“Yer honour was always kind to me——”
“Come, Tom, ye mustn’t be cryin’, man. Penny in pocket’s a merry companion, and I wrote ye down for somethin’ in my will, and ye a’ brewed me many a tankard, Tom—ye’ll never brew me another—and I wouldn’t go without a word and a shake by the hand.”
When this was over, the nurse signed to Tom to go.
I wonder how the grim old man, with near a week’s white stubble on his chin, felt as he saw Tom Ward glide away softly, with tears on his rugged cheeks. For Tom, it was the breaking up and foundering of old Wyvern in the deep. He was too old to live in the new Wyvern that was coming, mayhap.
“I’ll never get the old days out o’ my head, nor ever like the new, and ’twon’t be long, I’m thinkin’, before I follow him down the ash-tree road to Wyvern churchyard.”
And so for the old Squire it came, the last day of light, and the first of death.
It was a stately funeral in the old-fashioned way. All the good old houses of the county were represented there. The neighbours, great and small, mustered; the shops in the town were all shut, and the tenants attended in masses.
This solemn feast and pageant over, the fuss subsided, and Harry entered upon his reign with a gravity becoming his new prerogative and responsibilities.
Sergeant-Major Archdale was an influential, and prosperous, and reserved minister under the new régime. He had a snug berth at Warhampton, as Harry Fairfield had promised, and from that distant legation he was summoned every now and then to Wyvern, and there conferred with the Squire. I have called him Sergeant-Major, but he was so no longer. He had retired some time before from the militia and was now plain Mr. Archdale.