At the Holkers’ at Chetwood, one evening some days later, Cyril Waring met Elma Clifford once more, the first time for months, and had twenty minutes’ talk in the tea-room alone with her. Contrary to his rule, he had gone to the Holkers’ party that night, for a man can’t remain a recluse all his life, no matter how hard he tries, merely because his brother’s suspected of having committed a murder. In course of time, the attitude palls upon him. For the first year after Guy’s sudden and mysterious disappearance, indeed, Cyril refused all invitations point-blank, except from the most intimate friends; the shame and disgrace of that terrible episode weighed him down so heavily that he couldn’t bear to go out in the world among unsympathetic strangers.
But the deepest sorrow wears away by degrees, and at the end of twelve months Cyril found he could mix a little more unreservedly at last among his fellow-men. The hang-dog air sat ill upon his frank, free nature. This invitation to the Holkers’, too, had one special attraction: he knew it was a house where he was almost certain of meeting Elma. And since Elma insisted now on writing to him constantly—she was a self-willed young woman was Elma, and would have her way—he really saw no reason on earth himself why he shouldn’t meet her. To meet is one thing, don’t you know—to marry, another. At least so fifty generations of young people have deluded themselves under similar circumstances into believing.
Elma was in the room before him, prettier than ever, people said, in the pale red ball-dress which exactly suited her gipsy-like eyes and creamy complexion. As she entered she saw Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve with his wife and Gwendoline standing in the corner by the big piano. Gwendoline looked pale and preoccupied, as she had always looked since Granville Kelmscott disappeared, leaving behind him no more definite address for love-letters than simply Africa; and Lady Gildersleeve was, as usual, quite subdued and broken. But the judge himself, consoled by his new honours, seemed, as time wore on, to have recovered a trifle of his old blustering manner. A knighthood had reassured him. He was talking to Mr. Holker in a loud voice as Elma approached him from behind.
“Yes, a very curious coincidence,” he was just saying, in his noisy fashion, with one big burly hand held demonstratively before him. “A very curious and unexplained coincidence. They both vanished into space about the self-same time. And nothing more has ever since been heard of them. Quite an Arabian Nights’ affair in its way—the Enchanted Carpet sort of business, don’t you know—wafted through the air unawares, like Sinbad the Sailor, or the One-eyed Calender, from London to Bagdad, or Timbuctoo or St. Petersburg. The OTHER young man one understands about, of course; HE had sufficient reasons of his own, no doubt, for leaving a country which had grown too warm for him. But that Granville Kelmscott, a gentleman of means, the heir to such a fine estate as Tilgate, should disappear into infinity leaving no trace behind, like a lost comet—and at the very moment, too, when he was just about to come into the family property—why, I call it... I call it... I call it—”
His jaw dropped suddenly. He grew deadly pale. Words failed his stammering tongue. Do what he would, he couldn’t finish his sentence. And yet, nothing very serious had occurred to him in any way. It was merely that, as he uttered these words, he caught Elma Clifford’s eye, and saw lurking in it a certain gleam of deadly contempt before which the big blustering man himself had quailed more than once in many a Surrey drawing-room.
For Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve knew, as well as if she had told him the truth in so many words, that Elma Clifford suspected him of being Montague Nevitt’s murderer.
Elma came forward, just to break the awkward pause, and shook hands with the party by the piano coldly. Sir Gilbert tried to avoid her; but, with the inherited instinct of her race, Elma cut off his retreat. She boxed him in the corner between the piano and the wall.
“I heard what you were saying just now, Sir Gilbert,” she murmured low, but with marked emphasis, after a few polite commonplaces of conversation had first passed between them; “and I want to ask you one question only about the matter. ARE you so sure as you seem of what you said this minute? Are you so sure that Mr. Guy Waring HAD sufficient reasons of his own for wishing to leave the country?”
Before that unflinching eye, the great lawyer trembled, as many a witness had trembled of old under his own cross-examination. But he tried to pass it off just at first with a little society banter. He bowed, and smiled, and pretended to look arch—look arch, indeed, with that ashen, white face of his!—as he answered, with forced humour—
“My dear young lady, Mr. Guy Waring, as I understand, is Mr. Cyril Waring’s brother, and as by the law of England the king can do no wrong, so I suppose—”
Elma cut him short in the middle of his sentence with an imperious gesture. He had never cut short an obnoxious and intruding barrister himself with more crushing dignity.
“Mr. Cyril Waring has nothing at all to do with the point, one way or the other,” the girl said severely. “Attend to my question. What I ask is this: Why do you, a judge who may one day be called upon to try the case, venture to say, on such partial evidence, that Mr. Guy Waring had sufficient reasons of his own for leaving the country?”
Called upon to try Guy Waring’s case! The judge paused abashed. He was very much afraid of her. This girl had such a strange look about the eyes, she made him tremble. People said the Ewes women were the descendants of a witch. And there was something truly witch-like in the way Elma Clifford looked straight down into his eyes. She seemed to see into his very soul. He knew she suspected him.
