HESTER AND THE WILL.
Hester was sitting by her fire knitting a sock for Roger, and Aleck was
with her, smoking his pipe in the corner, and occasionally opening his
small, sleepy eyes to look at his better half when she addressed some
remark to him. They were a very quiet, comfortable, easy-looking couple
as they sat there together in the pleasant room which had been theirs
for more than forty years, and their thoughts were as far as possible
from the storm-cloud bursting over their heads, and of which Frank was
the harbinger.
“Mrs. Floyd, Mr. Irving would like to see you in the library,” Frank
said a little stiffly, and in his manner there was a tinge of importance
and self-assurance unusual to him when addressing the _head_ of
Millbank, Mrs. Hester Floyd.
Hester did not detect this manner, but she saw that he was agitated and
nervous, and she dropped a stitch in her knitting as she looked at him
and said, “Roger wants me in the library? What for? Has anything
happened that you look white as a rag?”
Frank was twenty-seven years old, but there was still enough of the
child about him to make him like to be first to communicate news whether
good or bad, and to Hester’s question he replied, “Yes. _The missing
will is found._”
Hester dropped a whole needle full of stitches, and she was whiter now
than Frank as she sprang to Aleck’s side and shook him so vigorously
that the pipe fell from his mouth, and the stolid, stupid look left his
face for once as she said: “Do you hear, Aleck, the will is found! The
will that turns Roger out-doors.”
Aleck did not seem so much agitated as his wife, and after gazing
blankly at her for a moment, he slowly picked up his pipe and said, with
the utmost nonchalance, “You better go and see to’t. You don’t want me
along.”
She did _not_ want him; that is, she did not need him; and with a
gesture of contempt she turned from him to Frank, and said, “I am ready.
Come.”
There was nothing of the deference due to the heir of Millbank in her
tone and manner. Frank would never receive that from her, and she
flounced out into the hall, and kept a step or two in advance of the
young man, to whom she said, “Who is with Roger? Anybody?”
As she came nearer to the library she began to have a little dread of
what she might encounter, and visions of lawyers and constables, armed
and equipped to arrest her bodily, flitted uneasily before her mind; but
when Frank replied, “There is no one there but mother,” her fear
vanished, and was succeeded by a most violent fit of anger at the
luckless Mrs. Walter Scott.
“The jade!” she said. “I always mistrusted how her snoopin’ around would
end. If I’d had my way, she should never have put foot inside this
house, the trollop.”
“Mrs. Floyd, you are speaking of my mother. You must stop. I cannot
allow it.”
It was the master of Millbank who spoke, and Hester turned upon him
fiercely.
“For the Lord’s sake, how long since you took such airs? I shall speak
of that woman how and where I choose, and you can’t help yourself.”
By this it will be seen that Hester was not in the softest of moods as
she made her way to the library, but her feelings changed the moment she
stood in the room where Roger was. She had expected to find him hot,
excited, defiant, and ready, like herself, to battle with those who
would take his birthright from him. She was not prepared for the
crushed, white-faced man who looked up at her so helplessly as she came
in, and tried to force a smile as he pointed to a chair at his side, and
said,—
“Sit here by me, Hester. It is you and I now. You and I alone.”
His chin quivered a little as he held the chair for her to sit down, and
then kept his hand on her shoulder as if he felt better stronger so. He
knew he had her sympathy, that every pulsation of her heart beat for
him, that she would cling to him through weal and woe, and he felt a
kind of security in having her there beside him. Hester saw the yellow,
soiled paper spread out before him, and recognized it at a glance. Then
she looked across the table toward the proud woman who sat toying with
her rings, and exulting at the downfall of poor Roger. At her Hester
glowered savagely, and was met by a derisive smile, which told how
utterly indifferent the lady was to her and her opinion. Then Hester’s
glance came back, and rested pityingly on her boy, whose finger now was
on the will, and who said to her,—
“Hester, there _was_ another will, as Helen thought. It is here before
me. It was found under the garret floor. Do you know who put it there?”
He was very calm, as if asking an ordinary question, and his manner went
far toward reassuring Hester, who, by this time, had made up her mind to
tell the truth, and brave the consequences.
“Yes,” she replied. “I put it there myself, the day your father died.”
