I went to Sandhurst and I was expelled from Sandhurst—very rightly and justly—for an offence, or rather the culminating offence of a series of offences, that were everything but mean, dishonest or underhand. I was wild, hasty, undisciplined and I was lost for want of a father to thrash me as a boy, and by possession of a most loving and devoted mother who worshipped, spoiled—and ruined me.
I enlisted under an assumed name in my late father's (and grandfather's) old Regiment of Foot and quickly rose to the rank of Sergeant-Major.
I might have had a commission in South Africa but I decided that I preferred ruling in hell to serving in heaven, and declined to be a grey-haired Lieutenant and a nuisance to the Officers' Mess of the Corps I would not leave until compelled.
In time I was compelled and I became Sergeant-Major of the Volunteer
Rifle Corps here and husband of a—well—de mortuis nil nisi bonum.
Why I married I don't know.
The English girl of the class from which soldiers are drawn never attracted me in the very least, and I simply could not have married one, though a paragon of virtue and compendium of housewifely qualities.
Admirable and pretty as Miss Higgs, Miss Bloggs, or Miss Muggins might be, my youthful training prevented my seeing beyond her fringe, finger-nails, figure, and aspirates, to her solid excellences;—and from sergeants'-dances I returned quite heart-whole and still unplighted to the Colonel's cook. But Dolores De Souza was different.
There was absolutely nothing to offend the most fastidious taste in her speech, appearance, or manners. She was convent-bred, accomplished, refined, gentle, worthless and wicked. The good Sisters of the Society of the Broken Heart had polished the exterior of the Eurasian orphan very highly—but the polish was a thin veneer on very cheap and unseasoned wood.
It is a strange fact that, while I could respect the solid virtues of the aspirateless Misses Higgs, Bloggs or Muggins, I could never have married one of them; yet, while I knew Dolores to be a heartless flirt, and more than suspected her to be of most unrigid principle, I was infatuated with her dark beauty, her grace, her wiles and witchery—and asked her to become my wife.
The good Sisters of the Society of the Broken Heart had taught Dolores to sing beautifully, to play upon the piano and the guitar, to embroider, to paint mauve roses on pink tambourines and many other useful arts, graces and accomplishments—but they had not taught her practical morality nor anything of cooking, marketing, plain sewing, house-cleaning or anything else of house-keeping. However, having been bred as I had been bred, I could take the form and let the substance go, accept the shapely husks and shout not for the grain, and prefer a pretty song, and a rose in black hair over a shell-like ear, to a square meal. I fear the average Sergeant-Major would have beaten Dolores within a week of matrimony, but I strove to make loss, discomfort, and disappointment a discipline,—and music, silk dresses and daintiness an aesthetic re-training to a barrack-blunted mind.