With Moore at Corunna by G. A. Henty (ebooks children's books free txt) 📖

"My dear cousin, it is evident that you know very little of English customs, though you speak English so well. We don't call our cousins Mr. and Miss; you will have to call me Terence and I shall certainly call you Mary. Macwitty brought you back to camp all right?"

"Yes; but it was terrible to hear all that firing, and I was wondering all the time whether you were being hurt."

"There is a great deal of powder fired away to every one that gets hit."

"Do you know what has happened in the town?" Don Jose asked.

"I know no more than what my cousin has no doubt told you of that terrible scene at the bridge. It is evident that the French burst through the lines without any difficulty, as we saw no soldiers, except those cowardly cavalrymen, before the French arrived. It is probable that the intrenchments were carried in the centre, and Soult evidently sent a body of soldiers straight through the town to secure the bridge. I think he must have cut off the main body of the defenders of the intrenchments from entering the town and must either have captured them or driven them off. The fire of cannon had ceased over there before we retired, and it is clear from that that the whole of the intrenchments must have been captured. There was, however, a heavy rattle of musketry in the town, and I suppose that the houses, and perhaps some barricades, were being defended. It was a mad thing to do, for it would only excite the fury of the French troops, and get them out of hand altogether. If there had been no resistance the columns might have marched in in good order; but even then I fear there might have been trouble, for unfortunately, your peasants have behaved with such merciless cruelty to all stragglers who fell into their hands, that the thirst for vengeance would in any case have been irrepressible. Still, the officers might possibly have preserved order had there been no resistance."

"Shall we be pursued, do you think, se�or?" Don Jose's wife asked.

"I do not think so. Possibly parties of horse may scour the country for some distance round, to see if there is a body of troops here, but we are too strong to be attacked by any but a very numerous body of horse; and if they should attempt it, you may be sure that we can render a very good account of ourselves. We have beaten off the French horse once, and, as since then we have had some stiff fighting, I have no fear of the men being unsteady, even if all Franceschi's cavalry came down upon us. Of that, however, there will be little chance; the French have their hands full for some days, and a few scouting parties are all that they are likely to send out."

"You speak Portuguese very well, Terence," Mary O'Connor said, in that language, hesitating a little before she used his Christian name.

"I have been nearly nine months in the country, during most of which I have been on the staff, and have had to communicate with peasants and others, and for the past two months I have spoken nothing else; necessity is a good teacher. Besides which, Lieutenant Herrara has been good enough to take great pains in correcting my mistakes and teaching me the proper idioms; another six months of this work and I have no doubt I shall be able to pass as a native."

After marching fifteen miles the column halted, Terence feeling assured that the French would not push out their scouting parties more than three or four miles from Villa Nova. They halted at the edge of a forest, and a party under one of the officers was at once despatched to a village two miles away, and returned in an hour with a drove of pigs that had been bought there, and a cart laden with bread and wine. Fires had already been lighted, and after seeing that the rations were divided among the various companies, Terence went to the tent. Herrara was chatting with his friends, and Mary O'Connor came out at once and joined him.

"That is right, Mary; we will take a stroll in the wood and have a talk together. Now tell me how you have got on. I had expected to find you quite thin and almost starving."

"No, I have had plenty of bread to eat," she laughed; "the sisters kept me well supplied. I am sure that most of them were sorry for me, and they used to hide away some of their own bread and bring it to me when they had a chance. The lady superior was very hard, and if I had had to depend entirely on what she sent me up I should have done very badly. I always ate as much as I could, as I wanted to keep up my strength; for I knew that if I got weak I might give way and do what they wanted, and I was quite determined that I would not, if I could help it."

"Macwitty told you, I suppose, how I came to hear where you were imprisoned?"

"Yes; he said that the officer had given you the letter that I dropped to him; yet how did he come to know that you were my cousin?"

"It was quite an accident; just the similarity of name. We were chatting, and he said, casually, 'I suppose that you have no relatives at Oporto,' and I at once said I had, for fortunately my father had been telling me about your father and you, the last time I saw him, that is four months ago. He was badly wounded at Vimiera and invalided home. Then Captain Travers told me about getting your letter and what was in it, and I felt sure that it was you, and of course made up my mind to do what I could to get you out, though at the time I did not think that I should be in Oporto until I entered with the British army."

