After the closing of the chapter of his first unhappy marriage, Charles Hearn married the lady he had been attached to before he met Rosa Tessima. At the Registration Office in Stephen's Green, Dublin, the record may be seen entered of the marriage, in 1857, of Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn, to Alicia (Posy), widow of George John Crawford.
Immediately afterwards, accompanied by his wife, Charles Hearn proceeded with his regiment to India. His eldest boy he entrusted to the care of Mrs. Justin Brenane, who promised to leave him her money, on condition that she was allowed to bring him up in the Roman Catholic faith.
Neither Mrs. Brenane nor Charles Hearn reckoned with the spirit that was housed in the boy's frail body, nor the fiery independence of mind that made him cast off all ecclesiastical rule and declare himself, as a boy at college, a Pantheist and Free Thinker, thus playing into the hands of those who for purposes of their own sought to alienate him from his grand-aunt.
Daniel James, the second boy, was ultimately sent to his Uncle Richard in Paris.
Of his father, Lafcadio retained but a faint memory. In an article written upon Lafcadio after his death, Mr. Tunison, his Cincinnati friend, says he used often to refer to a "blonde lady," who had wrecked his childhood, and been the means of separating him from his mother. His father used to write to him from India, he tells Mrs. Atkinson, "printing every letter with the pen, so that I could read it. I remember he told me something about a tiger getting into his room. I never wrote to him, I think Auntie used to say something like this: 'I do not forbid you to write to your father, child,' but she did not look as though she wished me to, and I was lazy."
Lafcadio and his father never met again, for on November 21st, 1866, on his return journey to England, Surgeon-Major Charles Bush Hearn died of Indian fever, on board the English steamship Mula at Suez, thus ending a distinguished career, and a military service of twenty-four years.
With the separation of his parents, Lafcadio's childhood came to an end. We now have to follow the development of this strange, undisciplined nature, through boyhood into manhood, and ultimately to fame, remembering always that henceforth he was unprotected by a father's advice or care, unsoothed by a mother's tenderness—that tenderness generally most freely bestowed on those least likely to conquer in the arena of life.