“There wasn’t any,” she said gently. “He died poorish.”
“They’ve stole it,” he cried. “They’ve robbed me. ’Twas me he meant it for.”
“No, no—all he left was used up in the funeral.”
“Ay, they ain’t satisfied with carts nowadays,” he commented bitterly. “Like that doddy little Dap. Did you goo to the churchyard to see the grave?”
“Yes,” she replied unflinchingly, sustained by the verbal accuracy. “I’ve got you a bloater for breakfast,” she added cheerfully.
“That’s the cowld chill he caught as a cad, gatherin’ eggs on the ma’shes,” he said musingly. “Ague they calls it—never got over it. And tramped with his pack-horses in all weathers. And rollin’ about here and there and everywheres. ‘You’ll never make old bones, Sid,’ Oi says to him.”
“A hundred and five is pretty old, Gran’fer,” Jinny reminded him. “King David only says seventy, that’s exactly one and a half lives your brother had.”
“Give me the Book,” he said brokenly.
With trembling hands she brought the great Family Bible he had inherited with the house. But his object seemed to be neither verification of the text nor prayerful reading, for he next asked for pen and ink, and then having ascertained the exact date of Sidrach’s death, he adjusted his spectacles and chronicled it with a quavering quill opposite Sidrach’s birth-date.
“He’s gone to heaven,” he said. “That’s more than some folks’ll do—even on their hands and knees. Do ye warm my beer for me this marnin’, dearie, for Oi fare to be cowld and lonely in my innards, and Oi’d fain smoke a pipe myself, same as Oi hadn’t promised the old man o’ God.”