By-and-by the dreadful news came
that he had committed suicide by cutting his throat with a razor. His
wife and daughters then left the Casa Antigua, and not long afterwards
Dona Mercedes wrote to my mother that they were left penniless; that
their flocks and other possessions at the estancia were to be sold for
the benefit of their creditors, and that she and her daughters were
living on the charity of some of her relations who were not well off.
Her only hope was that her two daughters, being good-looking girls,
would find husbands and be in a position to keep her from want. Her
one word about her dead husband, the lovable, easy-going George Royd,
the bright handsome English boy who had wooed and won her so many
years before, was that she looked upon her meeting with him in
girlhood as the great calamity of her life, that in killing himself
and leaving his wife and daughters to poverty and suffering, he had
committed an unpardonable crime.
So ends the story of our nearest English neighbour.
CHAPTER XI
A BREEDER OF PIEBALDS
La Tapera, a native estancia--Don Gregorio Gandara--His grotesque
appearance and strange laugh--Gandara's wife and her habits and pets--
My dislike of hairless dogs--Gandara's daughters--A pet ostrich--In
the peach orchard--Gandara's herds of piebald brood mares--His
masterful temper--His own saddle-horses--Creating a sensation at
gaucho gatherings--The younger daughter's lovers--Her marriage at our
house--The priest and the wedding breakfast--Demetria forsaken by her
husband.
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