THE WILL.
In the pursuit of personal information, which should have been in his
possession before, that somewhat too easy-going young soldier, Roland
Lindsay, in the course of a day or two, found himself in the 'Gray
Metropolis of the North,' or rather in that portion thereof which has
sprung up within the last hundred and forty years or so.
The office of Mr. M'Wadsett, W.S., was amid a number of such 'wasps'
nests,' in a small and rather gloomy and depressing arena known as
Thistle Court, under the shadow of St. Andrew's great, sombre, and
circular-shaped church.
The situation was a good one for a prosperous town lawyer's office,
and Mr. M'Wadsett was a prosperous--and, as usual with many of them,
effusively pious--lawyer, and all about him, whether by chance or
design, was arranged to give clients--victims many deemed
themselves--an impression that his practice was wide, select, and
respectable--intensely respectable--while Mr. M'Wadsett never omitted
church services at least twice daily, for the kirk was his
fetish--the test of a decorous life, like his black suit and white
necktie.
He was busily engaged just then, so Roland sent in his card and had
to wait, which he felt as a kind of hint that he was not so important
a client now as he might have been. The room he was ushered into was
a dull one, overlooking the gloomy court; and slowly the time seemed
to pass, for Roland was in an agony of impatience now to know the
worst--the profound folly of his father, for whom his feelings just
then were, to say the least of them, of a somewhat mingled cast.
Mr. M'Wadsett's office consisted of several rooms--the interior and
upper floors of an old-fashioned house. In one of these, partly
furnished like a parlour, the walls hung with fly-blown maps and
prospectuses--a waiting-room--Roland was left to fume and 'cool his
heels'; while in one somewhere adjacent he heard a curious clashing
of fire-irons, and a voice giving the--to him--somewhat familiar
words of command, but in a suppressed tone:
'Guard--point--two! Low guard--point--two!' etc., for it was evident
that some of the clerks who were rifle volunteers were having a
little bayonet exercise, till a bell rang, when they all vaulted upon
their stools and began to write intensely, for then the voice of old
Mr. M'Wadsett was heard, and Roland was ushered into his presence.
His room was snug and cosy, albeit its principal furniture consisted
of green charter boxes on iron frames, all of which held secrets
relating to the families whose well-known names were displayed upon
them. How much, indeed, did he not know about all the leading
proprietors of Fife and Kinross?
He received his visitor warmly and pleasantly enough, spoke of the
war in Egypt, his health, the weather, of course, and then when a
pause ensued, Roland stated the object for which he had come.
The lawyer, a fussy little man, with a sharp, keen manner, and sharp,
keen gray eyes, raised his silver-rimmed glasses above his bushy
white eyebrows, and said:
'My dear sir, I sent a copy of your respected father's will to Egypt.'
'Addressed to me?'
'Yes.'
'I never got it.'
'Why?'
'We were holding the lines in front of Ramleh at that time; the Arabs
made free with the mail-bags, and lit their pipes with the contents,
no doubt, in the desert beyond Ghizeh.'
'My dear sir, how lawless of them!'
'I have thought about this will at times, till I have become
stupid--woolly in fact, and hated the name of it.'
'Your good father--
'Ah,' interrupted Roland, a little testily, 'I fear we only looked
upon him latterly as the family banker, and he was useful in that
way--very.'
'To your brother in the Guards perhaps too much so,' said the lawyer
gravely.
'Well--about the cursed document itself?' began Roland a little
impetuously.
'Strong language, my dear sir--strong language! The terms of your
respected father's will are, I must say, a little peculiar, and were
framed much against my advice; though his old family agent, I
scarcely felt justified in drawing out the document.'
'I have heard that its conditions are outrageous.'
'They are--my dear sir--they are.'
'Such as no respectable lawyer should have drawn up,' said Roland
sternly.
'Captain Lindsay, there you are wrong--severe--but I excuse you,'
replied Mr. M'Wadsett, perking up his bald, shining head, as he drew
the document in question from a charter box, after some trouble in
finding the key thereof, and which Roland eyed--without touching
it--with a very gloomy and louring expression.
'Dear me--dear me,' muttered M'Wadsett, as, seating himself in a
well-stuffed circular chair, and adjusting his spectacles, he glanced
over the document. 'He wrote: "I have delayed making my will so long
as I have thought it safe to do so, but I am an old man now, and the
gross and wilful extravagance of----" Shall I read it all, Captain
Lindsay? The first few clauses are unimportant enough: £1,000 to Sir
Harry Maule; some jewellery to his daughter Hester--bequests to the
servants--Funnell the butler, Buckle the head groom, and then with
the provisions appointed for your sister and yourself----'
'Comes the "crusher," I suppose,' interrupted Roland, crashing his
right heel on the floor.
