CHAPTER LIII

THE HEIRESS PROVES THAT SHE INHERITS THE FEUD AND I GO DRIFTING

My grandfather lived eight months after a scene that had afforded him high gratification at the heaviest cost a plain man can pay for his pleasures:  it killed him.

My father’s supple nature helped him to survive it in apparently unimpeded health, so that the world might well suppose him unconquerable, as he meant that it should.  But I, who was with him, knew, though he never talked of his wounds, they had been driven into his heart.  He collapsed in speech, and became what he used to call ’one of the ordinary nodding men,’ forsaken of his swamping initiative.  I merely observed him; I did not invite his confidences, being myself in no mood to give sympathy or to receive it.  I was about as tender in my care of him as a military escort bound to deliver up a captive alive.

I left him at Bulsted on my way to London to face the creditors.  Adversity had not lowered the admiration of the captain and his wife for the magnificent host of those select and lofty entertainments which I was led by my errand to examine in the skeleton, and with a wonder as big as theirs, but of another complexion:  They hung about him, and perused and petted him quaintly; it was grotesque; they thought him deeply injured:  by what, by whom, they could not say; but Julia was disappointed in me for refraining to come out with a sally on his behalf.  He had quite intoxicated their imaginations.  Julia told me of the things he did not do as marvellingly as of the things he did or had done; the charm, it seemed, was to find herself familiar with him to the extent of all but nursing him and making him belong to her.  Pilgrims coming upon the source of the mysteriously-abounding river, hardly revere it the less because they love it more when they behold the babbling channels it issues from; and the sense of possession is the secret, I suppose.  Julia could inform me rapturously that her charge had slept eighteen hours at a spell.  His remarks upon the proposal to fetch a doctor, feeble in themselves, were delicious to her, because they recalled his old humour to show his great spirit, and from her and from Captain William in turn I was condemned to hear how he had said this and that of the doctor, which in my opinion might have been more concise.  ’Really, deuced good indeed!’ Captain William would exclaim.  ’Don’t you see it, Harry, my boy?  He denies the doctor has a right to cast him out of the world on account of his having been the official to introduce him, and he’ll only consent to be visited when he happens to be as incapable of resisting as upon their very first encounter.’

The doctor and death and marriage, I ventured to remind the captain, had been riddled in this fashion by the whole army of humourists and their echoes.