CHAPTER XLVIII.THE READING OF THE WILL.
Gilbert Moncktonwent up to Woodlands immediately after the funeral, in order to be present at the reading of the will. He felt that he had a right to see the end of this business, in which his wife had played so extraordinary a part. The will was to be read by Henry Lawford’s clerk, in the sitting-room, or study, which Maurice de Crespigny had occupied for many years before his death.
There were a great many people who, like Gilbert Monckton, thought they had a right to be present upon this occasion; people who had been kept out of the old man’s house by the rigid watchfulness and the inflexible will of the two maiden ladies for the last twenty years or so, but who were freely admitted now, as no longer capable of doing mischief. All manner of distant relationships, so remote as to be almost untraceable, came to light upon this occasion: cousins by marriage; sisters-in-law of dead first cousins, once removed; widowers who attached themselves to the house of Crespigny by right of departed wives; widows who declared themselves near relations on the strength of claims held by defunct husbands; poor connections who came on foot, and who were so poor that it was really an impertinence in them to expect the smallest legacy; rich connections who came in splendid carriages, and who seemed even more eager for any stray twenty pounds for a mourning ring that might be set against their names, than the poorest of the brotherhood. And indeed these owners of splendid carriages might have been needier than the dusty and weather-beaten pedestrians; for when people try to make fifteen hundred a-year do the work of three thousand, every accidental twenty pounds is a God-send to them.
However it might be, everybody in the Woodlands drawing-room upon that particular morning was influenced by the same feeling, a compound sensation of hope and distrust, expectancy and despair. Surely there could never before have been so many eager faces assembled together in the same small space. Every face, young or old, handsome or ugly, aristocratic or plebeian, wore the same expression; and had thus a common likeness, which bore out the idea of some tie of relationship binding the whole assembly.
Every one regarded his or her neighbour as the possible inheritor of something worth having, and therefore a personalenemy. Smiling relations were suspected of being acquainted with the contents of the will, and secretly rejoicing in the certainty of their own names being pleasantly mentioned therein. Frowning relations were looked at darkly as probable arch-plotters who had worked upon the mind of the dead man. Diffident relations were feared as toadies and sycophants, who had no doubt plied Mr. de Crespigny with artful flatteries. Confident relations were dreaded as people who perhaps had some secret claim upon the estate, and were silently gloating over the excellence of their chances. Every one of these outsiders hated each other with vengeful and murderous hate; but they all sympathized in a far deeper hatred of the four favourites for these great legacy stakes, the two maiden ladies, Mrs. Darrell, and her son. It was almost certain that one or other of these four people would inherit the Woodlands property, and the bulk of the dead man’s fortune; unless, indeed, by one of those caprices common to eccentric valetudinarians, he should have left his wealth to some distant connexion, who had been too proud to toady him—and had, moreover, never had the chance of doing so. Yes, the three nieces and Launcelot were the first favourites in this eager race; and the outsiders speculated freely amongst themselves as to the chances and the “condition” of these four fortunate creatures. And if the outsiders hated each other desperately for the sake of very small chances, how much more desperate must have been the feelings of these four who were to enter for the great stake.
Launcelot Darrell met Mr. Monckton this morning for the first time since that strange scene upon the night of Maurice de Crespigny’s death. The young man had called at Tolldale Priory during the interval, but both the lawyer and his ward had been denied to him.
Perhaps amongst all those assembled in the chamber which had so lately been tenanted by the dead man, there was not one more painfully anxious than Gilbert Monckton, into whose mind no mercenary thought had ever entered.
It was in the hope of seeing his wife justified that Mr. Monckton had come to Woodlands upon this day. He had brooded over Eleanor’s denunciation of Launcelot Darrell perpetually during the week that had elapsed since the old man’s death; but the more he pondered upon that passionate accusation the more bewildered and perplexed he became.
Let it be remembered that he was a man whose nature had been rendered jealous and suspicions by one cruel deception which had embittered his youth and soured a generous disposition. His mind was penetrated with the idea that Eleanor had never loved him, and that shehadloved Launcelot Darrell. This belief was the tormenting spirit, the insidious demonwhich had held possession of his breast ever since his brief honeymoon on the northern coast. He could not dismiss it all in a moment. The fiend was in possession, and was not very easily to be exorcised. That vehement denunciation, that passionate accusation which had rushed, impetuous and angry, from Eleanor Monckton’s lips, might be the outburst of a jealous woman’s fury, and might have its root in love. Eleanor had loved this young man, and was indignant against him for his intended marriage with Laura. If the desire to avenge her father’s death had alone actuated her, surely this passionate girl would have spoken before now. It was thus that Gilbert Monckton argued. He did not know how eager Eleanor had been to speak, and how she had only been held back by the worldly wisdom of Richard Thornton. How should he know the long trial of patience, the bitter struggle between the promptings of passion and the cold arguments of policy which his wife had endured? He knew nothing except that something—some secret—some master passion—had absorbed her soul, and separated her from him.
