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I was thinking of him when, at the end of a passage to me indistinguishable from any of the dozen or so we had already followed, my guide put out a hand, and, drawing aside a goatskin curtain, revealed a small chamber with a lamp hanging from the roof, and under the lamp a bed of straw, and upon the bed an emaciated man, propped and holding a book.

His eyes were on the entrance; for he had heard our footsteps. And almost we broke into one cry of joy. It was indeed my kinsman, Captain McNeill!

II.

CAPTAIN MCNEILL’S ADVENTURES.

“But how on earth came you here?” was the unspoken question in the eyes of both of us; and, each reading the reflection of his own, we both broke out together into a laugh–though my kinsman’s was all but inaudible–and after it he lay back on his pillow (an old knapsack) and panted.

“My story must needs be the shorter,” said I; “so let us have it over and get it out of the way. I come from watching Caffarelli in the north, and for the last four days have been taking a holiday and twiddling my fingers in camp here, just across the Zapardiel. Happening this afternoon to stroll to this amazing rock, I fell in with the reverend father here, and most incautiously told him my name: since which he has been leading me a dance which may or may not have turned my hair grey.”

“The reverend father?” echoed Captain Alan.

“He has not,” said I, turning upon my guide, who stood apart with a baffling smile, “as yet done me the honour to reciprocate my weak confidences.”

Captain Alan too stared at him. “Are you a priest, sir?” he demanded.

He was answered by a bow. “You didn’t know it?” cried I. “It’s the one thing he has allowed me to discover.”

“But I understood that you were a scholar, sir–“

“The two callings are not incompatible, I hope?”

“–of the University of Salamanca: a Doctor, too. My memory is yet weak, but surely I had it from your own lips that you were a Doctor?”

“–of Moral Philosophy,” the old man answered with another bow. “Of the College of the Conception–now, alas! destroyed.”

“The care with which you have tended me, sir, has helped my mistake: and now my gratitude for it must help my apologies. I fear I have, from time to time, allowed my tongue to take many liberties with your profession.”

“You have, to be sure, been somewhat hard with us.”

“My prejudice is an honest one, sir.”

“Of that there can be no possible doubt.”

“But it must frequently have pained you.”

“Not the least in the world,” the old Doctor assured him, almost with bonhomie. “Besides, you were suffering from sunstroke.”

My kinsman eyed him; and I could have laughed to watch it–that gaze betrayed a faint expiring hope that, after all, his diatribes against the Scarlet Woman had shaken the Doctor–upon whom (I need scarcely say) they had produced about as much effect as upon the rock of Rueda itself. And I think that, though regretfully, he must at length have realised this, for he sank back on the pillow again with a gentle weariness in every line of his Don Quixote face.

“Ah, yes, from sunstroke! My cousin”–here he turned towards me–“this gentleman–or, as I must now learn to call him, this most reverend Doctor of Philosophy, Gil Gonsalvez de Covadonga–found me some days ago stretched unconscious beside the highroad to Tordesillas, and in two ways has saved my life: first, by conveying me to this hiding-place, for the whole terrain was occupied by Marmont’s troops, and I lay there in my scarlet tunic, a windfall for the first French patrol that might pass; and, secondly, by nursing me through delirium back to health of mind and strength of body.”

“The latter has yet to come, Senor Capitano,” the Doctor interposed.