The colonel soon left, taking with him, secretly, Lucia, who had already begun to feel contented in the atmosphere of tenderness and luxury that surrounded her.
The fit of passion that Juan Garcia had experienced, united with grief, shame, and remorse, so affected his constitution, already spent and worn by the life he had been leading, that he fell into an inflammatory
fever, from which he never recovered. A little while before he died, he said to his old friend: “Uncle Bartolo, you hit the mark when you told me that the day would come when I should have eyes left only to weep. It has come, and—well, better to close them for ever.”
* * * * *
Two years had passed since the events last narrated, and five since Lucas left home. His regiment was in Cordova, where a general recently arrived from Madrid was going to review the troops of the garrison.
The evening before the parade, Lucas was in the quarters with several other soldiers from Arcos, one of whom, with the careless and constant gayety which characterizes the Spanish soldier, and proves, to the extreme scandal and disgust of the votaries of utility, the non-material genius of the nation, was alternately touching his guitar, and singing:
“Oh! ‘tis gay to be a soldier.
Standing guard with tired feet,
And head erect, in stiff cravat,
And nothing at all to eat.
“And, for the bread of munition,
He gets from the King of Spain,
To be ‘Alert there, sentinel!’
All night, and never complain.
“This is the life of a soldier.
To march wherever he’s led,
To sleep under alien shelter,
And die in a hospital bed.”
At this moment the picket-guard, which had just been relieved from duty at the general’s quarters, came up.