"More is wanted," urged Elizabeth. "We cannot take advantage of his own admissions to ruin him."
"If more were wanted," Mr. Brion repeated, with growing solemnity of manner, "we have here a paper under your father's hand, and duly witnessed by the same persons who witnessed the will—where are you going, Paul?" For at this point Paul rose and walked quietly towards the door.
"Go on," said the young man. "I will come back presently."
"But where are you going?" his father repeated with irritation. "Can't you wait until this business is finished?"
"I think," said Paul, "that the Miss Kings—the Miss Yelvertons, I suppose I ought to say—would rather be by themselves while you read that paper. It is not just like the will, you know; it is a private matter—not for outsiders to listen to."
Elizabeth rose promptly and went towards him, laying her hand on his arm. "Do you think we consider you an outsider?" she said, reproachfully. "You are one of us—you are in the place of our brother—we want you to help us now more than we have ever done. Come and sit down—that is, of course, if you can spare time for our affairs when you have so many important ones of your own."
He went and sat down, taking the seat by Patty to which Elizabeth pointed him. Patty looked up at him wistfully, and then leaned her elbows on the table and put her face in her hands. Her lover laid his arm gently on the back of her chair.
"Shall I begin, my dear?" asked the lawyer hesitatingly. "I am afraid it will be painful to you, Elizabeth. Perhaps, as Paul says, it would be better for you to read it by yourselves. I will leave it with you for a little while, if you promise faithfully to be very careful with it."
But Elizabeth wished it to be read as the will was read, and the old man, vaguely suspecting that she might be illegally generous to the superseded representative of the Yelverton name and property, was glad to keep the paper in his own hands, and proceeded to recite its contents. "I, Kingscote Yelverton, calling myself John King, do hereby declare," &c.
It was the story of Kingscote Yelverton's unfortunate life, put on record in the form of an affidavit for the benefit of his children, apparently with the intention that they should claim their inheritance when he was gone. The witnesses were an old midwife, long since dead, and a young Scripture reader, now a middle-aged and prosperous ecclesiastic in a distant colony; both of whom the lawyer remembered as features of the "old days" when he himself was a new-comer to the out-of-the-world place that counted Mr. King as its oldest inhabitant. It was a touching little document, in the sad story that it told and the severe formality of the style of telling it. Kingscote Yelverton, it was stated, was the second of three brothers, sons of a long line of Yelvertons of Yelverton, of which three, however, according to hereditary custom, only one was privileged to inherit the ancestral wealth. This one, Patrick, a bachelor, had already come into his kingdom; the youngest, a briefless barrister in comfortable circumstances, had married a farmer's daughter in very early youth (while reading for university honours during a long vacation spent in the farmer's house), and was the father of a sturdy schoolboy while himself not long emancipated from the rule of pastors and masters; and Kingscote was a flourishing young captain in the Guards—when the tragedy which shattered the family to pieces, and threw its vast property into Chancery, took place. Bradenham Abbey was neighbour to Yelverton, and Cuthbert Leigh of Bradenham was kin to the Yelvertons of Yelverton. Cuthbert Leigh had a beautiful daughter by his first wife, Eleanor D'Arcy; when this daughter was sixteen her mother died, and a stepmother soon after took Eleanor D'Arcy's place; and not long after the stepmother came to Bradenham Cuthbert Leigh himself died, leaving an infant son and heir; and not long after that Mrs. Cuthbert Leigh married again, and her new husband administered Bradenham—in the interest of the heir eventually, but of himself and his own children in the meantime. So it happened that Elizabeth Leigh was rather elbowed out of her rights and privileges as her father's daughter; which being the case, her distant cousin and near friend, Mrs. Patrick Yelverton, mother of the ill-fated brothers (who lived, poor soul, to see her house left desolate), fetched the girl away from the home which was hers no more, and took her to live under her own wing at Yelverton. Then the troubles began. Elizabeth was young and fair; indeed, all accounts of her agreed in presenting the portrait of a woman who must have been irresistible to the normal and unappropriated man brought into close contact with her. At Yelverton she was the daily companion of the unwedded master of the house, and he succumbed accordingly. As an impartial chronicler, I may hazard the suggestion that she enjoyed a flirtation within lady-like limits, and was not without some responsibility in the matter. It was clear also that the dowager Mrs. Patrick, anxious to see her first-born suitably married and settled, and placed safely beyond the reach of designing farmers' daughters, contrived her best to effect a union between the two. But while Patrick was over head and ears in love, and Elizabeth was dallying with him, and the old mother planning new furniture for the