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.”
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 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.”