England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Short stories, English
"He went off quiet," said she to the Squire. "I asked if he'd not like
a dhrink; but he wouldn't have it: the good gentleman had been there
giving him the bread and wine, and he said he'd take nothing, he
thought, after that. 'I'm going, Mary,' he suddenly says to me about ten
o'clock, and he called Dor up and shook hands with him, and bade him be
good to me, and then he shook hands with me. 'God bless ye both,' says
he, 'for Christ's sake; and God bless the friends who have been kind to
us!' And with that he died."
That's all, for now. And I hope no one will think I invented this
account of Jake's death, for I should not like to do it. The wife
related it to us in the exact words written.
"And I able to do so little for him," broke forth the Squire, suddenly,
when we were about half-way home; and he lashed up Bob and Blister
regardless of their tempers. Which the animals did not relish.
And so that assize week ended the matter. Bringing imprisonment to the
kidnapping woman, and to Jake death.
III.
WOLFE BARRINGTON'S TAMING.
This is an incident of our school life; one that I never care to look
back upon. All of us have sad remembrances of some kind living in
the mind; and we are apt in our painful regret to say, "If I had but
done this, or had but done the other, things might have turned out
differently."
The school was a large square house, built of rough stone, gardens and
playgrounds and fields extending around it. It was called Worcester
House: a title of the fancy, I suppose, since it was some miles away
from Worcester. The master was Dr. Frost, a tall, stout man, in white
frilled shirt, knee-breeches and buckles; stern on occasion, but a
gentleman to the back-bone. He had several under-masters. Forty boys
were received; we wore the college cap and Eton jacket. Mrs. Frost
was delicate: and Hall, a sour old woman of fifty, was manager of the
eatables.
Tod and I must have been in the school two years, I think, when Archie
Hearn entered. He was eleven years old. We had seen him at the house
sometimes before, and liked him. A regular good little fellow was
Archie.
Hearn's father was dead. His mother had been a Miss Stockhausen, sister
to Mrs. Frost. The Stockhausens had a name in Worcestershire: chiefly, I
think, for dying off. There had been six sisters; and the only two now
left were Mrs. Frost and Mrs. Hearn: the other four quietly faded away
one after another, not living to see thirty. Mr. Hearn died, from an
accident, when Archie was only a year old. He left no will, and there
ensued a sharp dispute about his property. The Stockhausens said it all
belonged to the little son; the Hearn family considered that a portion
of it ought to go back to them. The poor widow was the only quiet spirit
amongst them, willing to be led either way. What the disputants did was
to put it into Chancery: and I don't much think it ever came out again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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