“If you can cure him, Mr. Duffham, sir, I should take it as a great favour, like, showed to myself,” spoke the blacksmith. “I’d not have pounced upon him for all the world, to give him pain, in the state he’s in. He looks as if he were dying.”
They were in the kitchen still, when Grizzel opened the door to us, the fire bigger and hotter than ever. The first thing Duffham did was to order Caromel to bed, and to have a good fire lighted in his room.
But there was no hope for Nash Caromel. The Squire told us so going home that night. Duffham thought about ten days more would see the end of him.
II.
“And how have things gone during my short absence, Grizzel?” demanded Miss Gwinny Nave, alighting from the tax-cart the following morning, upon her return to Caromel’s Farm.
“Oh, pretty well,” answered Grizzel, who in her heart detested Miss Gwinny and all the Naves. “The master seems weaker. He have took to his bed, and got a fire in his room.”
“When did he do that?”
“He came down last night after you went, Miss Gwinny, and sat over this here kitchen fire for ever so long. Then he went up to bed, and I lighted him a fire and took him up some hot arrowroot with a wine glass o’ brandy in it. Shivering with cold, he was.”
“And he has not got up this morning?”
“No; and he says he does not mean to get up. ‘I’ve taken to my bed for good, Grizzel,’ he says to me this morning when I went in to light the fire again and see what he’d eat for breakfast. And I think he has, Miss Gwinny.”