Plain Tales from the Hills | Page 5

of evenings, and cried to herself,
and tried to imagine where her Englishman was. As she had no ideas of
distance or steamboats, her notions were somewhat erroneous. It would
not have made the least difference had she been perfectly correct; for
the Englishman had no intention of coming back to marry a Hill girl.
He forgot all about her by the time he was butterfly-hunting in Assam.
He wrote a book on the East afterwards. Lispeth's name did not appear.
At the end of three months, Lispeth made daily pilgrimage to Narkunda
to see if her Englishman was coming along the road. It gave her
comfort, and the Chaplain's wife, finding her happier, thought that she
was getting over her "barbarous and most indelicate folly." A little later
the walks ceased to help Lispeth and her temper grew very bad. The
Chaplain's wife thought this a profitable time to let her know the real
state of affairs--that the Englishman had only promised his love to keep

her quiet--that he had never meant anything, and that it was "wrong and
improper" of Lispeth to think of marriage with an Englishman, who
was of a superior clay, besides being promised in marriage to a girl of
his own people. Lispeth said that all this was clearly impossible,
because he had said he loved her, and the Chaplain's wife had, with her
own lips, asserted that the Englishman was coming back.
"How can what he and you said be untrue?" asked Lispeth.
"We said it as an excuse to keep you quiet, child," said the Chaplain's
wife.
"Then you have lied to me," said Lispeth, "you and he?"
The Chaplain's wife bowed her head, and said nothing. Lispeth was
silent, too for a little time; then she went out down the valley, and
returned in the dress of a Hill girl--infamously dirty, but without the
nose and ear rings. She had her hair braided into the long pig-tail,
helped out with black thread, that Hill women wear.
"I am going back to my own people," said she. "You have killed
Lispeth. There is only left old Jadeh's daughter--the daughter of a
pahari and the servant of Tarka Devi. You are all liars, you English."
By the time that the Chaplain's wife had recovered from the shock of
the announcement that Lispeth had 'verted to her mother's gods, the girl
had gone; and she never came back.
She took to her own unclean people savagely, as if to make up the
arrears of the life she had stepped out of; and, in a little time, she
married a wood-cutter who beat her, after the manner of paharis, and
her beauty faded soon.
"There is no law whereby you can account for the vagaries of the
heathen," said the Chaplain's wife, "and I believe that Lispeth was
always at heart an infidel." Seeing she had been taken into the Church
of England at the mature age of five weeks, this statement does not do
credit to the Chaplain's wife.
Lispeth was a very old woman when she died. She always had a perfect
command of English, and when she was sufficiently drunk, could
sometimes be induced to tell the story of her first love- affair.
It was hard then to realize that the bleared, wrinkled creature, so like a
wisp of charred rag, could ever have been "Lispeth of the Kotgarth
Mission."

THREE AND--AN EXTRA.
"When halter and heel ropes are slipped, do not give chase with sticks
but with gram."
Punjabi Proverb.
After marriage arrives a reaction, sometimes a big, sometimes a little
one; but it comes sooner or later, and must be tided over by both parties
if they desire the rest of their lives to go with the current.
In the case of the Cusack-Bremmils this reaction did not set in till the
third year after the wedding. Bremmil was hard to hold at the best of
times; but he was a beautiful husband until the baby died and Mrs.
Bremmil wore black, and grew thin, and mourned as if the bottom of
the universe had fallen out. Perhaps Bremmil ought to have comforted
her. He tried to do so, I think; but the more he comforted the more Mrs.
Bremmil grieved, and, consequently, the more uncomfortable Bremmil
grew. The fact was that they both needed a tonic. And they got it. Mrs.
Bremmil can afford to laugh now, but it was no laughing matter to her
at the time.
You see, Mrs. Hauksbee appeared on the horizon; and where she
existed was fair chance of trouble. At Simla her bye-name was the
"Stormy Petrel." She had won that title five times to my own certain
knowledge. She was a little, brown, thin, almost skinny, woman, with
big, rolling, violet-blue eyes, and the