CHAPTER XX. — MONTAGUE NEVITT FINESSES.
Guy rose mechanically, and followed him to the door. Nevitt still held the forged cheque in his hand. Guy thought of it so to himself in plain terms, as the forgery. Yet somehow, he knew not why, he followed that sinister figure through the passage and down the stairs like one irresistibly and magnetically drawn forward. Why, he couldn’t let any one go forth upon the streets of London—with the cheque he himself had forged in his hands—unwatched and unshadowed.
Nevitt called a cab; and jumped in, and beckoned him. Guy, still as in a dream, jumped after him hastily.
“To the London and West Country Bank, in Lombard Street,” Nevitt called through the flap.
The cab drove off; and Guy Waring leaned back, all trembling and irresolute, with his head on the cushions.
At last, after a short drive, during which Guy’s head seemed to be swimming most dreamily, they reached the bank—that crowded bank in Lombard Street. Nevitt thrust the cheque bodily into his companion’s hand.
“Take it in, now, and cash it,” he said with an authoritative air. “Do you hear what I say? Take it in—and cash it.”
Guy, as if impelled by some superior power, walked inside the door, and presented it timidly.
The cashier glanced at the sum inscribed on the cheque with no little surprise.
“It’s a rather large amount, Mr. Waring,” he said, scanning his face closely. “How will you take it?”
Guy trembled violently from head to foot as he answered, in a voice half choked with terror, “Bank of England hundreds, if you please. It is a large sum, as you say; but I’m placing it elsewhere.”
The cashier retired for a few minutes; then he returned once more, bringing a big roll of notes, and a second clerk by his side—just to prevent mistake—stared hard at the customer. “All square,” the second clerk said, in a half-whispered aside. “It’s him right enough.”
And the cashier proceeded to count out the notes with oft-wetted fingers.
Guy took them up mechanically, like a drunken man, counted them over one by one in a strange, dazed way; and staggered out at last to the cab to Nevitt.
Nevitt leaned forward and took the bundle from his hands. Guy stood on the pavement and looked vacantly in at him! “That’s right,” Nevitt said, clasping the bundle tight. “Rio Negro Diamond and Sapphire Mines, cabby, 127, Knatchbull Street, Cheapside.”
The cabman whipped up his horse and disappeared round the corner, leaving Guy Waring alone—like a fool—on the pavement.
For a minute or two the dazed and dazzled journalist stood there awaking by degrees as from some trance or stupefaction. At first he could only stand still and gaze vacantly down the street after the disappearing cab; but as his brain cleared slowly, and the mist that hung over his mind dispelled itself bit by bit, he was able to walk a few steps at a time towards the nearest shops, where he looked in at the windows intently with a hollow stare, and tried to collect his scattered wits for a great effort at understanding this strange transaction.
All at once, as he looked, the full folly of his deed burst in its true light upon his muddled brain. He had handed Nevitt six thousand pounds in Bank of England notes; to waste, or lose, or speculate, or run away with.
Six—thousand—pounds of Cyril’s money! Not that for one moment he suspected Nevitt. Guy Waring was too innocent to suspect anybody. But as he woke up more fully now to the nature of his own act, a horrible sense of guilt and pollution crept slowly over him. He put his hand ito his forehead. Cold sweat stood in clammy small drops upon his brow. Bit by bit, the hateful truth dawned clearly upon him. Nevitt had lured him by strange means, he knew not how, into hateful crime—into a disgraceful conspiracy. Word by word, the self-accusing sentence framed itself upon his lips.
He spoke it out, aloud: “Why—this—is forgery!”
Dazzled and stunned by the intensity of that awful awaking from some weird possession or suggestion of evil by a stronger mind, Guy Waring began to walk on in a feverish fashion, fast, fast, oh, so fast, not knowing where he went, but conscious only that he must keep moving, lest an accusing conscience should gnaw his very heart out.
Whither, he hadn’t as yet the faintest idea. His whole being for the moment was centred and summed up in that unspeakable remorse. He had done a great wrong. He had made himself a felon. And now, in the first recoil of his revolted nature, he must go after the man who held the evidences of his guilt, and by force or persuasion demand them at once from him. Those notes were Cyril’s. He must get them. He must get them.
Possessed by this one idea, with devouring force, but still in a very nebulous and hazy form, Guy began walking towards the Strand and the Embankment, at the hot top of his speed, to get the notes back—at Montague Nevitt’s chambers. He had walked with fiery zeal in that wrong direction for nearly a mile, his heart burning within him all the way, and his brain in a whirl, before it began to strike him, in a flash of common sense, that Montague Nevitt wouldn’t be there at all. He had driven off to the office. Guy clapped his hand to his forehead once more, in an agony of remorse. Great heavens, what folly! He had heard him tell the cabman the address himself—“127, Knatchbull Street, Cheapside.”
Even now he hadn’t sense enough to hail a cab and go after him. His faculties were still numbed and entranced by that horrible spell of Montague Nevitt’s eye. He had but one thought—to walk on, walk hastily. He tramped along the streets in the direction of Cheapside, straining every muscle to arrive at the office before Nevitt had parted with Cyril’s six thousand—but he never even thought of saving the precious moments by driving the distance between instead of walking it. Montague Nevitt’s personality still weighed down half his brain, and rendered his mind almost childish or imbecile.
Hurrying on so through the crowded streets, now walking, now running, now pausing, now panting, knocking up here against a little knot of wayfarers, and delayed again there by an untimely block at some crowded crossing, he turned the corner at last with a beating heart into the narrow pavement of an alley marked up as Knatchbull Street. Number 127 was visible from afar.
