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Page 57
"My boy," he said, "why do you say that some one has deceived
you?"
"Because, sir," replied the lad, "my father was to leave me
twenty thousand dollars. That was his plan. Thirty thousand
dollars should be set aside for Mr. Gosford, and the remainder
turned over to me."
"That would be thirty thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, instead of
fifty," said my father.
"Yes, sir," replied the boy; "that is the way my father said he
would write his will. But it was not written that way. It is
fifty thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, and the remainder to me.
If it were thirty thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, as my father,
said his will would be, that would have left me twenty thousand
dollars from the estate; but giving Mr. Gosford fifty thousand
dollars leaves me nothing."
"And so you adventured on a little larceny," sneered the
Englishman.
The boy stood very straight and white.
"I do not understand this thing," he said, "but I do not believe
that my father would deceive me. He never did deceive me in his
life. I may have been a disappointment to him, but my father
was a gentle man." His voice went up strong and clear. "And I
refuse to believe that he would tell me one thing and do
another!"
One could not fail to be impressed, or to believe that the boy
spoke the truth.
"We are sorry," said Lewis, "but the will is valid and we cannot
go behind it."
My father walked about the room, his face in reflection. Gosford
sat at his ease, transcribing a note on his portfolio. Old Gaeki
had gone back to his chair and to his little case of bottles; he
got them up on his knees, as though he would be diverted by
fingering the tools of his profession. Lewis was in plain
distress, for he held the law and its disposition to be
inviolable; the boy stood with a find defiance, ennobled by the
trust in his father's honor. One could not take his stratagem
for a criminal act; he was only a child, for all his twenty years
of life. And yet Lewis saw the elements of crime, and he knew
that Gosford was writing down the evidence.
It was my father who broke the silence.
"Gosford," he said, "what scheme were you and Marshall about?"
"You may wonder, sir," replied the Englishman, continuing to
write at his notes; "I shall not tell you."
"But I will tell you," said the boy. "My father thought that the
states in this republic could not hold together very much longer.
He believed that the country would divide, and the South set up a
separate government. He hoped this might come about without a
war. He was in horror of a war. He had traveled; he had seen
nations and read their history, and he knew what civil wars were.
I have heard him say that men did not realize what they were
talking when they urged war."
He paused and looked at Gosford.
"My father was convinced that the South would finally set up an
independent government, but he hoped a war might not follow. He
believed that if this new government were immediately recognized
by Great Britain, the North would accept the inevitable and there
would be no bloodshed. My father went to England with this
scheme. He met Mr. Gosford somewhere - on the ship, I think.
And Mr. Gosford succeeded in convincing my father that if he had
a sum of money he could win over certain powerful persons in the
English Government, and so pave the way to an immediate
recognition of the Southern Republic by Great Britain. He
followed my father home and hung about him, and so finally got
his will. My father was careful; he wrote nothing; Mr. Gosford
wrote nothing; there is no evidence of this plan; but my father
told me, and it is true."
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