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What happened to him when he arrived there must be left untold; suffice it to say that Major Alvaros was never more seen of men, and the mystery of his disappearance remains unsolved to this day, although Carlos Montijo and Jack Singleton are under the delusion that they know what became of him.
In 1827 I was in the house of his son-in-law, Count Teba, at Granada, a gallant, intelligent gentleman, much cut up in the wars, having lost an eye and been maimed in a leg and hand. Some years after, in Madrid, I was invited to the house of his widow, Madame de Montijo, one of the leaders of ton. She received me with the warmth and eagerness of an old friend.
She answered with equal frankness, "I may have had fancies, sire, but I have never forgotten that I was Mademoiselle de Montijo." Such a project of marriage was not approved by the emperor's family, it was not favored by his ministers, and the ladies of his court were all astir.
He stammered out a few halting and stumbling words of thanks for her kindly welcome of him, feeling all the time that he would have liked to kick himself for his stupid gaucherie; and then turned to receive the greeting of Senora Montijo.
Now it happened that on February 15th which fell on a Tuesday Don Hermoso Montijo, his son Carlos, and Jack Singleton, completely worn out by many months of campaigning among the mountains, and several sharp attacks of fever, having amalgamated their considerably augmented band with that of another insurgent leader, and turned the command over to him, succeeded in entering the city of Havana unrecognised, and made their way on board the Thetis which had then been for some time lying idle in the harbour with the intention of recruiting their health by running across the Atlantic for the purpose of procuring a further supply of arms and ammunition, which the continual accessions to the revolutionary ranks caused to be most urgently needed.
The prince-president, in 1852, installed himself here for the autumn season, and among his guests was that exquisite blond beauty, Eugenie Montijo, who, the year after, was to become the empress of the French.
Montijo nodded, and the two lads strode along, conversing upon various topics, until they reached Hyde Park Corner, and swung in through the Park gates, and so on to the grass. "Ah, now at last I can speak freely!" remarked Montijo with a sigh of relief.
For the first fortnight or three weeks following the evanishment of Senor Alvaros a considerable degree of uneasiness prevailed at the hacienda Montijo, the inmates of which daily looked for the appearance of some emissary of the Spanish Government, charged with the duty of investigating the circumstances connected with the disappearance of an important Spanish official: and it was recognised that not only would the enquiries of such an individual be difficult to reply to, but also that his presence would incidentally result in the discovery that the members of the Montijo family, instead of being at Fernando Po, were with one exception at home again.
It arrived late in the afternoon, and was taken straight aboard the yacht, where it was placed at haphazard in the cabins lately occupied by the various members of the Montijo family.
"Louis Napoleon and Eugénie Montijo, Emperor and Empress of France!" he wrote. "One of whom I have had a guest at my cottage on the Hudson; the other of whom, when a child, I have had on my knee at Granada! It seems to cap the climax of the strange dramas of which Paris has been the theatre during my lifetime." In 1855, "Wolfert's Roost" was published.
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