Mrs. Walter Scott did not know of the letter in Magdalen’s possession, or how much Hester Floyd had overheard years before, when, with lying tongue, she had hinted things she knew could not be true, and made the old man mad with jealousy. She did not think how soon she would be confronted with her lie, and she answered, “I do not know. It is the first intimation I have heard of Squire Irving’s reason for changing his Will.”
She had forgotten her language to Lawyer Schofield the night after the funeral when the other Will was the subject of debate; but Roger remembered it, and his eyes rested steadily on her face as he said, “You do not know? You never heard it hinted that my mother was false, then?”
“Never,” she felt constrained to say, for there was something in those burning eyes which threatened her with harm if by word or look she breathed aught against the purity of poor Jessie Morton.
“Who found this Will, and where?” Roger asked her next, and with a mean desire to pay him for that look, Mrs. Walter Scott replied, “Magdalen found it. She has hunted for it at intervals, ever since she was a child and heard that there was one.”
But she repented what she had said when she saw how deep her blow had struck.
“Magda found it; oh, Magda, I would a thousand times rather it had been some one else.”
That was what Roger said, as with a bitter groan he laid his head upon the table, while sob after sob shook his frame and frightened his sister, who had never dreamed of pain like this. Tearless sobs they were, for Roger was not crying; he was writhing in anguish, and the sobs were like gasping moans, so terrible was his grief. He remembered what Magdalen had told him once of looking for the Will when she was a child, and remembered how sorry she had seemed. Had she deliberately deceived him, and, after he had told her that it was supposed to give Frank nearly everything, had she resumed her search, hoping to find and restore to her lover his fortune? Then he thought of that night with Hester, and the cobweb in Magdalen’s hair. She had been to the garret, according to her own confession, and she had looked for the missing Will then and “at intervals” since, until she had found it and sent it to him by Mrs. Walter Scott, instead of bringing it herself?
And he had loved her so much, and thought her so innocent and artless and true,—his little girl through whom he had been so terribly wounded. If she had come herself with it and given it into his hands and told him all about it, he would not have felt one half so badly as to receive it from another, and that other the cruel, pitiless woman whose real character he recognized as he had never done before. He had nothing to hope from her, nothing to hope from Frank, nothing from Magdalen. They were all leagued against him. They would enjoy Millbank, and he would go from their midst a ruined, heart-broken man, shorn of his love, shorn of his fortune, and shorn of his name, if that dreadful clause, “the boy known as Roger Lennox Irving,” really meant anything. He knew it was false; he never for a moment thought otherwise; but it was recorded against him by his own father, and after Magdalen, it was the keenest, bitterest pang of all.
Could that have been stricken out and could he have kept Magdalen, he would have given all the rest without a murmur.
As the will read, it was right that Frank should come into his inheritance, and Roger had no thought or wish to keep him from it. He did not meditate a warfare against his nephew, as his sister feared he might. He had only given way for a few moments to the grief, and pain, and humiliation which had come so suddenly upon him, and he lay, with his face upon the table, until the first burst of the storm was over, and his sobs changed to long-drawn breaths, and finally ceased entirely, as he lifted up his head and looked again at the fatal document before him.