He stood aloof in the dead man’s study while Mr. Lamb, the clerk, a grey-haired old man, with a nervous manner and downcast eyes, arranged his papers upon a little table near the fire, and cleared his throat preparatory to commencing the reading of the will.
There was an awful silence in the room, as if everybody’s natural respiration had been suspended all in a moment, and then the clerk’s low voice began very slowly and hesitatingly with the usual formula.
“I, Maurice de Crespigny, being at this time,” &c., &c. The will was of some length, and as it began with a great many insignificant legacies—mourning rings, snuff-boxes, books, antique plate, scraps of valuable china, and small donations of all kinds to distant relations and friends who had been lost sight of on the lonely pathway along which the old man had crawled to his tomb under the grim guardianship of his two warders—the patience of the chief expectants was very sorely tried. But at last, after modest little annuities to the servants had been mentioned, the important clauses were arrived at.
To every one of the three sisters, Sarah and Lavinia de Crespigny and Ellen Darrell, the testator bequeathed money in the funds to the amount of two hundred a year. All the “rest and residue” of his estate, real and personal, was left to Launcelot Darrell absolutely, without condition or reserve.
The blood rushed up to the widow’s face, and then as suddenly receded, leaving it ghastly white. She held out her hand to her son, who stood beside her chair, and clasped his clammy fingers in her own.
“Thank God,” she said, in a low voice, “you have got your chance at last, Launcelot. I should be content to die to-morrow.”
The two sisters, pale and venomous, glared at their nephew. But they could only look at him. They could do nothing against him. He had won and they had lost; that was all. They felt strange buzzing noises in their ears, and the carpeted floor of the room seemed reeling up and down like the deck of a storm-tossed vessel. This was all that they felt just at present. The shock was so great that its first effect was only to produce a kind of physical numbness which extended even to the brain.
I don’t suppose that either of these elderly ladies, each of whom wore stuff shoes and crisp little curls of unnaturally brown hair upon her forehead, could, by any possibility, have spent upon her own wants more than a hundred pounds a year, nor had either of them been accustomed to indulge in the sweet luxury of charity; they were neither generous nor ambitious. They were entirely without the capacity of spending money either upon themselves or on other people, and yet they had striven as eagerly for the possession of this fortune as ever any proud, ambitious spirit strove for the golden means by which he hoped to work his way upon the road that leads to glory.
They were fond of money; they were fond of moneyper se; without reference to its uses, either noble or ignoble. They would have been very happy in the possession of their dead kinsman’s fortune, though they might have gone down to their graves without having spent so much as the two hundred a year which they received by this cruel will. They would have hoarded the government securities in an iron safe; they would have added interest to principal; they would have nursed the lands, and raised the rents, and been hard and griping with the tenants, and would have counted their gains and calculated together the increase of their wealth; but they would have employed the same cobbler who had worked for them before their uncle’s death; they would still have given out their stuff shoes to be mended; and they would have been as sharp as ever as to an odd sixpence in their dealings with the barber who dressed their crisp brown curls.
Launcelot Darrell kept his place beside his mother’s chair, though the reading of the will was finished, and the clerk was folding the sheets upon which it was written. Never had any living creature shown less elation than this young man did upon his accession to such a very large fortune.
Mr. Monckton went up to the little table at which the lawyer’s clerk sat, folding up the papers.
“Will you let me look at that will for a moment, Mr. Lamb?” he asked.
The clerk looked up at him with an expression of surprise.
“You wish to look at it?——” he said, hesitating a little.
“Yes. There is no objection to my doing so, is there? It will be sent to Doctors’ Commons, I suppose, where anybody will be able to look at it for a shilling.”
The clerk handed Gilbert Monckton the document with a feeble little laugh.
“There it is, Mr. Monckton,” he said. “You remember your own signature, I dare say; you’ll find it there along with mine.”
Yes, there was the signature. It is not a very easy thing for the cleverest man, who is not a professional expert, to decide upon the authenticity of his own autograph. There it was. Gilbert Monckton looked at the familiar signature, and tried in vain to find some flaw in it. If it was a forgery, it was a very skilful one. The lawyer remembered the date of the will which he had witnessed, and the kind of paper upon which it had been written. The date and the paper of this corresponded with that recollection.
