Rudyard Kipling

Plain Tales from the Hills Rudyard Kipling

She was the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadeh his wife. One year their maize failed, andtwo bears spent the night in their only poppy-field just above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarth side;so, next season, they turned Christian, and brought their baby to the Mission to be baptized. TheKotgarth Chaplain christened her Elizabeth, and "Lispeth" is the Hill or pahari pronunciation. Later, cholera came into the Kotgarth Valley and carried off Sonoo and Jadeh, and Lispethbecame half-servant, half-companion to the wife of the then Chaplain of Kotgarth. This was afterthe reign of the Moravian missionaries, but before Kotgarth 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 doneas much for her under any circumstances, I do not know; but she grew very lovely. When a Hill girlgrows lovely, she is worth traveling fifty miles over bad ground to look upon. Lispeth had a Greekface-one of those faces people paint so often, and see so seldom. She was of a pale, ivory colorand, for her race, extremely tall. Also, she possessed eyes that were wonderful; and, had she not beendressed in the abominable print-cloths affected by Missions, you would, meeting her on the hill-sideunexpectedly, 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 dosome Hill girls. Her own people hated her because she had, they said, become a memsahib andwashed herself daily; and the Chaplain's wife did not know what to do with her. Somehow, onecannot ask a stately goddess, five foot ten in her shoes, to clean plates and dishes. So she played withthe 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 thegirl ought to take service in Simla as a nurse or something "genteel." But Lispeth did not want totake service. She was very happy where she was. When travellers-there were not many in those years-came to Kotgarth, Lispeth used to lockherself into her own room for fear they might take her away to Simla, or somewhere out into theunknown world. One day, a few months after she was seventeen years old, Lispeth went out for a walk. She didnot walk in the manner of English ladies-a mile and a half out, and a ride back again. She coveredbetween twenty and thirty miles in her little constitutionals, all about and about, between Kotgarthand Narkunda. This time she came back at full dusk, stepping down the breakneck descent intoKotgarth with something heavy in her arms