He laughed a contemptuous sort of laugh.
“Oh, of course, it’s all my own fault. Everybody tells me that. When I was a boy, the doctors said I should outgrow it; when I was a young man, they said after thirty I should be better. When I was thirty, they said it was a trying age; but by the time I was forty I should be all right. Well, I’m forty now, and look at me. I’m a wreck—a perfect wreck.”
“Oh, come, sir,” I said; “I don’t see where the wreck comes in. You’re broad and upright, and you look as strong as a prize-fighter. Everybody who sees you says, ‘Is that Mr. Saxon? Why, I expected to see a cadaverous skeleton, by what I’ve heard about his being such an invalid.’”
“Oh yes, I know,” he said; “people say the same thing to me. I never get any sympathy. I dare say when I’m in my coffin people will come and look at me and say, ‘What a humbug that fellow is! Why, he looks as jolly as possible.’”
I tried to turn the conversation, because when Mr. Saxon begins to talk about himself and his wrongs and his ailments he will go on for hours if you’ll let him, so I asked him if he was writing anything new.
“Yes,” he said; “I’m writing my will. I’ve come down here to be able to work at it quietly, without anybody coming and putting me in a rage, and making me say something in that important document, in my temper, that I may be sorry for afterwards. Mrs. Beckett, I’ve left instructions that I’m to be cremated. If you’d like to be present at the ceremony I’ll drop in a line to say that you are to be invited. It is a very curious spectacle, and well worth seeing.”
It was a nice thing, wasn’t it, for him to ask me to come and see him cremated? But it was no good taking him seriously when he was like that, so I said, “Thank you, sir; you are very kind; but I’d very much sooner see you eat a good dinner. What shall I order for you?”
He thought a minute, and then he said, “Let me see, I have four hours before dinner. I can get my will finished in three, so you can order me for dinner some salmon and cucumber, some roast pork and apple sauce, and a nice rich plum-pudding, and, I think, if I have a bottle of champagne with it, and after that some apples and some Brazil nuts, and a bottle of old port, the chances are that I shan’t linger long.”
“Oh, Mr. Saxon,” I said, “the idea of your eating such a dinner as that, and you complaining of indigestion! Why, it’s suicide!”
“Of course it is,” he said, with an awful grin. “That’s what I mean it to be. It’s the only way I can do it without letting the blessed insurance companies have the laugh of me.”