The body of the will was in the handwriting of the clerk himself. It was written upon three sheets of foolscap paper, and the signatures of the testator and the two witnesses were repeated at the bottom of every page. Every one of the three autographs differed from the others in some trifling point, and this circumstance, small in itself, had considerable influence upon Gilbert Monckton.
“If this will had been a forgery, prepared by Launcelot Darrell, the signatures would have been fac-similes of each other,” thought the lawyer; “that is a mistake which forgers almost always fall into. They forget that a man very rarely signs his name twice alike. They get hold of one autograph and stereotype it.”
What was he to think, then? If this will was genuine, Eleanor’s accusation must be a falsehood. Could he believe this? Could he believe that his wife was a jealous and vindictive woman, capable of inventing a lie in order to avenge herself upon the infidelity of the man she had loved? To believe this would be most everlasting misery. Yet how could Gilbert Monckton think otherwise,ifthe will was genuine? Everything hinged upon that, and every proof was wanting against Launcelot Darrell. The housekeeper, Mrs. Jepcott, declared most distinctly that nobody had entered the dead man’s room or touched the keys upon the table by the bed. This alone, if the woman’s word was to be depended upon, gave the lie to Eleanor’s story.
But this was not all. The will was in every particular the very opposite of such a will as would be likely to be the work of a forger.
It contained legacies to old friends of the dead man whom he had not himself seen for twenty years, and whose very names must have been unknown to Launcelot Darrell. It was the willof a man whose mind lived almost entirely in the past. There was a gold snuff-box bequeathed “to my friend Peter Sedgewick, who was stroke in the Magdalen boat at Henley-on-the-Thames, fifty-seven years ago, when I was six in the same boat;” there was an onyx shirt-pin left “to my old boon companion Henry Laurence, who dined with me at the Beefsteak Club with George Vane and Richard Brinsley Sheridan on my birthday.” The will was full of personal recollections dated fifty years back; and how was it possible that Launcelot Darrell could have fabricated such a will; when by Eleanor’s own admission he had no access to the genuine document until he came to substitute the forgery after his uncle’s death? The forgery must therefore, Gilbert Monckton argued, have been prepared while the young man was in utter ignorance as to the tenor of the actual will, according to Eleanor’s story; and this, the lawyer reasoned, was proof conclusive against his wife.
Launcelot could not have fabricated such a will as this. This will, therefore, was genuine, and Eleanor’s accusation had been only prompted by a sudden burst of jealous rage, which had made her almost indifferent to consequences. Mr. Monckton examined the signatures again and again, and then, looking very sharply at the clerk, said, in a low voices—
“The body of this will is in your handwriting, I believe, Mr. Lamb?”
“It is, sir.”
“Can you swear that this is the genuine document; the same will which you wrote and witnessed?”
“Most decidedly,” the clerk answered, with a look of astonishment.
“You have no suspicion whatever as to its authenticity?”
“No, sir, none! Haveyouany suspicion, Mr. Monckton?” he added, after a moment’s pause.
The lawyer sighed heavily.
“No,” he said, giving the paper back to the clerk; “I believe the will is genuine.”
Just at this moment there was a stir in the assembly, and Gilbert Monckton turned round to see what was taking place.
It was Mrs. Jepcott, the housekeeper, who was saying something to which everybody listened intently.
The reason of this attention which the housekeeper’s smallest word received from every member of that assembly, was the fact that she held a paper in her hand. Every eye was fixed upon this paper. It might be a codicil revoking the will, and making an entirely new disposition of the property.
Faint streaks of red began to light up the wan cheeks of the two old maids, and Launcelot Darrell grew more livid than death.But it was not a codicil; it was only a letter written by Maurice de Crespigny, and addressed to his three nieces.
“The night before my poor dear master died,” the housekeeper said, “I was sitting up with him all alone, and he called me to him, and he told me to fetch him his dressing-gown, which he’d been wearing all through his illness, whenever he sat up; and I fetched it; and he took a sealed letter out of the breast-pocket, and he said to me, ‘Jepcott, when my will is read, I expect my three nieces will be very much disappointed and will think I have not treated them fairly; so I’ve written them a letter, begging them not to be angry with me after I’m dead and gone: and I want you to keep it, and take care of it, until the will has been read, and then give it to my eldest niece, Sarah, to read aloud to her two sisters in the presence of everybody.’ And this is the letter, miss,” added Mrs. Jepcott, handing the sealed letter to Sarah de Crespigny.
“Thank God!” thought Gilbert Monckton, “I shall know now whether the will is genuine. If it is a fabrication, this letter must bring detection upon the forger.”