A mob of excited people marked its site by loitering about the door. Two policemen held off the angrier spirits among the shareholders. But, nothing daunted by the press, Guy forced his way in and looked around the room trembling, for Montague Nevitt. Too late! Too late! Nevitt wasn’t there. The unhappy dupe turned to the clerk in charge.
“Has Mr. Montague Nevitt been here?” he asked, in a voice all tremulous with emotion.
“Mr. Montague Nevitt?” the clerk responded. “Just gone ten minutes ago. Came to settle Mr. Whitley’s call—his brother-in-law’s. Went off in a cab. Can I do anything for you?”
“He’s paid in six thousand pounds?” Guy gasped out interrogatively.
The clerk gazed at him hard with a suspicious glance. “Are you a shareholder?” he asked, with one eye on the policeman. “What do you want to know for?”
“Yes, I’m a shareholder, unfortunately,” Guy answered, still in a maze. “I hold three hundred original shares. My name’s Guy Waring. You’ve got me on your books. Mr. Nevitt has paid three thousand in Mr. Whitley’s name, and three thousand for me. That was our arrangement.”
The clerk glanced hard at him again. “Waring!” he repeated, turning over the leaves of his big book for further verification. “Waring! Waring! Waring! Ah, here it is; Waring, Guy; journalist; 22, Staple Inn; 300 shares. Three hundred pounds paid. Then we call up to three thousand. No, Mr. Nevitt didn’t settle for you, sir. He paid Mr. Whitley’s call in full. That was all. Nothing else. You’re still our debtor.”
“He didn’t pay up!” Guy exclaimed, clapping his hands to his head, all the black guile and treachery of the man coining home to him at once, at one fell blow. “He didn’t pay up for me! Oh, this is too, too terrible!”
He paused for a moment. Floods of feeling rushed over him. He knew now that he had committed that forgery for nothing. Cyril’s money was gone. And Montague Nevitt had stolen the three thousand Guy intrusted to him at the bank for the second payment. Yet Guy knew he had no legal remedy save by acknowledging the forgery! This was almost more than human nature could stand. If Montague Nevitt had been by his side that moment Guy would have leapt at his throat, and it would have gone hard with him if he had left the villain living.
He clapped his hands to his ears in the horror and agony of that hideous disclosure.
“The thief!” he cried aloud, in a choking voice. “Did he pay what he paid from a big roll of notes, and did he take the rest of the notes in the roll away with him?”
“Yes, just so,” the clerk answered calmly. “He didn’t mention your name. But perhaps he’s coming back by-and-by to settle for you.”
Guy knew better. He saw through the man’s whole black nature at once.
“I’ve been robbed,” he said slowly. “I’ve been robbed and deserted. I must follow the man and compel him to disgorge. When I’ve got the cash back I’ll return and pay you. ... No, I won’t, though. I forgot. I’ll take it home to the bank for Cyril.”
The clerk gazed at him with a smile of pitying contempt. Mad, mad; quite mad! The loss of his fortune had, no doubt, unhinged this shareholder’s reason. But Guy, never heeding him, rushed out into the street and hailed a passing cab.
“Temple Flats,” he cried aloud, and drove to Nevitt’s chambers. Too late, once more! The housekeeper told him Mr. Nevitt was out. He’d just started off, portmanteau and all, as hard as a hansom could drive, to Waterloo Station.
“Waterloo, then!” Guy shouted, in wild despair, to the cabman. “We must follow this man post haste. Alive or dead, I won’t rest till I catch him!”
It was an unhappy phrase. In the events that came after, it was remembered against him.
CHAPTER XXI. — COLONEL KELMSCOTT’S PUNISHMENT.
While Montague Nevitt was thus congenially engaged in pulling off his treble coup of settling his own share in the Rio Negro deficit, pocketing three thousand pounds, pro tem, for incidental expenses, and getting Guy Waring thoroughly into his power by his knowledge of a forgery, two other events were taking place elsewhere, which were destined to prove of no small importance to the future of the twins and their immediate surroundings. Things generally were converging towards a crisis in their affairs. Colonel Kelmscott’s wrong-doing was bearing first-fruit abundantly.
For as soon as Granville Kelmscott received that strangely-worded note from Gwendoline Gildersleeve, he proceeded, as was natural, straight down, in his doubt, to his father’s library. There, bursting into the room, with Gwendoline’s letter still crushed in his hand in the side pocket of his coat, and a face like thunder, he stood in the attitude of avenging fate before his father’s chair, and gazed down upon him angrily.
“What does THIS mean?” he asked, in a low but fuming voice, brandishing the note before his eyes as he spoke. “Is every one in the county to be told it but I? Is everybody else to hear my business before you tell me a word of it? A letter comes to me this morning—no matter from whom—and here’s what it says: ‘I know you’re not the eldest son, and that somebody else is the heir of Tilgate.’ Surely, if anybody was to know, I should have known it first. Surely, if I’m to be turned adrift on the world, after being brought up to think myself a man of means so long, I should, at least, be turned adrift with my eyes open.”
Colonel Kelmscott gazed at him open-mouthed with horror.
“Did Gwendoline Gildersleeve write that to you?” he cried, overpowered at once by remorse and awe. “Did Gwendoline Gildersleeve write that to you? Well, if Gwendoline Gildersleeve knows it, it’s all up with the scheme! That rascally lawyer, her father, has found out everything. These two young men must have put their case in the fellow’s hands. He must be hunting up the facts. He must be preparing to contest it. My boy, my boy, we’re ruined! we’re ruined!”
