IT is needless to dwell upon the gloom of the days that followed this event. Mr. Loseby came over from Hunston, as pale as he was rosy on ordinary occasions, and with a self-reproach that was half pathetic, half ludicrous. ‘I said every word of that new will of his would be a nail in his coffin, God forgive me,’ he said. ‘How was I to know? A man should never take upon himself to prophesy. God knows what a murdering villain he feels if it chances to come true.’
‘But nothing you said could have made the horse put his foot in that rabbit-hole,’ Heathcote said.
‘That is true, that is true,’ said the little lawyer: and then he began the same plaint again. But he was very active and looked after everything, managing the melancholy business of the moment, the inquest, and the funeral. There was a great deal to do. Telegrams flew about the country on all sides, warning the guests invited to the ball of what had happened—yet at least one carriage full of ladies in full ball dress had to be turned back from the lodge on the night when so much gaiety had been expected at Mount. Charley Ashley had come up from the rectory at once and took the position of confidential agent to the ladies, in a way that Heathcote Mountford could not do. He thought it wrong to forsake them, and his presence was needed as mourner at his cousin’s funeral; otherwise he would have been glad to escape from the chill misery and solitude that seemed to shut down upon the house which had been so cheerful. He saw nothing of the ladies, save that now and then he would cross the path of Anne, who did not shut herself up like her stepmother and sister. She was very grave, but still she carried on the government of the house. When Heathcote asked her how she was, she answered with a serious smile, though with quick-coming moisture in her eyes: ‘I am not ill at all; I am very well, Mr. Heathcote. Is it not strange one’s grief makes no difference to one in that way? One thinks it must, one even hopes it must; but it does not; only my heart feels like a lump of lead.’ She was able for all her work, just as usual, and saw Mr. Loseby and gave Charley Ashley the list of all the people to be telegraphed to, or to whom letters must be written. But Mrs. Mountford and Rose kept to their rooms, where all the blinds were carefully closed and every table littered with crape. Getting the mourning ready was always an occupation, and it did them good. They all went in a close carriage to the village church on the day of the funeral, but only Anne followed her father’s coffin to the grave. It was when Heathcote stood by her there that he remembered again suddenly the odiousness of the idea that some man or other, a fellow whom nobody knew, had managed to get between Anne Mountford and all the rest of the world. It was not a place for such a thought, yet it came to him in spite of himself, when he saw her falter for a moment and instinctively put out his arm to sustain her. She looked round upon him with a look in which gratitude and something like a proud refusal of his aid were mingled. That look suggested to him the question which suddenly arose in his mind, though, as he felt, nothing could be more inappropriate at such a time and place. Where was the fellow? Why was he not here? If he had permitted Anne to be disinherited for his sake, why had he not hurried to her side to support her in her trouble? Heathcote was not the only person who had asked himself this question. The Curate had not looked through Anne’s list of names before he sent intelligence of Mr. Mountford’s death to his friend. The first person of whom he had thought was Cosmo. ‘Of course you will come to the rectory,’ he telegraphed, sending him the news on the evening of the occurrence. He had never doubted that Cosmo would arrive next morning by the earliest train. All next day while he had been working for them, he had expected every hour the sound of the arrival, saying to himself, when the time passed for the morning and for the evening trains, that Cosmo must have been from home, that he could not have received the message, that of course he would come to-morrow. But when even the day of the funeral arrived without Cosmo, Charley Ashley’s good heart was wrung with mingled wrath and impatience. What could it mean? He was glad, so far as he himself was concerned, for it was a kind of happiness to him to be doing everything for Anne and her mother and sister. He was proud and glad to think that it was natural he should do it, he who was so old a friend, almost like a brother to the girls. But the other, who had a closer claim than that of any brother, who had supplanted Charley and pushed him aside, where was he? On this subject Anne did not say a word. She had written and received various letters, but she did not take anyone into her confidence. And yet there was a something in her eyes, a forlorn look, a resistance of any support, as if she had said to herself, ‘Since I have not his arm I will have no one else’s support.’ Heathcote withdrew from her side with a momentary sense of a rebuff. He followed her down the little churchyard path and put her into the carriage, where the others were waiting for her, without a word. Then she turned round and looked at him again. Was it an appeal for forgiveness, for sympathy—and yet for not too much sympathy—which Anne was making? These looks of mingled feeling which have so much in them of the poetry of life, how difficult they are to interpret! how easily it may be that their meaning exists only in the eyes that see them! like letters which may be written carelessly, hastily, but which we weigh, every word of them, in balances of the sanctuary, too fine and delicate for earthly words, finding out so much more than the writer ever thought to say. Perhaps it was only Heathcote’s indignant sense that the lover, for whom she had already suffered, should have been by Anne’s side in her trouble that made him see so much in her eyes. Charley Ashley had been taking a part in the service; his voice had trembled with real feeling as he read the psalms; and a genuine tear for the man whom he had known all his life had been in his eye; but he, too, had seen Anne’s looks and put his own interpretation upon them. When all was over, he came out of the vestry where he had taken off his surplice and joined Heathcote. He was going up to Mount, the general centre of everything at this moment. The mourners were going there to luncheon, and afterwards the will was to be read. Already, Mr. Mountford being safely in his grave, covered with wreaths of flowers which everybody had sent, the interest shifted, and it was of this will and its probable revelations that everybody thought.
‘Have you any idea what it is?’ the Curate said; ‘you were in the house, you must have heard something. It is inconceivable that a just man should be turned into an unjust one by that power of making a will. He was a good man,’ Charley added, with a little gulp of feeling. ‘I have known him since I was that high. He never talked very much about it, but he never was hard upon anyone. I don’t think I ever knew him to be hard on anyone. He said little, but I am sure he was a good man at heart.’
Heathcote Mountford did not make any answer; he replied by another question: ‘Mr. Douglas is a friend of yours, I hear?’
‘Oh, yes, he is a friend of mine: it was I—we are such fools—that brought him. Just think—if it brings harm to Anne, as everybody seems to believe—that I should have to reflect that I brought him! I who would cut off a hand!—I see you are thinking how strange it is that he is not here.’
‘It is strange,’ Heathcote said.
‘Strange! strange is not the word. Why, even Willie is here: and he that could have been of such use——. But we must remember that Anne has her own ways of thinking,’ the Curate added. ‘He wrote half-a-dozen lines to me to say that he was at her orders, that he could not act of himself. Now, whether that meant that she had forbidden him to come—if so, there is a reason at once.’
‘I don’t think I should have been inclined to take such a reason,’ Heathcote said.
The Curate sighed. How could he consider what he would have done in such circumstances? he knew that he would not have stopped to consider. ‘You don’t know Anne,’ he said: ‘one couldn’t go against her—no, certainly one couldn’t go against her. If she said don’t come, you’d obey, whether you liked it or not.’
‘I don’t think I should. I should do what I thought right without waiting for anyone’s order. What! a woman that has suffered for you, not to be there, not to be by, when she was in trouble! It is inconceivable. Ashley, your friend must be a—he must be, let us say the least——’
‘Hush! I cannot hear any ill of him, he has always been my friend; and Anne—do you think anything higher could be said of a man than that Anne—you know what I mean.’
Heathcote was very sympathetic. He gave a friendly pressure to the arm that had come to be linked in his as they went along. The Curate had not been able to disburden his soul to anyone in these days past, when it had been so sorely impressed upon him that, though he could work for Anne, it was not his to stand by her and give her the truest support. Heathcote was sympathetic, and yet he could scarcely help smiling within himself at this good faithful soul, who, it was clear, had ventured to love Anne too, and, though so faithful still, had an inward wonder that it had been the other and not himself that had been chosen. The looker-on could have laughed, though he was so sorry. Anne, after all, he reflected, with what he felt to be complete impartiality, though only a country girl, was not the sort of young woman to be appropriated by a curate: that this good, heavy, lumbering fellow should sigh over her choice of another, without seeing in a moment that he and such as he was impossible! However, he pressed Charley’s arm in sympathy, even though he could not refrain from this half derision in his heart.
