Never robust, and always
reckless with himself, his health had been steadily getting worse for some
years, and when he came back to London he looked, as indeed he was, a dying
man. Morbidly shy, with a sensitive independence which shrank from any
sort of obligation, he would not communicate with his relatives, who would
gladly have helped him, or with any of the really large number of attached
friends whom he had in London; and, as his disease weakened him more and
more, he hid himself away in his miserable lodgings, refused to see a
doctor, let himself half starve, and was found one day in a Bodega with
only a few shillings in his pocket, and so weak as to be hardly able to
walk, by a friend, himself in some difficulties, who immediately took him
back to the bricklayer's cottage in a muddy outskirt of Catford, where he
was himself living, and there generously looked after him for the last six
weeks of his life.
He did not realise that he was going to die; and was full of projects for
the future, when the L600 which was to come to him from the sale of some
property should have given him a fresh chance in the world; began to read
Dickens, whom he had never read before, with singular zest; and, on the
last day of his life, sat up talking eagerly till five in the morning.
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