The post-mortem examination showed that heart disease of long standing was the proximate cause of Kester St. George’s death. He was buried not in the family vault where the St. Georges for two centuries lay in silent state, but in the town cemetery. The grave was marked by a plain slab, on which was engraved simply the initials of the name he had always been known by, and the date of his death.
“I warned him of it long ago,” said Dr. Bolus to two or three fellows at Kester’s old club, as he stood with his back to the fire and his coat tails thrown over his arms. “But whose warnings are sooner forgotten than a doctor’s? By living away from London, and leading a perfectly quiet and temperate life, he might have been kept going for years. But, above all things, he should have avoided excitement of every kind.”
Lionel and Edith put off for a little while their long-talked-of tour in order that they might be present at the wedding of Tom and Jane. The ceremony took place in August. Tom and his bride went to Scotland for their honeymoon. Lionel and his wife started for Switzerland, en route for Italy, where they were to spend the ensuing winter.
Of late the Squire had recovered his health wonderfully. He seemed to have grown ten years younger in a few weeks. In the working of that wonderful coal-shaft, and in the prospect of his making a far larger fortune for his daughter than the one he so foolishly lost, he found a perpetual source of healthy excitement, which, by keeping both his mind and body actively and legitimately employed, had an undoubted tendency to lengthen his life. Besides this, Tom had asked him to superintend the construction of his new house. It was just the sort of job that the Squire delighted in—to look sharply after a lot of working men, and while pretending that they were all in a league to cheat him, blowing them up heartily all round one half-hour, and treating them to unlimited beer the next.
“I should like to see you in the Town Council, Bristow,” said the Squire one day to his son-in-law.
“Thank you, sir, all the same,” said Tom, “but it’s hardly good enough. There will be a general election before we are much older, when I mean, either by hook or by crook, to get into the House.”
“Bristow, you have the cheek of the Deuce himself,” was all that the astonished Squire could say.
It may just be remarked that Tom’s ambition has since been gratified. He is now, and has been for some time, member for W——. He is clever, ambitious, and a tolerable orator, as oratory is reckoned nowadays. What may not such a man aspire to?
Mr. Hoskyns is a frequent guest both of Tom and Lionel. Chatting with the former one day over the “walnuts and the wine,” said the old man: “I have often puzzled my brain over that affair of Baldry’s—that positive assertion of his that he saw and spoke to me one night in the Thornfield Road when I was most certainly not there. Have you ever thought about it since?”
“Once or twice, I dare say, but I could have enlightened you at the time had I chosen to do so. It was I whom Baldry met. I had made myself up to resemble you, and previously to my visit to the prison in your character, I thought I would try the effect of my disguise upon somebody who had known you well for years. As it so happened, Baldry was the first of your acquaintances whom I encountered on my nocturnal ramble. The rest you know.”