‘He might have stayed at the rectory,’ Charley continued; ‘that is what I proposed—of course he could not have gone to Mount without an invitation. I had got his room all ready; I sent our old man up to meet two trains. I never for a moment supposed—Willie, of course, never thought twice. He came off from Cambridge as a matter of course.’
‘As any one would——’ said Heathcote.
‘Unless they had been specially forbidden to do it—there is always that to be taken into account.’
Thus talking, they reached the house, where, though the blinds had been drawn up, the gloom was still heavy. The servants were very solemn as they served at table, moving as if in a procession, asking questions about wine and bread in funereal whispers. Old Saymore’s eyes were red and his hand unsteady. ‘Thirty years butler, and before that ten years in the pantry,’ he said to everyone who would listen to him. ‘If I don’t miss him, who should? and he was always the best of masters to me.’ But the meal was an abundant meal, and there were not many people there whose appetites were likely to be affected by what had happened. Mr. Loseby, perhaps, was the one most deeply cast down, for he could not help feeling that he had something to do with it, and that St. John Mountford might still have been living had he not said that about the words of an unjust will being nails in the coffin of the man who made it. This recollection prevented him from enjoying his meal; but most of the others enjoyed it. Many of the luxurious dainties prepared for the ball supper appeared at this less cheerful table. The cook had thought it a great matter, since there was no ball, that there was the funeral luncheon when they could be eaten, for she could not bear waste. After the luncheon most of the people went away; and it was but a small party which adjourned into the room where Mr. Mountford had spent most of his life, to hear the will read, to which everybody looked forward with excitement. Except Heathcote and the Rector, and Mr. Loseby, there was nobody present save the family. When Anne came, following her stepmother and sister, who went first, clinging together, she saw Charley Ashley in the hall, and called to him as she passed. ‘Come,’ she said softly, holding out her hand to him, ‘I know you will be anxious—come and hear how it is.’ He looked wistfully in her face, wondering if, perhaps, she asked him because he was Cosmo’s friend; and perhaps Anne understood what the look meant; he could not tell. She answered him quietly, gravely. ‘You are our faithful friend—you have been like our brother. Come and hear how it is.’ The Curate followed her in very submissively, glad, yet almost incapable of the effort. Should he have to sit still and hear her put down out of her natural place? When they were all seated Mr. Loseby began, clearing his throat:
‘Our late dear friend, Mr. Mountford, made several wills. There is the one of 1868 still in existence—it is not, I need scarcely say, the will I am about to propound. It was made immediately after his second marriage, and was chiefly in the interests of his eldest daughter, then a child. The will I am about to read is of a very different kind. It is one, I am bound to say, against which I thought it my duty to protest warmly. Words passed between us then which were calculated to impair the friendship which had existed between Mr. Mountford and myself all our lives. He was, however, magnanimous. He allowed me to say my say, and he did not resent it. This makes it much less painful to me than it might have been to appear here in a room so associated with him, and make his will known to you. I daresay this is all I need say, except that after this will was executed, on the day indeed of his death, Mr. Mountford gave to me in my office at Hunston two sealed packets, one addressed to Miss Mountford and the other to myself, with a clause inserted on the envelope to the effect that neither was to be opened till Miss Rose should have attained her twenty-first birthday. I calculated accordingly that they must have something to do with the will. Having said this, I may proceed to read the will itself.’
