At last her eyes dropped to the bottom of the document, a glare of delight shot from them, and striking the parchment with her open hands, she looked round upon us, with a smile of triumphant malice, horrible in that place and presence.
“It is not signed—it was not his work, but yours!” she cried, forgetting all respect for the dead in her fiendish exultation. “Go forth, one and all, your presence here is an insult!”
She waved her hand haughtily. But the lawyer and his clerk alone answered it. She still pointed her finger toward the door. Turner withstood the gesture firmly, but still with that respect which men of his class habitually render to those of superior station.
“Madam,” he said, “you have seen it written by his own order that this young girl was Lord Clare’s Child. Surely it cannot be that you wish her sent altogether from his dwelling while he is lying there?”
“I deny it; there is no proof that she is his child,” she retorted, pale with anger, and casting a furtive look at the bed, as if she feared those marble lips might move and contradict her. “What proof is there in an unsigned paper drawn up at a distance, and without his knowledge?”
“Before God and before the dead!” answered Turner, looking upward, and then bowing his forehead solemnly toward the death couch, “Clarence, Lord Clare, told me with his own lips, not twelve hours ago, that this child, Zana, was his daughter, proven so entirely to his satisfaction. By his orders, and at his dictation, I took down all that is in that unsigned will, and myself carried it to the lawyer, who hastened to put it in form.”
“It is false; had this been true Lord Clare would have signed it.”
“He was dead when we came back,” answered Turner.
I saw her lips move, those thin, pale lips made a movement, as if they would have said, “Thank God!” But in the awful presence of death she dared not force them to utter the blasphemy in words.
All this time George Irving had been so overwhelmed by the sudden shock of his uncle’s death, that he seemed entirely unconscious of what was passing. But at last the sharp tones of his mother’s voice aroused him, and he came forward with one hand slightly uplifted. “Hush!” he said, “this is no place for words.”