All was dismay within the Spanish lines. The Count de Blas died in the arms of the men who were bearing him into the castle; and Don Joseph de Penil was so severely wounded, that he dropped off his horse as soon as it had cleared the draw-bridge into the fortress. Half the garrison was slain or missing; and no officers of rank returned alive from the field, but what were borne in on their cloaks,—sad, mangled victims of the preceding rashness.

When De Penil's wounds were dressed, and he heard the state of his men, he was driven to despair. He called for the Marquis de Montemar, as the only person in whose steadiness to the last, he felt he could place any confidence. All who approached him came trembling; and, from confusion of mind, contradicted each other in every account of the garrison, excepting the one, that its destruction was now inevitable!

When Louis obeyed the General's summons, he corroborated the observations of De Penil's own senses; and told him that a contagious fear unmanned every heart; and that the eyes of the soldiers continually turned towards the sea, with a more evident wish for escape than resistance. While Don Joseph listened to the consequences of his own headstrong folly, and saw the bloody evidence of the courage he had pretended to doubt, on the cheek of the brave narrator, he obeyed the noble shame which coloured his own; and, having uttered a frank apology for his former conduct, as frankly asked for his opinion on the present crisis.

Louis did not hesitate to say, that he believed the Moors could not see their advantage without attempting to storm the place.

"And they will take it to a certainty," replied De Penil. "In the present disposition of the men there can be no resistance."

"Without resistance they are lost!" returned Louis. "There are no ships for flight, and the Moors grant no terms in a surrender."

"Then every man must fight for his life!" cried De Penil. "I will yet do my duty from this bed; and you, De Montemar, must act from my authority."

Louis did not now demur. He was ready to do all in his power to stop the torrent, whose sluice he would have prevented being broken down. Without losing time in sending for those paralized officers, who wandered from place to place at their wit's end, De Penil consulted his young co-adjutor on every resource; and while he marvelled at so comprehensive a judgment in so inexperienced a soldier, he adopted so many of his suggestions, that dispositions were soon made for the defence of Ceuta, of better promise than those which had placed it in such extremity.

Louis wrote down the necessary arrangement; and when it was finished, the wounded General was laid on a litter, and carried out along the ramparts; where, after he had said a few words of encouragement to the soldiers, Louis read aloud the different orders for the defence of the garrison.

De Penil was too conscious of the evil his impatience had wrought, not to do his utmost to prevent yet more disastrous consequences; and, while he exhorted the men to stand to their guns, and never to leave their ground but with their lives, he himself took an oath before them never to surrender. He told them to obey the Marquis de Montemar as his representative.

"But for his promptitude in mounting the battery which covered our retreat, and his steadiness in maintaining it," added the General, "we should not now have Ceuta to defend."

The soldiers knew this as well as their commander, and with a sincere hurrah of obedience, followed their officers to their respective duties.

Exhausted, and almost fainting, De Penil ordered the litter to his quarters; but he held himself up with assumed strength, till the walls of his apartment permitted over-tasked nature to sink under the pain of his wounds.

Louis's spirit rose with the summons for exertion. His calm collectiveness in dispensing his commands, and instant apprehension of what was most proper to be done, from objects of the greatest importance to the minutest inquiry from the meanest workmen in the lines, revived courage in the faintest heart, and inspired the brave with an animation equal to his own. After he had seen every thing prepared for the anticipated assault, he returned to De Penil, to inform him of the favourable aspect his commands had produced. Having found the General in a state of anxiety that looked for such intelligence to enable him to seek the repose his condition needed, he closed his communications with assurances of hope; and, leaving him to rest, proceeded to the quarters of Don Ferdinand.

His wound was deep, but not dangerous; yet the alarm for his life had been so great, before the extraction of the ball, that one of the surgeons dispatched a messenger immediately across the strait, with intelligence to Santa Cruz of the perilous state of his son, and the jeopardy of the garrison.

When Louis found what had been done, he reprimanded the man for presuming to send off any account, before the official reports of the affair could be duly ascertained. The other surgeons assured the young commander that his friend was not to be despaired of; and, with the feelings of a brother for the son of the revered Santa Cruz, he entered his apartment.

"De Montemar," cried Ferdinand, stretching out his hand to him, "dearer lips than mine must thank you that I live."

Louis smiled as he used to do in his unclouded days of happiness:—"God is good in yet giving life a value to me, by making me his instrument to preserve my friend. While I may be such," added he, with a deeper expression, and pressing Ferdinand's hand between his, "I feel the son of Ripperda is not completely lost!"

Ferdinand did not understand all the reference of this almost unconscious apostrophe; but supposing it arose from some free remarks of the Count de Patinos which might have reached his ear, he replied with earnestness:— "Il rit bien, qui rit le dernier! The sneers which De Patinos dared venture against the Duke de Ripperda's escape from his enemies, and the unsullied honour of De Montemar, were visited on his head this day. I saw him fly before the negro guards of Aben Humeya; and I have since been told, that he and his whole squadron threw down their arms before the barbarian."

