Anne Hereford: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

"I do not think I shall," said Mr. Edwin Barley. "Produce the will, and every behest in it shall be fulfilled. Failing a will, my wife's property becomes mine, and I shall act as I please by it."

The days went by; ten unhappy days. I spent most of my time with Miss Delves, seeing scarcely anything of Mr. Edwin Barley. Part of the time he was staying at his brother's, but now and then I met him in the passages or the hall. He would give me a nod, and pass by. I cannot describe my state of feeling, or how miserable the house appeared to me: I was as one unsettled in it, as one who lived in constant discomfort, fear, and dread; though, of what, I could not define. Jemima remarked one day that "Miss Hereford went about moithered, like a fish out of water."

The will did not turn up, and probably never would: neither was any clue given to the mystery of its disappearance. Meanwhile rumours of its loss grew rife in the household and in the neighbourhood: whether the lawyer talked, or Mr. Barley of the Oaks, and thus set them afloat, was uncertain, but it was thought to have been one or the other. I know I had said nothing; Charlotte Delves said she had not; neither, beyond doubt, had Mr. Edwin Barley. When an acquaintance once asked him whether the report was true, he answered Yes, it was true so far as that Mr. Gregg said his late wife had made a will, and it could not be found; but his own belief was that she must have destroyed it again; he could not suspect any of the household would tamper with its mistress's private affairs.

One day Mr. Edwin Barley called me to him. I was standing by the large Michaelmas daisy shrub, and he passed along the path.

"Are you quite sure," he asked in his sternest tone, but perhaps it was only a serious one, "that you did not reopen the cabinet yourself, and do something with the parchment?"

"I never opened it again, sir. If I had, my aunt must have seen me. And I could not have done so," I added, recollecting myself, "for she kept the bunch of keys under her pillow."

"She was the only one, though, who knew where it was placed," muttered Mr. Edwin Barley to himself in allusion to me, as he walked on.

"It's a queer start about that will!" Jemima resentfully remarked that same night when she was undressing me. "And I don't half like it; I can tell you that, Miss Hereford. They may turn round on me next, and say I made away with it."

"That's not likely, Jemima. The will would not do you any good. Do you think it will ever be found?"

"It's to be hoped it will—with all this unpleasantness! I wish I had never come within hearing of it for my part. The day old Gregg and the young man were here, Charlotte Delves got hold of me, pumping me on this side, pumping me on that. Had they been up to Mrs. Edwin Barley? she asked: and what had their business been with her? She didn't get much out of me, but it made me as cross as two sticks. It is droll where the will can have gone! One can't suspect Mr. Edwin Barley of touching it; and I don't; but the loss makes him all the richer. That's the way of the world," concluded Jemima: "the more money one has, the more one gets added to it. It is said that he comes into possession of forty thousand pounds by the death of Philip King."