“I’ve no doubt he disagreed with the cannibals,” sobbed the vicar, as he thought over the virtues of the deceased.
“None who ate him could escape appendicitis,” commented the Bishop, wiping a tear from his eye; “and, thank Heaven, the operation for that has yet to be invented. Those cannibals have been taken by this time from their wicked life.”
So it had gone on for ten generations. Cronky had been succeeded by his son and by his son’s son, and so on. To be Gloomster of the Isle of Man had by habit become the prerogative of the Gudehart family until the present, when Christian Goodheart found himself summoned before the Bishop to show cause why he should not be removed. Hitherto the Gloomster had given satisfaction. It would be hard to point to one of them—unless we except Eric Goodheart, the one who changed the name from Gudehart to Goodheart—who had not filled the island with that kind of sorrow that makes life seem hardly worth living. Eric Goodheart had once caught his father, “Bully Gudehart,” as he was called, in a moment of forgetfulness, doing a kindly act to a beggar at the door. A wanderer had appeared at the door of Nightmare Abbey in a starving condition, and Eric had surprised the Gloomster in the very act of giving the beggar a piece of apple-pie. The father found himself suddenly confronted by the round, staring eyes of his son, and he was frightened. If it were ever known that the Gloomster had done a kindly thing for anybody, he might be removed, and Bully Gudehart recognized the fact.
“Come here!” he cried brutally, to Eric, as the beggar marched away munching hungrily on the pie. “Come here, you brat! Do you hear? Come here!” The boy was coming all the while. “You saw?”
“Yes, your Honor,” he replied, “I saw. The man said he was nearly dead with hunger, and you gave him food.”
“No,” roared the Gloomster, full of fear, for he knew how small boys prattle, “I did not give him food! I gave him pie!”
“All right, your Majesty,” the boy answered. “You gave him pie. And I see now why they call you Bully. For pie is bully, and nothing less.”
“My son,” the Gloomster responded, seizing a trunk-strap and whacking the lad with it forcefully, “you don’t understand. Do you know why I fed that man?”
“Because he was dying of hunger,” replied the lad, ruefully, rubbing his back where the trunk-strap had hit him.
“Precisely,” said the Gloomster. “If I hadn’t given him that pie he’d have died on the premises, and I can’t afford the expense of having a tramp die here. As it is, he will enjoy a lingering death. That was one of your mother’s pies.”