第37章 A CATASTROPHE(2)

It was on the last night of November,1831,that they all set forth;Torrijos with Fifty-five companions;and in two small vessels committed themselves to their nigh-desperate fortune.No sentry or official person had noticed them;it was from the Spanish Consul,next morning,that the British Governor first heard they were gone.The British Governor knew nothing of them;but apparently the Spanish officials were much better informed.Spanish guardships,instantly awake,gave chase to the two small vessels,which were making all sail towards Malaga;and,on shore,all manner of troops and detached parties were in motion,to render a retreat to Gibraltar by land impossible.

Crowd all sail for Malaga,then;there perhaps a regiment will join us;there,--or if not,we are but lost!Fancy need not paint a more tragic situation than that of Torrijos,the unfortunate gallant man,in the gray of this morning,first of December,1831,--his last free morning.Noble game is afoot,afoot at last;and all the hunters have him in their toils.--The guardships gain upon Torrijos;he cannot even reach Malaga;has to run ashore at a place called Fuengirola,not far from that city;--the guardships seizing his vessels,so soon as he is disembarked.The country is all up;troops scouring the coast everywhere:no possibility of getting into Malaga with a party of Fifty-five.He takes possession of a farmstead (Ingles,the place is called);barricades himself there,but is speedily beleaguered with forces hopelessly superior.He demands to treat;is refused all treaty;is granted six hours to consider,shall then either surrender at discretion,or be forced to do it.Of course he _does_it,having no alternative;and enters Malaga a prisoner,all his followers prisoners.Here had the Torrijos Enterprise,and all that was embarked upon it,finally arrived.

Express is sent to Madrid;express instantly returns;"Military execution on the instant;give them shriving if they want it;that done,fusillade them all."So poor Torrijos and his followers,the whole Fifty-six of them,Robert Boyd included,meet swift death in Malaga.In such manner rushes down the curtain on them and their affair;they vanish thus on a sudden;rapt away as in black clouds of fate.Poor Boyd,Sterling's cousin,pleaded his British citizenship;to no purpose:it availed only to his dead body,this was delivered to the British Consul for interment,and only this.Poor Madam Torrijos,hearing,at Paris where she now was,of her husband's capture,hurries towards Madrid to solicit mercy;whither also messengers from Lafayette and the French Government were hurrying,on the like errand:at Bayonne,news met the poor lady that it was already all over,that she was now a widow,and her husband hidden from her forever.--Such was the handsel of the new year 1832for Sterling in his West-Indian solitudes.

Sterling's friends never heard of these affairs;indeed we were all secretly warned not to mention the name of Torrijos in his hearing,which accordingly remained strictly a forbidden subject.His misery over this catastrophe was known,in his own family,to have been immense.He wrote to his Brother Anthony:"I hear the sound of that musketry;it is as if the bullets were tearing my own brain."To figure in one's sick and excited imagination such a scene of fatal man-hunting,lost valor hopelessly captured and massacred;and to add to it,that the victims are not men merely,that they are noble and dear forms known lately as individual friends:what a Dance of the Furies and wild-pealing Dead-march is this,for the mind of a loving,generous and vivid man!Torrijos getting ashore at Fuengirola;Robert Boyd and others ranked to die on the esplanade at Malaga--Nay had not Sterling,too,been the innocent yet heedless means of Boyd's embarking in this enterprise?By his own kinsman poor Boyd had been witlessly guided into the pitfalls."I hear the sound of that musketry;it is as if the bullets were tearing my own brain!"