By Advice of Counsel
that his reflections upon that father's memory were far from filial. He
told himself that he'd always suspected something furtive about the old
man, who must have been under most unusual and extraordinary obligations
to a woman to whom he desired his son to turn over twenty-five thousand
dollars. It was pretty nearly half of his entire fortune! Would cut down
his income from around four thousand to nearly two thousand! The more he
pondered upon the matter the more the lawyer's arguments seemed
absolutely convincing. Lawyers knew more than other people about such
things, anyway. You paid them for their advice, and he would doubtless
have to pay Tutt for his upon this very subject, which, somehow, seemed
to be rather a good reason for following it. No, he would dismiss Sadie
Burch and the letter forever from his mind. Very likely she was dead
anyway, whoever she was. Four thousand a year! Not a bad income for a
bachelor!
And while our innocent young Launcelot trudging uptown hardened his
heart against Sadie Burch, by chance that lady figured in a short but
poignant conversation between Mr. Ephraim Tutt and Miss Minerva Wiggin
on the threshold of the room from which he had just departed.
Miss Wiggin never trusted anybody but herself to lock up the offices,
not even Mr. Tutt, and upon this particular evening she had made this an
excuse to linger on after the others had gone home and waylay him. Such
encounters were by no means infrequent and usually had a bearing upon
the ethical aspect of some proposed course of legal procedure on the
part of the firm.
Miss Minerva regarded Samuel Tutt as morally an abandoned and hopeless
creature. Mr. Ephraim Tutt she loved with a devotion rare among a sex
with whom devotion is happily a common trait, but there was a maternal
quality in her affection accounted for by the fact that although Mr.
Tutt was, to be sure, an old man in years, he had occasionally an
elfin, Puck-like perversity which was singularly boyish, at which times
she felt it obligatory for her own self-respect to call him to order.
Thus, whenever Tutt seemed to be incubating some evasion of law which
seemed more subtly plausible than ordinary she made it a point to call
it to Mr. Tutt's attention. Also, whenever, as in the present case, she
felt that by following the advice given by the junior member of the firm
a client was about to embark upon some dubious enterprise or
questionable course of conduct she endeavored to counteract his
influence by appealing to the head of the firm.
During the interview between Tutt and Payson Clifford the door had been
open and she had heard all of it; moreover, after Payson had gone away
Tutt had called her in and gone over the situation with her. And she
regarded Tutt's advice to his client,--not the purely legal aspect of
it, but the personal and persuasive part of it,--as an interference with
that young gentleman's freedom of conscience.
"Dear me!--I didn't know you were still here, Minerva!" exclaimed her
employer as she confronted him in the outer office. "Is anything
worrying you?"
"Not dangerously!" she replied with a smile. "And perhaps it's none of
my business--"
"My business is thy business, my dear!" he answered. "Without you Tutt &
Tutt would not be Tutt & Tutt. My junior partner may be the eyes and
legs of the firm and I may be some other portion of its anatomy, but you
are its heart and its conscience. Out with it! What rascality portends?
What bird of evil omen hovers above the offices of Tutt & Tutt? Spare
not an old man bowed down with the sorrows of this world! Has my shrewd
associate counseled the robbing of a bank or the kidnapping from a
widowed mother of her orphaned child?"
"Nothing quite so bad as that!" she retorted. "It's merely that Mr.
Samuel Tutt used his influence this afternoon to try to persuade a young
man not to carry out his father's wishes--expressed in a legally
ineffective way--and I think he succeeded--although I'm not quite sure."
"That must have been Payson Clifford," answered Mr. Tutt. "What were the
paternal wishes?"
"Mr. Tutt found a letter with the will in which the father asked the son
to give twenty-five thousand dollars to a Miss Sadie Burch."
"Miss Sadie Burch!" repeated Mr. Tutt. "And who is she?"
"Nobody knows," said Miss Wiggin. "But whoever she is, our
responsibility stops with advising Mr. Payson Clifford that the letter
has no legal effect. Mr. Tutt went further and tried to induce Mr.
Clifford not to respect the request contained in it. That, it seems to
me, is going too far. Don't you think so?"
"Are you certain you never heard of this Miss Burch?" suddenly asked Mr.
Tutt, peering at her sharply from beneath his shaggy eyebrows.
"Never," she replied.
"H'm!" ejaculated Mr. Tutt. "A woman in the case!"
"What sort of a young fellow is this Payson Clifford?" inquired Miss
Wiggin after a moment.
"Oh, not so much of a much!" answered Mr. Tutt whimsically.
"And what was the father like?" she continued with a woman's curiosity.
"He wasn't so much of a much, either, evidently," answered Mr. Tutt.
We have previously had occasion to comment upon the fact that no client,
male or female, consults a lawyer with regard to what he ought to do.
Women, often having decided to do that which they ought not to do,
attempt to secure counsel's approval of the contemplated sin; but while
a lawyer is sometimes called upon to bolster up a guilty conscience,
rarely is he sincerely invited to act as spiritual adviser. Most men
being worse than their lawyers, prefer not to have the latter find them
out. If they have made up their minds to do a mean thing they do not
wish to run the chance of having their lawyer shame them out of it. That
is their own business. And it should be! The law presents sufficiently
perplexing problems for the lawyer without his seeking trouble in the
dubious complexities of his client's morals! Anyhow, that is the
regulation way a lawyer looks at it and that is the way to hold one's
clients. Do what you are instructed to do--so long as it isn't too raw!
