MY wife brought me the case and the client, and, strict candor compels me to say, I was not particularly grateful for either. The case was a curiously involved combination of an over-indulgent, invalid mother; a shrewd, selfish and unscrupulous son; a trained nurse, rather worse than she should have been; a cleverly drawn but very unjust will; an exceedingly large estate mostly in investment securities; a husband-deserted daughter with two small children and “an annual income of nothing to keep ’em on”; a witness who would undoubtedly be “agin the government,” and one other person whose testimony might, or might not, be favorable to the prosecution, but who had apparently vanished bodily from the face of the earth. The client was a pretty, gentle little creature, crushed under a load of trouble much too big for her, quite pathetic in her helplessness, and shrinking and rather indifferent about her own claims, but with an almost fierce mother-instinct over the rights of her babies.
How the partner of my joys and sorrows discovered these wronged mites of humanity is immaterial—she has a keen scent for injustice or oppression of any kind—but she rounded them up, brought them to my office, and said I was to take the case. I never appeal from the decision of my supreme court, so I said, “Certainly.”
First she took me aside and gave me an ex parte and rather highly colored statement of the facts in the affair, explaining that her protégée was diffident and reticent, unless stirred up about the children, and perorating with the remark, “You will find, John, that my meek-looking lamb is quite a ferocious animal when roused.” Then she went over to the other woman, kissed her, gave the boy a pile of my cherished law-books to use as building-blocks, took the tiny girl on her lap, hitched her chair a bit closer to the mother and said, “Now, my dear, you tell John everything, just as you told it to me, and he will fix it all up for you.”
A tolerable portion of my fairly large practice has consisted, and, I fancy, will continue to consist, of charity cases brought to me by my wife. They have, of course, seldom or never been profitable; they have cost time, work, worry and money, have occasionally been paid in the base coin of ingratitude, and without them we should have had a much larger bank account. But the warmest-hearted and most generous woman I have ever known likes me to help those she thinks are wronged, and it is little enough for me to do for her dear sake.
My small, scared client attracted me from the first, and my dusty legal heart ached over her sad story. Her mother had never cared much for her and had lavished love and money on her brother. She had married unfortunately, while scarcely more than a child. The estrangement with her mother had increased, and her brother had craftily widened the breach. This last fact I had much trouble to elicit, and wormed it out of her piecemeal.
After three years of neglect and ill-treatment, her husband had deserted her and run away with another woman—incidentally, her best friend—leaving her almost destitute. When she recovered from an attack of brain fever she found a letter from her brother awaiting her, in which he announced the death of their mother, his marriage to the trained nurse who had taken care of the mother in her last illness, and their exodus to Europe. He inclosed a copy of the will, which left everything unreservedly to him, and said that his attorney would communicate with her. The man-of-the-law came in person, and stated that he was empowered to pay her a hundred dollars a month, so long as she did not attempt litigation.
The will was witnessed by the doctor and the trained nurse, and the doctor was, to all intents, beyond discovery.
It was, on its face, a probable case of undue influence and, perhaps, mental aberration. But how prove either, without the doubly expert testimony of the missing physician, who, it appeared, was the only person, except the son and the nurse, that had seen the invalid during the last year of her life?
It was a significant fact that the daughter’s name was not mentioned in the instrument; and I suspected collusion on the part of the medical gentleman with the beneficiary and the woman who would share the profits of the criminal enterprise. My poor little client had seen the doctor once only when she was vainly endeavoring to gain access to her mother, and described him as a very fine-looking man on the sunny slope of forty, with wavy blond hair and pointed beard, a suave and kindly manner, a charming voice and singularly handsome hands.
The bill of items would have fitted tolerably a dozen men of my acquaintance, and I said as much, asking her, as an afterthought, how she came to notice his hands. Someone has said that the gist of a woman’s letter is in the postscript, and the large majority of women that have employed me as counsel have invariably reserved the leading and important facts of their cases until the last. This client was no exception to the rule; but when the dramatic little body had finished personating the missing man, I would have known him as far as I could see him among ten thousand, unless he were asleep or quite still; for she had cleverly imitated a man whose restless hands were ever in motion as he talked, and who glanced at them with covert satisfaction every few seconds. This singular trick, the descriptive factors in his personal equation, and the name he had signed—which, she assured me, was undoubtedly his own—as witness to the signature of the testatrix were about all the additional information I could extract from her, except that she had refused her brother’s proposition and was ready to fight to the bitter end for her children’s rights, though she had to beg or steal the money to pay court and counsel.