He shuffled and temporized. “Well, everybody says so, you know,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders carelessly. “And what everybody says MUST be true. ... Besides, if HE, didn’t do it, who did, I wonder?”
Elma pounced upon her opportunity with a woman’s quickness. “Somebody else who was at Mambury that day, no doubt,” she replied, with a meaning look. “It MUST have been somebody out of the few who were at Mambury.”
That home-thrust told. The judge’s colour was livid to look upon. What could this girl mean? How on earth could she know? How had she even found out he was at Mambury at all? A terrible doubt oppressed his soul. Had Gwendoline confided his movements to Elma? He had warned his daughter time and again not to mention the fact, “for fear of misapprehension,” he said, with shuffling eyes askance. It was better nobody should know he had been anywhere near Dartmoor on the day of the accident.
However, there was one consolation; the law! the law! She could have no legal proof, and intuition goes for nothing in a court of justice. All the suspicion went against Guy Waring, and Guy Waring—well, Guy Waring had fled the kingdom in the very nick of time, and was skulking now, Heaven alone knew where or why, in the remotest depths of some far African diggings.
And even as he thought it, the servant opened the door, and, in the regulation footman’s voice, announced “Mr. Waring.”
The judge started afresh. For one moment his senses deceived him sadly. His mind was naturally full of Guy, just now; and as the servant spoke, he saw a handsome young man in evening dress coming up the long drawing-room with the very air and walk of the man he had met that eventful afternoon at the “Duke of Devonshire” at Plymouth. Of course, it was only Cyril; and a minute later the judge saw his mistake, and remembered, with a bitter smile, how conscience makes cowards of us all, as he had often remarked about shaky witnesses in his admirable perorations. But Elma hadn’t failed to notice either the start or its reason.
“It’s only Mr. Cyril,” she said pointedly; “not Mr. Guy, Sir Gilbert. The name came very pat, though. I don’t wonder it startled you.”
She was crimson herself. The judge moved away with a stealthy uncomfortable air. He didn’t half care for this uncanny young woman. A girl who can read people’s thoughts like that, a girl who can play with you like a cat with a mouse, oughtn’t to be allowed at large in society. She should be shut up in a cage at home like a dangerous animal, and prevented from spying out the inmost history of families.
A little later, Elma had twenty minutes’ talk with Cyril alone. It was in the tea-room behind, where the light refreshments were laid out before supper. She spoke low and seriously.
“Cyril,” she said, in a tone of absolute confidence—they were not engaged, of course, but still, it had got to plain “Cyril” and “Elma” by this time—“I’m surer of it than ever, no matter what you say. Guy’s perfectly innocent. I know it as certainly as I know my own name. I can’t be mistaken. And the man who really did it is, as I told you, Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve.”
“My dear child,” Cyril answered—you call the girl you are in love with “my dear child,” when you mean to differ from her, with an air of masculine superiority—“how on earth can that be, when, as I told you, I have Guy’s confession in writing, under his own very hand, that he really did it?”
“I don’t care a pin for that,” Elma cried, with a true woman’s contempt for anything so unimportant as mere positive evidence. “Perhaps Sir Gilbert made him do it somehow—compelled him, or coerced him, or willed him, or something—I don’t understand these new notions—or perhaps he got him into a scrape and then hadn’t the courage or the manliness to get him out of it. But at any rate, I can answer for one thing, I were to go to the stake for it—Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve is the man who’s really guilty.”
As she spoke, a great shadow darkened the door of the room for a moment ominously. Sir Gilbert looked in with a lady on his arm—the inevitable dowager who refreshes herself continuously at frequent intervals through six hours of entertainment. When he saw those two tête-à-tête, he drew back, somewhat disconcerted.
“Don’t let’s go in there, Lady Knowles,” he whispered to the dowager by his side. “A pair of young people discussing their hearts. We were once young ourselves. It’s a pity to disturb them.”
And he passed on across the hall towards the great refreshment-room opposite.
“Well, I don’t know,” Cyril said bitterly, as the judge disappeared through the opposite door. “I wish I could agree with you. But I can’t, I can’t. The burden of it’s heavier than my shoulders can bear. Guy’s weak, I know, and might be led half unawares into certain sorts of crime; yet I only knew one man ever likely to lead him—and that was poor Nevitt himself, not Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve, whom he hardly even knew to speak to.”
As he paused and reflected, a servant with a salver came up and looked into Cyril’s face inquiringly.
“Beg your pardon, sir,” he said, hesitating, “but I think you’re Mr. Waring.”
“That’s my name,” Cyril answered, with a faint blush on his cheek. “Do you want to speak to me?”
“Yes, sir; there’s half-a-crown to pay for porterage, if you please. A telegram for you, sir.”
