CHAPTER XXIII.
ROGER AND THE WILL.
The office was closed, the shutters down, and Roger gone. Frank had come too late, and he swiftly retraced his steps homeward, hoping still to be in time to tell the news before his mother. But his hopes were vain. Roger had entered the house while Frank was in the garret, and Mrs. Walter Scott heard him in his room as she passed through the hall after her interview with her son. But she was too much agitated and too flurried to speak to him just then. She must compose herself a little, and utterly forgetful of Magdalen, who was waiting for Frank, and growing impatient at his delay, she went to her own room and read the Will again to make sure that all was right and Frank the lawful heir. She could not realize it, it had come so suddenly upon her; but she knew that it was so, and she bore herself like a queen when she at last arose, and started for Roger’s room. It was the Mrs. Walter Scott of former days resurrected and intensified who swept so proudly through the hall, just inclining her head to the servant whom she met, and thinking, as she had once thought before, how she would dismiss the entire household and set up a new government of her own. There had been some uncertainty attending the future when she made this decision before, but now there was none. She held the document which made her safe in her possessions; she was the lady of Millbank, and there was a good deal of assurance in the knock, to which Roger responded “Come in.”
He was in his dressing-gown, and looking pale and worn just as he had looked ever since his return from New York. Beside him in a vase upon the table was a bouquet, which he had arranged for Magdalen, intending to send it to her with her dinner. And Mrs. Walter Scott saw it and guessed what it was for, and there flashed into her mind a thought that she would make matters right between Roger and Magdalen; she would help them to each other, and save Frank from the possibility of a mésalliance. But Mrs. Walter Scott was a very cautious woman; she always kept something in reserve in case one plan should fail, and now there came a thought that possibly Roger might contest the Will and win, and if he did, it might be well to reconsider Magdalen and her hundred thousand dollars, so she concluded that for the present it would be better not to throw Magdalen overboard. That could be done hereafter, if necessary.
She was very gracious to Roger, and took the seat he offered her, and played with her watch-chain, wondering how she should begin. It was harder than she had anticipated,—telling a man like Roger that all he had thought his, belonged to another; and she hesitated, and grew cold and hot and withal a little afraid of Roger, who was beginning to wonder why she was there, and what she wanted to say.
“Can I do anything for you, Helen?” he asked, just as he had once before, when she came on an errand which had caused him so much pain.
Then she had come to tear Magdalen from him; now she was there to take his fortune, his birthright away; and it is not strange that, cruel as she was, she hesitated how to begin.
“Roger,” she said, in reply to his question, “I am here on a most unpleasant errand, but one which, as a mother whose first duty is to her son, I must perform. You remember the Will which at your father’s death could not be found.”
She was taking it from her pocket, and Roger, who was quick of comprehension, knew before she laid the worn paper upon the table, that the lost Will was found! With trembling haste he snatched it up, and she made no effort to restrain him. She had faith in the man she was ruining. She knew the Will was safe in his hands; he would neither destroy nor deface it. He would give it its due consideration, and she sat watching him while he read it through, and pitying him, it must be confessed, with all the little womanly feeling she had left. She would have been a stone not to have pitied one whose lips uttered no sound as he read, but quivered and trembled, and grew so bloodless and thin, while his face dripped with the perspiration which started from every pore and rolled down his chin in drops. She thought at first they were tears, but when he lifted his eyes to hers as he finished reading, she saw that they were dry, but oh, so full of pain and anguish and surprise, and wounded love and grief, that his father should have disinherited him for such a cause. He knew what the clause “the boy known as Roger Lennox Irving” implied, and that hurt him more than all the rest.
Why had his father believed such a thing of his mother, and who had told him the shameful story? Leaning across the table to his sister he pointed to the clause, and moving his finger slowly under each word, said to her in a voice she would never have recognized as his, “Helen, who poisoned my father’s mind with that tale?”