Volume I Part 48 (1/2)
”Be reasonable, and come with me of your own accord My orders are to take you by force, but as I have not enough eneral will, of course, send a force sufficient to arrest you”
”Never; I will not be taken alive”
”YouYou have disobeyed the order I brought you to go to the 'bastarda; in that you have acted wrongly, and in that alone, for in every other respect you were perfectly right, the general hiht to have put myself under arrest?”
”Certainly; obedience is necessary in our profession”
”Would you have obeyed, if you had been in my place?”
”I cannot and will not tell you what I would have done, but I know that if I had disobeyed orders I should have been guilty of a crime:”
”But if I surrendered now I should be treated like a criminal, and much more severely than if I had obeyed that unjust order”
”I think not Co”
”What! Go without knohat fate may be in store for uilty of such a dreadful criainst me, I will surrender only to irresistible force I cannot be worse off, but there may be blood spilled”
”You are uilty But I say like you, let us have dinner A good meal will very likely render you more disposed to listen to reason”
Our dinner was nearly over, e heard some noise outside The lieutenant ca in the neighbourhood of h the island that the felucca had been sent with orders to arrest ood fellows, and to send theive them first a barrel of wine
The peasants went away satisfied, but, to shew their devotion to ,” said the adjutant, ”but it will turn out very serious if you let ive an exact account of all I have witnessed”
”I will follow you, if you will give me your word of honour to land me free in Corfu”
”I have orders to deliver your person to M Foscari, on board the bastarda”
”Well, you shall not execute your orders this tieneral, his honour will coainst you, and of course he can do it But tell eneral should leave you in this island for the sake of the joke? There is no fear of that, however, and, after the report which I eneral will certainlyblood”
”Without a fight it will be difficult to arrest me, for with five hundred peasants in such a place as this I would not be afraid of three thousand h; you will be treated as a leader of rebels
All these peasants ainst onea few pieces of gold I can tell you st all those men who surround you there is not one ould not o withyou in Corfu You will be courted and applauded You will narrate yourself all your h, and at the sa listened to reason the moment I came here Everybody feels esteereat deal of you He praises very highly the co froh that insolent fool, in order not to forget the respect you owed to his house The general hiet what you told him of that knave”
”What has becoate arrived with dispatches, in which the general must have found all the proof of the imposture, for he has caused the false duke or prince to disappear very suddenly nobody knohere he has been sent to, and nobody ventures to regious blunder respecting him”
”But was the ave him?”
”God forbid! Do you not recollect that he wore a sword? From that moment no one would receive him His arm was broken and his jaw shattered to pieces
”But in spite of the state he was in, in spite of what he must have suffered, his excellency had him removed a week after you had treated hiht is what everyone has been wondering over It was thought for three days that M D---- R---- had concealed you in his house, and he was openly blaeneral's table that he was in the norance of your whereabouts His excellency even expressed his anxiety about your escape, and it was only yesterday that your place of refuge was made known by a letter addressed by the priest of this island to the Proto-Papa Bulgari, in which he complained that an Italian officer had invaded the island of Casopo a week before, and had co all the girls, and of threatening to shoot hiainst you