Cyril pulled out the half-a-crown, and tore open the telegram. Its contents were indeed enough to startle him. It was dated “Cape Town,” and was as brief as is the wont of cable messages at nine shillings a word—
“Coming home immediately to repay everything and stand my trial. Kelmscott accompanies me. All well.—GUY WARING.”
Cyril looked at it with a gasp, and handed it on to Elma. Elma took it in her dainty gloved fingers, and read it through with keen eyes of absorbing interest. Cyril sighed a profound sigh. Elma glanced back at him all triumph. “I told you so,” she said, in a very jubilant voice. “He wouldn’t do that if he didn’t KNOW he was innocent.”
At the very same second, a blustering voice was heard above the murmur in the hall without.
“What, half-a-crown for porterage!” it exclaimed in indignant tones. “Why, that’s a clear imposition. The people at my house ought never to have sent it on. It’s addressed to Woodlands. Unimportant, unimportant! Here, Gwendoline, take your message—some milliner’s or dressmaker’s appointment for to-morrow, I suppose. Half-a-crown for porterage! They’d no right to bring it.”
Gwendoline took the telegram with trembling hands, tore it open all quivers, and broke into a cry of astonishment. Then she fell all at once into her father’s arms. Elma understood it all. It was a similar message from Granville Kelmscott to tell the lady of his heart he was coming home to marry her.
Sir Gilbert, somewhat flustered, called for water in haste, and revived the fainting girl by bathing her temples. At last he took up the cause of the mischief himself. As he read it his own face turned white as death. Elma noticed that, too. And no wonder it did—for these were the words of that unexpected message—
“Coming home to claim you by the next mail. Guy Waring accompanies me.—GRANVILLE KELMSCOTT.”
Next day but one, the Companion of St. Michael and St. George came in to Craighton with evil tidings. He had heard in the village that Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve was ill—very seriously ill. The judge had come home from the Holkers’ the other evening much upset by the arrival of Gwendoline’s telegram.
“Though why on earth should that upset him,” Mr. Clifford continued, screwing up his small face with a very wise air, “is more than I can conceive; for I’m sure the Gildersleeves angled hard enough in their time to catch young Kelmscott, by hook or by crook, for their gawky daughter; and now that young Kelmscott telegraphs over to say he’s coming home post haste to marry her, Miss Gwendoline faints away, if you please, as she reads the news, and the judge himself goes upstairs as soon as he gets home, and takes to his bed incontinently. But there, the ways of the world are really inscrutable! What reconciles me to life, every day I grow older, is that it’s so amusing—so intensely amusing! You never know what’s going to turn up next; and what you least expect is what most often happens.”
Elma, however, received his news with a very grave face.
“Is he really ill, do you think, papa?” she asked, somewhat anxiously; “or is he only—well—only frightened?”
Mr. Clifford stared at her with a blank leathery face of self-satisfied incomprehension.
“Frightened!” he repeated solemnly; “Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve frightened! And of Granville Kelmscott, too! That’s true wit, Elma; the juxtaposition of the incongruous. Why, what on earth has the man got to be frightened of, I should like to know? ... No, no; he’s really ill; very seriously ill. Humphreys says the case is a most peculiar one, and he’s telegraphed up to town for a specialist to come down this afternoon and consult with him.”
And indeed, Sir Gilbert was really very ill. This unexpected shock had wholly unmanned him. To say the truth, the judge had begun to look upon Guy Waring as practically lost, and upon the matter of Montague Nevitt’s death as closed for ever. Waring, no doubt, had gone to Africa—under a false name—and proceeded to the diamond fields direct, where he had probably been killed in a lucky quarrel with some brother digger, or stuck through with an assegai by some enterprising Zulu; and nobody had even taken the trouble to mention it.
It’s so easy for a man to get lost in the crowd in the Dark Continent! Why, there was Granville Kelmscott, even—a young fellow of means, and the heir of Tilgate, about whom Gwendoline was always moaning and groaning, poor girl, and wouldn’t be comforted—there was Granville Kelmscott gone out to Africa, and, hi, presto, disappeared into space without a vapour or a trace, like a conjurer’s shilling. It was all very queer; but, then, queer things are the way in Africa.
To be sure, Sir Gilbert had his qualms of conscience, too, over having thus sent off Guy Waring, as he believed, to his grave in Cape Colony. He was not at heart a bad man, though he was pushing, and selfish, and self-seeking, and to a certain extent even—of late—unscrupulous. He had his bad half-hours every now and again with his own moral consciousness. But he had learnt to stifle his doubts and to keep down his terrors. After all, he had told Guy no more than the truth; and if Guy in his panic-terror chose to run away and get killed in South Africa, that was no fault of HIS—he’d only tried to warn the fellow of an impending danger. All’s well that ends well; and, to-day, Guy Waring was lost or dead, while he himself was a judge, and a knight to boot, with all trace of his crime destroyed for ever.
