One of these
pleasures was building. Henry Marsham had spent ten years in building
Tallyn, and at the end of that time, feeling it impossible to live in
the huge incoherent place he had created, he hired a small villa at Nice
and went to die there in privacy and peace. Nevertheless, his will laid
strict injunctions upon his widow to inhabit and keep up Tallyn;
injunctions backed by considerable sanctions of a financial kind. His
will, indeed, had been altogether a document of some eccentricity;
though as eight years had now elapsed since his death, the knowledge of
its provisions possessed by outsiders had had time to grow vague. Still,
there were strong general impressions abroad, and as Alicia Drake
surveyed the house which the old man had built to be the incubus of his
descendants, some of them teased her mind. It was said, for instance,
that Oliver Marsham and his sister only possessed pittances of about a
thousand a year apiece, while Tallyn, together with the vast bulk of
Henry Marsham's fortune, had been willed to Lady Lucy, and lay,
moreover, at her absolute disposal. Was this so, or no? Miss Drake's
curiosity, for some time past, would have been glad to be informed.
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