‘I am glad to hear that,’ said Sampson, selecting a fresh cigar from a comfortably-filled case, ‘because if you imagine that by such a settlement as you propose you could escape the payment of any debts now existing you are mistaken. A man can make no settlement to the injury of his creditors. As regards future liability the case would be different, and if you were deeply involved in commerce, a speculator, I could understand your desire to shift the estate from your own shoulders to your wife’s. But as it is——’
‘Can’t you understand something not strictly commercial?’ exclaimed John Treverton, waxing impatient. ‘Can’t you understand that I want to obey the spirit as well as the letter of my cousin Jasper’s will? I want to make his adopted daughter the actual mistress of the estate, in the same position she would have naturally occupied had he never made that foolish vow.’
‘In so doing you make yourself a pensioner on her bounty.’
‘So be it. I am content to occupy that position. Come, my dear Sampson, we need not argue the question any further. If you won’t draw up the form of settlement I want, I must find a lawyer who will.’
‘My dear sir,’ cried Tom Sampson, briskly, ‘when a client of mine is obstinately bent upon making a fool of himself, I always see him through his folly. He had better make a fool of himself in my hands than in anyone else’s. I do not suffer by the loss of his business, and I am vain enough to believe that he suffers less than he would if he took his business to any other office. If you have quite made up your mind, I am ready to rough-draft any form of settlement you dictate; but I am bound to warn you that the dictation of such a settlement is a qualification for Bedlam.’
‘I will risk even as much as that. Nobody need know anything about the settlement but you and I, and, later, my wife. I shall not speak of it to her until it is ready for execution.’
Mr. Sampson, in a chronic state of wonder, took half a quire of slippery blue foolscap, and began his draft, with a very squeaky quill pen and a large consumption of ink. Simple and uniform as the gift was which John Treverton wished to make to his wife, the transfer of it required to be hedged round and intertwined with so much legal phraseology that Tom Sampson had consumed his half-quire of foolscap before he came to the end of the draft. The estate had to be scheduled, and every homestead and labourer’s cottage had to be described in a phrase of abstract grandeur, as ‘all that so and so, commonly known as so and so,’ and so forth, with almost maddening iteration. John Treverton, smoking his cigar, and letting his thoughts wander away at a tangent every now and then to regions that were not always paths of pleasantness, thought his host would never leave off driving that inexorable quill—the sort of pen to sign a death-warrant and feel none the worse for it—over the slippery paper.
‘Come,’ exclaimed Sampson, at last, ‘I think that ties the estate up pretty tightly on your wife and her children after her. She can squander the income as she pleases, and play old gooseberry up to a certain point, but she can’t put the tip of her little finger on the principal. And now you have only to name two responsible men as trustees.’
‘I don’t know two respectable men in the world,’ said John, frankly.
‘Yes, you do. You know the vicar of this parish, and you know me. Your cousin Jasper considered us worthy to be trustees to his will. You need hardly be afraid to make us trustees to your marriage settlement.’