“There now, feyther!” said the young man triumphantly.
“You hold your tongue, Joe, till you be asked, or I’ll lend ye a cuff.”
“Now I must explain,” continued Mr. Apjohn, “what passed between me and my dear old friend when I received instructions from him in this room as to this document which is now before me. You will excuse me, Mr. Jones,”—this he said addressing himself especially to Cousin Henry—“if I say that I did not like this new purpose on the Squire’s part. He was proposing an altogether new arrangement as to the disposition of his property; and though there could be no doubt, not a shadow of doubt, as to the sufficiency of his mental powers for the object in view, still I did not think it well that an old man in feeble health should change a purpose to which he had come in his maturer years, after very long deliberation, and on a matter of such vital moment. I expressed my opinion strongly, and he explained his reasons. He told me that he thought it right to keep the property in the direct line of his family. I endeavoured to explain to him that this might be sufficiently done though the property were left to a lady, if the lady were required to take the name, and to confer the name on her husband, should she afterwards marry. You will probably all understand the circumstances.”
“We understand them all,” said John Griffith, of Coed, who was supposed to be the tenant of most importance on the property.
“Well, then, I urged my ideas perhaps too strongly. I am bound to say that I felt them very strongly. Mr. Indefer Jones remarked that it was not my business to lecture him on a matter in which his conscience was concerned. In this he was undoubtedly right; but still I thought I had done no more than my duty, and could only be sorry that he was angry with me. I can assure you that I never for a moment entertained a feeling of anger against him. He was altogether in his right, and was actuated simply by a sense of duty.”
“We be quite sure of that,” said Samuel Jones, from The Grange, an old farmer, who was supposed to be a faraway cousin of the family.
“I have said all this,” continued the lawyer, “to explain why it might be probable that Mr. Jones should not have sent for me, if, in his last days, he felt himself called on by duty to alter yet once again the decision to which he had come. You can understand that if he determined in his illness to make yet another will—”
“Which he did,” said the younger Cantor, interrupting him.
“Exactly; we will come to that directly.”
“Joe, ye shall be made to sit out in the kitchen; ye shall,” said Cantor the father.
“You can understand, I say, that he might not like to see me again upon the subject. In such case he would have come back to the opinion which I had advocated; and, though no man in his strong health would have been more ready to acknowledge an error than Indefer Jones, of Llanfeare, we all know that with failing strength comes failing courage. I think that it must have been so with him, and that for this reason he did not avail himself of my services. If there be such another will—”
“There be!” said the irrepressible Joe Cantor the younger. Upon this his father only looked at him. “Our names is to it,” continued Joe.
“We cannot say that for certain, Mr. Cantor,” said the lawyer. “The old Squire may have made another will, as you say, and may have destroyed it. We must have the will before we can use it. If he left such a will, it will be found among his papers. I have turned over nothing as yet; but as it was here in this drawer and tied in this bundle that Mr. Jones was accustomed to keep his will—as the last will which I made is here, as I expected to find it, together with those which he had made before and which he seems never to have wished to destroy, I have had to explain all this to you. It is, I suppose, true, Mr. Cantor, that you and your son were called upon by the Squire to witness his signature to a document which he purported to be a will on Monday the 15th of July?”
Then Joseph Cantor the father told all the circumstances as they had occurred. When Mr. Henry Jones had been about a fortnight at Llanfeare, and when Miss Isabel had been gone a week, he, Cantor, had happened to come up to see the Squire, as it was his custom to do at least once a week. Then the Squire had told him that his services and those also of his son were needed for the witnessing of a deed. Mr. Jones had gone on to explain that this deed was to be his last will. The old farmer, it seemed, had suggested to his landlord that Mr. Apjohn should be employed. The Squire then declared that this would be unnecessary; that he himself had copied a former will exactly, and compared it word for word, and reproduced it with no other alteration than that of the date. All that was wanted would be his signature, efficiently witnessed by two persons who should both be present together with the testator. Then the document had been signed by the Squire, and after that by the farmer and his son. It had been written, said Joseph Cantor, not on long, broad paper such as that which had been used for the will now lying on the table before the lawyer, but on a sheet of square paper such as was now found
