“I don't need the doctor this time, honey; joy never killed yet.”
So said Mrs. Sherwood, opening her eyes to see the scared face of Nan
close above her. Then she saw her husband at her feet, quietly chafing
her hands in his own hard, warm palms. She pulled hers gently from his
clasp and rested them upon his head. Mr. Sherwood's hair was iron-gray,
thick, and inclined to curl. She ran her little fingers into it and
clung tightly.
“Let, let me get my breath!” she gasped. Then, after a moment she smiled
brilliantly into the wind-bitten face of the kneeling man. “It's all
over, Robert,” she said.
“My dear!” he cried thickly; while Nan could not wholly stifle the cry
of fear that rose to her lips.
“It's all over,” repeated the little woman. “All the worry, all the
poverty, all the uncertainty, all the hard times.”
Mr. Sherwood looked startled indeed. He had no idea what the letter
from Scotland contained, and he feared that his wife, who had already
suffered so much, was for the moment quite out of her head.
“My poor Jessie,” he began, but her low, sweet laugh stopped him.
“Not poor! Never poor again, Robert!” she cried. “God is very good to
us. At the very darkest hour He has shown us the dawn. Robert, we are
rich!”
“Great goodness, Jessie! What do you mean? Exclaimed Mr. Sherwood,
stumbling to his feet at last.
“It's true! It's true, Papa Sherwood!” Nan cried, clapping her hands.
“Don't you call ten thousand dollars riches?”
“Ten, thousand, dollars?” murmured her father. He put his hand to
his head and looked confusedly about for a seat, into which he weakly
dropped. Nan had picked up the letter and now she dramatically thrust it
into his hand.
“Read that, Papa Sherwood!” she said commandingly.
He read the communication from the Scotch attorney, first with immense
surprise, then with profound doubt. Who but a young imaginative girl,
like Nan, or a woman with unbounded faith in the miracles of God, like
her mother, could accept such a perfectly wonderful thing as being real?
“A hoax,” thought the man who had worked so hard all his life without
the least expectation of ever seeing a penny that he did not earn
himself. “Can it be that any of those heedless relatives of my wife's in
Memphis have attempted a practical joke at this time?”
He motioned for Nan to bring him the envelope, too. This he examined
closely, and then read the communication again. It looked all regular.
The stationery, the postmark, the date upon it, all seemed perfectly in
accord.
Mrs. Sherwood's gay little laugh shattered the train of her husband's
thought. “I know what the matter is with you, Papa Sherwood,” she said.
“You think it must be a practical joke.”
“Oh!” gasped Nan, feeling a positive pain at her heart. This awful
possibility had never entered her mind before.
“But it isn't,” went on her mother blithely. “It is real. Mr. Hugh
Blake, of Emberon, must have been very old; and he was probably as
saving and canny as any Scotchman who ever wore kilts. It is not
surprising that he should have left an estate of considerable size-----”
“Ten thousand dollars!” breathed Nan again. She loved to repeat it.
There was white magic in the very sound of such a sum of money. But her
father threw a conversational bomb into their midst the next instant.
“Ten thousand dollars, you goosey!” he said vigorously. “That's the main
doubt in the whole business. It isn't ten thousand dollars. It's fifty
thousand dollars! A pound, either English or Scotch, is almost five of
our dollars. Ten thousand dollars would certainly be a fortune for us;
fifty thousand is beyond the dreams of avarice.”
“Oh, dear me!” said Nan weakly.
But Mrs. Sherwood merely laughed again. “The more the better,” she said.
“Why shouldn't we be able to put fifty thousand dollars to good use?”
“Oh, we can, Momsey,” said Nan eagerly. “But, will we be let?”
Mr. Sherwood laughed grimly at that; but his wife continued confidently:
“I am sure nobody needs it more than we do.”
“Why!” her daughter said, just as excitedly, “we'll be as rich as Bess
Harley's folks. Oh, Momsey! Oh, Papa Sherwood! Can I go to Lakewood
Hall?”
