Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  CHAPTER LII.

  ESTATE OF THE LATE J. P. SOLOMONS.

  FOR the next week all Hillborough was agog with the fallen tunnel. So great an event had never yet diversified the history of the parish. The little town woke up and found itself famous. The even tenor of local life was disturbed by a strange incursion of noisy navvies. Central Southerns went down like lead to ninety, as Mr. Solomons had shrewdly anticipated. The manager and the chief engineer of the line paid many visits to the spot to inspect the scene of the averted catastrophe. Hundreds of hands were engaged at once with feverish haste to begin excavations, and to clear the line of the accumulated debris. But six months at least must elapse, so everybody said, before traffic was restored to the status quo, and the Central Southern was once more in working order. A parallel calamity was unknown in the company’s history: it was only by the greatest good luck in the world, the directors remarked ruefully at their next meeting, that they had escaped the onus and odium of what the newspapers called a good first-class murderous selling railway accident.

  On one point, indeed, all the London press was agreed on the Friday morning, that the highest praise was due to the heroic conduct of Mr. Solomons, a Jewish gentleman resident at Hillborough, who was the first to perceive the subsidence of the ground on the Knoll, and who, rightly conjecturing the nature of the disaster, hurried — unhappily, at the cost of his own life — to warn the station-masters at either end of the danger that blocked the way in the buried tunnel. As he reached his goal he breathed his last, pouring forth his message of mercy to the startled engine-driver.

  This beautiful touch, said the leader-writers, with conventional pathos, made a fitting termination to a noble act of self-sacrifice; and the fact that Mr. Solomons had friends in the train — Sir Paul and Lady Gascoyne, who were just returning from their wedding tour on the Continent — rather added to than detracted from the dramatic completeness of this moving dénouement. It was a pleasure to be able to record that the self-sacrificing messenger, before he closed his eyes finally, had grasped the hands of the friend he had rescued in his own dying fingers, and was aware that his devotion had met with its due reward. While actions like these continue to be done in everyday life, the leader-writers felt we need never be afraid that the old English courage and the old English ideal of steadfast duty are beginning to fail us. The painful episode of the Knoll tunnel had at least this consolatory point, that it showed once more to the journalistic intelligence the readiness of Englishmen of all creeds or parties to lay down their lives willingly at the call of a great public emergency.

  So poor Mr. Solomons, thus threnodied by the appointed latter-day bards of his adoptive nation, was buried at Hillborough as the hero of the day, with something approaching public honors. Paul, to be sure, as the nearest friend to the dead, took the place of chief mourner beside the open grave; but the neighboring squires and other great county magnates, who under any other circumstances would have paid little heed to the Jewish money-lender’s funeral, were present in person, or vicariously through their coachmen, to pay due respect to a signal act of civic virtue. Everybody was full of praise for Mr. Solomons’ earnest endeavor to stop the train; and many who had never spoken well of him before, falling in now, after the feeble fashion of our kind and of the domestic sheep, with the current of public opinion, found hitherto undiscovered and unsuspected good qualities in all the old man’s dealings with his fellow-creatures generally.

  The day after the funeral, Paul, as Mr. Solomons’ last bailer, attended duly, as in duty bound, with the will confided to his care in his hand, at the country attorney’s office of Barr & Wilkie’s, close by in High Street.

  Mr. Wilkie received him with unwonted courtesy; but to that, indeed, Paul was now beginning to grow quite accustomed. He found everywhere that Sir Paul Gascoyne made his way in the world in a fashion to which plain Paul had been wholly unused in his earlier larval stages. Still, Mr. Wilkie’s manner was more than deferential, even in these newer days of acknowledged baronetcy. He bowed his fat little neck, and smiled with all his broad and stumpy little face — why are country attorneys invariably fat, broad, and stumpy, I wonder — so that Paul began to speculate with himself what on earth could be the matter with the amiable lawyer. But he began conversation with what seemed to Paul a very irrelevant remark.

  “This smash in the tunnel’ll have depreciated the value of your property somewhat, Sir Paul,” he said, smiling and rubbing his hands, as soon as the first interchange of customary civilities was over. “Central Southern A’s are down at 89-90.”

