Grandfather Smallweed was a thin, toothless, wheezy, green-eyed old
miser, who was so nearly dead from age and asthma that he had to be
wheeled about by his granddaughter Judy.
He had a wife who was out of her mind. Everything said in her hearing
she connected with the idea of money. If one said, for example, "It's
twenty minutes past noon," Mrs. Smallweed would at once begin to gabble:
"Twenty pence! Twenty pounds! Twenty thousand millions of bank-notes
locked up in a black box!" and she would not stop till her husband threw
a cushion at her (which he kept beside him for that very purpose) and
knocked her mouth shut.
Grandfather Smallweed soon discovered the bundle of letters hidden back
of the shelf where Lady Jane, Krook's big cat, slept.
The name they bore, "Captain Hawdon," was familiar enough to the
money-lender. Long ago, when Hawdon was living a dissipated life in
London, he had borrowed money from Grandfather Smallweed, and this money
was still unpaid when he had disappeared. It was said that he had fallen
overboard from a vessel and had been drowned.
To think now that the captain had been living as a copyist all these
years in London, free from arrest for the debt, filled the wizened soul
of the old man with rage. He was ready enough to talk when Mr.
Tulkinghorn questioned him, and finally sold him the bundle of letters.
The lawyer saw that they were in Lady Dedlock's penmanship; it remained
to prove that the dead Nemo had really been Captain Hawdon.
Mr. Tulkinghorn, of course, had many specimens of the copyist's hand,
and after much search he found a man who had once been a fellow soldier
of the captain's. He was called "Mr. George," and kept a
shooting-gallery. Mr. George had among his papers a letter once written
him by Captain Hawdon, and not knowing the purpose for which it was to
be used, loaned it to the lawyer. The handwriting was the same! And thus
Mr. Tulkinghorn knew that the copyist had really been Captain Hawdon and
that the letters in the bundle had once been written to him by the woman
who was now the haughty Lady Dedlock.
It was a strange, sad story that the letters disclosed, as Mr.
Tulkinghorn, gloating over his success, read them, line by line. The man
who had fallen so low as to drag out a wretched existence by copying law
papers--whom, until she saw the handwriting in the lawyer's hands, she
had believed to be dead--was a man Lady Dedlock had once loved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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