As the two brothers were the last of their race, and no one has laid claim to Philip’s estate, in due course it reverted to the Crown. It is among the large number of those for which heirs-at-law are still wanting. Old Morley and his wife had not been in a good service for so many years for nothing; they would have retired from it long before had it not been for antiquated notions of fidelity. Their master’s death found them comfortably off, and in the possession, as it turned out, of a little property among the Surrey hills. On that property they are residing to this day. When it first came into their hands the neighbourhood was wild and rural; others, since, have discovered that it was beautiful. Building is taking place on every side; quite a town is springing up. Though this materially adds to the monetary value of their property, the old couple are a little restless amidst their new surroundings.
Hume is still unmarried. He becomes less and less engaged in the active practice of his profession. But he remains an authority on the obscure diseases of the brain. He has written more than one book upon this special subject. I have not read them—I am no reader, and such works would, in any case, be hardly in my way—but I understand that he seeks to show that we are, all of us, more or less mad, and that he goes far towards the proof of this thesis. He has not materially altered his estimate of my mental equipment. Indeed, he once assured me that he was becoming more and more convinced that men whose physical and muscular development went beyond a certain limit were, ipso facto, mad; and, ergo, I must be insane. However, we are tolerable friends, and he seems not unwilling to allow that I am as well out of an asylum as in.
It has been rumoured that Miss Adair intends, shortly, to retire from the stage; and the whisper is that Hume, who for some time has been her constant attendant, has something to do with her intention. In that case, they will make a well-matched pair, for in my opinion they both have tongues.
Bessie—I think that at this point in these pages I am entitled to call her Bessie—Bessie never acted again. After that hideous night brain fever supervened. For weeks she lay between life and death. More than once the doctors gave her up. Fortunately, doctors are not omniscient. After all, God was merciful—to me.
Almost her first words, when the darkest hour had given place to the first glimmerings of dawn, took the shape of a question: “Where is Tom?” Her scamp of a brother! After all she had suffered for him, he was foremost in her thoughts.
“I hope that he is on the road to fortune.”
Looking up at me with her big eyes, which had grown bigger, and sunk farther in her head, she asked me what I meant. I explained. I had supplied Young Hopeful with the wherewithal which would enable him to seek for gold in what was then the new El Dorado—the Klondyke region. He had started on his quest. But he never found what, at least nominally, he had gone to look for. Some months afterwards I learnt that he had died; fallen at night into the waters of the Yukon river and been drowned. My correspondent went on to explain that he was dead drunk at the time; which explanation I kept from his sister. I did not wish her to think that his end had been unbecoming to a man.
Bessie and I have been married just long enough to enable me to begin to realise my happiness. I am ever slow, so I will not say what is the tale of the years which that statement implies; though the sight of our youngsters is apt to give away the secret of their father’s dulness. There was no question between us of courtship. I knew, as I watched by her bedside, that if she came back to life she was mine; and that in any case I was hers. And so it was. So soon as she was strong enough we were married. And we have been lovers ever since. As I sit, with her hand clasped tightly, watching her children and mine, I am sometimes disposed to suspect that our courtship is beginning. I know it will never cease.
The goodness of God has been very great in giving me my wife. By what seemed accident, but was indeed the act of Providence, I have come to have for my very own the woman of my dreams. Sleeping and waking she is mine. So true is it that some men’s good fortune is out of all proportion to their deserts.
THE END