  Paul stared at him in astonishment.

  “I’m not a holder of stock, Mr. Wilkie,” he answered, after a brief pause of mental wonder.

  The attorney gazed back with a comically puzzled look.

  “But Mr. Solomons was,” he answered. Then after a short pause, “What! you don’t know the contents of our poor friend Solomons’ will, then, don’t you?” he inquired, beaming.

  “Why, that’s just what I’ve come about,” Paul replied, producing it. “A day or two after his nephew Lionel was buried at Lizard Town Mr. Solomons gave me this to take care of, and asked me to see it was duly proved after his death, and so forth. If you look at it, you’ll see he leaves all his property absolutely to the Jewish Board of Guardians in London.”

  Mr. Wilkie took the paper from his hand with an incredulous smile, and glanced over it languidly.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he answered with a benignant nod — the country attorney is always benignant—” but you evidently don’t understand our poor friend’s ways as well as I do. It was a fad of his, to tell you the truth, that he always carried his will about with him, duly signed and attested, in his own breast-pocket, ‘in case of accident,’ as he used to put it.”

  “Oh, yes,” Paul answered, “I know all that. He carried the predecessor of this about in his pocket just so, and he showed it to me in the train when we were going down to Cornwall, and afterward, when poor Lionel was dead, he handed the present will over to me to take particular care of because, he said, he thought he could trust me.”

  “Ah, yes,” the man of law answered dryly, looking up with a sharp smile. “That’s all very well as far as it goes. But, as a matter of habit, I know our friend Solomons would never have dreamed of handing over one will to you till he’d executed another to carry in his own breast-pocket. It would have made him fidgety to miss the accustomed feel of it. He couldn’t have gone about ten minutes in comfort without one. And, indeed, in point of fact, he didn’t. Do you know this paper, Sir Paul?” and the lawyer held up a stained and folded document that had seen much wear.

  “Do you know this paper?”

  “Why, yes,” Paul answered, with a start of recognition. “I’ve seen it before somewhere. Ah, now I remember. It’s the paper Mr. Solomons was clutching in his folded fingers when I saw him last half alive and half dead at Hipsley station.”

  “Quite so,” the lawyer answered. “That’s exactly what it is. You’re perfectly right. The men who brought him back handed it over to me as his legal adviser; and though I didn’t draw it up myself — poor Solomons was always absurdly secretive about these domestic matters, and had them done in town by a strange solicitor — I see it’s in reality his last will and testament.”

  “Later than the one I propound?” Paul inquired, hardly suspecting as yet whither all this tended.

  “Later by two days, sir,” Mr. Wilkie rejoined, beaming. “It’s executed, Sir Paul, on the very same day, I note, as the date you’ve endorsed the will he gave you upon. In point of fact, he must have had this new will drawn up and signed in the morning, and must have deposited the dummy one it superseded with you in the afternoon. Very like his natural secretiveness, that! He wished to conceal from you the nature of his arrangements. For Lionel Solomons’ death seems entirely to have changed his testamentary intentions and to have diverted his estate, both real and personal — well, so to speak, to the next representative.”


  “You don’t mean to say,” Paul cried, astonished, “he’s left it all to Mme. Ceriolo — to Lionel’s widow?”

  The lawyer smiled a sphinx-like enigmatic smile. “No, my dear sir,” he answered in the honeyed voice in which a wise attorney invariably addresses a rich and prospective client. “He revokes all previous wills and codicils whatsoever, and leaves everything he dies possessed of absolutely and without reserve to — his dear friend, Sir Paul Gascoyne, Baronet.”

  “No; you don’t mean that!” Paul cried, taken aback, and clutching at his chair for support, his very first feeling at this sudden access of wealth being one of surprise, delight, and pleasure that Mr. Solomons should have harbored so kindly a thought about him.

  “Yes, he does,” the lawyer answered, warily making the best of his chance in breaking the good tidings. “You can read for yourself if you like, ‘who has been more than a son to me,’ he says, ‘in my forlorn old age, and in consideration of the uniform gentleness, kindness, sense of justice, and forbearance with which he has borne all the fads and fancies of an exacting and often whimsical old money-lender.’”

