 | CHAPTER XXIV.
HESTER AND THE WILL. Millbank, or, Roger Irving's ward |  |
24. CHAPTER XXIV.
HESTER AND THE WILL.
HESTER was sitting by her fire knitting a sock for
Roger, and Aleck was with her, smoking his pipe in the
corner, and occasionally opening his small, sleepy eyes
to look at his better half when she addressed some remark to
him. They were a very quiet, comfortable, easy-looking couple
as they sat there together in the pleasant room which had been
theirs for more than forty years, and their thoughts were as far
as possible from the storm-cloud bursting over their heads, and
of which Frank was the harbinger.
“Mrs. Floyd, Mr. Irving would like to see you in the
library,” Frank said a little stiffly, and in his manner there was
a tinge of importance and self-assurance unusual to him when
addressing the head of Millbank, Mrs. Hester Floyd.
Hester did not detect this manner, but she saw that he was
agitated and nervous, and she dropped a stitch in her knitting
as she looked at him and said, “Roger wants me in the
library? What for? Has anything happened that you look
white as a rag?”
Frank was twenty-seven years old, but there was still enough
of the child about him to make him like to be first to communicate
news whether good or bad, and to Hester's question he
replied, “Yes. The missing will is found.”
Hester dropped a whole needle full of stitches, and she was
whiter now than Frank as she sprang to Aleck's side and shook
him so vigorously that the pipe fell from his mouth, and the
stolid, stupid look left his face for once as she said: “Do you
hear, Aleck, the will is found! The will that turns Roger
out-doors.”
Aleck did not seem so much agitated as his wife, and after
gazing blankly at her for a moment, he slowly picked up his
and see to't. You don't want me along.”
She did not want him; that is, she did not need him; and
with a gesture of contempt she turned from him to Frank, and
said, “I am ready. Come.”
There was nothing of the deference due to the heir of Millbank
in her tone and manner. Frank would never receive
that from her, and she flounced out into the hall, and kept a
step or two in advance of the young man, to whom she said,
“Who is with Roger? Anybody?”
As she came nearer to the library she began to have a little
dread of what she might encounter, and visions of lawyers and
constables, armed and equipped to arrest her bodily, flitted uneasily
before her mind; but when Frank replied, “There is no
one there but mother,” her fear vanished, and was succeeded
by a most violent fit of anger at the luckless Mrs. Walter
Scott.
“The jade!” she said. “I always mistrusted how her
snoopin' around would end. If I'd had my way, she should
never have put foot inside this house, the trollop.”
“Mrs. Floyd, you are speaking of my mother. You must
stop. I cannot allow it.”
It was the master of Millbank who spoke, and Hester turned
upon him fiercely.
“For the Lord's sake, how long since you took such airs?
I shall speak of that woman how and where I choose, and you
can't help yourself.”
By this it will be seen that Hester was not in the softest of
moods as she made her way to the library, but her feelings
changed the moment she stood in the room where Roger was.
She had expected to find him hot, excited, defiant, and ready,
like herself, to battle with those who would take his birthright
from him. She was not prepared for the crushed, white-faced
man who looked up at her so helplessly as she came in, and
tried to force a smile as he pointed to a chair at his side, and
said, —
“Sit here by me, Hester. It is you and I now. You and
I alone.”
His chin quivered a little as he held the chair for her to sit
down, and then kept his hand on her shoulder as if he felt better,
stronger so. He knew he had her sympathy, that every pulsation
of her heart beat for him, that she would cling to him
through weal and woe, and he felt a kind of security in having
her there beside him. Hester saw the yellow, soiled paper
spread out before him, and recognized it at a glance. Then
she looked across the table toward the proud woman who sat
toying with her rings, and exulting at the downfall of poor
Roger. At her Hester glowered savagely, and was met by a
derisive smile, which told how utterly indifferent the lady was to
her and her opinion. Then Hester's glance came back, and
rested pityingly on her boy, whose finger now was on the will,
and who said to her, —
“Hester, there was another will, as Helen thought. It is
here before me. It was found under the garret floor. Do you
know who put it there?”
