The Spanish Bride (7 page)

She seemed to be doubtful; to set her mind at rest, he called up his private groom, a stolidly respectable person who inspired even a nervous Spanish lady with confidence, and laid on him strict orders to keep his guests’ privacy inviolate.

‘Yessir,’ said English West woodenly, betraying no surprise. He took a look at the elder lady, and decided that there was nothing in it; he looked at Juana, all her alarms now ended, sitting on the edge of Harry’s bed, like an inquisitive robin, and encountered a shy smile that reminded him of an urchin detected in crime. He was visibly shaken, and retired with his head in a whirl.

Despairing of getting Harry to listen to reason, James Stewart, seeing in the marriage the ruin of his friend’s career, suggested desperately that it was not fair to pitchfork so young a girl into matrimony. Speaking to her in halting Spanish (for he could never achieve any fluency in a foreign tongue), he tried to ask her what her real wishes were, at the same time assuring her of protection in the camp.

She caught at his meaning, and smiled happily. ‘Please, I will marry Enrique,’ she said. She was quite sure, neither bashful nor coquettish. Life in the tail of an army held no terrors for her. She liked soldiers, she told Jack Molloy sunnily. Her own brother had been a soldier. Dead now, of course: killed by the French. Jack, seizing the opportunity afforded by Harry’s temporary absence, tried hard to paint for the little Spanish lady a true picture of the privations and the dangers ahead of her if she became Harry’s wife. She listened to him politely, encouraging his stumbling Spanish, occasionally supplying him with an elusive word, but she did not seem to be in the least impressed by what he said. When he described the discomforts of travelling in the rear of the army, all amongst the cumbrous baggage-train, and surrounded by camp-followers, perhaps not setting eyes on Harry for days together, she looked wise, and said with considerable decision that she thought better, perhaps, not to travel in the rear of the army

‘Much better!’ Molloy assured her. ‘You see, you did not entirely realize, señorita, what such a life would mean to a delicate female.’

‘It is very true. Besides, if I could not see my Enrique for days together I should not like it,’ said Juana.

‘How should you, indeed? And for him, consider the anxiety of being separated from you, not knowing how you fared, and unable to go to you!’

‘Yes, that is so,’ she agreed. ‘It is a very good thing that you have told me all this, for I am quite ignorant, though not, I think, stupid. I shall not go to the rear. It is not at all what I wish. I shall stay beside Enrique.”

She seemed to think that she had discovered the obvious solution to any possible difficulty in the way of her marriage. Molloy felt rather helpless. He tried to tell her that what she suggested was quite unheard of, but faltered under her candid, trustful look of inquiry, and muttered: ‘Oh, the devil!’

‘The worst of it is that she’s such a dear little soul—really, an angelic creature, Charlie!—that it makes it hellish hard to tell her the brutal truth,’ he told Eeles later. ‘Dash it, there she sits, not a bit shy, and with no more knowledge of what’s ahead of her than a baby!’ ‘Well, why couldn’t you tell her?’ demanded Eeles irritably. ‘That’s what you went to do, isn’t it?’

‘I did try. But she’s got a way of looking at one that makes it impossible for a man to go on. She says she shall stay beside Harry.’

‘Then poor Harry’s lost!’ said Eeles. ‘He, who used to be the example of a duty-officer! Damn it, he must listen to reason!’

‘Well, he won’t. He’s quite mad, and is gone off to find a decent woman to be the girl’s servant.’

‘Barnard must speak to him, then!’

‘No use. By what Kincaid tells me, the girl’s family is well-known to his lordship. Lord Fitzroy stayed with them after Talavera. Harry means to lay the whole story before Lord Wellington.’ ‘Good God, if he does, he’ll ruin himself with Wellington!’

‘So I warned him, but he will have it that his lordship has only to see his precious Juana to be won over. And when you come to think of it,’ Molloy added, reflecting on his lordship’s predilection for the fair sex, ‘he’s probably right.’

2

His lordship, happily for Brigade-Major Smith, was in high good-humour. He remembered the family of Los Dolores de León perfectly, and although he privately thought the careworn woman before him shockingly aged, he was delighted to meet an old acquaintance again. As for Juana, there was never any need to doubt that she would captivate his lordship. He said he had known her when she was a child (it was not quite three years since his lordship’s stay at Badajos, but possibly Juana had grown to womanhood since then, thought Colonel De Burgh, his lordship’s interested ADC); he did not suppose that she remembered him, but he claimed the privilege of a very old friend, for all that, and kissed her cheek, and called her his Juanita.