So he said to himself, rejoicing, the very day Granville Kelmscott’s telegram arrived. But now that he stood face to face again with that pressing terror, his thoughts on the matter were very different. Strange to say, his first idea was this: what a disgraceful shame of that fellow Waring to come to life again thus suddenly on purpose to annoy him! He was really angry, nay, more, indignant. Such shuffling was inexcusable. If Waring meant to give himself up and stand his trial like a man, why the dickens didn’t he do it immediately after the—well, the accident? What did he mean by going off for eighteen months undiscovered, and leaving one to build up fresh plans in life, like this—and then coming home on a sudden just on purpose to upset them? It was simply disgraceful. Sir Gilbert felt injured; this man Waring was wronging him. Eighteen months before he was keenly aware that he was unjustly casting a vile and hideous suspicion on an innocent person. But in the intervening period his moral sense had got largely blunted. Familiarity with the hateful plot had warped his ideas about it. Their places were reversed. Sir Gilbert was really aggrieved now that Guy Waring should turn up again, and should venture to vindicate his deeply-wronged character.
The man was as good as dead. Well, and he ought to have stopped so; or else he ought never to have died at all. He ought to have kept himself continually in evidence. But to go away for eighteen months, unknown and unheard of, till one’s sense of security had had time to re-establish itself, and then to turn up again like this without one minute’s warning—oh, it was infamous, scandalous. The fellow must be devoid of all consideration for others. Sir Gilbert wiped his clammy brow with those ample hands. What on earth was he to do for his wife, and for Gwendoline?
And Gwendoline was so happy, too, over Granville Kelmscott’s return! How could he endure that Granville Kelmscott’s return should be the signal for discovering her father’s sin and shame to her! If only he could have married her off before it all came out! Or if only he could die before the man was tried!—Tried! Sir Gilbert’s eyes started from his head with horror. What was that Elma Clifford suggested the other night? Why—if the man was arrested, he would be arrested at Plymouth, the moment he landed, and would be tried for murder at the Western Assizes. And it was he himself, Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve, who was that term to take the Western Circuit.
He would be called upon to sit on the bench himself, and try Guy Waring for the murder he had himself committed!
No wonder that thought sent him ill to bed at once. He lay and tossed all night long in speechless agony and terror. It was an appalling night. Next morning he was found delirious with fever.
When the news reached Elma, she saw its full and fatal significance. Cyril had stopped on for three days at the Holkers’, and he came over in the course of the morning to take a walk across the fields with her. Elma was profoundly excited, Cyril could hardly see why.
“This is a terrible thing,” she said, “about Sir Gilbert’s illness. What I’m afraid of now is that he may die before your brother returns. The shock must have been awful for him; mamma noticed it every bit as much as I did; and so did Miss Ewes. They both said at once, ‘This blow will kill him!’ And they both knew why, Cyril, as well as I did. It’s the Ewes’ intuition. We’ve all of us got it, and we all of us say, at once and unanimously—it was Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve.”
“But suppose he DID die,” Cyril asked, still sceptical, as he always was when Elma got upon her instinctive consciousness; “what difference would that make? If Guy’s innocent, as I suppose in some way he must be, from the tone of his telegram, he’ll be acquitted whether Sir Gilbert’s alive or not. And if he’s guilty—”
He broke off suddenly with an awful pause; the other alternative was too terrible to contemplate.
“But he’s NOT guilty,” Elma answered with confidence. “I know it more surely now than ever. And the difficulty’s this. Nobody knows the real truth, I feel certain, except Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve. And if Sir Gilbert dies unconfessed, the truth dies with him. And then—” She paused a moment. “I’m half afraid,” she went on with a doubtful sigh, “your brother’s been too precipitate in coming home to face it.”
“But, Elma,” Cyril cried, “I can’t bear to say it—yet one must face the facts—how on earth can he be innocent, when I tell you again and again he wrote to me himself saying he really did it?”
“You never showed me that letter,” Elma answered, with a faint undercurrent of reproach in her tone.
“How could I?” Cyril replied. “Even to YOU, Elma, there are some things a man can hardly bear to speak about.”
“I have more faith than you, Cyril,” Elma answered. “I’ve never given up believing in Guy all the time. I believe in him still—because I know he’s your brother.”
There was a short pause, during which neither spoke. They walked along together, looking at each other’s faces with half downcast eyes, but with the not unpleasant sense of mute companionship and sympathy in a great sorrow. At last Elma spoke again.
“There was one thing in Guy’s telegram,” she said, “I didn’t quite understand. ‘Coming home immediately to repay everything.’ What did he mean by that? What has that got to do with Mr. Nevitt’s disappearance?”
“Oh, that was quite another matter,” Cyril answered, blushing deep with shame, for he couldn’t bear to let Elma know Guy was a forger as well as a murderer. “That was something purely personal between us two. He—he owed me money.”
Elma’s keen eyes read him through at a glance.
