Mr. Hogarth's Will

by Catherine Helen Spence

Now the fawning manner was put on. Mrs. Peck had an object in view—she wanted money to take her to Melbourne, and to take her immediately, and this easy-going, benevolent-looking Adelaide gentleman seemed to be the most likely victim she could meet with.

She had long wished to see her daughter apart from her husband, and there never had been such a chance since she was married; and to get hold of one or both of the Melville girls at the same time was a conjunction of circumstances absolutely and marvellously favourable. Her last remittance from Mr. Phillips had been received a month before, and was spent as soon as it was got. Peck, with whose fortunes she had for many years connected herself, had not been lucky of late. He had come to Adelaide at race time, and had not got on well with his bets. He had done a little in gambling, but had got into a sort of row at a low public-house, and been taken up and fined for being drunk and disorderly, and dismissed with a caution; so he had gone up to the sheep-shearing, and then had worked a little at the hay-harvest, and again at the wheat-harvest. He could work pretty hard at such times, and make good wages; but he had no turn for steady, regular work, and neither had she. If she had been in Melbourne, she could have borrowed the ten or twelve pounds needed for her passage-money, and a decent-looking outfit from people who knew her there, and guessed that she had some hidden means, either from friends or foes; but in Adelaide she was unknown except from her connection with Peck, which did not inspire confidence.

This Adelaide gentleman had just come from London, and could know nothing about her, so she was determined to use her plausible tongue, and get the money out of him.

As Mr. Phillips said, she was possessed with the spirit of falsehood. She always had a disinclination to speak the truth, unless when it was very decidedly for her own interest to do so, or when she was enraged out of all prudence. So now, when she wanted to get an advance from Mr. Dempster, she forgot the agitation and the eagerness which she had shown about the Phillipses, the Melvilles, and the Hogarths, and opened up a quite new mine of anxieties and fears. Her secret, such as it was, should not be told to any one but the parties to whom it was valuable, and who would pay her handsomely for it, so she must now prevent this friend of the family from even guessing at what her schemes were.

Chapter III.

Raising The Wind

As Mrs. Peck sipped her brandy-and-water, putting a constraint on herself in so doing—for her natural taste would have led her to swallow it in large gulps, but that would not have answered her purpose of impressing Mr. Dempster—she began to talk of the letter she had received from Melbourne, which had distressed her so much. Her daughter was ill and dying, and her son-in-law had written to her to beg that if she possibly could she would come across to see poor dear Mary before she was no more; but, poor fellow, he was always hard up—a decent well-meaning fellow he was—but he wanted push, and things had never gone rightly with him.

"They have never had the doctor out of the house since they have been married, and many births and many deaths keep a man always poor, Mr. Dempster, as well you must know; and it's many's the five-pound note as I've given to them out of my small means to help them through at a hard pinch, and he thinks, of course, as how I can just put my hand in my pocket and pay my passage in the first steamer as quick as he thinks for to ask me; and so I would, and would never have begrudged it, for my poor Mary's sake, but things has gone so contrary with me and Peck for this year back that I ain't got a penny to lay out. And there's the poor soul laying so bad, and thinking as I'm on the road, I dare say, and me can no more get to her without wings nor she can to get me."

"What is your son-in-law by trade?" asked Mr. Dempster.