“I told you so,” dropped from Mrs. Walter Scott’s lips; but Hester paid
no heed to her.
She was looking at Roger, fascinated by the expression of his eyes and
face as he went on to question her.
“Why did you hide it, and where did you find it?”
“It was lying on the table, where Aleck found him dead, spread out
before him, as if he had been reading it over, as I know he had, and he
meant to change it, too, for he’d asked young Schofield to come that
night and fix it. Don’t you remember Schofield said so?”
Roger nodded, and she continued:
“And I know by another way that he meant to change it. ’Twas so writ in
his letter to you.”
“His letter to _me_, Hester? There was nothing like that in the letter,”
Roger exclaimed; and Hester continued:
“Not in the one I gave to you, I know. That he must have begun first,
and quit, because he blotched it, or something. Any ways, there was
another one finished for you, and in it he said he was goin’ to fix the
will, add a cod-cil or something, because he said it was unjust.”
“Why did you withhold that letter from me, Hester, and where is it now?”
Roger spoke a little sternly, and glad of an excuse to turn his
attention from herself to some one else, Hester replied,—
“It was in the same box with t’other paper, and I s’pose _she’s_ got it
who snooped till she found the will.”
She glanced meaningly at Mrs. Walter Scott, who deigned her no reply,
but who began to feel uneasy with regard to the letter of which she had
not before heard, and whose contents she did not know.
Neither Roger nor Frank wished to mix Magdalen up with the matter, if
possible to avoid it, and no mention was made of her then, and Hester
was suffered to believe it was Mrs. Walter Scott who had found the will.
“You read the letter, Hester. Tell me what was in it,” Roger said.
And then Hester’s face flushed, and her eyes flashed fire, as she
replied,—
“There was in it that which had never or’ to be writ. He giv the reason
why he made this will. He was driv to it by somebody who pisoned his
mind with the biggest, most impossible slander agin the sweetest,
innocentest woman that ever drawed the breath.”
Roger was listening eagerly now, with a fiery gleam in his blue eyes,
and his nostrils quivering with indignation.
Mrs. Walter Scott was listening, too, her face very pale, except where a
bright spot of red burned on her cheeks, and her lips slightly apart,
showing her white teeth.
Frank was listening also, and gradually coming to an understanding of
what had been so mysterious before.
Neither of the three thought of interrupting Hester, who had the field
to herself, and who, now that she was fairly launched, went on rapidly:
“I’ll make a clean breast of it, bein’ the will is found, which I never
meant it should be, and then them as is mistress here now can take me to
jail as soon as they likes. It don’t matter, the few days I’ve got left
to live. I signed that fust Will, me and Aleck, twenty odd year ago, and
more, and I knew pretty well what was in it, and that it was right, and
gin the property to the proper person; and then I thought no more about
it till a few months before he died, when Aleck and me was called in
agin to witness another will, here in this room, standin’ about as I set
now, with the old gentleman where _that_ woman is, Aleck where you be,
and Lawyer Schofield where Mr. Franklin stands. I thought it was a queer
thing, and mistrusted somethin’ wrong, particularly as I remembered a
conversation I overheard a week or so before about you, Roger, and your
mother, compared to who, that other woman ain’t fit to live in the same
place; and she won’t neither, she’ll find, when we all get our dues.”
Both Roger and Frank knew she referred to Mrs. Walter Scott, who, if
angry glances could have annihilated her, would have done so. But Hester
was not afraid of her, and went on, not very connectedly, but still
intelligibly, to those who were listening so intently:
“She pisoned his mind with snaky, insinuatin’ lies, which she didn’t
exactly speak out, as I heard, but hinted at, and made me so mad that I
wanted to throttle her then, and I wish I had bust into the room and
told her it was all a lie, as I could prove and swear to; for, from the
day Jessie Morton married Squire Irving until the summer she went to
Saratoga, when you, Roger, was quite a little shaver, she never laid
eyes on that man, who was her ruin afterward. I know it is so, and so
does others, for I’ve inquired; and if the scamp was here, he’d tell you
so, which I wish he was, and if I knew where to find him, I’d go on my
hands and knees to get his word, too, that what this good-for-nothing
snake in the grass told was a lie!”
