I do not know why Captain Nichols first left England.It was a matter upon which he was reticent, and with persons of his kind a direct question is never very discreet.He hinted at undeserved misfortune, and there is no doubt that he looked upon himself as the victim of injustice.My fancy played with the various forms of fraud and violence, and I agreed with him sympathetically when he remarked that the authorities in the old country were so damned technical.But it was nice to see that any unpleasantness he had endured in his native land had not impaired his ardent patriotism.He frequently declared that England was the finest country in the world, sir, and he felt a lively superiority over Americans, Colonials, Dagos, Dutchmen, and Kanakas.
But I do not think he was a happy man.He suffered from dyspepsia, and he might often be seen sucking a tablet of pepsin; in the morning hisappetite was poor; but this affliction alone would hardly have impaired his spirits.He had a greater cause of discontent with life than this.Eight years before he had rashly married a wife.There are men whom a merciful Providence has undoubtedly ordained to a single life, but who from wilfulness or through circumstances they could not cope with have flown in the face of its decrees.There is no object more deserving of pity than the married bachelor.Of such was Captain Nichols.I met his wife.She was a woman of twenty-eight, I should think, though of a type whose age is always doubtful; for she cannot have looked different when she was twenty, and at forty would look no older.She gave me an impression of extraordinary tightness.Her plain face with its narrow lips was tight, her skin was stretched tightly over her bones, her smile was tight, her hair was tight, her clothes were tight, and the white drill she wore had all the effect of black bombazine.I could not imagine why Captain Nichols had married her, and having married her why he had not deserted her.Perhaps he had, often, and his melancholy arose from the fact that he could never succeed.However far he went and in howsoever secret a place he hid himself, I felt sure that Mrs.Nichols, inexorable as fate and remorseless as conscience, would presently rejoin him.He could as little escape her as the cause can escape the effect.
The rogue, like the artist and perhaps the gentleman, belongs to no class.He is not embarrassed by the <i sans gene> of the hobo, nor put out of countenance by the etiquette of the prince.But Mrs.Nichols belonged to the well-defined class, of late become vocal, which is known as the lower-middle.Her father, in fact, was a policeman.I am certain that he was an efficient one.I do not know what her hold was on the Captain, but I do not think it was love.I never heard her speak, but it may be that in private she had a copious conversation.At any rate, Captain Nichols was frightened to death of her.Sometimes, sitting with me on the terrace of the hotel, he would become conscious that she was walking in the road outside.She did not call him; she gave no sign that she was aware of his existence; she merely walked up and down composedly.Then a strange uneasiness would seize the Captain; he would look at his watch and sigh.
"Well, I must be off," he said.
Neither wit nor whisky could detain him then.Yet he was a man who had faced undaunted hurricane and typhoon, and would not have hesitated to fight a dozen unarmed niggers with nothing but a revolver to help him.Sometimes Mrs.Nichols would send her daughter, a pale-faced, sullen child of seven, to the hotel.
"Mother wants you," she said, in a whining tone."Very well, my dear," said Captain Nichols.
He rose to his feet at once, and accompanied his daughter along the road.I suppose it was a very pretty example of the triumph of spirit over matter, and so my digression has at least the advantage of a moral.
