Elma hurried home full of intense misgivings. She dreaded having to meet her mother’s eye. How on earth could she hide from that searching glance the whole truth as to what had happened in the wood that morning? When she reached home, however, she learned to her relief, from the maid who opened the door to her, that their neighbour, Mr. Gilbert Gildersleeve, the distinguished Q.C., had dropped in for lunch, and this chance diversion supplied Elma with a little fresh courage to face the inevitable. She went straight up to her own room the moment she entered the house, without seeing her mother, and there she waited, bathing her face copiously till some minutes after the lunch bell had rung. For she felt sure she would blush crimson when she met her mother; but as she blushed habitually when strangers came in, the cause of it might thus, perhaps, she vainly flattered herself, escape even those lynx-like eyes of Mrs. Clifford’s.
The great Q.C., a big, overbearing man, with a pair of huge burly hands that somehow seemed to form his chief feature, was a little bit blustering in his talk, as usual; the more so because he had just learned incidentally that something had gone wrong between his daughter Gwendoline and Granville Kelmscott. For though that little episode of private wooing had run its course nominally without the knowledge or consent of either family, Mr. Gilbert Gildersleeve, at least, had none the less been aware for many weeks past of the frequent meetings between Gwendoline and Granville in the dell just beyond the disputed boundary line. And as Mr. Gildersleeve disliked Colonel Kelmscott of Tilgate Park, for a pig-headed esquire, almost as cordially as Colonel Kelmscott disliked Mr. Gildersleeve in return for a rascally lawyer, it had given the great Q.C. no little secret satisfaction in his own soul to learn that his daughter Gwendoline was likely to marry the Colonel’s son and heir, directly against the wishes and consent of his father.
Only that very morning, however, poor Mrs. Gildersleeve, that tired, crushed wife, had imparted to her lord and master, in fear and trembling, the unpleasant intelligence that, so far as she could make out, there was something wrong between Granville and Gwendoline. And this something wrong she ventured to suggest was no mere lover’s tiff of the ordinary kiss-and-make-it-up description, but a really serious difficulty in the way of their marriage. So Mr. Gildersleeve, thus suddenly deprived of his expected triumph, took it out another way by more than even his wonted boisterousness of manner in talking about the fortunes of the Kelmscott family.
“I fancy, myself, you know, Mrs. Clifford,” he was saying, very loud, as Elma entered, “there’s a screw loose just now in the Kelmscott affairs—something rotten somewhere in the state of Denmark. That young fellow, Granville, who’s by no means such a bad lot as his father all round—too good for the family, in fact; too good for the family—Granville’s been accustomed of late to come over into my grounds, beyond the boundary wall, and being anxious above all things to cultivate friendly relations with all my neighbours in the county, I’ve allowed him to come—I’ve allowed him, and I may even say to a certain extent I’ve encouraged him. There at times he’s met by accident my daughter Gwendoline. Oh, dear no”—with uplifted hand, and deprecating lips—“I assure you, nothing of THAT sort, my dear Mrs. Clifford. Gwendoline’s far too young, and I couldn’t dream of allowing her to marry into Colonel Kelmscott’s family. But, however, be that as it may, he’s been in the habit of coming there, till very recently, when all of a sudden, only a week or ten days back, to my immense surprise he ceased at once, and ever since has dropped into the defensive, exactly as he used to do. And I interpret it to mean—”
Elma heard no more of that pompous speech. Her knees shook under her. For she was aware only of Mrs. Clifford’s eyes, fixed mildly and calmly upon her face, not in anger, as she feared, or reproach, but rather in infinite pity. For a second their glances met in mute intercourse of soul, then each dropped their eyelashes as suddenly as before. Through the rest of that lunch Elma sat as in a maze, hearing and seeing nothing. What she ate, or drank, or talked about, she knew not. Mr. Gildersleeve’s pungent and embellished anecdotes of the Kelmscott family and their unneighbourly pride went in at one ear and out at the other. All she was conscious of was her mother’s sympathetic yet unerring eye; she felt sure that at one glance that wonderful thought-reader had divined everything, and seen through and through their interview that morning.
After lunch, the two men strolled upon the lawn to enjoy their cigars, and Elma and her mother were left alone in the drawing-room.
For some minutes neither could make up her mind to break the ice and speak. They sat shame-faced beside one another on the sofa, like a pair of shy and frightened maidens. At last Mrs. Clifford braced herself up to interrupt the awkward silence. “You’ve been in Chetwood Forest, Elma,” she murmured low, looking down and averting her eyes carefully from her trembling daughter.
“Yes, mother,” Elma answered, all aglow with conscious blushes. “In Chetwood Forest.”
“And you met him, dear?” The mother spoke tenderly and sympathetically.
Elma’s heart stood still. “Yes, mother, I met him.”
“And he had the snake there?”
Elma started in surprise. Why dwell upon that seemingly unimportant detail? “Oh yes,” she answered, still redder and hotter than ever. “He had it there. He was painting it.”
Mrs. Clifford paused a minute. Then she went on, with pain. “And he asked you, Elma?”
Elma bowed her head. “Yes, he asked me—and I refused him,” she answered, with a terrible wrench.
“Oh, darling; I know it,” Mrs. Clifford cried, seizing both cold hands in hers. “And I know why, too. But, Elma, believe me, you needn’t have done it. My daughter, my daughter, you might just as well have taken him.”
