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 honey-moon 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-tost 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.”
