For a moment Frank was tempted to refuse her request, but something in her face compelled him to unfold the paper and hold it while she read it through.
“Why, Frank, it gives you everything,” she exclaimed, with joy thrilling in every tone, as she clutched his arm, and looked into his face. “I never supposed it quite as good as this.”
“Mother,” Frank said, drawing back from her again, “are you a fiend to exult so over Roger’s ruin? Don’t you see it gives him a mere nothing, and he the only son?”
All the manhood of Frank’s nature was roused by his mother’s manner, and he was tempted for a moment to tear the will in shreds, and thus prevent the storm which he felt was rising over Millbank.
“There may be a doubt about the ‘only son,’” Mrs. Walter Scott replied. “A father does not often deal thus with his only surviving son. What do you imagine that means?” and she pointed to the words, “the boy known as Roger Lennox Irving.”
Frank knew then what it meant; knew that in some way a doubt as to Roger’s birth had been lodged in his grandfather’s mind, but it found no answering chord in his breast.
“Never will I believe that of Roger’s mother. He is more an Irving than I am, everybody says. Shame on you for crediting the story, even for a moment, and my curse on the one who put that thought in the old man’s heart, for it was put there by somebody.”
He was cursing her to her face, and he was going on to say still more when she laid her hand over his mouth, and said,—
“Stop, my son. You don’t know whom you are cursing, nor any of the circumstances. You are no judge of Jessie Morton’s conduct. Far be it from me to condemn her now that she is dead. She was a silly girl, easily influenced, and never loved your grandfather, who was three times her age. We read that the parents’ sin shall be visited upon the children, and if she sinned, her child has surely reaped the consequences, or will when this Will is proved. Poor Roger! I, too, am sorry for him, and disposed to be lenient; but he cannot expect us to let things go on as they have done now that everything is reversed. How did Magdalen happen to find it?”
She was talking very gently now, by way of quieting Frank, who told her briefly what he knew of the finding of the Will, and then, little by little as she adroitly questioned him, he let out the particulars of his interview with Magdalen, and Mrs. Walter Scott knew the secret of Magdalen’s distress. Her face was turned away from Frank, who did not see the cold, remorseless expression which settled upon it, as she thought of Magdalen’s pitting herself against the Millbank fortune. Magdalen’s value was decreasing fast. The master of Millbank could surely find a wife more worthy of him than the beggar girl who had been deserted in the cars, and that Magdalen Lennox should not marry her son was the decision she reached at a bound, and Frank must have suspected the nature of her thoughts, as she sat nervously tapping her foot upon the floor, and looking off through the window, with great wrinkles in her forehead and between her eyes.