would be his lot. What he suffered to-night, sitting amongst these people, not one of whom he could count as a friend, was only a foretaste of what he would have to suffer by-and-by in a criminal dock.
For some time there was silence in the room. The two sisters, anxious and perplexed, looked almost despairingly at each other, fearful that at the end of all this business they would be the sufferers; cheated, in their helplessness, either by George Vane’s daughter or by Launcelot Darrell. Eleanor, exhausted by her own excitement, sat with her eyes fixed upon the door, waiting for the coming of the old butler.
More than a quarter of an hour passed in this way. Then the door opened, and Mr. Parker made his appearance.
“You have found it!” cried Eleanor, starting to her feet.
“No, ma’am. No, Miss Lavinia,” added the butler. “I have searched every inch of the garding, and there is nothink in the shape of a paper to be found. The housemaid was with me, and she searched likewise.”
“It must be in the garden,” exclaimed Eleanor, “it must be there—unless it has been blown away.”
“There’s not wind enough for that, ma’am. The s’rubberies are ’igh, and it would take a deal of wind to blow a paper across the tops of the trees.”
“And you’ve searched the ground under the trees?” asked Mr. Monckton.
“Yes, sir. We’ve searched everywhere; me and the ’ousemaid.”
Launcelot Darrell burst into a loud laugh, an insolent, strident laugh.
“Why, I thought as much,” he cried; “the whole story is a farce. I beg your pardon, Mr. Monckton, for calling it a conspiracy. It is merely a slight hallucination of your wife’s; and I dare say she is as much George Vane’s daughter as I am the fabricator of a forged will.”
Mr. Darrell’s triumph had made him foolhardy. In the next moment Gilbert Monckton’s hand was on the collar of his coat, and the cane uplifted above his shoulders.
“Oh my goodness me!” shrieked Sarah de Crespigny, with a dismal wail, “there’ll be murder done presently. Oh, this is too dreadful; in the dead of the night, too.”
But before any harm could happen to Launcelot Darrell, Eleanor clung about her husband’s upraised arm.
“What you said just now was the truth, Gilbert,” she cried, “he is not worthy of it; he is not, indeed. He is beneath an honest man’s anger. Let him alone; for my sake let him alone. Retribution must come upon him sooner or later. I thought it had come to-night, but there has been witchcraft in all this business. I can’t understand it.”
“Stay, Eleanor,” said Gilbert Monckton, putting down his cane, and turning away from Launcelot Darrell as he might have turned from a mongrel cur that he had been dissuaded from punishing: “This last will—what was the wording of it—to whom did it leave the fortune?”
Launcelot Darrell looked up, eagerly, breathlessly, waiting for Eleanor’s answer.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What, have you forgotten?”
“No, I never knew anything about the contents of the will. I had no opportunity of looking at it. I took it from the chair on which Launcelot Darrell threw it, and put it in my pocket. From that moment to this I have never seen it.”
“How do you know, then, that it was a will?” asked Gilbert Monckton.
“Because I heard Launcelot Darrell and his companion speak of it as the genuine will.”
The young man seemed infinitely relieved by the knowledge of Eleanor’s ignorance.
“Come, Mr. Monckton,” he said, with an air of injured innocence, “you have been very anxious to investigate the grounds of your wife’s accusation, and have been very ready to believe in a most absurd story. You have even gone so far as to wish to execute summary vengeance upon me with a walking-stick. I think it’s my turn now to ask a few questions.”
“You can ask as many as you please,” answered the lawyer.
His mind was bewildered by what had happened. Eleanor’s earnestness, which had seemed so real, had all ended in nothing. How if it was all acting; how if some darker mystery lurked beneath all this tumult of accusation and denial? The canker of suspicion, engendered by one woman’s treachery, had taken deep root in Gilbert Monckton’s breast. He had lost one of the purest and highest gifts of a noble nature: the power to trust.
“Very well, then,” said Launcelot Darrell, turning to Eleanor: “Perhaps you will tell me how I contrived to open this cabinet, out of which you say I stole one document, and into which you declare I introduced another.”
“You took the keys from Mr. de Crespigny’s room.”
“Indeed! But is there no one keeping watch in that room?”
“Yes,” cried Miss Sarah, “Jepcott is there. Jepcott has been there ever since my beloved uncle expired. Nothing has been disturbed, and Jepcott has had the care of the room. We could trust Jepcott with untold gold.”
“Yes,” said Miss Lavinia, “with untold gold.”
“But she was asleep!” cried Eleanor, “the woman was asleep when that man went into the room.”
“Asleep!” exclaimed Miss Sarah; “Oh, surely not. Surely Jepcott would not deceive us; I can’t think that of her. The very last words I said to her were, ‘Jepcott, do you feel at all sleepy? If you feel in the least degree sleepy, have the housemaid to sit with you—make assurance doubly sure, and have the housemaid!’ ‘No, Miss,’ Jepcott said, ‘I never felt more wakeful in my life, and as to the girl, she’s a poor, frightened silly, and I don’t think you could induce her to go into master’s room, though you were to offer her a five-pound note for doing it.’ And if Jepcott went to sleep after this, knowing that everything was left about just as it was when my uncle died, it was really too bad of her.”
“Send for Mrs. Jepcott,” said Launcelot Darrell; “let us hear what she has to say about