Human nature could endure no more, and Mrs. Walter Scott sprang to her
feet, and turning to her son, asked,—
“If he, a man, would sit quietly, and hear his mother so abused?”
“You have a right to stop her,” she said, as she saw Frank hesitate. “A
right to turn her out of the house.”
“I’d like to see him do it,” Hester rejoined, her old face aglow with
passion and fierce anger.
“Hush, Hester, hush,” Roger said, in his quiet, gentle way; “and you,
Helen, sit down and listen. If I can bear this, you certainly can.”
The perspiration was rolling from his face in great drops a second time,
and something like a groan broke from his lips as he covered his eyes
with his hands and said, “My mother, oh, my mother, that I should hear
her so maligned.”
“She wan’t maligned,” Hester exclaimed, misinterpreting the meaning of
the word. “It was a lie, the whole on’t. She never left this house
except for church or parties, and only three of them, one to Miss
Johnson’s, one to Squire Schofield’s, and one to Mrs. Lennox’s, and a
few calls, from the time she came here till after you was born; I know,
I was here, I was your nurse, I waited on her, and loved her like my own
from the moment she cried so on my neck and said she didn’t want to come
here. She was too young to come as his wife. She was nothin’ but a
child, and when she couldn’t stan’ the racket any longer she run away.”
Roger was shaking now as with an ague fit. Here was something which
Hester could not deny. Jessie had run away and left him, her baby boy.
There was no getting smoothly over that, and he shivered with pain as
the old woman went on:
“I don’t pretend to excuse her, though there’s a good deal to be said on
both sides, and it most broke her heart, as a body who see her as I did
that last night at home would know.”
“Hester,” Roger said, and his voice was full of anguish, “why must you
tell all this. It surely has nothing to do with the matter under
consideration, and I would rather be spared, if possible, or at least
hear it alone.”
“I must tell it,” Hester rejoined, “to show you why I hid the will, and
why he made it, and how big a lie _that woman_ told him.”
There was the most intense scorn in her voice every time she said “that
woman,” and Mrs. Walter Scott winced under it, but had no redress then;
her time for that would be by and by, she reflected, and assuming a
haughty indifference she was far from feeling she kept still while
Hester went on:
“The night she went away she undressed her baby herself; she wouldn’t
let me touch him, and all the time she did it she was whispering, and
cooing, and crying-like over him, and she kissed his face and arms, and
even his little feet, and said once aloud so I in the next room heard
her, ‘My poor darling, my pet, my precious one, will you ever hate your
mother?’”
“Hester, I cannot hear another word of that. Don’t you see you are
killing me?” Roger said, and this time the tears streamed in torrents
down his face, and his voice was choked with sobs.
Hester heeded him now, and there were tears on her wrinkled face as she
laid her hand pityingly on his golden brown hair and said, “Poor boy, I
won’t harrer you any more. I’ll stick to the pint, which is that your
mother, after you was asleep, and just afore I left her for the night,
came up to me in her pretty coaxin’ way, and told me what a comfort I
was to her, and said if anything ever was to happen that Roger should
have no mother, she would trust me to care for him before all the world,
and she made me promise that if anything should happen, I would never
desert Roger, but love him as if he was my own, and consider his
interest before that of any one else. I want you to mind them words,
‘consider his interest before any one else’ for that’s the upshot of the
whole thing. I promised to do it. I _swore_ I would do it, and I’ve kep’
my word. Next morning she was gone, and in a week or so was drownded
dead off Cape Hattrass, where I hope I’ll never go, for there’s allus a
hurricane there when there ain’t a breath no wheres else. I sot them
words down. I’ve read ’em every Sunday since as regular as my Bible, and
that fetches me to the mornin’ the Squire was found dead.
