One fine morning Mrs. Selby paid them a visit, evidently full of news. It soon came out,—she had heard from Mr. Selby; he and Mr. Carrington would be home the next day; and—would Mrs. Colville believe it?—poor dear Sir Thomas had died without signing his last will and testament; so all the property would go, under a former one, to his heir, Mr. Peter Crawley—a very fine young man, in a large way of business in Manchester, though of course he’d give up all that sort of thing now. She, Mrs. Selby, was only sorry on one account, he had never been able to get it out of Mr. Selby, he was so ridiculously close, but she was almost certain Sir Thomas had left £20,000 to Mr. Carrington in his last will, and he would have spent the money so well, it certainly was a thousand pities; but Mr. Peter Crawley would benefit, and he was such a very fine young man; a fortunate family the Crawleys were, certainly.
That day at dinner, Mrs. Colville remarked her daughter’s appetite was returning, and that she began to look like herself again; which she attributed to a certain quinine mixture wherewith the Rosebud had been victimised, and which she canonised accordingly.
Ernest and Mr. Selby arrived when due, and the legend of Mr. Peter Crawley’s heirship remained uncontradicted—nay, was confirmed, by that very fine young man’s arrival, in high health and spirits, to enact the part of chief mourner. Ernest was much occupied by parish affairs, and by the arrangements for the approaching funeral (in regard to which Mr. Selby appeared resolved to consult him much more than he wished, or Mr. Peter Crawley seemed to relish); but all his leisure moments he spent at the cottage, and had no reason to complain of the reception he met with from either mother or daughter.
And so, in due course of time, the day for the funeral arrived. Now it is an acknowledged fact that funerals and weddings are the two dullest and most sombre occasions on which human creatures assemble themselves together, and are therefore equally insipid to describe; only a funeral labours under the additional disadvantage, that it is against every rule of good taste and right feeling to poke fun at it. We feel, therefore, that we have “our public” with us, when, without entering into detail, we beg them to consider Sir Thomas Crawley handsomely and appropriately interred, with the necessary amount of black crape, crocodile tears, and funereal foppery.
After the ceremony was over, Mr. Selby ate an excellent luncheon at the expense of the estate, to provide against the possible contingency of requiring the performance repeated on his own account, after a verdict of “died of inanition,” and then prepared to read the will—only, after searching high and low, and in every intermediate altitude, no will was forthcoming; so the next best thing was to inform a small and select coterie of ravening wolves, and daughters of the horse-leech, there met together in bombazine and black sheep’s-clothing (alias broadcloth), and styling themselves relations of the dear departed (which in more senses than one, they certainly were), all that he (Selby) knew about the matter. This was—that since his accession to the Manor of Ashburn, Sir Thomas Crawley had made two wills:—the first bequeathing the bulk of the property to Mr. Peter Crawley, he had duly signed, sealed, and delivered the second he had never completed. That, when Sir Thomas, in his last illness, summoned Mr. Selby to Baden, he had desired him to bring with him three documents, viz., old Sir Ralph Carrington’s will, under which he had originally inherited the property; his own completed will; and the draught of the more recent one, then incomplete. That Sir Thomas had carefully-perused every clause of Sir Ralph’s will; then, begging Mr. Selby to take especial care of it, he desired him to destroy both the others in his presence; adding that they neither of them carried out his present intentions, and that, on his return to the Priory, he should give instructions for a fresh one. That he (Mr. Selby), declining to destroy the wills without witnesses of his doing so, by Sir Thomas Crawley’s express desire, the valet and the English physician were summoned, and in their presence he burned the wills. The property must, therefore, be disposed of according to the will of the late Sir Ralph Carrington.
We will save the reader (and ourselves) the trouble of wading through the mire of that most senseless abuse of the Queen’s-English, and her subjects’ common sense, yclept “legal phraseology;” which ought to be rendered illegal without delay; and proceed at once to state that, in the event of plain Thomas Crawley (not then be-knighted) dying intestate and without issue, the property was to revert to the eldest son of Reginald-Carrington, &c. &c., which Reginald, as the reader may probably conjecture, was the “cut off” son of Sir Hugh, and the father of the present rector of Ashburn.
Ernest Carrington, therefore, the ci-devant mathematical and classical master of Dr. Donkiestir’s school at Tickletown, was now lord of the manor of Ashburn, patron of his own living, and owner of Ashburn Priory, besides, if he chose to revive the dormant title, a baronet also.
On hearing this announcement, that fine young man, Mr. Peter Crawley, said a naughty word, and then tried to look as if somebody else had done it, frowning portentously at the oldest ravening wolf, who, with the rest of the pack, appeared eager to turn and rend somebody, and were only restrained from an outbreak of ferocity by the tightness of their (black) sheep’s clothing; while the Misses Horse-leech, despite their bombazine and flounces, cast sanguinary glances on Mr. Selby, and would probably there and then have fixed upon him and exhausted his vital fluid, albeit his personal appearance was scarcely suggestive of an agreeable esculent, but for the presence of the bystanders.
The Rosebud heard the news before she slept that night—slept, did we say?—poor little self-tortured victim to a delusion of the arch-enemy—if agonised sobs, threatening to part soul and body; if pale cheeks, throbbing bosom, streaming eyes, and burning brow, be signs of sleep, then indeed was the expression rightly chosen. Ernest also, either by some strange vibration of the sympathetic chain which unites those who truly love—(my dear strong-minded old gentleman, albeit you are the “father of a family,” and a fair specimen of the ancient Turk of private life into the bargain, your saying “Pish! folly! German rubbish!” does not affect me in the slightest degree—probably because the sympathetic link which so much offends you, does not unite our spirits, which will, I fear, always more or less effervesce rather than mingle, by being brought in contact with one another)—Ernest also, either from some sympathetic influence, or from the natural impetuosity of his disposition, was so restless and excited that night, that he determined the next day should decide whether he was to be more happy, or more miserable, than anybody had ever been before—except, perhaps, the few other ardent young men who have “lived and loved,” and got into desperate states of mind about it, since the days when Noah went a-yachting.
Accordingly, being aware that Mrs. Colville had usually breakfasted in her own room since her illness, and seldom made her appearance in the drawing-room till about twelve o’clock, Ernest (as soon as he had finished his breakfast, and written two or three business letters, which were fertile in mistakes and erasures, seeing that his hand had written them while his mind was “far away”) walked down to the cottage, let himself in, and without announcement made his way into the drawingroom, as he had often done before, where, opening the door, he found, as he had fondly hoped to do, the Rosebud “blooming alone;” only that she was not blooming at all, but looking especially pale and washed out, by reason of the tempestuous night she had passed. Not but that the storm of feeling which had swept over her maiden soul, and left its traces behind, had added a depth and (if we may use the term) pathos to her beauty, which it wanted previously. She turned, if possible, still more pale as he entered; then, by a strong exercise of self-control, she strove, with tolerable success, to receive him in her usual manner. After a few commonplace inquiries and responses had passed between them, Emily, by a great effort, felicitated him on his accession of fortune. He smiled mournfully.