The barrister smiled.
“We make both ends meet,” he said meekly—“both ends meet. Yes, yes, both ends meet.”
“I went to see the old man the other day,” Leonard went on, taking a chair. “I thought you would like to know. He remains perfectly well, and there is no change in any respect. What I want to ask you is this. It may be necessary before long to get the question decided. Is he in a condition to make a will?”
The lawyer took time to give an opinion. Backed by his long legal experience and extensive practice, it was an opinion carrying weight.
“My opinion,” he said gravely, and as one weighing the case judicially—in imagination he had assumed the wig and gown—“my opinion,” he repeated, “would be, at first and on the statement of the case, that he is unfit and has been unfit for the last seventy years, to make a will. He is undoubtedly on some points so eccentric as to appear of unsound mind. He does nothing; he allows house and gardens and furniture and pictures to fall into decay; he never speaks; he has no occupation. This points, I say, to a mind unhinged by the shock of seventy years ago.”
“A shock of which I only heard the other day.”
“Yes—I know. My sister-in-law—your mother and your grandfather—thought to screen you from what they thought family misfortune by never telling you the truth—that is to say, the whole truth. I have followed the same rule with my children.”
“Family misfortune! I hardly know even now what to understand by it.”
“Well, they are superstitious. Your father died young, your grandfather died young; like you, they were young men of promise. Your great-grandfather at the age of six-and-twenty or thereabouts was afflicted, as you know.”
“And they think——”