The Widowed Bride — page 206: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE WIDOWED BRIDE. 197 child—and she used to sit at her window, with her chin leanin’ on her hand, and her eyes fixed on them little ones, as 1f she could ha’ murdered them and thought it no wrong. For even the wild beasts, my lord, they have an instinct for their own young, and there was always a streak of the tigress in Lady Edith’s hot Indian blood. We never said much about it in words, my lord, but I understood what she wanted, and I promised her it should be done—that when she came back from foreign parts they should not stand in her way.” ‘Woman!’ gasped Lord Glenhampton, ‘“‘you did not dream of—murder!” ‘I must tell my tale in my own way,” crooned Elison, irritably. ‘‘Murder! Why, we that had lived in India thought no more of such things than of killing a troublesome insect who had stung us. Human life isn’t the same thing there that it is here. Where was 1?—yes, I remember-now. She went away—but my heart somehow failed me. I did not let the little innocents find their death in the river that ran at the foot of the fields. There was a gardener at the place, who was a poor feeble thing—he was going to the south of France with a colony, to work in the vineyards— and when they all thought the babes was dead in the river bottom, they was miles away in Jason Garfield’s care. I paid him well for it—I could afford to do it, for my lady had been as generous as a queen!” ‘‘But the corpses that were buried?” eagerly broke in Mr. Eskett, unable longer to conceal his presence. But Elison did not seem to mind it. ‘‘Wait!’ she muttered, rubbing her forehead feebly. ‘Wait! I remember it all—but ye put me out! Yes—the corpses. When the time had come, I took them myself from a far away cemetery church-yard—I knew where they were and how 'to get them, for we who have learned the secrets of the East have ways and means you do not wot of —and I dressed them in the babes’ clothes, and I laid them in the water where they would be sure to be found—and you, Mr. Eskett, thought you were saying the funeral pray- ers over Lord Glenhampton’s daughters, when they were only Madge Holson’s poor little twins that died of scarlet fever two weeks before, and was put under ground at the parish charges.” _ And what became of Jason Garfield?” Eomicbooks (E (0) mn