“You’ll have to see that will carried out, Thorne. Now I’ll tell you what I have done.”
“You’re not going to tell me how you have disposed of your property?”
“Not exactly; at least not all of it. One hundred thousand I’ve left in legacies, including, you know, what Lady Scatcherd will have.”
“Have you not left the house to Lady Scatcherd?”
“No; what the devil would she do with a house like this? She doesn’t know how to live in it now she has got it. I have provided for her; it matters not how. The house and the estate, and the remainder of my money, I have left to Louis Philippe.”
“What! two hundred thousand pounds?” said the doctor.
“And why shouldn’t I leave two hundred thousand pounds to my son, even to my eldest son if I had more than one? Does not Mr Gresham leave all his property to his heir? Why should not I make an eldest son as well as Lord de Courcy or the Duke of Omnium? I suppose a railway contractor ought not to be allowed an eldest son by Act of Parliament! Won’t my son have a title to keep up? And that’s more than the Greshams have among them.”
The doctor explained away what he said as well as he could. He could not explain that what he had really meant was this, that Sir Roger Scatcherd’s son was not a man fit to be trusted with the entire control of an enormous fortune.
Sir Roger Scatcherd had but one child; that child which had been born in the days of his early troubles, and had been dismissed from his mother’s breast in order that the mother’s milk might nourish the young heir of Greshamsbury. The boy had grown up, but had become strong neither in mind nor body. His father had determined to make a gentleman of him, and had sent to Eton and to Cambridge. But even this receipt, generally as it is recognised, will not make a gentleman. It is hard, indeed, to define what receipt will do so, though people do have in their own minds some certain undefined, but yet tolerably correct ideas on the subject. Be that as it may, two years at Eton, and three terms at Cambridge, did not make a gentleman of Louis Philippe Scatcherd.
Yes; he was christened Louis Philippe, after the King of the French. If one wishes to look out in the world for royal nomenclature, to find children who have been christened after kings and queens, or the uncles and aunts of kings and queens, the search should be made in the families of democrats. None have so servile a deference for the very nail-parings of royalty; none feel so wondering an awe at the exaltation of a crowned head; none are so anxious to secure themselves some shred or fragment that has been consecrated by the royal touch. It is the distance which they feel to exist between themselves and the throne which makes them covet the crumbs of majesty, the odds and ends and chance splinters of royalty.
There was nothing royal about Louis Philippe Scatcherd but his name. He had now come to man’s estate, and his father, finding the Cambridge receipt to be inefficacious, had sent him abroad to travel with a tutor. The doctor had from time to time heard tidings of this youth; he knew that he had already shown symptoms of his father’s vices, but no symptoms of his father’s talents; he knew that he had begun life by being dissipated, without being generous; and that at the age of twenty-one he had already suffered from delirium tremens.
It was on this account that he had expressed disapprobation, rather than surprise, when he heard that his father intended to bequeath the bulk of his large fortune to the uncontrolled will of this unfortunate boy.
“I have toiled for my money hard, and I have a right to do as I like with it. What other satisfaction can it give me?”
The doctor assured him that he did not at all mean to dispute this.
“Louis Philippe will do well enough, you’ll find,” continued the baronet, understanding what was passing within his companion’s breast. “Let a young fellow sow his wild oats while he is young, and he’ll be steady enough when he grows old.”
“But what if he never lives to get through the sowing?” thought the doctor to himself. “What if the wild-oats operation is carried on in so violent a manner as to leave no strength in the soil for the product of a more valuable crop?” It was of no use saying this, however, so he allowed Scatcherd to continue.
“If I’d had a free fling when I was a youngster, I shouldn’t have been so fond of the brandy bottle now. But any way, my son shall be my heir. I’ve had the gumption to make the money, but I haven’t the gumption to spend it. My son, however, shall be able to ruffle it with the best of them. I’ll go bail he shall hold his head higher than ever young Gresham will be able to hold his. They are much of the same age, as well I have cause to remember;—and so has her ladyship there.”
Now the fact was, that Sir Roger Scatcherd felt in his heart no special love for young Gresham; but with her ladyship it might almost be a question whether she did not love the youth whom she had nursed almost as well as that other one who was her own proper offspring.
“And will you not put any check on thoughtless expenditure? If you live ten or twenty years, as we hope you may, it will become unnecessary; but in making a will, a man should always remember he may go off suddenly.”
“Especially if he goes to bed with a brandy bottle under his head; eh, doctor? But, mind, that’s a medical secret, you know; not a word of that out of the bedroom.”
Dr Thorne could but sigh. What could he say on such a subject to such a man as this?
“Yes, I have put a check on his expenditure. I will not let his daily bread depend on any man; I have therefore left him five hundred a year at his own disposal, from the day of my death. Let him make what ducks and drakes of that he can.”
“Five hundred a year certainly is not much,” said the doctor.
“No; nor do I want to keep him to that. Let him have whatever he wants if he sets about spending it properly. But the bulk of the property—this estate of Boxall Hill, and the Greshamsbury mortgage, and those other mortgages—I have tied up in this way: they shall be all his at twenty-five; and up to that age it shall be in your power to give him what he wants. If he shall die without children before he shall be twenty-five years of age, they are all to go to Mary’s eldest child.”
Now Mary was Sir Roger’s sister, the mother, therefore, of Miss Thorne, and, consequently, the wife of the respectable ironmonger who went to America, and the mother of a family there.
“Mary’s eldest child!” said the doctor, feeling that the perspiration had nearly broken out on his forehead, and that he could hardly control his feelings. “Mary’s eldest child! Scatcherd, you should be more particular in your description, or you will leave your best legacy to the lawyers.”
“I don’t know, and never heard the name of one of them.”
“But do you mean a boy or a girl?”
“They may be all girls for what I know, or all boys; besides, I don’t care which it is. A girl would probably do best with it. Only you’d have to see that she married some decent fellow; you’d be her guardian.”
“Pooh, nonsense,” said the doctor. “Louis will be five-and-twenty in a year or two.”
“In about four years.”
“And for all that’s come and gone yet, Scatcherd, you are not going to leave us yourself quite so soon as all that.”
“Not if I can help it, doctor; but that’s as may be.”
“The chances are ten to one that such a clause in your will will never come to bear.”
“Quite so, quite so. If I die, Louis Philippe won’t; but I thought it right to put in something to prevent his squandering it all before he comes to his senses.”
“Oh! quite right, quite right. I think I would have named a later age than twenty-five.”
“So would not I. Louis Philippe will be all right by that time. That’s my lookout. And now,