The Peace Egg and Other tales | Page 2

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 amongst 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 for ever 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 snows 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
grey hills and overgrown 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 an English resting-place, 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 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-grey. 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)