Mentioning the endeavours of the Colonel and Mr. —— to get a pension for him, I said, "They're very interested in it." "More so than what I be," he answered. Still, I urged, it was worth trying for; and as for the lost papers, duplicates of them might be obtained, if we knew the regiment. I was saying this, when with a sort of pride, though still irritably, the old man broke in, "I can tell ye all that: regiment, an' regimental number, and officers, and all." At that I asked what was his regiment?
He stiffened his head and neck (was it just one last flicker of the so long forgotten soldier's smartness?) and said, "Forty-eighth, and my number was three nought nought seven.... I could name twenty people that knowed about my service. There's old Crum Callingham. He used to work for Sanders then, the coal merchant. The day I came back, didn't we have a booze, too! He was at work in Sanders's hop-garden, and I found 'n out, and two more, and I kep' sendin' for half-gallons.... Yes, that was the same day as I got 'ome—from Portsmouth."
That afternoon I happened to meet old Beagley—the retired bricklayer, and recently Bettesworth's landlord. He spoke of Bettesworth with more than usual appreciation, saying that he had been a strong man, as if he meant unusually strong. His sight must have been bad "thirty or forty years," Beagley estimated. He (Beagley) remembered first noticing it when he dropped his trowel from a scaffold, and sent Bettesworth down the ladder for it. He observed that Bettesworth could not see the trowel, but groped for it, as one gropes in the dark, until his hand touched it. But, added Beagley, "he'd mix mortar as well as any man I ever knew. I've had him workin' for me, and noticed. I'd as soon have had him as anybody. He couldn't have seen the lumps of lime, but I suppose 'twas something in the feel of it on the shovel. At any rate, he always done it; and I've often thought about it."
July 14 (Friday).—I saw Bettesworth this afternoon, and it looks as if I shall not see him many times more.
Since my last visit to him a fortnight ago, the change in him is very marked. His niece, downstairs, prepared me for it. He was very ill, she said, and so weak that now they have to hold him up to feed him. Of course he can take no solids; not even a mouthful of sponge-cake for which he had had a fancy. His feet and the lower parts of his body are swelling: the doctor says it is dropsy setting in, and reports further that his heart is "wasting away." Hearing all this—yes, and how Mrs. Cook thought he should be watched at night, for he could not last much longer—hearing this, I fancied when I got upstairs that there was a look as of death on the shrunken cheeks: they had a corpse-like colour. Possibly it was only my fancy, but it was not fancy that his flesh had fallen away more than ever.
It has been an afternoon of magnificent summer weather, not sultry, but sumptuous; with vast blue sky, a few slow-sailing clouds, a luxuriant west wind tempering the splendid heat. The thermometer in my room stands at 80° while I am writing. So Bettesworth lay just covered as to his body and legs with a counterpane, showing his bare neck, while his sleeves falling back to the elbow displayed his arms. From between the tendons the flesh has gone; and the skin lies fluted all up the forearm, all up the neck. But at the foot of the bed his feet emerging could be seen swollen and tight-skinned. His ears look withered and dry, like thin biscuit.
He did not complain much of pain. Sometimes, "if anything touches the bottom o' my feet, it runs all up my legs as if 'twas tied up in knots." Again, "what puzzles the doctor is my belly bein' like 'tis—puffed up and hard as a puddin' dish." The doctor has not mentioned dropsy, to him. Enough, perhaps, that he has told him that his heart was "wasting away." "That's a bad sign," commented Bettesworth, to me. He said he had asked the doctor, "'Is there any chance o' my gettin' better?' 'Not but a very little,' he said. 'If you do, it'll be a miracle.'" At that, Bettesworth replied, "Then I wish you'd give me something to help me away from here." "Why, where d'ye want to go to?" the doctor asked; and was answered, "Up top o' Gravel Hill" to the churchyard. "I told him that, straight to his head," said the old man.
He lay there, thinking of his death. Door and window were wide open, and a cooling air played through the room. Through the window, from my place by the bed, I could see all the sunny side of the valley in the sweltering afternoon heat; could see and feel the splendour of the summer; could watch, right down in the hollow, a man hoeing in a tiny mangold-field, and the sunshine glistening on his light-coloured shirt. Bettesworth no doubt knew that man; had worked like that himself on many July afternoons; and now he lay thinking of his approaching death. But I thought, too, of his life, and spoke of it: how from the hill-top there across the valley you could not look round upon the country in any part of the landscape but you would everywhere see places where he had worked. "Yes: for a hundred miles round," he assented.
It came up naturally enough, I remember, in the course of desultory talk, with many pauses. He had had "gentry" to see him, he was saying, and he named the Colonel, and Mr. ——. "Who'd have thought ever he'd ha' bin like that to me?" he exclaimed gratefully. And each of these visitors had spoken of his "good character"; had "liked all they ever heared" about him, and so on; and it was then that I remarked about the places where he had worked, as proof that his good character had been well earned. But as we talked of his life, all the time the thought of his death was present. I fancied once that he wished to thank me for standing by him, and could not bring it off, for he began telling how the Colonel had said, "'You've got a very good friend to be thankful for.'" But it was easy to turn this. The Colonel too is a friend. He had left an order for a bottle of whisky to be bought when the last one sent by Mr. —— is empty; and he has not given up yet the endeavour to get Bettesworth's Crimean service recognized with a pension.
I cannot recall all that passed; indeed, it was incoherent and mumbling, and I did not catch all. He revived that imaginary grievance against his neighbour, for drawing money from me to pay his club when he went to the infirmary. It appeared that Jack had been going into the matter, and had satisfied Bettesworth that the payments had never been really owing; so they hoped that, now I knew, I should take steps to be righted. Bettesworth seemed to find much relief in the feeling that his own character was cleared from blame. "Some masters might have give me the sack for it," he said, "when I got back to work." To this he kept reverting, as if in the hope of urging me to have justice; and then he would say, "There, I'm as glad it's all right as if anybody had give me five shillin's." To humour him I professed to be equally glad; it was not worth while to trouble him with what I knew very well to be the truth—that Mrs. Eggar was in the right, and had really done him a service.