Perhaps it was this consideration that prompted old Mr. Talbot--O, bother old Mr. Talbot!--that prompted old Mr. Talbot, I say, to take the important step of dying, when, poor old man! his death would give the least possible trouble.
There seemed as little reason for his dying as there had seemed for his living, for as far as anyone knew there was nothing the matter with him, except an extreme sleepiness of an evening, which was but natural in an old weary man who still kept at his stone-masonry though he was full seventy.
Night after night, for some weeks, he had been getting sleepier and sleepier.
"Why, dad, I never saw such an old sleepy-head"--his wife had rallied him good-naturedly one night, looking at him with a sudden odd expression in her face.
"Eh, lass, but I was noddin' and no mistake," said the old man, struggling drowsily with the heaviness, and presently succumbing once more.
"He's off again," said Mrs. Talbot to herself, as she lifted the lid of a pent saucepan in which some boiled onions were mightily bubbling in a wild little world of steam.
Presently the old man sighed deeply,--so you would have thought; but Mrs. Talbot, hurrying to him, knew that he had tried to say "Jane," and had said it for the last time.
Yes, he had been getting sleepier and sleepier; all his life he had been trying to sleep, and at last he slept.
To most people Mr. Talbot's death was the first intimation of his ever having lived, and one rather resents for the old man the one day's publicity which death enforced upon him. It was indeed well for him that he was dead, for such unwonted excitement would surely have killed him. This important coming and going of undertakers; this populous invasion of friends talking like muffled drums in the front parlour, and passing up and down and up and down the stairs, in and out and in and out of his still room; this throng of neighbours awaiting him in the streets; these plumed impatient horses, and these carriages of dark grandeur--"Jane, why ever didn't you bury me by the back door?" would surely have been the old man's pitiful complaint could he have known.
However, the day passed and the old man was safe at last, where no front-parlour visitors should affright him more, and where no one would trouble his old brains for speech any more; and to all, save one, his death was but as though he had moved a little farther into the kitchen.