“No, never,” Elma cried, rising from her seat and moving towards the door in an agony of shame. “I couldn’t. I daren’t. It would be wrong. It would be cruel. But, mother, don’t speak to me of it. Don’t mention it again. Even before you it makes me more wretched and ashamed than I can say to allude to it.”
She rushed from the room, with cheeks burning like fire. Come what might, she never could talk to any living soul again about that awful episode.
But Mrs. Clifford sat on, on the sofa where Elma left her, and cried to herself silently, silently, silently. What a mother should do in these hateful circumstances she could hardly even guess. She only knew she could never speak it out, and even if she did, Elma would never have the courage or the heart to listen to her.
That same evening, when Elma went up to bed, a strange longing came across her to sit up late, and think over to herself again all the painful details of the morning’s interview. She seated herself by her bedside in her evening dress, and began to think it all out again, exactly as it happened. As she did so, the picture of Sardanapalus, on his bed of fern, came up clear in her mind, just as he lay coiled round in Cyril Waring’s landscape. Beautiful Sardanapalus, so sleek and smooth and glossy, if only she had him here now—she paused and hesitated. In a moment, the wild impulse rushed upon her once more. It clutched her by the throat; it held her fast as in a vice. She must get up and dance; she must obey the mandate; she must whirl till she fell in that mystical ecstasy.
She rose, and seemed for a moment as though she must yield to the temptation. The boa—the boa was in the lower drawer. Reluctantly, remorsefully, she opened the drawer and took it out in her hands. Fluff and feathers, fluff and feathers—nothing more than that! But oh, how soft, how smooth, how yielding, how serpentine! With a violent effort she steadied herself, and looked round for her scissors. They lay on the dressing-table. She took them up with a fixed and determined air. “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off,” she thought to herself. Then she began ruthlessly hacking the boa into short little lengths of a few inches each, which she gathered up in her hands as soon as she had finished, and replaced with care in the drawer where she had originally found them.
After that her mind felt somewhat more at ease and a trifle less turbulent. She loved Cyril Waring—oh yes, she loved him with all her heart; it was hard to give him up; hard not to yield to that pressing impulse in such a moment of doubt and despondency. The boa had said to her, as it were, “Come, dance, go mad, and forget your trouble!” But she had resisted the temptation. And now—
Why, now, she would undress, and creep into bed, like any other good English girl under similar circumstances, and cry herself asleep with thoughts of Cyril.
And so she did in truth. She let her emotion take its natural outlet. She lay awake for an hour or two, till her eyes were red and sore and swollen. Then at last she dropped off, for very weariness, and slept soundly an unbroken sleep till morning.
At eight o’clock, Mrs. Clifford knocked her tentative little knock at the door. “Come in, mother,” Elma cried, starting up in her surprise; and her mother, much wondering, turned the handle and entered.
When she reached the bed, she gave a little cry of amazement. “Why, Elma,” she exclaimed, staring her hard and long in the face; “my darling, what’s this? Your eyes are red! How strange! You’ve been crying!”
“Yes, mother,” Elma answered, turning her face to the wall, but a thousand times less ashamed than she had been the day before when her mother spoke to her. “I couldn’t help it, dearest.” She took that soft white hand in hers and pressed it hard in silence. “It’s no wonder, you know,” she said at last, after a long deep pause. “He’s going away from Chetwood to-day—and it was so very, very hard to say good-bye to him for ever.”
“Oh yes, I know, darling,” Mrs. Clifford answered, eyeing her harder than ever now with a half-incredulous look. “I know all that. But—you’ve had a good night in spite of everything, Elma.”
Elma guessed what she meant. They two could converse together quite plainly without words. “Well, yes, a better night,” she answered, hesitating, and shutting her eyes under the bed-clothes for very shame. “A little disturbed—don’t you know—just at first; but I had a good cry very soon, and then that mended everything.”
Her mother still looked at her, half doubting and half delighted. “A good cry’s the right thing,” she said slowly, in a very low voice. “The exact right thing, perfectly proper and normal. A good cry never did any girl on this earth one atom of harm. It’s the best safety-valve. You’re lucky, Elma, my child, in being able to get one.”
“Yes, dear,” Elma answered, with her head still buried. “Very lucky indeed. So I think, too, mother.”
Mrs. Clifford’s eye fell aimlessly upon certain tiny bits of feathery fluff that flecked the floor here and there like floating fragments of thistledown. In a second, her keen instinct divined what they meant. Without one word she rose silently and noiselessly, and opened the lower drawer, where the boa usually reposed among the furs and feathers. One glimpse of those mangled morsels showed her the truth at a glance. She shut the drawer again noiselessly and silently as she had opened it. But Elma, lying still with her eyes closed tight, yet knew perfectly well how her mother had been occupied.
Mrs. Clifford came back, and, stooping over her daughter’s bed, kissed her forehead tenderly. “Elma, darling,” she said, while a hot tear or two fell silently upon the girl’s burning cheek, “you’re very, very brave. I’m so pleased with you, so proud of you! I couldn’t have done it myself. You’re stronger-minded than I am. My child, he kissed you for good-bye yesterday. You needn’t say yes, you needn’t say no. I read it in your face. No need for you to tell me of it. Well, darling, it wasn’t good-bye after all, I’m certain of that. Believe me, my child, he’ll come back some day, and you’ll know you can marry him.”
“Never!” Elma cried, hiding her face still more passionately and wildly than before beneath great folds of the bed-clothes. “Don’t speak to me of him any more, mother! Never! Never! Never!”