He was very calm, as if asking an ordinary question, and
his manner went far toward reassuring Hester, who, by this
time, had made up her mind to tell the truth, and brave the
consequences.
“Yes,” she replied. “I put it there myself, the day your
father died.”
“I told you so,” dropped from Mrs. Walter Scott's lips; but
Hester paid no heed to her.
She was looking at Roger, fascinated by the expression of his
eyes and face as he went on to question her.
“Why did you hide it, and where did you find it?”
“It was lying on the table, where Aleck found him dead,
spread out before him, as if he had been reading it over, as I
know he had, and he meant to change it, too, for he'd asked
young Schofield to come that night and fix it. Don't you remember
Schofield said so?”
Roger nodded, and she continued:
“And I know by another way that he meant to change it.
'Twas so writ in his letter to you.”
“His letter to me, Hester? There was nothing like that
in the letter,” Roger exclaimed; and Hester continued:
“Not in the one I gave to you, I know. That he must
have begun first, and quit, because he blotched it, or something.
Any ways, there was another one finished for you, and
in it he said he was goin' to fix the will, add a cod-cil or something,
because he said it was unjust.”
“Why did you withhold that letter from me, Hester, and
where is it now?”
Roger spoke a little sternly, and glad of an excuse to turn
his attention from herself to some one else, Hester replied,—
“It was in the same box with t'other paper, and I s'pose
she's got it who snooped till she found the will.”
She glanced meaningly at Mrs. Walter Scott, who deigned
her no reply, but who began to feel uneasy with regard to the
letter of which she had not before heard, and whose contents
she did not know.
Neither Roger nor Frank wished to mix Magdalen up with
the matter, if possible to avoid it, and no mention was made of
her then, and Hester was suffered to believe it was Mrs. Walter
Scott who had found the will.
“You read the letter, Hester. Tell me what was in it,”
Roger said.
And then Hester's face flushed, and her eyes flashed fire, as
she replied, —
“There was in it that which had never or' to be writ. He giv
the reason why he made this will. He was driv to it by somebody
who pisoned his mind with the biggest, most impossible
slander agin the sweetest, innocentest woman that ever drawed
the breath.”
Roger was listening eagerly now, with a fiery gleam in his
blue eyes, and his nostrils quivering with indignation.
Mrs. Walter Scott was listening, too, her face very pale,
her lips slightly apart, showing her white teeth.
Frank was listening also, and gradually coming to an understanding
of what had been so mysterious before.
Neither of the three thought of interrupting Hester, who had
the field to herself, and who, now that she was fairly launched,
went on rapidly:
“I'll make a clean breast of it, bein' the will is found, which
I never meant it should be, and then them as is mistress here
now can take me to jail as soon as they likes. It don't matter,
the few days I've got left to live. I signed that fust Will, me
and Aleck, twenty odd year ago, and more, and I knew pretty
well what was in it, and that it was right, and gin the property
to the proper person; and then I thought no more about it till
a few months before he died, when Aleck and me was called in
agin to witness another will, here in this room, standin' about
as I set now, with the old gentleman where that woman is,
Aleck where you be, and Lawyer Schofield where Mr. Franklin
stands. I thought it was a queer thing, and mistrusted somethin'
wrong, particularly as I remembered a conversation I
overheard a week or so before about you, Roger, and your
mother, compared to who, that other woman ain't fit to live in
the same place; and she won't neither, she'll find, when we all
get our dues.”
Both Roger and Frank knew she referred to Mrs. Walter
Scott, who, if angry glances could have annihilated her, would
have done so. But Hester was not afraid of her, and went on,
not very connectedly, but still intelligibly, to those who were
listening so intently:
“She pisoned his mind with snaky, insinuatin' lies, which she
didn't exactly speak out, as I heard, but hinted at, and made me
so mad that I wanted to throttle her then, and I wish I had
bust into the room and told her it was all a lie, as I could prove
and swear to; for, from the day Jessie Morton married Squire
Irving until the summer she went to Saratoga, when you,
Roger, was quite a little shaver, she never laid eyes on that
others, for I've inquired; and if the scamp was here, he'd tell
you so, which I wish he was, and if I knew where to find him,
I'd go on my hands and knees to get his word, too, that what
this good-for-nothing snake in the grass told was a lie!”
