'Now, you'll want to know what was in the little green leather
case,' he says at the end. 'And it was this,--a lock of hair and a
wedding ring, and a marriage certificate, and a baptism certificate;
and you, Jasper, are but the son by a second marriage; and Sir
Robert, I congratulate you, for you are come to your own.'
'Do I get nothing, then?' shrieked young Sir Jasper, trembling like
a woman, and with the devil looking out of his eyes.
'Your father intended you to have the entailed estates, right or
wrong; that was his choice. But you chose to know what he wished to
hide from you, and now you know that the entailed estates belong to
your brother.'
'But the personalty?'
'You forget,' said the doctor, rubbing his hands, with a sour smile,
'that your father provided for that in the will to which you so much
objected.'
'Then, curse his memory and curse you,' cried Jasper, and flung out
of the house; nor have I ever seen him again, though he did set
lawyer folk to work in London to drive Sir Robert out of his own
place. But to no purpose.
And Sir Robert, he lives in the old house, and is loved as his
father was before him by all he says a kind word to, and his kind
words are many.
And to me he is all that I used to wish the boy Jasper might be, and
he has a reason for loving me which Jasper never had.
For he said to me when he first spoke to me after his father's
funeral--
'My mother was a farmer's girl,' he said, 'and your father was a
farmer, so I feel we come, as it were, of one blood; and besides
that, I know who my father's friends were. I never forget those
things.'
I still live on as a housekeeper at the Hall. My master left me no
money, but he bade his heir keep me on in my old place. I am glad to
think that he did not choose to leave me money, but instead the
great picture of himself that hung in the Hall. It hangs in my room
now, and looks down on me as I write.
ONE WAY OF LOVE
YOU don't believe in coincidences, which is only another way of
saying that all things work together for good to them that love
God--or them that don't, for that matter, if they are honestly
trying to do what they think right. Now I do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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