The Siege of Malta

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VCaptain Antonio might have come at a better speed had he been otherwise engaged than he was or had he heard any name but the one he did. It was but a few moments before that he had stood at the backs of two men who had not heard his approach, owing to the noise of the excavating at which their companions worked, and at which they should have been doing an equal part.

“But,” he overheard, “if it should be she for whom the proclamation is made——” The man’s voice ceased, as he became aware that his captain was not more than three paces away.

“Lonzo,” Captain Antonio asked, “of whom are you talking now?”

The man became silent, looking confused, and would have been urged by a sharper word, but his companion replied:

“It is that he saw a lady enter the Captain’s room, when the moon shone over the scarp.”

“Then,” Captain Antonio advised, “he should drink less.”

“He is not one,” his self-appointed advocate replied, for the man said nothing at all, “to drink more than he should.”

“To how many has this folly been told?”

“To no other but me, for I am his only friend, and he had mentioned it but a moment before.”

“Which was too soon for such talk. Lonzo, I say this to you, and to Pietri alike. There could be no lady enter the Captain’s room, for there is none here. I swear that by Our Lady Herself, which is not an oath on which I would be forsworn.” He added the names of certain Genoese saints which he was known to revere, feeling that what he did should be done well, and assuring himself that he swore truth, for who could call that slut by the name which God’s Mother does not despise?

“No,” he said, “no madonna is there. It was the shadows that lied of the passing clouds. . . . But I will give you counsel that you should heed.

“You are men who have been chosen by me, being changed from those who were first here, as you all are. You are well paid from the Order’s chest, and you have more beyond that, which Don Francisco supplies. You were chosen thus because there is little that can be said or done, whether in castle or town, of which the Turks do not hear by the next day, and Don Francisco was well resolved that no word should pass out from this place, for which the reason is known to you.

“Now if you should gossip in foolish ways, you would show that you are not worthy of such a trust. You might find yourselves in a worse place and taking a smaller pay. And if you should tell a tale that was false you might end, beyond that, where you would be sorry to be. For it is by such ways that men come to the lash or the prison cell, who are too good for such use.

“And even if you should tell one which is true (but which you need not have seen, had you looked aslant), which you could not do for this time, there being no substance in what you say, should you be the better for that?

“Let us suppose that you had come on traces of her for whom proclamation is made, as you were rashly saying you might have done. Well, it would be your duty to so report. I shall not tell you other than that. But would it be to your gain? I should say not. You would be a witness to be questioned apart. If you did not say all that they would think that you ought to know, or if there should be dispute, so that your tale should become suspect and yourself therefor, would not the thumb-screw be called to aid? He is a man with good eyes who can be blind when he should not see. It is such men who live long.”

The man, Pietri, who had seen the wraith in the night, and who had been silent till now, found some words to say when Antonio’s lecture was done.

“Captain,” he said, “I have eyes which see well in the light” (he could not deny that, for it was as a gunner that he drew pay), “yet it is well known that they are of little avail when the light is poor.”

“So I had supposed,” Captain Antonio replied, “from that which I heard you say.” And as he spoke there was one at his side with a tale that La Cerda was there, and seeking speech with Don Francisco on private affairs, and there was no name that Antonio, who desired trouble neither for others nor for himself, would have been less willing to hear.

“Well,” he said, “let him wait, while Don Francisco shall be informed. . . . Or it may be enough that I see him first, for it may be a matter too light to disturb Don Francisco’s rest.”

And having said that, he went in no haste (for he had some thinking to do), to where La Cerda waited at the near end of the trench.

He met a man whose patience was not reputed to last overlong, and was near its end, whom he greeted with the deference that his rank required, but without speaking the one word that La Cerda expected to hear.

“I have come myself,” he said, “being in command while Don Francisco is taking rest, and he having given me charge that he shall not be called unless there is reason of war.”

“The matter on which I came,” La Cerda replied, “is one on which I can speak only to him. . . . Do you say that he will sleep long?”

Captain Antonio would have liked to lie, but he was not sure that he would be thanked by him for whom it would have been done. “He is to be roused,” he said, “within half an hour of this time.”

