The Lindsays, Volume III by John K. Leys

The plan devised by Beattie for securing a fortune for himself and one for his fellow-conspirator, at the expense of the Free Church of Scotland, had been skilfully devised and boldly carried out. Its weakness was due to a succession of unlucky circumstances which could hardly have been foreseen, and which neither Beattie nor James Semple could possibly avert. The clerk's intention had been to draw the will himself, and alter the draft, after it came back from Mr. Lindsay, by taking out the page in which the all-important words appeared, and substituting a fresh page in which the bequest to the Free Church should be merely five thousand pounds. He would then have examined the draft with the engrossment along with MacGowan, gone to Mr. Lindsay with it, and read aloud ‘five hundred thousand pounds,' instead of ‘five thousand. ' If Mr. Lindsay had insisted on reading the will himself, it would have been easy to pretend that the error was simply due to the carelessness of the clerk who copied it; and if necessary, he could have slipped the original page of the draft back into its place, and thus diverted suspicion from himself. In any case, no one was likely to suspect him, for he had no apparent interest in the matter, one way or the other. If the will were challenged after the old man's death, it would be easy for Semple to say that his uncle had told him to instruct the lawyer's clerk to alter the amount, and easy for Beattie to declare that he had called the testator's attention to the matter when the will was signed.

The fraud seemed very easy of execution, the only real difficulty being the necessity of silencing MacGowan, which did not appear a very arduous undertaking. Beattie was congratulating himself already on his success, when the news that Mr. Lindsay specially desired that his nephew should prepare his will fell on him like a thunderbolt. Should he abandon the scheme? Abandon a hundred thousand pounds! It was not to be thought of. Was there any other method of carrying out the fraud? Beattie could think of none. On the spur of the moment he told Alec Lindsay not to send the draft to be settled by counsel, and not to send it to the law-stationers, hoping that some change in the old man's plans might yet enable him to carry out his scheme.