“These two young men,” Granville repeated, with a puzzled air of surprise. “WHAT two young men? I don’t know them. I never heard of them.” Then suddenly one of those flashes of intuition burst in upon him that burst in upon us all at moments of critical importance to our lives. “Father, father,” he cried, loaning forward in his anguish and clutching the oak chair, “you don’t mean to tell me those fellows, the Warings, that we met at Chetwood Court, are your lawful sons—and that THAT was why you bought the landscape with the snake in it?”
Kelmscott, of Tilgate, bent his proud head down to the table unchecked. “My son, my son,” he cried, in his despair, “you have said it yourself. Your own mouth has suggested it. What use my trying to keep it from you any longer? These lads—are Kelmscotts.”
“And—my mother?” Granville Kelmscott burst out, in a very tremulous voice. The question was almost more than a man dare ask. But he asked it in the first bitterness of a terrible awakening.
“Your mother,” Colonel Kelmscott answered, lifting his head once more, with a terrible effort, and looking his son point-blank in the face—“your mother is just what I have always called her—my lawful wife—Lady Emily Kelmscott. The mother of these lads, to whom I was also once duly married, died before my marriage with my present wife—thank God I can say so. I may have acted foolishly, cruelly, criminally; but at least I never acted quite so basely and so ill as you impute to me, Granville.”
“Thank Heaven for that,” his son answered fervently, with one hand on his breast, drawing a deep sigh as he spoke. “You’re my father, sir, and it isn’t for me to reproach you; but if you had only done THAT—oh, my mother! my mother! I don’t know, sir, I’m sure, how I could ever have forgiven you; I don’t know how I could ever have kept my hands off you.”
Colonel Kelmscott straightened himself up, and looked hard at his son. A terrible pathos gleamed in his proud brown eyes. His white moustache had more dignity than ever.
“Granville,” he said slowly, like a broken man, “I don’t ask you to forgive me; you can never forgive me; I don’t ask you to sympathise with me; a father knows better than to accept sympathy from a son; but I do ask you to bear with me while I try to explain myself.”
He braced himself up, and with many long pauses, and many inarticulate attempts to set forth the facts in the least unfavourable aspect, told his story all through, in minute detail, to that hardest of all critics, his own dispossessed and disinherited boy.
“If you’re hard upon me, Granville,” he cried at last as he finished, looking wistfully for pity into his son’s face, “you should remember, at least, it was for your sake I did it, my boy; it was for your sake I did it—yours, yours, and your mother’s.”
Granville let him relate his whole story in full to the bitter end, though it was with difficulty at times that that proud and grey-haired man nerved himself up to tell it. Then, as soon as all was told, he looked in his father’s face once more, and said slowly, with the pitilessness of sons in general towards the faults and failings of their erring parents—
“It’s not my place to blame you, I know. You did it, I suppose, as you say so, for me and my mother. But it IS my place to tell you plainly, father, that I, for one, will have nothing at all to do with the fruits of your deception. I was no party to the fraud; I will be no party either to its results or its clearing up. I, too, have to think, as you say, of my mother. For her sake, I won’t urge you to break her heart at once by disinheriting her son, now and here, too openly. You can make what arrangements you like with these blood-sucking Warings. You can do as you will in providing them with hush-money. Let them take their black-mail! You’ve handed them over half the sum you got for Dowlands already, I suppose. You can buy them off for awhile by handing them over the remainder. Twelve thousand will do. Leeches as they are, that will surely content them, at least for the present.”
Colonel Kelmscott raised one hand and tried hard to interrupt him; but Granville would not be interrupted.
“No, no,” he went on sternly, shaking his head and frowning. “I’ll have my say for once, and then for ever keep silence. This is the first and last time as long as we both live I will speak with you on the subject. So we may as well understand one another, once and for ever. For my mother’s sake, as I said, there need be just at present no open disclosure. You have years to live yet; and as long as you live, these Waring people have no claim upon the estate in any way. You’ve given them as much as they’ve any right to expect. Let them wait for the rest till, in the course of nature, they come into possession. As for me, I will go to carve out for myself a place in the world elsewhere by my own exertions. Perhaps, before my mother need know her son was left a beggar by the father who brought him up like the heir to a large estate, I may have been able to carve out that place for myself so well that she need never really feel the difference. I’m a Kelmscott, and can fight the world on my own account. But, in any case, I must go. Tilgate’s no longer a fit home for me. I leave it to those who have a better right to it.”
He rose as if to depart, with the air of a man who sets forth upon the world to seek his fortune. Colonel Kelmscott rose too, and faced him, all broken.
“Granville,” he said, in a voice scarcely audible through the stifled sobs he was too proud to give vent to, “you’re not going like this. You’re not going without at least shaking hands with your father! You’re not going without saying good-bye to your mother!”
Granville turned, with hot tears standing dim in his eyes—like his father, he was too proud to let them trickle down his cheek—and taking the Colonel’s weather-beaten hand in his, wrung it silently for some minutes with profound emotion.
Then he looked at the white moustache, the grizzled hair, the bright brown eyes suffused with answering dimness, and said, almost remorsefully, “Father, good-bye. You meant me well, no doubt. You thought you were befriending me. But I wish to Heaven in my soul you had meant me worse. It would have been easier for me to bear in the end. If you’d brought me up as a nobody—as a younger son’s accustomed—” He paused and drew back, for he could see his words were too cruel for that proud man’s heart. Then he broke off suddenly.
