Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/51

 was supposed to have died—killed in an earthquake, which destroyed some Italian towns. He was visiting a friend in Ireland at that time, and in his wild way fell in love with a wonderfully beautiful peasant girl. They were married, and he brought her to Friars' Moat, where the county refused to call—he was disliked, anyhow, for his lawlessness and his atheism and his awful temper. Soon he tired of his wife, and when little Ian was a baby it was discovered that his Italian wife was alive after all—a cruel thing for the poor Irish girl! She reproached her husband something dreadful, they say—for the baby's sake—and he was so furious that he refused to give her more money than an Irish peasant could live upon. Hoping that he'd do something for the child, the unhappy creature took a tiny cottage near by, and the wicked old man did have the decency to pay for the boy's schooling. When the little chap got old enough to hear the story, though, and of his father's meanness to the beautiful peasant mother, he wouldn't have another penny from him. And one day they met and there was an awful scene, for the boy inherited something of his father's wild temper. The story is that the old man struck him, for his 'impudence,' with a stick he carried; that the boy—only fourteen or so—wrenched it from him and threw it in his face. Of course that ended everything. Old Sir Ian disinherited the boy, to whom he meant to leave a few