"What the devil's the meaning of this?" demanded Colonel Taubmann as his post-boy reined up on the knap of the hill above the town. By 'this' he meant a triumphal arch, packed with evergreens, and adorned with the motto 'Death to the Invader' in white letters on a scarlet ground.
He repeated the question to Captain Pond, who appeared a minute later in full regimentals advancing up the hill with his Die-hards behind him and a large and excited crowd in the rear.
"Good-morning, sir!" Captain Pond halted beneath the archway and saluted, beaming with pride and satisfaction and hospitable goodwill. "I am addressing Colonel Taubmann, I believe? Permit me to bid you welcome to Looe, Colonel, and to congratulate you upon this perfect weather. Nature, as one might say, has endued her gayest garb. You have enjoyed a pleasant drive, I hope?"
"What the devil is the meaning of this, sir?" repeated the Colonel.
Captain Pond looked up at the motto and smiled. "The reference is to Bonaparte. Dear me, I trust—I sincerely trust—you did not even for a moment mistake the application? You must pardon us, Colonel. We are awkward perhaps in our country way—awkward no doubt; but hearty, I assure you."
The Colonel, though choleric, was a good-natured man, and too much of a gentleman to let his temper loose, though sorely tried, when at the bottom of the hill the Die-hards halted his carriage that he might receive not only an address from the Doctor as Mayor, but a large bouquet from the hands of the Doctor's four-year-old daughter, little Miss Sophronia, whom her mother led forward amid the plaudits of the crowd. (The Doctor, I should explain, was a married man of but five years' standing, and his wife and he doted on one another and on little Miss Sophronia, their only child.) This item of the programme, carefully rehearsed beforehand, and executed pat on the moment with the prettiest air of impromptu, took Colonel Taubmann so fairly aback that he found himself stammering thanks before he well knew what had happened: and from that moment he was at the town's mercy. Before he could drop back in the chaise, and almost before the Mayor, casting off his robe and throwing it upon the arm of the town-crier, had exchanged his civic for his military rôle, the horses were unharnessed and a dozen able-bodied men tugging at the traces: and so, desperately gripping a stout bunch of scarlet geraniums, Colonel Taubmann was rattled off amid a whirl of cheering through the narrow streets, over the cobbles, beneath arches and strings of flags and flag-bedecked windows, from which the women leaned and showered rice upon him, with a band playing ahead and a rabble shouting astern, up the hill to the battery, where willing hands had wreathed Looe's four eighteen-pounders with trusses of laurel. The very mark moored off for a target had been decorated with an enormous bunch of holly and a motto—decipherable, as Captain Pond, offering his field-glass, pointed out—
Our compliments to Bonyparty:
He'll find us well and likewise hearty!
Our compliments to Bonyparty:
He'll find us well and likewise hearty!
The moment for resistance, for effective protest, had passed. There was really nothing for the Colonel to do but accept the situation with the best face he could muster. As the chaise drew up alongside the battery, he did indeed cast one wild look around and behind him, but only to catch a bewitching smile from the Mayoress—a young and extremely good-looking woman, with that soft brilliance of complexion which sometimes marks the early days of motherhood. And Captain Pond, with the Doctor and Second Lieutenant Clogg at his elbow, was standing hat in hand by the carriage-step; and the weather was perfect, and every face in the crowd and along the line of the Die-hards so unaffectedly happy, that—to be brief—the Colonel lost his head for the moment and walked through the inspection as in a dream, accepting—or at least seeming to accept—it in the genial holiday spirit in which it was so honestly presented. Bang-Bang! went the eighteen-pounders, and through the smoke Colonel Taubmann saw the pretty Mayoress put up both hands to her ears.
"Damme!" said Gunner Spettigew that evening, "the practice, if a man can speak professionally, was a disgrace. Oke, there, at Number Two gun, must ha' lost his head altogether; for I marked the shot strike the water, and 'twas a good hundred yards short if an inch. 'Hullo!' says I, and glances toward the chap to apologise. If you'll believe me, I'd fairly opened my mouth to tell 'en that nine times out of ten you weren't such a blamed fool as you looked, when a glance at his eye told me he hadn' noticed. The man looked so pleased with everythin', I felt like nudgin' him under the ribs with a rammer: but I dessay 'twas as well I thought better of it. The regular forces be terrible on their dignity at times."