A fortnight later, Mary Rayner, as she was putting her two months' old baby girl to sleep, was called from her bedroom to see a stranger in the sitting-room. He was a stockman from a station seventy miles away on the coast.
He silently handed her a letter, and then turned away, She opened and read it. It was from die Police Inspector of the Cape Howe district, and in a few sympathetic words told her that the Cassowary had been lost near Cape Howe, and that every soul on board but one seaman and a child of four years of age had perished, and that her husband, her father and her mother had been buried three days previously.
She never survived the shock, and when Tom Gerrard made his long journey down from North Queensland to Victoria, to comfort and aid his loved sister, he found that she had died a month before.
It took some months to settle up Captain Gerrard's affairs. He had made a will devising his head station to his wife, together with (less a certain reservation) the sum of ten thousand pounds. His two other stations—one in Central Queensland, and the other in the Far North of that colony,—he bequeathed, the former to his “dear daughter, Mary Rayner” and the latter to his “son, Thomas Gerrard, together with such moneys as might be at his (the testator's) death, lying to the credit of the two stations.” Then—and here came the sting of the “certain reservation” to Elizabeth Westonley—to his “dearly esteemed son-in-law, Edward Westonley, of Marumbah Downs, I give and bequeath the sum of one thousand pounds, to be by him used in the manner he may deem best for the benefit of the Marumbah Jockey Club, of which for ten years he has been patron. To his wife (my daughter Elizabeth) I bequeath as a token of my appreciation of her efforts to improve the moral condition of illiterate and irreligious bushmen, the sum of one thousand pounds, provided that she first consults and has the approval of my wife Eleanor, as to the manner in which the said money shall be expended.”
Then, as if to show that despite this gentle sarcasm towards the cold-hearted daughter who had never forgiven him for his second marriage, and had so long alienated herself from her stepbrother and sister, he still bore her a parental affection, he added another clause (also with an unintended sting in it) to the effect that if Mrs Westonley should have issue, male or female, five thousand pounds was to be invested for her first child, to be paid upon coming of age, “also the like sum for the first child of my beloved and affectionate daughter, Mary Rayner.”
“Poor Lizzie!” said Tom Gerrard to his brother-in-law, Westonley, after the contents of the will were made known, “she won't be pleased at this, I fear, Ted.”
“She won't, Tom,” replied Westonley frankly, as he placed his hand on Gerrard's shoulder with a kindly gesture, “but, between you and I, she has nothing to be angered at. I am pretty well in, and if I died to-morrow, she would be well provided for. And I don't think—I'm not disloyal to my wife—I don't think that she was quite as kind as she might have been to your mother and to you, and to poor Mary.”
Of course the death of Mrs Gerrard simultaneously with that of her husband, somewhat complicated matters, for she had made no will, and was evidently not aware of the nature of that made by Captain Gerrard; for she was of too gentle and kindly a nature to have permitted him to have written anything that could have aroused a feeling of resentment in the mind of his first-born child, although that child, from the day she returned from England had treated her with unconcealed hauteur and coldness.
At last, however, matters were finally settled, and Mrs Westonley, although she did resent most bitterly what she called her father's “wicked will,” consented, at her husband's earnest request, to take charge of and educate Mary Rayner's orphan child.
“It will be a disgrace to us, Elizabeth, if we send the poor child to strangers,” Westonley had said to her, almost sternly. “Tom, although he is a bachelor, would be overjoyed if we let her go to him.”