Nothing could have passed off more smoothly. The victor of Badajos was not the Wellington whose blistering tongue caused quite senior officers to come away from an interview with him chalk-white and stuttering, and with knees trembling so much that they could scarcely walk. The Wellington who stood exchanging reminiscences with Juana’s sister was a cheerful, rather loud-voiced gentleman, very plainly but neatly dressed in a blue coat, and biscuit-coloured pantaloons; a gentleman whose frequent laugh showed him to be in excellent spirits, and who was no more unapproachable now that he was a peer than he had been when he was merely Sir Arthur Wellesley. A most unaffected creature, Viscount Wellington of Talavera (but they would make him an Earl after his brilliant successes at Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajos); none of the airs of your consciously great man about him. He could be a little stiff sometimes, to be sure; and he had a way of looking down his high-boned nose which made strong men shake in their shoes; but if nothing had occurred to make him irritable he was excellent company: very easy and natural, no airs and graces at all, in fact; and hugely enjoying a good joke.

Brigade-Major Smith’s lightning courtship made him laugh. If he disapproved of a promising young officer’s tying himself up in matrimony, he did not say so. The baggage-train of the army was already clogged and hampered by wives and camp-followers; it is possible that his lordship, a realist, thought that one more would make little difference to an already existing nuisance. He said that Smith was a damned lucky young fellow, and at the end of twenty minutes’ bantering conversation with Juana, announced that he would give the bride away himself. It was evident that he had taken a great fancy to the sparkling little creature: quite fatherly, of course, or perhaps avuncular. A shocking flirt, his lordship, but not the man to poach on a junior officer’s preserves.

He seemed genuinely distressed to hear of the sisters’ predicament, but the elder’s condemnation of the sack of Badajos merely drew from him a cool. ‘War is always a terrible business, señora. The town ought not to have held out against us once the breaches were practicable.’ He turned to Juana, adding in a softer voice: ‘But Smith will take care of you, my dear. Report him to me if he doesn’t!’

He quite saw the need for Smith to marry Juana. ‘One of the best families,’ he told him. ‘Fallen on hard times, have they? Ah—h’m! You’ll have to get a priest. Probably devilish strict.’

But Harry had already arranged that. The priest attached to the 88th Connaught Rangers had been engaged to perform the ceremony. Harry and Juana were going to have a drumhead wedding.

‘Very well,’ said his lordship. ‘But you’d better get it done quickly. We shall break up from camp in a day or two.’

It was done two days later, in spite of the protests of Harry’s friends. Everyone of them took the gloomiest view of his future. They said he was a fool, before they had been presented to Juana; and after that, they said that from now on he would be sure to neglect his duty ‘You’re wrong, you’re entirely wrong!’ Harry answered, very bright-eyed these days, walking as though on springs. ‘I’ll stick to my duty. Why, how the devil can I support a wife if I don’t get preferment? You’ll see!’

But he was careful to explain it all to Juana. Sitting with his arm round her waist on the eve of their wedding-day, he told her what his duties were, how they would keep him often from her side, yet how impossible it would be for him to shirk the least part of them. She flamed suddenly, chest swelling, eyes flashing. ‘Do you think that I would permit you to neglect your duty?’ she demanded. ‘You are abominable, a villain! I am a de León!’ ‘Oho!’ said Harry, amused by this glimpse of his love’s fiery temper. ‘Little guerrera!’ ‘Oh!’ To be called a virago made her speechless. She would have boxed his ears had he not caught her hand, and held it. ‘It is not true!’

‘No, no! Una nina buena!’ he assured her, laughing at her.

‘No! I am not any longer a child, and you shall not mock at me. And I have not got a very bad temper. Not at all, Absolutamente no! I am—I am—’

‘Dolce como la miel,’ he suggested.

She regarded him suspiciously, saw the betraying quiver of a muscle at the corner of his mouth, and burst into a little crow of laughter. ‘Yes! Yes! Sweeter than honey when people are polite to me!’

He jerked her roughly into his arms, crushing the breath out of her. ‘Enamorada! amanta!’ he said huskily, covering her face with kisses.

She whispered: ‘Love me! Love me always!’ ‘Mientras viva! As long as life!’ he answered.

