Mr. Hogarth's Will

by Catherine Helen Spence

"She is dead and gone a dozen years ago, and it was her as committed the crime, as you call it, and not me. I won't answer for it to nobody."

"Well, we must make inquiry in the house, though I fear that is hopeless, and in the newspapers. If you had had the sense to have got the mother's name, we might advertise in America; but I suppose you thought then that the less you knew about it the better. Though you cannot expect the thousand pounds——"

"But you promised it," said Mrs. Peck. "I'll say nothing more, unless I can get something first. You have basely deceived me. I never heard of a more scoundrelly action than getting me to tell you all that old story, and put myself into such a wrong box, on the pretence that I was to get a thousand pounds, and now you say that what you signed is waste paper. I'll get my own statement from you back again, before you leave this," and Mrs. Peck, with eyes of fury, planted herself at the back of the door. The next thing you'll do will be go and give information, I fancy.

"Be cool, Mrs. Peck; I do not mean to injure you. As I said, though there is no chance of our depriving Mr. Hogarth of property left to him so clearly as this, I think I may take it upon me to say, as his friend——"

"His friend!" interrupted Mrs Peck. "Oh, how you have deceived me! And you call yourself a gentleman, I suppose; and serve an old woman like that."

"Yes; as his friend," said Brandon, firmly, "I think I may say that he would be disposed to reward you, if you can prove that you are not his mother. I do not hesitate to say that he would give you five hundred pounds for such information as would hold in a court of law that he is not your son."

Mrs. Peck brightened up a little at this offer, though she could scarcely imagine any valid reason for it. "I think I could prove that; I really think I could prove that. There was my cousin that we lived with in Edinburgh, Violet Strachan, one of the witnesses to my marriage. She saw a great deal of my child, for, till we went to London, we lived in her house, and Frank was born there. She knew that he took convulsion fits very badly, and that he had a brown mole on his shoulder that this boy cannot have. I don't know of any other birth-mark," said Mrs. Peck.

"And this woman lived in Edinburgh. Do you think she is alive? Was she older or younger than you?"

"Oh, older by ten years," said Mrs. Peck, feeling the ground give way under her. "I hope she is not dead—she lived in 57, New Street, leading down to the Canongate, up three pair of stairs; her husband was a saddler, and she kept lodgers. His name was George. He would recollect something about Frank. Peck could swear that I have told him over and over again that my boy was dead, and that the boy Cross Hall brought up was none of mine."

"But Peck's word is worth nothing," said Brandon.