England -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
"Thank you both. Mr. Bintrey, my instructions for my last will and
testament are short and plain. Perhaps you will now have the goodness to
take them down. I leave the whole of my real and personal estate,
without any exception or reservation whatsoever, to you two, my joint
trustees and executors, in trust to pay over the whole to the true Walter
Wilding, if he shall be found and identified within two years after the
day of my death. Failing that, in trust to you two to pay over the whole
as a benefaction and legacy to the Foundling Hospital."
"Those are all your instructions, are they, Mr. Wilding?" demanded
Bintrey, after a blank silence, during which nobody had looked at
anybody.
"The whole."
"And as to those instructions, you have absolutely made up your mind, Mr.
Wilding?"
"Absolutely, decidedly, finally."
"It only remains," said the lawyer, with one shrug of his shoulders, "to
get them into technical and binding form, and to execute and attest. Now,
does that press? Is there any hurry about it? You are not going to die
yet, sir."
"Mr. Bintrey," answered Wilding, gravely, "when I am going to die is
within other knowledge than yours or mine. I shall be glad to have this
matter off my mind, if you please."
"We are lawyer and client again," rejoined Bintrey, who, for the nonce,
had become almost sympathetic. "If this day week--here, at the same
hour--will suit Mr. Vendale and yourself, I will enter in my Diary that I
attend you accordingly."
The appointment was made, and in due sequence, kept. The will was
formally signed, sealed, delivered, and witnessed, and was carried off by
Mr. Bintrey for safe storage among the papers of his clients, ranged in
their respective iron boxes, with their respective owners' names outside,
on iron tiers in his consulting-room, as if that legal sanctuary were a
condensed Family Vault of Clients.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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