Gladys, the Reaper. Anne Beale
and loans; but don't you be talking to anybody about it. Mind you, not to Howel nor to 'Lizbeth: promise me.'
Rowland promised.
The miser fell back exhausted.
'And now Uncle Griff, may I pray for you? Only think how soon you may be called to your account, to say exactly how you have employed your time, and the talents given—'
'I have done plenty—plenty—all out at interest, at five, six, even ten per cent.; none wrapped up in a napkin. I don't be calling a box a napkin, Rowland Prothero.'
'May I call in Mrs. Jenkins and Howel, and pray for you? Think; oh think, of the great Judge, and great Mediator. O God, have mercy upon us, miserable sinners!'
As Rowland said this, he clasped his hands, and looked upwards, in unutterable supplication. The old man was alarmed.
'I don't be going to die, but you may call 'em in.'
Rowland rose and obeyed. Mrs. Jenkins appeared with a candle in her hand. The old man rose with an effort as she drew near the bed.
'Put—out—the—candle,' he muttered.
As the night was fast drawing in, Mrs. Jenkins hesitated.
'Put—out—the—candle,' repeated the dying man, with a still stronger effort to rise and extinguish it himself. 'The ruling passion strong in death' must be attended to, and the light was extinguished.
Rowland Prothero clasped his hands with a groan, and repeated aloud a prayer from the service for the dying. The terrified wife knelt down by the bed in the deep gloom, and in the still deeper gloom behind, the son buried his face in his arms, and leaned upon the little table.
Whilst Rowland Prothero was praying from the very depth of his heart for the soul that was thus awfully passing to its account, they were all aroused by the last fearful struggle between death and life of him who had made gold his god. For some time they feared to rekindle the light, but at last they ventured. It was but to witness the last dread pangs of one who had made wife and son secondary to the great absorbing passion of avarice; and now he was constrained to depart from the scene of his toil, and to leave all that he had grovelled for behind him, for ever!
We will not dwell upon the awful hours that succeeded his final words. He neither spoke nor was conscious again. Light and dark were alike to him. Save that he grasped something in his right hand with an iron hold, reason and power had left him; death was still fighting with life, and gradually gaining the last great victory.
A few hours afterwards, and when that victory had been gained, the scene was changed in that small house. The chamber of death was deserted, and the wretched clay of the miser, decently covered with a white sheet, lay heavy and still, where the spirit that formerly animated it had been accustomed to brood over the miserable gains of its clays and years on earth.
In the small sitting-room below, behind the little shop where these gains had been begun and continued for half-a-century or more, sat the widow, surrounded by a score of gossips, who had left their beds and homes at daybreak to condole with her.
It would have been much more unnatural than natural if Mrs. Jenkins had grieved at heart for the husband she had lost. Married, or rather sold to him, when he was fifty and she thirty, she had lived five or six and twenty years of pure misery with him. She had starved with him, when she could not pilfer from him, and had endured patiently all these years what seemed past endurance in expectation of the closing scene. She had married and lived upon the prospect of his death, and it was come at last; and now that it was come, the awfulness of that last struggle overpowered her, and she wept and lamented as copiously as if her husband had been the kindest and most liberal in the world. Still, she was free, with competence, she hoped, in perspective? and this thought, together with the ever all-pervading one of her idol, her treasure, her only son, and his expectations, more than counterbalanced that of the death she had witnessed.
'Come you, don't you be takking on so,' said one old woman soothingly, as the widow rocked herself to and fro, and held her handkerchief to her eyes.
'Tak' you this drop o' tea,' said another, 'it'll be doing you good,'
'The Lord will be having mercy on his soul,' said a third, whose conscience was large when she was offering comfort.
'There now, keep up your spirits, Mrs. Jinkins, fach,' said a fourth, entering with a comfortable glass of gin and water that did seem of an exhilarating nature.
'There's a comfort Howel will be to you now!' said a fifth triumphantly.
'Deed to goodness, Griffey Jinkins was a saving man, and you have lost him, Mrs. Jinkins, fach,' began the friend with the gin and water; 'but I am seeing no use in takking on so. When John Jones died, he was leaving me with ten children, and they have all come on somehow. And you have only wan son, and he is so ginteel! Drink you this, my dear, and don't be down-hearted.'
Mrs. Jenkins turned from the tea to the gin and water with no apparent reluctance, and swallowed a portion of it. Revived by the beverage, she responded to the condolences of her friends by more rockings, sobs, and applications of the handkerchief and finally unburdened herself of her grief in the following manner.
'My son Howel, oh yes, he'll be a blessing to me, I know. Says I to my poor Griffey—oh, dear, only to be thinking of him now!—says I, "Let us be giving Howel a good eddication, and he so clever as never was, and able to be learning everything he do put his mind to, and never daunted at nothing—grammar, nor music, nor Latin, nor no heathen languages, and able to read so soon as he could speak, and knowing all the beasts in the ark one from another, when he was no bigger than that," says I, to my poor Griffey; "oh, annwyl! we have only wan child, let him be a clargy, or a 'torney, or a doctor, or something smart," and says he, "I can't afford it." He was rather near or so, you know, was my poor Griffey; but I never was letting him rest day or night, and the only thing he wasn't liking was being much talked over. So says I, "Come you, Jinkins, bach,"—he liked to be called by his sirname—"if you do larn Howel well, he'll be making his fortune some day," for he do say so, he do be always saying, "I'll be a great man, and get as much money as father." I eused to put in the last words of myself, for Howel never was taking to making money, but 'ould as soon give it away as not. Only poor Griffey—oh dear! oh dear!—was never knowing that, because I did be hiding it from him as much as I could.'
Whilst the widow talks on in this strain to her sympathising friends, her son and Rowland Prothero are in another small room of the house, engaged in a very different style of conversation. The room in which they are is worth a few words of description, not for any beauty or desert of its own, but for its heterogeneous, contents. You would think a small music warehouse, a miniature tobacco shop, or branch depot of foreign grammars and dictionaries were before you. Every kind of musical instrument seems to have met with a companion in this tiny apartment. Here are a violin, violoncello, horn, and cornopean; there an old Welsh harp and unstrung guitar. On this shelf are pipes of all sorts and sizes, forms, and nations—the straight English, the short German, and the long Turkish; on that are cigar-boxes, snuff-boxes, and tobacco-boxes of various kinds and appearances. Scattered about the room are play-books without number, from Shakspeare to the dramatists of the present day; and, interspersed with these, collections of songs of all countries and of all grades of merit. Some few novels, mostly French, live with the plays and songs; and Latin, French, German, Italian, Welsh, Spanish, and English grammars and dictionaries take up their abode in every available corner. A quantity of fishing tackle and a gun are thrown upon the window seat, and an embroidered waistcoat, blue satin cravat, and a pair of yellow kid gloves lie on an unoccupied chair.
From the general appearance of this room, the imagination would conceive great things of its inmate. All we shall here say is that he is one who has the reputation of being a natural genius, and firmly believes that he is one.
As all natural geniuses are supposed to have something very remarkable in their appearance, we will just take a sketch of the miser's son, as he alternately leans on the table or stalks about the room during his earnest conversation with his cousin. He has decidedly sentimental hair; long, black, shining,