"Well, I'll thank you to go and ask him, however."
Whereupon Mary quitted the room; and stepping up stairs, she opened, and then presently shut again, the door of her own bedroom. "It is no use disturbing my poor father," said she to herself; "I'm sure he knows nothing about any papers; and if I wake him, he will not get to sleep again all night. If he saw them, he'll say so in the morning."
"My father knows nothing of the papers, sir," said she, reentering the room; "and if they're not in the pocket, I'm sure Mr. Aldridge never brought them here."
"Perhaps he did not, after all," thought Jonas; "he has maybe removed it out of the tin-box, and put it into the bureau." A suggestion which made him desire to get home again as fast as he had left it. So, promising to send the undertakers in the morning to remove the body, Mr. Jonas took his leave, and hastened back to West Street, where he immediately set about ransacking every drawer, cupboard, and press, some of which he could only open with the keys he had just extracted from the dead man's pocket. But the morning's dawn found him unsuccessful: it appeared almost certain that the important paper was not in the house; and weary, haggard, and angry, he stretched himself on his bed till the hour admitted of further proceedings. And we will avail ourselves of this interval to explain more particularly the relative position of the parties concerned in our story.
Ephraim Aldridge, a younger member of a large and poor family, had been early in life apprenticed to a hosier; and being one of the most steady, cautious, saving boys that ever found his bread amongst gloves and stockings, had early grown into great favor with his master, who, as soon as he was out of his apprenticeship, elevated him to the post of book-keeper; and in this situation, as he had a liberal salary, and was too prudent to marry, he contrived to save such a sum of money as, together with his good character, enabled him to obtain the reversion of the business when his master retired from it. The prudence which had raised him adhered to him still; his business flourished, and he grew rich; but the more money he got, the fonder he became of it; and the more he had, the less he spent; while the cautious steadiness of the boy shrank into a dry reserve as he grew older, till he became an austere, silent, inaccessible man, for whom the world in general entertained a certain degree of respect, but whom nobody liked, with the exception perhaps of one person, and that was Maurice Lane, who had formerly been his fellow-apprentice, and was now his shopman. And yet a more marked contrast of character could scarcely exist than between these two young men; but, somehow or other, everybody liked Lane; even the frigid heart of Ephraim could not defend itself from the charm of the boy's beautiful countenance and open disposition; and when he placed his former comrade in a situation of responsibility, it was not because he thought him the best or the steadiest servant he could possibly find, but because he wished to have one person about him that he liked, and that liked him. But no sooner did Lane find himself with a salary which would have maintained himself comfortably, than he fell in love with a beautiful girl whom he saw trimming caps and bonnets in an opposite shop-window, and straightway married her. Then came a family, and with it a train of calamities which kept them always steeped in distress, till the wife, worn out with hard work and anxiety, died; the children that survived were then dispersed about the world to earn their bread, and Lane found himself alone with his youngest daughter Mary. Had he retained his health, he might now have done better; but a severe rheumatic fever, after reducing him to the brink of the grave, had left him in such infirm health, that he was no longer able to maintain his situation; so he resigned it, and retired to an obscure lodging, with a few pounds in his pocket, and the affection and industry of his daughter for his only dependence.
During all this succession of calamities, Mr. Aldrich had looked on with a severe eye. Had it been anybody but Lane, he would have dismissed him as soon as he married; as it was, he allowed him to retain his place, and to take the consequences of his folly. He had carved his own destiny, and must accept it; it was not for want of knowing better, for Ephraim had warned him over and over again of the folly of poor men falling in love and marrying. Entertaining this view of the case, he justified his natural parsimony with the reflection, that by encouraging such imprudence he should be doing an injury to other young men. He made use of Lane as a beacon, and left him in his distress, lest assistance should destroy his usefulness. The old house in Thomas Street, however, which belonged to him, happening to fall vacant, he so far relented as to send word to his old clerk that he might inhabit it if he pleased.
Some few years, however, before these latter circumstances, Mr. Aldridge, who had determined against matrimony, had nevertheless been seized with that desire so prevalent in the old especially, to have an heir of his own name and blood for his property. He had but two relations that he remembered, a brother and a sister. The latter, when Ephraim was a boy, had married a handsome sergeant of a marching regiment, and gone away with it; and her family never saw her afterward, though for some years she had kept up an occasional correspondence with her parents, by which they learned that she was happy and prosperous; that her husband had been promoted to an ensigncy for his good conduct; that she had one child; and finally, that they were about to embark for the West Indies.
His brother, with whom he had always maintained some degree of intercourse, had early settled in London as a harness-maker, and was tolerably well off; on which account Ephraim respected him, and now that he wanted an heir, it was in this quarter he resolved to look for one. So he went to London, inspected the family, and finally selected young Jonas, who everybody said was a facsimile of himself in person and character. He was certainly a cautious, careful, steady boy who was guilty of no indiscretions, and looked very sharp after his halfpence. Ephraim, who thought he had hit upon the exact desideratum, carried him to the country, put him to school, and became exceedingly proud and fond of him. His character, indeed, as regarded his relations with the boy, seemed to have undergone a complete change, and the tenderness he had all through life denied to everybody else, he now in his decline lavished to an injudicious excess on this child of his adoption. When he retired from business he took Jonas home; and as the lad had some talent for portrait-painting, he believed him destined to be a great artist, and forbore to give him a profession. Thus they lived together harmoniously enough for some time, till the factitious virtues of the boy ripened into the real vices of the man; and Ephraim discovered that the cautious, economical, discreet child was, at five-and-twenty, an odious specimen of avarice, selfishness, and cunning; and what made the matter worse was, that the uncle and nephew somehow appeared to have insensibly changed places—the latter being the governor, and the former the governed; and that while Mr. Jonas professed the warmest affection for the old man, and exhibited the tenderest anxiety for his health, he contrived to make him a prisoner in his own house, and destroy all the comfort of his existence—and everybody knows how hard it is to break free from a domestic despotism of this description, which, like the arms of a gigantic cuttle-fish, has wound itself inextricably around its victim.
To leave Jonas, or to make Jonas leave him, was equally difficult; but at length the declining state of his health, together with his ever-augmenting hatred of his chosen heir, rendering the case more urgent, he determined to make a vigorous effort for freedom; and now it first occurred to him that his old friend Maurice Lane might help him to attain his object. In the mean time, while waiting for an opportunity to get possession of the will by which he had appointed Jonas heir to all his fortune, he privately drew up another, in favor of his sister's eldest son or his descendants, on condition of their taking the name of Aldridge; and this he secured in a tin-box, of which he kept the key always about him, the box itself being deposited in a cupboard in his own chamber. In spite of all these precautions, however, Jonas penetrated the secret, and by means of false keys, obtained a sight of the document which was to cut him out of all he had been accustomed to consider his own; but it was at least some comfort to observe that the will was neither signed nor witnessed, and therefore at present perfectly invalid. This being the case, he thought it advisable to replace the papers, and content himself with narrowly watching his uncle's future proceedings, since stronger measures at so critical a juncture might possibly provoke the old man to more decisive ones of his own.
In a remote quarter of the town resided two young men, commonly called Jock and Joe Wantage, who had formerly served Mr. Aldridge as errand boys, but who had since managed to set up in a humble way of business for themselves; and having at length contrived one evening to elude the vigilance of his nephew, he stepped into a coach, and without entering into any explanation of his reasons, he, in the presence of those persons, produced and signed his will, which they witnessed, desiring them at the same time never to mention the circumstance to anybody, unless called upon to do so. After making them a little present of money, for adversity had now somewhat softened his heart, he proceeded to the house of his old clerk.