At length age and infirmities pressed more and more sorely upon the good old man. Soon he could no longer leave the house or even his chamber—and then it was he felt how rich a treasure he possessed in Florence. With how much tenderness and love did she watch over him, patiently enduring with all the querulousness and complainings of an old age racked with torturing pains; never weary, neither by day nor by night, ever devising, ever executing some plan which might soothe his troubles either of body or mind.
The old man died, leaving his fortune to Florence, upon one condition—the strangest, surely, that ever guided the pen of a dying man.
Never was so singular a will written—never was any thing more absurd! And for more than a month, which is certainly a long time for any wonder to stand its ground against the constant pressure of newer marvels, for more than a month after the coffin and the tomb had alike received their due, the city rang with the whimsicality of the last will and testament of old Abel May, who by this said will had compelled his young, blooming widow either to marry within a year of his demise, or otherwise forfeit to relatives innumerable that fine fortune which, with this proviso, he had bequeathed to her alone. The motives which actuated him were doubtless intended as a kindness to the young girl whom his death would leave unprotected. He overlooked the dangers to which he thus exposed her from the crafty wiles of the spendthrift and fortune-hunter, or he trusted, perhaps, that her innocence and loveliness might shield her against their artifices.
From marble-columned squares and by-lanes—from suburban cottages and distant villages, disappointed relatives came flocking in like a flight of hungry crows, one and all croaking forth the will a forgery; or that their beloved relative, for whom weepers a yard long streamed in the wind, and black veils fluttered hopefully, through weakness of body and consequent imbecility of mind, had been influenced by an artful young wife to draw up the unrighteous instrument to which his signature was attached. A likely story, truly, that passing by uncles and nephews, aunts and nieces, to say nothing of innumerable cousins of the first and third degree, he should have thrown his whole fortune into the hands of a young girl, one, too, whom they all were convinced he had married only that she might nurse his old body when gout or rheumatism should rack his bones, but that he also should have added to this unheard of folly his commands for her to marry, and by that means allow his hard-earned riches to pass into the hands of nobody knows who—any beggar she might choose to call up from squalid rags to fine linen and broadcloth, why that passed all bounds of belief. There had been intrigue and treachery somewhere; poor old Abel! it brought tears into their affectionate eyes even to think of it.