‘Your position, sir, must be as plain by this time to you as it is to me,’ said Mrs Lecount. ‘There is only one obstacle now left, between this woman and the attainment of her end. That obstacle is your life. After the discovery we have made upstairs, I leave you to consider for yourself what your life is worth.’
At those terrible words, the ebbing resolution in him ran out to the last drop. ‘Don’t frighten me!’ he pleaded; ‘I have been frightened enough already.’ He rose, and dragged his chair after him round the table to Mrs Lecount’s side. He sat down and caressingly kissed her hand. ‘You good creature!’ he said, in a sinking voice. ‘You excellent Lecount! Tell me what to do. I’m full of resolution – I’ll do anything to save my life!’
‘Have you got writing materials in the room, sir?’ asked Mrs Lecount. ‘Will you put them on the table, if you please?’
While the writing materials were in process of collection, Mrs Lecount made a new demand on the resources of her travelling-bag. She took two papers from it, each endorsed in the same neat commercial handwriting. One was described as ‘Draft for proposed Will’; and the other, as ‘Draft for proposed Letter’. When she placed them before her on the table, her hand shook a little; and she applied the smelling-salts, which she had brought with her in Noel Vanstone’s interests, to her own nostrils.
‘I had hoped, when I came here, Mr Noel,’ she proceeded, ‘to have given you more time for consideration, than it seems safe to give you now. When you first told me of your wife’s absence in London, I thought it probable that the object of her journey was to see her sister and Miss Garth. Since the horrible discovery we have made upstairs, I am inclined to alter that opinion. Your wife’s determination not to tell you who the friends are whom she has gone to see, fills me with alarm. She may have accomplices in London – accomplices, for anything we know to the contrary, in this house. All three of your servants, sir, have taken the opportunity in turn of coming into the room, and looking at me. I don’t like their looks! Neither you nor I know what may happen from day to day – or even from hour to hour. If you take my advice, you will get the start at once of all possible accidents; and when the carriage comes back, you will leave this house with me!’
‘Yes, yes!’ he said eagerly; ‘I’ll leave the house with you. I wouldn’t stop here by myself for any sum of money that could be offered me. What do we want the pen and ink for? Are you to write, or am I?’
‘You are to write, sir,’ said Mrs Lecount. ‘The means taken for promoting your own safety are to be means set in motion, from beginning to end, by yourself. I suggest, Mr Noel – and you decide. Recognize your own position, sir. What is your first and foremost necessity? It is plainly this. You must destroy your wife’s interest in your death, by making another will.’
He vehemently nodded his approval; his colour rose and his blinking eyes brightened in malicious triumph. ‘She sha’n’t have a farthing,’ he said to himself, in a whisper – ‘she sha’n’t have a farthing!’
‘When your will is made, sir,’ proceeded Mrs Lecount, ‘you must place it in the hands of a trustworthy person – not my hands, Mr Noel; I am only your servant! Then, when the will is safe, and when you are safe, write to your wife at this house. Tell her, her infamous imposture is discovered – tell her you have made a new will, which leaves her penniless at your death – tell her, in your righteous indignation, that she enters your doors no more. Place yourself in that strong position, and it is no longer you who are at your wife’s mercy, but your wife who is at yours. Assert your own power, sir, with the law to help you – and crush this woman into submission to any terms for the future that you please to impose.’
He eagerly took up the pen. ‘Yes,’ he said, with a vindictive self-importance, ‘any terms I please to impose.’ He suddenly checked himself, and his face became dejected and perplexed. ‘How can I do it now?’ he asked, throwing down the pen as quickly as he had taken it up.
‘Do what, sir?’ inquired Mrs Lecount.
‘How can I make my will, with Mr Loscombe away in London, and no lawyer here to help me?’
Mrs Lecount gently tapped the papers before her on the table with her forefinger.
