"One more consideration remains--the most important which I have yet approached, and therefore the consideration which I have reserved to the last. On the thirtieth of September, the Testator executes a will, leaving his widow sole executrix, with a legacy of eighty thousand pounds. On the third of November following, he expressly revokes this will, and leaves another in its stead, in which his widow is never once mentioned, and in which the whole residue of his estate, after payment of one comparatively trifling legacy, is left to a friend.
"It rests entirely with you to say whether any valid reason can or can not be produced to explain such an extraordinary proceeding as this. If no reason can be a.s.signed--and I know of none myself--I think we have a point here which deserves our careful consideration; for it may be a point which is open to attack. Pray understand that I am now appealing to you solely as a lawyer, who is obliged to look all possible eventualities in the face. I have no wish to intrude on your private affairs; I have no wish to write a word which could be construed into any indirect reflection on yourself.
"If you tell me that, so far as you know, your husband capriciously struck you out of his will, without a.s.signable reason or motive for doing so, and without other obvious explanation of his conduct than that he acted in this matter entirely under the influence of Mrs. Lecount, I will immediately take Counsel"s opinion touching the propriety of disputing the will on this ground. If, on the other hand, you tell me that there are reasons (known to yourself, though unknown to me) for not taking the course I propose, I will accept that intimation without troubling you, unless you wish it, to explain yourself further. In this latter event, I will write to you again; for I shall then have something more to say, which may greatly surprise you, on the subject of the Will.
"Faithfully yours,
"JOHN LOs...o...b..."
VII.
_From Mrs. Noel Vanstone to Mr. Los...o...b..._
"November 16th.
"DEAR SIR--Accept my best thanks for the kindness and consideration with which you have treated me; and let the anxieties under which I am now suffering plead my excuse, if I reply to your letter without ceremony, in the fewest possible words.
"I have my own reasons for not hesitating to answer your question in the negative. It is impossible for us to go to law, as you propose, on the subject of the Will.
"Believe me, dear sir, yours gratefully,
"MAGDALEN VANSTONE."
VIII.
_From Mr. Los...o...b.. to Mrs. Noel Vanstone._
"Lincoln"s Inn. November 17th.
"DEAR MADAM--I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, answering my proposal in the negative, for reasons of your own. Under these circ.u.mstances--on which I offer no comment--I beg to perform my promise of again communicating with you on the subject of your late husband"s Will.
"Be so kind as to look at your copy of the doc.u.ment. You will find that the clause which devises the whole residue of your husband"s estate to Admiral Bartram ends in these terms: _to be by him applied to such uses as he may think fit._
"Simple as they may seem to you, these are very remarkable words. In the first place, no practical lawyer would have used them in drawing your husband"s will. In the second place, they are utterly useless to serve any plain straightforward purpose. The legacy is left unconditionally to the admiral; and in the same breath he is told that he may do what he likes with it! The phrase points clearly to one of two conclusions. It has either dropped from the writer"s pen in pure ignorance, or it has been carefully set where it appears to serve the purpose of a snare. I am firmly persuaded that the latter explanation is the right one. The words are expressly intended to mislead some person--yourself in all probability--and the cunning which has put them to that use is a cunning which (as constantly happens when uninstructed persons meddle with law) has overreached itself. My thirty years" experience reads those words in a sense exactly opposite to the sense which they are intended to convey.
I say that Admiral Bartram is _not_ free to apply his legacy to such purposes as he may think fit; I believe he is privately controlled by a supplementary doc.u.ment in the shape of a Secret Trust.
"I can easily explain to you what I mean by a Secret Trust. It is usually contained in the form of a letter from a Testator to his Executors, privately informing them of testamentary intentions on his part which he has not thought proper openly to acknowledge in his will.
I leave you a hundred pounds; and I write a private letter enjoining you, on taking the legacy, not to devote it to your own purposes, but to give it to some third person, whose name I have my own reasons for not mentioning in my will. That is a Secret Trust.
"If I am right in my own persuasion that such a doc.u.ment as I here describe is at this moment in Admiral Bartram"s possession--a persuasion based, in the first instance, on the extraordinary words that I have quoted to you; and, in the second instance, on purely legal considerations with which it is needless to inc.u.mber my letter--if I am right in this opinion, the discovery of the Secret Trust would be, in all probability, a most important discovery to your interests. I will not trouble you with technical reasons, or with references to my experience in these matters, which only a professional man could understand. I will merely say that I don"t give up your cause as utterly lost, until the conviction now impressed on my own mind is proved to be wrong.
"I can add no more, while this important question still remains involved in doubt; neither can I suggest any means of solving that doubt. If the existence of the Trust was proved, and if the nature of the stipulations contained in it was made known to me, I could then say positively what the legal chances were of your being able to set up a Case on the strength of it: and I could also tell you whether I should or should not feel justified in personally undertaking that Case under a private arrangement with yourself.
"As things are, I can make no arrangement, and offer no advice. I can only put you confidentially in possession of my private opinion, leaving you entirely free to draw your own inferences from it, and regretting that I cannot write more confidently and more definitely than I have written here. All that I could conscientiously say on this very difficult and delicate subject, I have said.
"Believe me, dear madam, faithfully yours,
"JOHN LOs...o...b...
"P.S.--I omitted one consideration in my last letter, which I may mention here, in order to show you that no point in connection with the case has escaped me. If it had been possible to show that Mr. Vanstone was _domiciled_ in Scotland at the time of his death, we might have a.s.serted your interests by means of the Scotch law, which does not allow a husband the power of absolutely disinheriting his wife. But it is impossible to a.s.sert that Mr. Vanstone was legally domiciled in Scotland. He came there as a visitor only; he occupied a furnished house for the season; and he never expressed, either by word or deed, the slightest intention of settling permanently in the North."
