“He wouldn’t come.”

“Let him alone for coming!  They tell me, sir—­”

“Who tells you?”

“Why, sir, the servants now at the rectory.  Of course, sir, where two families is so near connected, the servants are just as near:  it’s no more than natural.  They tell me now that since you were so kind about the allowance, their talk of you is all changed.”  Then the squire’s anger was heated hot again.  Their talk had all been against him till he had opened his hand in regard to the allowance.  And now when there was something again to be got they could be civil.  There was none of that love of him for himself for which an old man is always hankering,—­for which the sick man breaks his heart,—­but which the old and sick find it so difficult to get from the young and healthy.  It is in nature that the old man should keep the purse in his own pocket, or otherwise he will have so little to attract.  He is weak, querulous, ugly to look at, apt to be greedy, cross, and untidy.  Though he himself can love, what is his love to any one?  Duty demands that one shall smooth his pillow, and some one does smooth it,—­as a duty.  But the old man feels the difference, and remembers the time when there was one who was anxious to share it.

Mr. Prosper was not in years an old man, and had not as yet passed that time of life at which many a man is regarded by his children as the best of their playfellows.  But he was weak in body, self-conscious, and jealous in spirit.  He had the heart to lay out for himself a generous line of conduct, but not the purpose to stick to it steadily.  His nephew had ever been a trouble to him, because he had expected from his nephew a kind of worship to which he had felt that he was entitled as the head of the family.  All good things were to come from him, and therefore good things should be given to him.  Harry had told himself that his uncle was not his father, and that it had not been his fault that he was his uncle’s heir.  He had not asked his uncle for an allowance.  He had grown up with the feeling that Buston Hall was to be his own, and had not regarded his uncle as the donor.  His father, with his large family, had never exacted much,—­had wanted no special attention from him.  And if not his father, then why his uncle?  But his inattention, his absence of gratitude for peculiar gifts, had sunk deep into Mr. Prosper’s bosom.  Hence had come Miss Thoroughbung as his last resource, and Miss Thoroughbung had—­called him Peter.  Hence his mind had wandered to Miss Puffle, and Miss Puffle had gone off with the farmer’s son, and, as he was now informed, had taken to drinking gin.  Therefore he turned his face to the wall and prepared himself to die.

On the next day he sent for Matthew again.  Matthew first came to him always in the morning, but on that occasion very little conversation ever took place.  In the middle of the day he had a bowl of soup brought to him, and by that time had managed to drag himself out of bed, and to clothe himself in his dressing-gown, and to seat himself in his arm-chair.  Then when the soup had been slowly eaten, he would ring his bell, and the conversation would begin.  “I have been thinking over what I was saying yesterday, Matthew.”  Matthew simply assented, but he knew in his heart that his master had been thinking over what he himself had said.