Perfectly calm and imperturbable,
he saluted the court, and sat down, his guards remaining some paces
behind him.
He had declined all offers of a friend to represent him, on the
grounds that the court could not possibly afford him a case to
answer.
The president, a florid, rather pompous man, who spoke with a
faint lisp, cleared his throat and read the charge against the
prisoner from the sheet with which he had been supplied - the
charge of having violated the recent enactment against duelling made
by the Commander-in-Chief of his Majesty's forces in the Peninsula,
in so far as he had fought: a duel with Count Jeronymo de Samoval,
and of murder in so far as that duel, conducted in an irregular
manner, and without any witnesses, had resulted in the death of the
said Count Jeronymo de Samoval.
"How say you, then, Captain Tremayne?" the judge-advocate
challenged him. "Are you guilty of these charges or not guilty?"
"Not guilty."
The president sat back and observed the prisoner with an eye that
was officially benign. Tremayne's glance considered the court and
met the concerned and grave regard of his colonel, of his friend
Carruthers and of two other friends of his own regiment, the cold
indifference of three officers of the Fourteenth - then stationed
in Lisbon with whom he was unacquainted, and the utter inscrutability
of O'Moy's rather lowering glance, which profoundly intrigued him,
and, lastly, the official hostility of Major Swan, who was on his
feet setting forth the case against him.
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