Now, Mrs. Leechy MacLeechy, our Scotch doctor's better half, was a strong-minded Irish woman, who wore a species of turban, and was the terror of the regiment; on each of her fat wrists she wore a bracelet of blood-encrusted medals, torn, as she said, "off Rooshian breasts," and sent to her from Sebastopol by her brother, who was "the matchor—the saynior matchor—devil a less, or the foighting eighty-ayth;" and so this lady, in her deep Galway patois, poured on the Spaniard a broadside that would have sunk the Santissima Trinidad.
Finding her love affair at an end, the cruel donna resolved to cut short mine. Within an hour after this meeting, Pedrillo was summoned; the old Spanish coach was brought forth; the baggage packed, and her farewell cards—P.P.C.—dispatched to the governor and his military secretary; to the aides-de-camp and staff colonel; to the officers commanding regiments, and all the great folks of the place. The old lady and the pretty Paulina got into the depths of the ponderous 'carrozza;' the three-legged stool was strapped to the door; Pedrillo clambered into his bucket-like boots, and muttered many 'carajos!' as he applied his latigo to the sleek sides of the dapple mules, and while their proprietrix was sulking and fuming at Gibraltar and all the heretics who dwelt therein, the huge conveyance crawled along the narrow causeway which forms the communication between the town and the isthmus, and, for the present, thus ended, as I have said, my pleasant little Spanish romance of a month.
A recollection was all that remained to me of Paulina, and of that flirtation which was fast maturing into something of a better and more lasting nature.
CHAPTER II.
THE GUARDA COSTA.
During the two preceding months we had been daily expecting orders to embark for the Crimea, and this expectation formed almost our sole topic at mess; but days became weeks, and weeks became months, yet we heard no more of it than what passed among ourselves.
Transports laden with troops—horse, foot, and artillery—touched daily at the Rock, and steamed on into the bright blue Mediterranean, with spirit-stirring cheers rising from their crowded decks. Regiments junior to ours were withdrawn from the Rock and dispatched to that scene of bravery and bloodshed, of mismanagement and disaster, towards which all our thoughts, our hopes, and hearts were turned; but the route never came for "Ours," and we grew decidedly peevish, and found the dull routine of duty among the endless batteries, bastions, curtains, magazines, and casemates of that mighty fortress which was so long boasted (before the days of steam) as the key of "the great French lake," sufficiently tedious; for we felt that we were merely playing at soldiers like militiamen, while our comrades of the line were engaged in desperate work, and played the great game of war, with the eyes of all the world upon them.
One evening, about a week after the departure of the ladies, I was captain of the guard at the New Mole Fort, and Jack Slingsby was my subaltern. We had just finished the dinner which had been sent to us, hot and smoking, from the mess-house, in a conveyance for the purpose; the windows of the officers' guardroom were open, and with a box of contraband cigars, a few periodicals from the garrison library, a telescope to watch the passing ships, and a bottle or two of very choice mess claret, we were dozing the sunny evening of Andalusia very comfortably away.
The last dispatches from the Crimea had been read and discussed by us; the last lists of killed, wounded, frozen, or missing in the trenches had been conned over for some familiar name, which brought vividly before us some fine fellow we should never see again; but whose sudden fate was the more interesting to us, because it soon might be our own.
Whether it was the result of the good dinner, the good wine, the sultry atmosphere, or our own thoughts that oppressed us, I know not; but we sat long silent, and gazing at the varied scenery and glittering waters of the bay.