By this time we had left the shed, and were standing in its shadow, where the wind blew up cold and draughty. "Let's get into the sunshine," I proposed.
As we moved, "Wasn't it a day yesterday?" I remarked; and Bettesworth assented, "No mistake!" It had in fact been a Sunday of March gales, of furious rain and hail-storms, and then gay bursts of sunshine hurrying down the valley. With none to sweep it, the path where we stood was still bestrewn with a litter of dead twigs, which the east winds had left, but this fierce westerly wind had finally torn out from the lilac bushes. "It's a sort of pruning," I said, and was answered, "Yes, that must do a lot o' good. Done it better 'n you could ha' done, too." We found a sunny place, although still a draughty wind searched us out, and fast-changing clouds sometimes drew across the sunshine and left us shivering. "More showers," we predicted, "before the day is out."
There, in the sunshine, Bettesworth coughed—a little painful cough without variety. It seemed as if it need not have begun, yet, having begun, need never cease. "You must get rid of that cough," said I.
"I en't got strength to cough," he replied. Then he put his hands against the pit of his stomach. "That's where it hurts me. Sims to tear me all to pieces." I advised care in feeding, and avoidance of solids. "Bread an' butter's the only solid food I takes," he said. "Liz wanted me to have a kipper. 'Naw,' I says, 'I en't much of a fish man.' But I don't want it. I en't got no appetite." It was suggested that the warm weather presently would restore him; but he returned, very quietly; "I dunno. I sims to think I shan't last much longer. I got that idear. I can feel it, somehow."
"How long have you felt like that?"
"This six weeks I've had that sort o' feelin'." He went on to repeat what he had said to Jack in consequence. When he had got his bed and other things into Jack's house, "'It's all yours now,' I says. 'You take everything there is. All you got to do is to see me put away.'"
His weakness was distressing to see, and he had to get back home somehow. Would a little more whisky help him? We adjourned to the kitchen, sat down there near the fire, and while the old man had his stimulant he talked of many things.
At first, handing me the key of his cottage, he told of his cat, how plump she looked, and how she had welcomed him home in such fashion as to make Liz say with a laugh, "No call to ask whose cat she is!" Sometimes he thought of "gettin' old Kid to put a charge o' shot into her"; sometimes, of "puttin' her in a sack an' drownin' her." Either was more than he had the heart to do; yet he could not bear to think of his cat without a home. Would not Mrs. Norris take care of her, then?" Oh yes, she'd feed her, but.... But Mrs. Norris can't hear, poor old soul. She bin a good ol' soul to me, though; and so've Kid." Of course I did not tell Bettesworth how old Nanny had lately talked of him.
What to do about his cabbages puzzled him. He had paid old Carver Cook two shillings for digging the ground and planting them; and now that he had given up the cottage, there was this value like to be lost! He must get "whoever took the cot" to take to the cabbages too; they ought to. He didn't like to cut 'em down—never liked to do anybody else a bad turn, but.... Ultimately I promised to get the price allowed, in settling with his landlord.
Through devious courses the conversation slid back to his nephew's family and household ways. Liz "don't sit down to dinner 'long o' the others." There are six boys besides her husband for her to wait upon, so that, were she to begin, "before she'd got a mouthful the others 'd be wantin' their second helpin'." The custom sounds barbarous—or shall I say archaic?—until one remembers that the husband and one or two of the boys must get home from work to dinner and back again within an hour. On Sunday afternoon "Jack was off to the town to this P.S.A. or whatever it is. He brought home another prize too.... A beautiful book—a foot by nine inches, and three or four inches thick! Jack can read, no mistake!" Unfortunately he reads in a very loud voice, so that Bettesworth grows weary of it, in spite of his passion for being read to. On Saturday night Jack was reading the paper, and said, "'Like any more?' 'Not to-night, Jack; I be tired.' All about this war" (in Manchuria). "Sunday he said, 'Shall I read ye the paper, uncle? 'Tis nothin' but the war.' 'Then we won't have it to-day.'"