The Neihart herald. [volume] (Neihart, Mont.) 1890-1901, 1899-08-05
CHAPTER w

With an imprecation l sprang to my
feet, cursing her for a consumma
firt, and left her sobbing and re-
preaching me for my wrath and
cruelty.
That night | went to town and tried
to drown despair in dissipation. At
the end of a fortnight l had almost
persuaded myself l was cured, when.
n night at the opera, I saw her
seated beside a young fellow of whom
I had been vaguely Jealous from the
beginning. Lord Sandmouth's sailor
son, just returned from sea.
She was smiling on him as she had
smiled on me, and my jealousy broke
forth as fiercely as ever. | could not
tell whether loved or hated her most.
The next day l determined to put the
sea between her and me, but could
not at once decide to which side of the
globe I would steer-whether to make
for Norway or the Nile, New York or
New Jerusalem, when / remembered a
commission, entrusted to me by a. dy-
ing friend in India some two years be-
fore, and l decided on fulfilling 1t be-
fore starting on a longer journey.
He had died of fever in the jungle,
and l was the only European with him
during his illness. He had asked me
on my return home to find out If his
mother was still alive, deliver a pack
age Of letters into her hand, beg her
forgiveness, and tell her how deeply
he regretted their long estrangement.
For fifteen years he had O seen or
heard of her, but he gave me her ad-
dress at their time of parting, in a re-
mote village on the coast of Donegal.
After a weary railway journey, and
many hours painful jolting over miles
of wild barren mountain, l found my
friends mother living in a d~esolate
farmhouse halfway up a craggy peak
overlooking the sea, eight miles by
road from the nearest post-town-and
a more disagreeable, repellent, harsh
toned old woman 1t was never my i'll
luck to come across.
1t was with a feeling of
that I delivered the poor fellows last
request for forgiveness, hearing the
way she sought to make spiritual cap
ital to herself out of his very death,
and improve the occasion for my bene.
fit.
Unceremoniously cutting a pharisai-
cal phrase short, I was in the act of
rising to take my leave when a girl
entered, her apron full Of freshly-dug
potatoes, which she held u to Mrs.
Sassy for inspection.
mike sen you in these, and wants
to know if he's to go digging for the
market"
With a n imperious gesture she ST.
fenced the girl. m~otioning her to the
window, where, after the first startled
glance in my direction, she sat quite
still, looking out to sea.
l resumed my seat half unconcern-
eddy, and stared at the new arrival
with an interest quite unaccountable
to myself; certainly, her beauty did not
appeal to me, she did not even strike
me as being possessed of ordinary
good looks. Her face was covered with
freckles and tanned by the sun, and
her hair fell in an unkempt mass
around her neck and shoulders; her
dress was a coarse serge, unrelieved by
the slightest attempt at trimming or
ornament. While / looked, my
thoughts went back to Edith, on whose
fairness / had often feasted, sitting In
the sunlight, as this girl was now, her
pretty fingers sparkling with dia-
monds, bangles and bracelets tinkling
unsteady on her wrists and mingling
with the soft frou frou of lace and silk
each time she drew her needle through
the everlasting strip Of oatmeal cloth.
Lace-could / imagine such a texture
shadowing that child's little brown
fist lingering the clay-crusted pota-
toes on her knees! began to won
der lazily who she was-servant or re-
Iatiou Of the grisly cbatslaias?-when