“But I CAN’T say good-bye to my mother,” he went on, with a piteous look. “If I tried to say good-bye to her, I must tell her all. I’d break down in the attempt. I’ll write to her from the Cape. It’ll be easier so. She won’t feel it so much then.”
“From the Cape!” Colonel Kelmscott exclaimed, drawing back in horror. “Oh, Granville, don’t tell me you’re going away from us to Africa!”
“Where else?” his son asked, looking him back in the face steadily. “Africa it is! That’s the only opening left nowadays for a man of spirit. There, I may be able to hew out a place for myself at last, worthy of Lady Emily Kelmscott’s son. I won’t come back till I come back able to hold my own in the world with the best of them. These Warings shan’t crow over the younger son. Good-bye, once more, father.” He wrung his hand hard. “Think kindly of me when I’m gone; and don’t forget altogether I once loved Tilgate.”
He opened the door and went up to his own room again. His mind was resolved. He wouldn’t even say good-bye to Gwendoline Gildersleeve. He’d pack a few belongings in a portmanteau in haste, and go forth upon the world to seek his fortune in the South African diamond fields.
But Colonel Kelmscott sat still in the library, bowed down in his chair, with his head between his hands, in abject misery. A strange feeling seemed to throb through his weary brain; he had a sensation as though his skull were opening and shutting. Great veins on his forehead beat black and swollen. The pressure was almost more than the vessels would stand. He held his temples between his two palms as if to keep them from bursting. All ahead looked dark as night; the ground was cut from under him. The punishment of his sin was too heavy for him to bear. How could he ever tell Emily now that Granville was gone? A horrible numbness oppressed his brain. Oh, mercy! mercy! his head was flooded.
CHAPTER XXII. — CROSS PURPOSES.
At the Gildersleeves’, too, the house that day was alive with excitement.
Gwendoline had thrown herself into a fever of alarm as soon as she had posted her letter to Granville Kelmscott. She went up to her own room, flung herself wildly on the bed, and sobbed herself into a half-hysterical, half-delirious state, long before dinner-time. She hardly knew herself at first how really ill she was. Her hands were hot and her forehead burning. But she disregarded such mere physical and medical details as those, by the side of a heart too full for utterance. She thought only of Granville, and of that horrid man who had threatened with such evident spite and rancour to ruin him.
She lay there some hours alone, in a high fever, before her mother came up to her room to fetch her. Mrs. Gildersleeve was a subdued and soft-voiced woman, utterly crushed, so people said, by the stronger individuality of that blustering, domineering, headstrong man, her husband. And to say the truth, the eminent Q.C. had taken all the will out of her in twenty-three years of obedient slavery. She was pretty still, to be sure, in a certain faded, jaded, unassuming way; but her patient face wore a constant expression of suppressed terror, as if she expected every moment to be the victim of some terrible and unexplained exposure. And that feature at least in her idiosyncrasy could hardly be put down to Gilbert Gildersleeve’s account; for hectoring and strong-minded as the successful Q.C. was known to be, nobody could for a moment accuse him in any definite way of deliberate unkindness to his wife or daughter. On the contrary, he was tender and indulgent to them to the last degree, as he understood those virtues. It was only by constant assertion of his own individuality, and constant repression or disregard of theirs, that he had broken his wife’s spirit and was breaking his daughter’s. He treated them as considerately as one treats a pet dog, doing everything for them that care and money could effect, except to admit for a moment their claim to independent opinions and actions of their own, or to allow the possibility of their thinking and feeling on any subject on earth one nail’s breadth otherwise than as he himself did.
At sight of Gwendoline, Mrs. Gildersleeve came over to the bed with a scared and startled air, felt her daughter’s face tenderly with her hands for a moment, and then cried in alarm, “Why, Gwennie, what’s this? Your cheeks are burning! Who on earth has been here? Has that horrid man come down again from London to worry you?”
Gwendoline looked up and tried to prevaricate. But conscience was too strong for her; the truth would out for all that. “Yes, mother,” she cried, after a pause, “and he said, oh, he said—I could never tell you what dreadful things he said. But he’s so wicked, so cruel! You never knew such a man! He thinks I want to marry Granville Kelmscott, and so he told me—” She broke off, of a sudden, unable to proceed, and buried her face in her hands, sobbing long and bitterly.
“Well, what did he tell you, dear?” Mrs. Gildersleeve asked, with that frightened air, as of a startled wild thing, growing deeper than ever upon her countenance as she uttered the question.
“He told me—oh, he told me—I can’t tell you what he told me; but he threatened to ruin us—he threatened it so dreadfully. It was a hateful threat. He seemed to have found out something that he knew would be our ruin. He frightened me to death. I never heard any one say such things as he did.”
Mrs. Gildersleeve drew back in profound agitation. “Found out something that would be our ruin!” she cried, with white face all aghast. “Oh, Gwennie, what do you mean? Didn’t he tell you what it was? Didn’t he try to explain to you? He’s a wicked, wicked man—so cruel, so unscrupulous! He gets one’s secrets into his hands, by underhand means, and then uses them to make one do whatever he chooses. I see how it is. He wants to force us into letting him marry you—into making you marry him! Oh, Gwennie, this is hard. Didn’t he tell you at all what it was he knew? Didn’t he give you a hint what sort of secret he was driving at?”
