Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/410

 in the neighbourhood, and will be down in half an hour, to smite everybody, hip and thigh.

Nothing would suit my host but that the Canonigo should take a seat in our carriage, and be of our party up to Mexico. The good priest was nothing loth, for he owned that he was dreadfully frightened of the brigands, who had been committing frightful atrocities lately on the Jalapa road. I might have mentioned to you, ere this, that we had brought with us from La Soledad a sufficiently imposing escort, in the shape of an entire company of French infantry, who journeyed with us on the "ride and tie" principle; half of them crowded inside and outside a kind of omnibus we had picked up in the post office at Orizaba, and half of them hanging on to the wheels—the omnibus often required pushing up hill or dragging out of a rut—or riding on the mules, or trudging through the sand or over the pebbles with their shakoes on the points of their bayonets, and their blue cotton handkerchiefs tied round their shins, with, perhaps, a damp plantain leaf superadded. These were the merriest set of fellows I ever met with, and they laughed and smoked and sang songs and capered all the way up to Mexico. They never asked us for drink money, and were uniformly respectful, polite, and cheerful. They had a little boy-soldier with them—an "enfant de troupe" in training to be a drummer—who was their pet and plaything and darling, and for whom, when he was tired of riding in or outside the omnibus, they would rig a kind of litter, made of knapsacks and ammunition blankets laid on crossed muskets, and with a canopy above of pocket-handkerchiefs tied together and held up by twigs. And they would carry the little man along, the soldiers singing and he singing, with a "Tra la, la! Tra la, la!" and the rest of the company beating their hands in applause from the top of the 'bus. There were but two officers with the company—the captain, who rode with us, and a sub-lieutenant, who preferred occupying the box seat of the longer vehicle. The captain was a pudgy little man, who, his stoutness notwithstanding, wore stays. He had been in Algeria, and, according to his showing, whenever he and Abd-el-Kader met, there had been weeping in the Smala and wailing in the Douar. He had been through the Crimean campaign, and, not very obscurely, insinuated that he, and not Marshal Pellisier, should, if the right man had got his deserts, have been made Duke of Malakoff. In fact, the fat little captain would have bragged Major Longbow's head off. He overflowed with good humour, however, and had a capital baritone voice. The sub, on the other hand, was a moody gaunt man, whose solitary epaulette seemed to have made him at once low-spirited and lopsided. It was as well, perhaps, that he did not form one of our party; for he evidently hated his captain with great fervour, and when they met, off duty, there was generally a squabble. "I know my duty, but I also know my rights," the sub used to mutter, looking fixed bayonets at his superior officer. He was scrupulously attentive to his duties, however, and never missed saluting his pudgy chief. I think the captain would have been infinitely rejoiced had the omnibus toppled over one of the yawning precipices in the Cumbrera, and had the dismal chasm comfortably engulfed that cantankerous sub-lieutenant.

But the Canonigo had a berline. Well; that was very soon got rid of. The postmaster, who was also landlord of the fonda where we dined—I remember that he expressed a hyperbolical wish to kiss my hands and feet at departing, and that he obliged us with two bad five-franc pieces in change for the napoleon we tendered him—would have none of the canonical equipage. "Vala nada," it is worth nothing, he said contemptuously. He hoped that the Canonigo would leave it "until called for," and that he would never call for it. But he was not destined to profit by the relinquishment of the vehicle. At first I suggested that it should be affected to the use of the cantankerous sub-lieutenant, and that fatigue parties of light infantry should be harnessed to the pole, and drag it; but this proposal did not meet with much favour—especially among the light infantry—and the sub himself vehemently protested against making his entrance into Mexico "before his chiefs," in a carriage, which he declared to be fit only for a quack doctor. "There may be those," he remarked, with a sardonic glance at the baritone captain, "who would like to play Dulcamara, or imitate Mengin in a Roman helmet, selling pencils in the Place de la Concorde; for my part, I know my duties, and I know my rights." In this dilemma Pedro Hilo was sent for. Pedro, a rather handsome half-caste, was the administrador or steward to the lordly proprietor of a hacienda—a maguey plantation in the neighbourhood. He was accustomed to buy everything, even, as my