“But he said it all in one sentence,” she objected, “as if the two went naturally together. Coming home immediately to repay everything and stand my trial. Cyril, Cyril, you’ve held something back. I believe there’s some fearful mistake here somewhere.”
“You think so?” Cyril answered, feeling more and more uncomfortable.
“I’m sure of it,” Elma replied, with a thrill, reading his thoughts still deeper. “Oh, Cyril”—she seized his arm with a convulsive grip—“for Heaven’s sake, go and get it; let me see that letter!”
“I have it here,” Cyril answered, pulling it out with some shame from Montague Nevitt’s pocket-book, which he wouldn’t destroy, and dared not leave about for prying eyes to light upon. “I’ve carried it day and night, ever since, about with me.”
Elma seized it from his hands, and sat down upon a stile, and read it through with profound attention.
At the end she handed it back and tears stood in her eyes. “Cyril,” she said, half laughing hysterically and half crying as she spoke, “you’ve been doing that poor fellow a deep injustice. Oh, don’t you see—don’t you see it? That isn’t the letter of a man who has committed a murder. It’s the letter of a man who has unwittingly and unwillingly done you some personal wrong, and is eager to repair it. My darling, my darling, you’ve misread it altogether. It isn’t about Montague Nevitt’s death at all; it’s about nothing an earth but some private money matter. More than that, when it was written, Guy didn’t yet know Mr. Nevitt was dead. He didn’t know he was suspected. He didn’t know anything. I wonder you don’t see! I wish to Heaven you’d shown me that letter months ago! Sir Gilbert fastened suspicion on the wrong man; and this letter has made you accept it too easily. Guy went to Africa—that’s as plain as words can put it—to make money of his own to repay what he owed you. And it’s this, the purely personal and unimportant charge, he’s coming home to give himself up upon.”
A light seemed to burst on Cyril’s mind as she spoke. For the very first time, he felt a gleam of hope. Elma was right, after all, he believed. Guy was wholly innocent of the greater crime; and his heart-broken letter had only meant to deal with the question of the forgery.
But Cyril had heard of the murder first, and had had that most in his mind when the letter reached him; so he interpreted it at once as referring to the capital charge, and never dreamt for a moment of its real narrower meaning.
That evening, when the messenger came back from “kind inquiries” at Woodlands, Elma asked, with hushed awe, how Sir Gilbert was going on.
“Very poorly, miss,” the servant answered. “The doctor says he’s sunk dreadful low; and the butler thinks he has something on his mind he can’t get out in his wanderings. He’s in a terrible bad way. They wouldn’t be astonished if he don’t live to morning.”
So Elma went to bed that night trembling most for the result of Sir Gilbert’s illness.
All the way home on that long journey from Cape Town, as the two half-brothers lounged on deck together in their canvas chairs, Granville Kelmscott was wholly at a loss to understand what seemed to him Guy Waring’s unaccountable and almost incredible levity. The man’s conduct didn’t in the least resemble that of a person who is returning to give himself up on a charge of wilful murder. On the contrary, Guy showed no signs of remorse or mental agony in any way; he seemed rather elated, instead, at the pleasing thought that he was going home, with his diamonds all turned at the Cape into solid coin, to make his peace once more with his brother Cyril.
To be sure, at times he did casually allude to some expected unpleasantness when he arrived in England; yet he treated it, Granville noticed, as though hanging were at worst but a temporary inconvenience. Granville wondered whether, after all, he could have some complete and crushing answer to that appalling charge; on any other supposition, his spirits and his talk were really little short of what one might expect from a madman.
And indeed, now and again, Granville did really begin to suspect that something had gone wrong somewhere with Guy Waring’s intellect. The more he thought over it, the more likely did this seem, for Guy talked on with the greatest composure about his plans for the future “when this difficulty was cleared up,” as though a trial for murder were a most ordinary occurrence—an accident that might happen to any gentleman any day. And, if so, was it possible that Guy had gone wrong in his head BEFORE the affray with Montague Nevitt? That seemed likely enough; for when Granville remembered Guy’s invariable gentleness and kindness to himself, his devotion in sickness and in the trials of the desert, his obvious aversion to do harm to any one, and, above all, his heartfelt objection to shedding human blood, Granville was constrained to believe his newly found half-brother, if ever he committed the murder at all, must have committed it while in a state of unsound mind, deserving rather of pity than of moral reprehension. He comforted himself, indeed, with this consoling idea—he could never believe a Kelmscott of Tilgate, when clothed and in his right mind, could be guilty of such a detestable and motiveless crime as the wilful murder of Montague Nevitt.