"But I cannot think how you got us all to start, and walked along with the lady superior as if you were a friend of hers. Macwitty had not time to tell me that. I was so frightened and bewildered with the dreadful noise and the strangeness of it all that I could not ask him many questions."

"It was by virtue of this ring," he said, holding up his hand.

"Why," she exclaimed in surprise, "that is the bishop's! I noticed it on his finger when he came one day to me and scolded me, and said that I should remain a prisoner if it was for years until my obstinate spirit was broken. But how did you get it?"

"Not with the bishop's good-will, you may be sure, Mary," Terence laughed; and he then told her how he had become possessed of it.

The girl looked quite scared.

"It sounds dreadful, doesn't it, Mary, to think that I should have laid hands upon a bishop, and such a bishop, a man who regards himself as the greatest in Portugal. However, there was no other way of getting the ring, and I could not see how, without it, I could persuade the lady superior to leave her convent with you all; and to tell you the truth, I would rather have got it that way than any other. The bishop is, in my opinion, a man who deserves no respect. He has terrorized all the north of Portugal, has caused scores of better men than himself to be imprisoned or put to death, and has now by his folly and ignorance cost the lives of no one knows how many thousand men, and brought about the sack of Oporto."

"Did you hear anything of my mother?" the girl asked.

"No; my Portuguese was not good enough for me to ask questions without risking being detected as a foreigner at once. She has behaved shamefully to you, Mary."

"She never liked me," the girl said, simply. "She and father never got on well together, and I think her dislike began by his taking to me, and my liking to be with him and getting to talk English. There was a terrible quarrel between them once because she accused him of teaching me to be a Protestant, although he never did so. He did give me a Bible, and I used to ask him questions and he answered them, that was all; but as it did seem to me that he was much wiser in all things than she was, I thought that he might be wiser in religion too. I would have given up the property directly they wanted me to, if they would have let me go away to England; but when they took me to the convent and cut off my hair, and forced me to become a nun, I would not give way to them. I never took the vows, Terence; I would not open my lips, but they went on with the service just the same. I was determined that I would not yield. I thought that the English would come some day, and that I might be freed then."

"What would you have done in England if you had gone there, Mary?"

"I should have found your father out, and gone to him. Father told me that your father was his greatest friend, and just before he died he told me that he had privately sent over all his own money to a bank at Cork, and ordered it to be put in your father's name. It was a good deal of money, for he would not give up the business when he married my mother, though she wanted him to; but he said that he could not live in idleness on her money, and that he must be doing something. And I know that he kept up the house in Oporto, while she kept up her place in the country. He told me that the sum he had sent over was �20,000. That will be enough to live on, won't it?"

"Plenty," Terence laughed. "I had no idea that I was rescuing such an heiress. I was sure that there was no chance of your getting your mother's money, at any rate, as long as the bishop was leader of Oporto. However just your claim, no judge would decide in your favour."

"Now tell me about yourself, Terence, and your home in Ireland, and all about it."

"My home has been the regiment, Mary. My father has a few hundred acres in County Mayo, and a tumble-down house; that is to say, it was a tumble-down house when I saw it four years ago, but it had been shut up for a good many years, and I should not be surprised if it has quite tumbled down now. However, my father was always talking of going to live there when he left the army. The land is not worth much, I think. There are five hundred acres, and they let for about a hundred a year. However, my father has been in the regiment now for about eighteen years; and as I was born in barracks I have only been three or four times to Ballinagra, and then only because father took a fancy to have a look at the old house. My mother died when I was ten years old, and I ran almost wild until I got my commission last June."

"And how did you come to be a staff-officer of the English general?" she asked.

"I have had awfully good luck," Terence replied. "It happened in all sorts of ways."

"Please tell me everything," she said. "I want to know all about you."

"It is a long story, Mary."

"So much the better," she said. "I know nothing of what has passed for the last year, and I dare say I shall learn about it from your story. You don't know how happy I am feeling to be out in the sun and in the air again, and to see the country after being shut up in one room for a year. Suppose we sit down here and you tell me the whole story."

Terence accordingly related the history of his adventures since he had left England. The girl asked a great many questions, and specially insisted upon hearing his own adventures very fully.

"It is no use your keeping on saying that it is all luck," she said when he had finished. "Your colonel could not have thought that it was luck when he wrote the report about that adventure at sea, and your general could not have thought so, either, or he would not have praised you in his despatch.