The Moonstone - Page 228/404

"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.