"That they may be his prisoners," replied Louis, "is too likely; but whatever may be the Count de Patinos' ungenerous enmity against men who never voluntarily gave him offence, I must exonerate him of the charge of cowardice. I believe him brave; and all I have now to wish is, that he may be treated according to his merits as a soldier, by the hands into which he has fallen."

At nine o'clock, Louis went the round of his posts, and found all in good order. The men were in spirits, though it was easy to discern, even by the naked eye, that a threatening commotion continued along the enemy's lines.

By his glass, earlier in the evening, he had observed the approach of artillery, and some other signs which convinced him of the necessity of Don Joseph's precaution. For his own part, he never retired under cover the whole night, but kept his station on the best point of observation,—a tower at the extremity of the outworks.

About the watch of the night, which is called by the Moors, Latumar, being their fifth hour of prayer, the sky was involved in total darkness; but the attentive ear of Louis heard a distant murmuring. It was demonstrative of the approach he expected; and having persons near him for the purpose, he dispatched them to the lines to order every one to be prepared.

In less than a quarter of an hour after he had taken his own most efficient station, the flash of cannon and of musquetry lit the plain for a moment, like the splendour of day; and, in the next, the roaring of the guns, and the smoke of the explosion, rocked the fortress to its foundation, and involved the whole atmosphere in sulphureous clouds. The ordnance on the walls of Ceuta were not silent; and the mutual bombardment in the intermitting darkness, was rendered more terrific by the savage cries of the besiegers mingling their horrid war-whoop with the hissing of the musquetry, and the tremendous thunders of the cannonade.

Where his father was in the midst of this dreadful contest, more than once shot in direful question across the mind of Louis; but he dismissed the paralyzing thought. He was there to defend the cause of his country and the faith of his fathers; and he must not allow the yearnings of his heart to unman his fidelity.

He flew from the bastion on which he stood, at the moment he heard a cry of triumph from the scene below. In defiance of shells and raking fires, these desperate barbarians had rushed on, and pointed their guns till a breach was made. Louis ordered a rampart to be immediately raised on the ruins, but the gabions were hardly rolled forward, and the cannon planted, when a tumbrel blew up, and rendered the egress wider and more accessible than before. The stone battlements shook under his feet like an earthquake, while the fragments from the torn rampart, the smoke, and the scorching powder, covered him with viewless horror. There was not the pause of a moment between the explosion, the dispersion of the smoke, and the most dreadful conflict of the day.

Aben Humeya had prepared for an escalade; and the very band which planted the crescent on the towers of Larach, was the first who scaled the walls of Ceuta. The contest at the breach was as sanguinary as it was decisive. The Moors were twice repulsed with terrible slaughter; and the more terrible the second time, as it was quickly known, by the intrepid desperation of the assailants, that they were led on by the Basha himself. Louis's unreceding arm had tumbled the leader of the first division from his footing on the wall; and at his fall his followers had given ground. On the second assault, he was contending with the invincible devotedness of a man who knew that spot was the key of the fortress, when his father's voice assailed his ear. A flash of musketry shewed the jewelled chelengk in his turban, as he mounted the farther ridge of the platform, slippery with blood, and called on his men to support him. In another moment, two Biscayan grenadiers held the Basha between their weapons and the pinnacle of the battlement. A choice of death seemed the only alternative,—their swords, or precipitation over the precipice. The Moors who pressed forward, were cut to pieces by the Spaniards on the breach; and Louis saw nothing but destruction to his father, when rushing towards the spot, in the moment Ripperda's weapon shivered against those of his enemies, he threw himself, sword in hand, between the Biscayans and their prey, franticly exclaiming:

"The Basha is the governor's prisoner." But the strokes which were levelled at Ripperda's breast were sheathed in his son's. Before the Spaniards could check their arms, he was cut through the shoulder and stabbed in his side; but the men recoiled on finding they had wounded their leader; and in the instant, Sidi Ali mounting the height with a fresh horde of triumphant Moors, they surrounded Aben Humeya, believing the day won. But as Ali's hand planted the Ottoman standard amidst the still grappling of foe to foe, and the anathemas of the Christian against the ferocious curses of the Moor, the clouds of smoke rolled away from the eastern point of the rampart, and the golden head of the sun peered from the horizon. Its first ray shot direct upon the radiant crest of Aben Humeya, and a rifle took aim. The ball struck; and, in spite of a momentary exertion in its victim to spring forward, he staggered and fell into the arms of his followers.

A woeful yell announced to the legions below, that some direful disaster had happened. The cry was echoed from rank to rank with shrieks and howlings; and a single blast of a trumpet immediately succeeded. The breach was abandoned, as if by enchantment. The firing sunk at once into a dead calm; and the flight of the Moors through the yet hovering smoke, sounded in the darkness like the wings of many birds brushing the sands before the sweep of some coming storm.