Strangely enough, moreover, the subject that seemed most to occupy Guy Waring’s mind, on the voyage home, was not his forthcoming trial on a capital charge, but the future distribution of the Tilgate property. Was he essentially a money-grubber, Granville wondered to himself, as he had thought him at first in the diamond fields in Barolong land? Was he incapable of thinking about anything but filthy lucre? No; that was clearly not the true solution of the problem, for, whenever Guy spoke to him about the subject, it was generally to say one and the self-same thing—
“In this matter, I feel I can speak for Cyril as I speak for myself. Neither of us would wish to deprive you now of what you’ve always been brought up to consider as your own. Neither of us would wish to dispossess Lady Emily. The most we would desire is this—to have our position openly acknowledged and settled before the world. We should like it to be known we were the lawful sons of a brave man and an honest woman. And if you wish voluntarily to share with us some part of our father’s estate, we’ll be willing to enter into a reasonable arrangement by which yon yourself can retain Tilgate Park and the mass of the property that immediately appertains to it. I’m sure Cyril would no more wish to be grasping in this matter than I am; and after all that you and I have gone through together, Granville, I don’t think yon need doubt the sincerity of my feelings towards you.”
He spoke so sensibly, he spoke so manfully, he spoke so kindly always, with a bright gleam in those tender eyes, that Granville hardly knew what to make of his evident confidence. Surely a man couldn’t be mad who could speak like that; and yet, whenever he alluded in any way to his return to England, it was always as though he ignored the gravity and heinousness of the charge brought against him. It was as though murder was an accident, for which one was hardly responsible. Granville couldn’t make him out at all; the fellow was an enigma to him. There was so much that was good in him; and yet, there must be so much that was bad as well. He was such a delicate, considerate, self-effacing gentleman—and yet, if one could believe what he himself more than once as good as admitted, he was a criminal, a felon, an open murderer.
Still, even so, Granville couldn’t turn his back upon the brother who had seen him so bravely across the terrors of Namaqua land. He thought of how he had misjudged him once before, and how much he had repented it. Whether Guy was a murderer or not, Granville felt, the man he had saved, at least, could never forsake him.
The night before their arrival at Plymouth, Guy was in unusually high spirits. His mirth was contagious. Everybody on board was delighted at the prospect of reaching land, but Guy was more delighted and more sanguine than anybody. He was sure in his own mind this difficulty must have blown over long before now; Cyril must have explained; Nevitt must have confessed; everything must have been set right, and his own good name satisfactorily rehabilitated. For more than eighteen months he had heard nothing from England. To-morrow he would see Cyril, and account for everything. He had money to set all right—his hard-earned money, got at the risk of his own life in the dreary deserts of Barolong land. All would yet be well, and Cyril would marry, and Elma Clifford would be the mistress of nearly half the Tilgate property.
“It was all so different, Granville,” he said to his friend confidentially, as they paced the deck after supper, cigar in mouth, “when you first went out, and we didn’t know one another. Then, I distrusted you, and you distrusted me. We didn’t understand one another’s characters. But now we can settle it all as a family affair. Men who have camped out together under the open sky on the African veldt, who have run the gauntlet of Korannas and Barolong and Namaqua, who have stood by one another in sickness and in fight, needn’t be afraid of disagreeing about their money matters in England. Cyril will meet us to-morrow and talk it all over, and I’m not the least troubled about the result, either for you or for him. The same blood runs in all our veins alike. Whatever you propose, he’ll be ready to agree to. He’s the very best fellow that ever lived, and when he hears what I have to say about you, he’ll welcome you as a brother, and be as fond of you as I am.”
Next morning early they reached Plymouth Harbour. As they entered the mouth of the breakwater, the tender came alongside to convey them ashore. Guy looked over the bulwarks and saw Cyril waiting for him. In a fervour of delight at the sight of the green fields and the soft hills of old England—the beautiful Hoe, and the solid stone houses, and the familiar face turned up to welcome him—Guy waved his handkerchief round and round his head in triumph; to which demonstration Cyril, as he fancied, responded but coldly. A chill fell upon his heart. This was bad, but still, after all, he could hardly expect Cyril to know intuitively under what sinister influence he had signed that fatal cheque. And yet he was disappointed. His heart had jumped so hard at sight of Cyril, he could hardly believe Cyril wasn’t glad to see him.
As he stepped into the tender from the gangway, just ready to rush up and shake Cyril’s hand fervently, a resolute-looking man by the side of the steps laid a very firm grip on his shoulder with an air of authority.
“Guy Waring?” he said interrogatively.
And Guy, turning pale, answered without flinching—
“Yes, my name’s Guy Waring.”
“Then you’re my prisoner,” the man said, in a very firm voice. “I’m an inspector of constabulary.”
“On what charge?” Guy exclaimed, half taken aback at this promptitude.
“I have a warrant against you, sir,” the inspector answered, “as you are no doubt aware, for the wilful murder of Montague Nevitt, on the 17th of August, year before last, at Mambury, in Devonshire.”
The word’s fell upon Guy’s ears with all the suddenness and crushing force of an unexpected thunderbolt.
“Wilful murder,” he cried, taken aback by the charge. “Wilful murder of Montague Nevitt at Mambury! Oh no, you can’t mean that! Montague Nevitt dead! Montague Nevitt murdered! And at Mambury, too! There MUST be some mistake somewhere.”