Gwendoline looked up once more, and murmured low through her sobs, “No, he didn’t say what it was. He’s too cunning for that. But I think—I think it was something about Granville. Mother, I never told you, but you know I love him! I think it was something about HIM, though I can’t quite make sure. Some secret about somebody not being properly married, or something of that sort. I didn’t quite understand. You see, he was so discreetly vague and reticent.”
Mrs. Gildersleeve drew back her face all aghast with horror. “Some secret—about somebody—not being properly married!” she repeated slowly, with wild terror in her eyes.
“Yes, mother,” Gwendoline gasped out, with an effort once more. “It was about somebody not being really the proper heir; he made me promise I wouldn’t tell; but I don’t know how to keep it. He was immensely full of it; it was an awful secret; and he said he would ruin us—ruin us ruthlessly. He said we were in his power, and he’d crush us under his heel. And, oh, when he said it, you should have seen his face. It was horrible, horrible. I’ve seen nothing else since. It dogs me—it haunts me.”
Mrs. Gildersleeve sat down by the bedside wringing her hands in silence. “It’s too late to-night,” she said at last, after a long deep pause, and in a voice like a woman condemned to death, “too late to do anything; but to-morrow your father must go up to town and try to see him. At all costs we must buy him off. He knows everything—that’s clear. He’ll ruin us. He’ll ruin us!”
“It’s no use papa going up to town, though,” Gwendoline answered half dreamily. “That dreadful man said he was going away for his holiday to the country at once. He’ll be gone to-morrow.”
“Gone? Gone where?” Mrs. Gildersleeve cried, in the same awestruck voice.
“To Devonshire,” Gwendoline replied, shutting her eyes hard and still seeing him.
Mrs. Gildersleeve echoed the phrase in a startled cry. “To Devonshire, Gwendoline! To Devonshire! Did he say to Devonshire?”
“Yes,” Gwendoline went on slowly, trying to recall his very words. “To the skirts of Dartmoor, I think he said; to a place in the wilds by the name of Mambury.”
“Mambury!”
The terror and horror that frail and faded woman threw into the one word fairly startled Gwendoline. She opened her eyes and stared aghast at her mother. And well she might, for the effect was electrical. Mrs. Gildersleeve was sitting there, transfixed with awe and some unspeakable alarm; her figure was rigid; her face was dead white; her mouth was drawn down with a convulsive twitch; she clasped her bloodless hands on her knees in mute agony. For a moment she sat there like a statue of flesh. Then, as sense and feeling came back to her by slow degrees, she could but rock her body up and down in her chair with a short swaying motion, and mutter over and over again to herself in that same appalled and terrified voice, “Mambury—Mambury—Mambury—Mambury.”
“That was the name, I’m sure,” Gwendoline went on, almost equally alarmed. “On a hunt after records, he said; on a hunt after records. Whatever it was he wanted to prove, I suppose he knew that was the place to prove it.”
Mrs. Gildersleeve rose, or to speak with more truth, staggered slowly to her feet, and, steadying herself with an effort, made blindly for the door, groping her way as she went, like some faint and wounded creature. She said not a word to Gwendoline. She had no tongue left for speech or comment. She merely stepped on, pale and white, pale and white, like one who walks in her sleep, and clutched the door-handle hard to keep her from falling. Gwendoline, now thoroughly alarmed, followed her close on her way to the top of the stairs. There Mrs. Gildersleeve paused, turned round to her daughter with a mute look of anguish and held up one hand, palm outward, appealingly, as if on purpose to forbid her from following farther. At the gesture, Gwendoline fell back, and looked after her mother with straining eyes. Mrs. Gildersleeve staggered on, erect, yet to all appearance almost incapable of motion, and stumbled down the stairs, and across the hall, and into the drawing-room opposite. The rest Gwendoline neither saw, nor heard, nor guessed at. She crept back into her own room, and, flinging herself on her bed alone as she stood, cried still more piteously and miserably than ever.
Down in the drawing-room, however, Mrs. Gildersleeve found the famous Q.C. absorbed in the perusal of that day’s paper. She came across towards him, pale as a ghost, and with ashen lips. “Gilbert,” she said slowly, blurting it all out in her horror, without one word of warning, “that dreadful man Nevitt has seen Gwennie again, and he’s told her he knows all, and he means to ruin us, and he’s heard of the marriage, and he’s gone down to Mambury to hunt up the records!”
The eminent Q.C. let the paper drop from his huge red hands in the intensity of his surprise, while his jaw fell in unison at so startling and almost incredible a piece of intelligence. “Nevitt knows all!” he exclaimed, half incredulous. “He means to ruin us! And he told this to Gwendoline! Gone down to Mambury! Oh no, Minnie, impossible! You must have made some mistake. What did she say exactly? Did she mention Mambury?”
“She said it exactly as I’ve said it now to you,” Mrs. Gildersleeve persisted with a stony stare. “He’s gone down to Devonshire, she said; to the borders of Dartmoor, on a hunt after the records; to a place in the wilds by the name of Mambury. Those were her very words. I could stake my life on each syllable. I give them to you precisely as she gave them to me.”
Mr. Gildersleeve gazed across at her with the countenance which had made so many a nervous witness quake at the Old Bailey. “Are you QUITE sure of that, Minnie?” he asked, in his best cross-examining tone. “Quite sure she said Mambury, all of her own accord? Quite sure you didn’t suggest it to her, or supply the name, or give her a hint of its whereabouts, or put her a leading question?”
