Lady Eleanor E-Book

Robert Barr

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

„Lady Eleanor: Lawbreaker” is a love story pure and simple from a British-Canadian short story writer and novelist Robert Barr, born at Glasgow, Scotland but emigrated with his parents to Upper Canada at age four and was educated in Toronto at Toronto Normal School. Here, the heiress conceals the will so that her cousin, the disinherited son of the house, may come to his own. His first thought is to sell the estate to set Richard Sheridan the dramatist up in management. The will is discovered and the young man retires madly in love. The heiress going to Sheridan’s to pay over a sum promised by her cousin is discovered by him and there is a jealous outburst followed by a happy ending.

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER I

Although it was considerably after ten o’clock in the forenoon, dingy stiff curtains still shut out the daylight from the office of Sharp & Clipper, solicitors, of Lincoln’s Inn. At best it was a darkish room, with massive, somber furnishing, but its present gloom in no way affected the spirits of the two persons conversing therein. Humble Sycamore, though seated at his desk, was paying scant attention to clerkly duties. Leaning forward, and occasionally emphasizing the point of his remarks with a quill pen, he was giving a vivid and animated account of his previous evening’s visit to the playhouse, which, in those days of 1776, was an adventure of magnitude. Trisket, the page boy, listened spellbound, as one who hears of brilliant and intrepid exploration in an unknown country.

“And did un fight, Mr. Sycamore?” he prompted, breathlessly, as the clerk paused, to give better effect to a telling point.

“Fight? Nay, that he didn’t, for a more arrant knave ne’er stood in honest shoe leather. But ’twas a sight to see him shaking with cowardice the while he blustered–his wig awry, and a great pistol in either hand. ‘Bob Acres’ they called him, and, faith! he was an ‘acher’ to me in honest truth, for I nigh cracked my sides with laughter at him. If you have ne’er seen a play, Trisket–”

“Nay, sir, I never have.”

“Then save your ha’pence and see that one to begin on. ’Tis called ‘The Rivals,’ and well ’tis named, for it can rival aught I’ve ever seen; though I’m told it was a failure when they tried it first, last year. ‘The Rivals’ is the name: Dick Sheridan wrote it.”

“‘Dick’ Sheridan! ‘Dick’! You know him, then?” questioned Trisket, in awe-struck tones.

“Not I, forsooth,” disclaimed Sycamore, disdainfully. “But one calls these player fellows ‘Dick’ or ‘Ben’ or ‘Davy,’ as ‘twere any other vagabond one spoke of. Know him, indeed! I ne’er heard of the knave until last night, and would not have heard of him even then but that I went to Covent Garden to bear a message to the new Lord Brandon, and found his lordship hobnobbing with the rogue as though it were an equal he clinked glasses with. ’Twas ‘Dick’ here, and ‘dear Dick’ there, and ‘bonny Dick’ between the whiles, till one’s gorge rose at the very sound of it. And all the time the fellow standing there, tricked out in silk and velvet, as though ‘t were any gentleman, and as familiar with his lordship as if the old Lord Brandon were not ten feet underground, and the new one were still the playgoing vagabond he had been when his father was alive.

“‘I’ll make your fortune, Dick,’ quoth he, laying his arm across the fellow’s shoulders, I’ll give your name to all the corners of the earth, and we’ll out-Garrick Garrick in his own field.’

“And then, ignoring me, they fell to talking of some ‘School for Scandal’ that the fellow had in mind–as though a school for that were needed, and it were a goodly thing to build! And if it were, should not players be the last to sanction it? Should not–”

The rising excitement in Sycamore’s tones was abruptly hushed. Outside, a voice uttered a curt command.

“Yes, yes; that will do. Come for me at dusk.”

“The master!” cried Trisket softly, springing up from his stool and carrying it with him to the window recess, where he placed it. Hastily he drew back the curtains, exposing a view of old Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the passing figures of two servants bearing Mr. Sharp’s empty sedan chair.

Sycamore jumped from his desk, and, bustling about, made a great show of getting the place in order, at the same time berating the boy as though he were solely to blame for the office not being open.

“Sluggard and idler!” he was declaiming loudly, as Humphrey Sharp entered, slowly removing his gloves. “Nigh to eleven, and not a curtain drawn yet! A lazy, idle, dawdling sloth! And with such a gentle, kindly master! You’ll end in the workhouse, ingrate!”

