Selected Stories Read Online Free PDF

the Chaplain’s wife had, with her own lips, asserted that the Englishman was coming back.
    â€˜How can what he and you said be untrue?’ asked Lispeth.
    â€˜We said it as an excuse to keep you quiet, child,’ said the Chaplain’s wife.
    â€˜Then you have lied to me,’ said Lispeth, ‘you and he?’
    The Chaplain’s wife bowed her head, and said nothing. Lispeth was silent, too, for a little time; then she went out down the valley, and returned in the dress of a Hill-girl – infamously dirty, but without the nose-stud and ear-rings. She had her hair braided into the long pigtail, helped out with black thread, that Hill-women wear.
    â€˜I am going back to my own people,’ said she. ‘You have killed Lispeth. There is only left old Jadéh’s daughter – the daughter of a
pahari
7 and the servant of
Tarka Devi
. 8 You are all liars, you English.’
    By the time that the Chaplain’s wife had recovered from the shock of the announcement that Lispeth had ’verted to her mother’s gods, the girl had gone; and she never came back.
    She took to her own unclean people savagely, as if to make up the arrears of the life she had stepped out of; and, in a little time, she married a woodcutter who beat her after the manner of
paharis
, and her beauty faded soon.
    â€˜There is no law whereby you can account for the vagaries of theheathen,’ said the Chaplain’s wife, ‘and I believe that Lispeth was always at heart an infidel.’ Seeing she had been taken into the Church of England at the mature age of five weeks, this statement does not do credit to the Chaplain’s wife.
    Lispeth was a very old woman when she died. She had always a perfect command of English, and when she was sufficiently drunk, could sometimes be induced to tell the story of her first love-affair.
    It was hard then to realize that the bleared, wrinkled creature, exactly like a wisp of charred rag, could ever have been ‘Lispeth of the Kotgarh Mission’.

Venus Annodomini 1
    And the years went on, as the years must do;
But our great Diana was always new–
Fresh, and blooming, and blonde, and fair,
With azure eyes and with aureate hair;
And all the folk, as they came or went,
Offered her praise to her heart’s content.
    Diana of Ephesus
.
    She had nothing to do with Number Eighteen in the Braccio Nuovo 2 of the Vatican, between Visconti’s Ceres and the God of the Nile. She was purely an Indian deity – an Anglo-Indian deity, that is to say – and we called her
the
Venus Annodomini, to distinguish her from other Annodominis of the same everlasting order. There was a legend among the Hills that she had once been young; but no living man was prepared to come forward and say boldly that the legend was true. Men rode up to Simla, and stayed, and went away and made their name and did their life’s work, and returned again to find the Venus Annodomini exactly as they had left her. She was as immutable as the Hills. But not quite so green. All that a girl of eighteen could do in the way of riding, walking, dancing, picnicking and over-exertion generally, the Venus Annodomini did, and showed no sign of fatigue or trace of weariness. Besides perpetual youth, she had discovered, men said, the secret of perpetual health; and her fame spread about the land. From a mere woman, she grew to be an Institution, insomuch that no young man could be said to be properly formed, who had not, at some time or another, worshipped at the shrine of the Venus Annodomini. There was no one like her, though there were many imitations. Six years in her eyes were no more than six months to ordinary women; and ten made less visible impression on her than does a week’s fever on an ordinary woman. Everyone adored her, and in return she was pleasant and courteous to nearly everyone. Youth had been a habit of hers for so long, that she could not part with it – never realized,