CHAPTER XXXIV. FARTHER ADVENTURES—MEMOIR OF THE VOLTIGEUR.
“She turned her face unto the wall.
Her colour changed to pallid clay;
Long ere the dews began to fall.
The flower of Ettriek lifeless lay.”
The Queen’s Wake.
Never was a Lord Mayor’s dinner put on a table with more ceremony, than that with which our supper was served up; and yet, the whole entertainment was embodied in one tureen. What its contents were, none, save those who designed and fabricated the medley, could even pretend to guess at. In an ocean of oleaginous liquid, a lean fowl was floating, surrounded by shapeless substances, which might possibly be either “fish, flesh, or good salt herring.” It looked grease, and smelt garlic. The host, however, praised it excessively, and so would an Esquimaux; but I am morally certain, it was the last thing, in the shape of a light supper, that either Paris or Abernethy would have recommended to a dyspeptic patient.
And yet it was marvellous how much the lean hidalgo and the little doctor, “who all but raised the dead,” managed to consume, and seemed delighted with their fare. To me, it was an unspeakable relief when the abominable composition was totally removed; and indeed, for an hour afterwards, the apartment was not endurable.
Early, the hidalgo and physician were summoned to their dormitory and withdrew; and we agreed generally that it was a prudent step on the gentleman’s part, the mess he had swallowed considered, to sleep with his doctor in the apartment.
From the general appearance of the establishment, we had no reason to expect that the sleeping department would be an exception to the rest, and consequently we were in no hurry to make the experiment. Some very wretched wine was exchanged for better, on a hint from the guerilla, that there was such a person as the Empecinado in existence. The Frenchman was exceedingly companionable; the night was wet and stormy; the partida heaped on wood, as if the host had been proprietor of a forest; and we still sate on, regardless of sundry intimations from the innkeeper, that the clock of a neighbouring monastery had “gone twelve.”
“And was this your first adventure, gentlemen?” inquired the voltigeur.
“Our first in Spain,” I replied; “and certainly, in no smaller portion of human life could more unexpected incidents have been crowded, than into those which have just occurred.”
“It is true,” returned the Frenchman; “the opening of my military career was sufficiently eventful, but yours exceeds it far.”
“May I ask where the scene lay?” I demanded of the lieutenant.
“It commenced,” he replied, “under the most brilliant successes which ever intoxicated a conqueror—in Germany—only to witness the greatest reverses which ever overtook insatiable ambition. I served, gentlemen, in that accursed country, where the bones of three hundred thousand gallant men are blanching—that grave to the glory of France, that boundary to the ambition of Napoleon—Russia.”
“And were you engaged in that luckless expedition?” I inquired.
“I was. Mine is but a brief history; and as you heard me, under peculiar circumstances, make allusions to my orphan child, I will, in a few words, tell you her father’s story, and briefly detail the adventures of