T. W. Speight - In the Dead of Night (Vol. 1-3)

Table of Contents

The dining-room at Park Newton. A cosy little table, with covers set for two people, was drawn up near the fire. The evening was cold and frosty. The wax-candles were lighted, the logs on the hearth burned cheerily. A large Indian screen shut in this end of the room from the wilderness of gloom and desolation beyond; for the dining-room at Park Newton would accommodate fifty or sixty guests with ease. The clock on the mantelpiece pointed to ten minutes past seven. Lionel Dering was growing impatient.

"Perrins is generally punctuality itself," he said. "What can have detained him? I hope he is not ill."

He was on the point of ringing the bell, and sending the servant with a message to the lawyer's room, when Mr. Perrins came in. With many apologies for being late, he sat down to table; but Lionel saw at once that he was bursting with some important news. As soon as the first course was served, and the servant had left the room, Perrins began.

"I have some very startling information for you, Mr. Dering," he said. "My late arrival at table is owing to a certain discovery which I made about an hour ago."

"I hope you are not going to tell me that my eleven thousand a year is all moonshine," said Lionel, as he helped the lawyer to some clear soup.

"No, no, Mr. Dering. The news I have to tell you is not quite so bad as that, and yet it is bad enough in all conscience. While going through some of your uncle's papers this afternoon--you know what a quantity of them there are, and in what disorder he kept them--while engaged upon this necessary duty, I discovered--what think you, sir? what think you?"

"Another will, I suppose," said Lionel, slowly.

"Not another will, but a codicil, sir; codicil to the will with whose provisions we are already acquainted; in the handwriting of the testator himself, witnessed in due form, and dated only three months ago!"

"And what may be the contents of this important document?" asked Lionel, as he crumbled his bread with apparent indifference.

"The contents are these: Should you, Lionel Dering, die unmarried, or without lawful issue, the whole of the property bequeathed you by your uncle's will reverts to your cousin, Mr. Kester St. George, or to his children, should you be the longer liver of the two."

"Is that all?" said Lionel, with a sigh of relief.

"All, sir! Quite enough, too, I should say, if I were in your place."

"Nobody can touch the property as long as, I live."

"Certainly not."

"Then a fig for the rest! Shall I send you a sole or some stewed eels?"

"It is quite a relief, to me to find how coolly you take my news; though it is true your uncle could not well have made the contingency of your cousin's inheriting a more remote one."

"Tell me," said Lionel, "have you either seen or heard anything of Kester since my uncle's death?"

"I have heard from him, but not seen him. He wrote to me a few days after your uncle's funeral, asking me to send him an abstract of the contents of the will. He gave an address in Paris, and I answered his letter by return of post."

"An address in Paris!" exclaimed Lionel. "That is very strange. I never felt more positive of anything than that my cousin Kester passed me on Westminster Bridge on the very night of my uncle's funeral."

"A coincidence, my dear sir, nothing more," said the lawyer, cheerfully. "Such things happen every day in London. It would almost seem as if every man had his double--a sort of unknown twin-brother--somewhere in the world."

Lionel pursued the subject no farther, but he was none the less convinced in his own mind that it was Kester, and no one but him, that he had seen. Could he ever forget the look of undying hatred that shone out of his cousin's eyes?

"You have not yet advised Kester of the contents of the codicil?" he said at last.

"I have not had time to do so. I purpose writing to him this evening: unless you wish me to defer doing so until you have satisfied yourself as to the authenticity of the document."

"My dear sir, if you are satisfied that the document is genuine, that is enough for me. Write to my cousin, by all means, and as soon as possible. By-the-by, you may as well give me his address. I shall probably drop him a line myself."

"I may as well tell you," said Mr. Perrins, as he gave the address, "that the balance of six thousand and odd pounds, which I found to your uncle's credit in his bank passbook at the time of his decease, represents, with the exception of a few shares in one or two public companies, the accumulated savings of Mr. St. George's lifetime."

"What! out of an income of eleven thousand a year?"

"Even so. When your uncle died, everybody who had known him, and who knew his simple, inexpensive mode of life, said: 'He must have saved a hundred thousand pounds at the very least.' But the reverse of that has proved to be the fact. In going through Mr. St. George's papers, I found numerous receipts for very large donations made by him to different charities. He seems to have received his rents with one hand and to have given them away with the other. In fact, your uncle was one of those unknown philanthropists of whom the world hears nothing, but whose wealth, like a bounteous stream, diffuses countless blessings among the sick and poor."

"And yet," said Lionel to himself, "this was the man who refused to forgive his own sister because he fancied that she had married beneath her!"

Mr. Perrins went off to bed at an early hour, after indulging in a due modicum of choice old port; but Lionel sat up till far into the small hours, with no companion but his favourite meerschaum.

His musings were very pleasant ones. How could they be otherwise? Not till to-day had he seemed to realize to the full all that was implied by his sudden change of fortune. In London he was nobody, or next to nobody; one rich man among ten thousand. Here, at Park Newton, he was lord and master of everything. This gray old mansion, with its wide sweep of park, and its noble trees which might be counted by hundreds, were all his, with many a fair and fruitful farm that now lay sleeping under the midnight moon. To the gracious shelter of that stately old roof he would in a little while bring his bride. There would their lives gradually wear themselves away in a round of daily duties, edged with a quiet happiness that never tires. In one or other of those rooms their last breath would ebb away; in the long gallery upstairs two more portraits would be added to the line of dead and gone ancestors. And then would come the day when a new master, his son, would reign at Park Newton, who would, in his turn, bring home a fair young bride, and would dream, perchance in that very room, in the dim years to come, dreams the like of those which the brain of Lionel Dering was shadowing forth to-night among the smoke-wreaths that floated slowly upward from his pipe.

But before that time should come there was, he hoped and thought, a long and happy future in store for himself and Edith. As he passed with his candle through the dim picture-gallery on his way to bed, each one of the old portraits seemed to greet him with a grim smile of welcome. With a queer, half-joyous, half-superstitious feeling at his heart, he turned at the gallery door. "Bon soir, messieurs," he said, with a bow to the silent crowd that seemed watching him so intently, "I hope--after a time--to form one of your pleasant society."

Lionel was up betimes next morning, and took a stroll round the house and shrubberies before breakfast. Park Newton dated from the era of William and Mary, and had little to boast of in the way of architectural magnificence. It was built of brick, with a profusion of stone copings, and mullions, and twisted chimneys. But its walls were now gray and venerable with age, powdered with lichens and delicate fairy mosses, and clasped about here and there with clinging tendrils of ivy. Everything about it was old and homelike. It had an air of stately comfort which seemed to carry back the mind instinctively to the days of periwigs and ruffles, of clouded canes and buckled shoes; before we English had become the gadabout race we are now; when a country gentleman's house was his home the year round, and country roads were altogether impassable in bad weather.