“Promise me, swear to me!” pants the departing wife to the man who has been faithful to his marriage-vow, but has realized every day since the glamour of the honeymoon faded, that his union with this woman has been a terrible mistake. “Let me go hence contented in the knowledge that you will never marry again, dear! I could not bear to think of you happy in the arms of another woman. Say, now, that it shall never be!”
She is thinking of one special woman as she feebly turns the thumbscrew, and forces her victim to open his jaws to take in the iron choke-pear of the prohibitive vow. He has not the courage or the inhumanity to resist her. Nay! it is impious to refuse to grant the wish of one about to die. So he yields, and she departs; and he goes lonely and unmated for all the days that are his upon earth.
And perhaps it may be the bitter punishment of those who have exacted from us these cruel promises; that, with eyes from which the films of earth have been purged for evermore, they may be fated to see them kept.
LIII
It was a calm, bright day, that third of December, with a mild, sweet westerly wind blowing between a blue, waveless sea and a blue, cloudless sky. So warm and genial the weather, that sandwich-board-men parading the streets of Folkestone behind blue-and-red double-crown bills announcing that Performances would be given at the Town Hall of that Thrilling Melodrama, “The Warlock of the Glen,” by Miss Arabella Smallsopp, of the Principal London Theaters, and a Full Company of Specially Engaged Artists, For Three Nights Only,—were fain to lean against the outer walls of public-houses—thus nefariously concealing from the public eye the colored pictorial representations of Miss Smallsopp in the rôle of the persecuted Countess—Mr. Montague Barnstormer as the usurping Laird, and Master Pilkington as the infant Adalbert—and hide their streaming faces in pots of frothing beer.
And so, over the salty, creaking, tarry-smelling gangway to the deck of the Boulogne packet Britannia. A jovial Irish priest, a pair of prim English spinsters in green veils, their lapdogs and their maid, their manservant and their courier; with Dunoisse and a honeymooning couple, made up the list of the Britannia’s after-cabin passengers. The bride was my Aunt Julietta; Fate would have it so.
For the impression created three brief years before upon the susceptible maiden fancy of my Aunt by the very ingratiating manners and handsome personality of a young foreign gentleman, by chance encountered in a railway-train, had faded; to be replaced by the highly-colored image of a large, loud, heavily-built, sturdily-limbed young man, holding the commission of a junior Captain in Her Majesty’s 444th Irish Regiment of Foot; a well-known fighting corps, distinguished in the annals of the British Army by the significant sobriquet of the “Rathkeale Ragamuffins.”
You saw in Captain Golightly M’Creedy the eldest of fourteen children, begotten of an ancient warrior of Peninsular fame, a certain Lieutenant-General M’Creedy of Creedystown, County Cork, who had served twenty years in the 444th, had left three fingers and half a sword-hilt upon the field of Talavera, and wore a silver plate at the top of his skull, to testify to his having been cut down by a sergeant of French Light Infantry during the Battle of Barrosa, when in the act of capturing an eagle from the foe.
Having thus performed his duty by his country, the veteran thought, and with some reason, that his country owed something to him; and commissions for his sons Golightly, Thaddeus, and Considine being obtained by the paternal interest, these three young gentlemen—as innocent of polite education and technical information as the hairy “lepping” colts they hunted, and the half-bred pointers they shot over—were pitched into the General’s old regiment, and left to sink or swim.
Goliath, Thady, and young Con, after some rasping experiences, mastered the small amount of professional knowledge that was held in those days to be indispensable to the status of an officer and a gentleman. Indeed, by the time the Rathkeale Ragamuffins, with flying colors, banging of drums, and blaring of brazen instruments, marched into the provincial garrison town of Dullingstoke, in the genteeler suburbs of which stood the family mansion of my grandparents, Captain Goliath M’Creedy had attained some degree of reputation in his regiment as a smart officer and a show man.