stately rooms where the queen was to reign who should succeed her, Kingscote the guardsman—Kingscote, the handsome, strong-willed, fiery-tempered second son—came home. To him the girl's heart, with the immemorial and incurable perversity of hearts, turned forthwith, like a flower to the sun; and a very short furlough had but half run out when she was as deeply over head and ears in love with Kingscote as Patrick was with her. Kingscote also loved her passionately—on his own testimony, he loved her as never man loved before, though he made a proud confession that he had still been utterly unworthy of her; and so the materials for the tragedy were laid, like a housemaid's fire, ready for the match that kindled them. Elizabeth found her position untenable amid the strenuous and conflicting attentions bestowed on her by the mother and sons, and went away for a time to visit some of her other relatives; and when her presence and influence were withdrawn from Yelverton, the smothered enmity of the brothers broke out, and they had their first and last and fatal quarrel about her. She had left a miniature of herself hanging in their mother's boudoir; this miniature Patrick laid hands on, and carried off to his private rooms; wherefrom Kingscote, in a violent passion (as Elizabeth's accepted lover), abstracted it by force. Then the master of the house, always too much inclined to assert himself as such, being highly incensed in his turn at the liberty that had been taken with him, marched into his brother's bedroom, where the disputed treasure was hidden, found it, and put it in his breast until he could discover a safer place for it. They behaved like a pair of ill-regulated schoolboys, in short, as men do when love and jealousy combine to derange their nervous systems, and wrought their own irreparable ruin over this miserable trifle. Patrick, flushed with a lurid triumph at his temporary success, strolled away from the house for an aimless walk, but afterwards went to a gamekeeper's cottage to give some instructions that occurred to him. The gamekeeper was not at home, and the squire returned by way of a lonely track through a thick plantation, where some of the keeper's work had to be inspected. Here he met Kingscote, striding along with his gun over his shoulder. The guardsman had discovered his loss, and was in search of his brother, intending to make a calm statement of his right to the possession of the picture by virtue of his rights in the person of the fair original, but at the same time passionately determined that this sort of thing should be put a stop to. There was a short parley, a brief but fierce altercation, a momentary struggle—on one side to keep, on the other to take, the worthless little bone of contention—and it was all over. Patrick, sent backward by a sweep of his strong brother's arm, fell over the gun that had been carelessly propped against a sapling; the stock of the gun, flying up, was caught by a tough twig which dragged across the hammers, and as the man and the weapon tumbled to the ground together one hammer fell, and the exploded charge entered the squire's neck, just under the chin, and, passing upward to the brain, killed him. It was an accident, as all the family believed; but to the author of the mischance it was nothing less than murder. He was guilty of his brother's blood, and he accepted the portion of Cain—to be a fugitive and a vagabond on the face of the earth—in expiation of it. Partly with the idea of sparing pain and disgrace to his family (believing that the only evidence available would convict him of murder in a court of law), and partly because he felt that, if acquitted, it would be too horrible and impossible to take an inheritance that had come to him by such means, in the overwhelming desperation of his remorse and despair he took that determination to blot himself out which was never afterwards revoked. Returning to the house, he collected some money and a few valuables, and, unsuspected and unnoticed, took leave of his home, and his name, and his place in the world, and was half way to London, and beyond recall, before the dead body in the plantation was discovered. In London Elizabeth Leigh was staying with an old Miss D'Arcy, quietly studying her music and taking a rest while the society which was so fond of her was out of town; and the stricken man could not carry out his resolve without bidding farewell to his beloved. He had a clandestine interview with Elizabeth, to whom alone he confided the circumstances of his wretched plight. The girl, of course, advised him to return to Yelverton, and bravely meet and bear whatever might befall; and it would have been well for him and for her if he had taken that advice. But he would not listen to it, nor be turned from his fixed purpose to banish and efface himself, if possible, for the rest of his life; seeing which, the devoted woman chose to share his fate. Whether he could and should have spared her that enormous sacrifice, or whether she was happier in making it than she would otherwise have been, only themselves ever knew. She did her woman's part in helping and sustaining and consoling him through all the blighted years that he was suffered to live and fret her with his brooding melancholy and his broken-spirited moroseness, and doubtless she found her true vocation in that thorny path of love.