And when he was about sixty, and had begun to be genuinely ill in the way everybody had always expected, his eldest daughter asked him one evening—in the way daughters do, having heard about half of the story from her mother—whether it was true that he had been told he would die at five-and-thirty.
"It is true. And you were nine-and-fifty last month."
"I was."
"Papa," she said, "were you angry when Dr. Pell said he had been wrong about the time? Were you angry with him?"
Nicholas Ware thought about that for a good while. "No," he said. "I have been asked that four times in twenty years, and the answer is always the same, and it always disappoints people. He gave me a number because I asked him for one. That is the whole of it. I sat in that library at eight-and-twenty and I said, 'How long?' And he was two-and-sixty and certain, and he told me. And there is not one man in England who would not have taken that number and built a house on it.
"What I have been angry about—and it took me about four years to find it, and it is not about Pell at all—is that I had eight years in which nobody in that house asked one single question: not my mother, not Trant, not my agent, and not me. And a woman came up my steps with four shillings and a bag, and she had been here four months, and she asked me at four in the morning who had told me, and when, and whether anybody had checked."
His daughter sat with that. "Why her?" she said. "Why did nobody else ever ask?"
"Because everybody else in this house loved me," said Nicholas Ware. "Your mother in the November did not, yet. She had four shillings, and a settlement, and no particular feeling about me at all. And she looked at my life the way you look at a set of accounts that somebody else has kept, and she found an error in it that forty people had been walking past for eight years because they could not bear to look.
"That is what she came here with, my dear: not kindness. Everybody in this county was kind to me, and it very nearly finished me. She came with a clear head and no stake in the answer, and she used it. And by the time she had begun to love me, she had already asked the question."