The Joss: A Reversion by Richard Marsh

Author:Richard Marsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1901-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

​Of its contents I was not able, at first, to make head or tail. After prolonged examination, however, I arranged them thus:

(a) The Missionary’s Letter.

(b) The Holograph Will.

(c) The Bonds.

(d) The Enclosure.

Summed up, the contents of the packet amounted to this.

A certain Benjamin Batters was reported to have died on an island on the other side of the world of which I had never heard; why I was advised of the fact, there was nothing to show. His will was entrusted to my keeping—how my name had travelled through space so as to reach the cognisance of the Mr. Arthur Lennard who had reported the death of the said Benjamin Batters there was not the faintest hint. Bonds—“Goschens”—to the value of £20,000 accompanied the will; since they were payable to bearer this alone suggested profound confidence in an apparently perfect stranger. Finally, there was a smaller parcel which was sealed and endorsed “To be given to my niece, Mary Blyth, and to be opened by her only.”

The will—which was almost as rudimentary a document of the kind as I ever lighted on—bequeathed to the said Mary Blyth the income which was derived from the consols. As to the person in whose name the capital was to be vested not a word was said, nor did I perceive anything which would prevent her from dealing with it exactly as she chose. She was also, under curious and stringent conditions, to become the life tenant of a house in Camford Street of which, however, no title-deeds were enclosed, nor was their existence hinted at.

Had it not been for the presence of the bonds I should have set the whole thing down right away as a hoax. ​The heading on “Arthur Lennard’s” letter was “Great Ka Island: Lat. 5° South; Long. 134° East.” There might be such a place; the description seemed precise enough, and I had no atlas which would enable me to determine. But, at any rate, the packet in which it came had not been posted there. The postmark was Deptford; the date yesterday’s. When I held the paper on which the letter had been written up to the light I found that the watermark was “Spiers and Pond. Freshwater Mill Note, London,” which, under the circumstances, seemed odd.

It was, perhaps, nothing that the will was obviously the production of an unlettered person. Such persons do make their own wills, and, probably, will continue to do so to the crack of doom. But it was something that it was both unwitnessed and undated. And when to this was added the fact that the letter which told of Mr. Batters’ decease was undated too, the conjunction struck one a trifle forcibly.

Then the conditions under which Mary Blyth was to inherit were so puerile, not to say outrageous. She was never to be out of the precious house in Camford Street after nine at night. She was to receive no visitors; have only a woman as a companion, and if that woman left her, was to occupy the premises alone.

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