“This affair,” said he, “will of course become a charge upon the property?”
“What affair?”
“This trial which is not to take place, and the rest of it.”
“The trial will have nothing to do with the estate,” said Mr. Apjohn.
“It has everything to do with it. I only mention it now to let you know that, as Isabel’s father, I shall make it my business to look after that.”
“The truth is, Brodrick,” said the Carmarthen attorney, with that gleam of triumph in his eye which had been so often seen there since the will had tumbled out of the volume of sermons in the book-room, “the whole of this matter has been such a pleasure to me that I don’t care a straw about the costs. If I paid for it all from beginning to end out of my own pocket, I should have had my whack for my money. Perhaps Miss Isabel will recompense me by letting me make her will some day.”
Such were the feelings and such were the words spoken at Carmarthen; and it need only be said further, in regard to Carmarthen, that the operations necessary for proving the later will and annulling the former one, for dispossessing Cousin Henry and for putting Isabel into the full fruition of all her honours, went on as quickly as it could be effected by the concentrated energy of Mr. Apjohn and all his clerks.
Cousin Henry, to whom we may be now allowed to bid farewell, was permitted to remain within the seclusion of the house at Llanfeare till his signature had been obtained to the last necessary document. No one spoke a word to him; no one came to see him. If there were intruders about the place anxious to catch a glimpse of the pseudo-Squire, they were disappointed.
Mrs. Griffith, under the attorney’s instructions, was more courteous to him than she had been when he was her master. She endeavoured to get him things nice to eat, trying to console him by titbits. None of the tenants appeared before him, nor was there a rough word spoken to him, even by young Cantor.
In all this Cousin Henry did feel some consolation, and was greatly comforted when he heard from the office in London that his stool at the desk was still kept open for him.
The Carmarthen Herald, in its final allusion to the state of things at Llanfeare, simply declared that the proper will had been found at last, and that Miss Isabel Brodrick was to be restored to her rights. Guided by this statement, the directors in London were contented to regard their clerk as having been unfortunate rather than guilty.
For the man himself, the reader, it is hoped, will feel some compassion. He had been dragged away from London by false hopes. After so great an injury as that inflicted on him by the last change in the Squire’s purpose it was hardly unnatural that the idea of retaliation should present itself to him when the opportunity came in his way. Not to do that which justice demands is so much easier to the conscience than to commit a deed which is palpably fraudulent! At the last his conscience saved him, and Mr. Apjohn will perhaps be thought to have been right in declaring that much was due to him in that he had not destroyed the will. His forbearance was recompensed fully.
As soon as the money could be raised on the property, the full sum of £4,000 was paid to him, that having been the amount with which the Squire had intended to burden the property on behalf of his niece when he was minded to put her out of the inheritance.
It may be added that, notorious as the whole affair was at Carmarthen, but little of Cousin Henry’s wicked doings were known up in London.
We must now go back to Hereford. By agreement between the two lawyers, no tidings of her good fortune were at once sent to Isabel. “There is so many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip,” said Mr. Apjohn to her father. But early in the following week Mr. Brodrick himself took the news home with him.
“My dear,” he said to her as soon as he found himself alone with her—having given her intimation that an announcement of great importance was to be made to her—“it turns out that after all your Uncle Indefer did make another will.”
“I was always quite sure of that, papa.”
“How were you sure?”
“He told me so, papa.”
“He told you so! I never heard that before.”
“He did—when he was dying. What was the use of talking of it? But has it been found?”
“It was concealed within a book in the library. As soon as the necessary deeds can be executed Llanfeare will be your own. It is precisely word for word the same as that which he had made before he sent for your cousin Henry.”
“Then Henry has not destroyed it?”
“No, he did not destroy it.”
“Nor hid it where we could not find it?”
“Nor did he hide it.”
“Oh, how I have wronged him;—how I have injured him!”
“About that we need say nothing, Isabel. You have not injured him. But we may let all that pass away. The fact remains that you are the heiress of Llanfeare.”
Of course he did by degrees explain to her all the circumstances—how the will had been found and not revealed, and how far Cousin Henry had sinned in the matter; but it was agreed between them that no further evil should be said in the family as to their unfortunate relative. The great injury which he might have done to them he
