“Which affect the dead and the living both,” answered the lawyer. “Circumstances, I grieve to say, which involve the future of Mr. Vanstone’s unhappy daughters.”
“Wait,” said Miss Garth, “wait a little.” She pushed her gray hair back from her temples, and struggled with the sickness of heart, the dreadful faintness of terror, which would have overpowered a younger or a less resolute woman. Her eyes, dim with watching, weary with grief, searched the lawyer’s unfathomable face. “His unhappy daughters?” she repeated to herself, vacantly. “He talks as if there was some worse calamity than the calamity which has made them orphans.” She paused once more; and rallied her sinking courage. “I will not make your hard duty, sir, more painful to you than I can help,” she resumed. “Show me the place in the will. Let me read it, and know the worst.”
Mr. Pendril turned back to the first page, and pointed to a certain place in the cramped lines of writing. “Begin here,” he said.
She tried to begin; she tried to follow his finger, as she had followed it already to the signatures and the dates. But her senses seemed to share the confusion of her mind—the words mingled together, and the lines swam before her eyes.
“I can’t follow you,” she said. “You must tell it, or read it to me.” She pushed her chair back from the table, and tried to collect herself. “Stop!” she exclaimed, as the lawyer, with visible hesitation and reluctance, took the papers in his own hand. “One question, first. Does his will provide for his children?”
“His will provided for them, when he made it.”
“When he made it!” (Something of her natural bluntness broke out in her manner as she repeated the answer.) “Does it provide for them now?”
“It does not.”
She snatched the will from his hand, and threw it into a corner of the room. “You mean well,” she said; “you wish to spare me—but you are wasting your time, and my strength. If the will is useless, there let it lie. Tell me the truth, Mr. Pendril—tell it plainly, tell it instantly, in your own words!”
He felt that it would be useless cruelty to resist that appeal. There was no merciful alternative but to answer it on the spot.