Yes, Mrs. Westerbrook was dead. She was carried off after a rather short illness: and Mr. Westerbrook was a widower, bereaved and solitary.
He was better off without her. The home was ten times more peaceful. He felt that: but he felt it to be very lonely; and he more than once caught himself wishing Fred was back again. Which of course meant wishing that he had never gone away, and never turned out to be a scamp.
Gisby did not die. Gisby had recovered in process of time, and was now more active on the farm than ever. Rather too active, its master was beginning dimly to suspect. Gisby seemed to haunt him. Gisby assumed more power than was at all necessary; and Gisby never ceased to pour into Mr. Westerbrook’s ear reiterations of Fred’s iniquity. Altogether, Mr. Westerbrook was growing a bit tired of Gisby. He had taken to put him down with curtness; and once when Gisby ventured to hint that it might be a convenient arrangement if he took up his abode in the house, Mr. Westerbrook swore at him. As to Fred, he was still popularly looked upon as cousin-german to the fiend incarnate.
Nothing had been heard of him. Nothing of any kind since that moonlight night when he had made his escape. Waiting for news from him so long, and waiting in vain, I, and Tod with me, had at last made up our minds that nothing more ever would be heard of him in this world. In short, that he had slipped out of it. Perhaps been starved out of it. Starved to death.
Well, Mr. Westerbrook called at the Manor within an hour of our getting home for Michaelmas, just twelve months after the uproar.
To me, he looked a good deal changed: his manner was quiet and subdued, almost as though he no longer took much interest in life; his hair had turned much greyer, and he complained of a continual pain in the left leg, which made him stiff, and sometimes prevented him from walking. Duffham called it a touch of rheumatism. Mr. Westerbrook fancied it might be an indication of something worse.
“But you have walked here, Westerbrook!” remarked the Squire.
“And shall walk back again—round by the village,” he said. “It seems to me to be just this, Squire—that if I do not make an effort to walk while I can, I may be laid aside for good.”
He gave a deep sigh as he spoke, as if he had the care of the whole parish upon him. The Squire began talking of the crop of oats on the N. D. Farm, saying what a famous crop it was.
“You’ll net a good penny by them this year, Westerbrook.”