“Is it likely I’d suggest it to her?” the meekest of women answered, aroused to retort for once, and with her face like a sheet. “Is it likely I’d tell her? Is it likely I’d give my own girl the clue? She said it all of herself, I tell you, without one word of prompting. She said it just as I repeated it—to a place in the wilds by the name of Mambury.”
Gilbert Gildersleeve whistled inaudibly to himself. ‘Twas his way when he felt himself utterly nonplussed. This was very strange news. He didn’t really understand it. But he rose and confronted his wife anxiously. That overbearing big man was evidently stirred by this untoward event to the very depths of his nature.
“Then Gwennie knows all!” he cried, the blood rushing purple into his ruddy flushed cheeks. “The wretch! The brute! He must have told her everything!”
“Oh, Gilbert,” his wife answered, sinking into a chair in her horror, “even HE couldn’t do that—not to my own very daughter! And he didn’t do it, I’m sure. He didn’t dare—coward as he is, he couldn’t be quite so cowardly. She doesn’t guess what it means. She thinks it’s something, I believe, about Granville Kelmscott. She’s in love with young Kelmscott, as I told you long ago, and everything to her mind takes some colour from that fancy. I don’t think it ever occurred to her, from what she says, this has anything at all to do with you or me, Gilbert.”
The Q.C. reflected. He saw at once he was in a tight corner. That boisterous man, with the burly big hands, looked quite subdued and crestfallen now. He could hardly have snubbed the most unassuming junior. This was a terrible thing, indeed, for a man so unscrupulous and clever as Montague Nevitt to have wormed out of the registers. How he could ever have wormed it out Gilbert Gildersleeve hadn’t the faintest idea, Why, who on earth could have shown him the entry of that fatal marriage—Minnie’s first marriage—the marriage with that wretch who died in Portland prison—the marriage that was celebrated at St. Mary’s, at Mambury? He couldn’t for a moment conceive, for nobody but themselves, he fondly imagined, had ever identified Mrs. Gilbert Gildersleeve, the wife of the eminent Q.C., with that unhappy Mrs. Read, the convict’s widow. The convict’s widow. Ah, there was the rub. For she was really a widow in name alone when Gilbert Gildersleeve married her.
And Montague Nevitt, that human ferret, with his keen sharp eyes, and his sleek polite ways, had found it all out in spite of them—had hunted up the date of Read’s death and their marriage, and had bragged how he was going down to Mambury to prove it!
All the Warings and Reads always got married at Widdicombe or Mambury. There were lots of them on the books there, that was one comfort, anyhow. He’d have a good search to find his needle in such a pottle of hay. But to think the fellow should have, had the double-dyed cruelty to break the shameful secret first of all to Gwendoline! That was his vile way of trying to force a poor girl into an unwilling consent. Gilbert Gildersleeve lifted his burly big hands in front of his capacious waistcoat, and pressed them together angrily. If only he had that rascal’s throat well between them at that moment! He’d crush the fellow’s windpipe till he choked him on the spot, though he answered for it before the judges of assize to-morrow!
“There’s only one thing possible for it, Minnie,” he said at last, drawing a long deep breath. “I must go down to Mambury to-morrow to be beforehand with him. And I must either buy him off; or else, if that won’t do—”
“Or else what, Gilbert?”
She trembled like an aspen leaf.
“Or else get at the books in the vestry myself,” the Q.C. muttered low between his clenched teeth, “before the fellow has time to see them and prove it.”
CHAPTER XXIII. — GUY IN LUCK.
Guy Waring reached Waterloo ten minutes too late. Nevitt had gone on by the West of England express. The porter at the labelling place “minded the gentleman well.” He was a sharp-looking gentleman, with a queer look about the eyes, and a dark moustache curled round at the corners.
“Yes, yes,” Guy cried eagerly, “that’s him right enough. The eyes mark the man. And where was he going to?”
“He had his things labelled,” the porter said, “for Plymouth.”
“And when does the next train start?” Guy inquired, all on fire.
The porter, consulting the time-table in the muddle-headed way peculiar to railway porters, and stroking his chin with his hand to assist cerebration, announced, after a severe internal struggle, that the 3.45 down, slow, was the earliest train available.
There was nothing for it then, Guy perceived, but to run home to his rooms, possessing his soul in patience, pack up a few things in his Gladstone bag, and return at his leisure to catch the down train thus unfavourably introduced to his critical notice.
If Guy had dared, to be sure, he might have gone straight to a police-station, and got an inspector to telegraph along the line to stop the thief with his booty at Basingstoke or Salisbury. But Guy didn’t dare. For to interfere with Nevitt now by legal means would be to risk the discovery of his own share in the forgery. And from that risk the startled and awakened young man shrank for a thousand reasons; though the chief among them all was certainly one that never would have occurred to any one but himself as even probable.
He didn’t wish Elma Clifford to know that the man she loved, and the man who loved her, had become that day a forger’s brother.
To be sure, he had only seen Elma once—that afternoon at the Holkers’ garden-party. But, as Cyril himself knew, he had fallen in love with her at first sight—far more immediately, indeed, than even Cyril himself had done. Blood, as usual, was thicker than water. The points that appealed to one brother appealed also to the other, but with this characteristic difference, that Guy, who was the more emotional and less strong-willed of the two, yielded himself up at the very first glance to the beautiful stranger, while Cyril required some further acquaintance before quite giving way and losing his heart outright to her. And from that first meeting forward, Guy had carried Elma Clifford’s image engraved upon his memory—as he would carry it, he believed, to his dying day. Not, to be sure, that he ever thought for a moment of endeavouring to win her away from his brother. She was Cyril’s discovery, and to Cyril, therefore, he yielded her up, as of prior right, though with a pang of reluctance. But now that he stood face to face at last with his own accomplished crime, the first thought that rose in his mind spontaneous was for Elma’s happiness. He must never let Elma Clifford know that the man she loved, and would doubtless marry, was now by HIS act—a forger’s brother.
