Part 71 (2/2)

”Surely that's a very important cla.s.s. Its members must be the ordained leaders of popular thought.”

”Anywhere else they might be leaders, but they have no social weight here.”

Pagett laughed. ”That's an epigrammatic way of putting it, Orde.”

”Is it? Let's see,” said the Deputy Commissioner of Amara, striding into the suns.h.i.+ne toward a half-naked gardener potting roses. He took the man's hoe, and went to a rain-scarped bank at the bottom of the garden.

”Come here, Pagett,” he said, and cut at the sun-baked soil. After three strokes there rolled from under the blade of the hoe the half of a clanking skeleton that settled at Pagett's feet in an unseemly jumble of bones. The M.P. drew back.

”Our houses are built on cemeteries,” said Orde. ”There are scores of thousands of graves within ten miles.”

Pagett was contemplating the skull with the awed fascination of a man who has but little to do with the dead. ”India's a very curious place,”

said he, after a pause.

”Ah? You'll know all about it in three months. Come in to lunch,” said Orde.

VOLUME V PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS

LISPETH

Look, you have cast out Love! What G.o.ds are these You bid me please?

The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so!

To my own G.o.ds I go.

It may be they shall give me greater ease Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.

--The Convert.

She was the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadeh his wife. One year their maize failed, and two bears spent the night in their only poppy-field just above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarh side; so, next season, they turned Christian, and brought their baby to the Mission to be baptized. The Kotgarh Chaplain christened her Elizabeth, and ”Lispeth” is the Hill or pahari p.r.o.nunciation.

Later, cholera came into the Kotgarh Valley and carried off Sonoo and Jadeh, and Lispeth became half-servant, half-companion to the wife of the then Chaplain of Kotgarh. This was after the reign of the Moravian missionaries, but before Kotgarh had quite forgotten her t.i.tle of ”Mistress of the Northern Hills.”

Whether Christianity improved Lispeth, or whether the G.o.ds of her own people would have done as much for her under any circ.u.mstances, I do not know; but she grew very lovely. When a Hill girl grows lovely, she is worth traveling fifty miles over bad ground to look upon. Lispeth had a Greek face--one of those faces people paint so often, and see so seldom.

She was of a pale, ivory color and, for her race, extremely tall. Also, she possessed eyes that were wonderful; and, had she not been dressed in the abominable print-cloths affected by Missions, you would, meeting her on the hill-side unexpectedly, have thought her the original Diana of the Romans going out to slay.

Lispeth took to Christianity readily, and did not abandon it when she reached womanhood, as do some Hill girls. Her own people hated her because she had, they said, become a memsahib and washed herself daily; and the Chaplain's wife did not know what to do with her. Somehow, one cannot ask a stately G.o.ddess, five foot ten in her shoes, to clean plates and dishes. So she played with the Chaplain's children and took cla.s.ses in the Sunday School, and read all the books in the house, and grew more and more beautiful, like the Princesses in fairy tales. The Chaplain's wife said that the girl ought to take service in Simla as a nurse or something ”genteel.” But Lispeth did not want to take service.

She was very happy where she was.

When travellers--there were not many in those years--came to Kotgarh, Lispeth used to lock herself into her own room for fear they might take her away to Simla, or somewhere out into the unknown world.

One day, a few months after she was seventeen years old, Lispeth went out for a walk. She did not walk in the manner of English ladies--a mile and a half out, and a ride back again. She covered between twenty and thirty miles in her little const.i.tutionals, all about and about, between Kotgarh and Narkunda. This time she came back at full dusk, stepping down the breakneck descent into Kotgarh with something heavy in her arms. The Chaplain's wife was dozing in the drawing-room when Lispeth came in breathing hard and very exhausted with her burden. Lispeth put it down on the sofa, and said simply:

”This is my husband. I found him on the Bagi Road. He has hurt himself.

We will nurse him, and when he is well, your husband shall marry him to me.”

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