“A morte me fas deixar O que me podia danar.”
As I pondered on this curious couplet, “Death makes me leave What might me grieve,” in the shadowy cloister, there came towards me a phantom of the past. It was an old, old man dressed in brown undyed homespun, short jacket, and breeches of a bygone fashion, and the universal black knitted stocking nightcap of the Portuguese peasant. He hobbled out of the cell where the great duke had slept the nights before the battle; and as he came slowly towards me, supported by a long staff, he courteously doffed his cap, and wished me good day. He was, he told me, ninety-three years old, but his eyes were still bright and his skin clear, and I fell into discourse with the ancient, as we rested together upon a bench in the darkling cloister, through the end door of which a bright splash of orange sunlight sent shimmering waves into the dimness.
Yes! _graças à Deus_, he was well, notwithstanding his great age, and he dwelt, past work now, with his son, a sort of foreman on the domain, in the double cell which had been that of the prior of the monastery. He was born in a neighbouring village, and had never been far away. He had witnessed the expulsion of the monks and the building of the beautiful palace that had pushed aside the pathetic abode of penitence, humility, and patience. In his prime he had known and talked to many of those who had witnessed the great battle on Bussaco’s slopes, and he told me artlessly, and in his quavering treble, how all down the slope, upon which I saw him the next day, the dead and wounded Frenchmen had lain thickly, with their arms, drums, and big shakoes scattered around them; how the poor wretches, crying in their agony for a draught of water, were refused by the country people, who hated so bitterly the invaders of their fatherland; how the good monks strove their hardest, succouring the wounded, French, English, and Portuguese alike, and reverently burying the dead in consecrated ground.
As the old man spoke, quietly and gently, telling at first-hand the story of nearly a century ago, my mind went back to another old man whom I had known when I was little more than a child, who himself had fought in this battle; but to my eager inquiries for details had little of satisfaction to impart. But, somehow, the mere fact of having known an actor in the scene, however inarticulate, and now to be speaking upon the spot with one who had all his life heard direct from those who witnessed it the story that made his countryside for ever famous, brought nearer to me the vivid vision of long ago. Bussaco fight to me for a brief space was real, as Salamanca and Vitoria never can be, and I feel that for one half hour I have lived in the time when the giants of the world contended for mastery.