“Mother, I could have wished to come to see you in a red coat. It has been ordered that I should wear a black. I do not think I shall ever be a bishop, but I will do my best to remain a gentleman and to be worthy of the name I bear.”
His mother turned the subject and talked to him of material matters, and made him promise to preserve intact the family portraits—twelve in all. Certain articles of furniture and plate he was to keep in trust for his brothers when they should return to England. William, she said, was certain to be a general, and Peter could hardly fail, with so much influence, to become an admiral.
“And I,” thought Francis, “am a stranger to ambition.”
Suddenly tears came to his eyes and he had a feeling of immense pity, and it was so queer to him that he should have an overflowing emotion in his mother’s presence that he was relieved when this colloquy was broken off by the entry of Dr. Fish, the physician from the town five miles away, who still wore a wig and knee-breeches and looked like a sparrow after a dust-bath.
Francis left him with his patient and went into the fruit-garden to enjoy a pipe of tobacco, a luxury which had mastered him in Dublin. He learned there to smoke a clay pipe and bird’s-eye tobacco and never changed them for sixty years.
Dr. Fish was rather a long time closeted in the dark room with the great bed, and when he came down Francis met him with an anxious face.
“Die?” said Dr. Fish. “Not a bit of it. She’ll live to be a hundred.”
But to Francis she was already dead, and in his life thereafter she was a ghost whom he regarded with a friendly eye. Never again did he allow her to meddle in his affairs.