Mr. Gogram came and was closeted with the Squire, and the doctor also came. The doctor saw Kate, and, shaking his head, told her that her grandfather was sinking lower and lower every hour. It would be infinitely better for him if he would take that port wine at four doses in the day, or even at two, instead of taking it all together. Kate promised to try again, but stated her conviction that the trial would be useless. The doctor, when pressed on the matter, said that his patient might probably live a week, not improbably a fortnight—perhaps a month, if he would be obedient—and so forth. Gogram went away without seeing Kate; and Kate, who looked upon a will as an awful and somewhat tedious ceremony, was in doubt whether her grandfather would live to complete any new operation. But, in truth, the will had been made and signed and witnessed—the parish clerk and one of the tenants having been had up into the room as witnesses. Kate knew that the men had been there, but still did not think that a new will had been perfected.
That evening when it was dusk the Squire came into the dining-room, having been shuffling about the grand sweep before the house for a quarter of an hour. The day was cold and the wind bleak, but still he would go out, and Kate had wrapped him up carefully in mufflers and greatcoats. Now he came in to what he called dinner, and Kate sat down with him. He had drank no wine that day, although she had brought it to him twice during the morning. Now he attempted to swallow a little soup, but failed; and after that, while Kate was eating her bit of chicken, had the decanter put before him. “I can’t eat, and I suppose it won’t hurt you if I take my wine at once,” he said. It went against the grain with him, even yet, that he could not wait till the cloth was gone from the table, but his impatience for the only sustenance that he could take was too much for him.
“But you should eat something, sir; will you have a bit of toast to sop in your wine?”
The word “sop” was badly chosen, and made the old Squire angry. “Sopped toast! why am I to spoil the only thing I can enjoy?”
“But the wine would do you more good if you would take something with it.”
“Good! Nothing will do me any good any more. As for eating, you know I can’t eat. What’s the use of bothering me?” Then he filled his second glass, and paused awhile before he put it to his lips. He never exceeded four glasses, but the four he was determined that he would have, as long as he could lift them to his mouth.
Kate finished, or pretended to finish, her dinner within five minutes, in order that the table might be made to look comfortable for him. Then she poked the fire, and brushed up the hearth, and closed the old curtains with her own hands, moving about silently. As she moved his eye followed her, and when she came behind his chair, and pushed the decanter a little more within his reach, he put out his rough, hairy hand, and laid it upon one of hers which she had rested on the table, with a tenderness that was unusual with him. “You are a good girl, Kate. I wish you had been a boy, that’s all.”
“If I had, I shouldn’t, perhaps, have been here to take care of you,” she said, smiling.
“No; you’d have been like your brother, no doubt. Not that I think there could have been two so bad as he is.”
“Oh, grandfather, if he has offended you, you should try to forgive him.”
“Try to forgive him! How often have I forgiven him without any trying? Why did he come down here the other day, and insult me for the last time? Why didn’t he keep away, as I had bidden him?”
“But you gave him leave to see you, sir.”
“I didn’t give him leave to treat me like that. Never mind; he will find that, old as I am, I can punish an insult.”
“You haven’t done anything, sir, to injure him?” said Kate.
“I have made another will, that’s all. Do you suppose I had that man here all the way from Penrith for nothing?”
“But it isn’t done yet?”
“I tell you it is done. If I left him the whole property it would be gone in two years’ time. What’s the use of doing it?”
“But for his life, sir! You had promised him that he should have it for his life.”
“How dare you tell me that? I never promised him. As my heir, he would have had it all, if he would have behaved himself with common decency. Even though I disliked him, as I always have done, he should have had it.”
“And you have taken it from him altogether?”
“I shall answer no questions about it, Kate.” Then a fit of coughing came upon him, his four glasses of wine having been all taken, and there was no further talk about business. During the evening Kate read a chapter of the Bible out loud. But the Squire was very impatient under the reading, and positively refused permission for a second. “There isn’t any good in so much of it, all at once,” he said, using almost exactly the same words which Kate had used to him about the port wine. There may have been good produced by the small quantity to which he listened, as there is good from the physic which children take with wry faces, most unwillingly. Who can say?
For many weeks past Kate had begged her uncle to allow the clergyman of Vavasor to come to him; but he had positively declined. The vicar was a young man to whom the living had