“That woman had been here a few months before, workin’ on his pride and
pisenen’ his mind, till he was drove out of his head, and you not here,
either, to prove it was a lie by your face, which, savin’ the eyes and
hair, is every inch an Irving. He acted crazy like, and mad them days,
as Aleck and me noticed, and he made another will, after that woman was
gone to Boston, and a spell after she went home for good. Aleck went up
in the mornin’ to make a fire here in this very room, and, sittin’ in
his chair, he found the Squire stark dead, and cold and stiff, and he
come for me who was the only other body up as good luck would have it,
and I not more’n half dressed. There was the will, lyin’ open on the
table, as if he had been readin’ it, and I read it, and Aleck, too;
’twas this same will, and my blood biled like a caldron kittle, and
Aleck fairly swore, and we said, what does it mean? There was a letter
on the table, too, a finished letter for Roger, and I read it, and found
the reason there. The Squire’s conscience had been a smitin’ him ever
since he did the rascally thing, and at last he’d made up his mind to
add a cod-cill, and he seemed to have a kind of forerunner that he
should never see Roger agin, and so he tried to explain the bedivelment
and smooth it over and all that, and signed himself, ‘Your affectionate
father.’”
“Did he, Hester? Did he own me at last?” Roger’s voice rang through the
room like a bell, its joyful tones thrilling even Mrs. Walter Scott, who
was growing greatly interested in Hester’s narrative, while Frank stood
perfectly spellbound, as if fearful of losing a word of the strange
story.
“Yes, I’m pretty sure he did,” Hester said, in reply to Roger’s
question. “Any way, he said he had forgiven your mother, and he would
leave _her_ letter with his, for you, in case he never see you, and I
gin you your mother’s, but kept his, because that would have told you
about the will, which I meant to hide. We both thought on’t to once,
Aleck and me, but I spoke first, bein’ a woman, and mentioned the
promise to consider Roger’s interest before any body’s else, and Jessie
seemed to be there with us, and haunted me, with the great blue eyes of
hern, till I made up my mind, and took the pesky thing and the letter,
and put ’em away safe up in the garret under the floor, where I’d had a
piece sawed out a spell before, so as to put pisen under there for the
rats. Then I moved an old settee over the place, and chairs and things,
so that it would look as if nobody had been there for ages. He must have
begun another letter first and blotched it, for the sheet lay there, and
I took it as a special Providence and kept it for Roger, as his father’s
last words to him. I knew t’other will was not destroyed, for I’d seen
it not long before, and I found it in his writing-desk, sealed up like a
drum, and left it there, and then she came with her lofty airs, and
queened it over us, as if she thought she was lord of all; but her
feathers drooped a bit when the will was read, and she thought the old
Harry was in it, and hinted, and snooped, and rummaged the very first
night, for I found her there, with her night gownd on, and more than
forty papers stickin’ in her hair, though why she thought ’twas there,
is more than I know; but she’s hunted the garret ever since by turns,
and I moved it twice, and then carried it back, and once she set
Magdalen at it, she or _he_, it’s little matter which.”
Magdalen was a sore point with Roger, and he shuddered, when her name
was mentioned, and thought of the letter, and wondered if she had it,
and would ever bring it to him.
“I was easy enough when that woman wasn’t here,” Hester continued, “and
I did think for a spell, she’d met with a change, she was so soft and so
velvety and so nice, that butter couldn’t melt in her mouth if it should
try. Maybe she’s forgot what she sprung from, but I knew the Browns,
root and branch; they allus was a peekin’, rummagin’ set, and her uncle
peeked into a money drawer once. She comes honestly by her snoopin’ that
found the will.”
Mrs. Walter Scott had borne a great deal of abuse from Hester, and borne
it quietly after her appeal to Frank, but now she could keep still no
longer, and she half rose from her chair, and exclaimed:
“Silence, old woman, or I will have you put out of the house, and I hold
Frank less than a man if he will hear me so abused. I never found the
will. It was Magdalen Lennox who found it, just where you told her it
was when you were crazy.”
“Magdalen found it, and brought it to _you_ instead of burnin’ it up!”
old Hester exclaimed, raising her hands in astonishment, and feeling her
blood grow hot against the poor girl. “Magdalen found it, after all he
has done for her! She’s a _viper_ then; and my curse be—”
She did not finish the sentence, for both Roger and Frank laid a hand
upon her mouth, and stopped the harsh words she would have spoken.
“You don’t know the circumstances. You shall not speak so of Magdalen,”
Roger said, while Frank, glad of a chance to prove that he _was_ a man
even if he had allowed his mother to be abused, said sternly: “Mrs.