Human nature could endure no more, and Mrs. Walter Scott
sprang to her feet, and turning to her son, asked, —
“If he, a man, would sit quietly, and hear his mother so
abused?”
“You have a right to stop her,” she said, as she saw Frank
hesitate. “A right to turn her out of the house.”
“I'd like to see him do it,” Hester rejoined, her old face
aglow with passion and fierce anger.
“Hush, Hester, hush,” Roger said, in his quiet, gentle way;
“and you, Helen, sit down and listen. If I can bear this, you
certainly can.”
The perspiration was rolling from his face in great drops a
second time, and something like a groan broke from his lips as
he covered his eyes with his hands and said, “My mother, oh,
my mother, that I should hear her so maligned.”
“She wan't maligned,” Hester exclaimed, misinterpreting the
meaning of the word. “It was a lie, the whole on't. She
never left this house except for church or parties, and only
three of them, one to Miss Johnson's, one to Squire Schofield's,
and one to Mrs. Lennox's, and a few calls, from the time she
came here till after you was born; I know, I was here, I was
your nurse, I waited on her, and loved her like my own from the
moment she cried so on my neck and said she didn't want to
come here. She was too young to come as his wife. She was
nothin' but a child, and when she couldn't stan' the racket any
longer she run away.”
Roger was shaking now as with an ague fit. Here was something
which Hester could not deny. Jessie had run away and
left him, her baby boy. There was no getting smoothly over
that, and he shivered with pain as the old woman went on:
“I don't pretend to excuse her, though there's a good deal
who see her as I did that last night at home would know.”
“Hester,” Roger said, and his voice was full of anguish,
“why must you tell all this. It surely has nothing to do with
the matter under consideration, and I would rather be spared,
if possible, or at least hear it alone.”
“I must tell it,” Hester rejoined, “to show you why I hid
the will, and why he made it, and how big a lie that woman
told him.”
There was the most intense scorn in her voice every time
she said “that woman,” and Mrs. Walter Scott winced under
it, but had no redress then; her time for that would be by and
by, she reflected, and assuming a haughty indifference she was
far from feeling she kept still while Hester went on:
“The night she went away she undressed her baby herself;
she wouldn't let me touch him, and all the time she did it she
was whispering, and cooing, and crying-like over him, and she
kissed his face and arms, and even his little feet, and said once
aloud so I in the next room heard her, `My poor darling, my
pet, my precious one, will you ever hate your mother?”'
“Hester, I cannot hear another word of that. Don't you
see you are killing me?” Roger said, and this time the tears
streamed in torrents down his face, and his voice was choked
with sobs.
Hester heeded him now, and there were tears on her wrinkled
face as she laid her hand pityingly on his golden brown
hair and said, “Poor boy, I won't harrer you any more. I'll
stick to the pint, which is that your mother, after you was
asleep, and just afore I left her for the night, came up to me in
her pretty coaxin' way, and told me what a comfort I was to
her, and said if anything ever was to happen that Roger should
have no mother, she would trust me to care for him before all
the world, and she made me promise that if anything should happen,
I would never desert Roger, but love him as if he was my
own, and consider his interest before that of any one else. I
want you to mind them words, `consider his interest before
promised to do it. I swore I would do it, and I've kep' my
word. Next morning she was gone, and in a week or so was
drownded dead off Cape Hattrass, where I hope I'll never go,
for there's allus a hurricane there when there ain't a breath
no whereas else. I sot them words down. I've read 'em every
Sunday since as regular as my Bible, and that fetches me to
the mornin' the Squire was found dead.
“That woman had been here a few months before, workin'
on his pride and pisenen' his mind, till he was drove out of his
head, and you not here, either, to prove it was a lie by your
face, which, savin' the eyes and hair, is every inch an Irving.
He acted crazy-like, and mad them days, as Aleck and me
noticed, and he made another will, after that woman was gone
to Boston, and a spell after she went home for good. Aleck
went up in the mornin' to make a fire here in this very room,
and, sittin' in his chair, he found the Squire stark dead, and
cold and stiff, and he come for me who was the only other body
up as good luck would have it, and I not more'n half dressed.
