“‘Madre de Dios!’
“‘I hope he won’t burn the village.’
“‘Questos infernales Ingleses! how wicked they are.’
“‘You’d better try what a sack of moidores or doubloons might do with him; he may refuse them, but make the effort.’
“Ha!” said the major, with a long-drawn sigh, “those were pleasant times; alas, that they should ever come to an end! Well, among the old hidalgos I met there was one Don Emanuel Selvio de Tormes, an awful old miser, rich as Croesus, and suspicious as the arch-fiend himself. Lord, how I melted him down! I quartered two squadrons of horse and a troop of flying artillery upon him. How the fellows did eat! Such a consumption of wines was never heard of; and as they began to slacken a little, I took care to replace them by fresh arrivals,—fellows from the mountains, caçadores they call them. At last, my friend Don Emanuel could stand it no longer, and he sent me a diplomatic envoy to negotiate terms, which, upon the whole, I must say, were fair enough; and in a few days after, the caçadores were withdrawn, and I took up my quarters at the château. I have had various chances and changes in this wicked world, but I am free to confess that I never passed a more agreeable time than the seven weeks I spent there. Don Emanuel, when properly managed, became a very pleasant little fellow; Donna Maria, his wife, was a sweet creature. You need not be winking that way. Upon my life she was: rather fat, to be sure, and her age something verging upon the fifties; but she had such eyes, black as sloes, and luscious as ripe grapes; and she was always smiling and ogling, and looking so sweet. Confound me, if I think she wasn’t the most enchanting being in this world, with about ten thousand pounds’ worth of jewels upon her fingers and in her ears. I have her before me at this instant, as she used to sit in the little arbor in the garden, with a Manilla cigar in her mouth, and a little brandy-and-water—quite weak, you know—beside her.
“‘Ah, General,’ she used to say—she always called me general—‘what a glorious career yours is! A soldier is indeed a man.’
“Then she would look at poor Emanuel, who used to sit in a corner, holding his hand to his face, for hours, calculating interest and cent per cent, till he fell asleep.
“Now, he labored under a very singular malady,—not that I ever knew it at the time,—a kind of luxation of the lower jaw, which, when it came on, happened somehow to press upon some vital nerve or other, and left him perfectly paralyzed till it was restored to its proper place. In fact, during the time the agony lasted, he was like one in a trance; for though he could see and hear, he could neither speak nor move, and looked as if he had done with both for many a day to come.
“Well, as I was saying, I knew nothing of all this till a slight circumstance made it known to me. I was seated one evening in the little arbor I mentioned, with Donna Maria. There was a little table before us covered with wines and fruits, a dish of olives, some Castile oranges, and a fresh pine. I remember it well: my eye roved over the little dessert set out in old-fashioned, rich silver dishes, then turned towards the lady herself, with rings and brooches, earrings and chains enough to reward one for sacking a town; and I said to myself, ‘Monsoon, Monsoon, this is better than long marches in the Pyrenees, with a cork-tree for a bed-curtain, and wet grass for a mattress. How pleasantly one might jog on in this world with this little country-house for his abode, and Donna Maria for a companion!’
“I tasted the port; it was delicious. Now, I knew very little Portuguese, but I made some effort to ask if there was much of it in the cellar.