The Duke of Ottershaw knelt on the flags of a service passage with his father's will in his two hands, and when he spoke it was very quiet, and it was the voice of the fighting man arriving two years late and entire. "Fetch my mother."
Mr. Sansom, attorney of the county town, came out the next morning, a compact iron-haired Welshman with quick dark-blue eyes, and was closeted an hour with the recovered sheets and the docketed wrapper, his own office draft open beside them. He came out of that hour looking ten years older. The draft matched. Every clause. He had drawn this will himself in October 1816, at the old Duke's own instruction; he and his two clerks had watched the old man sign it and had signed their own names beneath his, three witnesses to it and not one of the three a beneficiary. In February a civil letter over Mr. Cyril Farrant's signature had told him the Duke had thought better of it and destroyed the instrument.
"I had only a draft, your Grace, and a draft gives an attorney small standing. I let a civil letter spare me the trouble of doubting it. Fifty years your family has trusted mine, and I let it lie. I am ashamed, madam."
"You were lied to by a man who lies well," said Griselda. "I was not, and had only my certainty, so we are neither of us to boast. Sit down, Mr. Sansom, and take some tea."
It was her drawing room, her tea table, and her tea, and her son saw to it that the shape held: family and household only, and the law kept to one quiet man with a tea-cup.
Mr. Cyril Farrant was summoned to his aunt's tea like a nephew, and arrived like one, into a room where the recovered sheets lay flat on the tea table, weighted down against the draught by a cracked blue-rimmed saucer. He understood at the door. Jacintha, watching from behind the Dowager's chair, saw the understanding arrive: the flick of his eyes across the torn edge, the saucer, the faces. He had been too fastidious to stand over a grate and burn a dead man's hand, and too certain that a box of waste paper would go unexamined. He had looked into the still-room box once in the spring, found it low, and gone away satisfied that the grates had taken what he put there. It had not once occurred to him to ask what else in that house carried paper away.
"Cyril," said the Dowager. "Sit down. Mr. Sansom is going to read something aloud, and then we shall all have tea."
Sansom read the will of the tenth of October, 1816, plainly, without ornament. Title and entailed land as before, by patent and settlement. Everything else to my son Clifford, Duke of Ottershaw, whom I appoint executor of this my will together with my attorney, Mr. Sansom. To my beloved wife, over and above her settled jointure, the dower house for her life, the furniture and plate in it, and four hundred pounds by the year. Legacies to the servants by name — Gathercole's forty years priced in plain figures that made the old man's voice unusable for the rest of the day; Mrs. Kedge; the cook; the pensioners restored. And to my nephew, Cyril Farrant, one hundred pounds, and my hope that he will find honest employment for his gifts.
Into the silence, Farrant said, "A curious paper to find intact. I understood it had been destroyed."
"That is the only point of law we shall want this afternoon," said Sansom, "and it is short. A will is not revoked because another man tears it after the testator is dead. It may be revoked only by the testator himself, or by another in his presence and at his direction. These pages were torn afterwards, and your own hand says so." He turned the creased wrapper round so that the docket faced its writer. "Papers removed from His late Grace's desk, February 1817. This will was never lawfully revoked. It stands, sir. My draft, my own name at the foot of it, and my two living clerks will prove it wherever proof is called for."
"The rest is short too," Sansom said. "I shall prove this will, the grant under the will of 1809 is called in, and Mr. Farrant accounts to the estate for every pound and acre he has dealt with since January. There is a renunciation drawn, sir, and you will sign it before you leave the room. What else might be asked of you is not business for a drawing room, and need not be asked at all."
The tea went cold and every voice stayed level. Farrant looked once more round the table — at his cousin, who looked back and held his peace and had ceased hoarding it; at the saucer doing duty as a paperweight; at his aunt.
"You will want to be in Bath by quarter-day, Cyril," said Griselda. "The lodgings are already taken in your name, I believe."
He signed the renunciation where Sansom's finger rested, neatly, as he did everything. It was mercy with a straight back, and he took it: he rose, bowed to the correct depth, and paused at the door.
"You have all been," he said pleasantly, "so very much luckier than you deserve," and was gone.
The county went without the particulars; the family declined to supply them. That evening the Duke of Ottershaw walked out of the garden door with a cracked blue-rimmed saucer carried before him in both hands, past Mrs. Kedge — who held the door, correct to the last, and permitted herself one dry sentence: "I shall strike the standing rule out of the book tonight, your Grace, and gladly" — and down the kitchen-garden to the broad flagstone, where he set the saucer down in full view of every window on that side, and clicked it once against the stone. Gooseberry was in no hurry. She came out of the lavender in her own time, ate crouched, ignored him utterly, and left with her tail up.
"The arrears, I think," said the Dowager from the path, dry as sand, "are settled."
He came to the garden at six the next morning, when the sun was full on the flags and Gooseberry sat on the warm stone attending to her white bib. Jacintha knelt by the cold-frames. He stopped on the path, took his hat in both hands, and she stood up, because she could hear a man's whole courage gathering from three feet away.
"I had this arranged," he said. "It began with the estate — the fortune restored, the settlement, what I can now put in your name. I shall not say it, because you would tell me, gently, that it was fighting nothing. So you shall have the other speech instead. Two years ago I watched a woman feed what nobody wanted, at an hour when nobody watched. She did it out of her own supper, in the rain, and asked no leave, and told no one, and I thought: there is the only person in this house who is rich. I was the other unwanted creature at Ottershaw, Miss Pinnock. Fed by servants, seen at windows, belonging nowhere. You kept watch over one of us and never knew you kept watch over both." He stopped there a moment, and made himself go on. "I have watched two years, and I am done watching. Will you marry me?"
"Yes," said Jacintha, and got it out first and alone, so that everything after it could only be decoration. Then her heart caught up with her mouth, and she added: "Yes — although your Grace should know the estate speech might have answered too, and been shorter."