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 grandchildren. Though not so
bitterly prejudiced as the old father, the Captain's wife's friends had
their doubts about the marriage. The place was not a military station,
and they were quiet country folk who knew very little about soldiers,
while what they imagined was not altogether favorable to "red-coats," as
they called them.
Soldiers are well-looking generally, it is true, and the Captain was
more than well-looking--he was handsome; brave, of course it is their
business, and the Captain had V. C. after his name and several bits of
ribbon on his patrol jacket. But then, thought the good people, they are
here to-day and gone to-morrow, you "never know where you have them;"
they are probably in debt, possibly married to several women in several
foreign countries, and, though they are very courteous in society, who
knows how they treat their wives when they drag them off from their
natural friends and protectors to distant lands, where no one can call
them to account?
"Ah, poor thing!" said Mrs. John Bull, junior, as she took off her
husband's coat on his return from business, a week after the Captain's
wedding, "I wonder how she feels? There's no doubt the old man behaved
disgracefully; but it's a great risk marrying a soldier. It stands to
reason, military men aren't domestic; and I wish--Lucy Jane, fetch your
papa's slippers, quick!--she'd had the sense to settle down comfortably
among her friends with a man who would have taken care of her."
"Officers are a wild set, I expect," said Mr. Bull, complacently, as he
stretched his limbs in his own particular arm-chair, into which no
member of his family ever intruded. "But the red-coats carry the day
with plenty of girls who ought to know better. You women are always
caught by a bit of finery. However, there's no use our bothering our
heads about it. As she has brewed she must bake."
The Captain's wife's baking was lighter and more palatable than her
friends believed. The Captain, who took off his own coat when he came
home, and never wore slippers but in his dressing-room, was domestic
enough.
A selfish companion must, doubtless, be a great trial amid the hardships
of military life, but when a soldier is kind-hearted, he is often a much
more helpful and thoughtful and handy husband than any equally
well-meaning civilian. 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 smarter man, more like the lover of his wife's young
days, than Mr. Bull amid his stationary comforts.
Then if the Captain's wife was--as her friends said--"never settled,"
she was also forever entertained by new scenes; and domestic mischances
do not weigh very heavily on people whose possessions are few and their
intellectual interests many.
It is true that there were ladies in the Captain's regiment who passed
by sea and land from one quarter of the globe to another, amid strange
climates and customs, strange trees and flowers, beasts and birds, from
the glittering snow of North America to the orchids of the Cape, from
beautiful Pera to the lily-covered hills of Japan, and who in no place
rose above the fret of domestic worries, and had little to tell on their
return but of the universal misconduct of servants, from Irish "helps"
in the colonies to _compradors_ and China-boys at Shanghai. But it was
not so with the Captain's wife. Moreover, one becomes accustomed to
one's fate, and she moved her whole establishment from the Curragh to
Corfu with less anxiety than that felt by Mrs. Bull over a port-wine
stain on the best table-cloth.
And yet, as years went and children came, the Captain and his wife grew
tired of travelling. New scenes were small comfort when they heard of
the death of old friends. One foot of murky English sky was dearer,
after all, than miles of the unclouded heavens of the South. The gray
hills and overgrown lanes of her old home haunted the Captain's wife by
night and day, and homesickness, 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 an
English resting-place, however small, before everybody 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 to England, 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 to India. 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 young 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 while 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.