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Penny Dreadfuls, 1899 · page 114 of 295

Lady Evelyn — page 114: what you’re looking at

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Lady Evelyn — page 114: Penny Dreadfuls, 1899

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> nn Vv LY> Be, rs ™ As AY *y ry a ay re. ae Xue : ‘ Wa > 5 og, ae ee * + Ad § pricy ene Ph CRN oe WO in 3S OO OF Pl ee Ve b iy +S ‘ae od) tay! i via a! e A i At N . - \ ae ay ¥ Wh Xe to ‘Ver st vay Lay ee Fe et Ny ¥.: aS) aa P see ’ ! ; ‘ ) » J Al S yo ip ere 4 * ‘ aa) Ls oS * ;% i i 4 reed , ty vy Mother and Daughter, | 107 mother, looking up from her pillows with great dark dilated eyes, that seemed burning into his bad heart, had caughthis wrists in her cold, wan fingers, and whispered weirdly: — “Gerald, the good God has sent me comfort at last! She looks at me with my lost darling’s eyes!” And then she had fallen back, the poor pale lips mur- muring things pitiably small, singing fragments of the old Spanish ballads Rory had loved, and which she had never sung since his loss. Andacurse, deep and mighty, had come, crushed through Lord Clontarf’s teeth. In that hour he could have strangled mother and child. For the frail mite of babyhood, gazing with wide-open eyes trom billows of flannel and muslin and lace, looked at him indeed with the wondrous violet eyes whose light his red right hand had quenched two years before. But the frail babe grew and flourished, and the father loved her with the only lasting, pure and unselfish love of his life. And once more he loved in vain. As her ~ mother had been ere her birth, so the child was to him— cold as snow, passionless as marble, submitting to his caresses, never, never returning them with one word, one look, one thought of love. It was his punishment—or part of it—and the deep, dark, violet, eyes haunted him ever like some avenging ghost. _, All day long they gazed at him in his daughter's beau- tiful face, and at night—oh, Heaven!—in the deep, still, solemn watches of long summer moonlight, of wild win- try storm, Rory Desmond rose up before him—the gold- hred hair dripping with brine, the brilliant azure eyes stony and fixed—pale and horrible from his deep sea grave, until the cold drops rolled down the watcher’s livid face, and his hands had clenched in agony. | Men wondered why the great statesman’s hair had sitvered so soon—why, at fifty, he was more worn, and haggard, and pallid, and hollow-eyed than men of eighty —and set it down to profound study and ceaseless mental labor. And of all the world—his world—only his wife knew or guessed. For a horrible foreshadowing of the truth had dawned upon her. Had she not heard him, in his fitful and broken sleep, toss his arms and struggle wildly, and ery out, with a dreadful voice of agony that had pealed omicbooks.co ae