Cyril Waring, thus dismissed, and as in honour bound, hurried up to London with a mind preoccupied by many pressing doubts and misgivings. He thought much of Elma, but he thought much, too, of sundry strange events that had happened of late to his own private fortunes. For one thing he had sold, and sold mysteriously, at a very good price, the picture of Sardanapalus in the glade at Chetwood. A well-known London dealer had written down to him at Tilgate making an excellent offer for the unfinished work, as soon as it should be ready, on behalf of a customer whose name he didn’t happen to mention. And who could that customer be, Cyril thought to himself, but Colonel Kelmscott? But that wasn’t all. The dealer who had offered him a round sum down for “The Rajah’s Rest” had also at the same time commissioned him to go over to the Belgian Ardennes to paint a picture or two, at a specified price, of certain selected scenes upon the Meuse and its tributaries. The price offered for the work was a very respectable one, and yet—he had some internal misgivings, somehow, about this mysterious commission. Could it be to get rid of him? He had an uncomfortable suspicion in the back chambers of his mind, that whoever had commissioned the pictures might be more anxious to send him well away from Tilgate than to possess a series of picturesque sketches on the Meuse and its tributaries.
And who could have an interest in keeping him far from Tilgate? That was the question. Was there anybody whom his presence there could in any way incommode? Could it be Elma’s father who wanted to send him so quickly away from England?
And what was the meaning of Elma’s profound resolution, so strangely and strongly expressed, never, never to marry him?
A painful idea flitted across the young man’s puzzled brain. Had the Cliffords alone discovered the secret of his birth? and was that secret of such a disgraceful sort that Elma’s father shrank from owning him as a prospective son-in-law, while even Elma herself could not bring herself to accept him as her future husband? If so, what could that ghastly secret be? Were he and Guy the inheritors of some deadly crime? Had their origin been concealed from them, more in mercy than in cruelty, only lest some hideous taint of murder or of madness might mar their future and make their whole lives miserable?
When he reached Staple Inn, he found Guy and Montague Nevitt already in their joint rooms, and arrears of three days’ correspondence awaiting him.
A close observer—like Elma Clifford—might perhaps have noted in Montague Nevitt’s eye certain well-restrained symptoms of suppressed curiosity. But Cyril Waring, in his straightforward, simple English manliness, was not sharp enough to perceive that Nevitt watched him close while he broke the envelopes and glanced over his letters; or that Nevitt’s keen anxiety grew at once far deeper and more carefully concealed as Cyril turned to one big missive with an official-looking seal and a distinctly important legal aspect. On the contrary, to the outer eye or ear all that could be observed in Montague Nevitt’s manner was the nervous way he went on tightening his violin strings with a tremulous hand and whistling low to himself a few soft and tender bars of some melancholy scrap from Miss Ewes’s refectory.
As Cyril read through that letter, however, his breath came and went in short little gasps, and his cheek flushed hotly with a sudden and overpowering flood of emotion.
“What’s the matter?” Guy asked, looking over his shoulder curiously. And Cyril, almost faint with the innumerable ideas and suspicions that the tidings conjured up in his brain at once, said with an evident effort, “Read it, Guy; read it.”
Guy took the letter and read, Montague Nevitt gazing at it by his side meanwhile with profound interest.
As soon as they had glanced through its carefully-worded sentences, each drew a long breath and stared hard at the other. Then Cyril added in a whirl, “And here’s a letter from my own bankers saying they’ve duly received the six thousand pounds and put it to my credit.”
Guy’s face was pale, but he faltered out none the less with ashy lips, staring hard at the words all the time, “It isn’t only the money, of course, one thinks about, Cyril; but the clue it seems to promise us to our father and mother.”
“Exactly,” Cyril answered, with a responsive nod. “The money I won’t take. I don’t know what it means. But the clue I’ll follow up till I’ve run to earth the whole truth about who we are and where we come from.”
Montague Nevitt glanced quickly from one to the other with an incredulous air. “Not take the money,” he exclaimed, in cynical surprise. “Why, of course you’ll take it. Twelve thousand pounds isn’t to be sneezed at in these days, I can tell you. And as for the clue, why, there isn’t any clue. Not a jot or a tittle, a ghost or a shadow of it. The unnatural parent, whoever he may be—for I take it for granted the unnatural parent’s the person at the bottom of the offer—takes jolly good care not to let you know who on earth he is. He wraps himself up in a double cloak of mystery. Drummonds pay in the money to your account at your own bank, you see, and while they’re authorized to receive your acknowledgment of the sum remitted, they are clearly NOT authorized to receive to the sender’s credit any return cheque for the amount or cash in repayment. The unnatural parent evidently intends to remain, for the present at least, strictly anonymous.
“Couldn’t you find out for us at Drummond, Coutts and Barclay’s who the sender is?” Guy asked, with some hesitation, still turning over in his hand the mysterious letter.
Nevitt shook his head with prompt decision. “No, certainly not,” he answered, assuming an air of the severest probity. “It would be absolutely impossible. The secrets in a bank are secrets of honour. We are the depositaries of tales that might ruin thousands, and we never say a word about one of them to anybody.”
As for Cyril, he felt himself almost too astonished for words. It was long before he could even discuss the matter quietly. The whole episode seemed so strange, so mysterious, so uncanny. And no wonder he hesitated. For the unknown writer of the letter with the legal seal had proposed a most curious and unsatisfactory arrangement. Six thousand pounds down on the nail to Cyril, six thousand more in a few weeks to Guy. But not for nothing. As in all law business, “valuable consideration” loomed large in the background. They were both to repair, on a given day, at a given hour, to a given office, in a given street, where they were to sign without inquiry, and even without perusal, whatever documents might then and there be presented to them. This course, the writer pointed out, with perspicuous plainness, was all in the end to their own greater advantage.