IX.
_From Mrs. Noel Vanstone to Mr. Los...o...b..._
"DEAR SIR--I have read your letter more than once, with the deepest interest and attention; and the oftener I read it, the more firmly I believe that there is really such a Letter as you mention in Admiral Bartram"s hands.
"It is my interest that the discovery should be made, and I at once acknowledge to you that I am determined to find the means of secretly and certainly making it. My resolution rests on other motives than the motives which you might naturally suppose would influence me. I only tell you this, in case you feel inclined to remonstrate. There is good reason for what I say, when I a.s.sure you that remonstrance will be useless.
"I ask for no a.s.sistance in this matter; I will trouble n.o.body for advice. You shall not be involved in any rash proceedings on my part.
Whatever danger there may be, I will risk it. Whatever delays may happen, I will bear them patiently. I am lonely and friendless, and surely troubled in mind, but I am strong enough to win my way through worse trials than these. My spirits will rise again, and my time will come. If that Secret Trust is in Admiral Bartram"s possession--when you next see me, you shall see me with it in my own hands. Yours gratefully,
"MAGDALEN VANSTONE."
THE SIXTH SCENE.
ST. JOHN"S WOOD.
CHAPTER I.
IT wanted little more than a fortnight to Christmas; but the weather showed no signs yet of the frost and snow, conventionally a.s.sociated with the coming season. The atmosphere was unnaturally warm, and the old year was dying feebly in sapping rain and enervating mist.
Toward the close of the December afternoon, Magdalen sat alone in the lodging which she had occupied since her arrival in London. The fire burned sluggishly in the narrow little grate; the view of the wet houses and soaking gardens opposite was darkening fast; and the bell of the suburban m.u.f.fin-boy tinkled in the distance drearily. Sitting close over the fire, with a little money lying loose in her lap, Magdalen absently shifted the coins to and fro on the smooth surface of her dress, incessantly altering their positions toward each other, as if they were pieces of a "child"s puzzle" which she was trying to put together.
The dim fire-light flaming up on her faintly from time to time showed changes which would have told their own tale sadly to friends of former days. Her dress had become loose through the wasting of her figure; but she had not cared to alter it. The old restlessness in her movements, the old mobility in her expression, appeared no more. Her face pa.s.sively maintained its haggard composure, its changeless unnatural calm. Mr.
Pendril might have softened his hard sentence on her, if he had seen her now; and Mrs. Lecount, in the plenitude of her triumph, might have pitied her fallen enemy at last.
Hardly four months had pa.s.sed since the wedding-day at Aldborough, and the penalty for that day was paid already--paid in unavailing remorse, in hopeless isolation, in irremediable defeat! Let this be said for her; let the truth which has been told of the fault be told of the expiation as well. Let it be recorded of her that she enjoyed no secret triumph on the day of her success. The horror of herself with which her own act had inspired her, had risen to its climax when the design of her marriage was achieved. She had never suffered in secret as she suffered when the Combe-Raven money was left to her in her husband"s will. She had never felt the means taken to accomplish her end so unutterably degrading to herself, as she felt them on the day when the end was reached. Out of that feeling had grown the remorse which had hurried her to seek pardon and consolation in her sister"s love. Never since it had first entered her heart, never since she had first felt it sacred to her at her father"s grave, had the Purpose to which she had vowed herself, so nearly lost its hold on her as at this time. Never might Norah"s influence have achieved such good as on the day when that influence was lost--the day when the fatal words were overheard at Miss Garth"s--the day when the fatal letter from Scotland told of Mrs. Lecount"s revenge.
The harm was done; the chance was gone. Time and Hope alike had both pa.s.sed her by.
Faintly and more faintly the inner voices now pleaded with her to pause on the downward way. The discovery which had poisoned her heart with its first distrust of her sister; the tidings which had followed it of her husband"s death; the sting of Mrs. Lecount"s triumph, felt through all, had done their work. The remorse which had embittered her married life was deadened now to a dull despair. It was too late to make the atonement of confession--too late to lay bare to the miserable husband the deeper secrets that had once lurked in the heart of the miserable wife. Innocent of all thought of the hideous treachery which Mrs.
Lecount had imputed to her--she was guilty of knowing how his health was broken when she married him; guilty of knowing, when he left her the Combe-Raven money, that the accident of a moment, harmless to other men, might place his life in jeopardy, and effect her release. His death had told her this--had told her plainly what she had shrunk, in his lifetime, from openly acknowledging to herself. From the dull torment of that reproach; from the dreary wretchedness of doubting everybody, even to Norah herself; from the bitter sense of her defeated schemes; from the blank solitude of her friendless life--what refuge was left? But one refuge now. She turned to the relentless Purpose which was hurrying her to her ruin, and cried to it with the daring of her despair--Drive me on!
For days and days together she had bent her mind on the one object which occupied it since she had received the lawyer"s letter. For days and days together she had toiled to meet the first necessity of her position--to find a means of discovering the Secret Trust. There was no hope, this time, of a.s.sistance from Captain Wragge. Long practice had made the old militia-man an adept in the art of vanishing. The plow of the moral agriculturist left no furrows--not a trace of him was to be found! Mr. Los...o...b.. was too cautious to commit himself to an active course of any kind; he pa.s.sively maintained his opinions and left the rest to his client---he desired to know nothing until the Trust was placed in his hands. Magdalen"s interests were now in Magdalen"s own sole care. Risk or no risk, what she did next she must do by herself.
The prospect had not daunted her. Alone she had calculated the chances that might be tried. Alone she was now determined to make the attempt.
"The time has come," she said to herself, as she sat over the fire. "I must sound Louisa first."
She collected the scattered coins in her lap, and placed them in a little heap on the table, then rose and rang the bell. The landlady answered it.