"I leave everything to my wife," said Sir John. "That's all." He turned
round on his pillow, and composed himself to sleep again.
I was obliged to disturb him.
"Am I to understand," I asked, "that you leave the whole of the
property, of every sort and description, of which you die possessed,
absolutely to Lady Verinder?"
"Yes," said Sir John. "Only, I put it shorter. Why can't you put it
shorter, and let me go to sleep again? Everything to my wife. That's my
Will."
His property was entirely at his own disposal, and was of two kinds.
Property in land (I purposely abstain from using technical language),
and property in money. In the majority of cases, I am afraid I should
have felt it my duty to my client to ask him to reconsider his Will. In
the case of Sir John, I knew Lady Verinder to be, not only worthy of the
unreserved trust which her husband had placed in her (all good wives
are worthy of that)--but to be also capable of properly administering a
trust (which, in my experience of the fair sex, not one in a thousand of
them is competent to do). In ten minutes, Sir John's Will was drawn, and
executed, and Sir John himself, good man, was finishing his interrupted
nap.
Lady Verinder amply justified the confidence which her husband had
placed in her. In the first days of her widowhood, she sent for me, and
made her Will. The view she took of her position was so thoroughly sound
and sensible, that I was relieved of all necessity for advising her. My
responsibility began and ended with shaping her instructions into the
proper legal form. Before Sir John had been a fortnight in his grave,
the future of his daughter had been most wisely and most affectionately
provided for.
The Will remained in its fireproof box at my office, through more years
than I Like to reckon up. It was not till the summer of eighteen hundred
and forty-eight that I found occasion to look at it again under very
melancholy circumstances.
At the date I have mentioned, the doctors pronounced the sentence on
poor Lady Verinder, which was literally a sentence of death. I was the
first person whom she informed of her situation; and I found her anxious
to go over her Will again with me.
It was impossible to improve the provisions relating to her daughter.
But, in the lapse of time, her wishes in regard to certain minor
legacies, left to different relatives, had undergone some modification;
and it became necessary to add three or four Codicils to the original
document. Having done this at once, for fear of accident, I obtained
her ladyship's permission to embody her recent instructions in a
second Will. My object was to avoid certain inevitable confusions and
repetitions which now disfigured the original document, and which, to
own the truth, grated sadly on my professional sense of the fitness of
things.