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Updated: June 9, 2025
"I shall have to search every register in Yorkshire till I light upon the record I want," I thought to myself, "unless Sheldon will consent to advertise for the Meynell marriage certificate. There could scarcely be danger in such an advertisement, as the connection between the name of Meynell and the Haygarth estate is only known to ourselves."
That at no time hereafter shall the said Valentine Hawkehurst be entitled to a larger recompense than is herein-before provided; nor shall he be liable to the said George Sheldon for the return of any moneys which the said George Sheldon may advance on account of the said inquiries in the event of the same not resulting in the establishment of an heir to the estates of the late John Haygarth.
"How did you discover Miss Halliday's descent from Matthew Haygarth?" asked George, very meekly. He was quite crestfallen. He began to feel that his brother would have the upper hand of him in this business as in all other business of this world. "That is my secret," replied Mr. Sheldon, with agreeable tranquillity of manner. "You have kept your secrets, and I shall keep mine.
I want to fathom the mystery of that midnight interment at Dewsdale; I want to know the story of that Mary Haygarth who lies under the old yew-tree at Spotswold, and for whose loss some one sorrowed without hope of consolation. Was that a widower's commonplace, I wonder, and did the unknown mourner console himself ultimately with a new wife?
He took a little oblong memorandum-book from his pocket, and looked at his memoranda of the past week. Among those careless jottings he found one memorandum scrawled in pencil, amongst notes and addresses in ink, "Haygarth intestate. G.S. to see after." "That's it," he exclaimed; "Haygarth intestate; Valentine Hawkehurst not at Dorking, but working for my brother; Goodge letters to be paid for.
Haygarth came home, gave his horse into the charge of the lad, took his candle from the man-servant, and walked straight upstairs, as if going to bed. The man-servant locked the doors, took his master the key, and then went to his own quarters. The boy remained up to feed and groom the horse, which had the appearance of having performed a hard day's work.
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.
Under a fine old yew which had been old a hundred years ago, it seems I found huddled amongst other headstones one so incrusted with moss, that it was only after scraping the parasite verdure from the stone with my penknife that I was able to discover the letters that had been cut upon it. I found at last a brief inscription: "Here lieth ye body of MARY HAYGARTH, aged 27. Born 1727. Died 1754.
Fortune favoured me throughout this Dewsdale expedition. The rector is a simple garrulous old soul, to whom to talk is bliss. He has occupied the house five-and-thirty years. He rents it of the lord of the manor, who bought it from John Haygarth.
"Whatever you do, keep your eye upon the Captain," said George Sheldon, in one of many interviews, all bearing upon the Haygarth succession. "If there is any underhand work going on between him and Philip, you must be uncommonly slow of perception if you can't ferret it out. He pretended he saw you leave town the day you went to Ullerton, but I am half inclined to believe that was only a trap."
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