Cousin Henry

her heart became soft. The way to melt the heart of a Mrs. Griffith is to eat nothing. “Laws, Mr. Jones, you have not had a mouthful. Shall I do you a broil?” He assented to the broil, and ate it, when it was cooked, with a better appetite than he had enjoyed since his uncle’s death. Gradually he came to feel that a great load had been taken from off his shoulders. The will was no longer hidden in the book. Nothing had been done of which he could not repent. There was no prospect of a life before him made horrid by one great sin. He could not be Squire of Llanfeare; nor would he be a felon⁠—a felon always in his own esteem. Upon the whole, though he hardly admitted as much to himself, the man’s condition had been improved by the transactions of the morning.

“You don’t quite agree with all that I have done this morning,” said Mr. Apjohn, as soon as the two lawyers were in the fly together.

“I am lost in admiration at the clearness of your insight.”

“Ah! that comes of giving one’s undivided thoughts to a matter. I have been turning it over in my mind till I have been able to see it all. It was odd, wasn’t it, that I should have foretold to you all that happened, almost to the volume?”

“Quite to the volume!”

“Well, yes; to the volume of sermons. Your brother-in-law read nothing but sermons. But you thought I shouldn’t have asked those questions.”

“I don’t like making a man criminate himself,” said Mr. Brodrick.

“Nor do I⁠—if I mean to criminate him too. My object is to let him off. But to enable us to do that we must know exactly what he knew and what he had done. Shall I tell you what occurred to me when you shook the will out of the book? How would it be if he declared that we had brought it with us? If he had been sharp enough for that, the very fact of our having gone to the book at once would have been evidence against us.”

“He was not up to it.”

“No, poor devil! I am inclined to think that he has got as bad as he deserves. He might have been so much worse. We owe him ever so much for not destroying the will. His cousin will have to give him the £4,000 which he was to have given her.”

“Certainly, certainly.”

“He has been hardly used, you know, by his uncle; and, upon my word, he has had a bad time of it for the last month. I wouldn’t have been hated and insulted as he has been by those people up there⁠—not for all Llanfeare twice over. I think we’ve quenched him now, so that he’ll run smooth. If so, we’ll let him off easily. If I had treated him less hardly just now, he might have gathered courage and turned upon us. Then it would have been necessary to crush him altogether. I was thinking all through how we might let him off easiest.”

XXIII

Isabel’s Petition

The news was soon all about Carmarthen. A new will had been found, in accordance with which Miss Brodrick was to become owner of Llanfeare, and⁠—which was of more importance to Carmarthen at the present moment⁠—there was to be no trial! The story, as told publicly, was as follows;⁠—Mr. Apjohn, by his sagacity, had found the will. It had been concealed in a volume of sermons, and Mr. Apjohn, remembering suddenly that the old man had been reading these sermons shortly before his death, had gone at once to the book. There the will had been discovered, which had at once been admitted to be a true and formal document by the unhappy pseudo-proprietor. Henry Jones had acknowledged his cousin to be the heiress, and under these circumstances had conceived it to be useless to go on with the trial. Such was the story told, and Mr. Apjohn, fully aware that the story went very lame on one leg, did his best to remedy the default by explaining that it would be unreasonable to expect that a man should come into court and undergo an examination by Mr. Cheekey just when he had lost a fine property.

“Of course I know all that,” said Mr. Apjohn when the editor of the paper remarked to him that the libel, if a libel, would be just as much a libel whether Mr. Henry Jones were or were not the owner of Llanfeare. “Of course I know all that; but you are hardly to expect that a man is to come and assert himself amidst a cloud of difficulties when he has just undergone such a misfortune as that! You have had your fling, and are not to be punished for it. That ought to satisfy you.”

“And who’ll pay all the expenses?” asked Mr. Evans.

“Well,” said Mr. Apjohn, scratching his head; “you, of course, will have to pay nothing. Geary will settle all that with me. That poor devil at Llanfeare ought to pay.”

“He won’t have the money.”

“I, at any rate, will make it all right with Geary; so that needn’t trouble you.”

This question as to the expense was much discussed by others in Carmarthen. Who in truth would pay the complicated lawyers’ bill which must have been occasioned, including all these flys out to Llanfeare? In spite of Mr. Apjohn’s good-natured explanations, the public of Carmarthen was quite convinced that Henry Jones had in truth hidden the will. If so, he ought not only to be made to pay for everything, but be sent to prison also and tried for felony. The opinion concerning Cousin Henry in Carmarthen on the Thursday and Friday was very severe indeed. Had he shown himself in the town, he would almost have been pulled in pieces. To kill him and to sell his carcase for what it might fetch towards lessening the expenses which