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His direct descent from Matthew Haygarth, the father of the intestate, had been proved to the satisfaction of Crown lawyers and High Court of Chancery, and he had been in due course placed in possession of the reverend intestate's estate, to the profit and pleasure of his solicitors and M. Fleurus, and to the unspeakable aggravation of George Sheldon, who washed his hands at once and for ever of all genealogical research, and fell back in an embittered and angry spirit upon the smaller profits to be derived from petty transactions in the bill-discounting line, and a championship of penniless sufferers of all classes, from a damsel who considered herself jilted by a fickle swain, in proof of whose inconstancy she could produce documentary evidence of the "pork-chop and tomato sauce" order, to a pedestrian who knocked his head against a projecting shutter in the Strand, and straightway walked home to Holloway to lay himself up for a twelvemonth in a state of mental and bodily incapacity requiring large pecuniary redress from the owner of the fatal shutter.
Will Charlotte be told that she is the reverend intestate's next of kin? These are questions which I ask myself as I sit in the stillness of my room at the Magpie, scribbling this wretched diary of mine, while the church clock booms three solemn strokes in the distance.
He spoke with the air of an archaeological Hercules, to whom difficulties were nothing. It seemed as if he would have been quite ready to "go in" for some sidereal branch of the Plantagenets, or the female descendants of the Hardicanute family, if George Sheldon had suggested that the intestate's next of kin was to be found there. "Mat Haygarth, by all means," he said.
Sheldon set himself to examine the lines of the intestate's kindred and ancestors; his father's only sister, his grandfather's brothers and sisters, and even to the brothers and sisters of his great-grandfather. At that point the Haygarth family melted away into the impenetrable darkness of the past.
Sheldon produced a bundle of papers, and exhibited some of them to his agent, beginning with that advertisement in the Times which had first attracted his notice, but taking very good care not to show his coadjutor the obituary in the Observer, wherein the amount of the intestate's fortune was stated.
Much as I was annoyed to find that there were claimants lying in wait for the rev. intestate's wealth, I was glad to perceive that Theodore Judson's unpopularity was calculated to render his kindred agreeably disposed to any stranger likely to push that gentleman out of the list of competitors for these great stakes, and I took my cue from this in my interview with the simple old draper.
He showed himself almost as quick at tracing up the intricacies of a family tree as Mr. Sheldon, the astute attorney and practised genealogist. "I have traced these Haygarths back to the intestate's great-grandfather, who was a carpenter and a Puritan in the reign of Charles the First.
But I've a kind of presentiment that this hand of mine will never touch the prize of the victor; or, in plainer English, that no good will ever arise to me or mine out of the reverend intestate's hundred thousand pounds." "Why, what a dismal-minded croaker you are this morning!" exclaimed George Sheldon with unmitigated disgust; "a regular raven, by Jove!
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