The Country Gentleman Read Free Page A

the windows to receive such paltry and fetid ventilation as was to be had from the alley, each settled to her chosen task. Anne obliged herself to read again a particularly dense passage in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , which she was determined to understand if it killed her, while Maria profited by the morning light to work a bit of specially fine filagree. And so, in a silence broke by nothing louder than the turning of a page, they sat together some half hour.
    Into this quiet intruded first the knock, then the venerable head, of Dolphim, Miss Guilfoyle’s butler. He bowed, then presented to his mistress a letter only justarrived—a letter of business, she saw as she took it, from her solicitor, Mr. Nicodemus Dent. Guiltily relieved by the distraction, she closed a silver marker into her Kant and opened the letter at once.
    Maria, who had looked up, seen Dolphim, seen the letter, and looked down at her filagree again, was startled a minute later to hear, “Good heavens!” and again, “Gracious God!” burst from her friend. She dropped her work to her lap and regarded Anne in some alarm; but as the exclamations were immediately followed by a rich peal of laughter, her emotion changed to mere curiosity. She observed Anne turn the paper over, read farther, then heard her laugh again. She was just on the point of demanding to know what was in it when, looking up and waving the paper about in amused delight, Anne addressed her: “My dear Maria, imagine it! I am the beneficiary of a will.”
    Mrs. Insel obligingly responded to this news with eager applications of “Whose?” and “What?”
    Anne settled the page in her lap again and, referring to it now and then, informed her, “My great uncle Herbert Guilfoyle. Do you recall, we saw the notice of his death not long ago?”
    “Of Cheshire, was not he?”
    “The very same.”
    “But you said you remembered meeting him only once, in childhood—”
    “I was twelve. My father had just begun to ail, and his uncle came to see him. What a queer man he was! The veriest eccentric. He refused to speak to me till I had read Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Fancy saying so to a girl of twelve!”
    “Fancy!” Then, as Anne seemed to have fallen into a reverie of sorts, Mrs. Insel hinted, “It is difficult toimagine what he may have left you. Not a copy of La Nouvelle Heloïse , perchance?”
    “Not at all. Or rather, perhaps he has, for he’s left me his entire estate.”
    “But my dear,” Maria said, wondering in this case at her friend’s light tone (for she could not help thinking it would be no small thing to her to be left a home of her own), “that is very fine indeed! How peculiar, yes; but also, how fortunate, how kind.”
    Anne laughed again. “You have not heard all, my love; I told you he was eccentric. My great uncle leaves me—” She scanned the page, frowning lightly, for some particular word. “Here it is. ‘Linfield, at Faulding Chase in Cheshire, its house, its land, and its income’— providing I reside there ten months a year! Having—let me see, where is it? Oh yes, here: ‘Having a horror most particular and principled of a landlord who knows not the condition and character of his tenants, his lands, his etc. etc…’ Hm; Oh yes, here we are again. ‘Having such a particular horror, the estate is left to his only surviving relation of whom he at least knows no certain evil—’” Anne paused to smile at the thought of Frederick hearing that. “‘The estate is left to his great niece Anne Guilfoyle on condition she reside there—’ Well, what I told you. ‘In the event the above-named Miss Guilfoyle prove whether unwilling or unable to conform to this provision, either now or at any future time, the estate and all its’ so on and so forth ‘to pass irreversibly to—’” Anne ran a finger along the lines, searching again. “Ah, to ‘Mr. Henry Highet, Gentleman, Fevermere, Faulding Chase, Cheshire—’” She folded the letter and