“Money is a very good thing, Captain,” answered Rupert, with a smile that appeared to mean more than the tongue expressed—“a surprisingly good thing is money! But you must not exaggerate Grace's illness, which I dare say is merely constitutional, and will lead to nothing. I hope your many voyages have produced their fruits?”
“And Lucy?” I resumed, disregarding his question concerning my own success as an owner. “Where and how is she?”
“Miss Hardinge is in town—in her own—that is, in our house—in Wall Street, though she goes to the place in the morning. No one who can, likes to remain among these hot bricks, that has a pleasant country-house to fly to, and open to receive him. But I forgot—I have supposed you to know what it is very likely you have never heard?”
“I learned the death of Mrs. Bradfort while in Italy, and, seeing you in black, at once supposed it was for her.”
“Yes, that's just it. An excellent woman has been taken from us, and, had she been my own mother, I could not have received greater kindnesses from her. Her end, my dear Wallingford, was admitted by all the clergy to be one of the most edifying known in the place for years.”
“And Mrs. Bradfort has left you her heir? It is now time to congratulate you on your good fortune. As I un-understand her estate came through females to her, and from a common ancestor of hers and yours, there is not the slightest reason why you should not be gratified by the bequest. But Lucy—I hope she was not altogether forgotten?”
Rupert fidgeted, and I could see that he was on tenter-hooks. As I afterwards discovered, he wished to conceal the real facts from the world; and yet he could not but foresee that I would probably learn them from his father. Under all the circumstances, therefore, he fancied it best to make me a confidant. We were strolling between Trinity and Paul's church walks, then the most fashionable promenade in town; and, before he would lay open his secret, my companion led me over by the Oswego Market, and down Maiden Lane, lest he might betray himself to the more fashionable stocks and stones. He did not open his lips until clear of the market, when he laid bare his budget of griefs in something that more resembled his old confidential manner, than he had seen fit to exhibit in the earlier part of our interview.
“You must know, Miles,” he commenced, “that Mrs. Bradfort was a very peculiar woman—a very peculiar sort of a person, indeed. An, excellent lady, I am ready to allow, and one that made a remarkably edifying and; but one whose peculiarities, I have understood, she inherited with her fortune. Women do get the oddest conceits into their heads, you know, and American women before all others; a republic being anything but favourable to the continuation of property in the same line. Miss Merton, who is a girl of excellent sense, as you well know yourself, Miles, says, now, in England I should have succeeded, quite as a matter of course, to all Mrs. Bradfort's real estate.”
“You, as a lawyer—a common law lawyer-can scarcely require the opinion of an Englishwoman to tell you what the English laws would do in a question of descent.”
“Oh! they've a plaguey sight of statutes in that country, as well as ourselves. Between the two, the common law is getting to be a very uncommon sort of a law. But, to cut the matter short, Mrs. Bradfort made a will.”