The sick man's feeble hand pointed to the door, through which his wife departed very submissively.
"I've no wish to hear anything, Luke," she said, "but I hope you won't say anything against those that have been good and generous to you."
"I shall say what I like," answered Mr. Marks, fiercely, "and I'm not a-goin' to be ordered by you. You ain't the parson, as I've ever heerd of; nor the lawyer neither."
The landlord of the Castle Inn had undergone no moral transformation by his death-bed sufferings, fierce and rapid as they had been. Perhaps some faint glimmer of a light that had been far off from his life now struggled feebly through the black obscurities of ignorance that darkened his soul. Perhaps a half angry, half sullen penitence urged him to make some rugged effort to atone for a life that had been selfish and drunken and wicked. Be it how it might he wiped his white lips, and turning his haggard eyes earnestly upon Robert Audley, pointed to a chair by the bedside.
"You made game of me in a general way, Mr. Audley," he said, presently, "and you've drawed me out, and you've tumbled and tossed me about like in a gentlemanly way, till I was nothink or anythink in your hands; and you've looked me through and through, and turned me inside out till you thought you knowed as much as I knowed. I'd no particular call to be grateful to you, not before the fire at the Castle t'other night. But I am grateful to you for that. I'm not grateful to folks in a general way, p'r'aps, because the things as gentlefolks have give have a'most allus been the very things I didn't want. They've give me soup, and tracks, and flannel, and coals; but, Lord, they've made such a precious noise about it that I'd have been to send 'em all back to 'em. But when a gentleman goes and puts his own life in danger to save a drunken brute like me, the drunkenest brute as ever was feels grateful like to that gentleman, and wishes to say before he dies--which he sees in the doctor's face as he ain't got long to live--'Thank ye, sir, I'm obliged to you."
Luke Marks stretched out his left hand--the right hand had been injured by the fire, and was wrapped in linen--and groped feebly for that of Mr. Robert Audley.
The young man took the coarse but shrunken hand in both his own, and pressed it cordially.
"I need no thanks, Luke Marks," he said; "I was very glad to be of service to you."