Bessie Costrell | Page 4

let Louisa order her
about. But before the end, Eliza had come to be restless when she was
not there.
Now, however, Eliza knew no more, and the little widow sat gazing at
her with the tears on her cheeks. John, too, felt his eyes wet.
But after half an hour, when there was still no change, he was turning
away to go back to bed, when the widow touched his arm.
"Won't yer give her a kiss, John?" she said timidly. "She wor a good
sister to you."
John, with a tremor, stooped, and clumsily did as he was told--the first
time in his life he had ever done so for Mary Anne. Then, stepping as
noiselessly as he could on his bare feet, he hurried away. A man shares
nothing of that yearning attraction which draws women to a death-bed
as such. Instead, John felt a sudden sickness at his heart. He was
thankful to find himself in his own room again, and thought with dread
of having to go back--for the end. In spite of his still vigorous and
stalwart body, he was often plagued with nervous fears and fancies.
And it was years now since he had seen death--he had, indeed,
carefully avoided seeing it.
Gradually, however, as he sat on the edge of his bed in the summer
dark, the new impression died away, and something habitual took its
place--that shielding, solacing thought, which was in truth all the world
to him, and was going to make up to him for Eliza's death, for getting
old, and the lonesomeness of a man without chick or child. He would
have felt unutterably forlorn and miserable, he would have shrunk
trembling from the shapes of death and pain that seemed to fill the
darkness, but for this fact, this defence, this treasure, that set him apart
from his fellows and gave him this proud sense of superiority, of a

good time coming in spite of all. Instinctively, as he sat on the bed, he
pushed his bare foot backwards till his heel touched a wooden object
that stood underneath. The contact cheered him at once. He ceased to
think about Eliza, his head was once more full of whirling plans and
schemes.
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,