Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/254

244 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 perfectly 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 revenge 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 was 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 voice:

“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 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.

A faint red flush 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.”