There was the will, lyin' open on the table, as if he had been
readin' it, and I read it, and Aleck, too; 'twas this same will,
and my blood biled like a caldron kittle, and Aleck fairly
swore, and we said, what does it mean? There was a letter
on the table, too, a finished letter for Roger, and I read it, and
found the reason there. The Squire's conscience had been a
smitin' him ever since he did the rascally thing, and at last he'd
made up his mind to add a cod-cill, and he seemed to have a
kind of forerunner that he should never see Roger agin, and so
he tried to explain the bedivelment and smooth it over and all
that, and signed himself, `Your affectionate father.”'
“Did he, Hester? Did he own me at last?” Roger's voice
rang through the room like a bell, its joyful tones thrilling even
Mrs. Walter Scott, who was growing greatly interested in Hester's
narrative, while Frank stood perfectly spellbound, as if
fearful of losing a word of the strange story.
“Yes, I'm pretty sure he did,” Hester said, in reply to
mother, and he would leave her letter with his, for you, in case
he never see you, and I gin you your mother's, but kept his,
because that would have told you about the will, which I
meant to hide. We both thought on't to once, Aleck and me,
but I spoke first, bein' a woman, and mentioned the promise to
consider Roger's interest before any body's else, and Jessie
seemed to be there with us, and haunted me, with the great
blue eyes of her, till I made up my mind, and took the pesky
thing and the letter, and put 'em away safe up in the garret
under the floor, where I'd had a piece sawed out a spell before,
so as to put pisen under there for the rats. Then I moved an
old settee over the place, and chairs and things, so that it would
look as if nobody had been there for ages. He must have begun
another letter first and blotched it, for the sheet lay there,
and I took it as a special Providence and kept it for Roger, as
his father's last words to him. I knew t'other will was not destroyed,
for I'd seen it not long before, and I found it in his
writing desk, sealed up like a drum, and left it there, and then
she came with her lofty airs, and queened it over us, as if she
thought she was lord of all; but her feathers drooped a bit
when the will was read, and she thought the old Harry was
in it, and hinted, and snooped, and rummaged the very first
night, for I found her there, with her night gownd on, and more
than forty papers stickin' in her hair, though why she thought
'twas there, is more than I know; but she's hunted the garret
ever since by turns, and I moved it twice, and then carried it
back, and once she set Magdalen at it, she or he, it's little matter
which.”
Magdalen was a sore point with Roger, and he shuddered,
when her name was mentioned, and thought of the letter, and
wondered if she had it, and would ever bring it to him.
“I was easy enough when that woman wasn't here,” Hester
continued, “and I did think for a spell she'd met with a
change, she was so soft and so velvety and so nice, that butter
couldn't melt in her mouth if it should try. Maybe she's forgot
branch; they allus was a peekin', rummagin' set, and her uncle
peeked into a money drawer once. She comes honestly by her
snoopin' that found the will.”
Mrs. Walter Scott had borne a great deal of abuse from
Hester, and borne it quietly after her appeal to Frank, but now
she could keep still no longer, and she half rose from her chair,
and exclaimed:
“Silence, old woman, or I will have you put out of the house,
and I hold Frank less than a man if he will hear me so abused.
I never found the will. It was Magdalen Lennox who found
it, just where you told her it was when you were crazy.”
“Magdalen found it, and brought it to you instead of burnin'
it up!” old Hester exclaimed, raising her hands in astonishment,
and feeling her blood grow hot against the poor girl. “Magdalen
found it, after all he has done for her! She's a viper
then; and my curse be —”
She did not finish the sentence, for both Roger and Frank
laid a hand upon her mouth, and stopped the harsh words she
would have spoken.
“You don't know the circumstances. You shall not speak
so of Magdalen,” Roger said, while Frank, glad of a chance to
prove that he was a man even if he had allowed his mother to
be abused, said sternly: “Mrs. Floyd, I have stood quietly by
and heard my mother insulted, but when you attack Magdalen
I can keep still no longer. She must not be slandered in my
presence. I hope she will be my wife.”
