For Richard, desperate, distracted,
careless of what happened to him, rode out one day through a pelting
rain. Result, congested lungs; the poor wastrel, who had no wish to
live, was soon satisfactorily dead.
"When James Hampden got that news, he rose up from his chair, laid
the book he had been reading--it was Baxter's 'Saint's Rest'--down
on the library table and fell as if lightning had struck him.
Apoplexy, it was said; a thrust through the heart, I should call it.
Richard the sinner was none the less Richard his first-born.
"Hard upon the heels of these two disasters came a third, the case
of Jessamine Hynds. This Jessamine--a highly gifted, imperious
creature, proud as Lucifer, after the manner of the Hyndses--was an
orphan, reared in Hynds House. She was some several years older than
her cousins, to whom she was greatly attached. The trouble so preyed
upon her that she became melancholy, and one fine day disappeared
and was never afterward found. There was great hue and cry made for
her, and men riding hither and yon, for this was a Hynds woman, and
her story touched popular imagination, so that she is supposed,"
said the lawyer dryly, "to wander around Hynds House o' nights,
crying for Richard and searching for the lost jewels.
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