But flight was barred. Faversham entered, accompanied by the senior
solicitor to the Threlfall estate and by old Dixon, shaking with
nervousness, in a black Sunday suit. Chairs had been provided. They took
their seats. Tatham cleared his own table.
"No need!" said the solicitor, a gentleman with a broad, benevolent face
slightly girdled by whiskers. "It's very short!"
And smiling, he took out of his pocket a document consisting apparently
of two sheets of square letter paper, and amid the sudden silence, he
began to read.
The first and longer sheet was done. Felicia, sitting on the edge of a
stiff chair, her small feet dangling, was staring at the lawyer. Victoria
was looking at her son bewildered. Boden wore an odd sort of smile.
Undershaw, impassive, was playing with his watch-chain. Lydia radiant and
erect, in a dress of gray-blue tweed, a veil of the same tint falling
back from the harmonious fairness of her face, had her eyes on Felicia.
There was a melting kindness in the eyes--as though the maternity deep in
the girl's nature spoke.
A deed of gift, _inter vivos_, conveying the whole personality and real
estate, recently bequeathed to Claude Faversham by Edmund Melrose,
consisting of so-and-so, and so-and-so,--a long catalogue of shares and
land which had taken some time to read--to Felicia Melrose, daughter of
the late Edmund Melrose, subject only to an annuity to her mother,
Antonetta Melrose, of L2,000 a year, to a pension for Thomas Dixon and
his wife, and various other pensions and small annuities; Henry, Earl
Tatham, and Victoria, Countess Tatham, appointed trustees, and to act as
guardians, till the said Felicia Melrose should attain the age of
twenty-four; no mention of any other person at all; the whole vast
property, precisely as it had passed from Melrose to Faversham, just
taken up and dropped in the lap of this little creature with the dangling
feet without reservation, or deduction--now that it was done, and not
merely guessed at, it showed plain for what in truth it was--one of those
acts wherein the energies of the human spirit, working behind the
material veil, swing for a moment into view, arresting and stunning the
spectator.
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