The Footsteps at the Lock
By Ronald A. Knox.
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To
David
in memory of the Uncas
The Footsteps at the Lock
I
Two Cousins
It is an undeniable but a mystifying fact of natural ethics that a man has the right to dispose of his own property at death. They can do him no good now, those ancestral acres, those hard-won thousands, nor may any of the trees he planted, save the grim cypress, follow their ephemeral master; yet before the partnership of hand and mind is altogether dissolved, a brief flourish at the tail of a will may endow a pauper or disinherit a spendthrift, may be frittered away in the service of a hundred useless or eccentric ends. No good to him—at least, there was once a theory that a man might be happier in the after state for the use of his means here, but we have abolished all that long since; no good to him, but much to expectant nephews and nieces, much to lifeboat funds and cats’ homes, much to the Exchequer, wilting for lack of death-duties. Of all this he is the arbiter. Yet we have it on the authority of all the copybooks that money does far more harm in the world than good; why, then, do we leave the direction of that harm to the one man who, ex hypothesi, will be out of the way when it happens? Why let the testator arrange for the unworthy squandering of his property, when he is to have no tenure in it henceforward except the inalienable grave?
Such doubts, entirely methodical in character, are suggested by the last will and testament of Sir John Burtell, a barrister of some note in his day, that is, in the latter years of Queen Victoria. A safe man, with no itch for politics or ambition for titles, he retired soon after the death of the Great Queen, leaving the world open to his two sons, John and Charles, then in the flower of their age. He came of a sound stock, and found, besides, some zest in country pursuits; nor, in the end, was it years that carried him off, but the severe influenza epidemic of 1918. By that time, his two sons had predeceased him. Both took their commissions in 1915; both were killed two years later. John’s wife had died long since, Charles’ widow alienated the old man’s sympathies by marrying again and settling in the United States. His will, therefore, on which this story turns, left the bulk of his property, some fifty thousands pounds, to his elder grandson Derek; in the event of his death it was to revert to Charles’ son Nigel.
So far, you might have thought the old gentleman would cheat the lawyers and die intestate. But certain conditions attached to the will made it a document of importance. The testator reflected that one child was an orphan, the other fatherless and as good as motherless; that they had to grow
