Marions Faith | Page 7

blithe and gay with its merry populace. All the officers' families had joined; several young ladies were spending the spring in garrison and taking their first taste of military life; hops and dances came off almost every night, a "german" every week; rides, drives, hunts, and picnic-parties were of daily occurrence; the young officers were in clover, the young ladies in ecstasy, the young matrons--perhaps not quite so well pleased as when they had the field to themselves in Arizona, where young ladies had been few and far between, and all promised delightfully for the coming summer,--all but the war-cloud rising in the far Northwest.
CHAPTER II.
GARRISON TALK.
It was a picturesque group that assembled every pleasant morning on the veranda of the colonel's quarters. There had been a time in the not very distant past of the regiment when the ladies gathered almost anywhere else in preference, but that was when Colonel Pelham had retained the command, and when his wife sought to rule the garrison after methods of her own devising. However successful may be such feminine usurpation for a time, it is at best but a temporary power, for women are of all things revolutionary. The instances where some ambitious matron has sought to assume the control of the little military bailiwick known as "the garrison" are numerous indeed, but the fingers of one hand are too many to keep tally of the cases of prolonged and peaceful reign. Mrs. Pelham's queendom had been limited to a very brief fortnight,--so 'twas said in the regiment,--despite the fact that the more prominent members of the social circle of the --th had been quite ready to do her every homage on her first arrival,--provided the prime ministry were not given to some rival sister. But Mrs. Pelham's administration had been fraught with errors and disasters enough to wreck a constitutional monarchy, and, as a result, affairs were in a highly socialistic, if not nihilistic condition for some months after the return of the regiment from its exile in Arizona. Only a few of the officers had taken their families thither with them, for the journey in those days was full of vast discomfort and expense, and life there was an isolation; but those ladies who had shared the heat and burden of the Arizona days with their lords were not unnaturally given to regarding themselves as entitled to more consideration as regimental authorities than those of their sisterhood who had remained in comfort in the East. Then, too, there was a little band of heroines who had made the march "cross country" with the --th, and held themselves (and were held by the men) as having a higher place on the regimental unwritten records than those who were sent home by way of the Pacific, San Francisco, and the one railway that then belted the continent. Of these heroines Mrs. Pelham was not, and when she rejoined at Fort Hays, got her house in order and proceeded, though with inward misgiving, to summon her subjects about her, she found that even the faint rally on which she had counted was denied her. The ladies who knew her at Camp Sandy had thrown off the yoke, and those who were joining for the first time had been unmistakably cautioned by the determined Amazons of the homeward march. Courtesy, civility, and a certain degree of cordiality when in their social gatherings, the ladies were willing to extend to the colonel's wife, but the declaration of independence had been signed and sealed,--they would have no more of her dominion.
To a woman of her character garrison life was no longer tolerable to Mrs. Pelham; the colonel, too, was getting tired of it, was aging rapidly and no longer able to take his morning gallops. Then, too, he was utterly lonely; his one daughter, the light of his old eyes, had married the man of her choice during the previous year; his sons were scattered in their own avocations, and the complaints and peevishness of his wife were poor companions for his fireside. The officers welcomed him to their club-room, and gladly strove to interest him in billiards or whist, to the exclusion of the Gleason clique and concomitant poker, which was never played in the colonel's presence; but even this solace was denied him by his wife. She was just as lonely at home, poor lady, and she had to have some one to listen to her long accumulation of feminine trials and grievances, otherwise the overcharged bosom would burst. We claim it an attribute of manhood that "to suffer and be strong" is an every-day affair; but the best of men feel infinite relief in having some trusted friend who will listen in patience to the oft-told story of their struggle. To suffer, be