Winter Evening Tales by Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
page 53 of 256 (20%)
page 53 of 256 (20%)
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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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