For unless they signed, they would get nothing more, and it would be useless for them at attempt the unravelling of the mystery. But if they consented to sign, then, the writer declared, the anonymous benefactor at whose instigation he wrote would leave them by his will a further substantial sum, not one penny of which would ever otherwise come to them.
And Montague Nevitt, as a man of business, looking the facts in the face, without sentiment or nonsense, advised them to sign, and make the best of a good bargain.
For Montague Nevitt saw at once in his own mind that this course would prove the most useful in the end for his own interests, both as regards the Warings and Colonel Kelmscott.
The two persons most concerned, however, viewed the matter in a very different light. To them, this letter, with its obscure half-hints, opened up a chance of solving at last the mystery of their position which had so long oppressed them. They might now perhaps find out who they really were, if only they could follow up this pregnant clue; and the clue itself suggested so many things.
“Whatever else it shows,” Guy said emphatically, “it shows we must be the lawful sons of some person of property, or else why should he want us to sign away our rights like this, all blindfold? And whatever the rights themselves may be, they must be very considerable, or else why should he bribe us so heavily to sign ourselves out of them? Depend upon it, Nevitt, it’s an entailed estate, and the man who dictated that letter is in possession of the property, which ought to belong to Cyril and me. For my part, I’m opposed to all bargaining in the dark. I’ll sign nothing, and I’ll give away nothing, without knowing what it is. And that’s what I advise Cyril to write back and tell him.”
Cyril, however, was revolving in his own mind meanwhile a still more painful question. Could it be any blood-relationship between himself and Elma, unknown to him, but just made known to her, that gave rise to her firm and obviously recent determination never to marry him? A week or two since, he was sure, Elma knew of no cause or just impediment why they should not be joined together in holy matrimony. Could she have learned it meanwhile, before she met him in the wood? and could the fact of her so learning it have thus pricked the slumbering conscience of their unknown kinsman or their supposed supplanter?
They sat there long and late, discussing the question from all possible standpoints—save the one thus silently started in his own mind by Cyril. But, in the end, Cyril’s resolution remained unshaken. He would leave the six thousand pounds in the bank, untouched; but he would write back at once to the unknown sender, declining plainly, once for all, to have anything to do with it or with the proposed transactions. If anything was his by right, he would take it as of right, but he would be no party to such hole-and-corner renunciations of unknown contingencies as the writer suggested. If the writer was willing to state at once all the facts of the case, in clear and succinct language, and to come to terms thus openly with himself and his brother, why then, Cyril averred, he was ready to promise they would deal with his claims in a spirit of the utmost generosity and consideration. But if this was an attempt to do them out of their rights by a fraudulent bribe, he for one would have nothing to say to it. He would therefore hold the six thousand pounds paid in to his account entirely at his anonymous correspondent’s disposition.
“And as there isn’t any use in my wasting the summer, Guy,” he said, in conclusion, “I won’t let this red-herring, trailed across my path, prevent me from going over at once, as I originally intended, to Dinant and Spa, and fulfilling the commission for those pictures of Dale and Norton’s; You and Nevitt can see meanwhile what it’s possible for us to do in the matter of hunting up this family mystery. You can telegraph if you want me, and I’ll come back at once. But more than ever now I feel the need of redeeming the time and working as hard as I can go at my profession.”
“Well, yes,” Guy answered, as if both their thoughts ran naturally in the self-same channel. “I agree with you there. She’s been accustomed to luxury. No man has a right to marry any girl if he can’t provide for her in the comfort and style she’s always been used to. And from that point of view, when one looks it in the face, Cyril, six thousand pounds would come in handy.”
Mr. Montague Nevitt rubbed his hands with delight in the sacred privacy of his own apartment. Mr. Nevitt, indeed, had laid his plans deep. He had everybody’s secrets all round in his hands, and he meant to make everybody pay dear in the end for his information.
Mr. Nevitt was free. His holidays were on at Drummond, Coutts and Barclay’s, Limited. He loved the sea, the sun, and the summer. He was off that day on a projected series of short country runs, in which it was his intention strictly to combine business and pleasure. Dartmoor, for example, as everybody knows, is a most delightful and bracing tourist district; but what more amusing to a man of taste than to go a round of the Moor with its heather-clad tors, and at the same time hunt up the parish registers of the neighbourhood for the purpose of discovering, if possible, the supposed marriage record of Colonel Kelmscott of Tilgate with the Warings’ mother? For that there WAS a marriage Montague Nevitt felt certain in his own wise mind, and having early arrived at that correct conclusion, why, he had quietly offered forthwith, in Plymouth papers, a considerable reward to parish clerks and others who would supply him with any information as to the births, marriages, or deaths of any person or persons of the name of Waring for some eighteen months or so before or after the reputed date when Guy and Cyril began their earthly pilgrimage.
For deaths, Nevitt said to himself, with a sinister smile, were every bit as important to him as births or marriages. He knew the date of Colonel Kelmscott’s wedding with Lady Emily Croke, and if at that date wife number one was not yet dead, when the Colonel took to himself wife number two, who now did the honours of Tilgate Park for him, why, there you had as clear and convincing a case of bigamy as any man could wish to find out against another, and to utilize some day for his own good purposes.
