A MILLTONAIRE'S MONEY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 8734, 21 February 1890, Page 5 (Supplement)

A MILLTONAIRE'S MONEY.

(Daily Telegraph.)

If anybody advise! the noplicws and nieces or the human rn.ee not to expect anything from their uncles, the counsel would most assuredly be thrown away. Ever since uncles were first invented the reason of their existence —in the eyes of all who regard them as such—has been their laudable propensity to bestow gifts. Presents from a father or mother come as matters of course; but thereis always an element o£ doubt about the receipt of donations from the more distant kinsmen. Some are poor; others thoughtlessly get married, and their own children exhaust their spare pocket money; while a few remove to distant lands and forget the ties of blood. Yet, though this last class often fails at Christmas and on birthdays— not even sending a card—there are always romantic hopes about them, sometimes blissfully realised. In old comedies or melodramas the rich uncle from " the Indies," East or y/esl., generally came in at the end of the fourth or fifth act to rescue the hero or heroine from undeserved affliction. Novelists have also user! the long estranged and hardly known relation as the only man who can cut the Gordian knot into which they have tied all their characters. Ruin stares a' family in the face; the father has to go to prison for debt, the eldest son to break off his engagement, and all the daughters to go out as governesses, when "Mr Robinson, from London," is introduced. He asks the poor man the apparently irrelevant question, I " Arc you the only son of the late Mary ! Jones, of Easingwold, in the county of ! York?" and, on being answered in' the affirmative, adds, "Then it is my pleasing duty to inform you that you are the heir-at-la,v to the entire property of her brother, Thomas Smith, who died at New Orleans last year worth half a million of money." Tableau: embraces, limelight on the hero, and—curtain! This romance is based on occasional reality. Englishmen tramp the world in search of fortune. They do not keep up home ties with the fidelity displayed by the French, the Irish, or even the German people. They are not fond of writing family letters to distant kinsfolk they never see; they forget or ignore their brothers, their sisters, and their descendants, because they are engaged in what seems to them a pore interesting occupation—the piling up of enormous wealth. No wonder, therefore, that sometimes the marvellous does occur. One of these crusty old gentlemen dies a millionaire and unmarried, without any relations in the land of his adoption. Then solicitors have to trace him back to his birthplace to find out his relations, and to bring the knowledge of new wealth to an engine-driver, a policeman, a village blacksmith, or sometimes to a pauper in a workhouse. The legacy is all the more welcome that it does not even suggest a sentiment of sorrow for the death of a relative whom the legatees never knew.

