annise over these two wretched men! He had never heard the last
of that money which they had sent to Mrs. Mason, Clive said. When the
knowledge of the fact came to the Campaigner's ears, she raised such a
storm as almost killed the poor Colonel, and drove his son half mad.
She seized the howling infant, vowing that its unnatural father and
grandfather were bent upon starving it--she consoled and sent Rosey into
hysterics--she took the outlawed parson to whose church they went, and
the choice society of bankrupt captains, captains' ladies, fugitive
stockbrokers' wives, and dingy frequenters of billiard-rooms, and
refugees from the Bench, into her councils; and in her daily visits
amongst these personages, and her walks on the pier, whither she trudged
with poor Rosey in her train, Mrs. Mackenzie made known her own wrongs
and her daughter's--showed how the Colonel, having robbed and cheated
them previously, was now living upon them; insomuch that Mrs. Bolter,
the levanting auctioneer's wife, would not make the poor old man a bow
when she met him--that Mrs. Captain Kitely, whose husband had lain for
seven years past in Boulogne gaol ordered her son to cut Clive; and
when, the child being sick, the poor old Colonel went for arrowroot
to the chemist's, young Snooks, the apothecary's assistant, refused
to allow him to take the powder away without previously depositing the
money.

He had no money, Thomas Newcome. He gave up every farthing. After
having impoverished all around him, he had no right, he said, to touch
a sixpence of the wretched pittance remaining to them--he had even given
up his cigar, the poor old man, the companion and comforter of forty
years. He was "not fit to be trusted with money," Mrs. Mackenzie said,
and the good man owned as he ate his scanty crust, and bowed his noble
old head in silence under that cowardly persecution.

And this, at the end of threescore and seven or eight years, was to be
the close of a life which had been spent in freedom and splendour, and
kindness and honour; this the reward of the noblest heart that ever
beat--the tomb and prison of a gallant warrior who had ridden in twenty
battles--whose course through life had been a bounty wherever it had
passed--whose name had been followed by blessings, and whose career was
to end here--here--in a mean room, in a mean alley of a foreign town--a
low furious woman standing over him and stabbing the kind defenceless
heart with killing insult