The first part of the document contained nothing very remarkable. Many of the ordinary little bequests, legacies to servants, one or two to public institutions, and all that was to belong to his widow, were very fully and clearly enumerated. The attention of the little company was lulled as all this was read. There was nothing wonderful in it after all. The commonplace is always comforting: it relieves the strained attention far better than anything more serious or elevated. An unconscious relief came to the minds of all. But Mr. Loseby’s voice grew husky and excited when he came to what was the last paragraph—
‘All the rest of my property of every kind, including——[and here there was an enumeration of the unentailed landed property and money in various investments, all described] I leave to my eldest daughter, Anne Mountford——.’ Here the reader made a little involuntary half-conscious pause of excitement—and all the anxious people round him testified the strain relieved, the wonder satisfied, and yet a new rising of wonder and pleasant disappointment. What did it mean? why then had their interest been thus raised, to be brought, to nothing? Everything, then, was Anne’s after all! There was a stir in which the next words would have been lost altogether, but for a louder clearing of the voice on the part of the reader, calling as it seemed for special attention. He raised his hand evidently with the same object. ‘I leave,’ he repeated, ‘to my eldest daughter, Anne Mountford—in trust for her sister, Rose——’
Mrs. Mountford, who had been seated in a heap in her chair, a mountain of crape, had roused up at the first words. She raised herself up in her chair forgetful of her mourning, not believing her ears; ‘To Anne!’ she said under her breath in strange dismay. Had it meant nothing then? Had all this agitation both on her own part and on that of her husband, who was gone, come to nothing, meant nothing? She had suffered much, Mrs. Mountford remembered now. She had been very unhappy; feeling deeply the injustice which she supposed was being done to Anne, even though she knew that Rose was to get the advantage—but now, to think that Rose had no advantage and Anne everything! So many things can pass through the mind in a single moment. She regretted her own regrets, her remonstrances with him (which she exaggerated), the tears she had shed, and her compunctions about Anne. All for nothing. What had he meant by it? Why had he filled her with such wild hopes to be all brought to nothing? The tears dried up in a moment. She faced Mr. Loseby with a scared pale face, resolving that, whatever happened, she would contest this will, and declare it to be a falsehood, a mistake. Then she, like all the others, was stopped by the cough with which Mr. Loseby recommenced, by the lifting of his finger. ‘Ah!’ she said unconsciously; and then among all these listening, wondering people, fell the other words like thunderbolts out of the skies, ‘in trust—for her sister, Rose——’ They sat and listened all in one gasp of suspended breathing, of eagerness beyond the power of description; but no one took in the words that followed. Anne was to have an income of five hundred a year charged on the property till Rose attained her twenty-first year. Nobody paid any attention to this—nobody heard it even, so great grew the commotion; they began to talk and whimper among themselves before the reader had stopped speaking. Anne to be set aside, and yet employed, made into a kind of steward of her own patrimony for her sister’s benefit; it was worse than disinheritance, it was cruelty. The Rector turned round to whisper to Heathcote, and Rose flung her arms about her mother. The girl was bewildered. ‘What does it mean? what does it mean?’ she cried. ‘What is that about Anne—and me?’
‘Mr. Loseby,’ the Rector said, with a trembling voice, ‘this cannot be so: there must be some mistake. Our dear friend, whom we have buried to-day, was a good man; he was a just man. It is not possible; there must be some mistake.’
‘Mistake! I drew it out myself,’ Mr. Loseby said. ‘You will not find any mistake in it. There was a mistake in his own mind. I don’t say anything against that; but in the will there’s no mistake. I wish there was. I would drive a coach and six through it if I could; but it’s all fast and strong. Short of a miracle, nobody will break that will—though I struggled against it. He was as obstinate as a mule, as they all are—all the Mountfords.’
‘Mr. Loseby,’ said Mrs. Mountford, ‘I did not approve any more than you did. It was not any doing of mine. I protested against it; but my husband—my husband had his reasons.’
‘There are no reasons that could justify this,’ said the tremulous old Rector; ‘it is a shame and a sin; it ought not to be. When a man’s will is all wrong, the survivors should agree to set it right. It should not be left like that; it will bring a curse upon all who have anything to do with it,’ said the old man, who was so timid and so easily abashed. ‘I am not a lawyer. I don’t know what the law will permit; but the Gospel does not permit such injustice as this.’
