THE COLLECTED WORKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING (Illustrated Edition). Rudyard Kipling

Consequences

       The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin

       A Germ Destroyer

       Kidnapped

       The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly

       The House of Suddhoo

       His Wedded Wife

       The Broken Link Handicapped

       Beyond the Pale

       In Error

       A Bank Fraud

       Tods' Amendment

       In the Pride of His Youth

       Pig

       The Rout of the White Hussars

       The Bronckhorst Divorce-Case

       Venus Annodomini

       The Bisara of Pooree

       The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows

       The Story of Muhammad Din

       On the Strength of a Likeness

       Wressley of the Foreign Office

       By Word of Mouth

       To Be Held for Reference

       The Three Musketeers

       The Taking of Lungtungpen

       The Daughter of the Regiment

       A Friend’s Friend

       The Madness of Private Ortheris

       Haunted Subalterns

       Bitters Neat

      Lispeth

       Table of Contents

      Look, you have cast out Love! What Gods are these

       You bid me please?

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

       To my own Gods 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 pronunciation.

      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 title of "Mistress of the Northern Hills."

      Whether Christianity improved Lispeth, or whether the gods of her own people would have done as much for her under any circumstances, 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 goddess, five foot ten in her shoes, to clean plates and dishes. So she played with the Chaplain's children and took classes 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 constitutionals, 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."

      This was the first mention Lispeth had ever made of her matrimonial views, and the Chaplain's wife shrieked with horror. However, the man on the sofa needed attention first. He was a young Englishman, and his head had been cut to the bone by something jagged. Lispeth said she had found him down the khud, so she had brought him in.

      He was breathing queerly and was unconscious.

      He