Hester gave a violent start, and a sudden gleam of intelligence
came into her eyes, as she replied, “Oh, I see now. She
wasn't content to have you alone, and I don't blame her for
that. It would be a sickening pill to swaller, you and that
woman too but she must take advantage of my crazy talk, and
find the will which makes her lover a nabob. That's what I
call gratitude to me and Roger, for all we've done for her.
Much good may her money and lover do her!”
Thus speaking, Hester rose from her chair and went toward
what, as the shadow of a thought, he had tried so hard to fight
down.
“I'm done now,” she said. “I've told all I know about the
will. I hid it, Aleck and me, and I ain't sorry neither, and I'm
ready to go to jail any minit the new lords see fit to send me.”
She started for the door, but came back again to Roger, and,
laying her hand on his hair, said soothingly, and in a very different
tone from the one she had assumed when addressing
Frank or his mother: “Don't take it so hard, my boy. We'll
git along somehow. I ain't so very old. There's a good deal
of vim in me yet, and me and Aleck will work like dogs for
you. We'll sell the tavern stand, and you shall have the hull it
fetches. Your father give us the money to buy it, you know.”
Roger could not fail to be touched by this generous unselfishness,
and he grasped the hard-wrinkled hand, and tried to
smile, as he said: “Thank you, Hester, I knew you would not
desert me; but I shall not need your little fortune. I can
work for us all.”
It was growing dark by this time, and the bell had thrice sent
forth its summons to dinner. As Roger finished speaking, it
rang again, and, glad of an excuse to get away, old Hester said,
“What do they mean by keepin' that bell a dingin' when they
might know we'd something on hand of more account than
victuals and drink. I'll go and see to't myself.”
She hurried out into the hall, and Frank shut the door after
her, and then came back to the table, and began to urge upon
Roger the acceptance of a portion, at least, of the immense
fortune, which a few hours before he had believed to be all his
own. But Roger stopped him short.
“Don't, Frank,” he said. “I know you mean it now, and,
perhaps, would mean it always, but so long as that clause stands
against me, I can take nothing from the Irvings.”
He pointed to the words “the boy known as Roger Lennox
Irving,” and Frank rejoined, “It was a cruel thing for him to
do.”
“Yes; but a far wickeder, crueller thing, to poison his mind
with slanders, until he did it,” Roger replied, as he turned to
his sister, and said, “Helen, I hold you guilty of my ruin, if
what Hester has told us be true; but I shall not reproach
you; I will let your own conscience do that.”
Mrs. Irving tried to say that Hester had spoken falsely, that
she had never worked upon the weak old man's jealousy of his
young wife; but she could not quite utter so glaring a false-hood,
knowing or believing, as she did, that Magdalen had the
letter, which might refute her lie. So she assumed an air of
lofty dignity, and answered back that it was unnecessary to
continue the conversation, which had been far more personal
than the questoins involved required, — neither was it needful
to prolong the interview. The matter of the will was now between
him and Frank, and, with his permission, she would
withdraw. Roger simply inclined his head, to indicate his
willingness for her to leave, and, with a haughty bow, she swept
from the room, signalling to Frank to follow. But Frank did
not heed her. He tarried for a few moments, standing close to
Roger, and mechanically toying with the pens and pencils upon
the table. He did not feel at all comfortable, nor like a man
who had suddenly become possessed of hundreds of thousands.
He felt rather like a thief, or, at best, an usurper of another's
rights, and would have been glad at that moment had the will
been lying in its box under the floor, where it had lain so many
years. Roger was the first to speak.
“Go, Frank,” he said; “leave me alone for to-night. It is
better so. I know what you want to say, but it can do no
good. Things are as they are, and we cannot change them.
I do not blame you. Don't think I do. I always liked you,
Frank, always, since we were boys together, and I like you still;
but leave me now. I cannot bear any more.”
Roger's voice trembled, and Frank could see through the fast
gathering darkness how white his face was and how he wiped
the sweat-drops from his forehead and lips, and wringing his
hand nervously, he, too, went away, and Roger was alone.
| CHAPTER XXIV.
HESTER AND THE WILL. Millbank, or, Roger Irving's ward | |