The latest story o£ this kind is connected with the very legitimate expectations arising on the decease of the late Thomas Blythe, of San Francisco. He left Chester for America in 1840. That was the year of the gold discoveries in California, and there he made his wealth. Such an opportunity of piling up gold was never before presented in the world—not by picking it up on the spot, but by attending to the rising trade of the marvellous city o£ San Francisco. It was then a mere village ; now it has grown to be a city of wonderful development, and the rise in the value of land in and about it has been greater and more rapid than in any part of the world—Melbourne, perhaps, coming next. It is not, therefore, at all surprising that Mr Blythe [should have ;made his "pile." He died some time ago worth 5,000,000d01— £1,000,000 British money — his estate including a cattle ranche and other extensive possessions. There was no will. To whom, then, would the property go? The first olaimaut was a " Miss Dickerson," who declared that she was the wife, "by contract," of the deceased gentleman." This phrase sounds odd, but the States have various kinds o£ marriage, as well as almost infinite varieties of divorce. In Arizona, for instance, cohabitation lor one year establishes a marriage; in New Hampshire three years are necessary. This is akin to the Scotch marriages, which are said to be proved by " habit and repute." Such a plea was put in by Miss Dickerson in the Californian courts, and she claimed the share of the property which, according to the laws of the State, falls to a wife when her husband died intestate. But there also started up four other claimants, all on the same level — the nephews of Mr Blythe, young men named Williams, living at Chester. They are his sister's children, and there was no doubt that they were next-of-kin and heirs-at-law according to the English rules of inheritance, which are also the basis of American law. Their claim, however, even if admitted, would not entirely set aside the claim of the alleged widow, if she could establish that, according to the laws of California, she was the dead man's lawful wife. The litigation lasted for some time, the nephews keenly fighting the ground inch by inch. For what is the good of a rich uncle dying abroad if a young lady suddenly starts up, as if from a stage trap, and exclaims, "I was his wife" 1 In Mr Gilbert's play of Brantinghame Hall a real wife tells a lie, and declares herself not married, to save from ruin her husband's father. In Miss Dickerson's case we have the converse conduct. The courts found her claim was not good, and that j she was not the wife of the deceased millionaire, even on the liberal interpretation oE the marriage contract sometimes allowed in the United States. She was declared " Miss" Dickerson, and the four young men from Chester " breathed again" as they buhcld the million sterling of their happily i testate uncle divided among themselves. We need not pause to conjecture how many divers ways of spending the quarter of a million each of the young men planned out or vaguely contemplated. It is even possible that £our young women sweethearts or wives, hung upon the issue of the lawsuit, and dreamed of the coming glories to ensue. The fairy gold must have, indeed, seemed within their grasp when '• that Miss Dickerson," as doubtless they called her, was relegated to the condition o£ legal spinsterhood whence she sought \vrong£ully to emergo. So ended the fourth act, the curtain falling on four happy young men and their respective belongings. Fate, liowevcr, had other intentions. Miss Dickerson was not to disappear altogether. If, as wife, she was sent down one " vampire trap," she quickly reappeared at another corner of the stage as " The Demon Malevolcntia." She laughed at the four }7 oung men with the "Ha ! ha! " that always accentuates dramatic villainy, and she startled them by exclaiming, " Behold 1 his will 1" This was the more atrocious because all along this designing young person had denied the existence of any such document. She had lived with Mr Blythe, she knew his habits, and she declared" that there was no will. Consequently, during a long litigation, the court treated him as having died intestate. Otherwise, in fact, her claim as a widow would not have arisen. This, of course, was j the obvious motive for concealing the paper; | but she did not destroy it, and on being j I finally defeated by the four nephews she pro- J duced the document. It was examined with ] care and severe criticism, and, after due scrutiny, was pronounced a good and valid will. After leaving some minor legacies, to the extent of £200,000, this testament bequeathed the remainder of the fortune, £800,000, to "Florence Blythe." This was an absolutely now claimant —never heard of before by any of the relatives. On inquiry, it, turns out that she is ihu daughter of the deceased millionaire, brought up in England, not in America, and placed by him at a school in Northendon, Cheshire. She is now only 14; Sier mother is presumably dead; and this will, which has been established, makes her, the Californiau papers say, " one of the richest girls in America." Here are certainly in the prose realities of the clay the materials of a three volume romance. The expectations, the tricks, and the final revelations of Miss Dickerson, the hopes and the fears of the four young men from Chester, and the sudden bounding on the stage at the transformation scene of a columbine of 11 with diamonds on her brow and wealth at her feet, surpass in their changes and character the incidents invented-by onr most sensational story-tellers. Will Miss Florence reward Miss Dickerson for her tardy confession o£ the truth -her deferred production of the will ? The false wife might have destroyed the document, and then nobody would have been the .wiser; but in that case all the money would have gone to the Williams ' family, on whom, as her enemies in the litigation, she could have no claim. On the other ; hand, by revealing the will, she enriches a ' little girl who did not know of her ' good fortune, and thus perhaps she may consider herself entitled to some pecuniary consideration from the unexpected i heiress. The immorality of the conceali ment is indisputable. Anthony Trollope, in ; one of his later stories, depicts a "cousin 1 Henry " who is mean enough to hide a will : in a book, trusting to chance for the final

discovery or concealment of it, believing iv a kind of muddle-headed way that he was not responsible for the fate of a document which mi'iht or might not be found any day.

When it is found he is really relieved. Miss Dickorson may have acted from such mixed motives, and may have imagined that she hud an equitable right to conceal what she considered an unjust will. For the final I* i>atec also held an irregular position. Miss Florence Blytho, thus proclaimed as " one of the richest girls in the United States," is the illegitimate daughter of the late millionaire ; bm in her case the bar sinister is of solid g«.l«l.