“Schuyler, you’re a lawyer and that rare one, an honest man. I depute you to open this sealed document and read the contents to the company. Practically, it is my ‘last will and testament’—I mean the last one I’ve made, though I’m likely to alter it a score of times yet! I inscribed it ‘to be opened after my death,’ but as I feel I’ve just secured a new lease of life you needn’t wait for that but shall open it now.”
She spoke with all her old whimsicality but with a tremor in her voice, and somehow Seth Winters managed to place himself a little nearer to her and Dorothy clung the tighter about her neck.
Not yet did the child dream that this sealed packet related to herself or that the irrepressible feeling which had sent her flying to the old gentlewoman’s arms had been the call of the blood. She merely felt that her “Godmother” needed soothing and that it was her delightful duty to so soothe.
There is no need to here repeat the technical wording of what the Judge so distinctly read in his clear, strong voice, amid a silence which except for that voice would have echoed the falling of the proverbial “pin.” He summed it up after one reading in a brief epitome:
“Dorothy, otherwise Dorothy Elizabeth Somerset Calvert, is the last and nearest living relative of Mrs. Elizabeth Cecil Somerset-Calvert. She is the only child of one Cecil Calvert, deceased, and of Miriam his wife. Cecil Calvert, herein named, was the only son of the only son of Mrs. Calvert’s only brother. The descent is clear and unmistakable. Cecil Calvert, the father of Dorothy, was early left an orphan and was ‘raised’ by Mrs. Betty, presumably to be her heir. When he came of age to want a wife she provided one for him. He objected and made his own choice. She cut him off with a limited income, but sufficient for one differently reared, and taking his bride he went to the far West. There he died and his wife soon followed him; but her illness was a lingering one and during it she sought to provide for their baby Dorothy.
“This envelope contains her letters and those of her husband, written after his fatal seizure to Mrs. Calvert, describing everything connected with their young and, as it proved, improvident lives. Neither of them, the sad wife protests, had ever been trained to the wise handling of money or of anything useful. It had not been their fault so much as their misfortunes that they were dying in what was to them real poverty; and the pathetic letters ended with the declaration that, after its mother’s death, the child Dorothy would be safely convoyed to its great-great-aunt’s door and left to her to be ‘fairly dealt with.’ It was all quite simple and direct; the commonplace story of many other lives.”
But here Mrs. Betty, stifling the emotion which the re-reading of the papers had roused in her, took up the tale herself.
“When the baby came I was indignant. That at first. I felt I was too old to have a squalling infant forced into my house. Then better thoughts prevailed. I saw in the little thing traces of my own family likeness and I would have kept her. It was old Dinah and Ephraim who advised me then and wisely I believe, though there have been times when I’ve wished I hadn’t listened to them. They told me with the privilege of life-long service, that I’d made a brilliant failure of my raising of Cecil. They advised me to hunt up some worthy couple unburdened with children of their own and force the child upon them, to rear in simple, sensible ways, I to pay such a sum as would provide for the child’s actual necessities. No more. I listened and the notion falling in somewhat with my own conviction—you behold the result.
“Dorothy is what she is; to me the loveliest little maid in God’s good world. Save what nature implanted in her, all that makes her adorable to me and others is due to her foster-parents, the most unselfish and self-devoted pair of mortals it has ever been my lot to know in my long life. She belongs to them more than to me; but it shall be as she and they elect. Even yet I will try to say it justly.
“My homes are many and ample. There is room in every one of them for a little household of four. Johnnie, Martha, my own Dorothy, shall we not make at last, one unbroken, happy family?”