The Cantankerous Old Lady nodded. She was in her element, I must admit.
She dearly loved a row--above all, a family row; but to be in the thick of a family row, and to feel herself in the right, with the law against her--that was joy such as Lady Georgina had seldom before experienced.
"Yes, dear," she burst out volubly, "I"m in possession, thank Heaven.
And what"s more, they won"t oust me without a legal process. I"ve been here, off and on, you know, ever since poor dear Marmy died, looking after things for Harold; and I shall look after them still, till Bertie Southminster succeeds in ejecting me, which won"t be easy. Oh, I"ve held the fort by main force, I can tell you; held it like a Trojan. Bertie"s in a precious great hurry to move in, I can see; but I won"t allow him.
He"s been down here this morning, fatuously bl.u.s.tering, and trying to carry the post by storm, with a couple of policemen."
"Policemen!" I cried. "To turn you out?"
"Yes, my dear, policemen: but (the Lord be praised) I was too much for him. There are legal formalities to fulfil yet; and I won"t budge an inch, Lois, not one inch, my dear, till he"s fulfilled every one of them. Mark my words, child, that boy"s up to some devilry."
"He is," I answered.
"Yes, he wouldn"t be in such a rampaging hurry to get in--being as lazy as he"s empty-headed--takes after Gwendoline in that--if he hadn"t some excellent reason for wishing to take possession: and depend upon it, the reason is that he wants to get hold of something or other that"s Harold"s. But he sha"n"t if I can help it; and, thank my stars, I"m a dour woman to reckon with. If he comes, he comes over my old bones, child. I"ve been overhauling everything of Marmy"s, I can tell you, to checkmate the boy if I can; but I"ve found nothing yet, and till I"ve satisfied myself on that point, I"ll hold the fort still, if I have to barricade that pasty-faced scoundrel of a nephew of mine out by piling the furniture against the front door-- I will, as sure as my name"s Georgina Fawley!"
"I know you will, dear," I a.s.sented, kissing her, "and so I shall venture to leave you, while I go out to inst.i.tute another little enquiry."
"What enquiry?"
I shook my head. "It"s only a surmise," I said, hesitating. "I"ll tell you about it later. I"ve had time to think while I"ve been coming back in the train, and I"ve thought of many things. Mount guard till I return, and mind you don"t let Lord Southminster have access to anything."
"I"ll shoot him first, dear." And I believe she meant it.
I drove on in the same cab to Harold"s solicitor. There I laid my fresh doubts at once before him. He rubbed his bony hands. "You"ve hit it!" he cried, charmed. "My dear madam, you"ve hit it! I never did like that will. I never did like the signatures, the witnesses, the look of it.
But what could I do? Mr. Tillington propounded it. Of course it wasn"t my business to go dead against my own client."
"Then you doubted Harold"s honour, Mr. Hayes?" I cried, flushing.
[Ill.u.s.tration: NEVER! HE ANSWERED. NEVER!]
"Never!" he answered. "Never! I felt sure there must be some mistake somewhere, but not any trickery on--your husband"s part. Now, _you_ supply the right clue. We must look into this, immediately."
He hurried round with me at once in the same cab to the court. The incriminated will had been "impounded," as they call it; but, under certain restrictions, and subject to the closest surveillance, I was allowed to examine it with my husband"s solicitor, before the eyes of the authorities. I looked at it long with the naked eye and also with a small pocket lens. The paper, as I had noted before, was the same kind of foolscap as that which I had been in the habit of using at my office in Florence; and the typewriting--was it mine? The longer I looked at it, the more I doubted it.
After a careful examination I turned round to our solicitor. "Mr.
Hayes," I said, firmly, having arrived at my conclusion, "this is _not_ the doc.u.ment I type-wrote at Florence."
"How do you know?" he asked. "A different machine? Some small peculiarity in the shape of the letters?"
"No, the rogue who typed this will was too cunning for that. He didn"t allow himself to be foiled by such a scholar"s mate. It is written with a Spread Eagle, the same sort of machine precisely as my own. I know the type perfectly. But----" I hesitated.
"But what?"
"Well, it is difficult to explain. There is character in typewriting, just as there is in handwriting, only, of course, not quite so much of it. Every operator is liable to his own peculiar tricks and blunders.
If I had some of my own typewritten ma.n.u.script here to show you, I could soon make that evident."
"I can easily believe it. Individuality runs through all we do, however seemingly mechanical. But are the points of a sort that you could make clear in court to the satisfaction of a jury?"
"I think so. Look here, for example. Certain letters get habitually mixed up in typewriting; _c_ and _v_ stand next one another on the keyboard of the machine, and the person who typed this draft sometimes strikes a _c_ instead of a _v_, or _vice versa_. I never do that. The letters I tend to confuse are _s_ and _w_, or else _e_ and _r_, which also come very near one another in the arbitrary arrangement. Besides, when I type-wrote the original of this will, I made no errors at all; I took such very great pains about it."
"And this person did make errors?"
"Yes; struck the wrong letter first, and then corrected it often by striking another rather hard on top of it. See, this was a _v_ to begin with, and he turned it into a _c_. Besides, the hand that wrote this will is heavier than mine: it comes down _thump_, _thump_, _thump_, while mine glides lightly. And the hyphens are used with a s.p.a.ce between them, and the character of the punctuation is not exactly as I make it."
"Still," Mr. Hayes objected, "we have nothing but your word. I"m afraid, in such a case, we could never induce a jury to accept your unsupported evidence."
"I don"t want them to accept it," I answered. "I am looking this up for my own satisfaction. I want to know, first, who wrote this will. And of one thing I am quite clear: it is _not_ the doc.u.ment I drew up for Mr.
