‘Come back,’ whispered General Vincente. ‘Slowly, my child—slowly.’
Estella stood for a moment looking down with a royal insolence, then turned, and with measured steps approached the window. As she passed in she met Conyngham’s eyes, and that one moment assuredly made two lives worth living.
‘I have set my life upon a cast And I will stand the hazard of the die.’
‘EXCELLENCY,’ reported a man who entered the room at this moment, ‘they are bringing carts of fuel through the Calle de la Ciudad to set against the door and burn it.’
‘To set against which door, my honest friend?’
‘The great door on the Plaza, Excellency; the other is an old door of iron.’
‘And they cannot burn it or break it open?’
‘No, Excellency. And, besides, there are loopholes in the thickness of the wall at the side.’
The General smiled on this man as being after his own heart.
‘One may not shoot to-night, my friend. I have already given the order.’
‘But one may prick them with the sword, Excellency?’ suggested the trooper, with a sort of suppressed enthusiasm.
The General shrugged his shoulders, wisely tolerant.
‘Oh yes,’ he answered, ‘I suppose one may prick them with the sword.’
Conyngham, who had been standing half in and half out of the open window, listening to this conversation, now came forward.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that I can clear the Plaza from time to time if you give me twenty men. We can thus gain time.’
‘Street-fighting,’ answered the General gravely. ‘Do you know anything of it? It is nasty work.’
‘I know something of it. One has to shout very loud. I studied it—at Dublin University.’
Julia and Estella watched and listened. Their lot had been cast in the paths of war, and since childhood they had remembered naught else. But neither had yet been so near to the work, nor had they seen and heard men talk and plan with a certain grim humour—a curt and deliberate scorn of haste or excitement—as these men spoke and planned now. Conyngham and Concepçion Vara were altered by these circumstances—there was a light in their eyes which women rarely see, but the General was the same little man of peace and of a high domestic virtue, who seemed embarrassed by a sword which was obviously too big for him. Yet in all their voices there rang alike a queer note of exultation. For man is a fighting animal, and from St. Paul down to the humblest little five-foot-one recruit, would find life a dull affair were there no strife in it.