"Wonderful are the expectations of man," exclaimed the baronet, "just as much might a chimney-sweeper expect to be treated like an archbishop, because he wears black--but let us to business, let us to business, if we go on complimenting each other in this way we shall not get through the affair to-night, especially with your lucid assistance, Wittingham; for if there be a man in England who can so stir a puddle that the sharpest eyes shall not be able to see a lost half-crown at the bottom, you are the man."
Up started the worthy magistrate, exclaiming in a weak voice and bewildered air,
"I will not stay, that man will drive me mad."
"Impossible," shouted Sir John Slingsby, as Mr. Wittingham staggered towards the door; and he then added in a lower tone, "fools never go mad, they tell me;" but Doctor Miles, who saw that old Wittingham was really ill, rose from his seat, and crossing the room, spoke a word or two to the retreating magistrate, which he was not allowed to finish, for old Wittingham pushed him rudely aside and darted out of the room.
Before I proceed to give any account of the further inquiries of the three magistrates who remained, I shall beg leave to follow Mr. Wittingham to his own house. About two hundred yards' distance from the justice-room he stopped, and leaned for a minute or two against a post, and again paused at his own gate as if hardly able to proceed. He reached his own dwelling, however, and after several attempts, with a shaking hand, succeeded in thrusting his private key into the lock and opening the door. The hall was vacant; the whole house still; there was neither wife nor child to receive and welcome him; no kindred affection, no friendly greeting to soothe and cheer the sick old man, whose pursuits, whose hopes, whose tendencies through life had been totally apart from the kindly sympathies of our nature. But there are times, steel the heart how we may, when a yearning for those very kindly sympathies will come over us; when the strong frame broken, the eager energies quelled, the fierce passions dead and still within us, the strong desires either disappointed or sated, leave us alone in our weakness, to feel with bitter regret that there are better things and more enduring than those which we have pursued; and when the great moral lessons, taught by decay, are heard and listened to for the first time, when perhaps it is too late to practise them. That lonely house, that silent hall, the absence of every trace of warm life and pleasant social companionship, the dull, dead stillness that pervaded every thing had their effect upon Mr. Wittingham, and a sad effect it was. All was so quiet and so still; all was so solemn and so voiceless; he felt as if he were entering his tomb. The very sunshine, the bright sunshine that, streaming through the fanlight over the door, fell in long rays upon the marble-floor, had something melancholy in it, and he thought "It will soon shine so upon my grave." What was to him then the satisfaction of the greedy love of gold, that creeping ivy of the heart, that slowly growing, day by day, chokes every softer and gentler offspring of that on which it rests? What was to him the gratification of that vanity, which was all that the acquisition of wealth had satisfied? Nothing, all nothing. He stood there friendless, childless, companionless, alone; sick at heart, disappointed in all those expectations he had formed, having reaped bitterness from the very success of his labours, and finding no medicine either for the heart or the body in the gold he had accumulated or the station he had gained.
He paused there for a moment, whilst a deep and bitter anguish of the regret of a whole life took possession of him, and then staggering on into the trim, well-arranged, cold and orderly library, he sunk into one of the arm-chairs by the side of the fireless hearth and rang the bell sharply. For two or three minutes no one appeared, and then he rang again, saying to himself,
"There never were such bad servants as mine; ay, ay, it wants a mistress of a house," and he rang again furiously.
In about a minute after the door opened, and Mrs. Billiter appeared, and Mr. Wittingham inquired, angrily, why nobody came at his summons? The housekeeper replied,
"That she thought the footman had come, but finding the bell ring again she had hastened up herself."
Mr. Wittingham's rage was then turned upon the footman, and after denouncing him in very vehement terms and condemning him to expulsion from his household, his anger either worked itself off, or his strength became exhausted, and he sat for a moment or two in silence, till Mrs. Billiter quietly began to move towards the door.