  The tears rose fast into Paul’s eyes as he read these words. “I’m afraid,” he said, after a pause, with genuine self-reproach, “I’ve sometimes thought too hardly of him, Mr. Wilkie.”

  “Well,” the lawyer answered briskly, “he screwed you down, Sir Paul, there’s no doubt about that — he screwed you down infernally. It was his nature to screw, he couldn’t help it. He had his virtues, good soul, as well as his faults; I freely admit them; but nobody can deny he was an infernally hard hand at a bargain sometimes.”

  “Still, I always thought, in a sneaking sort of way, half unknown to himself, he had my interests truly at heart,” Paul answered penitently.

  “Well, there’s a note inclosed with the will — a private note,” the lawyer went on, producing it. “I haven’t opened it, of course — it’s directed to you; but I daresay it’ll clear up matters on that score somewhat.

  Paul broke the envelope and read to himself in breathless silence:

  “MY dear, dear Boy:

  “When you open this, I shall be dead and gone. I want your kind thoughts. Don’t think too hardly of me. Since Leo died, I’ve thought only of you. You are all I have left on earth to work and toil for. But if I’d told you so openly, and wiped out your arrears, or even seemed to relax my old ways at all about money, you’d have found me out and protested, and refused to be adopted. I didn’t want to spoil your fine sense of independence. To tell you the truth, for my own sake I couldn’t. What’s bred in the bone will out in the blood. While I live, I must grasp at money, not for myself, but for you; it’s become a sort of habit and passion with me. But forgive me for all that. I hope I shall succeed in the end in making you happy. When you come into what I’ve saved, and are a rich man, as you ought to be, and admired and respected and a credit to your country, think kindly sometimes of the poor old man who loved you well and left his all to you. Good-by, my son.

  “Yours ever affectionately,

  “J. P. SOLOMONS.

  “P. S. — If Lady Gascoyne is ever presented at court, I hope she will kindly remember to wear my diamonds.”

  When Paul laid the letter down the tears were dimmer in his eyes than ever.

  “I so often misjudged him,” he said slowly. “I so often misjudged him.”

  “But there’s a codicil to the will, too,” Mr. Wilkie said cheerfully, after a moment’s pause. “I forgot to tell you that. There’s a codicil also. Curiously enough, it’s dated the day after your marriage. He must have gone up to town on purpose to add it.”

  “I remember,” Paul said, “when he left Lanhydran he mentioned he had important business next day in London.”

  “And by it,” the lawyer continued, “he leaves everything, in case of your death before his own, absolutely to Nea, Lady Gascoyne, for her own sole use and benefit.”

  “That was kind,” Paul cried, much touched. “That was really thoughtful of him.”

  “Yes,” the lawyer answered dryly (sentiment was not very much in his way); “and as regards probate, from what I can hear, the value of the estate must be sworn at something between fifty and sixty thousand.”

  When Paul went home and told Nea of this sudden freak of fortune she answered quietly, “I more than half suspected it. You know, dear Paul, he wrote to papa while I was stopping at Sheffield, and urged me most strongly to marry you, saying our future was fully assured; and so he did, too, to Faith and Charlie. But he particularly begged us to say nothing to you about the matter. He thought it would only prevent your marrying.” Then she flung her arms passionately around her husband’s neck. “And now, darling,” she cried, bursting into glad tears, “now that those dreadful claims are settled for ever, and you’re free to do exactly as you like, you can give up that horrid journalism altogether, and devote yourself to the work you’d really like to do — to something worthy of you — to something truly great and noble for humanity!”

  THE END

  The Woman Who Did

  The Woman Who Did (1895) tells the story of a young, self-assured middle-class woman, who defies convention as a matter of principle and is fully prepared to suffer the consequences of her actions. First published in London by John Lane in a series intended to promote the ideal of the “New Woman”, the novel introduces Herminia Barton, a Cambridge-educated daughter of a clergyman.

