“I had the right of a daughter,—an older sister, whose business it was to see that matters were kept straight until some head was appointed,” Mrs. Walter Scott said, and then she asked again for the package which Roger had taken from the drawer.
There was a moment’s hesitancy on Roger’s part; then, remembering that she could not compel him to let her read his mother’s farewell message, he took the sea-stained letter from his pocket and said:
“It was from my mother. She wrote it on the “Sea Gull,” just before it took fire. It was found on the table where father sat writing to me when he died. I believe he was going to send it to me. At all events it is mine now, and I shall keep it. Hester gave it to me this morning, and I put it in the private drawer and took the key with me. I knew nothing of this will, or any other will, except that father always talked as if I would have Millbank, and told me of some improvements it would be well to make in the factory and shoe-shop in the course of a few years, should he not live so long. Are you satisfied with my explanation!”
He was looking at the lawyer, who replied:
“I believe you, boy, just as I believe that Squire Irving destroyed his second will, if he ever made one, which, without any disrespect intended to the lady, I doubt, though she may have excellent reasons for believing otherwise. It would have been a most unnatural thing for a father to cast off with a legacy his only son, and knowing Squire Irving as I did, I cannot think he would do it.”
The lawyer had forsaken the lady’s cause entirely, and wholly forgetting herself in her wrath she burst out with—
“As to the sonship there may be a question of doubt, and if such doubt ever crept into Squire Irving’s mind he was not a man to rest quietly, or to leave his money to a stranger.”
Roger had not the most remote idea what the woman meant, and the lawyer only a vague one; but Hester knew, and she sprang up like a tiger from the chair where she had hitherto sat a quiet spectator of what was transpiring.
“You woman,” she cried, facing Mrs. Walter Scott, with a fiery gleam in her gray eyes, “if I could have my way, I’d turn you out of doors, bag and baggage. If there was a doubt, who hatched it up but you, you sly, insinuatin’ critter. I overheard you myself working upon the weak old man, and hintin’ things you orto blush to speak of. There was no mention made of a will then, but I know now that was what you was up to, and if he was persuaded to the ’bominable piece of work which this gentleman, who knows law more than I do, don’t believe, and then destroyed it,—as he was likely to do when he came to himself,—and you, with your snaky ways, was in New York, it has served you right, and makes me think more and more that the universal religion is true. Not that I’ve anything special agin’ Frank, whose wust blood he got from you, but that Roger should be slighted by his own father is too great a dose to swaller, and I for one shan’t stay any longer in the same room with you; so hand me the key to the door which you locked when you thought Roger had the will in his pocket. Maybe you’d like to search the hull coboodle of us. You are welcome to, I’m sure.”
Mrs. Walter Scott was a good deal taken aback with this tirade. She had heard some truths from which she shrank, and, glad to be rid of Hester on any terms, she mechanically held out the key to the door.