‘All the help you need, sir, is waiting for you here,’ she said. ‘I considered this matter carefully, before I came to you; and I provided myself with the confidential assistance of a friend, to guide me through those difficulties which I could not penetrate for myself. The friend to whom I refer, is a gentleman of Swiss extraction, but born and bred in England. He is not a lawyer by profession – but he has had his own sufficient experience of the law, nevertheless; and he has supplied me, not only with a model by which you may make your will, but with the written sketch of a letter which it is as important for us to have, as the model of the will itself. There is another necessity waiting for you, Mr Noel, which I have not mentioned yet – but which is no less urgent in its way, than the necessity of the will.’
‘What is it?’ he asked, with roused curiosity.
‘We will take it in its turn, sir,’ answered Mrs Lecount. ‘Its turn has not come yet. The will, if you please, first. I will dictate from the model in my possession – and you will write.’
Noel Vanstone looked at the draft for the will and the draft for the letter, with suspicious curiosity.
‘I think I ought to see the papers myself, before you dictate,’ he said. ‘It would be more satisfactory to my own mind, Lecount.’
‘By all means, sir,’ rejoined Mrs Lecount, handing him the papers immediately.
He read the draft for the will first, pausing and knitting his brows distrustfully, wherever he found blank spaces left in the manuscript, to be filled in with the names of persons, and the enumeration of sums bequeathed to them. Two or three minutes of reading brought him to the end of the paper. He gave it back to Mrs Lecount without making any objection to it.
The draft for the letter was a much longer document. He obstinately read it through to the end, with an expression of perplexity and discontent which showed that it was utterly unintelligible to him. ‘I must have this explained,’ he said, with a touch of his old self-importance, ‘before I take any steps in the matter.’
‘It shall be explained, sir, as we go on,’ said Mrs Lecount.
‘Every word of it?’
‘Every word of it, Mr Noel, when its turn comes. You have no objection to the will? To the will, then, as I said before, let us devote ourselves first. You have seen for yourself that it is short enough and simple enough for a child to understand it. But if any doubts remain on your mind, by all means compose those doubts by showing your will to a lawyer by profession. In the mean time, let me not be considered intrusive, if I remind you that we are all mortal, and that the lost opportunity can never be recalled. While your time is your own, sir, and while your enemies are unsuspicious of you, make your will!’
She opened a sheet of note-paper, and smoothed it out before him; she dipped the pen in ink, and placed it in his hands. He took it from her without speaking – he was, to all appearance, suffering under some temporary uneasiness of mind. But the main point was gained. There he sat, with the paper before him, and the pen in his hand; ready at last, in right earnest, to make his will.
‘The first question for you to decide, sir,’ said Mrs Lecount, after a preliminary glance at her draft, ‘is your choice of an executor. I have no desire to influence your decision; but I may, without impropriety, remind you that a wise choice means, in other words, the choice of an old and tried friend whom you know that you can trust.’
‘It means the admiral, I suppose?’ said Noel Vanstone.
Mrs Lecount bowed.
‘Very well,’ he continued. ‘The admiral let it be.’
There was plainly some oppression still weighing on his mind. Even under the trying circumstances in which he was placed, it was not in his nature to take Mrs Lecount’s perfectly sensible and disinterested advice without a word of cavil, as he had taken it now.
‘Are you ready, sir?’
‘Yes.’
Mrs Lecount dictated the first paragraph, from the draft, as follows:
‘This is the last Will and Testament of me, Noel Vanstone, now living at Baliol Cottage, near Dumfries. I revoke, absolutely and in every particular, my former will executed on the thirtieth of September, eighteen hundred and forty-seven; and I hereby appoint Rear-Admiral Arthur Everard Bartram, of St Grux-in-the-Marsh, Essex, sole executor of this my will.’
‘Have you written those words, sir?’
‘Yes.’
Mrs Lecount laid down the draft; Noel Vanstone laid down the pen. They neither of them looked at each other. There was a long silence.
‘I am waiting, Mr Noel,’ said Mrs Lecount, at last, ‘to hear what your wishes are, in respect to the disposal of your fortune. Your large fortune,’ she added, with merciless emphasis.
He took up the pen again, and began picking the feathers from the quill in dead silence.
