Many, many years back the Captain's wife had been a child herself, and
had laughed to see the village mummers act "The Peace Egg," and had been
quite happy on Christmas Eve. Happy, though she had no mother. Happy,
though her father was a stern man, very fond of his only child, but with
an obstinate will that not even she dared thwart. She had lived to
thwart it, and he had never forgiven her. It was when she married the
Captain. The old man had a prejudice against soldiers, which was quite
reason enough, in his opinion, for his daughter to sacrifice the
happiness of her future life by giving up the soldier she loved. At last
he gave her her choice between the Captain and his own favor and money.
She chose the Captain, and was disowned and disinherited.
The Captain bore a high character, and was a good and clever officer,
but that went for nothing against the old man's whim. He made a very
good husband too; but even this did not move his father-in-law, who had
never held any intercourse with him or his wife since the day of their
marriage, and who had never seen his own grand-children.
Amid the ups and downs of their wanderings, the discomforts of shipboard
and of stations in the colonies, bad servants, and unwonted sicknesses,
the Captain's tenderness never failed. If the life was rough the Captain
was ready. He had been, by turns, in one strait or another, sick-nurse,
doctor, carpenter, nursemaid and cook to his family, and had, moreover,
an idea that nobody filled these offices quite so well as himself.
Withal, his very profession kept him neat, well-dressed, and active. In
the roughest of their ever-changing quarters he was a smart man, and
never changed his manner from that of the lover of his wife's young
days.
As years went and children came, the Captain and his wife grew tired of
traveling. New scenes were small comfort when they heard of the death of
old friends. One foot of the dear, old, dull home sky was dearer, after
all, than miles of the unclouded heavens of the South. The grey hills
and over-grown lanes of her old home haunted the Captain's wife by night
and day, and home-sickness (that weariest of all sicknesses) began to
take the light out of her eyes before their time. It preyed upon the
Captain too. Now and then he would say, fretfully, "I _should_ like a
resting-place in our own country, however small, before _every_body is
dead! But the children's prospects have to be considered." The continued
estrangement from the old man was an abiding sorrow also, and they had
hopes that, if only they could get home, he might be persuaded to peace
and charity this time.
At last they were sent home. But the hard old father still would not
relent. He returned their letters unopened. This bitter disappointment
made the Captain's wife so ill that she almost died, and in one month
the Captain's hair became iron gray. He reproached himself for having
ever taken the daughter from her father, "to kill her at last," as he
said. And (thinking of his own children) he even reproached himself for
having robbed the old widower of his only child. After two years at home
his regiment was ordered again on foreign duty. He failed to effect an
exchange, and they prepared to move once more--from Chatham to Calcutta.
Never before had the packing to which she was so well accustomed, been
so bitter a task to the Captain's wife.
It was at the darkest hour of this gloomy time that the Captain came in,
waving above his head a letter which changed all their plans.
Now close by the old home of the Captain's wife there had lived a man,
much older than herself, who yet had loved her with a devotion as great
as that of the young Captain. She never knew it, for when he saw that
she had given her heart to his younger rival, he kept silence, and he
never asked for what he knew he might have had--the old man's authority
in his favor. So generous was the affection which he could never
conquer, that he constantly tried to reconcile the father to his
children whilst he lived, and, when he died, he bequeathed his house and
small estate to the woman he had loved.
"It will be a legacy of peace," he thought, on his death bed. "The old
man cannot hold out when she and her children are constantly in sight.
And it may please GOD that I shall know of the reunion I have not been
permitted to see with my eyes."
And thus it came about that the Captain's regiment went to India without
him, and that the Captain's wife and her father lived on opposite sides
of the same road.