“I am afraid he will hardly get over it. He never spoke. He just groaned when they took him down from the cart at Huntercombe.”
“Poor Lady Bassett!”
“Ay, it will be a bad job for her. Jane!”
“Yes, dear.”
“There is a providence in it. The fall would never have killed him; but his head struck a tree upon the ground; and that tree was one of the very elms he had just cut down to rob our boy.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes; he was felling the very hedgerow timber, and this was one of the old elms in a hedge. He must have done it out of spite, for elm-wood fetches no price; it is good for nothing I know of, except coffins. Well, he has cut down his.”
“Poor man! Richard, death reconciles enemies. Surely you can forgive him now.”
“I mean to try.”
Richard Bassett seemed now to have imbibed the spirit of quicksilver. His occupations were not actually enlarged, yet, somehow or other, he seemed full of business. He was all complacent bustle about nothing. He left off inveighing against Sir Charles. And, indeed, if you are one of those weak spirits to whom censure is intolerable, there is a cheap and easy way to moderate the rancor of detraction—you have only to die. Let me comfort genius in particular with this little recipe.