“The parenthesis, at least, is like him,” said she, smiling.
“To the children he has bequeathed I don't know what, sometimes with Lucy as their guardian, sometimes myself. The Lendrick girl was always handsomely provided for till lately, when he scratched her out completely; and in the last document which I saw there were the words, 'To my immediate family I bequeath my forgiveness for their desertion of me, and this free of all legacy duty and other charges.' I am sure, mother, he's a little mad.”
“Nothing of the kind,—no more than you are.”
“I don't know that. I always suspect 'that the marvellous vigor' of old age gets its prime stimulus from an overexcited brain. He sat up a whole night last week—I know it to my cost, for I had to copy it out—writing a letter to the 'Times' on the Land Tenure Bill, and he nearly went out of his mind on seeing it in small type.”
“He is vain, if you like; but not mad certainly.”
“For a while I thought one of his fits of passion would do for him,—he gets crimson, and then lividly pale, and then flushed again, and his nails are driven into his palms, and he froths at the mouth; but somehow the whole subsides at last, and his voice grows gentle, and his manner courteous,—you 'd think him a lamb, if you had never seen him as a tiger. In these moods he becomes actually humble, so that the other night he sat down and wrote his resignation to the Home Office, stating, amidst a good deal of bombast, that the increasing burden of years and infirmity left him no other choice than that of descending from the Bench he had occupied so long and so unworthily, and begging her Majesty would graciously accord a retreat to one 'who had outlived everything but his loyalty.'”
“What became of this?”
“He asked me about it next morning, but I said I had burned it by his orders; but I have it this moment in my desk.”
“You have no right to keep it. I insist on your destroying it.”
“Pardon me, mother. I'd be a rich man to-day if I had n't given way to that foolish habit of making away with papers supposed to be worthless. The three lines of a man's writing, that the old Judge said he could hang any man on, might, it strikes me, be often used to better purpose.”