Mr. Loseby had pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and listened with an astonishment which was tinctured first with awe, then with amusement. The old Rector, feeblest of men and preachers! The lawyer gazed at him as at a curiosity of nature. It was a fine thing in its way. But to attack a will of his, John Loseby’s! He smiled at the folly, though he sympathised with the courage. After all, the old fellow had more in him than anybody thought.
Mrs. Mountford was roused too beyond her wont. ‘My husband had his reasons,’ she said, her pale face growing red; ‘he never did anything without thought. I would not change what he had settled, not for all the world, not for a kingdom. I interfere to set a will aside! and his will! I don’t think you know what you are saying. No one could have such a right.’
‘Then it will bring a curse and no blessing,’ said the Rector, getting up tremulously. ‘I have nothing to do here; I said so at the first. Anne, my dear excellent child, this is a terrible blow for you. I wish I could take you out of it all. I wish—I wish that God had given me such a blessing as you for my daughter, my dear.’
Anne rose up and gave him her hand. All the usual decorums of such a meeting were made an end of by the extraordinary character of the revelation which had been made to them.
‘Thank you, dear Mr. Ashley; but never think of me,’ Anne said. ‘I knew it would be so. And papa, poor papa, had a right to do what he pleased. We spoke of it together often; he never thought it would come to this. How was he to think what was to happen? and so soon—so soon. I feel sure,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears, ‘it was for this, and not for pain, that he groaned after he fell.’
‘He had need to groan,’ said the Rector, shaking his head—‘he had need to groan! I hope it may not be laid to his charge.’ Mr. Ashley was too much moved to recollect the ordinary politenesses; he pushed his chair away, back to the wall, not knowing what he was doing. ‘Come, Charley!’ he said, ‘come, Charley! I told you we had nothing to do here. We cannot mend it, and why should we be in the midst of it? It is more than I can bear. Come, Charley—unless you can be of use.’
But Mrs. Mountford felt it very hard that she should thus be disapproved of by her clergyman. It compromised her in every way. She began to cry, settling down once more into the midst of her crape. ‘I don’t know why you should turn against me,’ she said, ‘Mr. Ashley. I had nothing to do with it. I told him it would make me wretched if he punished Anne; but you cannot ask me to disapprove of my husband, and go against my husband, and he only to-day—only to-day——’
Here she was choked by genuine tears. Rose had kept close by her mother’s side all the time. She cried occasionally, but she gave her attention closely to all that was going on, and the indignation of the bystanders at her own preferment puzzled her somewhat narrow understanding. Why should not she be as good an heiress as Anne? Why should there be such a commotion about her substitution for her sister? She could not make out what they meant. ‘I will always stand by you, mamma,’ she said, tremulously. ‘Come upstairs. I do not suppose we need stay any longer, Mr. Loseby? There is nothing for us to do.’
‘Nothing at all, Miss Rose,’ said the lawyer. The men stood up while the ladies went away, Mrs. Mountford leaning on her child’s arm. Anne, too, stood aside to let them pass. There was no reason perhaps why they should have said anything to her; but she looked at them wistfully, and her lip trembled a little. There were two of them, but of her only one. One alone to face the world. She cast a glance round upon the others who were all of her faction, yet not one able to stand by her, to give her any real support. Once more, two of them at least felt that there was an appeal in her eyes—not to them, nor to any one—a secret sense of the cruelty of—what?—circumstances, fate, which left her quite alone at such a crisis. Then she, too, turned to the lawyer. ‘May I go too?’ she said. ‘No doubt there will be a great deal for me to learn and to do; but I need not begin, need I, to-day?’
‘My dear Miss Anne,’ cried Mr. Loseby, ‘I don’t know that you need to accept the trust at all. I said to him I should be disposed to throw it into Chancery, and to make your sister a ward of the Court. I don’t know that you need to accept it at all——’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, with a smile. ‘I will accept it. I will do it. My father knew very well that I would do it; but I need not begin, need I, to-day?’