‘Perhaps, your existing will may help you to instruct me, sir,’ pursued Mrs Lecount. ‘May I inquire to whom you left all your surplus money, after leaving the eighty thousand pounds to your wife?’
If he had answered that question plainly, he must have said, ‘I have left the whole surplus to my cousin, George Bartram’ – and the implied acknowledgement that Mrs Lecount’s name was not mentioned in the will, must then have followed in Mrs Lecount’s presence. A much bolder man, in his situation, might have felt the same oppression and the same embarrassment which he was feeling now. He picked the last morsel of feather from the quill; and, desperately leaping the pitfall under his feet, advanced to meet Mrs Lecount’s claims on him of his own accord.
‘I would rather not talk of any will, but the will I am making now,’ he said uneasily. ‘The first thing, Lecount –’ He hesitated – put the bare end of the quill into his mouth – gnawed at it thoughtfully – and said no more.
‘Yes, sir?’ persisted Mrs Lecount.
‘The first thing is –’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘The first thing is, to – to make some provision for You?’
He spoke the last words in a tone of plaintive interrogation – as if all hope of being met by a magnanimous refusal had not deserted him, even yet. Mrs Lecount enlightened his mind on this point, without a moment’s loss of time.
‘Thank you, Mr Noel,’ she said, with the tone and manner of a woman who was not acknowledging a favour, but receiving a right.
He took another bite at the quill. The perspiration began to appear on his face.
‘The difficulty is,’ he remarked, ‘to say how much.’
‘Your lamented father, sir,’ rejoined Mrs Lecount, ‘met that difficulty (if you remember) at the time of his last illness?’
‘I don’t remember,’ said Noel Vanstone, doggedly.
‘You were on one side of his bed, sir; and I was on the other. We were vainly trying to persuade him to make his will. After telling us he would wait, and make his will when he was well again – he looked round at me, and said some kind and feeling words which my memory will treasure to my dying day. Have you forgotten those words, Mr Noel?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Noel, without hesitation.
‘In my present situation, sir,’ retorted Mrs Lecount, ‘delicacy forbids me to improve your memory.’
She looked at her watch, and relapsed into silence. He clenched his hands, and writhed from side to side of his chair, in an agony of indecision. Mrs Lecount passively refused to take the slightest notice of him.
‘What should you say –?’ he began, and suddenly stopped again.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘What should you say to – a thousand pounds?’
Mrs Lecount rose from her chair, and looked him full in the face, with the majestic indignation of an outraged woman.
‘After the service I have rendered you to-day, Mr Noel,’ she said, ‘I have at least earned a claim on your respect – if I have earned nothing more. I wish you good morning.’
‘Two thousand!’ cried Noel Vanstone, with the courage of despair.
Mrs Lecount folded up her papers, and hung her travelling-bag over her arm in contemptuous silence.
‘Three thousand!’
Mrs Lecount moved with impenetrable dignity from the table to the door.
‘Four thousand!’
Mrs Lecount gathered her shawl round her with a shudder, and opened the door.
‘Five thousand!’
He clasped his hands, and wrung them at her in a frenzy of rage and suspense. ‘Five thousand,’ was the death-cry of his pecuniary suicide.
Mrs Lecount softly shut the door again, and came back a step.
‘Free of legacy duty, sir?’ she inquired.
‘No!’
Mrs Lecount turned on her heel, and opened the door again.
‘Yes!’
Mrs Lecount came back, and resumed her place at the table, as if nothing had happened.
‘Five thousand pounds, free of legacy duty, was the sum, sir, which your father’s grateful regard promised me in his will,’ she said, quietly. ‘If you choose to exert your memory, as you have not chosen to exert it yet, your memory will tell you that I speak the truth. I accept your filial performance of your father’s promise, Mr Noel – and there I stop. I scorn to take a mean advantage of my position towards you; I scorn to grasp anything from your fears. You are protected by my respect for myself, and for the Illustrious Name I bear. You are welcome to all that I have done, and to all that I have suffered in your service. The widow of Professor Lecompte, sir, takes what is justly hers – and takes no more!’