Ashurst. Just look at that _x_. The _x_ alone is conclusive. My typewriter had the upper right-hand stroke of the small _x_ badly formed, or broken, while this one is perfect. I remember it well, because I used always to improve all my lower-case _x_"s with a pen when I re-read and corrected. I see their dodge clearly now. It is a most diabolical conspiracy. Instead of forging a will in Lord Southminster"s favour, they have subst.i.tuted a forgery for the real will, and then managed to make my poor Harold prove it."
"In that case, no doubt, they have destroyed the real one, the original," Mr. Hayes put in.
"I don"t think so," I answered, after a moment"s deliberation. "From what I know of Mr. Ashurst, I don"t believe it is likely he would have left his will about carelessly anywhere. He was a secretive man, fond of mysteries and mystifications. He would be sure to conceal it. Besides, Lady Georgina and Harold have been taking care of everything in the house ever since he died."
"But," Mr. Hayes objected, "the forger of this doc.u.ment, supposing it to be forged, must have had access to the original, since you say the terms of the two are identical; only the signatures are forgeries. And if he saw and copied it, why might he not also have destroyed it?"
A light flashed across me all at once. "The forger _did_ see the original," I cried, "but not the fair copy. I have it all now! I detect their trick! It comes back to me vividly! When I had finished typing the copy at Florence from my first rough draft, which I had taken down on the machine before Mr. Ashurst"s eyes, I remember now that I threw the original into the waste-paper basket. It must have been there that evening when Higginson called and asked for the will to take it back to Mr. Ashurst. He called for it, no doubt, hoping to open the packet before he delivered it and make a copy of the doc.u.ment for this very purpose. But I refused to let him have it. Before he saw me, however, he had been left by himself for ten minutes in the office; for I remember coming out to him and finding him there alone: and during that ten minutes, being what he is, you may be sure he fished out the rough draft and appropriated it!"
[Ill.u.s.tration: WE SHALL HAVE HIM IN OUR POWER.]
"That is more than likely," my solicitor nodded. "You are tracking him to his lair. We shall have him in our power."
I grew more and more excited as the whole cunning plot unravelled itself mentally step by step before me. "He must then have gone to Lord Southminster," I went on, "and told him of the legacy he expected from Mr. Ashurst. It was five hundred pounds--a mere trifle to Higginson, who plays for thousands. So he must have offered to arrange matters for Lord Southminster if Southminster would consent to make good that sum and a great deal more to him. That odious little cad told me himself on the _Jumna_ they were engaged in pulling off "a big _coup_" between them. He thought then I would marry him, and that he would so secure my connivance in his plans; but who would marry such a piece of moist clay?
Besides, I could never have taken anyone but Harold." Then another clue came home to me. "Mr. Hayes," I cried, jumping at it, "Higginson, who forged this will, never saw the real doc.u.ment itself at all; he saw only the draft: for Mr. Ashurst altered one word _viva voce_ in the original at the last moment, and I made a pencil note of it on my cuff at the time: and see, it isn"t here, though I inserted it in the final clean copy of the will--the word "especially." It grows upon me more and more each minute that the real instrument is hidden somewhere in Mr.
Ashurst"s house--Harold"s house--our house; and that _because_ it is there Lord Southminster is so indecently anxious to oust his aunt and take instant possession."
"In that case," Mr. Hayes remarked, "we had better go back to Lady Georgina without one minute"s delay, and, while she still holds the house, inst.i.tute a thorough search for it."
No sooner said than done. We jumped again into our cab and started. As we drove back, Mr. Hayes asked me where I thought we were most likely to find it.
"In a secret drawer in Mr. Ashurst"s desk," I answered, by a flash of instinct, without a second"s hesitation.
"How do you know there"s a secret drawer?"
"I don"t know it. I infer it from my general knowledge of Mr. Ashurst"s character. He loved secret drawers, ciphers, cryptograms, mystery-mongering."
"But it was in that desk that your husband found the forged doc.u.ment,"
the lawyer objected.
Once more I had a flash of inspiration or intuition. "Because White, Mr.
Ashurst"s valet, had it in readiness in his possession," I answered, "and hid it there, in the most obvious and unconcealed place he could find, as soon as the breath was out of his master"s body. I remember now Lord Southminster gave himself away to some extent in that matter. The hateful little creature isn"t really clever enough, for all his cunning,--and with Higginson to back him,--to mix himself up in such tricks as forgery. He told me at Aden he had had a telegram from "Marmy"s valet," to report progress; and he received another, the night Mr. Ashurst died, at Moozuffernuggar. Depend upon it, White was more or less in this plot; Higginson left him the forged will when they started for India; and, as soon as Mr. Ashurst died, White hid it where Harold was bound to find it."
"If so," Mr. Hayes answered, "that"s well; we have something to go upon.
The more of them, the better. There is safety in numbers--for the honest folk. I never knew three rogues hold long together, especially when threatened with a criminal prosecution. Their confederacy breaks down before the chance of punishment. Each tries to screen himself by betraying the others."
"Higginson was the soul of this plot," I went on. "Of that you may be sure. He"s a wily old fox, but we"ll run him to earth yet. The more I think of it, the more I feel sure, from what I know of Mr. Ashurst"s character, he would never have put that will in so exposed a place as the one where Harold says he found it."
We drew up at the door of the disputed house just in time for the siege.
Mr. Hayes and I walked in. We found Lady Georgina face to face with Lord Southminster. The opposing forces were still at the stage of preliminaries of warfare.
"Look heah," the pea-green young man was observing, in his drawling voice, as we entered; "it"s no use your talking, deah Georgey. This house is mine, and I won"t have you meddling with it."