Three forty-five arrived at last, and Guy set off, all trembling, on his fatal quest. As he sped along, indignant at heart with Nevitt’s black treachery, on the line to Plymouth, he had plenty of time to revolve these things abundantly in his own soul. And when, after a long and dusty drive, he reached Plymouth, late at night, he could learn nothing for the moment about Montague Nevitt’s movements. So he was forced to go quietly for the evening to the Duke of Devonshire Hotel, and there wait as best he might to see how events would next develop themselves.
A day passed away—two days—but nothing turned up. Guy wasted much time in Plymouth making various inquiries before he learnt at last that a man with a queer look about the eyes, and a moustache with waxed ends, had gone down a night or so earlier by the other line to a station at the foot of Dartmoor, by the name of Mambury.
No sooner, however, had he learnt this promising news, than he set off at once, hot at heart as ever, to pursue the robber. That wretch shouldn’t get away scot free with his booty; Guy would follow him and denounce him to the other end of the universe! When he reached Mambury, he went direct to the village inn and asked, with trembling lips, if Mr. Montague Nevitt was at present staying there. The landlord shook his head with a stubborn, rustic negative. “No, we arn’t a-got no gentleman o’ thik there name in the house,” he said; “fact is, zur, to tell ‘ee the truth, we arn’t a-had nobody stoppin’ in the Arms at all lately, ‘cep’ it might be a gentleman come down from London, an’ it was day afore yesterday as he did come, an’ he do call ‘unself McGregor.”
Quick as lightning, Guy suspected Nevitt might be passing under a false name. What more likely, indeed, seeing he had made off with Guy’s three thousand pounds?
“And what sort of a man is this McGregor?” he asked hastily, putting his suspicion into shape. “What age? What height? What kind of a person to look at?”
“Wull, he’s a vine upstandin’ zart of a gentleman,” the landlord answered glibly in his own dialect; “as proper a gentleman as you’d wish to zee in a day’s march; med be about your height, zur, or a trifle more, has his moustaches curled round zame as if it med be a bellick’s harns; an’ a strange zart o’ a look about his eyes, too, as if ur could zee right drew an’ drew ‘ee.”
“That’s him!” Guy exclaimed, with a start, in profound excitement. “That’s the fellow, sure enough. I know him. I know him. And where is he now, landlord? Is he in the house? Can I see him?”
“Well, no, ‘ee can’t zee him, zur,” the landlord answered, eyeing the stranger askance; “he be out, jest at present. He do go vur a walk, mostly, down yonner in the bottom alongside the brook. Mebbe if you was to vollow by river-bank you med come up wi’ him by-an’-by ... and mebbe, agin, you medn’t.”
“I’ll follow him,” Guy exclaimed, growing more excited than ever, now this quarry was almost well within sight; “I’ll follow him till I find him, the confounded rascal. I’ll follow him to his grave. He shan’t get away from me.”
The landlord looked at him with a dubious frown. That one could smile and smile and be a villain didn’t enter into his simple rustic philosophy.
“He’s a pleasant-spoken gentleman is Maister McGregor,” the honest Devonian said, with a tinge of disapprobation in his thick voice. “What vur do ‘ee want to vind ‘un? That’s what I wants to know. He don’t look like one as did ever hurt a vlea. Such a soft zart of a voice. An’ he do play on the viddle that beautiful—that beautiful, why, ‘tis the zame if he war a angel from heaven. Viddler Moore, he wur up here wi’ his music last night; an’ Maister McGregor, he took the instrument vrom un, an’ ‘Let ME have a try, my vrend,’ says he, all modest and unassoomin’; and vi’ that, he wounded it up, an’ he begun to play. Lard, how he did play. Never heard nothing like it in all my barn days. It is the zame, vor all the world, as you do hear they viddler chaps that plays by themselves in the Albert Hall up to London. Depend upon it, zur, there ain’t no harm in HIM. A vullow as can play on the viddle like thik there, why, he couldn’t do no hurt, not to child nor chicken.”
Guy turned away from the door, fretting and fuming inwardly. He knew better than that. Nevitt’s consummate mastery of his chosen instrument was but of a piece, after all, with the way he could play on all the world, as on a familiar gamut. It was the very skill of the man that made him so dangerous and so devilish. Guy felt that under the spell of Nevitt’s eye he himself was but as clay in the hands of the potter.
But Nevitt should never so trick him and twist him again. To that his mind was now fully made up. He would never let that cold eye hold him fixed as of yore by its steely glance. Once for all, Nevitt had proved his power too well. Guy would take good care he never subjected himself in future to that uncanny influence. One forgery was enough. Henceforth he was adamant.
And yet? And yet he was going to seek out Nevitt; going to stand face to face with that smiling villain again; going to tax him with his crime; going to ask him what he meant by this double-dyed treachery.
The landlord had told him where Nevitt was most likely to be found. He followed that direction. At a gate that turned by the river-bank, twenty minutes from the inn, a small boy was seated. He was a Devonshire boy of the poorest moorland type, short, squat, and thick set. As Guy reached the gate, the boy rose and opened it, pulling his forelock twice or thrice, expectant of a ha’penny. “Has anybody gone down here?” Guy asked, in an excited voice.