The earnestness of her cry showed the depths to which that desire had
plumbed during these last weeks of privation and uncertainty. It was
Nan's first practical thought in relation to the possibility of their
changed circumstances.
The father and mother looked at each other with shocked understanding.
The surprise attending the letter had caused both parents to forget,
for the moment, the effect of this wonderful promise of fortune, whether
true or false, on imaginative, high-spirited Nan.
“Let us be happy at first, Nan, just in the knowledge that some money is
coming to us,” Mrs. Sherwood said more quietly. “Never mind how much, or
how little. Time will tell all that.”
“Now you talk like father,” cried Nan, pouting.
“And let father talk a little, too,” Mr. Sherwood said, smiling, “and
to you both.” His right forefinger struck the letter emphatically in his
other hand. “This is a very wonderful, a blessed, thing, if true. But it
has to be proven. We must build our hopes on no false foundation.”
“Oh, Papa Sherwood! How can we, when the man says there-----”
“Hush!” whispered Momsey, squeezing her excited little daughter's hand.
“In the first place,” continued Mr. Sherwood quietly and gravely, “there
may be some mistake in the identification of your mother, child, as the
niece mentioned in this old man's will.”
“Oh!” Nan could not help that gasp.
“Again, there may be stronger opposition to her claim than this lawyer
at present sees. Fifty thousand dollars is a whole lot of money, and
other people by the name of Blake will be tempted by it.”
“How mean of them!” whispered Nan.
“And, above all,” pursued Mr. Sherwood, “this may be merely a scheme by
unprincipled people to filch small sums of money from gullible people.
The 'foreign legacy swindle' is worked in many different ways. There
may be calls for money, by this man who names himself Andrew Blake, for
preliminary work on the case. We haven't much; but if he is baiting for
hundreds of Blakes in America he may secure, in the aggregate, a very
tidy sum indeed.”
“Oh, Father!” cried Nan. “That's perfectly horrid!”
“But perfectly possible. Let us not swallow this bait, hook, line and
sinker. You see, he sends no copy of the will in question, or
that codicil relating to your mother's legacy; nor does he offer
identification or surety as to his own standing. Don't let the
possibilities of this wonderful thing carry you off your feet, my dear.”
Nan's lip was quivering and she could scarcely crowd back the tears. To
have one's hopes rise so high only to be dashed-----.
“Don't completely crush us, Papa Sherwood, with your perfectly
unanswerable logic,” said his wife lightly. “We'll remember all these
strictures, and more. We can at least put the matter to the test.”
“Quite so,” agreed her husband. “We will prepare the papers requested
by this Scotch attorney. I will even inquire of a good lawyer here
something regarding the Scotch laws in such a matter as this, if it will
be necessary to make a personal appearance before the local courts
over there. And perhaps we can find out the true standing of Mr. Andrew
Blake, of Kellam & Blake, Edinburgh. It will cost us a little money, and
we can ill spare it now; but to satisfy ourselves-----”
“We will throw a sprat to catch a herring,” quoted Momsey cheerfully.
“Quite so,” repeated Mr. Sherwood.
“But, dear, DEAR!” moaned Nan. “Is that all it is going to amount to?
Don't you really believe it's all true, Papa Sherwood?”
“I can't say that I do, my dear,” returned her father gravely. “Such
romantic things as this do not often happen outside of story books.”
“Then, I declare!” cried Nan desperately, “I wish we lived in a story
book!”
“Your father will make inquiries at once, honey,” said Momsey easily,
seemingly very little disturbed herself by her husband's doubts and
fears. To her mind this wonderful turn of fortune's wheel was in direct
answer to prayer. Nothing could shake her faith in the final result
of her husband's inquiries. Yet, she was proud of his caution and good
sense.
“I do think it is dreadful,” murmured Nan, “to believe one's self rich
for only a minute!”
“Have patience, honey,” said her mother.
“Meanwhile,” added Mr. Sherwood, rising, “I will go back to sifting
cinders.”
But Nan did no more sweeping that day.