could be kinder or more satisfactory than the first part of Ada's letter; but when she came to write about her mamma, her pen evidently went slower, and her words were cautiously chosen. Mamma, she said, was very sorry indeed to hear of the will being missing, and indeed was made quite ill by the news. She begged her to say how much she condoled with me upon it, and what a dreadful affair it was. "In short," Ada finally scribbled, evidently puzzled how to put it—"in short, you know exactly what mamma would say under the circumstances."
Ada and I continued to correspond regularly, and I kept her posted up in the proceedings of our plot to discover the chamber. In answer to the joyous letter I wrote to Ada after Christmas—saying that we had discovered one of the secret openings which opened the door, and had now every hope of finding the other—Lady Desborough herself wrote, for the first time since the will had been lost. She said how glad she was that, after all, it seemed by what Ada said, we were likely to find the missing will, and regain our fortunes. She stated that she had always expressed herself as certain that the infamous conspiracy against us would be defeated, and she wound up by saying that she sincerely trusted that the document would be discovered before long, both for my sake and Percy's, who, she believed, would sail for India in the following autumn.
As I read this letter, it appeared to me that the pith of the whole contents was contained in that last line. To me it said as plainly as if she had so written it—"He goes to India in the autumn, but, of course, unless you find the will before that, he will have to go without you." I was neither hurt nor surprised at this. I knew Lady Desborough well enough to be perfectly assured that with her consent I should never marry Percy unless I regained the lost fortune.
Percy's letters to me were always alike; he told me that he did not care whether I had the fortune or not. That for my own sake he should of course have preferred that I should have had money, in order that in our Indian home we might be surrounded by more comforts and luxuries, but that for no other reason did he in the least care. That, of course, his pay as a cornet was next to nothing, but he expected that before many months he should get a step. He calculated that his lieutenant's pay in India, with the staff appointment—which he made sure, from his proficiency in the native languages, he should speedily obtain—together with the £300 a year his mother allowed him, would enable us to live in tolerable comfort.
He spoke always of the £300 a year as if it were a certainty, but I was sure that in case of his marrying me his mother would at once stop it.
Lady Desborough, although she lived in so fashionable a style, was by no means a very rich woman. Her income, with the trifling exception of her pension as a General's widow, was derived entirely from property she possessed previous to her marriage, and which had been settled upon her at that time. Of this she had the entire income during her lifetime, and could leave it as she chose between her children.
Percy's letters to me were very loving and tender, and he was never tired of drawing happy pictures of our future. My answers to him, since the loss of the will, were not less loving, perhaps, than before; but they were far less confident and hopeful, and I could not trust myself to speak much of a future which I so feared in my heart could never come for me.
Altogether, I was very nervous and anxious all this time, and I looked forward to Sarah's communications with feverish eagerness. I felt that to me far more depended on the discovery of this will than the mere matter of money. It was not the question of wealth or the reverse, it was—a life of happiness with Percy, or one of solitary unhappiness. Had it not been for the search Sarah was making, which kept hope alive, I should have felt it even more than I did. But when the secret spring was found, I did begin to think that all would come right again.
On New Year's Day we had a great surprise—a letter came to papa from Miss Harmer; a messenger brought it, and it was sent in just as we had finished dinner. Papa opened it, glanced it through, and gave a long whistle of astonishment. "The man who brought this is not waiting, I suppose?" he asked the servant.
"No, sir, he said that he was told there was no answer."
"You can clear away the dinner things at once, and put the dessert on."
We were all quiet while this was being done, wondering what it could be about—and papa was evidently waiting only till the servant left the room to read the letter to us. When she had finished, and had gone out, without any preface he opened the letter and read it aloud:—
"Dear Dr. Ashleigh,
"The will of our late brother Herbert not having been found, and it therefore being now extremely improbable that it ever will be so, my sister and myself have naturally, as his only relatives, come into possession of his property. At our death that property will go, as originally intended by our elder brothers, to the destination from which it was only diverted by one of those extraordinary combinations of events by which Providence sometimes upsets our best-laid plans. My brother Herbert had, however, some property of his own, which he acquired in India, in addition to that which he inherited from his brothers. The amount of this property was, our man of business informs us, about £30,000. This sum we propose to devote to carrying out a portion of his expressed wishes. We are willing therefore to pay over at once the sum of £10,000 to each of your children—on the one condition that not one single penny shall they ever directly or indirectly bestow to or for the benefit of the person formerly known as Sophy Needham, and now as Sophy Gregory, she having by her conduct caused our brother's death. And that they all bind themselves to this condition under an oath solemnly taken on the Bible, and under penalty of forfeiture of the amount should this condition not be strictly observed.
"Awaiting your reply,
"&c., &c.,
"Cecilia and Angela Harmer."
What an astonishment that was to us, and in what silent amazement we looked at each other when papa had finished reading the letter.
No one spoke for some time.
At last papa said, "This is a very serious question, my dears; and the offer ought to be thoroughly discussed before being either accepted or refused. £10,000 each is a handsome provision for you. It will start Harry in a good business, and it will enable you girls to marry well and yet to feel that you bring your share to the expenses of the household." And here papa glanced at me, and I saw at once that although he had never spoken to me on the subject, he had yet thought a good deal about my engagement with Percy. He then went on: "All this is the bright side of the picture—now for the reverse;—you are unquestionably entitled to a much larger amount, and those who make this offer are the very people who are keeping you out of it. Then, too, the condition about Sophy is most repugnant; as you would naturally have wished in the event of your accepting this sum, to make her at any rate an equal participator in it with each of yourselves. The matter is one which must be thought over very seriously, and no conclusion should be hastily arrived at. Talk it over quietly together: it is a question on which I would rather give no opinion whatever, but leave you to decide it entirely by yourselves."
"There is one thing, papa, you have not mentioned," Polly said, "and that is, that if we take this money we must give up all search for the will; we cannot accept the Misses Harmer's money, and then get their servants to work against them."
"Certainly, my dear; that must of course be quite understood. If you accept this money, you must give up all further search for the will, and dismiss all idea of ever hearing of it again. There, don't say any more about it now. Let us have a glass of wine and some nuts, and after that I shall go into my study, and you can talk it over among yourselves."
When papa left us, we drew round the fire, and Harry said the first thing to be done was to smoke the calumet of council; accordingly in a minute or two he was puffing clouds of smoke from an immense meerschaum, of which he was very proud.