As he thought these thoughts, Montague Nevitt gave the last delicate twirl, the final touch of art, to the wire-like ends of his waxed moustache, in front of his mirror, and, after surveying the result in the glass with considerable satisfaction, proceeded to set out, on very good terms with himself, for his summer holiday.
Devonshire, however, wasn’t his first destination. Montague Nevitt, besides being a man of business and a man of taste, was also in due season a man of feeling. A heart beat beneath that white rosebud in his left top button-hole. All his thoughts were not thoughts of greed and of gain. He was bound to Tilgate to-day, and to see a lady.
It isn’t so easy in England to see a lady alone. But fortune favours the brave. Luck always attended Mr. Montague Nevitt’s most unimportant schemes. Hardly had he got into the field path across the meadows between Tilgate station and the grounds of Woodlands than, at the seat by the bend, what should he see but a lady sitting down in an airy white summer dress, her head leaning on her hand, most pensive and melancholy. Montague Nevitt’s heart gave a sudden bound. In luck once more. It was Gwendoline Gildersleeve.
“Good morning!” he said briskly, coming up before Gwendoline had time to perceive him—and fly. “This is really most fortunate. I’ve run down from town today on purpose to see you, but hardly hoped I should have the good fortune to get a tete-a-tete with you—at least so easily. I’m so glad I’m in time. Now, don’t look so cross. You must at any rate admit, you know, my persistence is flattering.”
“I don’t feel flattered by it, Mr. Nevitt,” Gwendoline answered coldly, holding out her gloved hand to him with marked disinclination. “I thought last time I had said good-bye to you for good and for ever.”
Nevitt took her hand, and held it in his own a trifle longer than was strictly necessary. “Now don’t talk like that, Gwendoline,” he said coaxingly. “Don’t crush me quite flat. Remember at least that you ONCE were kind to me. It isn’t my fault, surely, ifIstill recollect it.”
Gwendoline withdrew her hand from his with yet more evident coolness. “Circumstances alter cases,” she said severely. “That was before I really knew you.”
“That was before you knew Granville Kelmscott, you mean,” Nevitt responded with an unpleasantly knowing air. “Oh yes, you needn’t wince; I’ve heard all about that. It’s my business to hear and find out everything. But circumstances alter cases, as you justly say, Gwendoline. And I’ve discovered some circumstances about Granville Kelmscott that may alter the case as regards your opinion of that rich young man, whose estate weighed down a poor fellow like me in what you’ve graciously pleased to call your affections.”
Gwendoline rose, and looked down at the man contemptuously. “Mr. Nevitt,” she said, in a chilling voice, “you’ve no right to call me Gwendoline any longer now. You’ve no right to speak to me of Mr. Granville Kelmscott. I refused your advances, not for any one else’s sake, or any one else’s estate, but simply and solely because I came to know you better than I knew you at first; and the more I knew of you the less I liked you. I am NOT engaged to Mr. Granville Kelmscott. I don’t mean to see him again. I don’t mean to marry him.”
Nevitt took his cue at once, like a clever hand that he was, and followed it up remorselessly. “Well, I’m glad to hear that anyhow,” he answered, assuming a careless air of utter unconcern, “for your sake as well as for his, Miss Gildersleeve; for Granville Kelmscott, as I happen to know in the course of business, is a ruined man—a ruined man this moment. He isn’t, and never was, the heir of Tilgate. And I’m sure it was very honourable of him, the minute he found he was a penniless beggar, to release you from such an unequal engagement.”
He had played his card well. He had delivered his shot neatly. Gwendoline, though anxious to withdraw from his hateful presence, couldn’t help but stay and learn more about this terrible hint of his. A light broke in upon her even as the fellow spoke. Was it this, then, that had made Granville talk so strangely to her that morning by the dell in the Woodlands? Was it this which, as he told her, rendered their marriage impossible? Why, if THAT were all—Gwendoline drew a deep breath and clasped her hands together in a sudden access of mingled hope and despair. “Oh, what do you mean, Mr. Nevitt,” she cried eagerly. “What can Granville have done? Don’t keep me in suspense! Do tell me what you mean by it.”
Montague Nevitt, still seated, looked up at her with a smile of quiet satisfaction. He played with her for a moment as a cat plays with a mouse. She was such a beautiful creature, so tall and fair and graceful, and she was so awfully afraid, and he was so awfully fond of her, that he loved to torture her thus and hold her dangling in his power. “No, Gwendoline,” he said slowly, drawing his words out by driblets, so as to prolong her suspense, “I oughtn’t to have mentioned it at all. It’s a professional secret. I retract what I said. Forget that I said it. Excuse me on the ground of my natural reluctance to see a woman I still love so deeply and so purely—whatever she may happen to think of ME—throw herself away on a man without a name or a penny. However, as Kelmscott seems to have done the honourable thing of his own accord, and given you up the minute he knew he couldn’t keep you in the way you’ve been accustomed to—why, there’s no need, of course, of any warning from me. I’ll say no more on the subject.”
His studied air of mystery piqued and drew on his victim. Gwendoline knew in her own heart she ought to go at once; her own dignity demanded it, and she should consult her dignity. But still, she couldn’t help longing to know what Nevitt’s half-hints and innuendoes might mean. After all, she was a woman! “Oh, do tell me,” she cried, clasping her hands in suspense once more; “what have you heard about Mr. Kelmscott? I’m not engaged to him; I don’t want to know for that, but—” she broke down, blushing crimson, and Montague Nevitt, gazing fixedly at her delicate peach-like cheek, remarked to himself how extremely well that blush became her.
