To assist in making such a terrible hotch-potch of scandal, as would be made by any posthumous repudiation, might have tempted a London Old Bailey practitioner, but it did not tempt for an instant this respectable rural devotee of Themis.
Cocky was silent for some time, breathing hard and deliberating what he would do. Almost more than his wife he hated his brother Alberic, who had always been the beloved of his father.
He raised himself, at last, feebly on his pillows. “Look here, Curton,” he said, with gasping effort, “you make my will, and be quick about it, for I’m dead beat. I can’t touch much, I know, but where I can do anything, make it as deuced unpleasant for her as you can; and renew the—the—what d’ye call it—settlement for the jewels, so that she’ll have to give ’em up; renew it just as it stood in my father’s and grandfather’s wills, will you? And look here, Curton: I appoint as guardians my brother-in-law and my uncle Augustus.”
Mr. Curton inclined his head in approval.
“Lord Hurstmanceaux and the Bishop of Dunwich? Your Grace could not make a more admirable selection. The highest principle——”
Cocky chuckled with a sound very like the death-rattle. “I choose Ronnie ’cause he’s so damned conscientious, he can’t refuse, and he’ll hate it so; and I choose old Augustus ’cause he came down once when I was a shaver at Eton and never tipped me, and gave me a beastly book called ‘The Christian Year.’ Make it all as deuced annoyin’ to both of ’em as you can. Lord, what a pother they’ll find all my affairs in—that’s a comfort.”
And it was a genuine tonic and cordial to him to think how, after his decease, all his sins and embarrassments would continue to circle like mosquitos around the heads of his trustees and executors.
“Beric will hate being left out,” he murmured; on the whole he was getting considerable fun out of this ante-mortem duty. But it was a bore to die, an awful bore, just when he had come into things and could do what he liked; he moved restlessly and uneasily on his bed while the lawyer wrote out the clauses of the testament, hastening as much as he could, for he saw that every breath might be his client’s last. When the witnesses were called in, oxygen was given to the dying man, and he rallied enough to sit up in his servant’s arms and sign “Otterbourne” legibly, in that clear handwriting which he had learned at Eton, and which had signed so much “bad paper.”
“I couldn’t do much, but I’ve done what I could,” he said feebly, as the pen fell from his fingers. “To be damned disagreeable to ’em all round,” he concluded, as his cough permitted him to complete the phrase.
“What a Christian spirit!” murmured the vicar of the village, who was present to witness the will, and had not heard the concluding sentence.