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Winter Evening Tales by Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
page 53 of 256 (20%)
her, because she "had done well unto herself." Yet, at the last end, the
same seed brought forth the same fruit, and the Lady of Hawksworth Hall
learned, with bitter rapidity, that riches are too poor to buy love.
Scarcely had she taken possession of her splendid home before she longed
for the placid happiness of her mother's cottage, and those evening
walks under the beech-trees, whose very memory was now a sin. Over her
beautiful face there crept a pathetic shadow, which irritated the rude
and noisy squire like a reproach. He had always had what he wanted. Not
even the beauty of all the border counties had been beyond his means to
buy but somehow he felt as if in this bargain he had been overreached.
Her better part eluded his possession, and he felt dissatisfied and
angry. Expostulations grew into cruel words; cruel words came to cruder
blows. _Yes, blows_. English gentlemen thirty years ago knew their
privileges; and that was one of them. She was as much and as lawfully
his as the horses in his stables or the hounds in his kennels. He beat
them, too, when they did not obey him. Her beauty had betrayed her into
the hands of misery. She had wedded it, and there was no escape for her.
One day, when her despair and suffering was very great, some tempting
devil brought her a glass of brandy, and she drank it. It gave her back
for a few hours her departed sceptre; but at what a price! Her slave
soon became her master. Stimulus and stupefaction, physical exhaustion
and mental horrors, the abandonment of friends and the brutality of a
coarse and cruel husband, brought her at last to the day of reckoning.
She died, seven years after her marriage, in the delirium of opium.
There were physicians and servants around her, and an unloving husband
waiting for the news of his release. I think I would rather have died
where Lettice did--under the sky, with the solemn mountains lifting
their heads in a perpetual prayer around me, and that faithful dog
licking my hands, and mourning my wasted life.

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