CHAPTER XI.
I must here interrupt the thread of my narrative, in order to give a few particulars respecting my host and his family, which may serve as samples of the olden time of India.
The general was the youngest of the ten sons of Sir Gerald Capsicum, a fire-eating baronet of a “rare ould ancient Irish family,” and was sent to India about anno 1750, with little more than his sword, his brogue, and the family love of fighting wherewith to assist him on in the world. The general’s career had been varied, and he had gone through all the adventures, public and domestic, which usually happened to those whose lot, in respect to time and place, had been similarly cast.
I have said the general was an Irishman; it follows as a natural consequence, that he was extremely susceptible of the tenderest of passions; and as in his early days there were few white dames in the land, like many others he e’en put up with a black one—attached himself to Sung Sittara Begum (the “Queen of Stars”), one of the gazelle-eyed daughters of Hind.
This union, though not cemented by the forms of marriage, was, on the whole, more harmonious and enduring than many that are. I say on the whole; for if tradition may be depended on, the Queen of Stars was wont, now and then, to exhibit traits of vivacity, which were rather of a striking than of a pleasing nature. With these trifling breaks, the union long harmoniously subsisted, and was not finally dissolved till the angel of death, one fine day, summoned the Begum to the seventh heaven.
By the Begum, the general had Major John Capsicum, an officer in the service, and commanding the forces of his highness Ram Row Bhow Punt, the Jam of Ghurrumnugger, a Mahratta potentate of small note, whose territories it might be difficult to discover in the map; secondly, Augustus, an indigo planter in the district of Jessore, commonly called by the general’s native servants (who, like all the rest of the fraternity, were not au fait at European names) “Disgustus Sahib;” and Mrs. Colonel Yellowly, a lady of high and indomitable spirit, who died some years before the period to which I am referring, and of whom I could learn little more from record or tradition than that she was rather celebrated for the manufacture of Chutnee and Dopiajah curry, talked a good deal of a certain terra incognita called “home,” and ultimately went off rather suddenly,—as some affirm, from chagrin in consequence of having a point of precedence decided against her, arising out of a dispute with Lady Jiggs at a presidency party as to who de jure should first come in or go out.
The stickling for precedency, by the way, is a disorder very prevalent in colonial dependencies; and like gravitation, which increases with the squares of the distance, its intensity seems to be governed by a somewhat similar law, and to exist in an inverse ratio to the apparent cause for it.
Long after the general had passed his fiftieth year, he married the mother of the amiable widow (a nonpareil grafted on a crab), by all accounts a charming person, who, yielding to importunity, took old Capsicum to gratify the ambition of worldly parents, in whose opinion wealth and rank are all that are essential to connubial happiness.
Poor thing! she gave her hand, but her heart was another’s. The worm-i’-the-bud was there, and soon did the business. Opportunity offered—nature was too powerful for the colder suggestions of duty—she eloped with the man she loved; but even love cannot flourish in an atmosphere of scorn. Mankind are intensely gregarious. Shunned—deserted by her own sex, who, like birds (though from more obvious cause), peck their wounded fellows to death—she died in a lone outpost, and the winds of the jungles pipe over her solitary grave.
“C’est bien difficile d’être fidèle