But here the lawyer interposed, and said:
“Excuse me, one moment, please. Mrs. Floyd, do you remember signing this will which I have read in your hearing?”
“Perfectly;” and Hester snapped her words off with an emphasis. “The master was sick and afraid he might die, and he sent for your father, who was alone with him a spell, and then he called me and my old man in, and said we was to be witnesses to his will, and we was, Aleck and me.”
“It was strange father did not remember you, who had lived with him so long,” Roger suggested, his generosity and sense of justice overmastering all other emotions.
“If he had they could not have been witnesses,” the lawyer said, while Hester rejoined:
“It ain’t strange at all; for only six weeks before, he had given us two thousand dollars to buy the tavern stand down by the toll-gate, where we’ve set my niece Martha up in business, who keeps as good a house as there is in Belvidere; so you see that’s explained, and he gave us good wages always, and kept raisin’, too, till now we have jintly more than some ministers, with our vittles into the bargain.”
Hester was exonerating her late master from any neglect of herself and Aleck, and in so doing she made the lawyer forget to ask if she had ever heard of a second will made by Squire Irving. The old lawyer Schofield would have done so, but the son was young and inexperienced, and not given to suspecting everybody. Besides that, he liked Roger. He knew it was right that he should be the heir, and believed he was, and that Mrs. Walter Scott was altogether mistaken in her ideas. Still he suggested that there could be no harm in searching among the squire’s papers. And Mrs. Walter Scott did search, assisted by Roger, who told her of a secret drawer in the writing-desk and opened it himself for her inspection, finding nothing there but a time-worn letter and a few faded flowers,—lilies of the valley,—which must have been worn in Jessie’s hair, for there was a golden thread twisted in among the faded blossoms. That secret drawer was the sepulchre of all the love and romance of the old squire’s later marriage, and it seemed to both Mrs. Walter Scott and Roger like a grave which they had sacrilegiously invaded. So they closed it reverently, with its withered blossoms and mementos of a past which never ought to have been. But afterward, Roger went back to the secret drawer, and took therefrom the flowers, and the letter written by Jessie to her aged suitor a few weeks before her marriage. These, with the letter written on the sea, were sacred to him, and he put them away where no curious eyes could find them. There had been a few words of consultation between Roger and Lawyer Schofield, and then, with a hint that he was always at Roger’s service, the lawyer had taken his leave, remarking to Mrs. Walter Scott, as he did so:
“I thought you would find yourself mistaken; still you might investigate a little further.”
He meant to be polite, but there was a tinge of sarcasm in his tone, which the lady recognized, and inwardly resented. She had fallen in his opinion, and she knew it, and carried herself loftily until he said to Roger,—
“I had an appointment to meet your father in his library the very evening he died. He wished to make a change in his will, and I think, perhaps, he intended doing better by the young boy, Frank. At least, that is possible, and you may deem it advisable to act as if you knew that was his intention, you have an immense amount of money at your command, for your father was the richest man in the county.”