As he had now vested the enormous savings of his property in the funds, he felt no diminution of it.
Mr. Elwes passed the spring of 1786 alone, at his solitary house at Stoke; and, had it not been for some little daily scheme of avarice, would have passed it without one consolatory moment. His temper began to give way apace; his thoughts unceasingly ran upon money! money! money!—and he saw no one but whom he imagined was deceiving and defrauding him.
As, in the day, he would not allow himself any fire, he went to bed as soon as day closed, to save candle; and had begun to deny himself even the pleasure of sleeping in sheets. In short, he had now nearly brought to a climax the moral of his whole life—the perfect vanity of wealth!
On removing from Stoke, he went to his farmhouse at Thaydon Hall; a scene of more ruin and desolation, if possible, than either of his houses in Suffolk or Berkshire. It stood alone, on the borders of Epping Forest; and an old man and woman, his tenants, were the only persons with whom he could hold any converse. Here he fell ill; and, as he would have no assistance, and had not even a servant, he lay, unattended, and almost forgotten, for nearly a fortnight—indulging, even in death, that avarice which malady could not subdue. It was at this period he began to think of making his will; feeling, perhaps, that his sons would not be entitled, by law, to any part of his property, should he die intestate: and, on coming to London, he made his last will and testament.
Mr. Elwes, shortly after executing his will, gave, by letter of attorney, the power of managing, receiving, and paying all his monies, into the hands of Mr. Ingraham, his lawyer, and his youngest son, John Elwes, Esq. who had been his chief agents for some time.
Nor was the act by any means improper. The lapses of his memory had now become frequent and glaring. All recent occurrences he forgot entirely; and as he never committed any thing to writing, the confusion he made was inexpressible. As an instance of this, the following anecdote may serve. He had one evening given a draft on Messrs. Hoares, his bankers, for twenty pounds; and having taken it into his head, during the night, that he had over-drawn his account, his anxiety was unceasing. He left his bed, and walking about his room with that little feverish irritation that always distinguished him, waited with the utmost impatience till morning came, when, on going to his banker, with an apology for the great liberty he had taken, he was assured there was no occasion for his apology, as he happened to have in their hands, at that time, the small sum of fourteen thousand seven hundred pounds!
Mr. Elwes passed the summer of 1788 at his house in Welbeck-Street, London, without any other society than that of two maid servants: for he had now given up the expense of keeping any male domestic. His chief employment used to be that of getting up early in the morning to visit his houses in Marybone, which during the summer were repairing. As he was there generally at four o'clock in the morning, he was of course on the spot before the workmen; and he used contentedly to sit down on the steps before the door to scold them when they did come. The neighbours, who used to see him appear thus regularly every morning, and who concluded, from his apparel, he was one of the workmen, observed, "there never was so punctual a man as the old carpenter." During the whole morning he would continue to run up and down stairs, to see the men were not idle for an instant, with the same anxiety as if his whole happiness in life had been centred in the finishing this house, regardless of the greater property he had at stake in various places, and for ever employed in the minutiæ only of affairs. Indeed, such was his anxiety about this house, the rent of which was not above fifty pounds a year, that it brought on a fever, which nearly cost him his life.
In the muscular and unincumbered frame of Mr. Elwes, there was every thing that promised extreme length of life; and he lived to above seventy years of age without any natural disorder attacking him: but, as Lord Bacon has well observed, "the minds of some men are a lamp that is continually burning;" and such was the mind of Mr. Elwes. Removed from those occasional public avocations which had once engaged his attention, money was now his only thought. He rose upon money; upon money he lay down to rest; and as his capacity sunk away from him by degrees, he dwindled from the real cares of his property into the puerile concealment of a few guineas. This little store he would carefully wrap up in various papers, and depositing them in different corners, would amuse himself with running from one to the other, to see whether they were all safe. Then forgetting, perhaps, where he had concealed some of them, he would become as seriously afflicted as a man might be who had lost all his property. Nor was the day alone thus spent: he would frequently rise in the middle of the night, and be heard walking about different parts of the house, looking after what he had thus hidden and forgotten.
It was at this period, and at seventy-six years old, or upwards, that Mr. Elwes began to feel, for the first time, some bodily infirmities from age. He now experienced occasional attacks from the gout: on which, with his usual perseverance, and with all his accustomed antipathy to apothecaries, and their bills, he would set out to walk as far and as fast as he could. While he was engaged in this painful mode of cure, he frequently lost himself in the streets, the names of which he no longer remembered, and was as frequently brought home by some errand-boy, or stranger, of whom he had inquired his way. On these occasions he would bow and thank them, at the door, with great civility; but never indulged them with a sight of the inside of the house.
During the winter of 1789, the last winter Mr. Elwes was fated to see, his memory visibly weakened every day; and, from his unceasing wish to save money, he now began to apprehend he should die in want of it. Mr. Gibson had been appointed his builder in the room of Mr. Adam; and one day, when this gentleman waited upon him, he said, with apparent concern, "Sir, pray consider in what a wretched state I am; you see in what a good house I am living; and here are five guineas, which is all I have at present; and how I shall go on with such a sum of money, puzzles me to death—I dare say you thought I was rich; now you see how it is!"