But what is not common and not familiar (in
my experience), is that all these fine things were not only ordered,
but paid for. The pictures, the statues, the flowers, the jewels,
the carriages, and the horses--inquiry proved, to my indescribable
astonishment, that not a sixpence of debt was owing on any of them. As
to the villa, it had been bought, out and out, and settled on the lady.
I might have tried to find the right reading of this riddle, and tried
in vain--but for Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite's death, which caused an inquiry
to be made into the state of his affairs.
The inquiry elicited these facts:--
That Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite was entrusted with the care of a sum of
twenty thousand pounds--as one of two Trustees for a young gentleman,
who was still a minor in the year eighteen hundred and forty-eight. That
the Trust was to lapse, and that the young gentleman was to receive the
twenty thousand pounds on the day when he came of age, in the month of
February, eighteen hundred and fifty. That, pending the arrival of this
period, an income of six hundred pounds was to be paid to him by his two
Trustees, half-yearly--at Christmas and Midsummer Day.
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