This Wheeler found him now so shrunk in body, so pale and haggard in face, and dejected in mind, that he was really shocked, and asked leave to send a doctor from a neighboring town.
“What to do?” said Richard, moodily. “It's my mind; it's not my body. Ah, Wheeler, it is all over. I and mine shall never have Huntercombe now.”
“I'll tell you what it is,” said Wheeler, almost angrily, “you will have six feet by two of it before long if you go on this way. Was ever such folly! to fret yourself out of this jolly world because you can't get one particular slice of its upper crust. Why, one bit of land is as good as another; and I'll show you how to get land—in this neighborhood, too. Ay, right under Sir Charles's nose.”
“Show me that,” said Bassett, gloomily and incredulously.
“Leave off moping, then, and I will. I advise the bank, you know, and 'Splatchett's' farm is mortgaged up to the eyes. It is not the only one. I go to the village inns, and pick up all the gossip I hear there.”
“How am I to find money to buy land?”
“I'll put you up to that, too; but you must leave off moping. Hang it, man, never say die. There are plenty of chances on the cards. Get your color back, and marry a girl with money, and turn that into land. The first thing is to leave off grizzling. Why, you are playing the enemy's game. That can't be right, can it?”
This remark was the first that really roused the sick man.
Wheeler had too few clients to lose one. He now visited Bassett almost daily, and, being himself full of schemes and inventions, he got Bassett, by degrees, out of his lethargy, and he emerged into daylight again; but he looked thin, and yellow as a guinea, and he had turned miser. He kept but one servant, and fed her and himself at Sir Charles Bassett's expense. He wired that gentleman's hares and rabbits in his own hedges. He went out with his gun every sunny afternoon, and shot a brace or two of pheasants, without disturbing the rest; for he took no dog with him to run and yelp, but a little boy, who quietly tapped the hedgerows and walked the sunny banks and shaws. They never came home empty-handed.
But on those rarer occasions when Sir Charles and his friends beat the Bassett woods Richard was sure to make a large bag; for he was a cool, unerring shot, and flushed the birds in hedgerows, slips of underwood, etc., to which the fairer sportsmen had driven them.