“Then I will wait, in what comfort you have, making my time his.”

“My orders,” Captain Antonio replied, in some embarrassment, which was not usual to him, “are strict and exact, that none may enter beyond this point, except at my captain’s leave.”

La Cerda stared his surprise. “Why, man,” he exclaimed, with more contempt for him he addressed than he would have shown at a better time, “do you think I shall stand here? Do you call me Turk?”

Antonio felt a doubt of whether he had been as wise as he wished. Orders were strict, and had a cause which the Grand Master himself would have approved, but he was not sure that they should be applied to one who was a Commander of the Order himself, and whom he knew well by sight. Beyond that he had a shrewd doubt that he was acting as he would not have done but for another thing, which it was equally sure that the Grand Master would have condemned, and of which no suspicion, however faint, should be allowed to rise in La Cerda’s mind.

“You will admit,” he said, “that in time of war orders may be so framed as to hinder those for whom they are not meant, and that he may take blame who shall interpret them in a better way, being beyond that which he has commission to do. Yet I am assured that this order was not to have held you here, and it shall be my risk that you wait in a better place.”

La Cerda was little appeased by an admission that came too late. He said: “You are a wise man,” in a tone that proposed a doubt, or at best that his wisdom had been tardy in its advice. He followed Captain Antonio through a tunnel which had been hewed from the rock, having small chambers along its side, and was again surprised that so much had been done at what he had thought to be little more than a gun-platform outside the wall. He came to where the guns were, and saw two long culverins of the newest make pointing through embrasures which showed him, as in a frame, a picture of the long floating boom and of St. Michael’s fort at its further end, and something of the inner and outer harbours to left and right.

“I had not been told,” he said, “that you had such weapons as these. I thought that you had but three sakers, such as would throw their discharge to little more than the boom’s length.”

“So we had,” Captain Antonio replied, “and so we have still,” and he pointed to where these cannon were drawn aside, “but Don Francisco would have these guns from the Santa Martha, which was his own ship, thinking that they might be of more use. . . . It is that which is known to none but the twelve men we have in garrison here, and the seamen by whom they were brought during the night, which must be excuse for the strict orders I have that none shall enter without his leave.”

La Cerda was more appeased when he saw that it was something beyond the routine of a leaguered place which had held him back; he unbent enough to discuss matters of warfare by land and sea, on which Captain Antonio had some observations of wit to make and some tales to tell. The time did not seem long before Francisco appeared.

He had heard already, by Captain Antonio’s care—though no more than the bare fact—that La Cerda waited him by the guns. He could not guess what La Cerda knew, nor to what questions he might have to make instant reply, and though he came forward in a quiet and confident style, born of his pride and his blood, yet he could not tell, being young, how he should act, nor what he would be likely to say.

La Cerda, having folded his cloak for a seat, had found comfort enough on a stone ledge of the parapet which protected the guns. Captain Antonio stood at his side, in which positions their heights were not so different that they could not discourse with ease. La Cerda rose as Francisco approached, and looked at one who seemed to have advanced in dignity and the qualities by which manhood is known since he had seen him before, more than the short weeks would explain. “War,” he thought, laying praise at a wrong door, “may do much for those men it does not kill.”

He spoke at once when they met, without waiting to be asked why he had come.

“Don Francisco,” he said, “I am still in doubt of whether I owe you thanks, or the word of regret that it may be knightly to speak at times, or no more than a bare sword, such as was between us before, but, by your leave, I will put such questions aside at this time, both because it is hour of war and because you could say that I am unfit” (he looked down at his bandaged arm) “to support my words, and also until I am more fully informed. But I would ask you now, on your knightly word, if you can give me help on a search which I still make?”

“Chevalier,” Francisco replied, “it is knightly said, and I will answer it in the best manner I may.

“As to ourselves, there are times when I have the same doubt; but, by your own choice, I will say no more, except that, as I suppose, my honour is still clean.

“As to what you ask, I would ask this in reply: If one should know, or suppose, to where the lady Venetia has made her retreat, is it that which should be told to any without her leave, she being in the great jeopard she is, and there also being proclamation of death against whoever may have taken her in?”

