The wooden object was a box that held his money, the savings of a labourer’s lifetime.  Seventy-one pounds!  It seemed to him an ocean of gold, never to be exhausted.  The long toil of saving it was almost done.  After the Frampton job, he would begin enjoying it, cautiously at first, taking a bit of work now and again, and then a bit of holiday.

All the savour of life was connected for him with that box.  His mind ran over the constant excitements of the many small loans he had made from it to his relations and friends.  A shilling in the pound interest—­he had never taken less and he had never asked more.  He had only lent to people he knew well, people in the village whom he could look after, and seldom for a term longer than three months, for to be parted from his money at all gave him physical pain.  He had once suffered great anxiety over a loan to his eldest brother of thirty pounds.  But in the end James had paid it all back.  He could still feel tingling through him the passionate joy with which he had counted out the recovered sovereigns, with the extra three half-sovereigns of interest.

Muster Drew indeed!  John fell into an angry inward argument against his suggestion of the savings-bank.  It was an argument he had often rehearsed, often declaimed, and at bottom it all came to this—­without that box under his bed, his life would have sunk to dulness and decrepitude; he would have been merely a pitiful and lonely old man.  He had neither wife nor children, all for the hoard’s sake; but while the hoard was there, to be handled any hour, he regretted nothing.  Besides, there was the peasant’s rooted distrust of offices, and paper transactions, of any routine that checks his free will and frightens his inexperience.  He was still eagerly thinking when the light began to flood into his room, and before he could compose himself to sleep the women called him.

But he shed no more tears.  He saw Eliza die, his companion of forty years, and hardly felt it.  What troubled him all through the last scene was the thought that now he should never know why she was so set against ’Bessie’s ‘avin it.’

SCENE II

It was, indeed, the general opinion in Clinton Magna that John Bolderfield—­or ‘Borrofull,’ as the village pronounced it, took his sister-in-law’s death too lightly.  The women especially pronounced him a hard heart.  Here was ‘poor Eliza’ gone, Eliza who had kept him decent and comfortable for forty years, ever since he was a lad, and he could go about whistling, and—­to talk to him—­as gay as a lark!  Yet John contributed handsomely to the burial expenses—­Eliza having already, through her burial club, provided herself with a more than regulation interment; and he gave Jim’s Louisa her mourning.  Nevertheless these things did not avail.  It was felt instinctively that he was not beaten down as he ought to have been, and Mrs. Saunders, the smith’s wife, was applauded when she said to her neighbours that ’you couldn’t expeck a man with John Bolderfield’s money to have as many feelins as other people.’  Whence it would seem that the capitalist is no more truly popular in small societies than in large.