“Mr. Salmon and Mr. Willis Joyner wished to meet you, together with myself,” he remarked, “but were obliged to attend another appointment. In the meantime, before you can see them, I shall be happy to afford you all necessary explanations.”
“Which I very much need, for I am unpleasantly mystified. In the first place, I am at a loss to comprehend why this client of yours should have selected me as the person to whom he chose to confide so vast a trust,” Captain Desfrayne replied, in a tone almost bordering on ill humor.
“I am quite aware of the fact that you were not a personal friend of Mr. Vere Gardiner,” said the lawyer. “He trusted scarcely any one. I believe he entertained a painfully low estimate of the goodness or honesty of the majority of people. Of his particular object in giving this property into your care, I am unable to enlighten you. I know that he took a great interest in you; and as he frequently sojourned in the places where you happened to be staying, I have no doubt he had every opportunity of becoming acquainted with as much as he wished to learn of—of—— In fact, I have no grounds beyond such observations as may have been made before me for judging that he did take an interest in you. If you are surprised by the circumstance of his appointing you to such a post, I think you will probably be infinitely more so when you hear the contents of the will.”
He rose, and took from an iron safe a piece of folded parchment, which he spread open before him on his desk.
Captain Desfrayne said nothing, but eyed the portentous document with an odd glance.
“The history of this will is perhaps a curious one,” Mr. Frank Amberley resumed. “Mr. Vere Gardiner was, when a young man, very deeply attached to a young person in his own rank of life, whom he wished to marry. She, however, preferred another, and refused the offers of Mr. Gardiner. He never married. In a few years she was left a widow. He again renewed his offer, and was again refused. He was very urgent; and, to avoid him, she changed her residence several times. The consequence was, he lost sight of her. He became a wealthy man, chiefly, he always declared, through your instrumentality. After this he found this person—when he had, so to speak, become a man of fortune—again renewed his offer of marriage, and was again refused as firmly as before. She had one child, a daughter.”
The lawyer turned to look for some papers, which he did not succeed in finding, and, having made a search, turned back again.
Captain Desfrayne made no remark whatever.
“He offered to do anything, or to help this Mrs. Turquand in any way she would allow him: to put the child to school, or—— In fact, his offers were most generous. But she persistently shunned him, and refused to listen to anything he had to say. He lost sight of her for some years before his death, and did not even know whether she was living or dead.
“It was accidentally through—through me,” the lawyer continued, speaking with a visible effort, as if somewhat overmastered by an emotion inexplicable under the circumstances—“it was through me that he learned of the death of the mother and the whereabouts of the daughter.”