  Herminia frees herself from her parents’ influence and moves to London, where she decides to live alone. As she is not a woman of independent means, she starts working as a teacher. When she meets and falls in love with Alan Merrick, a lawyer, she suggests they live together without getting married. Reluctantly, he agrees, and the couple move to Italy. There, in Florence, Merrick dies of typhoid before their daughter Dolores is born. Legal technicalities and the fact that the couple were not married prevent Herminia from inheriting Merrick’s money.

  Allen was sympathetic to the feminist cause and saw his novel as a way to promote women’s rights. The Woman Who Did created an immediate popular sensation. Flora Thompson wrote how, in a small town in Hampshire, “copies were bought and handed round until practically everyone of mature age in the village had read and passed judgement on it”. Conservative readers as well as feminists criticised Allen for the heroine he had invented. Victoria Crosse wrote her novel The Woman Who Didn’t (1895) as a response to Allen’s book and Mrs. Lovett Cameron wrote The Man Who Didn’t.

  The first edition’s title page

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  VII.

  VIII.

  IX.

  X.

  XI.

  XII.

  XIII.

  XIV.

  XV.

  XVI.

  XVII.

  XVIII.

  XIX.

  XX.

  XXI.

  XXII.

  XXIII.

  XXIV.

  TO MY DEAR WIFE

  TO WHOM I HAVE DEDICATED MY TWENTY HAPPIEST YEARS

  I DEDICATE ALSO

  THIS BRIEF MEMORIAL OF A LESS FORTUNATE LOVE

  WRITTEN AT PERUGIA

  SPRING 1893

  FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE

  WHOLLY AND SOLELY TO SATISFY

  MY OWN TASTE

  AND MY OWN CONSCIENCE

  PREFACE

  “But surely no woman would ever dare to do so,” said my friend.

  “I knew a woman who did,” said I; “and this is her story.”

  I.

  Mrs. Dewsbury’s lawn was held by those who knew it the loveliest in Surrey. The smooth and springy sward that stretched in front of the house was all composed of a tiny yellow clover. It gave beneath the foot like the pile on velvet. One’s gaze looked forth from it upon the endless middle distances of the oak-clad Weald, with the uncert
ain blue line of the South Downs in the background. Ridge behind ridge, the long, low hills of paludina limestone stood out in successive tiers, each thrown up against its neighbor by the misty haze that broods eternally over the wooded valley; till, roaming across them all, the eye rested at last on the rearing scarp of Chanctonbury Ring, faintly pencilled on the furthest skyline. Shadowy phantoms of dim heights framed the verge to east and west. Alan Merrick drank it in with profound satisfaction. After those sharp and clear-cut Italian outlines, hard as lapis lazuli, the mysterious vagueness, the pregnant suggestiveness, of our English scenery strikes the imagination; and Alan was fresh home from an early summer tour among the Peruginesque solidities of the Umbrian Apennines. “How beautiful it all is, after all,” he said, turning to his entertainer. “In Italy ’tis the background the painter dwells upon; in England, we look rather at the middle distance.”

  Mrs. Dewsbury darted round her the restless eye of a hostess, to see upon whom she could socially bestow him. “Oh, come this way,” she said, sweeping across the lawn towards a girl in a blue dress at the opposite corner. “You must know our new-comer. I want to introduce you to Miss Barton, from Cambridge. She’s SUCH a nice girl too, — the Dean of Dunwich’s daughter.”

  Alan Merrick drew back with a vague gesture of distaste. “Oh, thank you,” he replied; “but, do you know, I don’t think I like deans, Mrs. Dewsbury.” Mrs. Dewsbury’s smile was recondite and diplomatic. “Then you’ll exactly suit one another,” she answered with gay wisdom. “For, to tell you the truth, I don’t think SHE does either.”

  The young man allowed himself to be led with a passive protest in the direction where Mrs. Dewsbury so impulsively hurried him. He heard that cultivated voice murmuring in the usual inaudible tone of introduction, “Miss Barton, Mr. Alan Merrick.” Then he raised his hat. As he did so, he looked down at Herminia Barton’s face with a sudden start of surprise. Why, this was a girl of most unusual beauty!