'Precisely so, my dear sir; I don't wonder that you feel it; but
listen and I shall read it all.'
'Please don't,' cried Roland; 'lawyers make everything so lengthy, so
elaborate, so full of circumlocution and irritating repetition. Cut
it short--the gist of it.'
'Is--that all the estates, real and personal, are devised and
bequeathed by the testator to his wife, Deborah Sharpe or Lindsay.'
'For life?
'No--to do with as she pleases in all time coming; the whole power of
willing everything away is left in her hands, as you may read for
yourself here.'
There was a silence of a minute.
'I thought such episodes--such outrages--never happened but in
novels?' said Roland.
The lawyer smiled faintly and shook his head, and refolding the
document, said:
'It is, of course, duly recorded.'
'And Earlshaugh will go to her heirs?'
'To Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, unless she devises otherwise.'
'A bitter satire!'
'A codicil was framed, or nearly so, revoking much that had gone
before; but was never signed. By that omission----'
'I have lost all,' said Roland, starting to his feet; 'so the
fortunes of the Lindsays of Earlshaugh are at their lowest ebb.'
'Unless you can find an heiress,' said the lawyer, with another of
his weak smiles.
Annot was no heiress, Roland remembered.
'As for my father's folly,' he was beginning bitterly, when M'Wadsett
touched his arm:
'Let us not speak ill of the dead,' said he; 'the late Laird may have
been deceived, misled--let us not wrong him.'
'But he has wronged the living, who have to feel--to endure and to
suffer!'
'The folly of your brother, the Guardsman--rather than your
own--brought all this about, Captain Lindsay,' said the lawyer,
rising too, as if the unprofitable interview had come to an end; and,
a few minutes after, Roland found himself outside in the bustle and
sunshine of George Street, that broad, stately, and magnificent
thoroughfare, along which he wandered like one in a bad dream, and
full of vague, angry, and bitter thoughts.
A deep sense of unmerited humiliation galled his naturally proud
spirit, now that the truth of his real position had been laid before
him without doubt.
The 'fool's paradise' in which he had been partly living had
vanished; and he thought how much better it had been had he left his
bones at Tel-el-Kebir, at Kashgate, or anywhere else in Egypt, as so
many of his comrades had done.
What was he to do now?
His profession at least was left him. Would he return to his
regiment at once, and go to Earlshaugh no more? It was impossible
just yet to turn his back on what was once his home. There was
Annot, his _fiancée_; there was Maude, his sister; there were Jack
Elliot and other guests; before them a part must be acted as yet--and
then--what then--what next?
A bitter malediction rose to his lips, but he stifled it.
Once matters were somehow smoothed over, back to the regiment he
should, of course, go, and turning his back on Scotland for ever, try
to forget the past and everything!
With incessant iteration the thought--the question--was ever before
him how to explain to Jack Elliot and Annot Drummond that he--Roland
Lindsay, deemed the heir, the Lord of Earlshaugh and all its acres of
wood and wold, field and pasture, was little better than an
outcast--admitted there on the sufferances of the sister of that most
pitiful wretch, Hawkey Sharpe!
Viewed in every way the situation was maddening--intolerable. With
regard to Annot, he could but trust to her love now. Should he ask
Maude or Hester to break the matter to her gently? No--that task
must be his own.
Most of the hopes of himself and his sister seemed to be based on the
goodwill that might be borne them by Deborah Sharpe (how he loathed
to think of her as Mrs. Lindsay), and she, too, evidently, was
inimical to them both, and under the complete influence of her
brother, Hawkey Sharpe.
Amid the turmoil of his thoughts he did not forget to procure as a
souvenir of this wretched visit to Edinburgh a valuable bracelet for
Annot Drummond, and then took his way--homeward he could not deem
it--to Earlshaugh.
He had but one crumb of consolation, that at the last hour his father
seemed to have repented the evil he had done him--at the last
hour--but too late!
'Not always in life is it possible to unravel the mesh which our
fingers have woven,' says a writer. 'Sometimes it is permitted to
recall the lost opportunities of a few mistaken hours; sometimes,
when all too late, we would willingly buy back with every drop of our
heart's blood the moments we have so wilfully abused, and the chances
we have so foolishly neglected. But it is too late!'
So it was too late when Roland's father thought to amend his fatal
will.