"'At last we have avenged ourselves! Perros y ladrones! Frenchmen, dogs, and murderers, let me scream into your dying ears, that we are Castilian women, and have avenged our wrongs! I have lost my brave husband and his noble sons—by numbers you destroyed them, and side by side they fell on the palace threshold of the kings of Castile. Oh, bloodhounds—worse than devils in the form of men, ye murdered them, and now—my daughter (her voice became choked), my innocent little daughter—but we are revenged—revenged—revenged! Oh, Santa Maria, Virgin, y Madre de Jesu! let us be forgiven—but, fiends, the sure, cold hands of death are upon you—you are dying, for the wine you have drunk is poisoned!'
"Mon Dieu!" said St. Florian, pausing while the perspiration almost suffused his forehead, "still the screech-owl voice of that detestable hag seems to ring in my tingling ears!
"Inspired by terror and rage, I made an effort to spring up, to draw my sabre, to run her through the heart; but the moment my hand touched the hilt, a deadly numbness crept over me; I staggered backward, and while sleep and despair came over my soul, sank prone and insensible on the corpses of my comrades!"
St. Florian paused again for an instant, for he really seemed considerably excited by the recollection of the adventure.
"Parbleu! 'twas a most unpleasant denouement—a devil of a winding-up. Next morning I found my self lying prostrate on the chilly floor of the Church of the Conception, which, with many others, had been converted into a temporary hospital for the sick and wounded. I was sick for seventeen days, and my head ached as if it had been crushed in a vice; while my miserable throat was skinned by the stomach pump and other engines of the medical science, which the staff surgeon had kept at work on me, as they afterwards said, for two consecutive hours.
"Poor Jacques Chataigneur was in the same wretched condition, and lay opposite to me, kennelled on a bed of straw, under the gothic canopy which covered the grave perhaps of some long-bearded hidalgo of old Castile.
"We alone recovered.
"The gay Chevalier de Vivancourt and his three comrades of la Garde Imperiale died; so did poor Jean Graule and all our servants; for the little fury Virginia had administered part of her infernal potion to them too. So to this hour, my friend, I entertain such a horror of all kinds of prepared wine, that I may safely say, 'tis not in the power of man, or even woman, with all her superlative cunning and witchery, to make me taste a single drop that is not pure as when it came from the wine-press."
"And the ladies—what became of them?"
"Donna Elvira," continued my garrulous friend, "disappeared from Madrid on that very night, taking with her the unlucky Virginia, and for a time we heard no more of them, save in the columns of the 'Moniteur' and 'El Espanol,' where, the Lord knows, our malheur made more than noise enough! May mischief dog their heels as two revengeful vixens. But I afterwards learned that the girl assumed another name, and, bestowing her hand on a certain hidalgo of Alava, actually had the happiness to give me shelter one night on the retreat from Vittoria. My whiskers had grown, and she did not recognise me; sacre bleu, if she had! I was never discovered, and blessed my stars that I was sound, wind and limb, when I left her mansion in the morning—Ouf! let me think no more of it, for altogether 't is a story that makes me shudder."