“Pampered, oh Ch—st!” ejaculated the housekeeper.
“Aye, and what are there so many candles for, all fours, and the same below I warrant. Ah! you—you—worthless, wasteful old devil.”
“Indeed, your honor, they are all sixes.”
“Sixes—and what the devil are you burning sixes for, d’ye think it’s the wake already? Ha?”
“Oh! not yet, your honor, not yet,” chorussed the beldams; “but in God’s good time, your honor knows,” in a tone that spoke ill suppressed impatience for the event. “Oh! that your honor would think of making your soul.”
“That’s the first sensible word you have said,” said the dying man, “fetch me the prayerbook—you’ll find it there under that old bootjack—blow off the cobwebs;—it has not been opened this many a year.” It was handed to him by the old governante, on whom he turned a reproaching eye. “What made you burn sixes in the kitchen, you extravagant jade? How many years have you lived in this house?”
“I don’t know, your honor.”
“Did you ever see any extravagance or waste in it?”
“Oh never, never, your honor.”
“Was anything but a farthing candle ever burned in the kitchen?”
“Never, never, your honor.”
“Were not you kept as tight as hand and head and heart could keep you, were you not? answer me that.”
“Oh yes, sure, your honor; every sowl about us knows that—everyone does your honor justice, that you kept the closest house and closest hand in the country—your honor was always a good warrant for it.”
“And how dare you unlock my hold before death has unlocked it,” said the dying miser, shaking his meagre hand at her. “I smelt meat in the house—I heard voices in the house—I heard the key turn in the door over and over. Oh that I was up,” he added, rolling in impatient agony in his bed, “Oh that I was up, to see the waste and ruin that is going on. But it would kill me,” he continued, sinking back on the bolster, for he never allowed himself a pillow; “it would kill me—the very thought of it is killing me now.” The women, discomfited and defeated, after sundry winks and whispers, were huddling out of the room, till recalled by the sharp eager tones of old Melmoth.—“Where are ye trooping to now? back to the kitchen to gormandize and guzzle? Won’t one of ye stay and listen while there’s a prayer read for me? Ye may want it one day for yourselves, ye hags.”
Awed by this expostulation and menace, the train silently returned, and placed themselves round the bed, while the housekeeper, though a Catholic, asked if his honor would not have a clergyman to give him the rights (rites) of his church.
The eyes of the dying man sparkled with vexation at the proposal. “What for—just to have him expect a scarf and hatband at the funeral. Read the prayers yourself, you old ⸻; that will save something.”
The housekeeper made the attempt, but soon declined it, alleging, as her reason, that her eyes had been watery ever since his honor took ill.
“That’s because you had always a drop in them,” said the invalid, with a spiteful sneer, which the contraction of approaching death stiffened into a hideous grin.—“Here—is not there one of you that’s gnashing and howling there, that can get up a prayer to keep me from it?”
So adjured, one of the women offered her services; and of her it might truly be said, as of the “most desartless man of the watch” in Dogberry’s time, that “her reading and writing came by nature;” for she never had been at school, and had never before seen or opened a Protestant prayer book in her life; nevertheless, on she went, and with more emphasis than good discretion, read nearly through the service for the “churching of women;” which in our prayerbooks following that of the burial of the dead, she perhaps imagined was someway connected with the state of the invalid.
She read with great solemnity—it was a pity that two interruptions occurred during the performance, one from old Melmoth, who, shortly after the commencement of the prayers, turned towards the old housekeeper, and said, in a tone scandalously audible, “Go down and draw the niggers of the kitchen fire closer, and lock the door, and let me hear it locked. I can’t mind anything till that’s done.” The other was from John Melmoth gliding into the room, hearing the inappropriate words uttered by the ignorant woman, taking quietly as he knelt beside her the prayerbook from her hands, and reading in a suppressed voice part of that solemn service which, by the forms of the Church of England, is intended for the consolation of the departing.
“That is John’s voice,” said the dying man; and the little kindness he had ever showed this unfortunate lad rushed on his hard heart at this moment, and touched it. He saw himself, too, surrounded by heartless and rapacious menials; and slight as must have been his dependence on a relative whom he had always treated as a stranger, he felt at this hour he was no stranger, and grasped at his support like a straw amid his wreck. “John, my good boy, you are there.—I kept you far from me when living, and now you are nearest me when dying.—John, read on.”
John, affected deeply by the situation in which he beheld this poor man, amid all his wealth, as well as by the solemn request to impart consolation to his dying moments, read on;—but in a short time his voice became indistinct, from the horror with which he listened to the increasing hiccup of the patient, which, however, he struggled with from time to time, to ask the housekeeper if “the niggers were closed.” John, who was
