She is very pretty, and a good little thing apparently. But they are very poor, and she is very young and lively, and if she falls into bad hands, she would laugh herself into foolish scrapes. At present the husband and wife are very fond of each other, but a girl who marries at fifteen hardly knows what she likes.
When she wrote this passage, Miss Eden might have been a Sibyl, for her words were to become abundantly true.
IV
Except when on active service, officers of the Company's Army were not overworked. Everything was left to the sergeants and corporals; and, while Thomas Atkins and Jack Sepoy trudged in the dust and sweated and drilled in their absurd stocks and tight tunics, the commissioned ranks, lolling in barracks, killed the long hours as they pleased.
Following form, Captain James (the Afghan business had brought him a step in rank) did a certain amount of tiger-shooting and pig-sticking, and a good deal of brandy-swilling, combined with card-playing and gambling. As a husband, he was not a conspicuous success. "He slept," complained Lola, feeling herself neglected, "like a boa-constrictor," and, during the intervals of wakefulness, "drank too much porter." The result was, there were quarrels, instead of love-making, for they both had tempers.
"Runaway matches, like runaway horses," Lola had once written, "are almost sure to end in a smash-up." In this case there was a "smash-up," for Tom James was not always sleeping and drinking. He had other activities. If fond of a glass, he was also fond of a lass. The one among them for whom he evinced a special fondness was a Mrs. Lomer, the wife of a brother officer, the adjutant of his regiment. His partiality was reciprocated.
One morning when, without any suspicion of what was in store for them, Mrs. James and Adjutant Lomer sat down to their chota-hazree, two members of the accustomed breakfast party were missing. Enquiries having been set on foot, the fact was elicited that Captain James and Mrs. Lomer had gone out for an early ride. It must have been a long one, thought the camp, as they did not appear at dinner that evening. Messengers sent to look for them came back with a disturbing report. This was to the effect that the couple had slipped off to the Nilgiri Hills and had decided to stop there.
The next morning a panting native brought a letter from the errant lady addressed to her furious spouse. This missive is (without explaining how he got it) reproduced by an American journalist, T. Everett Harré, in a series of articles, The Heavenly Sinner: "I suggest," runs an extract, "you come to your senses and give me my freedom ... I am going with a man of parts who knows how to give a woman the attentions she craves, and is himself glad to shake off a young chit of a wife who is too brainless to appreciate him."