And the boy answered promptly, “Yes, thik there gentleman, what’s stoppin’ at the Talbot Arms. And another gentleman, too; o’ny t’other one come after and went t’other way round. A big zart o’ a gentleman wi’ ‘ands vit vor two. He axed me the zame question, had anybody gone by. This is dree of ‘ee as has come zince I’ve been a zitting here.”
Guy paid no attention to the second-named gentleman, with the hands fit for two, or to his inquiries after who might have gone before him. He fastened at once on the really important and serious information that the person who was stopping at the Talbot Arms had shortly before turned down the side footpath.
“All right, my boy,” he said, tossing the lad sixpence, the first coin he came across in his waistcoat pocket. The boy opened his eyes wide, and pocketed it with a grin. So unexpected a largess sufficed to impress the handsome stranger firmly on his memory. He didn’t forget him when a few days later he was called on to give evidence—at a coroner’s inquest.
But Guy, unsuspicious of the harm he had done himself, walked on, all on fire, down the woodland path. It was a shady path, and it led through a deep dell arched with hazels on every side, while a little brawling brook ran along hard by, more heard than seen, in the bottom of the dingle. Thick bramble obscured the petty rapids from view and half trailed their lush shoots here and there across the pathway. It was just such a mossy spot as Cyril would have loved to paint; and Guy, himself half an artist by nature, would in any other mood have paused to gaze delighted on its tangled greenery.
As it was, however, he was in no mood to loiter long over ferns and mosses. He walked down that narrow way, where luxuriant branches of fresh green blackberry bushes encroached upon the track, still seething in soul, and full of the bitter wrong inflicted upon him by the man he had till lately considered his dearest friend. At each bend of the footpath, as it threaded its way through the tortuous dell, following close the elbows of the bickering little stream, he expected to come full in sight of Nevitt. But, gaze as he would, no Nevitt appeared. He must have gone on, Guy thought, and come out at the other end, into the upland road, of which the porters at Mambury Station had told him.
At last he arrived at a delicious green nook, where the shade of the trees overhead was exceptionally dense, and where the ferns by the side were somewhat torn and trodden. Casting his eye on the ground to the left, a metal clasp, gleaming silvery among the bracken, happened to attract his cursory attention. Something about that clasp looked strangely familiar. He paused and stared hard at it. Surely, surely he had seen those metal knobs before. A flash of recognition ran electric through his brain. Why, yes; it was the fastener of Montague Nevitt’s pocket-book—the pocket-book in which he carried his most private documents; the pocket-book that must have held Cyril’s stolen six thousand. Guy stooped down to pick it up with a whirling sense of surprise. Great heavens! what was this? Not only the clasp, but the pocket-book itself—the pocket-book filled full and crammed to bursting with papers. Ah, mercy, what papers? Yes, incredible—the money! Hundred-pound notes! Not a doubt upon earth of it. The whole of the stolen and re-stolen three thousand.
For a minute or two Guy stood there, unable to believe his own swimming eyes. What on earth could have happened? Was it chance or design? Had Nevitt deliberately thrown away his ill-gotten gains? Were detectives on the track? Was he anxious to conceal his part in the theft? Had remorse got the better of him? Or was he frightened at last, thinking Guy was on his way to recover and restore Cyril’s stolen property?
But no, the pocket-book was neither hidden in the ferns nor yet studiously thrown away. From the place where it lay, Guy felt confident at once it had fallen unperceived from Nevitt’s pocket, and been trodden by his heel unawares into the yielding leaf-mould.
Had he pulled it out accidentally with his handkerchief? Very likely, Guy thought. But then, how strange and improbable that a man so methodical and calculating as Nevitt should carry such valuable belongings as those in the self-same pocket. It was certainly most singular. However, Guy congratulated himself, after a moment’s pause, that so much at least of the stolen property was duly recovered. He could pay back one-half of the purloined sum now to Cyril’s credit. So he went on his way through the rest of the wood in a somewhat calmer and easier frame of mind. To be sure, he had still to hunt down that villain Nevitt, and to tax him to his face with his double-dyed treachery. But it was something, nevertheless, to have recovered a part, at any rate, of the stolen money. And Nevitt himself need never know by what fortunate accident he had happened to recover it.
He emerged on the upland road, and struck back towards Mambury. All the way round, he never saw his man. Weary with walking, he returned in the end to the Talbot Arms. Had Mr. McGregor come back? No, not yet; but he was sure to be home for dinner. Then Guy would wait, and dine at the inn as well. He might have to stop all night, but he must see McGregor.
As the day wore on, however, it became gradually clear to him that Montague Nevitt didn’t mean to return at all. Hour after hour passed by, but nothing was heard of him. The landlord, good man, began to express his doubts and fears most freely. He hoped no harm hadn’t come to the gentleman in the parlour; he had a powerful zight o’ money on un for a man to carry about; the landlord had zeen it when he took out his book from his pocket to pay the porter. Volks didn’t ought to go about with two or dree hundred pound or more in the lonely lanes on the edge of the moorland.
But Guy, for his part, put a different interpretation on the affair at once. In some way or other Montague Nevitt, he thought, must have found out he was being tracked, and, fearing for his safety, must have dropped the pocket-book and made off, without note or notice given, on his own sound legs, for some other part of the country.
So Guy made up his mind to return next morning by the very first train direct to Plymouth, and there inquire once more whether anything further had been seen of the noticeable stranger.