"They'll take suggestion as a cat laps milk."
--SHAKESPEARE: Tempest.
The triumphant confidence of the Mayor founded on Mr. Featherstone's
insistent demand that Fred and his mother should not leave him, was a
feeble emotion compared with all that was agitating the breasts of the
old man's blood-relations, who naturally manifested more their sense of
the family tie and were more visibly numerous now that he had become
bedridden. Naturally: for when "poor Peter" had occupied his arm-chair
in the wainscoted parlor, no assiduous beetles for whom the cook
prepares boiling water could have been less welcome on a hearth which
they had reasons for preferring, than those persons whose Featherstone
blood was ill-nourished, not from penuriousness on their part, but from
poverty. Brother Solomon and Sister Jane were rich, and the family
candor and total abstinence from false politeness with which they were
always received seemed to them no argument that their brother in the
solemn act of making his will would overlook the superior claims of
wealth. Themselves at least he had never been unnatural enough to
banish from his house, and it seemed hardly eccentric that he should
have kept away Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and the rest, who had no
shadow of such claims. They knew Peter's maxim, that money was a good
egg, and should be laid in a warm nest.
But Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and all the needy exiles, held a
different point of view. Probabilities are as various as the faces to
be seen at will in fretwork or paper-hangings: every form is there,
from Jupiter to Judy, if you only look with creative inclination. To
the poorer and least favored it seemed likely that since Peter had done
nothing for them in his life, he would remember them at the last.
Jonah argued that men liked to make a surprise of their wills, while
Martha said that nobody need be surprised if he left the best part of
his money to those who least expected it. Also it was not to be
thought but that an own brother "lying there" with dropsy in his legs
must come to feel that blood was thicker than water, and if he didn't
alter his will, he might have money by him. At any rate some
blood-relations should be on the premises and on the watch against
those who were hardly relations at all. Such things had been known as
forged wills and disputed wills, which seemed to have the golden-hazy
advantage of somehow enabling non-legatees to live out of them. Again,
those who were no blood-relations might be caught making away with
things--and poor Peter "lying there" helpless! Somebody should be on
the watch. But in this conclusion they were at one with Solomon and
Jane; also, some nephews, nieces, and cousins, arguing with still
greater subtilty as to what might be done by a man able to "will away"
his property and give himself large treats of oddity, felt in a
handsome sort of way that there was a family interest to be attended
to, and thought of Stone Court as a place which it would be nothing but
right for them to visit. Sister Martha, otherwise Mrs. Cranch, living
with some wheeziness in the Chalky Flats, could not undertake the
journey; but her son, as being poor Peter's own nephew, could represent
her advantageously, and watch lest his uncle Jonah should make an
unfair use of the improbable things which seemed likely to happen. In
fact there was a general sense running in the Featherstone blood that
everybody must watch everybody else, and that it would be well for
everybody else to reflect that the Almighty was watching him.