As she spoke those words, the traces of sickness seemed, for the moment, to disappear from her face; her eyes shone with a steady inner light; all the woman warmed and brightened in the radiance of her own triumph – the triumph, trebly won, of carrying her point, of vindicating her integrity, and of matching Magdalen’s incorruptible self-denial on Magdalen’s own ground.
‘When you are yourself again, sir, we will proceed. Let us wait a little first.’
She gave him time to compose himself; and then, after first looking at her draft, dictated the second paragraph of the will, in these terms:
‘I give and bequeath to Madame Virginie Lecompte (widow of Professor Lecompte, late of Zurich) the sum of Five Thousand Pounds, free of Legacy Duty. And, in making this bequest, I wish to place it on record that I am not only expressing my own sense of Madame Lecompte’s attachment and fidelity in the capacity of my housekeeper, but that I also believe myself to be executing the intentions of my deceased father, who, but for the circumstance of his dying intestate, would have left Madame Lecompte, in his will, the same token of grateful regard for her services, which I now leave her in mine.’
‘Have you written the last words, sir?’
‘Yes.’
Mrs Lecount leaned across the table, and offered Noel Vanstone her hand.
‘Thank you, Mr Noel,’ she said. ‘The five thousand pounds is the acknowledgement on your father’s side of what I have done for him. The words in the will are the acknowledgement on yours.’
A faint smile flickered over his face for the first time. It comforted him, on reflection, to think that matters might have been worse. There was balm for his wounded spirit, in paying the debt of gratitude by a sentence not negotiable at his banker’s. Whatever his father might have done – he had got Lecount a bargain, after all!
‘A little more writing, sir,’ resumed Mrs Lecount, ‘and your painful, but necessary, duty will be performed. The trifling matter of my legacy being settled, we may come to the important question that is left. The future direction of a large fortune is now waiting your word of command. To whom is it to go?’
He began to writhe again in his chair. Even under the all-powerful fascination of his wife, the parting with his money on paper had not been accomplished without a pang. He had endured the pang; he had resigned himself to the sacrifice. And now, here was the
dreaded ordeal again, awaiting him mercilessly for the second time!
‘Perhaps it may assist your decision, sir, if I repeat a question which I have put to you already,’ observed Mrs Lecount. ‘In the will that you made under your wife’s influence, to whom did you leave the surplus money which remained at your own disposal?’
There was no harm in answering the question, now. He acknowledged that he had left the money to his cousin George.
‘You could have done nothing better, Mr Noel – and you can do nothing better now,’ said Mrs Lecount. ‘Mr George and his two sisters are your only relations left. One of those sisters is an incurable invalid, with more than money enough already for all the wants which her affliction allows her to feel. The other is the wife of a man, even richer than yourself. To leave the money to these sisters is to waste it. To leave the money to their brother George, is to give your cousin exactly the assistance which he will want, when he one day inherits his uncle’s dilapidated house, and his uncle’s impoverished estate. A will which names the admiral your executor, and Mr George your heir, is the right will for you to make. It does honour to the claims of friendship, and it does justice to the claims of blood.’
She spoke warmly – for she spoke with a grateful remembrance of all that she herself owed to the hospitality of St Crux. Noel Vanstone took up another pen, and began to strip the second quill of its feathers as he had stripped the first.
‘Yes,’ he said, reluctantly; ‘I suppose George must have it – I suppose George has the principal claim on me.’ He hesitated: he looked at the door, he looked at the window, as if he longed to make his escape by one way or the other. ‘Oh, Lecount,’ he cried, pitebusly, ‘it’s such a large fortune! Let me wait a little, before I leave it to anybody.’
To his surprise, Mrs Lecount at once complied with this characteristic request.
‘I wish you to wait, sir,’ she replied. ‘I have something important to say, before you add another line to your will. A little while since, I told you there was a second necessity connected with your present situation, which had not been provided for yet – but which must be provided for, when the time came. The time has come now. You have a serious difficulty to meet and conquer, before you can leave your fortune to your cousin George.’