THE ULTIMATUM
News of the affair at Tavora reached Sir Terence O'Moy, the Adjutant-General at Lisbon, about a week later in dispatches from headquarters. These informed him that in the course of the humble apology and explanation of the regrettable occurrence offered by the Colonel of the 8th Dragoons in person to the Mother Abbess, it had transpired that Lieutenant Butler had left the convent alive, but that nevertheless he continued absent from his regiment.
Those dispatches contained other unpleasant matters of a totally different nature, with which Sir Terence must proceed to deal at once; but their gravity was completely outweighed in the adjutant's mind by this deplorable affair of Lieutenant Butler's. Without wishing to convey an impression that the blunt and downright O'Moy was gifted with any undue measure of shrewdness, it must nevertheless be said that he was quick to perceive what fresh thorns the occurrence was likely to throw in a path that was already thorny enough in all conscience, what a semblance of justification it must give to the hostility of the intriguers on the Council of Regency, what a formidable weapon it must place in the hands of Principal Souza and his partisans. In itself this was enough to trouble a man in O'Moy's position. But there was more. Lieutenant Butler happened to be his brother-in-law, own brother to O'Moy's lovely, frivolous wife. Irresponsibility ran strongly in that branch of the Butler family.
For the sake of the young wife whom he loved with a passionate and fearful jealousy such as is not uncommon in a man of O'Moy's temperament when at his age - he was approaching his forty-sixth birthday - he marries a girl of half his years, the adjutant had pulled his brother-in-law out of many a difficulty; shielded him on many an occasion from the proper consequences of his incurable rashness.
This affair of the convent, however, transcended anything that had gone before and proved altogether too much for O'Moy. It angered him as much as it afflicted him. Yet when he took his head in his hands and groaned, it was only his sorrow that he was expressing, and it was a sorrow entirely concerned with his wife.
The groan attracted the attention of his military secretary, Captain Tremayne, of Fletcher's Engineers, who sat at work at a littered writing-table placed in the window recess. He looked up sharply, sudden concern in the strong young face and the steady grey eyes he bent upon his chief. The sight of O'Moy's hunched attitude brought him instantly to his feet.
"Whatever is the matter, sir?"
"It's that damned fool Richard," growled O'Moy. "He's broken out again."
The captain looked relieved. "And is that all?"
O'Moy looked at him, white-faced, and in his blue eyes a blaze of that swift passion that had made his name a byword in the army.
"All?" he roared. "You'll say it's enough, by God, when you hear what the fool's been at this time. Violation of a nunnery, no less."
And he brought his massive fist down with a crash upon the document that had conveyed the information. "With a detachment of dragoons he broke into the convent of the Dominican nuns at Tavora one night a week ago. The alarm bell was sounded, and the village turned out to avenge the outrage. Consequences: three troopers killed, five peasants sabred to death and seven other casualties, **** himself missing and reported to have escaped from the convent, but understood to remain in hiding - so that he adds desertion to the other crime, as if that in itself were not enough to hang him. That's all, as you say, and I hope you consider it enough even for **** Butler - bad luck to him."
"My God!" said Captain Tremayne.
"I'm glad that you agree with me."
Captain Tremayne stared at his chief, the utmost dismay upon his fine young face. "But surely, sir, surely - I mean, sir, if this report is correct some explanation -" He broke down, utterly at fault.
"To be sure, there's an explanation. You may always depend upon a most elegant explanation for anything that **** Butler does. His life is made up of mistakes and explanations." He spoke bitterly, "He broke into the nunnery under a misapprehension, according to the account of the sergeant who accompanied him," and Sir Terence read out that part of the report. "But how is that to help him, and at such a time as this, with public feeling as it is, and Wellington in his present temper about it? The provost's men are beating the country for the blackguard. When they find him it's a firing party he'll have to face."
Tremayne turned slowly to the window and looked down the fair prospect of the hillside over a forest of cork oaks alive with fresh green shoots to the silver sheen of the river a mile away. The storms of the preceding week had spent their fury - the travail that had attended the birth of Spring - and the day was as fair as a day of June in England. Weaned forth by the generous sunshine, the burgeoning of vine and fig, of olive and cork went on apace, and the skeletons of trees which a fortnight since had stood gaunt and bare were already fleshed in tender green.
>From the window of this fine conventual house on the heights of Monsanto, above the suburb of Alcantara, where the Adjutant-General had taken up his quarters, Captain Tremayne stood a moment considering the panorama spread to his gaze, from the red-brown roofs of Lisbon on his left - that city which boasted with Rome that it was built upon a cluster of seven hills - to the lines of embarkation that were building about the fort of St. Julian on his left. Then he turned, facing again the spacious, handsome room with its heavy, semi-ecclesiastical furniture, and Sir Terence, who, hunched in his chair at the ponderously carved black writing-table, scowled fiercely at nothing.
"What are you going to do, sir?" he inquired.
Sir Terence shrugged impatiently and heaved himself up in his chair.
"Nothing," he growled.
"Nothing?"
The interrogation, which seemed almost to cover a reproach, irritated the adjutant.
