In half a minute I had him out and lying helpless and half-stunned on the road, and had jumped into the carriage to the King, only to start back in amazement and dismay at the discovery that it was not the King at all, but a girl lying prone, faint, and helpless on an invalid's stretcher, her eyes staring up into my face with the glazed, set stillness of unconsciousness or paralysed fright. What could it mean and what had I done? What astounding blunder had I perpetrated? What miracle had happened? Where was the young King?
What I endured in those first moments after my shock of surprise I cannot tell. A thousand possible consequences in a mounting scale of danger crowded my mind to the exclusion of all coherent thoughts; and I gazed down in sheer stolidity of bewilderment at the inert form of the girl on the stretcher.
I had risked everything, and lost the whole stake through my blundering, selfish stupidity in trying to carry this thing through single-handed. Indeed, I had lost more than all--for I had laid myself open to a charge of having played the highwayman in this reckless fashion; and while the Carlists were speeding off with the young King, I should be hustled off to a gaol for a common thief.
And this was how I was pitting myself against Sebastian Quesada! At this thought my chagrin, my humiliation, and my self-contempt culminated in an acute agony of mortification and disappointment. I was like a man distracted and broken, when in a flash the light burst in on me.
I stooped over the girl and saw that what in my hasty glance I had mistaken for a piece of displaced frilling was in reality the covering for a cunningly constructed gag. In a moment I had torn it off and was looking on the young King's face.
"Is your Majesty hurt?" I asked, and as I spoke my fingers were busy tearing away the dress with which his captors had covered him, my hands positively trembling in excitement.
"I cannot move. Who are you? I am strapped down everywhere," he said weakly.
"By God's grace, I am come to save your Majesty;" and, without wasting time in words, I searched for the straps that bound him to the stretcher and severed them with my knife. The whole arrangement was cunningly contrived in truth; but a sharp blade cut the bonds quickly enough, and I soon had him out of the carriage. "Have you strength to ride, sire?" I said, finding he was staggering feebly on my arm.