CHAPTER V — THE STORY OF JOSEPH
Mr. Bingle went home in a taxi-cab, completely done up.
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Back in 1885, Joseph Hooper, disgraced, disowned by his family and as poor Job's turkey, made a brief but sufficiently explicit will in which he named his beloved nephew Thomas Singleton Bingle as his sole heir. He drew it up on the surface of a fresh, unused postal card, and had it properly witnessed by the bailiff who came to Bingle's apartment to demand his appearance before a court to show cause why he should not consider himself in contempt for having disregarded the order to pay monthly sums in the shape of alimony to his late but unlamented wife.
In looking about for the second witness, he observed a levying deputy sheriff in the act of carrying off his last and only possession of value, to wit: a gold-headed cane that had been left to him by his father. With a fine sense of irony, he persuaded the aforesaid deputy sheriff to affix his signature to the will, and then remarked with deep sarcasm that he had "put his house in order" so far as it was in his power to do so. Inasmuch as the deputy sheriff was making way with what looked to be his entire estate, saving the clothes upon his back and the post-card (which he had taken the precaution to address to his lawyers, thereby securing its protection by the United States Government), Mr. Hooper's last will and testament as uttered on the 16th day of October, 1885, was necessarily brief and succinct. It merely said:
"I hereby revoke any former will I may have made prior to this date, and now bequeath to my beloved nephew, Thomas Singleton Bingle, my entire fortune, which at this time appears to be not my face but my figure. I therefore bequeath to him my physical person, and vest in him the right to chuck it into the river, or to dispose of it for medical purposes, as he may see fit, provided however that I shall first have been declared sufficiently dead by competent judges. I also bequeath to him any property, great or small, that may be in my possession at the time of my demise, even though it be no more than the collar-button with which he so kindly supplied me this morning, and which I shall always retain as a mark of his devotion, knowing well what it means for a man to deprive himself of a cherished belonging."
This was written in a very fine, cramped hand, and there was ample room at the bottom for his own signature and those of the witnesses, although it must be said that the elegant symmetry of the document was destroyed by the bulging scrawl of the bailiff, whose name was Abraham Kosziemanowski and who had to turn the final two syllables down at a sharp angle in order to get the whole of his signature on the card.
Bradlee, Sigsbee & Oppenheim, on the receipt of this jocose instrument, immediately communicated with their once magnificent client, who laconically instructed them to put it away in a very safe place as it might come in handy some time. To their own and to his subsequent surprise, they DID put it away in a safe place, but forgot all about it until he walked in upon them fifteen years afterwards and revealed himself as the great and only Joseph H. Grimwell.
Having once disinherited his children, he was then in the mood to reconsider his act, being alive to the fact that his days were numbered. But he went about the business with the sagacity of an old dog who has been kicked hard by some one who was not his master. Instead of proclaiming himself to be the Midas-like Joseph Grimwell, he appeared before his son and daughters, as poor old Joseph Hooper, their long lost father, as poor—nay, even poorer than when he went away, for he had lost the rugged health that was his only possession at the beginning of his vicissitudes.
Assuming a condition of abject, though genteel poverty, he went to each of them in turn. He wanted to give them a chance to reconsider, as he had done. But they would have none of him! Vastly dismayed by the failure of his nice little scheme to trick them into filial responsibility, he was on the point of shouting his denunciations from the house-tops when he suddenly remembered Tom Bingle: he wondered if Tom would receive him—an old derelict—with open arms.