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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 1, 1900)
22 THE BATTALION. the consequences of his disgraceful act, had killed himself. Filled with horror, the old Judge turned away in time to catch in his arms the fainting wife of the fallen man, suddenly and terribly made aware that she was now a widow. . Later, the body was examined, and in an inner vest pocket was found a letter addressed to his wife, bidding her farewell, and stating that he could not survive the disgrace he had brought upon her and all connected with him. The clothes were the same he wore when he had gone away from home a few days before. He had been seen in them on the streets of Savannah, in Darien, and on Jekyll Island. There was no doubt in the mind of any man as to his identity. The funeral took place as quietly as possible; and his wife mourned for him. Yes, she mourned. He had certain ly loved her; and his awful end took away somewhat from the meanness of the act which had made it necessary. It was easy for her to persuade herself that he had yielded to immense temp tation in a moment of weakness. Death flings a mantle over those weak nesses that make it possible for one to fall lower and drop into the pit of degrading crime. Pity at last inclined her to hold that he must have been of unsound mind when the deed was done. But she was y oung, and naturally of a buoyant temperament. Wooers came, the sense of life’s sweetness re turned, and in time she listened, pleas ed, to one of them. Meanwhile, however, the fate of an other seemed, in some mysterious way, to have been linked with that of her lost husband. Malcolm Tarnish had been his chos en companion in revels, at the card- table, and on the race course. It was known that, when at his wits’ end for money, Gastreet had more than once borrowed of Tarnish what he needed; and it began to be whispered about that pressure for payment of some of these loans had urged the unhappy man to the shameful deed of forgery. For Tarnish had disappeared about the time of $he finding of Gastreet’s body in the Dutart garden. Tarnish was out of view, with mys tery and vague suspicion thick about his memory. Gastreet, it was believed, had atoned for his fault against so ciety by Anally ridding society of his presence. The balance was in favor of the dead. With this deeper shade on that of his former associate relieving some what the blackness of her first hus band’s memory, the young widow ven tured to marry again. Manton West- wood was an estimable gentleman, who had loved her almost in her child hood; she felt sure of happiness with him. He was a member of the Georgia Legislature, which, at that time, held its sessions in the little town of Mil- ledgeville. At the time of the inci dent I am telling, he was in attend ance on the General Assembly of the State. In the absence of her husband, the young wife lived with no one in the house except her cousin, Mariam McAL pine. This girl, a brave maiden, and sensible, withal, but with just a. touch of the Highland turn for superstition, was, as it happened, the cousin also of Mrs. Westwood’s first husband, and
