Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 11.pdf/533

 496

LEAVES FROM AN ENGLISH SOLICITOR'S NOTE BOOK. By Baxter Borret.

II. A STORY OF PROFESSIONAL NEGLIGENCE. AMONG my clients when I was in practice in Georgetown were two maiden ladies, sisters, Mary and Margaret Croome, who lived in a very pretty cottage, with gardens and orchard and everything to make it a charming homestead, on the borders of the beautiful forest of Dean, just where Gloucestershire adjoins Monmouth shire, separated only by the lovely river Wye. They called their cottage Croomedene, and once at least in every summer they ex pected me to pay them a visit to talk over their affairs, as they said; to me it was a visit looked forward to year by year as a delight ful relaxation from the worry of professional life. Their habit was to invite me to come on the Friday afternoon, to devote Saturday to their business, and spend a Sunday in the peaceful quiet of their cottage home, leaving them on the Monday morning. But the most peaceful home in the land has its closet, and in it its skeleton; and these two sisters had their one sorrow, in the shape of a scape grace brother, George, whose debts and de linquencies compelled him to live abroad; where he was kept from want by monthly payments made from his sisters' incomes, and remitted through my office. George had married, abroad, a dashing beauty who died in about the fifth year of their married life, leaving behind her an only daughter Dorothy. In the first weeks of his sorrow, George had paid a hurried visit to his sisters at Croomedene, bringing little Dorothy with him, and the kind hearts of the sisters had warmed towards the motherless little girl, so that they had eagerly assented when he asked them to make a home for her at Croomedene, only stipulating that he should not take her from them so long as either sister lived, and

so Dorothy had grown up in their pretty cottage and become the tender object of their affection, and she, on her side, had become devoted to her old maiden aunts. On one of my annual visits to Croomedene they had consulted me as to the wills which it behoved them to make, and I had advised that the two should make identic wills, each leav ing everything to the other if she should sur vive her sister; but in the event of either sister surviving the other and then dying, the prop erty of the survivor was to be vested in trus tees for the sole benefit of Dorothy for her life, with power for the trustees to settle her fortune upon children in case of her marry ing, and other proper provisions for securing Dorothy's fortune from reaching the hands of George or his creditors. I had carefully prepared these wills for signature by the two sisters, and had arranged to go down to Croomedene one Friday afternoon as usual, when at the last moment I was summoned unexpectedly to London by a business en gagement which could not be put off. At that time I had in my office a very good young pupil, Cecil Harrington, the son of a medical man practising in the Forest of Dean, and Harrington was, as I knew, on terms of friendly intimacy with the two old ladies. Harrington was just finishing the last of his five years' articles in my office, and knew the position of affairs, and had, indeed, drawn the wills for me (under my own supervision of course); and in my dilemma I had to turn to him, and ask him to go in my stead to Croomedene to see to the wills being properly signed. As Harrington's father was the medical attendant of the two sisters, I had previously arranged with them that he should meet me at Croomedene on the Satur