Too Many Cousins

the match was evenly applied. Cecile Boulanger was drinking tea. She put down her cup and resumed her tale.
She used to think of her maternal great-grandfather, she said rather surprisingly, as a sort of Mr. Dombey. Rutland Shearsby had been, in fact, an importer of oriental goods, and Cecile remembered an old daguerrotype of him in which he was shown with a bald head and whiskers, wearing a low waistcoat and a stiff white shirt with two immense black studs in it. She had known him in his later days, when she was a schoolgirl and he was an octogenarian. When he died in 1926 he was ninety-two. He lived in an immense house in Lancaster Gate—a dreadful house, said Gecile, like a prison. It was gone now, ecrase by a bomb. It had become an emergency water tank.
The oriental importer had three children—Martin, Alice (Mile Boulanger’s grandmother), and Deverel. His wife died before Gecile herself was born. And it was after Mrs. Rutland Shearsby’s death that the trouble began. In 1902, at the age of sixty-eight, the widower married again.
He knew quite well what he was doing, Gecile said in reply to a question by Mr. Tuke. He had only retired from business three years before, and was still very active and full of interests. There was nothing the matter with his mind for another ten or twelve years. “Though you might say,” Mile Boulanger remarked acidly, “that his mind must have been failing, because the woman was only twenty-nine. But that sort of weakness seems to be rather common. Old men and young women, I mean.” It was not, however, the disparity in years, or even a second marriage as such, that perturbed the family. It was the lady herself. She had been the importer’s housekeeper. And, as Cecile said, one did not have lady housekeepers in those days.
“Was there any addition to the family as a result of this second marriage?” Harvey asked at this point.
“No, thank goodness,” said Cecile.
“Did you know the lady?”
“Oh, of course. I saw her several times while greatgrandfather was still alive. She is not dead yet, you know.” Harvey’s eyebrows lifted. “Indeed? Though of course, she will still be relatively young.”
“She is seventy-one.”
“A mere child. And I suppose your great-grandfather, having married her, drew up a new will which is bearing rather hardly on his descendants of your generation?” Cecile gave him a sharp look, and smiled unmirthfully. “You would think of that, naturally. You are a lawyer.”
“The story also seems to be developing along familiar fictional lines. The unjust will is an essential feature of the step-relation theme. Though a step-great-grandmother is in every sense a novel variation to me.”
“We are finding it rather hackneyed,” Cecile said bitterly. “But you are right about the will, of course. I’ll try to explain it. The lawyers made it sound difficult——”
She stopped, a little confused. Mrs. Tuke smiled. “What are we for?” said Harvey. “Go on.”
When Rutland Shearsby married again, his youngest child, Deverel, was dead. Deverel travelled for the firm, and he died in India in 1893. He was married, and the importer settled some money on the widow. The eldest son, Martin, was also in the business, and he became the head of it when his father retired. Alice, the daughter, married Paul Dressed, of Dresser’s Bank at Chelmsford, one of the old private banks. This pair, born respectively in 1860 and 1861, were some dozen years older than their stepmother; and as Mr. Tuke remarked, such a situation called for great tact and forbearance on both sides. Mile Boulanger seemed about to make some comment on this, but contented herself with an expressive shrug and passed on to the terms of her greatgrandfather’s will.
This, it seemed, was not drawn up at the time of the second marriage. According to Alice Dresser, though the new wife got round her father in some ways, he regarded the marriage as a kind of experiment, so far as the bulk of his fortune was concerned. He needed somebody, and he was used to her, but she was on trial, so to speak. For her part, she was well aware that she might lose everything if she played her cards badly. She was clever, and she waited; nothing was said about a will. She had plenty of time, and she was alone with the old man in that great house in Lancaster Gate. Nobody knew, said Cecile, how she worked on him all those years, being humble and grateful and making herself indispensable, and gradually turning him against his own children and grandchildren. . . .
“Because,” said Cecile through tight lips, “that is what it came to. All his children, and now another whole generation, have died without getting one penny of the money that ought to have been theirs. . . . ”
Old Rutland Shearsby, in fact, waited until he was nearly eighty before he made his last will. By the terms of it, after legacies and certain sums to be paid outright to his two surviving children had been deducted, a trust fund was to be created out of the residue of the estate, and of this fund the second Mrs. Shearsby was to draw the income as long as she lived, or until she married again.
“Which, of course,” said Cecile, with a short laugh, “she was not such an imbecile as to do. After her death, the fund was to be shared equally between the children, or if they died before her, between their children, and so on. I am not explaining it very well, perhaps. It was all wrapped up in words like residuary and increment and per something. . . . ”
“Per stirpes?” Harvey suggested.
“Yes, that is it.”
“It means that the capital in trust will, after the death of your step-great-grandmother, flow down in three equal shares through the descendants of the testator’s children, assuming that the latter are already deceased. I gather from what you say that the next generation