“Died the day before yesterday,” continued Mrs Pullet; “an’ her legs was as thick as my body,” she added, with deep sadness, after a pause. “They’d tapped her no end o’ times, and the water—they say you might ha’ swum in it, if you’d liked.”
“Well, Sophy, it’s a mercy she’s gone, then, whoever she may be,” said Mrs Glegg, with the promptitude and emphasis of a mind naturally clear and decided; “but I can’t think who you’re talking of, for my part.”
“But I know,” said Mrs Pullet, sighing and shaking her head; “and there isn’t another such a dropsy in the parish. I know as it’s old Mrs Sutton o’ the Twentylands.”
“Well, she’s no kin o’ yours, nor much acquaintance as I’ve ever heared of,” said Mrs Glegg, who always cried just as much as was proper when anything happened to her own “kin,” but not on other occasions.
“She’s so much acquaintance as I’ve seen her legs when they was like bladders. And an old lady as had doubled her money over and over again, and kept it all in her own management to the last, and had her pocket with her keys in under her pillow constant. There isn’t many old parish’ners like her, I doubt.”
“And they say she’d took as much physic as ’ud fill a wagon,” observed Mr Pullet.
“Ah!” sighed Mrs Pullet, “she’d another complaint ever so many years before she had the dropsy, and the doctors couldn’t make out what it was. And she said to me, when I went to see her last Christmas, she said, ‘Mrs Pullet, if ever you have the dropsy, you’ll think o’ me.’ She did say so,” added Mrs Pullet, beginning to cry bitterly again; “those were her very words. And she’s to be buried o’ Saturday, and Pullet’s bid to the funeral.”
“Sophy,” said Mrs Glegg, unable any longer to contain her spirit of rational remonstrance,—“Sophy, I wonder at you, fretting and injuring your health about people as don’t belong to you. Your poor father never did so, nor your aunt Frances neither, nor any o’ the family as I ever heard of. You couldn’t fret no more than this, if we’d heared as our cousin Abbott had died sudden without making his will.”
Mrs Pullet was silent, having to finish her crying, and rather flattered than indignant at being upbraided for crying too much. It was not everybody who could afford to cry so much about their neighbours who had left them nothing; but Mrs Pullet had married a gentleman farmer, and had leisure and money to carry her crying and everything else to the highest pitch of respectability.
“Mrs Sutton didn’t die without making her will, though,” said Mr Pullet, with a confused sense that he was saying something to sanction his wife’s tears; “ours is a rich parish, but they say there’s nobody else to leave as many thousands behind ’em as Mrs Sutton. And she’s left no leggicies to speak on,—left it all in a lump to her husband’s nevvy.”