THE READING OF THE WILL.
Gilbert Monckton went 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 personal enemy. 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 she _had_
loved Launcelot Darrell. This belief was the tormenting spirit, the
insidious demon which 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 money _per 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, _if_ the 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 will of 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! Have _you_ any 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.”