James Hawtry, Junior, sitting beside the heiress, failed to derive much
satisfaction from this clause. If things were being given away, he was
not quite certain as to what "rest and residue" might mean, but if
things of any kind were being doled out he would fain have enjoyed them
with the rest.
Presently the lawyer read the final codicil and gathered his papers
together, then addressed the blank and disappointed assemblage with: "As
you have seen that all the minor bequests are articles of a household
nature--portraits, tableware and the like, 'portable property' as my
immortal colleague, Mr. Wemmick, would have said--I should suggest the
present to be an admirable time for their removal by the fortunate
legatees who may not again be in this neighbourhood. And now I have but
to congratulate the young lady who has succeeded to this property, a
really handsome property I may say, though the amount is not stated nor
even yet fully ascertained. If Miss Cecelia Anne Hawtry is present, I
should like to pay my respects to her and to wish her all happiness in
her new inheritance. I have never had the pleasure of meeting the
principal legatee. May I ask her to come forward and accept my
congratulations."
"Take her, Jimmie," commanded Mr. Hawtry, setting Cecelia down upon her
thin little black legs, while he tried to smooth her into presentable
shape in anticipation of the anxious cross-examination he was sure to
undergo when he returned with the children to his New York home and wife.
"She looked as fit as paint," he afterward assured that anxious
questioner. "I stood the bow out on her hair and pushed her dress down
just as I've seen you do hundreds of times. Jimmie helped, too, and I
declare to you, you'd have been as proud of those two kids as I was when
that boy led his little sister through the hostile camp. Funny, he felt
the hostility instantly, though of course, he didn't understand it. But
she--well, you know what a confiding little thing she is, and having
been asleep made her eyes look even more babyish than they always
do--walked beside him, smiling her soft little smile and looking about
three inches high in her little black dress."
"If I had been there," interrupted Mrs. Hawtry warmly, "I should have
murdered your sister Elizabeth before I allowed her to put that baby
into mourning. The black bow I packed for her hair would have been quite
enough."
"Well, she had it on. I saw it bobbing up the room while tenth and
fifteenth cousins seven or eight times removed, stared at it and at her.
But the person most surprised was old Debrett when Jimmie introduced them."
"'This is her,' remarked your son with more truth than polish, and I'm,
well, antecedently condemned, if that dry-as-dust old lawyer didn't
stoop and kiss her as he wished her joy."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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