Volume Two—Chapter Twenty One.
Boulogne-sur-Mer.
Major Mahon is a soldier of the rollicking Irish type—good company as ever drank wine at a regimental mess-table, or whisky-and-water under the canvas of a tent. Brave in war, too, as evinced by sundry scars of wounds given by the sabres of rebellious sowars, and an empty sleeve dangling down by his side. This same token almost proclaims that he is no longer in the army. For he is not—having left it disabled at the close of the Indian Mutiny: after the relief of Lucknow, where he also parted with his arm.
He is not rich; one reason for his being in Boulogne—convenient place for men of moderate means. There he has rented a house, in which for nearly a twelvemonth he has been residing: a small domicile, meublé. Still, large enough for his needs: for the Major, though nigh forty years of age, has never thought of getting married; or, if so, has not carried out the intention. As a bachelor in the French watering-place, his income of five hundred per annum supplies all his wants—far better than if it were in an English one.
But economy is not his only reason for sojourning in Boulogne. There is another alike creditable to him, or more. He has a sister, much younger than himself, receiving education there; an only sister, for whom he feels the strongest affection, and likes to be beside her.
For all he sees her only at stated times, and with no great frequency. Her school is attached to a convent, and she is in it as a pensionnaire.
All these matters are made known to Captain Ryecroft on the day after his arrival at Boulogne. Not in the morning. It has been spent in promenading through the streets of the lower town and along the jetée, with a visit to the grand lion of the place, l’Establissement de Bains, ending in an hour or two passed at the “cercle” of which the Major is a member, and where his old campaigning comrade, against all protestations, is introduced to the half-dozen “good fellows as ever stretched legs under mahogany.”
It is not till a later hour, however, after a quiet dinner in the Major’s own house, and during a stroll upon the ramparts of the Haute Ville, that these confidences are given to his guest, with all the exuberant frankness of the Hibernian heart.