So the poor lady died; and some people said the Captain “felt it very much.”  I don’t think he did.  But he was not very well just then, and looked the part of mourner and penitent to admiration—­being seedy and sick.  He drank a great deal of brandy and water that night, and called in Farmer Dobbs, for want of better company, to drink with him; and told him all his grievances, and how happy he and “the poor lady up-stairs” might have been, had it not been for liars, and pick-thanks, and tale-bearers, and the like, who came between them—­meaning Molly Doyle—­whom, as he waxed eloquent over his liquor, he came at last to curse and rail at by name, with more than his accustomed freedom.  And he described his own natural character and amiability in such moving terms, that he wept maudlin tears of sensibility over his theme; and when Dobbs was gone, drank some more grog, and took to railing and cursing again by himself; and then mounted the stairs unsteadily, to see “what the devil Doyle and the other ——­ old witches were about in poor Peg’s room.”

When he pushed open the door, he found some half-dozen crones, chiefly Irish, from the neighbouring town of Hackleton, sitting over tea and snuff, etc., with candles lighted round the corpse, which was arrayed in a strangely cut robe of brown serge.  She had secretly belonged to some order—­I think the Carmelite, but I am not certain—­and wore the habit in her coffin.

“What the d——­ are you doing with my wife?” cried the Captain, rather thickly.  “How dare you dress her up in this ——­ trumpery, you—­you cheating old witch; and what’s that candle doing in her hand?”

I think he was a little startled, for the spectacle was grisly enough.  The dead lady was arrayed in this strange brown robe, and in her rigid fingers, as in a socket, with the large wooden beads and cross wound round it, burned a wax candle, shedding its white light over the sharp features of the corpse.  Moll Doyle was not to be put down by the Captain, whom she hated, and accordingly, in her phrase, “he got as good as he gave.”  And the Captain’s wrath waxed fiercer, and he chucked the wax taper from the dead hand, and was on the point of flinging it at the old serving-woman’s head.

“The holy candle, you sinner!” cried she.

“I’ve a mind to make you eat it, you beast,” cried the Captain.

But I think he had not known before what it was, for he subsided a little sulkily, and he stuffed his hand with the candle (quite extinct by this time) into his pocket, and said he—­

“You know devilish well you had no business going on with y-y-your d——­ witch-craft about my poor wife, without my leave—­you do—­and you’ll please take off that d——­ brown pinafore, and get her decently into her coffin, and I’ll pitch your devil’s waxlight into the sink.”

And the Captain stalked out of the room.

“An’ now her poor sowl’s in prison, you wretch, be the mains o’ ye; an’ may yer own be shut into the wick o’ that same candle, till it’s burned out, ye savage.”