“No, but remember,” he said in a very grave voice, in his favourite impersonation of the man of honour, “whatever I tell you—if I give way at all and tell you anything—you must hear in confidence, and must repeat to nobody. If you do repeat it, you’ll get me into very serious trouble. And not only so, but as nobody knows it except myself, you’ll as good as proclaim to all the world that you heard it from ME. If I tell you what I know, will you promise me this—not to breathe a syllable of what I say to anybody?”
Gwendoline, glancing down, and thoroughly ashamed of herself, yet answered in a very low and trembling voice, “I’ll promise, Mr. Nevitt.”
“Then the facts are these,” the man of feeling went on, with an undercurrent of malicious triumph in his musical voice. “Kelmscott is NOT his father’s eldest son; he’s NOT, and never was, the heir of Tilgate. More than that, nobody knows these facts but myself. And I know the true heirs, and I can prove their title. Well, now, Miss Gildersleeve—if it’s to be Miss Gildersleeve still—this is the circumstance that alters the case as regards Granville Kelmscott. I have it in my hands to ruin Kelmscott. And what I’ve taken the trouble to come down and say to you to-day is simply this for your own advantage; beware, at least, how you throw yourself away upon a penniless man, with neither name nor fortune! When you’ve quite got over that dream, you’ll be glad to return to the man you threw overboard for the rich squire’s son. No circumstances have ever altered him. He loved you from the first, and he will always love you.”
Gwendoline looked him back in the face again, as pale as death. “Mr. Nevitt,” she said scornfully, unmoved by his tale, “I do not love you, and I will never love you. You have no right to say such things to me as this. I’m glad you’ve told me, for I now know what Mr. Kelmscott meant. And if he was as poor as a church mouse, I’d marry him to-morrow—I said just now I didn’t mean to marry him. I retract that word. Circumstances alter cases, and what you’ve just told me alters this one. I withdraw what I said. I’ll marry Granville Kelmscott to-morrow if he asks me.”
She looked down at him so proudly, so defiantly, so haughtily, that Montague Nevitt, sitting there with his cynical smile on his thin red lips, flinched and wavered before her. He saw in a moment the game was up. He had played the wrong card; he had mistaken his woman and tried false tactics. It was too late now to retreat. An empty revenge was all that remained to him. “Very well,” he said sullenly, looking her back in the face with a nasty scowl—for indeed he loved that girl and was loath to lose her—“remember your promise, and say nothing to anybody. You’ll find it best so for your own reputation in the end. But mark my words; be sure I won’t spare Granville Kelmscott now. I’ll play my own game. I’ll ruin him ruthlessly. He’s in my power, I tell you, and I’ll crush him under my heel. Well, that’s settled at last. I’m off to Devonshire to-morrow—on the hunt of the records—to the skirts of Dartmoor, to a place in the wilds by the name of Mambury.” He raised his hat, and, curling his lip maliciously, walked away, without even so much as shaking hands with her. He knew it was all up. That game was lost. And, being a man of feeling, he regretted it bitterly.
Gwendoline, for her part, hurried home, all aglow with remorse and excitement. When she reached the house, she went straight up in haste to her own bedroom. In spite of her promise, all woman that she was, she couldn’t resist sitting down at once and inditing a hurried note to Granville Kelmscott.
“Dearest Granville,” it said, in a very shaky hand, not unblurred by tears, “I know all now, and I wonder you thought it could ever matter. I know you’re not the eldest son, and that somebody else is the heir of Tilgate. And I care for all that a great deal less than nothing. I love you ten thousand times too dearly to mind one pin whether you’re rich or poor. And, rich or poor, whenever you like, I’ll marry you.
“Yours ever devotedly and unalterably,
She sealed it up in haste and ran out with it, all tremors, to the post by herself. Her hands were hot. She was in a high fever. But Mr. Montague Nevitt, that man of feeling, thus balked of his game, walked off his disappointment as well as he could by a long smart tramp across the springy downs, lunching at a wayside inn on bread and cheese and beer, and descending as the evening shades drew in on the Guildford station. Thence he ran up to town by the first fast train, and sauntered sulkily across Waterloo Bridge to his rooms on the Embankment. As he went a poster caught his eye on the bridge. It riveted his attention by one fatal phrase. “Financial News. Collapse of the Rio Negro Diamond and Sapphire Mines!”
He stared at the placard with a dim sense of disaster. What on earth could this mean? It fairly took his breath away. The mines were the best things out this season. He held three hundred shares on his own account. If this rumour were true, he had let himself in for a loss of a clear three thousand!
But being a person of restricted sympathies, he didn’t reflect till several minutes had passed that he must at the same time have let Guy Waring in for three thousand also.
At Charing Cross Station Montague Nevitt bought a Financial News and proceeded forthwith to his own rooms to read of the sudden collapse of his pet speculation. It was only too true. The Rio Negro Diamond and Sapphire Mines had gone entirely in one of the periodical South American crashes which involved them in the liabilities of several other companies. A call would be made at once to the full extent of the nominal capital. And he would have to find three thousand pounds down to meet the demand on his credit immediately.
Nevitt hadn’t three thousand pounds in the world to pay. The little he possessed beyond his salary was locked up, here and there, in speculative undertakings, where he couldn’t touch it except at long notice. It was a crushing blow. He had need of steadying. Some men would have flown in such a plight to brandy. Montague Nevitt flew, instead, to the consolations of music.