“Sycamore!”

The master’s tone was keen, and betrayed annoyance. His clerk turned in seeming amazement.

“Eh? Mr. Sharp! Oh, sir, is it you?”

“Aye. You are late this morning, Sycamore,” said Mr. Sharp, coldly. “It has gone eleven, and the curtains but this moment drawn. Boy!”

Meekly Trisket came forward to receive the lawyer’s hat, gloves, and gold-knobbed cane. Having hung up the hat, and placed near it the other articles, he vanished discreetly to the small outer room.

“It was Trisket’s fault, sir,” protested Humble Sycamore. “I bade him be here early, as the errand you sent me on last night would keep me up late, and prevent early rising. But the untrustworthy ingrate must needs go to the playhouse, and oversleep himself this morning. You must have heard me scolding him when you entered. A graceless, idle, playgoing imp! I found him sleeping when I came.”

“Better have slept for weeks than enter a playhouse once,” said Mr. Sharp somewhat wearily. “Heaven knows we’ve had enough and to spare of player-folk on our minds of late, Sycamore.”

“Aye, enough and to spare, sir, as you say.”

The lawyer went to his desk and, seating himself before it, began methodically to arrange the accumulation of papers thereon. Presently he glanced across at Sycamore.

“You carried my two messages yesterday?” he asked. “The one to the Lady Eleanor Beaumont, the other to–” he hesitated, sighing a little, “to the new Lord Brandon?”

“I did, sir.”

“And both will be here this morning?”

“Both, sir. Lady Eleanor bade me say she’d come as near eleven as possible. She longs to see this fortunate cousin, on whom she has not set eyes since she was a child.”

“Fortunate? Yes, he is fortunate. It is not given every man to win disinheritance as he won it, to flout a good and godly father by associating with vile player-folk, and then, after adding to his disgrace by becoming one of them–painting his face, and strutting in tinsled finery for pay–to come into his own at last. Sycamore, I am sure the late Lord Brandon never destroyed that will. He was at such pains to have me draw it up for him, and to make it clear that not one guinea of his money, not one foot of his land, should go to this dissipated mummer who had defied and disgraced him. All was for his sister’s child, the Lady Eleanor Beaumont, and, in his wrath, he made me draw a will that left no weak spot for his son to break. He never forgave that son, never looked on him, nor allowed his name to be mentioned, to the hour of his death. Why, then, should he have destroyed that will–if he did destroy it?”

“Lady Eleanor thinks that he must have done so, sir.”

“Lady Eleanor! Yes, but–Ah, well! Get me the Brandon deed-box. In this defective world, Sycamore, there would be nothing astonishing in the disappearance of that will were it not that it left everything, without reserve, to Lady Eleanor Beaumont herself. A girl of her high ideals and pride of race, a girl who has often declared herself an usurper, and called it ‘cruel her cousin might not have his own’–”

Humble Sycamore paused in amazement on the steps he had mounted to secure the box bearing the white-lettered name “Brandon,” and looked round at his employer.

“My faith! You cannot think that she–La, sir, no woman in her senses would plan to rob herself of two hundred thousand pounds. It’s not in nature, sir.”

“Considering the woman,” said Mr. Sharp, thoughtfully, “it’s not out of it, I’ll be sworn.” He was silent long enough to open the deed-box Sycamore had placed before him, and to withdraw from it several bundles of documents and one loose parchment, then he continued: “The will was made and witnessed in my presence at Brandon Hall. With my own eyes I saw Lord Brandon place it in his cabinet, and Lady Eleanor saw it, too. I have here,” he picked up the sheet of parchment, “the first rough draft of the instrument as dictated by my lord himself, and practically unchanged in the legal document. Only three persons in the world knew where that document was deposited: Lord Brandon, Lady Eleanor, and myself. Lord Brandon could not have removed it; I did not. Thus there remains but one conclusion–a conclusion which is not weakened by the fact that Lady Eleanor accepts its disappearance as a sign that it no longer exists, and strongly opposes any search being made for it.”

“But, God bless us, it’s absurd, sir! To suspect a lady of cheating herself out of two hundred thousand pounds–cheating herself! My faith, such an accusation would not stand in law for the time it would take to make it.”

“No, it would not,” agreed the lawyer decisively. “So the question confronting us is: What are Sharp & Clipper to do?”

“That’s the question, sir.”