"If it's any satisfaction to you, Nell, I'll see the parson," he said.
"His talk can't do me much harm, anyhow." Whereupon the rector of Crosber
and Hallibury was sent for, and came swiftly to perform his duty to the
dying man. He was closeted with Mr. Whitelaw for some time, and did his
best to awaken Christian feelings in the farmer's breast; but it was
doubtful if his pious efforts resulted in much. The soul of Stephen
Whitelaw was in his barns and granaries, with his pigs and cattle. He
could not so much as conceive the idea of a world in which there should
be no such thing as sale and profit.
His end came quietly enough at last, and Ellen was free. Her time of
bondage had been very brief, yet she felt herself twenty years older than
she had seemed before that interval of misery began.
When the will was read by Mr. Pivott on the day of Stephen Whitelaw's
funeral, it was found that the farmer had left his wife two hundred a
year, derivable from real estate. To Mrs. Rebecca Tadman, his cousin, he
bequeathed an annuity of forty pounds, the said annuity to revert to
Ellen upon Mrs. Tadman's death should Ellen survive. The remaining
portion of his real estate he bequeathed to one John James Harris, a
distant cousin, who owned a farm in Wiltshire, with whom Stephen Whitelaw
had spent some years of his boyhood, and from whom he had learned the
science of agriculture.
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