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The Peace Egg
by
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.
III.
The eldest of the Captain’s children was a boy. He was named Robert, after his grandfather, and seemed to have inherited a good deal of the old gentleman’s character, mixed with gentler traits. He was a fair, fine boy, tall and stout for his age, with the Captain’s regular features, and, he flattered himself, the Captain’s firm step and martial bearing. He was apt–like his grandfather–to hold his own will to be other people’s law, and happily for the peace of the nursery this opinion was devoutly shared by his brother Nicholas. Though the Captain had sold his commission, Robert continued to command an irregular force of volunteers in the nursery, and never was a colonel more despotic. His brothers and sisters were by turn infantry, cavalry, engineers, and artillery, according to his whim, and when his affections finally settled upon the Highlanders of “The Black Watch,” no female power could compel him to keep his stockings above his knees, or his knickerbockers below them.
The Captain alone was a match for his strong-willed son.
“If you please, sir,” said Sarah, one morning, flouncing in upon the Captain, just as he was about to start for the neighboring town, “if you please, sir, I wish you’d speak to Master Robert. He’s past my powers.”
“I’ve no doubt of it,” thought the Captain; but he only said, “Well, what’s the matter?”
“Night after night do I put him to bed,” said Sarah, “and night after night does he get up as soon as I’m out of the room, and says he’s orderly officer for the evening, and goes about in his night-shirt and his feet as bare as boards.”
The Captain fingered his heavy moustache to hide a smile, but he listened patiently to Sarah’s complaints.
“It ain’t so much him I should mind, sir,” she continued, “but he goes round the beds and wakes up the other young gentlemen and Miss Dora, one after another, and when I speak to him he gives me all the sauce he can lay his tongue to, and says he’s going round the guards. The other night I tried to put him back in his bed, but he got away and ran all over the house, me hunting him everywhere, and not a sign of him, till he jumps out on me from the garret-stairs and nearly knocks me down. ‘I’ve visited the outposts, Sarah,’ says he; ‘all’s well,’ and off he goes to bed as bold as brass.”