Stephen set down the empty glass and looked round the room—another man.
He even smiled in a ghostly kind of fashion as he took the will from his pocket and opened it.
“Poor Jack!” he murmured, with a sardonic display of the white teeth. “This no doubt makes you master of Hurst Leigh; but Providence has decreed that the spendthrift shall be disappointed. Yes, I am the humble instrument chosen. I am——”
He stopped suddenly with a start, for he had been reading as he soliloquized, and he had come upon words that struck him to the very heart’s core.
Was he dreaming, or had his senses taken leave of him?
With beating heart and white, parched lips he stared at the paper until the lines of crabbed handwriting danced before his astounded eyes.
If brevity is the soul of wit, old Ralph Davenant’s will was wit itself. It consisted of five paragraphs.
The first was merely the usual preamble declaring the testator to be of sound mind.
The second ran thus:
“To John Newcombe I will and bequeath the sum of fifty thousand pounds, the said sum to be realized by the sale or transfer of bonds and stocks, at the discretion of James Hudsley.”