Question the propriety of his course and while your client may follow
your advice in this single instance he probably will not return again.
The paradoxical aspect of the matter with Mr. Tutt was that while he was
known as a criminal lawyer whenever he was asked for advice he concerned
himself quite as much with his client's moral as his legal duty. The
rather subtle reason for this was probably to be found in the fact that
since he found the law so easy to circumvent he preferred to disregard
it entirely as a sanction of conduct and merely to ask himself "Now is
this what a sportsman and a gentleman would do?" The fact that a man was
a technical criminal meant nothing to him at all; what interested him
was whether the man was or was not a "mean" man. If he was, to hell with
him! In a word, he applied to any given situation the law as it ought to
be and not the law as it was. A very easy and flexible test! say you,
sarcastically. Do you really think so? There may be forty different laws
upon the same subject in as many different states of our political
union, but how many differing points of view upon any single moral
question would you find among as many citizens? The moral code of decent
people is practically the same all over the terrestrial ball, and
fundamentally it has not changed since the days of Hammurabi. The ideas
of gentlemen and sportsmen as to what "is done" and "isn't done" haven't
changed since Fabius Tullius caught snipe in the Pontine marshes.
Mr. Tutt was a crank on this general subject and he carried his
enthusiasm so far that he was always tilting like Don Quixote at some
imaginary windmill, dragging a very unwilling Sancho Panza after him in
the form of his reluctant partner. Moreover, he had a very keen sympathy
for all kinds of outcasts, deeming most of them victims of the sins of
their own or somebody's else fathers. So when he learned from Miss
Wiggin that Tutt had presumed to interfere with the financial prospects
of the unknown Miss Sadie Burch he was distinctly aggrieved, less on her
account to be sure than upon that of his client's whom he regarded more
or less in his keeping. And, as luck would have it, the object of his
grievance, having forgotten something, at that moment unexpectedly
reentered the office to retrieve it.
"Hello, Mr. Tutt!" he exclaimed. "Not gone yet!"
His senior partner glanced at him sharply, while Miss Wiggin hastily
sidestepped into the corridor.
"Look here, Tutt!" said Mr. Tutt. "I don't know just what you've been
telling young Clifford, or how you've been interfering in his private
affairs, but if you've been persuading him to disregard any wish of his
father plainly expressed in his own handwriting and incorporated with
his will you've gone further than you've any right to go."
"But," expostulated Tutt, "you know how dangerous it is to meddle with
things like that. Our experience certainly shows that it's far wiser to
let the law settle all doubtful questions than to try to guess what the
final testamentary intention of a dead testator really was. Don't you
remember the Dodworth case? A hypersensitive conscience cost our widowed
client ten thousand dollars! I say, leave well enough alone."
"'Well enough'! 'Well enough'!" snarled Mr. Tutt. "Are you going to
constitute yourself the judge of what is well enough for a young man's
soul? I give you fair warning, Tutt: he's heard your side of it, but
before he gets through he's going to hear mine as well!"
Samuel Tutt turned a faint pink in the region of his collar.
"Why, certainly, Mr. Tutt!" he stammered. "Do so, by all means!"
"You jolly well bet I will!" replied Mr. Tutt, jamming on his stovepipe.
Several days passed, however, without the subject being mentioned
further, while the proper steps to probate the will were taken as usual.
Payson Clifford's dilemma had no legal reaction. He had made up his mind
and he was going to stick to it. He had taken the opinion of counsel and
was fully satisfied with what he had done. Nobody was going to know
anything about it, anyway. When the proper time came he would burn the
Sadie Burch letter and forget Sadie Burch. That is, he thought he was
going to and that he could. But--as Plautus says: "_Nihil est miserius
quam animus hominis conscius_."
You see, Payson Clifford, having been sent to a decent school and a
decent college, irrespective of whether his father was a rotter or not,
had imbibed something of a sense of honor. Struggle as he would against
it, the shadow of Sadie Burch kept creeping athwart his mind. There were
so many possibilities! Suppose she was in desperate straits? Hadn't he
better look her up, anyhow? No, he most definitely didn't want to know
anything about her! Supposing she really had rendered some service to
his father for which she ought to be repaid as he had sought to repay
her? These thoughts obtruded themselves upon Payson's attention when he
least desired it, but they did not cause him to alter his intention to
get his hooks into his father's whole residuary estate and keep it for
himself. He had, you observe, a conscience, but it couldn't stand up
against twenty-five thousand dollars reinforced by perfectly sound legal
arguments.
No, he had a good excuse for not being a gentleman and a sportsman and
he did not purpose to look for any reasons for doing differently. Then
unexpectedly he was invited to dinner by Mr. Ephraim Tutt in a funny
old ramshackle house on West Twenty-third Street with ornamented iron
piazza railings all covered with the withered stalks of long dead
wistarias, and something happened to him. "Payson Clifford's Twenty-five
Thousand Dollar Dinner." He had no suspicion, of course, what was coming