monks and parish priests of the ancient creed would be faithful.
It might indeed in some cases be otherwise with some selfish and pampered Jesuits or the benefice-seeking rabble of clerics who hang about the purlieus of a court. A father-confessor or two might flee over-seas, an abbot go on timely pilgrimage to Rome, but here in San Ildefonso, Rollo knew that he would either find the priests and holy brothers of the Church manfully doing their noble work, or dead and in their sainted graves—in any case, again in military phrase, "all present or all accounted for!"