This speech drew a murmur of assent from the council, but the viceroy answered with his usual treacherous suavity.
“There is nothing to fear from my countrymen on that score, Messires.”
“No, by the Mass!” cried half a dozen voices, with some sardonic laughter; and the count turned to the commandant again, biting his lip with suppressed rage.
“Do as you please, Senhor de Chaste,” he said, with as much calmness as he could assume. “You are all masters here, I perceive, but I warn you fairly beforehand, that the walls of Angra are no better than a nut-shell, and the cannon of the marquis will bring them down upon your hot heads in less than twelve hours. Moreover, the place can contain not more than two hundred soldiers, as Heaven is my witness.”
Which was as great a fib as ever knight told, but quite as excusable as many, you ladies, are in the habit of telling by proxy at all hours of the day and at your front doors. I cannot see, for my part, how the Count de Torrevedros could possibly have acted otherwise under the circumstances, which approached as nearly as any military predicament may a civil, the not at home of mesdames out of toilette. In short, the count had that same night sent the keys of Angra by a trusty messenger to the Marquis of Santa Cruz, with his complimentary offer of services; an errand which the astute ambassador acquitted himself of to admiration, by leaving out the count and assuming the credit: and at the same moment the viceroy was giving his disinterested advice, no less a personage than Don Augustino Inique was marching in with five hundred men through the wide-open gates of the fortress.
This the commandant learned by daybreak the next morning, at which early hour he was pushing for the mountains in accordance with the advice of Torrevedros, who had gone ahead, as people say taking French leave. At the village of Nostre Dame Dager de Loup, they heard further that the governor had put off in a boat from the coast; and the French army, debarred from the sea on one side and Angra on the other, and now openly deserted by the Portuguese, occupied the little town and began immediately to throw up intrenchments before the arrival of the Spaniards.
“We must not think longer how best to live, but most honorably to die,” De Chaste answered a few of his young officers who grumbled at the want of necessary stores. A fine, heroic answer, which stopped the mouths of those high-spirited gentlemen, but was less efficient in the case of the soldiery. It must be confessed the estimable pair Hilo and the serjeant were not a little responsible for this discontent; hard work agreed with neither of their constitutions, and before nightfall they had found opportunity to exchange their views on the subject.
“I’d as lief be a galley-slave and be done with it,” the serjeant muttered to Hilo, who was helping him lift a load of sand out of the ditch.
“Captain,” returned the other, “you speak my mind; and things are getting in such a state here the sooner we draw our necks out of the noose the better.”
“Good,” replied Carlo, “but how is that to be done, look you? The marquis will hang us up for spies if we go over to them, and the count they say has gone off in the last boat on this coast.”