For some minutes, indeed, he paced his room up and down in solemn silence. Then his eye fell by accident on the violin case in the corner. Ah, that would do! That beloved violin would inspire him with ideas; was it suicide or fraud? or some honest way out: be it this plan or that the violin would help him. Screwing up the strings for a minute with those deft, long, double-jointed fingers of his, he took the bow in his right hand, and, still pacing the room with great strides, like a wild beast in its cage, began to discourse low passionate music to himself from one of those serpentine pieces of Miss Ewes’s of Leamington.
As he played and played, his whole soul in his fingers, a plan began to frame itself, vaguely, dimly at first, then more and more definitely by slow degrees—shape, form, and features—as it grew and developed. A beautiful chord, that last! Oh, how subtle, how beautiful! It seemed to curl and glide on like a serpent through the grass, leaving strange trails behind as of a flowing signature; a flowing signature with bold twirls and flourishes—twirls and flourishes—twirls and flourishes—twirls, twirls, twirls and flourishes; the signature to a cheque; to a cheque for money; three thousand pounds at Drummond, Coutts and Barclay’s.
It ran through his head, keeping time with the bars. Four thousand pounds; five thousand; six thousand.
The longer he played the clearer and sharper the plan stood out. He saw his way now as clear as daylight. And his way too, to make a deal more in the end by it.
“Pay self or bearer six thousand pounds! Six thousand pounds; signed, Cyril Waring!”
For hours he paced up and down there, playing long and low. Oh, music, how he loved it; it seemed to set everything straight all at once in his head. With bow in hand and violin at rest, he surpassed himself that evening in ingenuity of fingering. He trembled to think of his own cleverness and skill. What a miracle of device! What a triumph of cunning! Not an element was overlooked. It was safe as houses. He could go to bed now, and drop off like a child; having arranged before he went to make Guy Waring his cat’s paw, and turn this sad stroke of ill-luck in the end to his own ultimate greater and wider advantage.
And he was quite right too. He did sleep as he expected. Next morning he woke in a very good humour, and proceeded at once to Guy Waring’s rooms the moment after breakfast.
He found Guy, as he expected, in a tumult of excitement, having only just that moment received by post the final call for the Rio Negro capital.
When other men are excited the wise man takes care to be perfectly calm. Montague Nevitt was calm under this crushing blow. He pointed out blandly that everything would yet go well. All was not lost. They had other irons in the fire. And even the Rio Negros themselves were not an absolute failure. The diamonds, the diamonds themselves, he insisted, were still there, and the sapphires also. They studded the soil, they were to be had for the picking. Every bit of their money would come back to them in the end. It was a question of meeting an immediate emergency only.
“But I haven’t three thousand pounds in the world to meet it with,” Guy exclaimed in despair. “I shall be ruined, of course. I don’t mind about that; but I never shall be able to make good my liabilities!”
Nevitt lighted a cigarette with a philosophical smile. The hotter Guy waxed, the faster did he cool down.
“Neither have I, my dear boy,” he said, in his most careless voice, puffing out rings of smoke in the interval between his clauses; “but I don’t, therefore, go mad. I don’t tear my hair over it; though, to be sure, I’m a deal worse off than you. My position’s at stake. If Drummonds were to hear of it—sack—sack instanter. As to making yourself responsible for what you don’t possess, that’s simply speculation. Everybody on the Stock Exchange always does it. If they didn’t there’d be no such thing as enterprise at all. You can’t make a fortune by risking a ha’penny.”
“But what am I to do?” Guy cried wildly. “However am I to raise three thousand pounds? I should be ashamed to let Cyril know I’d defaulted like this. If I can’t find the money I shall go mad or kill myself.”
Montague Nevitt played him gently, as an experienced angler plays a plunging trout, before proceeding to land him. At last, after offering Guy much sympathetic advice, and suggesting several intentionally feeble schemes, only to quash them instantly, he observed with a certain apologetic air of unobtrusive friendliness, “Well, if the worst comes to the worst, you’ve one thing to fall back upon: There’s that six-thousand, of course, coming in by-and-by from the unknown benefactor.”
Guy flung himself down in his easy-chair, with a look of utter despondency upon his handsome face. “But I promised Cyril,” he exclaimed, with a groan, “I’d never touch that. If I were to spend it I don’t know how I could ever face Cyril.”
“I was told yesterday,” Nevitt answered, with a bitter little smile, “and by a lady, too, many times over, that circumstances alter cases, till I began to believe it. When you promised Cyril you weren’t face to face with a financial crisis. If you were to use the money temporarily—mind, I say only temporarily; for to my certain knowledge Rio Negros will pull through all right in the end—if you were to use it temporarily in such an emergency as this, no blame of any sort could possibly attach to you. The unknown benefactor won’t mind whether your money’s at your banker’s, or employed for the time being in paying your debts. Your creditors will. If I were you, therefore, I’d use it up in paying them.”
“You would?” Guy inquired, glancing across at him, with a faint gleam of hope in his eye.
Nevitt fixed him at once with his strange cold stare, He had caught his man now. He could play upon him as readily as he could play his violin.
“Why, certainly I would,” he answered, with confidence, striking the new chord full. “Cyril himself would do the same in your place, I’ll bet you. And the proof that he would is simply this—you yourself will do it. Depend upon it, if you can do anything, under given circumstances, Cyril would do it too, in the same set of conditions. And if ever Cyril feels inclined to criticise what you’ve done, you can answer him back, ‘I know your heart as you know mine. In my place, I know you’d have acted as I did.’”
