Torwood's trust

by Evelyn Everett-Green

There were but two of them after all, though one was of a bulk and importance that gave it the substance of half a dozen ordinary letters. The crabbed characters were familiar to her eye, and it did not need the colossal signature ‘T. M. Maynard’ to tell her that it had been penned by her late uncle, the former master of Ladywell.

It was, in fact, nothing less than the dead man’s letter to his nephew, Philip Debenham, which Tor had read in the little hotel at Hornberg.

With a subdued exclamation of curiosity and satisfaction, Mrs. Belassis sat down to read the document; and as she did so, her face assumed an expression not at all agreeable to look upon. She read the paper not once, but twice; and the venomous expression deepened upon her face, until it grew positively hideous in its intensity.

Then she turned the paper over and over, and opened out its stiff folds, although the writing had only occupied the first page, and in so doing her attention was caught by a few pencilled words written on the inside, as if by an afterthought. And she was convinced by the manner in which the paper opened, that hers had been the first hand which had unfolded it. An eager yet dark look crossed her face, as she took in the sense of that after-message.

‘Your father once gave me to understand that he had drawn up a more equitable will, and had hidden it away somewhere in my library. I told him he had better take it out and give it to a lawyer to keep. And I think he must have taken it out—and destroyed it; for I never could find it, though I took the trouble to make a thorough search. He was just a muddler with his affairs, and a dreamer too. You may be sure he made away with the will in a moment of weakness; but of course if you choose to search for it, you can—you won’t find it.’

As she took in the import of these words, Mrs. Belassis fairly trembled. The anger which had disfigured her face before, gave way now to a look more nearly approaching terror; and then, after a few minutes of deep thought, she folded the paper once more and put it in her pocket.

‘I will show it to Alfred. He must see it. Then the pencilled words shall be erased, and I will take an early opportunity to return the paper. There are a hundred chances to one that it will not be missed. Now for the other.’

The other was Maud’s eager letter to her brother, written to him at Hornberg, to announce her delight and eager anticipation. The terms in which it was couched were not calculated to soothe Mrs. Belassis, and a look of bitter hatred crossed her face.

‘The little reptile, the little toad—making mischief from the very first! Oh, but I will be even with her! She shall learn to rue the day when first she tried to poison her brother’s minds against us—putting all sorts of suspicions into his head. Faugh! the ingratitude of the little viper!’

Mrs. Belassis folded the letter, and flung it into the drawer after the other things, and then she viciously locked it. Her mind was so much disturbed by her late discoveries, that she was almost tempted to pursue her researches no further, confident that she had found the most important papers in existence. But the dogged stubbornness of her character prevailed over her preoccupation and dismay, and she remembered that although she had found something of the greatest importance, she had not found anything of the character she had hoped—nothing to compromise her nephew, or to verify the very dim suspicion that had entered into her head. What that suspicion was she would have found it hard to say; all that she told even herself as yet was that there was ‘something odd’ about Phil, and that she believed there was ‘some mystery’ going on. So far, however, she had found nothing to encourage such an idea, and with a certain sense of having been baffled, she opened the sixth and last drawer.