Her father had left her and her sisters six thousand pounds apiece, and there had been six of them when they had first moved down to the dower-house. He had committed this rather extraordinary piece of generosity because shortly before his death he had inherited intact the considerable fortune of his brother, who had been a merchant in the City of London, as his father had been before him. Merchant Jack, of whom Aunt Laura had spoken to Susan Clinton, had inherited Kencote as a younger son, had passed on the estates and his own acquired store of money to his eldest son, Colonel Thomas, and his business to his younger son, John Clinton, who had lived and died a bachelor, having little use for the wealth he amassed, beyond that part of it which enabled him to live in solid comfort in his old house in Bloomsbury and lay down a cellar of fine wine, the remainder of which still shed a golden glow over the cobwebby bins at Kencote. The thirty-six thousand pounds with which Colonel Thomas portioned his daughters had still left the great bulk of this windfall to go with the estate, to go rather to the next heir, who was Edward, our Squire.
The Squire had succeeded at the age of nineteen to a large fortune, as well as to many thousands of acres of land, and was a much richer man than even his sons suspected. He cared little about money, or if he cared for it, it was not for the aggrandisement it might have brought him. He had an income far in excess of what was required to keep up his establishment and his property in the way he wanted to keep it up, and what was left over he had no further use for. He had simply allowed it to accumulate, investing the overplus of year after year in gilt-edged securities on the advice of his old-established firm of stockbrokers, whose forebears had also advised his, and not giving it a thought when it was once so disposed of. The bulk of his funded property came from the money which his great-uncle had bequeathed to his grandfather, and some of it was still invested in the securities which the shrewd old merchant had himself selected. It was this money out of which, after his widow and younger children had been handsomely provided for, Dick would inherit the sum necessary to enable him to live at Kencote as he himself had done—if Dick behaved as he should behave. Otherwise it would go—well, he had not yet made up his mind where it would go.
Now, if the jointure of the six maiden aunts had been chargeable on the estate, as it would have been but for the old merchant's bequest, only on a much lower scale, the Squire would no doubt have busied himself about it, would have known exactly what proportion of it was being spent and what saved, and might have had some suggestion to make as to the disposal of what should remain after the death of the last sister had caused it to revert to the estate. As it was, he hardly ever gave it a thought. He knew that his aunts were well off, but he did not know what sum had been left to them, although he could easily have informed himself of it if he had cared to. Nor did he know how Aunt Laura, in whose frail hands the whole of it had now come to lie, proposed to leave it. It would not be quite true to say that he had never given the matter a thought, but it would not be far from the truth. He had so much more than sufficed for his own needs that although he would be gratified if after Aunt Laura's death he found himself richer by several thousand pounds, the legacy would not actually do for him more than slightly increase his lightly borne business cares. It would go eventually to the children, and the amount of speculation he had ever expended on the subject was as to whether it would come first to him, or, by Aunt Laura's direct bequest, to them, as to which he did not care either the one way or the other. The possibility of its being left outside the family altogether never so much as crossed his mind, because he knew Aunt Laura quite well enough to know that, as to the bulk of it, there was no such possibility.
Happy Aunt Laura, to have been permitted to escape the siege which is not seldom laid against rich maiden aunts! And happy Clintons, to have escaped, both in youth and age, those complications which the lack of plentiful coin brings into the lives of so many of their fellow-creatures!
But perhaps they had not altogether escaped them. It was doubtful, as yet, whether the Squire, who was now thinking of using his riches as a weapon in a way in which he had never had to think of using them before, was the happier for having that weapon ready to his hand. Money was for the first time playing its part in Dick's life in a way the outcome of which was still to be seen. Humphrey, at least, had never had enough of it to do what he wished to do, and was becoming increasingly hungry for more. And Aunt Laura, lying sometimes for hours on a sleepless bed, was beginning to be a little worried about her responsibilities as the steward of a considerable fortune, concerning whose disposition she had to come to a decision before she could peaceably leave this world for a better one, in which money and the anxiety attendant on it would play no part.
She was surprisingly innocent about money, although amongst the six sisters she had been considered the financial genius, and from the first had kept all the accounts. "Dear Laura," Aunt Ellen had been used to say, "has a wonderful head for pounds, shillings, and pence. Her accounts are never out by so much as a farthing, and she would be an ideal wife for a poor man, such as a clergyman, with a fixed but limited income."
She remembered this as she lay, now, in the night, turning over in her mind this question of money, and remembered it with pride. She remembered how upon their father's death old Mr. Pauncey, the Bathgate solicitor, who was so old-established, and had had such a long connection with Kencote that he might be regarded almost as an equal, and only treated with the merest shade more of consideration than one of the county neighbours, had explained to them all in conclave exactly what their financial position was, and how the sum that had been left to each of them was invested. He had had a sheet of paper with him, from which, after taking snuff, he had read out a long list of securities, and figures, and percentages, and left them at the end of it mentally gasping for breath, and no wiser at all than they had been before.
Then it was she, the youngest of them all, who had summoned up courage to say, "I think, Mr. Pauncey, if you would tell us exactly what sum of money is brought in by all those—those things, we could make our arrangements accordingly."
She could see now, in the darkness, the admiring looks of her sisters bent upon her, and hear the ready acquiescence of Mr. Pauncey, as, with gold pencil-case in his hand, he made some rapid calculations, and gave her the figures required.
After that it was she who, with pencil in hand, secretary and treasurer to a most serious committee, had set down on paper exactly how the comfortable income they had had secured to them should be spent—so much for the housekeeping, so much for wages, so much for stables, garden, dress, charity, and so on—a delightfully interesting occupation, as she well remembered, although readjustments had had to be made later, and it required a good many hours a week with account-books and paper ruled in money columns to keep unflinchingly to the course laid down. "Laura is busy with accounts; she must not be disturbed. The amount of trouble she gives herself to keep all our affairs in perfect order you would hardly credit." She remembered as if it were yesterday sitting in the oak parlour on a warm September morning with the casement open and a scent of mignonette coming through it, and overhearing her eldest sister talking to the old Rector, so many years since in his grave, and the thrill of happiness that the words had brought to her, struggling with her task and with rows of recalcitrant figures which would not add up twice alike.