"Who is she?" I asked.
"He's grand-daughter.... That young Mackenzie was her father. She've got plenty o' gab. 'You 'alf-bred Scotch people,' I says to her sometimes, 'talks too much.' I tells her of it sometimes. She don't like me."
It seemed unlikely that Bettesworth would long continue to be a tenant under such a landlord. The change, however, was not to come yet.
As yet, indeed, difficulties like these were but trivial incidents of the life in which Bettesworth continued to take an interest as virile as ever. He had dealt with landlords before, and had no qualms now. It might be that the great strength of his prime was gone, but his health seemed unimpaired, and I believe he still felt master of his fate as he went quietly about his daily work.
It is true that my very next note of him contains evidence of a digestive weakness which, having not much troubled him hitherto, though he had always been subject to it, was growing upon him, and beginning to undermine his forces. But it was for another reason—because of a curious word he used—that I then recorded what he told me.
The entry in my journal, bearing still the date December 9, is to the effect that "on Friday afternoon" a horrid pain took him right through the midriff, from front to back. "I begun to think I was goin' to croak," he said afterwards, when telling me about it. "And I reached, and the sheer-water run out o' my eyes an' mouth. I didn't know where to go for an hour or more, I was in that pain. I 'xpect 'twas stoopin' down over my work brought it on. I'd had a hot dinner, ye see—bit o' pickled pork an' pa'snips. And then stoopin' down.... But that sheer-water—you knows what I means—run out o' my mouth." I did not know what he meant, until the next day, when I asked how he felt. He was "all right," but, repeating the story, said, "and the water run out o' my mouth, jest like boilin' water."
During the last year or two of his life I think he seldom went a week without a recurrence of this pain of indigestion, the disorder being doubtless aggravated by the breakdown of his domestic arrangements. But this is looking too far ahead. At the period which now concerns us, he was far from thinking of himself as an invalid. He could joke about his passing indispositions as he could defy his landlord. This particular attack, unless I am much mistaken, was the subject of a flippancy I remember his repeating to me. A neighbour looking in upon him and seeing his serious condition said genially, "You ben't goin' to die, be ye, Freddy?" And he answered, "I dunno. Shouldn't care if I do. 'Tis a poor feller as can't make up his mind to die once. If we had to die two or three times, then there might be something to fret about." In relating this to me, he added more seriously, "But nobody dunno when, that's the best of it."
Knowing now how his attitude changed towards death when it was really near, I can see in this sturdy defiance the evidence of the physical vigour he was still enjoying. There was no real cause for fretting about himself, any more than about his affairs; and so he went through this winter, garrulous and good-tempered, even happy in his way.
Accordingly, taking my notes in their due order, they bring before my mind, as I read them again now, pleasant pictures of the old man. I can see him at work, or taking his wages, or starting for the town; often the very weather and daylight around him come back to me; and the chief loss is in his voice-tones, which I cannot by any effort of memory recover.
December 10, 1901.—One such mind-picture dates from December 10. The short winter afternoon was already closing in, with a mist—the forerunner of rain—enveloping the garden between the bare-limbed trees. Over our heads sounded the roar of wind in a little fir-wood; but down under the oak-trees by the well, where Bettesworth was digging, there was shelter and stillness, or only the slight trembling of a few leaves not yet fallen. It was "nice and warm," he assured me, and then paused—himself a dusky-looking old figure in the oncoming dusk—to ask, whom did I think he had seen go down the lane just now? It was no other than his former neighbour, "old Jack Morris's widow."