Verner's Pride

by Mrs. Henry Wood

Of course the only thing to do was to look for the codicil. Great interest was excited; and it appeared to be altogether so mysterious an affair that one and all flocked upstairs to the room; the room where he had died! whence the coffin had but just been borne. Mrs. Tynn was summoned; and when she found what was amiss, she grew excited; fearing, possibly, that the blame might in some way fall upon her. Saving Lionel himself, she was the only one who had been alone with Mr. Verner; of course, the only one who could have had an opportunity of tampering with the desk. And that, only when the patient slept.

"I protest that the desk was never touched, after I returned it to the closet by my master's desire, when the parchment was put into it!" she cried. "My master never asked for his desk again, and I never so much as opened the closet. It was only the afternoon before he died, gentlemen, that the deed was signed."

"Where did he keep his keys?" asked Mr. Bitterworth.

"In the little table-drawer at his elbow, sir. The first day he took to his bed, he wanted his keys, and I got them out of his dressing-gown pocket for him. 'You needn't put them back,' he says to me; 'let them stop inside this little drawer.' And there they stayed till he died, when I gave them up to Mr. Lionel."

"You must have allowed somebody to get into the room, Mrs. Tynn," said Dr. West.

"I never was away from the room above two minutes at a time, sir," was the woman's reply, "and then either Mr. Lionel or Tynn would be with him. But, if any of 'em did come in, it's not possible they'd get picking at the master's desk to take out a paper. What good would the paper do any of the servants?"

Mrs. Tynn's question was a pertinent one. The servants were neither the better nor the worse for the codicil; whether it were forthcoming, or not, it made no difference to them. Sir Rufus Hautley inquired upon this point, and the lawyer satisfied him.

"The codicil was to this effect alone," he explained. "It changed the positions of Mr. Lionel and Mr. John Massingbird, the one for the other, as they had stood in the will. Mr. Lionel came into the inheritance, and Mr. Frederick Massingbird to five hundred pounds only. Mr. John was gone—as everybody knows."

"These two, Mr. Lionel and Frederick Massingbird, were the only parties interested in the codicil, then?"

"The only two. John Massingbird's name was mentioned, but only to revoke all former bequests to him."