“No, there’s no mistake at all, this time,” the inspector said quietly, slipping a pair of handcuffs unobtrusively into his pocket as he spoke. “If you come along with me without any unnecessary noise, we won’t trouble to iron you. But you’d better say as little as possible about the charge just now, for whatever you say may be used in evidence at the trial against you.”
Guy turned to Cyril with an appealing look. “Cyril,” he, cried, “what does all this mean? Is Nevitt dead? It’s the very first word I’ve ever heard about it.”
Cyril’s heart gave a bound of wild relief at those words. The moment Guy said it his brother knew he spoke the simple truth.
“Why, Guy,” he answered, with a fierce burst of joy, “then you’re not a murderer after all? You’re innocent! You’re innocent! And for eighteen months all England has thought you guilty; and I’ve lived under the burden of being universally considered a murderer’s brother!”
Guy looked him back in the face with those truthful grey eyes of his.
“Cyril,” he said solemnly, “I’m as innocent of this charge as you or Granville Kelmscott here. I never even heard one whisper of it before. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know who they want. Till this moment I thought Montague Nevitt was still alive in England.”
And as he said it, Granville Kelmscott, too, saw he was speaking the truth. Impossible as he found it in his own mind to reconcile those strange words with all that Guy had said to him in the wilds of Namaqua land, he couldn’t look him in the face without seeing at a glance how profound and unexpected was this sudden surprise to him. He was right in saying, “I’m as innocent of this charge as you or Granville Kelmscott.”
But the inspector only smiled a cynical smile, and answered calmly—
“That’s for the jury to decide. We shall hear more of this then. You’ll be tried at the assizes. Meanwhile, the less said, the sooner mended.”
For many days, meanwhile, Sir Gilbert had hovered between life and death, and Elma had watched his illness daily with profound and absorbing interest. For in her deep, intuitive way she felt certain to herself that their one chance now lay in Sir Gilbert’s own sense of remorse and repentance. She didn’t yet know, to be sure—what Sir Gilbert himself knew—that if he recovered he would, in all probability, have to sit in trial on another man for the crime he had himself committed. But she did feel this,—that Sir Gilbert would surely never stand by and let an innocent man die for his own transgression.
IF he recovered, that was to say. But perhaps he would not recover. Perhaps his life would flicker out by degrees in the midst of his delirium, and he would go to his grave unconfessed and unforgiven! Perhaps even, for his wife’s and daughter’s sake, he would shrink from revealing what Elma felt to be the truth, and would rest content to die, leaving Guy Waring to clear himself at the trial, as best he might, from this hateful accusation.
It would be unjust. It would be criminal. Yet Sir Gilbert might do it.
Elma had a bad time, therefore, during all those long days, even before Guy returned to England. She knew his life hung by a slender thread, which Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve might cut short at any moment. But her anxiety was as nothing compared to Sir Gilbert’s own. That unhappy man, a moral coward at heart, in spite of all his blustering, lay writhing in his own room now, very ill, and longing to be worse, longing to die, as the easiest way out of this impossible difficulty. For his wife’s sake, for Gwendoline’s sake, it was better he should die; and if only he could, he would have left Guy Waring to his fate contentedly. His anger against Guy burnt so bright now at last that he would have sacrificed him willingly, provided he was not there himself to see and know it. What did the man mean by living on to vex him? Over and over again the unhappy judge wished himself dead, and prayed to be taken. But that powerful frame, though severely broken by the shock, seemed hardly able to yield up its life merely because its owner was anxious to part with it.
After a fortnight’s severe illness, hovering all the time between hope and fear, the doctor came one day, and looked at him hard.
“How is he?” Lady Gildersleeve asked, seeing him hold his breath and consider.
To her great surprise the doctor answered, “Better; against all hope, better.” And indeed Sir Gilbert was once more convalescent. A week or two abroad, it was said, would restore him completely.
Then Elma had another terrible source of doubt. Would the doctors order Sir Gilbert abroad so long that he would be out of England when the trial took place? If so, he might miss many pricks of remorse. She must take some active steps to arouse his conscience.
Sir Gilbert, himself, now recovering fast, fought hard, as well he might, for such leave of absence. He was quite unfit, he said, to return to his judicial work so soon. Though he had said nothing about it in public before (this was the tenor of his talk) he was a man of profound but restrained feelings, and he had felt, he would admit, the absence of Gwendoline’s lover—especially when combined with the tragic death of Colonel Kelmscott, the father, and the memory of the unpleasantness that had once subsisted, through the Colonel’s blind obstinacy, between the two houses. This sudden news of the young man’s return had given him a nervous shock of which few would have believed him capable. “You wouldn’t think to look at me,” Sir Gilbert said plaintively, smoothing down his bedclothes with those elephantine hands of his, “I was the sort of man to be knocked down in this way;” and the great specialist from London, gazing at him with a smile, admitted to himself that he certainly would not have thought it.