La Cerda weighed the implications of this in a mind that was alert, and with suspicions not buried to any depth. He remembered what he had been told in the last hour, that Francisco had quarrelled with her whom he supposed to have been more close than she was, and that that had been from when they had found him in the room where Venetia lay. It was a simple conclusion that Francisco could tell him where she now was, and a presumption that she was still in the Maltese lines. His doubt of Francisco’s faith stirred him to an anxious wrath that he could not lightly restrain.

Yet restrain it he did, remembering the declaration that he had just made; and so, reflecting that it was by patience, if at all, that he would come to the knowledge he sought, he made a reasoned reply.

“As to that—I must conclude that you would not propose it in such a form unless your own knowledge made it to be of something more than idle debate—you may think the Lady Venetia’s jeopard to be much more than it is. I have been told by Sir Oliver Starkey himself that she may not have much to dread if she will come forward now, and I should say that her peril is greatly more while she lie concealed, for she will have less mercy to hope if she be dug out than if she will now advance, saying that she did but wait till I should be free to give her support.

“As to the part of who may have been her aid I will say this: It could be told to me—as I think it should, I having the right I have—on my plighted word (which should be assurance enough) that there would be no disclosure without consent, nor such as would bring him to peril he might have missed.”

“There would be the question, beyond that, of her own will.”

“Which you would ask me to doubt?”

“I mean that she may not agree that she can come forward at little cost, and a mistake would be learned too late.”

“But is it not that for her, and for me? Do you propose that I might betray her against her will?”

La Cerda spoke now with an impatience he could hardly repress. Francisco’s words seemed to make it clear that he knew where Venetia lay, and his tone to imply that he had a right of decision, and even to speak for her, which gave jealousy more grounds than the position must have contained in its simplest form.

Yet he reminded himself again that, if Francisco had secured her safety when he was himself unable to do so, there might be a debt of thanks to be paid in a better form than the base coinage of suspicions which might be utterly false, and, beyond that, he must have put himself in a peril which was even greater than hers, and that alone must give him some right to say what should be done now. And while he strove to control himself to a temperate mood, and yet one which would still persist—for he was resolved that he would not now turn from that quest, till he had heard Venetia protest her truth with her own lips—Francisco answered with more candour than he had spoken before.

“Chevalier,” he said, “I would have you know that I wish to act as a knight should, and I will say that I have no practice in such matters as this, and that I would that the course of honour were more easy to see.

“I will tell you that she came to me, being in a great dread, when she heard that you were powerless (as for that time) to be her support. She asked for aid which I did not refuse, and I suppose that we may have no quarrel for that.”

“As to that,” La Cerda interposed, “you have thanks.” The words were well enough, but they were without warmth, as though he waited to hear that which was still to say.

“I put myself in your hands,” Francisco went on, “in the confidence of your own pledge, and because you urge that you have a right to be told, when I say that I may know where she is now. But you must own that my obligation is not to you, but to her. I will see her between now and to-morrow noon, and, if I have her consent, I will then lead you to where she is.”

La Cerda heard this, and suspicions stirred with more force in his mind and would not be still. He was not too angry to see that, in the strict logic of the position, Francisco was right; but passion put logic aside to ask with what object he had helped her at all, and why he should be in doubt (as he professed) as to whether she should be willing for him to tell where she now lay. He had to remind himself of his bandaged arm, and of the resolution he had made, as he replied:

“Well, it is but a day, and I suppose there is no doubt of what her answer will be. We will so agree till to-morrow noon, if you will assure me of but one thing, which you will forgive that I ask——”

But the question, which might have brought crisis in its reply, was not asked, the words being drowned in a thunder of Turkish guns which broke out in a sudden fury of storm from every battery round St. Angelo’s girth. It was a thunder that did not cease, and La Cerda said: “I must seek my post. I will be here at to-morrow noon.”

He spoke to one who had ceased to give attention to him, and went in haste to take boat across the inner harbour to reach his place on St. Michael’s wall. He went through a bustle of those who ran different ways with the same object as he, for the noise of the Turkish guns was now drowned in the nearer thunder of Christian reply, and the bells tolled to call all men to their stations upon the walls.