“Father,” said Luke, bending over the old man’s pillow, “for your sake and your kindly words, I’ll do the best I can.”
“Thank you, my boy, God bless you, I know you will,” said the old man. “For life is so short, Luke, my son. Good-bye, my boy. Do all the good you can. I’m going to sleep now. God bless you, good-bye.”
He closed his eyes, and drew a long breath, dropping off at once into a calm and restful slumber, Luke staying by his side for a while.
Then taking out a blue official-looking document from his pocket, he looked at it for a few moments before replacing it in his breast.
“Poor old man!” he said, softly. “I wish I had told him what I was about to do, it would have pleased him to know.”
He got up and went softly down-stairs, to pause for a few minutes in the homely, comfortably furnished room with its well-polished furniture, every knob and handle seeming like familiar friends. There was his father’s seat, his mother’s, and the little Windsor arm-chair that had been his own, religiously preserved, and kept as bright as beeswax and sturdy country hands could make it.
“He has gone off to sleep,” Luke said to the matronly housekeeper, who never ventured to speak to him without a curtsey.
“No, Mr Luke, sir—I mean yes, Mr Luke, sir, I’ll keep going up and peeping at him, and take him his beef tea when he wakens. Your coming, sir, begging your pardon for taking the liberty of saying so, sir, have done him a power of good.”
Luke smiled and nodded—“so condescending and kind-like,” the woman afterwards told a neighbour—and walked out across the marketplace, stopping to shake hands here and there with the tradesmen who came to their doors, and at last making his way down towards the schools.
“They seem to esteem me a very great gun,” he said, half in jest, half bitterly, as he walked slowly on, passing men whom he remembered as boys, and responding constantly to the salutations he received.