“Oh, nonsense, my dear sir,” the specialist answered, however, to all his appeals. “This is the merest passing turn, I assure you. I couldn’t conscientiously say you’d be unfit for duty by the time the assizes come round again. It’s clear to me, on the contrary, with a physique like yours, you’ll pull yourself together in something less than no time with a week or so at Spa. Before you’re due in England to take up harness again you’ll be walking miles at a stretch over those heathery hills there. Convalescence, with a man like you, is a rapid process. In a fortnight from to-day, I’ll venture to guarantee, you’ll be in a fit condition to swim the Channel on your back, or to take one of your famous fifty-mile tramps across the bogs of Dartmoor. I’ll give you a tonic that’ll set your nerves all right at once. You’ll come back from Spa as fresh as a daisy.”
To Spa, accordingly, Sir Gilbert went; and from Spa came trembling letters now and again between Gwendoline and Elma. Gwendoline was very anxious papa should get well soon, she said, for she wanted to be home before the Cape steamer arrived. “You know why, Elma.” But Sir Gilbert didn’t return before Guy’s arrival in England, for all that. The papers continued to give bulletins of his health, and to speculate on the probability of his returning in time to do the Western Circuit. Elma remained in a fever of doubt and anxiety. To her, much depended now on the question of Sir Gilbert’s presence or absence. For if he was indeed to try the case, she felt certain to herself, it must work upon his remorse and compel confession.
Meanwhile, preparations went on in England for Guy’s approaching trial. The magistrates committed; the grand jury, of course, found a true bill; all England rang with the strange news that the man Guy Waring, the murderer of Mr. Montague Nevitt some eighteen months before, had returned at last of his own free will, and had given himself up to take his trial. Gildersleeve was to be the judge, they said; or if he were too ill, Atkins. Atkins was as sure as a gun to hang him, people thought—that was Atkins’s way—and, besides, the evidence against the man, though in a sense circumstantial, was so absolutely overwhelming that acquittal seemed impossible.
Five to two was freely offered on Change that they’d hang him.
The case was down for first hearing at the assizes. The night before the trial Elma Clifford, who had hurried to Devonshire with her mother to see and hear all—she couldn’t help it, she said; she felt she MUST be present—Elma Clifford looked at the evening paper with a sickening sense of suspense and anxiety. A paragraph caught her eye: “We understand that, after all, Mr. Justice Gildersleeve still finds himself too unwell to return to England for the Western Assizes, and his place will, therefore, most probably be taken by Mr. Justice Atkins. The calendar is a heavy one, and includes the interesting case of Mr. Guy Waring, charged with the wilful murder of Montague Nevitt, at Mambury, in Devonshire.”
Elma laid down the paper with a swimming head. Too ill to return. She wasn’t at all surprised at it. It was almost more than human nature could stand, for a man to sit as judge over another to investigate the details of the crime he had himself committed. But the suggestion of his absence ruined her peace of mind. She couldn’t sleep that night. She felt sure now there was no hope left. Guy would almost certainly be convicted of murder.
Next morning she took her seat in court, with her mother and Cyril, as soon as the assize hall was opened to the public. But her cheek was very pale, and her eyes were weary. Places had been assigned them by the courtesy of the authorities, as persons interested in the case; and Elma looked eagerly towards the door in the corner, by which, as the usher told her, the judge was to enter. There was a long interval, and the usual unseemly turmoil of laughing and talking went on among the spectators in the well below. Some of them had opera-glasses and stared about them freely. Others quizzed the counsel, the officers, and the witnesses. Then a hush came over them, and the door opened. Cyril was merely aware of the usual formalities and of a judicial wig making its way, with slow dignity, to the vacant bench. But Elma leaned forward in a tumult of feeling. Her face all at once turned scarlet with excitement.
“What’s the matter, darling?” her mother asked, in a sympathetic tone, noticing that something had profoundly stirred her.
And Elma answered with bated breath, in almost inarticulate tones, “Don’t you see? Don’t you see, mother? Just look at the judge! It’s himself! It’s Sir Gilbert!”
And so indeed it was. Against all hope, he had come over. At the very last moment a telegram had been handed to the convalescent at Spa:
“Fallen from my horse. A nasty tumble. Sustained severe internal injuries. Impossible to go the Western Circuit, Relieve me if you can. Wire reply,—ATKINS.”
Sir Gilbert, as he received it, had just come in from a long ride across the wild moors that stretch away from Spa towards Han, and looked the picture of health, robust and fresh and ruddy. He glowed with bodily vigour; no suspense could kill him. Refusal under such circumstances was clearly impossible. He saw he must go, or resign his post at once. So, with an agitated heart, he wired acquiescence, took the next train to—Brussels and Calais, and caught the Dover boat just in time for acceptance. And now he was there to try Guy Waring for the murder of the man he himself had killed in The Tangle at Mambury.