She nestled against his breast. ‘And I too, Enrique. Con toda mi alma, bien amado!’ Seeing him swept off his feet by this tempestuous passion, Harry’s friends accepted defeat, yet accounted him lost. There was very little for even the keenest duty-officer to do while the British troops continued to ravage Badajos, so that Harry’s vow not to neglect the least part of his work could not at once be put to the test. The inward glow in his narrowed eyes, a certain tautness of muscle, that consuming look of hunger he had, did not promise well for the brigade, thought his anxious friends. But they attended his wedding, putting good faces on the disaster; and even poor Johnston, that superb Rifleman, lying in his tent with a shattered arm, roused himself from his agony to send Harry a message of good luck. There were tragic gaps in the ranks of Harry’s friends, but still they mustered a good many, gathered about the upturned drum in the camp of the Connaught Rangers, those brave, drunken blackguards of old Picton’s. Overhead, a wind-tossed sky showed patches of blue between billows of white cloud. A strong sunlight beat down upon the deserted tents; the wind fluttered the priest’s stole, and the mantilla cast over Juana’s head. There was an unaccustomed silence in the camp, but from the walled town faint shots sounded from time to time, and the subdued murmur of tumult, hushed by distance. The troops inside Badajos were shooting at the pigeons that wheeled and circled round the Cathedral tower; the muted noise of an army let loose to enjoy itself made Juana’s sister shiver, and glance fearfully across the Rivillas stream to the bastioned walls. But, after all, there were two ways of looking at the sack of Badajos. ‘Well!’ said Paddy Aisy, brewing a strong potion of spiced wine in one of the camp-kettles, ‘now id’s all past and gone, and wasn’t it the divil’s own dthroll business, the taking that same place; and wasn’t Long-Nose a quare lad to shtrive to get into it, seeing how it was definded? But what else could he do, afther all? Didn’t he recave ordhers to do it; and didn’t he say to us all, “Boys,” says he, “ids myself that’s sorry to throuble yees upon this dirty arrand; but we must do it, for all that; and if yees can get into it, by nook or by crook, be the powers, id’ll be the making of yees all—and of me too!” and didn’t he spake the thruth? “Sure,” says he, “did I ever tell yees a lie, or spake a word to yees that wasn’t as thrue as the Gospil? and if yees folly my directions, there’s nothing can bate yees?” And sure,’ added Paddy, refreshing himself from the contents of his kettle, ‘afther we got in, was he like the rest, sthriving to put us out before we divarted ourselves? Not he, faith! It was he that spoke to the boys dacently. “Well, boys, “says he, when he met myself and a few more aising a house of a thrifle, “Well, boys,” says he (for he knew the button), “God bless the work! Id’s myself that’s proud to think how complately yees tuk the concate out of the Frinch 88th, in the Castel last night!” Not very like his lordship’s laconic style, perhaps; yet certainly his lordship was turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the atrocities being committed within the walls of the town. The only thing that had made his lordship angry was being nearly shot down by feu-de-joie, fired enthusiastically in his honour by a mob of drunken privates, when he rode through Badajos. Paddy Aisy’s sentiments were very much his lordship’s own, however crudely expressed. After the sack had lasted for eighteen hours, his lordship had issued a cool General Order. ‘It is now full time that the plunder of Badajos should cease,’ he wrote, accepting war as it was, no affair of ancient chivalry, but a bloody, desperate business. ‘An officer, and six steady non-commissioned officers will be sent from each regiment, British and Portuguese, of the 3rd, 4th, 7th, and Light Divisions into the town at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning, to bring away any men still straggling there.’

But on the 8th April, when his lordship stood at the drumhead with Juana on his gallant arm, his orders had not been obeyed, for no officer, and no six non-commissioned officers, however steady, could hope to control the activities of any regiment at present rioting in the streets, or wenching in the white-washed houses of Badajos.

Yet his lordship seemed quite unperturbed, whispering his nonsense into Juana’s ear. His lordship did not love his men, but without effort he understood them. Presently he would send a strong force into Badajos, and erect a gallows there, but not until his wild, heroic troops had glutted themselves with conquest. Had his lordship cared, after the bloody combat at Ciudad Rodrigo, when he had met the men of the 95th Rifles clad in every imaginable costume, excepting only the dress of a Rifleman? Not a bit! They had had their swords stuck full of hams, tongues, and loaves of bread; they were weighed down by their plunder; but when they had set up a cheer for his lordship, he had acknowledged it in his usual stiff way, and had asked the officer of the leading company, quite casually, what regiment it was? And when he was told that he beheld some of his crack troops, he had given a neigh of laughter, and had ridden on.