'May He have mercy on you, my friend!--if you will think of Him, and look to Him, He will have mercy on you.'
'Well--I will try, doctor; but would that it were all to do again.
You'll see to the old woman for my sake, won't you?'
'What, Lady Scatcherd?'
'Lady Devil! If anything angers me now it is that "ladyship"--her to be my lady! Why, when I came out of jail that time, the poor creature had hardly a shoe to her foot. But it wasn't her fault, Thorne; it was none of her doing. She never asked for such nonsense.'
'She has been an excellent wife, Scatcherd; and what is more, she is an excellent woman. She is, and ever will be, one of my dearest friends.'
'Thank'ee, doctor, thank'ee. Yes; she has been a good wife--better for a poor man than a rich one; but then, that was what she was born to.
You won't let her be knocked about by them, will you, Thorne?'
Dr Thorne again assured him, that as long as he lived Lady Scatcherd should never want one true friend; in making this promise, however, he managed to drop all allusion to the obnoxious title.
'You'll be with him as much as possible, won't you?' again asked the baronet, after lying quite silent for a quarter of an hour.
'With whom?' said the doctor, who was then all but asleep.
'With my poor boy, Louis.'
'If he will let me, I will,' said the doctor.
'And, doctor, when you see a glass at his mouth, dash it down; thrust it down, though you thrust out the teeth with it. When you see that, Thorne, tell him of his father--tell him what his father might have been but for that; tell him how his father died like a beast, because he could not keep himself from drink.'
These, reader, were the last words spoken by Sir Roger Scatcherd. As he uttered them he rose up in bed with the same vehemence which he had shown on the former evening. But in the very act of doing so he was again struck by paralysis, and before nine on the following morning all was over.
'Oh, my man--my own, own man!' exclaimed the widow, remembering in the paroxysm of her grief nothing but the loves of their early days; 'the best, the brightest, the cleverest of them all!'
Some weeks after this Sir Roger was buried, with much pomp and ceremony, within the precincts of Barchester Cathedral; and a monument was put up to him soon after, in which he was portrayed, as smoothing a block of granite with a mallet and chisel; while his eagle eye, disdaining such humble work, was fixed upon some intricate mathematical instrument above him. Could Sir Roger have seen it himself, he would probably have declared, that no workman was ever worth his salt who looked one way while he rowed another.
Immediately after the funeral the will was opened, and Dr Thorne discovered that the clauses of it were exactly identical with those his friend had described to him some months back. Nothing had been altered; nor had the document been unfolded since that strange codicil had been added, in which it was declared that Dr Thorne knew--and only Dr Thorne--who was the eldest child of the testator's only sister. At the same time, however, a joint executor with Dr Thorne had been named--one Mr Stock, a man of railway fame--and Dr Thorne himself was made a legatee to the humble extent of a thousand pounds. A life income of a thousand pounds a year was left to Lady Scatcherd.