Floyd, I have stood quietly by and heard my mother insulted, but when
you attack Magdalen I can keep still no longer. _She_ must not be
slandered in my presence. I hope she will be my wife.”
Hester gave a violent start, and a sudden gleam of intelligence came
into her eyes, as she replied, “Oh, I see now. She wasn’t content to
have you alone, and I don’t blame her for that. It would be a sickening
pill to swaller, you and that woman too but she must take advantage of
my crazy talk, and find the will which makes her lover a nabob. That’s
what I call gratitude to me and Roger, for all we’ve done for her. Much
good may her money and lover do her!”
Thus speaking, Hester rose from her chair and went toward Roger, who had
sat as rigid as a stone while she put into words what, as the shadow of
a thought, he had tried so hard to fight down.
“I’m done now,” she said. “I’ve told all I know about the will. I hid
it, Aleck and me, and I ain’t sorry neither, and I’m ready to go to jail
any minit the new lords see fit to send me.”
She started for the door, but came back again to Roger, and, laying her
hand on his hair, said soothingly, and in a very different tone from the
one she had assumed when addressing Frank or his mother: “Don’t take it
so hard, my boy. We’ll git along somehow. I ain’t so very old. There’s a
good deal of vim in me yet, and me and Aleck will work like dogs for
you. We’ll sell the tavern stand, and you shall have the hull it
fetches. Your father give us the money to buy it, you know.”
Roger could not fail to be touched by this generous unselfishness, and
he grasped the hard-wrinkled hand, and tried to smile, as he said:
“Thank you, Hester, I knew you would not desert me; but I shall not need
your little fortune. I can work for us all.”
It was growing dark by this time, and the bell had thrice sent forth its
summons to dinner. As Roger finished speaking, it rang again, and, glad
of an excuse to get away, old Hester said, “What do they mean by keepin’
that bell a dingin’ when they might know we’d something on hand of more
account than victuals and drink. I’ll go and see to’t myself.”
She hurried out into the hall, and Frank shut the door after her, and
then came back to the table, and began to urge upon Roger the acceptance
of a portion, at least, of the immense fortune, which a few hours before
he had believed to be all his own. But Roger stopped him short.
“Don’t, Frank,” he said. “I know you mean it now, and, perhaps, would
mean it always, but so long as that clause stands against me, I can take
nothing from the Irvings.”
He pointed to the words “the boy known as Roger Lennox Irving,” and
Frank rejoined, “It was a cruel thing for him to do.”
“Yes; but a far wickeder, crueller thing, to poison his mind with
slanders, until he did it,” Roger replied, as he turned to his sister,
and said, “Helen, I hold you guilty of my ruin, if what Hester has told
us be true; but I shall not reproach you; I will let your own conscience
do that.”
Mrs. Irving tried to say that Hester had spoken falsely, that she had
never worked upon the weak old man’s jealousy of his young wife; but she
could not quite utter so glaring a falsehood, knowing or believing, as
she did, that Magdalen had the letter, which might refute her lie. So
she assumed an air of lofty dignity, and answered back that it was
unnecessary to continue the conversation, which had been far more
personal than the questions involved required,—neither was it needful to
prolong the interview. The matter of the will was now between him and
Frank, and, with his permission, she would withdraw. Roger simply
inclined his head, to indicate his willingness for her to leave, and,
with a haughty bow, she swept from the room, signalling to Frank to
follow. But Frank did not heed her. He tarried for a few moments,
standing close to Roger, and mechanically toying with the pens and
pencils upon the table. He did not feel at all comfortable, nor like a
man who had suddenly become possessed of hundreds of thousands. He felt
rather like a thief, or, at best, an usurper of another’s rights, and
would have been glad at that moment had the will been lying in its box
under the floor, where it had lain so many years. Roger was the first to
speak.
“Go, Frank,” he said; “leave me alone for to-night. It is better so. I
know what you want to say, but it can do no good. Things are as they
are, and we cannot change them. I do not blame you. Don’t think I do. I
always liked you, Frank, always, since we were boys together, and I like
you still; but leave me now. I cannot bear any more.”
Roger’s voice trembled, and Frank could see through the fast gathering
darkness how white his face was and how he wiped the sweat-drops from
his forehead and lips, and wringing his hand nervously, he, too, went
away, and Roger was alone.