"It was said to be a certain person known as Dick Ramble of 'Ours'," continued Slingsby, in his bantering way; "but I am deuced glad it is all over, like any other flirtation, and you are 'free to win and free to wed another;' I don't like Spaniards—and never shall. In fact, I have hated them ever since that unpleasant adventure I had at Malaga last year, and about which I shall tell you some other time; but here come Shafton, Morton, and some more of 'Ours,' and as soon as we leave the mess, we shall adjourn to the billiard table."
What this 'unpleasant adventure,' to which Slingsby referred—and to which I had often heard him refer before—might have been I cared not then to inquire; but walked on, more chilled than consoled by his rattling manner and by that mess-room raillery, which I have known to laugh many a wiser man than your humble servant, out of an honest and sincere passion; while it has also been the saving of many an inflammable "Newcome," or unfledged, but amatory ensign, from the lures of those passé garrison belles, whose feathers are beginning to moult, and whose brilliance is beginning to fade, after a long career of close flirtation, round-dancing, supper-crushes, cold fowl, ices, pink champagne, affectionate farewells in the grey morning, when the drowsy drum-boys beat reveillie, or when the route arrived, and each lover—a lover alas! but for the time—departed with his regiment to return no more.
Of Paulina de Lucena (such a pretty name it is!) I had seen much during her short residence in Gibraltar, and had become—what shall I term it, for 'Ours' were not marrying men—charmed by her sweetness of temper and piquant manner, as well as by her acknowledged beauty.
Jack Slingsby stigmatised this under the denomination of "being spooney;" but as I have a proper abhorrence of all that slang phraseology which is peculiar to the university, the barrack, the clubhouse, and the turf, I believe I shall quote honest Jack no more, but proceed in my own fashion.
She was the only daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Don Ignacio de Lucena, a Knight of San Ferdinando, an officer of Lancers in the service of the Queen of Spain, in one of whose battles he was taken prisoner by Cabrera, and shot in cold blood with fifty of his soldiers: for this ferocious Carlist behaved with such barbarity to the Constitutional Army that one of its officers, who had been a prisoner, assured me that at Valencia he and his comrades were subjected to such cruelty by their captors, that after a thousand sufferings, on being denied food, they were driven to the dreadful necessity of devouring the body of a fellow captive.*
* A work published in Valencia positively asserts this.
The profession of her father, together with the circumstance of one of her brothers being in the Spanish sea service, and another in the army of Portugal, caused her to view with a favourable eye all who have the honour to live by the sword; and my small smattering of Spanish, which I picked up in those idle hours of a garrison life that otherwise must have hung heavily over me, gave me every facility for cultivating a friendship which had in it everything that might serve to dazzle and charm a young man; for with the idea of Andalusia and Spanish beauty we are apt to conjure up so much of love and of romance that the imagination gets the better of the senses; besides, those rogues of travellers and romancers have always given us such exaggerated pictures of Spanish loveliness.
In regularity of feature and fairness of complexion, Donna Paulina was inferior to many a pretty girl I have seen at home. Her most glorious attractions were her dark glossy tresses and her black eloquent eyes—brilliant, sad, subduing, ever varying, but ever black, and under their long, long fringes, ever melting. In beauty of form and grace of movement she was unmatched out of her own province, and I can assure the reader that the first time her very striking figure appeared among the promenaders in the Alameda of Gibraltar with her drapery of black lace falling from a high pearl comb, her mantilla, her close-fitting dress, her pretty feet in their Cordovan slippers, and her large fan, the unhappy bones of which were ever in a state of flutter and excitement, and between which she shot her most dangerous glances, it occasioned much marvel, curiosity, and speculation at all the mess-tables of Her Majesty's forces stationed on the rock.
To such a companion imagine the charm of acting cicerone about the fortifications of old Gibraltar; imagine our evening rambles round Rosia Bay and along the new mole, where the ships of the British and Yankees, the French, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Turks, Greeks, Moors, Arabs, and Jews, with all their varieties of ensigns, costume and rig, are riding at anchor, and where many a grim mortar and cannon gun frown over the new bastion; imagine the transition from the sunny Alameda to the deep cool galleries which are hewn in the heart of the living rock, and which are now turned to such war-like purposes as old Pomponius Mela, who first wrote of them, could never have conceived, and where we wandered for many an hour, the pretty donna forgetting the starched customs of her country so far as to grasp my arm with both her hands at times, for the aspect of these places filled her with timidity and awe.
To these subterranean batteries there is admitted but a dim and dubious light that steals through their embrasures, glinting on the damp slime of their walls and roof of rock; and on the heavy ordnance—sixty-eight pounders some of them—which stand on frames of metal, on piles of balls and bombs, and on doors studded with iron, that lead to other and inner vaults full of missiles and unknown terrors.