I was at the door, when Mrs Bowden spoke to me again. ‘You have not broken the seal of that packet, I hope?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t do so. It will be asked for some day, and it may be for your profit that the seal is intact.—You may go now. You’re a good lad, and I am pleased to think that you will be May’s husband.’
I felt strangely curious about the eccentric old lady, and hoped that she would again command in her imperious fashion that I should visit her. But it was not to be. Little more than a week had passed, when May came to Gerald’s rooms, weeping, and with all her little possessions. Mrs Bowden had been found dead in her bed that morning; and before noon, Mr George Bowden, in his self-assumed capacity of executor, had turned my poor little sweetheart out of the house.
I said some harsh things about this greedy and self-seeking man, and gave expression to some unkindly wishes about his inheritance of his sister-in-law’s property; but I did not guess what a strangely complete punishment his rapacity was to receive.
Ten days had passed since Mrs Bowden’s death. May was domiciled in my apartments, which I had vacated for her, and was trying to obtain daily teaching. I was accompanying my hurried dinner at a City restaurant by a yet more hurried study of the Daily Telegraph, when my eye was caught by the following advertisement: ‘Lost, on the 24th of February, by a gentleman since deceased, a sealed envelope containing the Will of Mrs Anne Bowden, of Well Walk, Hampstead. Any one bringing the same, or giving information by which it may be recovered, to Messrs Godding and Son, Solicitors, Bedford Row, E.C., will be rewarded.’
For a moment I perceived nothing more than that the will of May’s Mrs Bowden was missing; but immediately the conviction rushed upon me that this which was advertised for was my packet, the mysterious envelope, the possession of which had for four months—it was now June—been so irritating to me. Could it be possible that the two documents were the same? and that Mrs Bowden had been aware all the time that it was in my hands, yet had made no effort to regain possession of it, or to restore it to her solicitor, who had originally been destined to keep it till it was wanted? It seemed wholly unlikely; but the eccentricity of the dead lady’s character made it not impossible; and if so strange a coincidence really had happened, her oft repeated advice that I should not break the seal received a new importance. I could not delay investigating the matter. Instead of returning to the office of Messrs Hamley and Green, I rushed off to my lodging in Camden Town, took the packet from the desk in which it had been reposing so long, and hurried off to Bedford Row.
Mr Godding was engaged when I reached his office, and I was put into an anteroom to wait; but this was separated from the solicitor’s private room only by a not wholly closed door, and the voices of him and his client were raised to such loud altercation that I could not avoid hearing their words.
‘I tell you that you are making an unnecessary fuss about this matter,’ said one. ‘I have every reason to believe that my sister-in-law meant to leave her property to me; and in advertising for this missing will and postponing my entrance into my inheritance, you are simply wasting time, and, I have no doubt, lining your pockets with my money.’
‘Your last suggestion is too absurd to be annoying, sir,’ replied the other, evidently the lawyer. ‘Mrs Bowden did not, you admit, definitely state that you were to be her heir; she merely told you on the 24th of last February that she had signed a will and intrusted it to my father, who, as you know, was on that day seized with the illness which terminated in his death. You say that she “gave you to understand” that this will was in your favour. That is a phrase which may mean much or little. May I ask what, in this case, it does mean?’