“Cyril and I are not absolutely identical,” Guy answered slowly, his eyes still fixed on Montague Nevitt’s. “Sometimes I feel he does things I wouldn’t do.”
“He has more initiative than you,” Nevitt answered, as if carelessly, though with deep design in his heart. “He acts where you debate. You’re often afraid to take a serious step. Cyril never hesitates. You draw back and falter; Cyril goes straight ahead. But all the more reason, accordingly, that Cyril should admit the lightness of whatever you do, for if you do anything—anything in the nature of a definite step, I mean—why, far more readily, then, would Cyril, in like case, have done it.”
“You think he has more initiative?” Guy asked, with a somewhat nettled air. He hated to be thought less individual than Cyril.
“Of course he has, my dear boy,” Nevitt answered, smiling. “He’d use the money at once, without a second’s hesitation.”
“But I haven’t got the money to use,” Guy continued, after a short pause.
“Cyril has, though,” Nevitt responded, with a significant nod.
Guy perused his boots, and made no immediate answer. Nevitt wanted none just then; he waited some seconds, humming all the while an appropriate tune. Then he caught Guy’s eye again, and fixed him a second time.
“It’s a pity we don’t know Cyril’s address in Belgium,” he said, in a musing tone. “We might telegraph across for leave to use his money meanwhile. Remember, I’m just as deeply compromised as you, or even more so. It’s a pity we should both be ruined, with six thousand pounds standing at this very moment to Cyril’s account at the London and West Country. But it can’t be helped. There’s no time to lose. The money must be paid in sharp by this evening.”
“By this evening!” Guy exclaimed, starting up excitedly.
Nevitt nodded assent. “Yes, by this evening, of course,” he answered unperturbed, “or we become ipso facto defaulters and bankrupts.”
That was a lie to be sure; but it served his purpose. Guy was a child at business, and believed whatever nonsense Nevitt chose to foist upon him.
The journalist rose and paced the room twice or thrice with a frantic air of unspeakable misery.
“I shall lose my place at our bank, no doubt,” Nevitt went on, in a resigned tone. “But that doesn’t much matter. Though a temporary loan—I could pay every penny in six weeks if I’d time—a temporary loan would set things all straight again.”
“I wish to heaven Cyril was here,” Guy exclaimed, in piteous tones.
“He is, practically, when you’re here,” Nevitt answered, with a knowing smile. “You can act as his deputy.”
“How do you mean?” Guy asked, turning round upon him open-mouthed.
Nevitt paused, and smiled sweetly.
“This is his cheque-book, I think,” he replied, in the oblique retort, picking it up and looking at it. He tore out a cheque, as if pensively and by accident.
“That’s a precious odd thing,” he went on, “that you showed me the other day, don’t you know, about your signature and Cyril’s being so absolutely identical.”
Guy gazed at him in horror. “Oh, don’t talk about that!” he cried, running his hand through his hair. “If I were even to entertain such an idea for a moment, my self-respect would be gone for ever.”
“Exactly so,” Nevitt put in, with a satirical smile. “I said so just now. You’ve no initiative. Cyril wouldn’t be afraid. Knowing the interests at stake, he’d take a firm stand and act off-hand on his own discretion.”
“Do you think so?” Guy faltered, in a hesitating voice.
Nevitt held him with his eye.
“Do I think so?” he echoed, “do I think so? I know it. Look here, Guy, you and Cyril are practically one. If Cyril were here we’d ask him at once to lend us the money. If we knew where Cyril was we’d telegraph across and get his leave like a bird. But as he isn’t here, and as we don’t know where he is, we must show some initiative; we must act for once on our own responsibility, exactly as Cyril would. It’s only for six weeks. At the end of that time the unknown benefactor stumps up your share. You needn’t even tell Cyril, if you don’t like, of this little transaction. See! here’s his cheque. You fill it in and sign it. Nobody can tell the signature isn’t Cyril’s. You take the money and release us both. In six weeks’ time you get your own share of the unnatural parent’s bribe. You pay it in to his credit, and not a living soul on earth but ourselves need ever be one penny the wiser.”
Guy tried to look away, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. Nevitt held him fixed with his penetrating gaze. Guy moved uneasily. He felt as if he had a stiff neck, so hard was it to turn. Nevitt took a pen, and dipped it quick in the ink.
“Just as an experiment,” he said firmly, yet in a coaxing voice, “sit down and sign. Let me see what it looks like. There. Write it just here. Write ‘Cyril Waring.’”
Guy sat down as in a maze, and took the pen from his hand like an obedient schoolboy. For a second the pen trembled in his vacillating fingers; then he wrote on the cheque, in a free and flowing hand, where the signature ought to be, his brother’s name. He wrote it without stopping.
“Capital! Capital!” Nevitt cried in delight, looking over his shoulder. “It’s a splendid facsimile! Now date and amount if you please. Six thousand pounds. It’s your own natural hand after all. Ah, capital, capital!”
As he spoke, Guy framed the fatal words like one dreaming or entranced, on the slip of paper before him. “Pay Self or Bearer Six Thousand Pounds (L6,000), Cyril Waring.”
Nevitt looked at it critically. “That’ll do all right,” he said, with his eye still fixed in between whiles on Guy’s bloodless face. “Now the only one thing you have still left to do is, to take it to the bank and get it cashed instanter.”