"But I am the residuary legatee!" said Payson.
"As executor you've got to pay it over in full to yourself as residuary legatee!" repeated Tutt stubbornly, evading the issue.
"Well, where does that leave me?" asked his client.
"It gets you out of your difficulty, doesn't it?" asked Tutt. "Don't borrow trouble! Don't—if you'll pardon my saying so—be an idiot!"
There was silence for several minutes, finally broken by the lawyer who came back again to the charge with renewed vigor.
"Why, this sort of thing comes up all the time. Take this sort of a case, for instance. The law only lets a man will away a certain proportion of his property to charity—says it isn't right for him to do so, if he leaves a family. Now suppose your father had given all his property to charity, would you feel obliged to impoverish yourself for the benefit of a Home for Aged Mariners?"
"Really," replied the bewildered Payson. "I don't know. But anyway I'm satisfied you're quite right and I'm tremendously obliged. However," he added musingly, "I'd rather like to know who this Sadie Burch is!"
"If I were you, young man," advised the lawyer sagely, "I wouldn't try to find out!"
Mr. Payson Clifford left the offices of Tutt & Tutt more recalcitrant against fate and irritated with his family than when he had entered them. He had found himself much less comfortably provided for than he had expected, and the unpleasant impression created by the supposed paternal relatives at his father's funeral had been heightened by the letter regarding Sadie Burch. There was something even more offensively plebeian about them than that of the vulgar Weng. It would have been bad enough to have had to consider the propriety of paying over a large sum to a lady calling herself by an elegant or at least debonair name like Claire Desmond or Lillian Lamar,—but Sadie! And Burch! Ye gods! It was ignoble, sordid. That was a fine discovery to make about one's father!
As he walked slowly up Fifth Avenue to his hotel it must be confessed that his reflections upon that father's memory were far from filial. He told himself that he'd always suspected something furtive about the old man, who must have been under most unusual and extraordinary obligations to a woman to whom he desired his son to turn over twenty-five thousand dollars. It was pretty nearly half of his entire fortune! Would cut down his income from around four thousand to nearly two thousand! The more he pondered upon the matter the more the lawyer's arguments seemed absolutely convincing. Lawyers knew more than other people about such things, anyway. You paid them for their advice, and he would doubtless have to pay Tutt for his upon this very subject, which, somehow, seemed to be rather a good reason for following it. No, he would dismiss Sadie Burch and the letter forever from his mind. Very likely she was dead anyway, whoever she was. Four thousand a year! Not a bad income for a bachelor!
And while our innocent young Launcelot trudging uptown hardened his heart against Sadie Burch, by chance that lady figured in a short but poignant conversation between Mr. Ephraim Tutt and Miss Minerva Wiggin on the threshold of the room from which he had just departed.
Miss Wiggin never trusted anybody but herself to lock up the offices, not even Mr. Tutt, and upon this particular evening she had made this an excuse to linger on after the others had gone home and waylay him. Such encounters were by no means infrequent and usually had a bearing upon the ethical aspect of some proposed course of legal procedure on the part of the firm.
Miss Minerva regarded Samuel Tutt as morally an abandoned and hopeless creature. Mr. Ephraim Tutt she loved with a devotion rare among a sex with whom devotion is happily a common trait, but there was a maternal quality in her affection accounted for by the fact that although Mr. Tutt was, to be sure, an old man in years, he had occasionally an elfin, Puck-like perversity which was singularly boyish, at which times she felt it obligatory for her own self-respect to call him to order. Thus, whenever Tutt seemed to be incubating some evasion of law which seemed more subtly plausible than ordinary she made it a point to call it to Mr. Tutt's attention. Also, whenever, as in the present case, she felt that by following the advice given by the junior member of the firm a client was about to embark upon some dubious enterprise or questionable course of conduct she endeavored to counteract his influence by appealing to the head of the firm.
During the interview between Tutt and Payson Clifford the door had been open and she had heard all of it; moreover, after Payson had gone away Tutt had called her in and gone over the situation with her. And she regarded Tutt's advice to his client,—not the purely legal aspect of it, but the personal and persuasive part of it,—as an interference with that young gentleman's freedom of conscience.
"Dear me!—I didn't know you were still here, Minerva!" exclaimed her employer as she confronted him in the outer office. "Is anything worrying you?"
"Not dangerously!" she replied with a smile. "And perhaps it's none of my business—"
"My business is thy business, my dear!" he answered. "Without you Tutt & Tutt would not be Tutt & Tutt. My junior partner may be the eyes and legs of the firm and I may be some other portion of its anatomy, but you are its heart and its conscience. Out with it! What rascality portends? What bird of evil omen hovers above the offices of Tutt & Tutt? Spare not an old man bowed down with the sorrows of this world! Has my shrewd associate counseled the robbing of a bank or the kidnapping from a widowed mother of her orphaned child?"
"Nothing quite so bad as that!" she retorted. "It's merely that Mr. Samuel Tutt used his influence this afternoon to try to persuade a young man not to carry out his father's wishes—expressed in a legally ineffective way—and I think he succeeded—although I'm not quite sure."
"That must have been Payson Clifford," answered Mr. Tutt. "What were the paternal wishes?"
"Mr. Tutt found a letter with the will in which the father asked the son to give twenty-five thousand dollars to a Miss Sadie Burch."
"Miss Sadie Burch!" repeated Mr. Tutt. "And who is she?"
"Nobody knows," said Miss Wiggin. "But whoever she is, our responsibility stops with advising Mr. Payson Clifford that the letter has no legal effect. Mr. Tutt went further and tried to induce Mr. Clifford not to respect the request contained in it. That, it seems to me, is going too far. Don't you think so?"
"Are you certain you never heard of this Miss Burch?" suddenly asked Mr. Tutt, peering at her sharply from beneath his shaggy eyebrows.
"Never," she replied.
"H'm!" ejaculated Mr. Tutt. "A woman in the case!"
"What sort of a young fellow is this Payson Clifford?" inquired Miss Wiggin after a moment.
"Oh, not so much of a much!" answered Mr. Tutt whimsically.
"And what was the father like?" she continued with a woman's curiosity.
"He wasn't so much of a much, either, evidently," answered Mr. Tutt.
We have previously had occasion to comment upon the fact that no client, male or female, consults a lawyer with regard to what he ought to do. Women, often having decided to do that which they ought not to do, attempt to secure counsel's approval of the contemplated sin; but while a lawyer is sometimes called upon to bolster up a guilty conscience, rarely is he sincerely invited to act as spiritual adviser. Most men being worse than their lawyers, prefer not to have the latter find them out. If they have made up their minds to do a mean thing they do not wish to run the chance of having their lawyer shame them out of it. That is their own business. And it should be! The law presents sufficiently perplexing problems for the lawyer without his seeking trouble in the dubious complexities of his client's morals! Anyhow, that is the regulation way a lawyer looks at it and that is the way to hold one's clients. Do what you are instructed to do—so long as it isn't too raw! Question the propriety of his course and while your client may follow your advice in this single instance he probably will not return again.
The paradoxical aspect of the matter with Mr. Tutt was that while he was known as a criminal lawyer whenever he was asked for advice he concerned himself quite as much with his client's moral as his legal duty. The rather subtle reason for this was probably to be found in the fact that