"What were the circumstances?" asked Miss Fleming.
"The property, you understand, was old Morôt's—Morôt of New Orleans. Virginie was his only child: she married Swendon, and her father came to live with them in Baltimore. The two men were at odds from the first day. Old Morôt was a keen, pig-headed business-man: he knew nothing outside of the tobacco-trade; worked in the counting-house all day; his one idea of pleasure was to swill port and terrapin half the night. Swendon—Well, you know the captain. He was a brilliant young fellow in those days, full of ideas that never came to anything—an invention every month which was to make his fortune. They quarreled, of course the wife sided with her husband, and Morôt, in a fit of rage, left the whole property to his nephew, Will Laidley. When he was on his deathbed, however, the old man relented and sent for Laidley. It was too late to alter the will, but he charged him to do justice to his daughter. Laidley has told me that much himself. But it never occurred to him that justice meant anything more than to keep the estate, and allow it at his death to revert to Jane and her father."
"Well, well!" cried Mr. Waring hastily, "that cannot be far off now. Laidley is so nearly a thing of the past, judge, that we might afford to bury his faults with him, decently out of sight."
"I can't put out of sight the years of want for Virginie and her child while he was throwing their money to the dogs in every gambling-hell in Baltimore and New York. Why, the story was so well known that when he came down to Richmond he was not recognized, sir! Not recognized. He felt it. Left the county like a whipped cur."
"Yet, legally, the money was his own," remarked Cornelia.
"Oh, legally, I grant you! But morally, now—" The judge had counted on Miss Fleming's sympathy in his story. Only the day before he had seen the tears come to her eyes over his hurt hound. He was disappointed that she took little Jane's misfortunes so coolly. "Of course this sort of crime is unappreciable in the courts. But society, Virginia society, knows how to deal with it."
"I happen to know," said Waring, "that Laidley's will was made a year ago, leaving the whole property to Miss Swendon."
"And he knows that in the mean time she is barely able to keep herself and her father alive. Pah-h!"
"Really, Jane has quite a dramatic history, and you are precisely the person to tell it with effect, judge," said Miss Fleming, smiling good-humoredly, with that peculiar affable intonation which always numbs the hearer into a conviction that his too excessive emotion is being humored as the antics of an ill-disciplined child.
The judge grew red.